Symbols of Easter
We may think that the proper religious symbols of Eastertide are the Easter fire, the Paschal candle and the font of baptism, and that the other Easter symbols are pagan ones for the purely secular world, but we would be wrong.
Although it is difficult to find a place for the Easter bonnet, the Easter egg has a well-established history as a symbol of the Resurrection, though admittedly not in its modern chocolate guise. The egg’s oval shape, like a seed, echoes Christ’s words: “Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die, it remains a single grain, but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest”.
The Church encouraged the practice, especially common in Slavic lands, of elaborately decorating Easter eggs, even if the religious authorities never foresaw the degree of decoration achieved by the jeweller Fabergé with his Easter eggs of gold, silver and precious gems which the royal families of Europe used to present to each other.
The Easter bunny, too, has a perfectly respectable religious history, at least if we perform a small sleight of hand and for ‘rabbit’ read ‘hare’. In ancient tradition the hare was the animal which never closed its eyes and which watched over the other animals during the night. It was thus a symbol of the moon. Easter is of course a lunar feast, celebrated on the first full moon after the spring equinox. For early Christians the hare was as much a symbol of the risen Christ as the fish was of the name of Christ.
It is only natural that for a feast based on new life, believers should turn to parallels of new life and pick these up as symbols. Easter is the springtime of Christ …
At least, so we say. But what if we live in the southern hemisphere, say in the Christian lands of the far south like Chile and Argentina, where autumn has well and truly arrived? What can they make of our liturgical stress on the Easter spring, when for them Easter is represented by shortening days, high winds, falling leaves and fog?
For them, Easter hope must take a different form. It is a hope which has a more distant fulfilment. Just as in winter a tree seems stark and bare, yet guards all its life within itself to bring it forth again gloriously in the spring, so an autumn Easter speaks of the sunshine of Christ destined to shine only when the reality of dark days has well and truly passed. We can all surely think of ‘autumn Easters’ in our lives, and we must preserve our hope while we are experiencing them.