This is our first Easter since the unfolding, relentless Saturn/Pluto cycle which began on 12th January 2020. The archetypal story of suffering, crucifixion, death – and rebirth, let us not forget! – which is at the core of the Easter message, feels profoundly appropriate now as our human community travels the dark night of the current corona virus crisis. At present we have no idea of when, or how, we will emerge. So we wait, and hope…
Here are my thoughts, which I first wrote at Easter Eve some years ago. They seem even more apt now:
photo: Anne Whitaker
“…There is a stillness about Easter Eve. Whether you are Christian, hold another faith, or none, the underlying archetypes of the Easter journey are common to all human experience.
We have all, unless we have led a supremely charmed life, been cast out into the wilderness at one time or another. Life has crucified us all, to a greater or lesser extent. We have been in the Underworld, have known what it is like to go through experiences so severe that we die to our old selves. Then there is the wait, the wait in darkness, fear, and not knowing.
Will we ever emerge, reborn? And when we do emerge, who are we now? Who recognises us, acknowledges and honours where we have been?
And the most profound question of all: what should we do with the life which has been given back to us?
As ever, in times of waiting, the great poets have been there before us, giving a context, bringing collective dignity to our individual struggles. Here are some magnificent lines from T.S.Eliot to see you through this dark night, before the Easter light returns:
“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” …” (i)
Endnotes
(i) from T.S.Eliot ‘s “East Coker” No 2 of The Four Quartets
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400 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2020
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