EasterBlog

You know the sort of thing. A kind of superstition. Dudley Moore once told of something like it, probably, if memory serves, in one of the famous 'Pete & Dud' routines: the daft idea that when you finish on the loo upstairs you pull the chain and have to run downstairs and get to the bottom before it flushes or the bogeyman will get you...

Often, I think I will write something like this. But then I think ‘No, that is being morose; like wishing it to come’. But then again, whether what I fear happens or no, following that path means I may never write the words at all; and there will, of course, eventually come a day when it will be too late. So if I write it at all, the time must not matter, only the words.

Watching the children - I call them children, though they are grown older now - watching the children I remember how when they were little we sought anxiously to protect them. From the bumps and knocks of everyday life, yes, and from other things as well. How, feeling hopelessly inadequate for the task (and we made some unhappy mistakes, in particular over the way they were allowed to be treated at school - God, how I wish we had never heard of that wretched place!) we sought to help them cope with the slings and arrows they would meet as increasingly they made their way into the big wide world.

Well, there has to come a day when one stops feeling responsible for one’s children. They will make their own decisions, suffer their own mistakes and learn of gladness when they have chosen and acted wisely. I know. But still the longing to nurture, to protect, is there; though now as time passes it takes a different form, in proportion more insistent as one feels more ineffectual.

What can I do for them, what can I do for their children, that will weigh for them when I am gone? Many things flood to mind, but one stands out. I can tell them again the Easter story. What they make of it must be their own business, but at least I can tell them the story. The tale itself has a life beyond my mortality. Its complex intertwined themes will remain for them to untangle long after I am gone. That is why we preserve the resurrection myth and its words of hope and meaning in life. There may be other reasons too, but that is the one which rings truest and most urgently.

The words echo for me down the years, as I still hope they will ring for my own children and for their little ones: ‘Daddy, Daddy, where shall I find meaning in all this?’ There are other ways in other faiths to describe what it conveys and can mean for you it, but none better. Learn to live life that is not conditioned by fear. ‘Follow the way of the one who died, my child.’