Let us go bunny jumping from great height
Some days ago, a poor PR woman got hold of the wrong end of His stick, when she confused Easter eggs with the hatching rather than the dispatching of Christ. Mind you, the whole Easter story is rather odd, starting, as it does, with Good Friday.
Good Friday, right? Surely that must be a day of celebration, marking some kind of triumph, a glorious birth - or at the very least a Hell of a birthday party. Well, actually, no. Good Friday is all about the humiliation, torture and the slow and excruciatingly painful death of the Guy Who put the Christ in Jesus H tap-dancing Christ. Go figure. Small wonder people get confused about the whole Easter thing.
Mind you, pasting your Christian holidays to pagan yearbook markers, as the early church decided to do, always carried the risk of confusing certain sacred issues. The moment you have your God born on old Wotan’s sacred tree day, for instance, you’re asking for all kinds of weird shit further down the line.
Same with combining the celebratory nailing to a stick of same God a few months later with an ancient fertility festival. Before you know it you have bucketloads of bloody bunnies digging their infernal tunnels under Golgotha hill, mucking things up – and between thoughts of sex and chocolate, that good old Good Friday message of faithful blood and gore gets sidelined like roadkill.
Small wonder so many firebrand religious types would like to see Hugh Hefner, like some Seventies’ pop star, lying face-down in the water, at the shallow end of the gene pool – and kill off the Easter bunny too. (For as the Good Book says, in Revelations; 42, Behold, I split the bunny and a demon appeared!)
Anyway, whatever your religious take or chocolate intake: a happy Easter to all. Take it away, sister Jane:
They may tell you the god is broken
into a higher life,
but it isn’t true:
the one who comes back remains,
even riveted, even pierced -
together in spring,
an always-broken god.
The knots survive in his body,
the clenched-grain scars.
And the iced winter ponds are real:
the children, skating lightly there,
feel a secret shiver
as they cross the blue places
of darkness rising-to-meet,
where the other face of the god
is looking up.
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