Easter Message

Easter Sunday, the most holy day in the Christian calendar, fell on April 4th this year. Now that’s a more unusual statement than it might at first seem, for this year Easter Sunday fell on the same day for all Christians, both those of the so-called Eastern and Western varieties.
Easter day is calculated from the first full moon of Spring and, with the moon trotting saround the Earth at a crisp four thousand kilometers an hour, the timing of the full moon varies depending on where you are, as the moon is at a slightly different place in the heavens and with a slightly changed aspect as it rises in varying locations around the world.
I wondered if I’d missed something and that, after nearly a thousand years of schism, agreement had been arrived at on the timing Easter, so I checked next year and, what do you know, they’ll only be one Easter again, according to Wikipedia, on the 24th April. But when I looked up 2012 hopes were dashed, we’ll be back to same old, same old and they’ll be weeks apart. No agreement after all, something that doesn’t surprise, just disappoints.
One Lebanese friend had a different, and typically pragmatic view, though; he felt that he’d been done out of a day off, as both Easters warrant National Holidays here!
As a child, I did the Sunday school bit and still have on my desk a little booklet, written in my childish printing, of St. Paul’s revelation on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus. There’s even a map, drawn in crayon, of the Holy Land, Syria and Lebanon.
About half a kilometer from where we live is another Damascus Road, the one from Beirut to Damascus: it’s about a three hour drive. Surrounded by a fair amount of Biblical geography, it’s easier to feel a connection to events that took place all that time ago.
But there’s something incomplete, to adult eyes at least, about that childish map: there are no boundaries.
So, although I can drive to Damascus, up into the mountains of Lebanon, around the corner into Jordan and take a dip in the Dead Sea, Jerusalem is impossible. I have been driven down to the border of Israel and the Occupied Territories (the official Foreign Office nomenclature for the Holy Land that was) and walked along it. On one side of the barbed wire and no-man’s land were irrigated, green plots and pretty houses with gently sloping red-tiled roofs, built in something like Cotswold stone. On the other side were irrigated, green plots and pretty houses with gently sloping red-tiled roofs, built in something like Cotswold stone. The border fortifications had no gaps.
I broke off writing this to listen to breaking news, late on Sunday evening. Three car bombs hit targets in Baghdad, killing scores of people, so this little piece is not going to finish in the way originally planned, rather ….
What was the message behind Easter again? Oh, yes, love one another and be ready to forgive.