Church and superstition
I blogged at Christmas-time about the difficulty of church-festival times of year for clergy abuse victims, and back then I said that Christmas was the worst, because it’s so all-pervasive. But Easter has its own reasons for being considered the worst – primarily the intensity of feeling associated with it, and also the fact that it is (at least on Good Friday) a festival of grief as well as joy. And the combination of intensity, grief and church is exactly what makes it a trigger time for abuse victims, because that’s the combination they faced daily throughout their abuse.
But for me there’s an added element – my first marriage ended dramatically and painfully on Good Friday (2001). And what compounds the pain of that memory is that Good Friday is, year by year, a movable feast. Which means that some years the anniversary of date and festival closely coincide, but other years there can be two weeks or more between the two, making the painful memories a long-drawn-out process indeed. But what got me musing (and blogging) is something I’ve often said to others: if you want the religious parallels of that experience, it’s that I was so exhausted by the event that I lay down on Good Friday, and didn’t rise from my bed till Easter Sunday. On the other hand, if you want the superstitious parallels, it’s that it happened on Friday 13th in the 13th year of our marriage!
So I was musing on the irony of being able to offer such alternative interpretations (christian or superstitious) of that event, and the pain of swinging between the two – particularly of being drawn to think church thoughts at a time which is painfully inclined to that anyway – and realised that this is the struggle I carry with me all the time. Having grown up in a very conservative christian-oriented world/life, my interpretation of nearly everything was cast within that framework, and it’s often a struggle to find an alternative. Yet Easter itself (not to mention every other church festival) is simply a christian overlay forced onto a much older “pagan” festival.
[There's an interesting aside here, that pagan means "of the country", and first came into use as a derogatory term when christianity became the state religion under the Emperor Constantine. As the newly authorised religion pervaded the educated cities, "pagan" rites and beliefs referred to those of the uneducated rural dwellers, and only over time did it come to mean specifically non (or anti)-christian.]
But back to the point: the Easter festival is overlaid on a very old (more than 1500 years before Christ) fertility festival dedicated to Ishtar (Assyrian) or Astarte (Babylonian), goddess of fertility. And the eggs, Easter bunny, hot cross buns, and even the practice of Lent, are borrowed from this much earlier tradition. And an echo of that earlier “pagan” festival can be found in the Easter date controversies of the 3rd and 4th centuries – some christians still followed the Jewish calendar, celebrating Easter according to the date set for Passover, and some celebrated it on the immediately following Sunday, to commemorate the day of Jesus’ resurrection. But dissatisfaction arose because in some years the Jewish date for Passover fell before the spring equinox!! Now if religious/cultural events are all that’s important in setting the date, then the equinox has no relevance at all. It’s precisely because the old fertility festival still carried some echoes in their thinking that the equinox was important.
I have no quibble with that; religions seeking to convert whole communities have always adopted prior-practised festivals and overlaid them with a new meaning – as, indeed, christians did with the Passover. But when the religion then promotes their own interpretation of the festival as the only right one, and denigrates other parts of it, which they borrowed in the first place, as unacceptable, they really mess with our heads 
The church I grew up in went through a phase of seeking to separate themselves from the pagan associations of Easter (which name is derived from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess, unlike most European languages where the word for Easter is derived from the Latin pasch, in turn derived from Pesach, the Jewish word for Passover) by calling it “The Festival of the Resurrection” instead of Easter. And, of course, rejecting the Easter bunny and Easter eggs (but not chocolate!). But what I think would be better is to see these traditions blended rather than separated – and not only to blend them, but celebrate the blending. In a larger sense, to blend religious practices rather than emphasise the separatenesses.
My struggle, though – returning to my starting point – is to find a way to blend interpretations as well as practices. And part of the struggle is that it’s hard to blend interpretations without being swept back into a conservative christian mindset (which is, perhaps, the reason why religions tend to insist on single-minded adherence). It’s hard to embrace parts of the beliefs/words/practices without taking along with them all the baggage that one grew up with as an intrinsic part of them. And therein lies the basic trigger dilemma of a clergy abuse victim – that one can’t just dabble one’s toes in the edge of church waters, without also having to fight an internal battle against the parts of doctrine one no longer assents to. So one gets forced into being “in” or “out” by one’s own limitations, as much as by the expectations or definitions of others.
But where I’d like to sit is somewhere where superstition and religion are equally valid. Where miracles and magic are seen as the same. And where love and truth and justice are recognised as just as good (ie. life-giving, or what christians would call godly) whether one finds them in Jesus or in any other person, and that selfishness and lies and injustice are just as evil (ie. life-destroying, or what christians would call sinful) whether one finds them in the worst criminal or in the church.