"Fair daffodils we weep to see thee haste away so soon. . ."
At the bottom of my garden there is a sole daffodil sticking its head through the weeds. It might be one of the ones I planted there in 1984 coyly returning to tell me that it's Easter. Spring has arrived and the daffodil has resurrected itself for the 17th time.
That beautiful, golden trumpet is called the "blossom of the hanged head" in Irish. I walked down the garden and lifted the bowed head and looked at it. Surrounded by weeds, I thought of how this act was almost religious.
Yesterday was Good Friday. On that day Jesus was publicly executed. It is the remembrance of a horrid, violent and lonely end of what we all value most - a human life. Tomorrow is Easter Sunday and we celebrate a triumph over that same horror. It is a feast that should prompt us to reflect on the meaning of our own lives. What happens when we die?
Contemporary lifestyles do not really lend themselves to profound reflection on life, death and eternity. Getting from day to day is the ruination of our lives. As somebody sits in endless traffic, commuting to a mundane job with a fancy title, what real chance has he or she to think that there must be something better than this ceaseless toil? Get up early, commute, work, come home late, eat the supermarket's processed oblation straight from the microwave, watch television, go to bed. And tomorrow, the same again. Underneath this repetitious programme many of us feast on soap operas, "real-life" dramas that substitute themselves for the drama of really living.
Many pastoral workers do not enjoy "real-life" dramas. Some can even be quite hostile to people discussing the plots of ER and Eastenders, which could never become entertainment for nurses and social workers. This is because these things happen to real people and are not at all entertaining. Real human beings with real feelings, real emotions and real relatives lie for days on hospital trolleys. Television glamorises this and presents life as if it were something to be watched from the safety of the sofa rather than participated in. But these same dramas compensate for a life that is often passing us by. Different things happen to characters that are as real to many people as their workmates are. They compensate us for the fact that many of are not living our lives to the full.
Christianity, like all other faiths, celebrates life as something with a great value. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the drama of God participating in our real lives. And Easter is Christ walking down the garden, finding the blossom of the hanged head among the weeds, and lifting its head because he recognised its true beauty and value. There is something greater out there, if only we look for it.
". . .as yet the early rising sun has not attained its noon."
F. MacE.