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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 11, 2004
Easter MMIV
People Christians especially still complain about the commercialization of Christmas and other symptoms of its conversion from a religious celebration into a crass self-indulgent secular pig-out. (That is the good news: there are still complaints.) For all the repetition the observation is true and correctly reflects the decline and decadence of our society. To be sure there is still some starch in us; the achievement of what was a grand civilization takes a long time to be washed away. There is still evidence of the survival of some of that compunction which continues to restrain our animal instincts long after we have forgotten why they must be tamed. Civilization is incidentally not something that exists primarily in external objects -- in art and architecture and books and music which are only the external gestures of the thing; nor even in the graceful manners which reveal its presence regardless of outward dress. It is rather something that is carried within each of its members; forms of nobility that are contagious alike to savages and to our children. It is the creative power that builds all these beautiful things and which when it passes watches the desert and jungle reclaim them -- watches the desert and jungle in turn reclaiming the heart of man. It is everything -- moral aesthetic ethical -- but especially civilization is moral. It turns men outward lifts them above the animal contemplation of immediate need and towards the requirements of God and our neighbour. And as we have chiefly forgotten today it is in its very nature sacramental. It is the lifting up of entire peoples in a mysterious aggregative act of prayer. The degree of our decadence was brought home to me through Lent as I watched public reactions to political events at home and abroad. This is not the day to review what they were but I was struck by the nearly complete failure on the part of public and politicians alike to rise above squalor; by our almost eager willingness to accept the low motive and the low road. Cynicism and faithlessness have always been features of our public life and checks upon both personal and collective spiritual progress. They can never be entirely overcome by sinful men; but one senses the abandonment of any serious effort to resist or even conceal them. In myself I noticed various failures of courage -- lazy self-caressing relaxations into forms of cheap and theatrical despair -- the mirror of the narcissism I find in operation all around me. "What is the point?" one asks oneself Why do you even bother to try? Even were I willing and equal to the task what could I possibly do for people who have rejected God and are determined to embrace the world the flesh and the devil. The world is the easiest to overcome (according to St. John of the Cross) the devil is the hardest to understand the flesh is our most tenacious enemy. But a visit to any shopping mall will confirm that we as a society have lost even the ability to stand up to the world drawn as we are to the dung-heaps of "consumerism". It is all hopeless; or else it is not. Christmas may be a wash and the public celebration of Easter has been sabotaged -- replaced with a secular and meaningless "March break" for the convenience of administrators and the unionized teaching force. But enough Christians remain to acknowledge their right to Good Friday and Easter. And except for some cursory commercial effort to reduce the season to the glibness of bunnies and chocolate eggs it is more or less untouched. Easter remains as the focus of the Christian liturgical year the safe dry ground from which to advance forward. We ourselves need personally to be saved but so does the world around us. And it is in the mystery of Christ's Resurrection on this Easter morning that we can see the way clear. It is more than a reminder a list of "things to do today" for Christ is in charge. The actual Christ not the semblance or an image or a myth or a symbol or a custom from old times but Our Lord risen from the dead carrying the victorious standard of Christendom. And the way forward is not the way back. We have carried the cross of a battered Christian civilization one now beyond the possibility of repair. But there is nothing to stop us from building another. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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