By Michael Meade

This is an Easter like no other in memory. Rather than egg hunts, flower filled Easter services and parades of people in bonnets and finery, we see hordes of doctors, nurses and healthcare workers swathed in improvised PPE as they risk their lives to save the lives of others. Rather than playful baskets with chocolate bunnies and painted Easter eggs, we see great crowds of people waiting in long lines at food banks or standing six feet apart in makeshift masks while waiting for hours to be tested for the coronavirus. 

Rather than services to celebrate the renewal of life, we see reports of the number of new cases of Covid-19 throughout the world. In many places funeral services are delayed, in most places voting is delayed, and in many ways Easter must also wait. Instead of a day of rising with the light of redemption, we find ourselves in an extended time of descent into suffering and loss of life. For everything there is a season and this Easter season is more about the tomb than the womb.

The Christian rites of Easter celebrate the rising of the Son of God after a dark period of crucifixion, death and descent. The savior rises like the sun from the tomb of the underworld. The ceremony of rebirth coincides with the arrival of spring when the earth becomes reborn from the dark time of the year. Yet, this year people actually risk contracting a disease and spreading death if they should gather together to celebrate the return of life. This year the period of descent to the underworld has become literal as a return to life must be put off to an indefinite time in the future. 

Yet, it may be that the postponing of Easter as an occasion for gathering in churches, and the loss of Easter as a commercial opportunity, can allow for a deeper consideration of the need for a genuine renewal of life on earth. For, it is not simply that the economy has stopped; it is also that life is more in jeopardy at this time and the earth is more in peril. 

Often, the modern sense of an Easter break ignores the ancient sense of a necessary descent that precedes the moment of resurrection and the renewal of life on earth. Maybe the sorrowful sense that a worldwide funeral is under way can help bring back the ancient sense that daily life must occasionally stop altogether in order that the sacred might find its way back into collective awareness. 

Instead of the economy-fueled visions of a President wanting to “open up the country” for personal and political reasons, there might begin to be a renewed sense of the sacredness of life and the need to protect the earth itself as well as all the people on it. 

Rolling back the stone of time reveals a long history of symbolic events as Easter offers a parade of mysteries in the form of eggs, paschal sheep, and deities that disappear into the earth, only to rise again. The original Eastertide involved, not just a spring-break from school or work, but the sense of stopping the relentless march of time. The original Easter-break involved an invocation of timelessness and a conscious seeking for a touch of the eternal that could renew life on earth.

The title of Easter remains a muted memory of Eostre, a goddess of the dawn who arrived from the east, bringing light and promise of new life. Eostre was also an earth goddess who represented the womb of memory as well as the deep fertility of life’s renewing cycles. Naturally, any sense of a renewal or rebirth of life had to involve the eternal feminine and the deep presence of the earth that is both tomb and womb.   

By symbolically participating in the disappearance and return of the god or the goddess, people too were renewed, reborn, born again in the sense of being re-stored. In that sense, Easter was the first Earth Day that began with a descent into darkness, but led to a return of all the potentials of life in tune with the arrival of spring that can renew all the branches and blossoms of the earth. This deep sense of renewal exists in the depths of the human soul, just as it resides in the depths of the earth itself.

To heal means to make whole again, even it is just a moment of wholeness in which we feel connected to the source of life.

It may be that the issue is not simply a postponement of Easter Sunday, but more like a need to redeem the sense of redemption. Each day is intended to be a little redemption as the sun rises from the depths of night and the world begins again. “Each day has a moment of eternity waiting for you,” was an old idea that might serve us well at this time. 

Moments of eternity can come when our eye falls upon a flower that speaks for all of creation or a face that reflects a true sense of humanity back to us or the gestures of compassionate service seen every day in the midst of this pandemic of suffering that reveal the caring and courage and loving nature of the human heart. 

The point of delaying Easter may be a return to the sense that we must find little redemptions each day, in the way that healing happens, in the way that spring happens, in ways that makes life sacred again, and in ways that make the earth truly a sacred place again. For that, we can all pray.