Easter memory loss makes plastic of the pr

Easter memory loss makes plastic of the present

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Andrew Hamilton |  16 April 2014
The Easter holidays are a reminder of how our secular calendar still honours the Christian society out of which it came. But the central symbols of contemporary Easter — the big football matches, the holidays and picnics — are a reminder of how widely the Christian meaning of Easter has been forgotten.
This is ironical because both the Jewish Passover, and the Christian Easter that echoes it, are exercises in memory. The Jewish child who ritually asks why this day is remembered among all other days is told a story of slavery in Egypt followed by deliverance by their God. The memory shows the power and good will of God. The remembering shows the hope that the story gives for the present day, even when all the things that make for despair are taken into account.
In the retelling of the story the past is stitched to the present and to the memories that shape the present. The boy who asks the question this year stands in line with other boys who asked the same question during the Holocaust. As participants remember the Passover and its deliverance, they also remember the forms of slavery that mark their personal lives and society and their hope for deliverance.
Easter is an even more complex exercise in remembering and stitching. The Christian liturgy of Easter retells the Jewish story of Passover in a way that stitches it to the climactic story of Jesus' execution and rising from the dead. In both the Passover and in Jesus' death the power and love of God are embodied. The story of the crucifixion, a definitive crushing of hope in a personal project and in a God who cares for the world, is unexpectedly shot through with hope and life.
In celebrating Easter people are invited to remember the first Easter, to stitch it to the torn rags of their own life and world, and to find in it the promise of new garments more resplendent and substantial than any worn by the kings of the day and praised by their courtiers.
Both Passover and Easter in their origins invite a treasuring of history, a pondering of the things that make for life and death and the hope for transformation. In our society this shared attentiveness to the past seems to have atrophied. The focus of celebration is on an infinitely plastic present and on what we can make of it.

That leads us to focus on the individual self and encourages the easy belief that we can make and remake ourselves to be the kind of persons that we want to be without regard to the lasting effects of our actions on ourselves and others. We can define slavery out of existence and do not need to enter the tragedy of death and loss. We surf down the superficiality of the immediate.
The devaluation of history and memory has a deeply corrosive effect on society and culture. Social institutions are layered, and grow organically. Habits of civility and respect for the rule of law, of individual and social rights, and for personal freedom have been built over centuries. They can be quickly eroded if the conditions that sustain them are not treasured and defended.
When we believe they can be disregarded for the sake of short term goals and do not attend to the processes by which in the past they have been built and corrupted, we put at risk our own culture.
In our society the devaluation of memory can be seen in our treatment of asylum seekers. The memory of the displacement of people in World War II and the determination to find refugees a home has been lost. So has the memory of the corruption of societies under Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler: the emphasis on control and security, the stripping of people from the protection of the rule of law, the scapegoating and demonisation of unfavoured minorities, the control of information, the neutering of parliament and the enrichment of those close to power.
There are uncomfortable echoes of these things in the behaviour of government in Australia, particularly in their dealings with people who seek our protection. The harm they do to people and to society is clear to see in the past. If we take pains to remember.
The remembering done at Passover and Easter remains important because it allows us to look back at the brutality of kings without flinching, to recognise in our time the naked brutality of kings and our complicity in covering it over, and to celebrate the sure hope that humanity will flower in the dust of kings and courtiers.