Easter was about being a family holiday. It was about Jesus, too. Easter was a new dress and a basket of treats. The treats must have been a great pacifier to an entire family weary from winter. In this way, they brightened themselves through the ‘gifts’ of spring; among these, treating a child to an unusual gift easily imagined as a preventive salve to the approach on the busy day ahead . . . which– often enough– included church. Our family was casual about that though . . . never a regularly-pressing matter.
Maybe it’s living down South, or maybe it’s having the fortune to have come up in one of the best decades there ever were– either way back then, things were a little more casual and we [almost] had a grip. Today, things seem out of hand to say the least.
There were concerns then, but overall people were reasoned, healthy creatures on the way to better days. (Maybe people still are. We’re just ruminating here.) Today, it feels like we’re challenged. Instead of becoming easier, things are difficult as ever, if not more, especially when you consider that so many want to believe the world is ending. Every crass, medieval happenstance is taken to be a sign of impending rapture. As I understand it, this has been a phenomenon oft’ repeated.
To exacerbate the serious problems, we have people creating issues where there should be none. We’re left slack-jawed at the latest media exposure of unreasonable, threatening arms reaching out to affect the experiences of others based on highly personalized moral inventions, and in such stark contrast to the way they themselves live. It’s gone as far as intrusion into the private visits of women with their doctors and medical staff, their bodies and, ultimately, their access to health care as our species has come to know it.
Our relational individualism has regressed to the point of not being able to communicate effectively in a way that honors everyone in the room. The involvement of some into the practices of others has officially gone too far, again, when we’ve allowed pass on legislation designed to allow our government records clerks to insinuate their personal moral dictates into their public-service job descriptions, potentially ruining due process of law for anyone taken as gay or . . . or what else? What’s next?
Our old secular spring holiday isn’t what it used to be? Via the NYT: “Sacred and Secular in Easter Celebrations; Family Holiday Isn’t What it Used to Be”
So it’s an issue that there may be fewer church-goers, or that “family holiday isn’t what it used to be”.
Life is different!
There may be fewer faithers of the type referred to in the article linked above. . .yet maybe there aren’t. Either way, we shouldn’t forget that there are those others who enjoy Easter holiday for it’s natural , secular, acknowledgements; the nature of which we can’t assume to know, and there are evolving cultural-societal considerations regarding familial behaviors and the Easter holiday where any co-recognized traditions may or may not exist– an interesting exploration to consider undertaking.
Still, to the misplaced concern over the “sacred” habits of others: Couldn’t it be as important, that many families today are spread farther apart and significantly more challenged economically than during some other generations in recent time. Neither get-togethers nor casual, dressed-to-the-9s shopping are the easily undertaken activities they once were, for most U.S. residents.
(If you haven’t read the article linked above in this post, then you may miss some of the significance of references above.)
What’s really getting in the way of family get-togethers, fancy dress and casual shopping?
It’s pause-worthy as well to consider that much of the decline referred to may be the result of family-fracturing drug use (going strong since way back, but especially since incremental outlawing and stigmatization) that has grown so prevalent today, after being outlawed and maligned to the point of completely changing the close knit of our societal fabric for the prize of revenue and enslavement.
People today have advanced addictions . . . not just on the street but in homes across suburbia where it’s been so easy to acquire substantial mind-altering substances in the face of those who live a different economic lifestyle and take to the streets to be arrested and marginalized. The problem of overprescribed, often hot, pain pills and ‘disorder’ pills (new concoctions all the time) have arisen as a result of the constant market turning toward something that hasn’t yet been made illegal. Again, economy, and in the bad side of that people have heroine, their savior when the doctor stops prescribing, and problems with all the new synthetics that are absolutely unpredictable. Synthetics, another outcropping of drug law.
Maybe it’s these things– trust issues, essentially– that have altered the landscape of springtime– if it’s been altered. As the author indicates, church attendance may be up and all the worry over people’s souls could be a figment of the imagination. Should we consider again-rising attendance and self-ascribed sacredness a great thing? It seems to be reflecting harshly on the civic experience.
So, rather than worry over a “national holiday” (that’s religious and secular, as always) seeming irrelevant to a supposedly evolving secular society, shan’t we rather recognize that ‘secular marketing’ [that’s “marketing” to the mainstream reasoning] isn’t confusing anyone, contrary to religious opinion.
Rather, things have been looking just as they should. This Easter consternation is much like the Christmas season, rather than very different. People have been arguing about how to celebrate the winter holidays much more so than on Easter, in my perception.
How to Put the Focus Back in the Easter National Holiday
But, I defer- Christmas does remain more popular, it seems. Maybe it’s the lights. There don’t tend to be many lights out for Easter the way that we’ve become accustomed to seeing during the wintertime and it’s holidays. . . probably because lights are associated with an increased feeling of warmth, physically needed during the wintertime. Could it could be that, if we introduced festive lighting into the Easter weekend, then celebrations would rise to levels of the winter holidays?
Now, in case you haven’t noticed, the ruminating article linked herein this post was written in 1988. When we consider today how much has occurred since that time and look at the continuing worry over churchgoing and various personal affairs of others. . . I believe we can safely say that things may be getting out of hand! It’s not the fault of the politicians . . . it’s our fault for taking so much of what truly matters in this life for granted. We’re worried about all the wrong things, when we’re ruminating over people’s supposed lack of religiosity or moral compassing. What good is it doing us, when media and politics are in the state that they are today? The wrong tail is wagging the wrong dog, and this has been going on in various ways for a long time.
We live in a space where national celebrations simply won’t be as strictly performed to the ideals of any one church, as during some times in the past. On a smaller scale, to the tighter community, sure. That a community can voluntarily collect and enjoy holiday celebrations is a part of a free nation. An understanding of secular perspective is necessary however, especially on a national level of celebration. Nationally, a secular perspective is more evident. These celebrations have a broader appeal and the capacity to achieve a unity among many. That’s what we want.
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