A life in letters: Easter

The Brethren churches my parents and I attended when I was a child and teenager didn’t follow the Church Calendar. The early Brethren aimed to replicate the simple practices of the New Testament church, and saw the Calendar as one of the undesirable complexities introduced by the institutional church of which they had ‘come out.’ And so while at Brethren services in the 1950s and 60s there might be a nod in the direction of Christmas, the view was that there was no need for a special annual day to celebrate the death of Christ, because his sacrifice was remembered week by week at the morning meeting.

My main childhood memory of Easter is of going into my parents’ room first thing on Easter Sunday morning when they were still in bed. The night before they would have hidden a dozen or more small chocolate eggs around the bedroom – one might be in a drawer, one in a slipper, one behind the clock. It was my job to find these, with mum and dad’s encouragement.

I also remember a Sunday School book I had as a young child which contained a story in which a mother tries to explain to her children why Good Friday, which is a day of death, was called ‘Good’ rather than ‘Bad.’ Even at that stage, I was totally familiar with the theological explanation.

Another predominantly positive Easter memory comes from 1965 when I went with some school friends to a Scripture Union Camp held in hutted buildings at Meigle in Perthshire, led by the roudoubtable J. W. (‘Boss’) Meiklejohn. I remember singing a hymn which was new to me – Thine be the glory to Handel’s melody Judas Maccabeus and sensing its power and beauty

But as someone perpetually prone to depression, my principal recollection of Easter, particularly before my marriage, is of a weekend of sadness. Sadness because the Easter services which seemed to mean so much to others, meant nothing to me as, sitting in church I felt an emotional disconnect from the great drama. Sadness, because while in the community Easter was presented as a season of hope and love and joy in my heart there was only desolation. Sadness because, whether I was staying with my parents or at home, Bank Holiday Monday stretched ahead, a long, sad, anxious day.

One Easter, instead of giving me a chocolate egg, my mother presented me with a furry toy rabbit. An odd gift for someone by then in their late 20s. But the sight of that rabbit baptised me more deeply in desolation. It was, I suppose, a symbol of joy and life, a symbol of childhood and security and belonging. Its furry presence emphasised the gap between longing and experience.

When I was attending Airdrie Baptist Church in the 1980s I took along to the Good Friday morning service one year a bag of small chocolate eggs to hand out to the children during coffee time after the service. I suppose in doing this, I was trying to ‘buy’ some sense of connectedness and belonging, The kids were happy enough to get the chocolate, but soon I was walking out of the church into the crowd of mid-day shoppers, alone.

But it was warm that day, and in the afternoon a couple from the church who lived near me invited me to sit in the garden with them, and that gesture was a healing encouragement.

‘See you later,’ said Norma when I got up to leave. I have always used those words to refer to later today, but I knew that what Norma meant was ‘see you sometime in the future.’ I wished as I walked back to my front door that I had someone to say ‘See you later!’ to, and mean today. It was the same yearning for belonging and security.

Recently, I have discovered a part of the Church’s Easter worship which resonates profoundly with me, although I never heard it referred to in Brethren or Baptist circles. It is the concept of Holy Saturday, a time for recalling the pain of Jesus’ followers after his death, when their hopes and dreams imploded, leaving them desolate.  During the Tenebrae service, candles are extinguished one by one until the building is left in utter darkness and the worshippers file out quietly. Were I present at a Tenebrae service I don’t think I would be able to connect with it, but I find the symbolism somehow reassuring. I empathise with the desolation of the disciples, and I am reassured that I am not alone in feeling desolate, and that at the heart of Easter is the embracing of our pain by God in Christ. We are not alone. God is with us as we suffer. Easter affirms that suffering comes, that it’s OK to find yourself in pain.

But there’s more than that. While services leave me cold, I have throughout the year, been blessed by the symbol of Easter.

I remember being encouraged by the very title of a book published in 1978:  Winter Past: A story of Depression and Healing by Nancy Anne Smith. The title came from Song of Solomon:

‘My beloved spoke to me and said to me, “Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, come with me. See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come.”’

To me, among the most precious and powerful words in all poetry are those from Gerard Manly Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland: ‘let him easter in us.’ I have, in my imagination stood in the resurrection garden, sensing an awakening joy in realising that daylight has come, that the figure is not the gardener, that my name is known.

And I have stood in the dark tomb, eyes to the wall, scarcely able to believe that if I turn round I will find that the stone has been rolled away, that I can walk free.

And I see this eastering of the garden as a symbol of the future when Jesus will easter in every atom of creation and the whole cosmos will dance with its risen king.

But is this just symbolism, just one more of the many sets of images we humans use to celebrate  survival through another hard season as the earth journeys from the tomb of the winter into the resurrection garden of spring?

Or while Easter is more than a symbol, is Jesus alive in the Christ Spirit, but not in body?

I will not be disappointed if it transpires that Jesus’ resurrection was not physical, but I have read and thought and it seems to me that the records of that Easter Rising read like history, not myth. And so I believe that the resurrection was physical, that the one who endured tenebrae, who walks with us in our brokenness is physically alive, and that beyond death we will find ourselves called forth into a resurrection garden by someone to whom we are not strangers.