The year is 1953, and on my seventh Easter I unwrap a small parcel from my father. It contains a Bible: blue cloth, a few watercolour illustrations, and maps of the Holy Land at the back. I am as pleased with it as with my chocolate egg, and yet we are not a religious family — not at all. But that was a time when it was assumed that every child should possess a Bible, when “scripture ” was a primary-school staple, and we chorused the great hymns (“When I survey the wondrous Cross . . .”), which I still sing, through my veins, confirming who I am. My generation was probably the last to take part in the universally held state school morning assembly: a hymn, a prayer, a reading, and then the notices — including who was in detention.
So for my father to buy me a little Bible was not strange, and the stately cadences commissioned by King James moved me when I could not understand all the words. Today I hold the precious, battered little book, falling apart and badly mended with yellowing Sellotape over the years, and look at the pictures I used to copy with crayons. There is white-clad Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, the people waving palms, somebody kneeling. I remember wishing to jump in there and tell him to turn back. I was glad there was no picture of the Crucifixion.
Like so many people, I am perplexed about belief, disturbed equally by the anti-religionists who dismiss all faith with secular cynicism, and by those who abuse belief: fanatical Islamist and lunatic creationist Christian alike. But last Sunday, Palm Sunday, found me in my parish church again, holding my palm cross and singing Ride on Ride on in Majesty and My Song is Love Unknown. For years I felt sheepish when I was drawn to church on high days and holy days, believing that I, an agnostic since the age of 18, had no business to be there. I would stay silent during the creed, and hold back from the communion rail. Not now. Fully taking part, I love the very fabric of the building, so much so that I’ve just become involved in raising £450,000 to shore up the pinnacled tower of St Stephen’s, on the northern slopes of Bath. I see it as a powerful symbol, visible from across the city, of more than two thousand years of belief. In an age like this we need such symbols, telling us we must reach up and up.
Does the Church matter? It does. “This is our story, this is our song,” said the Rev Caroline O’Neill in the pulpit, at the beginning of Holy Week. Looking around at babies in arms, oblivious toddlers scampering up the aisle, teenagers in jeans, the middle-aged, the elderly; contemplating the idea of sacrifice, hearing prayers for mercy and the injunction “Go in peace”, I realised two important things. First, I could not quarrel with anything in the message of the service. Second, that the good feeling of community I took home with my palm cross represents far more than my neighbourhood here in Bath.
Faced with unthinking multiculturalism on the one hand, and rampant secularism on the other, I believe that both contribute to a sad dilution of the “story” of which I, agnostic or not, feel a part. Hollywood called it The Greatest Story Ever Told — and (like it or not) it is part of our DNA. From the pictures of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” in my Bible, through the awesome majesty of Piero della Francesca’s risen Christ to Stanley Spencer’s vision of the Resurrection; from the medieval mystery cycles through the St Matthew Passion to sweet, infant nativity plays; from the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood, through Dante’s Divine Comedy to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — the Christian story is the shaping spirit of this culture, and therefore my life. At once the tale of a great civilisation and a personal metaphor for the testing journey we all take from cradle to grave, the faith that built the great cathedrals of Europe still sets millions on a quiet quest to make sense of the world.
No matter what beliefs we espouse, the idea of the sacred flows through the calendar of existence, whether we are aware of it or not. All cultures set aside certain days, holy days, to celebrate and re-enact religious events. The feasts served to reinforce identity; thus at the Passover the Jew understands what it means to be a member of “the people of God” and at Easter Christians unite before the pinnacle of their faith: the Resurrection of Christ. Both are surely rooted in the primitive need to follow two linked natural cycles: the phases of the Moon and solar equinoxes, and nature’s seasons of sowing and reaping. The pagan fertility festival Eastre predated Easter, and the early Christians thought it expedient to fix their most important feast at the same time.
The need for light in midwinter, the sense of new growth in spring; these are the impulses which fixed our ancestors in patterns that still lend an abstract beauty to our lives, transcending even the shopping-fests they have become. Good Friday may take people into a mall instead of into stillness and meditation, yet I cling to the conviction that something in the sight of a foil-covered egg or bunch of daffodils whispers joyfully through the Muzak that, God willing, all shall be renewed.
In The Times last Saturday Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks recalled celebrating Passover as a little boy, suggesting that the tenacity of the Jewish identity “has much to do with the gifts of narrative and memory”. He went on: “The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard once defined post-modernism as ‘the death of metanarrative’, meaning that we don’t have, or don’t need, the big stories any more — the ones that tell us who we are, where we came from, and what we are called on to do. I think he was wrong. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity we are cast adrift into a sea of chance, without compass, map or destination.”
His words took me back to Christianity: that narrative which (like all the great world faiths) has compassion at its heart, sets out its own golden rule for behaviour, and offers in the story of Jesus of Nazareth a paradigm of “what we are called on to do”. On Good Friday I can sum it up simply as: “Bear your crosses with reticent courage, forgive those who hurt you, and have faith that your spirit will rise up.” It’s not a bad compass, directing the quest for a good life, and for meaning.
The yearning to understand the purpose of existence lies behind the title of Paul Gauguin’s greatest painting, Who Are We? Where Have We Come From? Where Are We Going? This longing takes many who have turned their back on conventional religion into a search for the spiritual in other forms. Wander through Glastonbury and you will see myriad shops selling “new age” spirituality in the form of crystals, Celtic crosses, tarot cards, peace symbols and the like, beside books on yoga, mysticism, astrology, feng shui and the pagan Green Man. Not far away the ruined Benedictine abbey reminds you that the town was a sacred Christian site, whatever pagan rites may have been enacted on the Tor. That mysterious mound, the abbey and all the paraphernalia of the high street combine in my mind to represent what might be called “ the holy longing”: the enduring human hankering for something over and above “getting and spending”, for a truth beyond the self, for transcendence and faith. What is spiritual longing, and why does it annoy those who resolutely place their faith (there’s a word to conjure with) in the rational? Are we not defined partially by what we yearn for? If so, and the materialistic “must-have” does battle with the religious “must strive”, I know which side I am on. Getting the latest designer furbelow, getting drunk, getting high, getting rich, getting laid — I’ve had my share of all those, but know them all to be as lasting as a chocolate egg in a child’s hand on Easter Day. And as nutritious. Surely it is the lack of something else, the confusion arising from the lack of a great, guiding “ narrative”, that underlies so much of the despair and conflict in our society? That narrative can be seen as humankind’s long evolution towards social justice — which was, in any case, a part of the message of the troublemaker, who drove the moneychangers from the temple, embraced the poor and stood up against the hierarchies in power.
The philosopher Ronald Dworkin has argued that the concept of the sacred is an essential part of human ethics. This I am sure of — the reduction of the world to the strictly rationalist, scientific and material is responsible for as many ills as the misapplication of religious fervour. Both are intolerant and deny the mysterious, the numinous: that which is beyond humble comprehension. Dogmatic, they have no truck with that confused longing for the “good” (call it God if you will) that drives the spiritual quest of the informed heart.
Humanist, agnostic, cultural Christian, wistful seeker, student of comparative religion — I accept all those descriptions. In his inspirational book Looking in the Distance the former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway defines people like me (and himself) thus: “They may or may not ‘believe’ in God but they . . . do not cease to be interested in spirituality or the inner life of the human community.”
There is pride in his assertion that “this is not a place of neutral agnosticism. It is a place of committed unknowing”. Similarly, George Eliot had no sympathy for arid free thinking, but believed that the longing for God, that impulse outwards and upwards, was as profound an expression of the human spirit as her own stated beliefs that “pity and fairness embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life” and “our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy”.
Good Friday is about suffering and sacrifice, Easter Day shouts joy and faith from the pinnacles of our places of worship. This narrative is that of the human condition — and it is to meditate on that, and to celebrate the hope and grace that is at the heart of the story, that I shall sit in St Stephen’s Church on Easter morning, sing Jesus Christ is Risen Today and know where I belong.
What Easter means to me
I think the Easter story has meanings even for an agnostic like me. I accept that it is a Christian takeover of pagan spring festivals. But it is different, because it combines spring renewal with the Crucifixion, and what the Crucifixion teaches is that the sufferer is superior to those who inflict suffering.
Merely by willingly submitting to torment, and dying, he triumphs because he remains innocent — and his triumph is, for me, not affected by whether he comes back to life again as Christians believe he does. It is just his pain, his helplessness and his endurance that make him superior. I know it is irrational to believe this (as irrational as to believe in the Resurrection) but I believe it all the same. I connect it with the innocence of nature which can be crushed by brute force but will always return. As D. H. Lawrence said: “The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy”.
JOHN CAREY
More than anything else, the message of Easter is a message of hope. By Good Friday, we think of Christ’s death on the Cross and despair, but beyond that despair lies hope. It’s important for all people, when facing difficulty and sometimes tragedy, to believe that it can be turned around and that out of tragedy something creative can happen, provided we allow it to.
TERRY WAITE
Very simply, what Easter means to me is that it was when man’s salvation was procured and when we were guaranteed everlasting life. The essential purpose of Easter is the Lord’s death and Resurrection. That to me is what is important, and everything else is peripheral.
ANN WIDDECOMBE
