25 March: Boreham on Easter

The Glory of Easter
It is the distinctive glory of Easter that it imports into the programme of the year the soul-stirring note of challenge and of triumph. In deploring the cheerless and disconsolate atmosphere that enveloped the funeral of Robert Browning, Sir Edward Burne-Jones said that he longed to see, somewhere in the black procession, one or two gay, defiant banners, "and much would I have given," he adds, "if a chorister had emerged from the triforium and rent the air with a trumpet!" Easter supplies that exultant quantity. For, at Easter time, we do honour, not to one of life's phases or events or experiences, but to life itself. Easter stands for life at its best, regnant, deathless, immortal. And, in consequence, it produces its stimulating reaction in us all.

Among the subtle but authoritative laws that govern our intricate and complex beings is a law that ordains that the life that pulses within our own veins shall throb with new and startling energy whenever it is confronted by some vivid manifestation of life around or life beyond. The repercussion is so perfectly natural and instantaneous that we often ascribe to external and objective causes a sensation that is really internal and subjective. Wordsworth was once asked why he wrote, and wrote at considerable length, of dancing daffodils.

I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils
Beside the lake, beneath the
trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
And—
Ten thousand saw I at
a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance,
The waves beside them
danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves . . .

But, as the poet was obliged to confess when his attention was directed to the matter, daffodils do not dance. They stand perfectly still. Confronted by this embarrassing problem, Wordsworth reflected for some time and then replied that he could only suppose that, since the daffodils set his soul dancing with delight, he had unconsciously transferred the inward sensation to the outward object.

Humanity's Invincible Lust Of Life
The thrill with which we greet the return of Easter is but another phase of the same arresting phenomenon. It is life answering to life. In actual fact, man loves life, profoundly and constantly, and every manifestation of the thing that is so dear to him captivates his fancy and sends tremors of gladness through all his being. We love the city because it swarms with life; we love the bush because new forms of life startle us everywhere; we love the play, the film, the novel and the art gallery because, by means of them, we are able to explore new twists and turns of the life that we love. A similar discovery, on a still more exalted and impressive plane, breaks upon our minds with every recurring Easter. Easter is the supreme festival of life, of resurrection, of immortality. Our nerves tingle in response to its stirring message. In celebrating Easter we are unconsciously giving three cheers for life itself.

It is only man's unquenchable lust of life that enables him to live. In his "Kingdom of Man," Sir Edwin Ray Lankester directs attention to the remarkable fact that although, compared with the brutes, man is one of the most helpless and one of of the most fertile creatures on the planet; he is at the same time one of the most doggedly persistent and one of the most prolific. His birth rate is inconsiderable when compared with the birth rate of the beasts. What then is the secret of his survival and multiplication? Sir Edwin attributes it to his low death rate. His love of life leads him to cling with amazing tenacity to the life that he cherishes. His intense and passionate love of living enables him to endure when all things band together for his destruction. "Even when every natural chance is against him, he insists on saying, and on saying successfully: 'I will live!'" This irrepressible love of life is his most significant and important characteristic.

Man Dares The Thing He Most Dreads
Man is a medley of contradictory qualities. He involves himself in risks that no other creature would face; yet he insures himself, in a way that is possible only to himself, against the hazards that he courts with such intrepidity. Thus, for example, he is the only creature that absolutely declines to be restricted in the scope of his operations by climatic conditions. Other animals have their own geographical haunts and natural habitats. But man goes everywhere. Neither polar snows nor equatorial suns deter him in his restless wanderings and his alien settlements. Yet, although he displays an audacity that no other creature can rival, and scorns all the limits set, by torrid and by frigid zones, his rate of mortality is the lowest on record. He seems at times to be courting death and destruction; but it is merely a piece of innocent coquetry; he is genuinely in love with life and will ensure any torture in order to retain it.

Nourished by such hopes and aspirations as Easter annually brings, man's passion for living waxes as his physical faculties wane. Men come to feel that death, in any ultimate sense, is unimaginable. The instinct of immensity, infinity, eternity is the light of their eyes and the breath of their nostrils. Immortality is in their blood. In dying, they defy death with the sublime taunt that, though dying, they can never die. They go down to their graves but they go down to their graves with a triumphant Nil Desperandum on their lips. They cry, with Browning:

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time: I
press God's lamp
Close to my breast: its splendour, soon or late,
Will
pierce the gloom: I shall emerge one day;
You understand me? I have said
enough.

It is the peculiar glory of the Easter festival that, once a year, it sounds in the responsive hearts of men that stimulating trumpet blast of unconquerability.

F W Boreham

Image: Spring flowers from GP's UAE garden.