A word in season

Easter was never ‘a normal day’.

Over the years in these pages we have often stressed the need to use words properly as an aid to clear thinking and so to a better understanding of things. Over recent days I have been struck by the way so many people speak of longing for ‘a normal Easter.’

We know what they mean: eggs, chocolates, rabbits, family gatherings, the family at Mass in Church…and so on.

Yet this is to ignore that Easter was never a normal day. It has always been a quite abnormal day, and was seen that way by the very first Christians, as the narratives in the four Gospels suggest.

Perhaps a little while should be found to read through these pages on Easter, whatever else one chooses to do.

They will remind everyone how strange it seemed at the time. And that strangeness is worth thinking about. No: the first Easter was not an ordinary day at all.

Perhaps ‘abnormal’ was not the word I was looking for above; it might have been better to say it was for everyone then and now quite out of the ordinary. It was and is, in fact, an ‘extra-ordinary’ day.