Something to celebrate

I NORMALLY stick fairly rigidly to political topics in my regular Guernsey Press column but a letter in this paper about the ‘real meaning of Easter’ got me thinking in a more philosophical vein. I confess that I venture into such waters with some trepidation as the last thing I want to do is cause upset and I know how poignant the Christian story of Easter is to those of that faith.

They believe that Jesus died to atone for our sins and they commemorate this seminal sacrifice at the festival of Easter. This must be powerful stuff for those with a Christian belief and I in no way want to make light of it. That said, the idea that there is one ‘real story’ surrounding any religious festival is rewriting history and probably ought to be challenged.

One lesson I have painfully learned during many years in politics is that the hardest thing to get people to embrace is change. It was ever thus. So when the early evangelists brought the message of the ‘new’ monotheistic religion of Christianity westwards to this part of the world it must have been a challenge to get local people to set aside their old beliefs and practices. Their answer? Change as little as possible in terms of custom and practice because it is the core beliefs which really matter.

So many of the old ‘pagan’ sites of worship were retained. It is no coincidence that there are stone monoliths representing ancient fertility goddesses in the grounds of the parish churches of both St Martin’s and Castel. It was so much easier to get people to worship a new god if they were at least allowed to do so where they and their families had always worshipped. They had always known that these were holy places, so why engender pointless resistance by claiming otherwise?

By the way, I put the word ‘pagan’ in inverted commas because I am using it in the modern sense of ‘relating to an older pre-Christian belief system’. That is not the original meaning of the word. It effectively means ‘country dweller’, which sort of underlies my point about change. It is a known phenomenon that those who live a rural life tend to be even more resistant to change than others. That can be seen clearly in the modern world today. So those who hung on longest to the old ways in the face of the arrival of this new-fangled Christian belief were dubbed ‘pagans’. But I digress.

It was not just in respect of places of worship that the Christian evangelists took a pragmatic approach when trying to change an ingrained belief system. Exactly the same could be said when it came to the timing of important religious festivals.

I am certainly not a biblical scholar. CSE divinity is my highest qualification in this respect. But I understand from those who do have such expertise that there is no particular reason to believe Jesus was born in December and, if anything, the evidence points against this. So why do we celebrate his birth at that time of year?

Again it comes down to the importance of minimising the changes in custom and practice if you want a community to embrace new beliefs. If a society has held a huge mid-winter celebration since time immemorial – as most of pagan Europe had – then getting them to abandon such an important annual event would be very difficult. How much better to re-purpose this ancient celebration in a way which was consistent with the new Christian religion.

It’s a bit like Guernsey’s enduring desire to have a fire festival in the autumn. In Britain the main fire festival was Beltane in May. Here we had the traditional budloe, or Bout de l’An, the wood which was burned at the end of the year, which probably happened around the winter solstice.

Much later it was transformed into Guy Fawkes night to belatedly celebrate the foiling of the gunpowder plot over in England.

This 19th century reform (it really was that recent) was encouraged by a Guernsey establishment uncomfortable with pagan traditions but seemingly happy to revel in the joyous memories of an execution.

Still, when I was growing up no one called it anything but budloe night. These days it is really neither pagan nor anything to do with Catholic plotting. It’s just an excuse for eating and drinking around a big fire, but my goodness the tradition has certainly sustained because humans are creatures of habit.

So finally we come to Easter. Again both the timing and the name date back to a period long before Christianity.

If the mid-winter festival was big in ‘pagan times’, then the spring fertility festival was mega. This is not surprising when society was overwhelmingly agrarian – nothing would have been more important to those communities than the bursting forth of new life after the ‘little death’ of winter. Except perhaps the successful gathering in of the harvest at the other end of the growing season, which the early church also sensibly retained as a celebration.

Even in today’s world, humanity is a part of nature and not set apart from it. As such we all tend to feel a bit more positive as spring arrives, when the days lengthen, the days warm and rebirth is all around us. In common parlance, it is a time of year when we ‘feel our sap rise’. Imagine how much more this would have been the case when the occupation of 90% of the population was producing food.

So the early church would have been bonkers to try to get those they were seeking to convert to give up this ingrained spring festival. So much better to retain it and give it a Christian twist – and what better than a story of death and then miraculous rebirth?

As for the name, Easter is named after the ancient European fertility goddess Eostre. She had symbols which showed clearly her role in ensuring fertility. These included the hare (not the rabbit – that got lost in translation) and the egg.

So what am I trying to say? I suppose that the meaning of things – even those things rooted in deep spiritual belief – do change and evolve. So we should all guard against orthodoxy or lecturing others about ‘the true meaning’ of anything. That applies not just to religions but to all belief systems.

Where I do agree with those who object to a purely material and hedonistic celebration of Easter is that it is a special time of year and worthy of marking in a deeper way than just munching chocolate and enjoying a four-day weekend.

I am neither a Christian nor a pagan and so secular that I don’t really understand the concept of spirituality. However even I recognise that some seasons just feel so important to humanity that our nature prompts us to mark them in some meaningful way. If folk want to gorge themselves on Easter eggs too, that is their lookout but personally I’m that rare creature – a complete chocophobe.