Politically Correct Easter

We are very interested in what you and yours are doing for the Easter season this year.  Please comment or post links.

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N. T. Wright quote:

We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. …

This is our greatest festival.

Take Christmas away and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else.

Take Easter away and you don’t have a New Testament;

You don’t have a Christianity.

Boo.  I hate that quote.   It’s Reddit-tier.

I had the unusual experience yesterday Sunday of hearing the quote twice, hating it both times and getting a rush of insight as to why, but also getting insight into how to make Easter more meaningful  this year.

Let’s talk about both: why you shouldn’t feel guilty if your Easter doesn’t have quite the same valence in the same way as Christmas, but also how you can make more of your Easter.

Political correctness is not just about Orwellianizing the language in the 1990s and onward.  Political correctness happens in every group and institution including ours.  It could be a form of virtue signalling or holiness spiraling, I don’t know, but what I do know is that to greater or lesser degrees it happens everywhere.  We sometimes know it by the name of the party line or the company line.  The basic phenomenon is taking some shared concept or value and asserting that social and physical reality should bend to the shared concept and value, and if it doesn’t we should just will-power our way through.

It is contrary to Christianity and in particular to Restoration Christianity in that it treats the flesh and our socialities as secondary or accidental inconveniences at best and downright obstacles at worst.  Even so, we are sometimes subject to it.  There was a time, for example, when there was a feeling in LDS circles that you *ought* to be joyful at a funeral because our doctrine taught that the person was going to a better place.  Luckily that has faded away.  You see some of it in the response to President Nelson’s call to acknowledge Christ in our references to the Church and to the Gospel.  The Mormon Tabernacle Choir changed their name to the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square–TabCATS.  No additional reference to Christ found.

So let’s talk about Easter.  Trying to  measure the amount of New Testament chapters dependent on an event and then sizing our celebrations accordingly is a 110 IQ managerial approach.  It’s dumb.  By the same token we should feel bad that we don’t have a Commandments Day with cake and yippees, or a  Second  Coming Day where we festively burn sinners in effigy (never mind, this would be awesome).

Easter is the wrong season for a big blowout and a long holiday period.  Christmas is when the harvest is still in, the animals are being slaughtered, and there isn’t as much work to do.  Lights look great in  the darkness.  Easter is at spring, which is beautiful.   But also traditionally a time of privation and of lots of work doing the spring planting and the spring cleaning.  Not really a leisure kick-back time.  That is less so now that we are more detached from the seasons and the soil, but we still have the underlying biological rhythms to match, plus the calendar isn’t set up for a long Easter season celebration with time to recuperate afterwards.

The  holiday itself also doesn’t lend itself to a long season of celebration.  Christmas is pure victory and fun.  But Easter is about overcoming death and sin.  The glorious Sunday is preceded by Good Friday, so you can’t really have a huge build up of celebration culminating in Easter.  The celebration can’t really come until Easter itself and still be true to the holiday.

Finally, there is the lack of cultural and institutional support for a big Easter bash.  Every family has their own Christmas traditions but these traditions are buttressed and sustained by all the existing cultural traditions, movies, books, songs, and so on.  Practically and psychologically there is only so much of a holiday you can do on your own, or that you should do on your own.

That said, there is more we can do, and that was the over all point that Elder Stevenson was making in the talk where he quoted N.T. Wright as above.  Not that we need to carefully measure our Easter to make ourselves spend as much time and money on it as Christmas, or will ourselves into feeling festive for weeks and weeks.  But that there is more that we can do.

What I believe that the more we can do is leaning in to the nature of the holiday.  Which means emphasizing more the private and repentance and personal reflection that leads up to the celebration and sacrament on Easter day.  Some of you have made some great suggestions.  For me, at minimum I have decided to fast all Saturday and to spend more time on Holy Week in study and prayer.  These won’t make Easter  more like Christmas, but they will make Easter more like Easter.