scrapheapstuart3

It’s Easter weekend. Our close is clogged with strange cars. Several of our neighbours are hosting family gatherings. The shouts and screams of young children disturbs our usual Sunday morning peace as people’s grandkids let off steam in the garden. Maybe soon, some of them will go on an Easter egg hunt or will be devouring some egg -shaped milk chocolate. I did it myself when I was a young kid.

I used to teach RE ( as well as history and geography) and a significant part of the curriculum was about Easter. Although we had to teach comparative world religions, studying the beliefs and practices of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism etc, the emphasis had to be on Christianity as we are still officially a Christian country. For Christians, Easter is the most important festival of the year, even eclipsing Christmas in importance. That is difficult to believe in 21st century Britain in what is an increasingly secular society. It seems that our 2 main festivals are now driven mainly by commercial interests and the media rather than by the church. We go through the religious motions of course. Today’s news contained the obligatory item that the King and Queen and the rest of the Royal family ( except Harry and Andrew) have attended church at Sandringham this Easter morning. However, when I asked my pupils what Easter meant to them, the overwhelming answer was time off school and eating chocolate eggs. They might have added, time with their extended family. So much for all my carefully crafted lessons about the Christian idea of Jesus dying to save our sins, understanding humankind’s suffering by being tortured on a wooden cross and then being born again or resurrected to offer us hope and the promise of eternal life. ( if we play our cards right and the spirit in the sky forgives us our repented sins.)

I don’t blame my students as they were merely accurate representations of the society they lived in, although I don’t think they would have done very well in the end of term exam. When I was a young kid, I too looked forward to the time off school and the colourfully-wrapped easter eggs that my indulgent grandma and grandad would give to me. However I grew up in more religious times, back in the 1950s, when many more people attended church on Sundays and we children were packed off to 2 sessions of Sunday School as well as to an evening service. My parents and grandparents were Primitive Methodists ( the “Prims”) and were very strict followers of the rules that had been laid down for them by John Wesley and his mates at Oxford University in the 18th century. It was a sort of “off the peg” religion for the masses. Follow the rules ( the “method”) and you will lead a happy life and go to heaven when you die. This stuff about conquering death was, and still is, a very comforting, hopeful thought for many and explains why christianity became so popular. It also explains why Easter is so important.

As a child Easter also meant having to go to church twice in a weekend. It was a bit of a trial as all I wanted to do was go out and play with my mates and scoff my chocolate. On Good Friday we all went to church for a bout of communal misery. We were thinking of Jesus suffering on the cross and being subjected to a long, painful death. Apparently, the victim nailed to the cross didn’t die from blood loss, thirst or starvation as one might expect. He died because the dead weight of his slumping body crushed his lungs. You learn some gruesome things when you are an RE teacher. The mood in the Good Friday chapel was sombre and we sang down-beat hymns such as : ” There is a green hill far away, without a city wall, where our dear Lord was crucified, He died to save us all”. We were told that Jesus Christ, who was either God’s son or God in human form, had volunteered to take the punishment that God was going to dish out to the human race for all the bad things they had done while on earth. Jesus was the ultimate substitute. He was giving us all a second chance. All we had to do was confess our sins, say a sincere “sorry” and all would be well, as Jesus had already suffered our punishment. I wonder whether Stalin or Hitler believed in all this, a system that would allow them to get away with mass murder? But I digress from my childhood visit to the Good Friday service. It was a very trying, endurance test of patience. True Christians take it all very seriously though and even decorate their churches and themselves with crosses, the ultimate symbol of their Christ’s great sacrifice. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is even acted out in Passion plays. There was one presented by a drama company in Trafalgar Square this year. it must be weird being a tourist and taking a picture of someone realistically pretending to be suffering and dying on a cross.

Two days later, on Easter Sunday, we were back in church again for more hymns and prayers and another long sermon. But this time everything was upbeat and happy as we were celebrating Jesus’s resurrection, his cheating of death. We sang joyful songs full of optimism. Then when I got home, I was at last allowed the hit the chocolate!

So what’s this about eggs at Easter time? Surely it’s not really just about giving ourselves yet another sugar rush? As always in these festivals and traditions, a lot of symbolism is involved. The egg represents new life, because Easter always coincides with the arrival of spring. After the dreary, dead months of winter, we are all cheered up by the advent of Spring. We enjoy the appearance of snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils and tulips, bringing welcome colour to our gardens, parks and verges. We enjoy the beautiful blackthorn and cherry blossom. We like the arrival of lambs in the fields or spotting a baby rabbit. We love hearing the birdsong ( if we can hear it above the traffic noise), and seeing our feathered friends building their nests and laying their eggs. The eggs contain the new lives that give us all that hope that the world will go on for another year. Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan will be setting up their cameras so we can all witness this rebirth of the natural world on our television screens on Springwatch. Leaving all the religious stuff out of it, Easter for many, is simply a celebration of the coming of Spring. In fact it gets its name from the old English word: Eostre, the pagan goddess of Spring. As with Christmas, the Christians simply commandeered an already existing pagan festival and exploited it to increase their own popularity.

So the egg represents the hope of new life. Wearing my cynical vegetarian’s hat, I think it’s deeply ironic that many will celebrate Easter by eating slaughtered chickens, the most common and popular meat in the British cuisine. New life, new death. I wonder how KFC are commemorating Easter?

The egg, when broken open also symbolises for some the empty cave-tomb, the discovery of which told Jesus’s disciples that he had risen from the dead. Thus, because of their symbolic significance, Easter seems to be all about eggs. We eat chocolate versions of them, we decorate them, our children hunt for them, we decorate little Easter trees with colourful pretend eggs and stick them in our windows for others to see. A few years ago, a friend of mine hid a dozen Cadbury’s Cream eggs in his large garden for his grandchildren to find on Easter morning. It kept them enjoyably busy for a while. The trouble is that they only ever found 9 so there are still 3 chocolate eggs out there giving the worms an unexpected Easter treat! When my children and I visited Norwegian friends for Christmas back in the 1980s, we all painted hard boiled eggs the night before and then after the children had gone to bed , we hid them around the house and made up cryptic clues to help the young ones find them the following morning.

Since I became an adult, I have never been a great one for tradition. I resent having to put on a straight -jacket dictated to me by the rest of society. The pressure to conform has increased since the rise and rise of social media. Now we can be the stars of our own “perfect” lives and show the world how lovely our Easter decorations are and what a happy time we are having with our wonderful, happy families. We post joyous photos or videos on Instagram or Facebook and wait for the “likes” and love emojis to come rolling in.

But, cynicism apart, if I stop to think about it, tradition is the glue that sticks our largely individualistic society together. Following a tradition help us to bond, feel part of a common society and reinforces our sense of identity. I think it’s a good thing that different generations of a family get together at festival time instead of staying in their separate boxes. I don’t really mind the extra cars and children’s screeches disrupting the normally peaceful existence of our close. It’s just a bit sad and difficult for people who don’t belong to a “happy” family however — the divorced, the widowed, the lonely. Either the family gatherings around them emphasise even more their isolation or they become the pitied relative in the corner of the room , invited because he/she is on their own. For some, it will a long day of food, drink and desultory small talk.

I think Easter is a strange remnant of a festival in modern Britain. A few go to church but many don’t . Lots of people get together with their families but othera cannot. For the majority, the origins and real meaning of Easter have been lost in the mists of time. Britain now has has a large Muslim minority. I wonder what they think about it all? As much as the rest of us think about Ramadan I suppose. There was shameful booing at Elland Road football stadium recently when play was stopped at dusk to enable 3 visiting muslim footballers to break their fast. Some probably Islamaphobic wag on social media suggested that Easter football matches be stopped to allow the Christian players on the field to eat their Easter eggs. His comment and the booing show some people’s lack of respect for other people’s religions and festivals.

For the tens of thousands at the football stadiums Easter is about sport, and crucial promotion or relegations battles. For others Easter represents family gatherings, like a mini Christmas. For children it means chocolates, sweets and gifts. Some fly off for foreign holidays in warmer climes. Bikers like to gather together and go for a long ride in the countryside. Some use their time off work and school to go to the seaside and eat fish and chips or ice-creams. A few little traditions cling on. Some eat fish rather than meat on Good Friday and others munch into hot cross buns. There was a big controversy the other year when the supermarkets suggested leaving the cross off their cinnamon flavoured tea cakes, even though their taste wouldn’t be compromised one jot. We don’t have many traditions left in Britain but many cling on to the ones we still have even though their meanings and origins have been largely forgotten.

Yes, a lot of the meanings of the most important Christian festival are lost on many of the British public at large. Yet it is still an occasion that binds us loosely together, even if it just means saying “Happy Easter” to people in the street instead of the usual “good-day.”