As I sat in the lobby of AT&T yesterday morning, I watched as one of the employees made her way out the door towards the parking lot. "Have a good Resurrection Day!", she happily exclaimed to the security guard. The guard wished her the same.It took me a minute to figure out that she was referring to Easter. I'm so removed from Christianity that I'm now out of touch with the new nomenclature given to customary "Christian" holidays.
It seems that the holiday I grew up with, Easter, resplendent with baskets full of chocolate bunnies and eggs, ham dinners and colorful pastels and bouquets of flowers, isn't really a Christian holiday at all. When you look at the symbols closely, it becomes all so apparent, really...bunny rabbits=fertility, spring colors and motifs=the same, eggs=again fertility. Chocolate treats, marshmallow peeps, sumptuous ham dinners and baskets o' plenty=the promise of Spring's renewal of agricultural riches and a hope for prosperity. All so very...pagan.
The Venerable Bede wrote about the Germanic goddess Eostre in the Dark Ages. The celebrants to Eostre had by his time (c. 700 AD) pretty much died out and been supplanted by early Christians who had adopted and assimilated the name and customs into their annual remembrance of Christ's resurrection, the Pascha.
Fast-forward to the Age of Enlightenment (c. 1700s) and the subsequent founding of the United States under secular humanist principles, adopting and embracing the Judeo-Christian heritage of it's European creators but also desiring a greater move towards less-supernatural aspects of the lessons and traditions of the Bible, the more secular aspects of the holiday are given favor, above and beyond, in many contexts to the fantastic tale of the resurrection of the dead corporeal Jesus.
Christian fundamentalists to this day try to wrestle back the meaning of Easter. They see it, like Christmas, as having evolved into a commercialized and off-centered telling of Christ's message, and mission for which He died.
But I think, that unless we allow religious zealots to control the media and thus what we think (for let us accept the fact that the media controls our thoughts and actions) most people would hold dear the childhood memories of egg hunts and Easter Bunny gifts above the dour (and freakin' scary) images of a bleeding torture victim dying a horrifically painful death and magically being "beamed up" to an ethereal plain of dubious description to be closer to "God"...who is actually himself and they share that existence with another entity, only known as "The Holy Spirit" and they have always been the one creator and omniscient, omnipotent being who is The One True God. Do you have a headache yet? I know I do. Well, get used to pain, because if you don't believe in Him (all three of Him(s), I guess), you'll endure an eternity of burning and torture in Hell!
I'm watching one of my traditional favorites aired on TV each year around this time, Cecil B. DeMille's great "The Ten Commandments", starring Chuck Heston, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson and, of course, my favorite Yul Brynner.
I guess this really isn't an "Easter" movie, since the supposed historical events depicted take place thousands of years before Christ during the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt. It had more of a foundation in the tenets of The Passover, a Jewish holiday intertwined, coincidentally, with the events of the Christian resurrection myth.
I love the quote ascribed and stated many times in the movie by Brynner's character about adhering to the written word as the law and the ultimate importance and sacrosanctness placed on the written word.
In the time of the real Rameses II, who Brynner's character was based, the written word instructed readers to follow the true faith. Through the Sed festival and a fervent reassertion of the pre-Akhenaten hierarchy of the pantheistic Egyptian belief system, the Pharaoh was revered as a god. Gone, under Rameses, were the misguided days of a monotheistic sun god and back to the gods of what would then be regarded as "old time religion".
The prior "written word" of the heresy of Akhenaten was eviscerated from monuments and tablets. Ramses would allow only one religion. The True One. The one which had endured over a thousand years, and would continue to be worshiped for another thousand years. Until, it too, like Christianity centuries later, would be corrupted and morphed into...something else.
Some "new" way of trying to explain, with utter futility, the inexplicableness of human existence and our ultimate destination after death.