Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label easter

Easter, the Spring Festival

Easter brings to mind the resurrection of Jesus.  But Easter was celebrated even before Jesus.  It was a spring festival.  Many states in India have similar festivals.  Vishu in Kerala and Bihu in Assam are examples.  In Western literary traditions, winter symbolises death and spring is the harbinger of new life.  “April is the cruellest month,” begins T S Eliot’s classical poem, The Waste Land . The Eliotean waste land is a metaphor for the aridity of modern life.  In such a world there is only perpetual winter, winter that keeps us warm.  Our life is no better than death, implies Eliot.  We live death-in-life existence clutching lifeless roots in “this stony rubbish”.  Easter, or resurrection as it has come to mean today, is a celebration of new life.  Spring comes with a new life that stirs up the dull roots that lay beneath the snow in winter, to use the Eliotean metaphor.   The whole Christian concept of the Holy Week which starts a week before Easter Sunday is

Happy Easter

Upon the yellow sands    by the lake of Galilee Sat the Saviour                playing with pebbles.             Schools of fish swarmed    beneath the ripples And cried unto the Saviour:    Give us our daily bread. I give you life’s water,    muttered the Saviour. Off they went calmly    into life’s depths.   And upon the trembling ripples    lay the Saviour’s image Dying in silence    nailed to a cross. Wish everyone a HAPPY EASTER if that makes any sense to anyone.