Easter As An Antidote to Fear and Hopelessness

Friday, Apr. 10, 2020

Holy Week and Easter have a strange feel this year. The coronavirus has turned our lives upside down. We are fearful, isolated, depressed. Tragically, hundreds of thousands have lost their lives, and the count may go higher. When we need it more than ever, we are deprived of public participation in the Easter Triduum. We are thrown back on our own personal prayers.

But humanity has long been stricken by evil of both human and natural kinds. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles has the following entry on human evil for the year 1137: “Every powerful man built his castles and when the castles were built they filled them with devils and wicked men. By night and day they took those people they thought had any goods ... and put them in prison and tortured them with indescribable torture to exhort gold and silver. Many thousands they killed by starvation. They levied taxes on the villages every so often and called it protection money.”

 The Chronicles continue: “Wretched people died of starvation; some lived by begging for alms who had once been rich men; some fled the country. There had never been till then greater misery in the country, nor had heathens done worse than (Christians]. Men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep.”

Barbara Tuchman’s book, “A Distant Mirror,” paints a similarly desolate picture of the 14th century, when European civilization seemed to have collapsed utterly, beyond all hope of redemption. 

And if one skips several centuries and reads accounts of the underworld of life among the poor in Victorian England, again one is stuck by the viciousness and barbarity which was the daily diet of large numbers of people. Certainly a black record could be drawn up of the 20th century – and now the 21st century – with all their wars, acts of genocide, cruel ideologies, assaults on human dignity, self-indulgent luxury on the one hand and appalling poverty on the other.

A few years ago, English Catholic commentator John F.X Harriott put all this in the context of Easter. He wrote: “Holy Week should be the antidote to that kind of cosmic despair. Christianity was born on Calvary, in a moment of black despair, when all that is bad in human nature seemed to have [overcome] all that is best. And the pattern then set, of hope being seeded, faith kindled, as momentarily the light of the world seemed extinguished, has been rediscovered and relived ever since. And nobody can live long without encountering it, sometimes in ways that stand all conventional suppositions on their head.”

Harriott continues: “I remember once listening to a man describing his experience in Auschwitz. He had been beaten up and tortured, seen relatives and friends carried off to the gas ovens, human beings reduced to beasts, and he himself almost died of starvation. When he finished his story I asked how he had kept his faith. ‘That is where I found it,’ he said.”

Harriott concludes: “In every age, in the worst of every age, that is the Christian experience. God has visited his people not in a golden age, not in a sanitized experience of human existence, but in its darkest moment and its lowest depths. It was out of that that he rose from the dead, and by his saving power so can we. Pessimism is not an option. Confidence and joy are the Christian heritage, now, as they were in our [ancestors’] times.”

Our suffering now is more natural than human. Yet it belongs in a long history of human calamities.