Easter is an odd holiday if you are brought up Catholic since it purports to be joyous about resurrection and yet the lead-up to it involves torture and death.

I used to hate the long hours spent at church on Good Friday – the statues covered in purple cloth, the long reading of the Passion. For a child, it seemed endless, and even our new Easter dresses were no compensation.

As I got older, it became even more graphic. Pontius Pilate washing his hands of Jesus and then the torture of the crucifixion – the piercing of his side and the dialogue with the two men crucified with him. Then the skies darkened and the veil of the temple was ripped apart, the promise that one of them would be with him that day in heaven. It is amazing storytelling.

Symbolism

The first school I taught in was a Catholic Sixth Form College in London and one of my colleagues, who was not Christian, was horrified by what she saw as symbols of torture in every room – the crucifixes. She was able to see them, in a way that, because of familiarity, I couldn’t.

I was speaking to some Protestant friends recently who explained that, in Protestantism, Christ is not depicted on the cross because he isn’t there anymore, due to the resurrection – I hadn’t thought of that before.

And yet many of the crucifixes of my childhood were more modernist and quite beautiful. They were shorn of the symbols of torture – the medieval realism of blood, thorns and torn skin – and instead seemed to float above the altar, the skin of the Christ luminous, smooth and sensual.

My aunts, I remember, went to see the living Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany – a tradition that originated in the bubonic plague years of the 17th century. Villagers promised God that, if spared the plague, they would perform a Passion

every 10th year. This was a big part of 1960s Catholic tourism and involved bringing back little bits of Hummel (figurines) and cowbells and stories of the strange, ancient reenactment that charmed and moved them.

The first school I taught in was a Catholic Sixth Form College in London and one of my colleagues, who was not Christian, was horrified by what she saw as symbols of torture in every room – the crucifixes

Modern traditions

One of the biggest Easter traditions these days in the north of Ireland is to head in exodus to Donegal. So many adult associations are travelling up there, past lambs in the fields, the grass acid-green, the days still cold and sharp; Easter weddings in Gweedore with Scotsmen in kilts and pipers.

One year, we were in a pub in Rossnowlagh on Good Friday and we were told we couldn’t order wine because of the day that was in it. As the hours passed, however, we could hear great hilarity that seemed to suggest consumption behind a curtain that was closing off the bar. When we asked the waitress, she told us that that was the cast of the Passion play from the friary, and although it was not confirmed, we expect there were exemptions.

Now, for me, without religious belief, the symbolism remains. I especially love the Easter hymn, Now the Green Blade Riseth. It is a hymn about the turning of the year and the return of spring, of life asserting itself over death once more.

’Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,

Wheat that in the dark earth, many days has lain;

Love lives again, that with the dead has been:

Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.’

This is the world and the hope of gardens. Even in a cold, wet spring such as this, when all still looks decimated by winter from afar, going up close, it is clear that everything is growing, coming back. I pulled up a seemingly dead plant the other day only to find the little leaves of a heathy aquilegia there in its heart.

Prompt

The prompt this month is Easter or spring – what are your associations with this time of year? What were the rituals around it – religious or secular?

If you’d like to write to Maureen, email: icl@farmersjournal.ie