...But is it important?

Lent 2020 - Day 43

Happy Easter to all Quartodecimanists! (If you're not in the know - this was the name for early Christians who celebrated Easter on the 14th day of Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar.)

Unlike the birth of Jesus (for which there's no biblical reference linking it to 25 December), His crucifixion is noted in the Gospels as having taken place at Passover. Now, given the fact that the Hebrew calendar is both lunar and solar (using seven leap months every 19 years to keep the seasons in place), the date of Easter keeps jumping around. It can be as early as 21 March, as late as 24 April.

Within the early church there was fierce debate over this subject. The most important celebration in the Christian year - commemorating the bodily resurrection of the Saviour Jesus Christ - and yet no one really knew when to hold it. Those who held different points of view could be excommunicated or even executed as heretics.

The debate over the Easter Controversy is intriguing, not least because it has resulted in an endlessly shifting date for the feast, as opposed to Christmas Day which unfailingly arrives on 25 December, despite any historical evidence it happened on that day. If one wanted to be as accurate as possible as to the historical date of Easter, the date generally accepted by Biblical scholars and historians is Friday 3 April, 33 AD for the crucifixion and Sunday, 5 April for the resurrection. And yet, the movable feast, based on the Hebrew calendar - but fixed on a Sunday - remains the tradition. We abide by it, Christians and the unbelievers.

Is it important to us in our lives whether Easter falls on the same day of Jesus's resurrection or not? People are much less bothered these days about matters of dogma that they were even half a century ago. [A reminder of how things were, read about the heated exchange of letters between Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman in the late 1940s about Catholicism and Anglicanism here.]

So what is important to us in our lives?

Important are moments of joy. Our lives have their own characteristics, but rich or poor we all have the capacity to experience joy. These moments are fleeting - such is their nature. We must recognise and cherish them. I don't think anyone could argue that joy in this life can be a permanent state. But can it be replicable, I ask?

The nature of joy is its transience

Important too is is an awareness of just how precious, how unique, how statistically improbable our lives are. Everyone of our ancestors managed to procreate successfully in a direct line leading to ourselves - a line unbroken by premature death resulting from plagues, famines, wars, accidents or general illnesses. Since the dawn of homo sapiens as a species - and then going back some, since creatures first emerged out of the oceans onto the Earth's landmass - and going back some more since the First Common Ancestor of all life forms, some 4.3 billion years ago. Was that just a coincidence? Or is there some ulterior purpose to your consciousness?

It is also important to put our lives, our concerns, our woes and indeed our joys into the context of the Universe - those billions of galaxies containing billions of stars - that stretches back 13.8 billion years to the Big Bang and stretches forward to - who knows? We are connected to this Universe through our consciousness, something that lets us subjectively experience reality in a way unique to each one of us. Sense it, let it play through your mind - the past and the future...

Be aware, be grateful.

You are so important, the Universe was made for you.

The Universe, in which you are a speck of dust, a grain of sand.

If you can balance those two statements - both true - then you are have made one important step forward in this existence.

This time three years ago:
Conscious prayer

This time five years ago:
Putin - Stalin - history repeating?

This time  seven years ago:
Remembering Margaret Thatcher

This time ten years ago:
Katyń - genocide?

This time 11 years ago:
Blazing Warsaw bus

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's suburban electric trains