EASTER vs easter [T, 4-22-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Mutterings of An Old Man—EASTER vs easter [T, 4-22-25]

 

I like to find a helpful picture to post at the head of my columns, either something that represents the subject, or one that brings up relevant questions, like What in the world is he writing about now?

So, on Holy Saturday, I searched Google and Bing image categories to find something like He Lives, maybe with an empty tomb. But I put only Easter into the search line. That produced rows and rows of pictures of bunnies and baskets and chocolate and ham buffets and colored eggs!! Not a thing about Jesus or resurrection.

But one of the search categories at the top [Bing is better than Google for these.] was Christian Easter. You mean there is a Buddhist Easter? Or Jewish Easter? When did Christian Easter become a sub-category of easter?

I clicked on Christian Easter. Indeed, there were empty crosses and empty tombs, pale white Christs standing in midair, etc. There really is a Christian Easter.

The arbiters of current culture—the tech companies—assume that anyone who searches for Easter is thinking about secular easter, commercial easter, Hallmark easter, not Easter easter. Yes, they acknowledge that there is a Christian Easter, but only on the third line of images, and then only one bare cross, which is about Good Friday, not Easter.

Makes sense, those images of bunnies and eggs and chocolate. Most everybody celebrates easter. Family cookouts, where drunken uncles tell us how religious the current presidential administration is, for they are focused on putting The Ten Commandments [That’s Hebrew, not Christian] into court houses, and improving the economy, because Jesus wants us to be rich.

You can make money off of easter. Not so much from Easter. And money is the only value of current culture, and current politics. As it says in the Declaration of Independence the purpose of it all is, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Money.

 

Oh, sure, there is an occasional story on Tik Tok about someone who has discovered that money is only second in importance--after self-knowledge, or some other psychobabble category--but even a new psychobabble genre is soon monetized, through books and podcasts and graphic novels and video games and gambling.

The psychobabble people say that I should accept the moment, embrace whatever is and make it into what I want it to be, that I can make easter into Easter if I want to. Well, okay, but I think I’d better start with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, the way he originally wrote it, according to a search of the same internet that thinks resurrection is a sub-category of colored eggs:

O God and heavenly father, grant us the serenity of mind to accept the things that cannot be changed, courage to change that which can be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord.

So, what do you think of the picture I put at the top of this screed…column?

John Robert McFarland

For what it’s worth, I’m going to an every-third-day posting schedule for a while, instead of the every-other-day schedule I have been using. Maybe an extra day will make me less acerbic.