Here’s to a really Good Friday, and a weekend spent resurrecting the wonder of Easter

IWONDER how many people still think of today as Spy Wednesday? When I was a child, I loved how the first named day of Holy Week carried such dramatic impact: the day when Judas struck a deal with the chief priests to betray Jesus and went from being an apostle to a spy in the camp.

To our childish minds, it sounded less historical and biblical than cloak and dagger and James Bond – but for adults and children alike, it set in motion a strange and emotional few days that has all but disappeared from modern Irish life.

Easter rituals were a huge part of my childhood, and later they played a significant role in my own children’s lives. Back in my own formative years, we really did go all-in – walking up to the church for Confession on Wednesday or Thursday, excitedly discussing breaking our self-imposed Lenten chocolate ban at the weekend and our hopes for hauls of Easter eggs.

We always got new clothes for Easter and those would be up for discussion too – the first summer dress of the season. Then the children’s Mass of the Last Supper on Thursday and the way it always ended oddly, without a blessing or any acknowledgement that the Mass was over.

Again, fuelled by a million stories from beyond the Bible, my young brain revelled in the drama of that. A Son of Man’s gotta do what a Son of Man’s got to do, after all, and together we would live the trauma of the next few days along with the Protagonists.

Stations on the Friday, then solemn music on the radio for the afternoon. We’d watch the clock in our house and when it turned three, we’d fall silent and maybe strike our breast (even if we didn’t really know why). You could break your fast on Saturday, and one year, after I’d hoarded forbidden chocolate bars in an old soap box, I took my first tentative bite that day and it tasted of soap, which I took as a sign of something.

Later, as a teenager, I used to attend the midnight Easter vigil in St Pat’s in Drumcondra with my sisters. It was three hours long, that Mass, and the music in my memory remains the best I’ve ever heard in a church. We’d sit in the church in the dark and then light a bonfire of candles and the whole thing felt spiritual and visceral and, again, very dramatic.

When my own children came along, I tried to involve them in some of the ritual I’d enjoyed as a child – this time, with me as one of the adult organisers – but, by then, the fires of faith were waning in Ireland and they didn’t have the same communal experience as I did.

And now, none of us goes in my family and the numbers of people attending Easter services across the country has severely declined. Easter increasingly feels like just another bank holiday.

AND I think that’s a bit of a pity. While I don’t lament the passing of the power of the Catholic Church, there was definitely something about that sense of pause at the end of Lent that did a body and mind – whatever about a soul – good.

We have just passed the spring equinox, where night and day are of equal length. On Sunday morning, Resurrection Day, we will adjust our clocks to shift ourselves further into daylight. There is something very primal about that shift from Winter to Spring, a sense of having survived the hardest part of the year and walking towards the light.

Old time religion used to provide us with a cause for that pause – but in reality, the need for a couple of days reset was already there, historically and naturally. Easter coincides with the older Passover celebrations and, in Ireland, druids were already lighting bonfires on hills to mark the shift from one season to the next.

I’m not suggesting we go back to an Ireland of black fasts, closed pubs and soapy chocolate, but there’s no doubt that the breath that Holy week afforded us all – pagan, Christian, or just plain thirsty – was good for the soul.

Maybe, in the days to come, we should all try to draw that breath and reconnect with that pause again. Otherwise, it’s just another Manic Bank Holiday Monday.