The Stretch - An Easter Read

Across the land this weekend, millions of Canadians will be frequenting their respective places of worship. Yet it won’t be a normal kind of service, for it represents both the sacrifice and renewal that comes part and parcel with Easter and Passover commemoration.   Ultimately it is meant to be a season of transformation, of renewal and overcoming.All this is occurring at a time when organized religion itself is not only struggling with its identity but its very ability to attract and coax people into living more meaningful individual and collective lives.Kind of like organized politics.  Both church and state have seen better days, and both are struggling with their own demons. They’re not appealing to people like they used to and they are troubled by that discovery.  Religious adherents and citizens alike are increasingly opting to live lives removed from those very organized agencies designed to bring us together for the sake of celebration and deliberation.  While they place the blame for their distance squarely on the institutions themselves, they nevertheless can’t summon the collective will to make either their faith or their politics count in ways that transform.It all reminds us of Dante’s Ulysses in The Divine Comedy. Ulysses himself reasons that the human condition is one of always stretching, reaching beyond the norm, to discover new possibilities.  When he reaches the Pillars of Hercules, which were the boundary set by God to human ambitions, he exhorts his companions to go on and achieve their fate.  Five months later they encounter a storm so violent that the sea swallowed up ship and men.  It stands as an eternal tale conveying the moral that we are likely to experience calamity when our ambitions exceed the limits established by God.It seems to me on this Easter weekend that we as citizens and people of faith have actually gone in the other direction.  Separated by those conscious associations with church and state, we have drifted, not so much driven by ambition but by negativism and self-absorption.  In Ottawa, religion takes the path most traveled where faith becomes easiest when we follow the tribal mindset.  And politics itself has become a kind of religion, where a contentious minority parliament results in a vicious fight for survival and where political creed matters more than sacrifice for the common good.And across the land, citizens and people of faith yearn for a deeper significance in their lives; realizing that true fulfillment escapes them, they nevertheless pursue independent paths that lead to ultimate alienation from their peers.  We are what Northrop Frye called us: Divisions on a Ground, and we can’t put all the pieces back together again because we refuse to support those very institutions designed to keep us together.In effect, we have become an arrested civilization, calling out the faults and sins of both church and state, using such criticisms as excuses for inaction.  But as we pick up the stones we are about to fire at such institutions, Easter reminds us of Christ’s own direction: “You who are without sin, cast the first stone.”  In the Biblical narrative, those holding the rocks dropped them where they stood and filed silently away, neither transformed nor empowered, but humiliated by their own inadequacies.We are Canadians, blessed with all the resources necessary to be spiritually fulfilled and an example to the world of dedicated citizenry.  Yet we stand separate from church and state, insisting we can reach our destination through our independence.  Only we’re not.  Our lack of resolve and social transformation are merely indicators of our unwillingness to stretch and to gather.  We’re the opposite of Ulysses, staying within the comfort of our riches and freedom.  We need the lessons of Easter now more than ever.