By Wayne Allensworth
On Easter Sunday before the service, I was sitting in church and watching the congregants come in. What I saw gave me some cause for hope. A few of the ladies wore hats — “Easter bonnets,” we called them in the past — and low and behold, a few of the children were dressed up. Dresses, ties, little jackets. It’s not that I think God cares what people wear. It’s about us and instilling some reverence in a world that has largely lost its sense of the sacred.
The sights and sounds of that Sunday morning took me back, jarring my memory of Easters past. I recall childhood Easters when Easter bonnets were still quite common. Even my carpenter father wore a suit and tie. And my mother dressed her boys in jackets and bow ties. Clip ons, of course. The pastel colors of the women’s dresses reflected the change of seasons and spring coming on. Our yard had greened up, as my father used to say, and the planters were full of blooming flowers. My grandparents were there, and the annual Easter egg hunt became quite a show. My parents spent some time hiding the colored eggs we boiled and colored in the kitchen. I remember home movies of us kids searching diligently in the planters and under trees and in the grass, filling our baskets before Easter dinner. At church, we sang glorious hymns in praise of the risen Christ. In the choir loft, the organist played, the choir sang, and the congregants rose to join in. Here’s a particular favorite of mine, a deeply moving, even exhilarating Easter hymn that always seemed to me, even as a boy, to rise to the heights of heaven. Oh, the sweet joy this sentence gives, I know that my Redeemer lives!:
I believe that there was a time in the past when many common folk consciously or unconsciously understood what the Easter rituals and symbols meant, their origins, and why they endured. They drew on that deep well of consciousness that is the source of our religious sense, our sense of wonder and awe — of an enchanted world deeply imbued with meaning, reflective of that which transcended material being. Christ the paschal lamb. The cross as the tree of suffering, but also as the World Tree, the center of creation, an echo of Jacob’s ladder. As the Tree of Life, life in the resurrection. Easter in spring as the cycle of life renewed began yet again in the sunlight so longed for after the darkness of winter. The blooming flowers as both cause and effect. Begotten of the plant and begetter of the seed. The Easter egg, the symbol of birth. The life cycle itself reflected in the hero’s or prophet’s tragic and triumphant journey, sacrifice, descent into the abyss, and ascension. The paradox of losing one’s life to gain it. Of picking up and bearing a cross as an act of fulfillment. Of spiritual famine transformed into a new kingdom. Of the savior child threatened, hidden, and returning in triumph. Of principalities and powers overturned, death defeated. Metaphor and symbol conveying Truth in a way that cannot be conveyed in other, more explicit forms. Chords struck in the human psyche by narrative and art.
As Easter approached, the 20th Century world’s chief narrative form, cinema, conveyed something to us of a faded sense of the sacred, as we were living in a much “thinner” cultural milieu than the “thick” network of ritual and ceremony people had lived in during a receding past. At Easter, we watched The Ten Commandments and King of Kings. But technocracy was having its impact. People replaced angels with extraterrestrial spacemen in their visions of transcendence.
Through the centuries, Christmas gradually replaced Easter as the central Christian holy day and most celebrated holiday of our culture. Reasons for that abound, but I think one of them may be that the birth of a particular child is fully comprehensible in our materialist age. Childbirth is common enough. But the central event of Easter defies all materialist logic. And the rich symbolic depth of Easter motifs faded as a consequence. I’ve written elsewhere about how much has been uncovered by researchers in various fields concerning consciousness acting on matter, on mind over matter, or consciousness as ontologically prior to matter as the most fundamental substance of our universe, of life after “clinical death,” which should bolster our regard for the resurrection story. The dismal secular tide might be turning a bit. Recent polls suggest that Christianity’s decline has at least halted, suggesting that it could be reversed. What was lost could be restored.
A new revival, a new society based on the best elements of our past civilization, would not be exactly what we once knew. It would be new itself in significant ways. It just may be possible to re-enchant our world, to revive a sense of the numinous.
We can hope.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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