What does EASTER mean today?

Growing up in England, we used to celebrate Easter as a three-day period of mixed emotions. In Sunday school we were given colourful accounts of the Crucifixion on Good Friday. Each year we heard of Jesus being nailed to a cross on Calvary and left to die, strategically placed between two criminals. We befittingly had a national bank holiday and the more zealous souls went to Church and devoted the entire day to subdued introspection and a pious disposition. The next day, Saturday we thankfully aroused from our spiritual hibernation and replenished the pantry with adequate food for the anticipated joy on the following day. Easter Sunday was traditionally a glad awakening to the fact that our Lord had ‘risen from the dead’ and had adhered to the predetermined sequence of events, prophesied by Isaiah. It released us from the enforced Good Friday-melancholy-modus and gave the more devout beings the feeling of hope and good in the world. The ladies were encouraged to subscribe to a new Easter bonnet to sport at the Easter Sunday Church Service, and the competition among them was rife. After a Sunday lunch, generally comprising roast lamb and its usual embellishments, we were handed a chocolate Easter egg which was small enough to have been laid by a chicken. We were still under post-war sugar-rationing until I was nine, which maintained the size at a minimum.

Now let’s fast-forward to 2023, where, in the meantime, much water has trickled under the bridge, with a breathtaking surge in the past decade. Hardly has the excitement of carnival concluded in February, when contingents of chocolate bunnies in all sizes, start lining the supermarket shelves. Rigidly segregated into brown and white bunnies, thousands of these chocolate formations accommodate an alarming amount of sugar. Colourful silver paper goes into overdrive to camouflage chocolate eggs of all dimensions, some hollow and some converted into heavily bloated calorie-bombs. Other shelves harbour plastic petals, china chickens, fluffy rabbits and sundry objects, intended to adorn the home and generate a synthetic ambiance for the Easter festivity. Sizeable areas of shopping centers are devoted to spawning a reason to celebrate this annual event, which effectively is only observed in the spirit of its initial significance by those of the Christian faith.

This sector of the community is diminishing with despairing haste in more recent times. For many reasons, people are leaving the Church, assuming they ever went. There appears to be no appetite for institutional doctrine, and God’s ground staff are not in all cases completely above reproach. Many people are developing an inner spiritualty, applying their own preferred features from the menu of their concept of religion. There is also an ever-increasing lobby of non-believers who need an open playing field for all religions, including the relatively new Islam, in Switzerland. In order to avoid upsetting people of different cultures, many people, including politicians, prefer to relegate the Christian heritage of our forefathers to the perimeter of society. Just last week, a Swiss newscaster on national television was reprimanded and warned to remove the minute cross on a chain around her neck. A channel which historically frequently broadcast Christian events is now anxious not to offend a minority of ethnically different groups.

It would seem that the vacuum left behind through diminishing religion, can at present be compensated by flooding the market with bunnies, chicks and ducks. But hey-ho, we need to boost the economy, at all costs. It beggars belief, how a cross-section of the public, specifically young folk would react to a survey on the subject of Easter, and what it is they believe they are celebrating. For many people, it represents two more days off work and an abnormal consumption of chocolate, until the advent of an Epiphany!

Photo: pexels / Kris Schulz