Easter and forgiving

In Ireland the suddenness of spring is also a dominant gold with primroses, tulips and of course daffodils. Even the weeds springing across the lawn are yellow and rhyme with the emerging spring flowers.

This quick of sap and life is also a signifier of Easter which in Ireland is a time of particular significance, since it is always a reminder of the “troubles” and of 800 years of British rule and in particular of the penal laws that forbade Catholics from practising their faith. But it is most especially a reminder of the resilience and resistance of a people despite the odds, since it commemorates the Easter rising and the martyrdom of Ireland’s heroes.

Springtime brings colour and vibrancy to the land and the people.

As a season it speaks of new beginnings after the traditional Christian period of fast and abstinence.

But giving up treats and vices such as alcohol and cigarettes (for those who still smoke) for Lent is only a passage to something new. That newness heralds forgiveness and the capacity to start anew. Indeed, the idea of Easter is the most important in Christian theology.

The significance of this for all of us, Christian or not, is a reminder that while we can never get back lost time, and even one second that is past cannot be recalled, there is still something called hope.

Few of us live without regret — at words spoken out of despair or desperation, or impulsive acts that are born of tiredness or depression, or even because of acts of intolerance. We often justify these deeds because they appear to be enacted as retaliation for deeds done to us or because of remembered hurts.

Lack of acknowledgement is high up in the list of things that make us speak bitter words. And forgiveness or forgetfulness which are the necessary prerequisites for healing are often simply not possible because so often those who offend cannot bring themselves to admit their wrong. So we see the death of relationships. How many sisters and brothers out there do not speak to each other, or stir up hatred against another, out of a sense of hurt or an inability to transcend some perhaps imagined wrong? But Holy Week and Easter signal the possibility of wounds that can be healed and the potential to resurrect lost or even irretrievably broken relationships. There is something buried deep in the rituals of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil Mass that speaks to both a sense of deep despair and to the possibility that something one considered dead or lost can be resurrected.

It would be wonderful if, amidst the turmoil and the warmongering currently encircling the world, this message could take root. Whether we believe that Syria was bombed as an act of justifiable retaliation or that US President Donald Trump in the age-old tradition of presidents and demagogues saw war as a way of binding the country behind him, and rising in the popularity polls, Easter reminds us that every life has a value.

It also contains the message in Holy Week that crowds are easily swayed and people die because the general populace can be so readily made to cry out in hatred. It brings home the idea that generating hatred against Jews or Palestinians or Syrians or Muslims or anyone creates a spiral that continues to propagate effect for generations.

As Europe continues to live in tremulous fear of possible attacks as has occurred in France, in Britain, in Germany and in Sweden, Easter offers the potential, symbolically, of respite and reconciliation, if only those with power could look beyond the immediate acts of atrocity and the short-term gains and recognise that acts of aggression have not worked in Afghanistan or in Iraq and certainly have led to far greater problems in Libya.

The poui, as with the immortelle, has taken on metaphoric significance in Caribbean poetry.

Both are as it were for a moment.

Their ephemeral beauty suggests that hope is indeed fragile and that even the promises made by the powerful are but for a moment.

But as Walcott put it in Season of Phantasmal Peace that was twice read at his funeral, even if “this season lasted one moment, like the pause / between dusk and darkn e s s , between fury and p e a c e ” for us frail hum a n s in our current state, “it l a s t e d long.”