Both my girls lost their faith during the pandemic. This abruptly ended some of the things we did together as a family – like weekly church attendance, whole-family friendships with my church community, and Christian summer camps. I can also no longer make any reference to Christianity at home without risking a backlash. I once wished the youngest a happy Easter and found out later she’d said to her sister ‘Mum’s preaching at me again!’1
Easter family tradition
But one Christian family tradition remains: the Easter tomb. I started this when the girls were young, found it therapeutic in the depths of Covid, and we have carried on in our brave new post-Covid world, despite the girls being outspoken atheists.
I’m always slightly surprised the girls agree to celebrate a resurrection they don’t believe happened of a divinity they don’t believe exists. Maybe it’s the hands-on element – every Easter, we make something new to go into the tomb. Or more likely it’s the promise of chocolate, which appears in the tomb on Easter Sunday, in accordance with the Scriptures. But I do try really hard to make it meaningful for them. Every year I flounder around getting it wrong, being too ‘religious’ – and then somehow magically it takes on a life of its own. Like it did this year.
Our Good Friday ceremony is based around filling up the tomb. Last year the theme was ‘things that need to be made new’, so we already had a range of symbolic clay creations – a fish for oceans, a snail for biodiversity, a globe for climate, a ‘+’ sign for the NHS, and so on. (No one can remember why there needed to be a giant cat.) Then there’s Jesus – he can be dead or risen, depending on whether he’s horizontal and wrapped in strips of linen cloth, aka toilet paper, or not.
The tomb had been stored on top of the fridge, where our youngest cat Geronimo had waged a vendetta against it all year long, proving our suspicions that she is in fact the Antichrist. The giant cat had lost its face and the angel, who was designed to sit on the tomb having rolled away the stone, lost one and a half legs after being repeatedly pushed off the fridge onto the tiles below. (We thought he could represent people with disabilities, but my sister reckons he’s a ‘para angel’. )
The solidarity of the cross
This year, the theme I suggested was ‘solidarity in suffering’. I was struck by Rev Munther Isaac’s Good Friday sermon. Like his Christmas sermon about Christ being born ‘under the rubble’, he sees Jesus’ suffering on the cross reflected in the horrific scenes of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
“I watched with anguish today the cruel scene of a child under the rubble, who miraculously survived the bombing. And while he was being pulled out, he was saying, ‘Where is the water? I am thirsty.’
This reminded me of Jesus’ cry on the cross, ‘I am thirsty’, in solidarity with those being annihilated by famine and siege. He stands in solidarity with all the victims of wars and forced famines, caused by unjust and tyrannical regimes in our world.”
– Rev Dr Munther Isaac, Good Friday sermon 2024
This is a moving but unfamiliar way for me of looking at the cross. I was taught to see it as ‘substitution’, of Jesus suffering the wrath of God against sinful humanity so that we (those of us who signed up to believe in him) wouldn’t have to. This year, for the first time, I’ve encountered this angle of solidarity:2
“Jesus dies ‘for’ us not in the sense of ‘in place of’ but ‘in solidarity with’. The first is merely a heavenly transaction of sorts; the second is a transformation of our very soul and the trajectory of our history”
– Richard Rohr, Wonderful Encounters
Burial in the tomb
So my plan for our Good Friday ceremony was for us to write messages of solidarity with people who are suffering and put them in the tomb with Jesus, by candlelight, while I read out the account of Jesus’ death and burial from Luke. Then after closing the tomb we’d listen in silence to a minute of Allegri’s Misere Mei, Deus. Doesn’t that sound lovely? The girls didn’t think so.
The ‘messages of solidarity’ part was okay – the eldest wrote several while the youngest mummified Jesus in strips of carefully torn up toilet paper. Solidarity and social justice are things my eldest daughter understands at the very core of her being. The day before she’d been demonstrating for Palestine in central London, and I’ve now lost count of how many marches she’s been on.
What’s sad is that she can’t relate this in any way to the message of Jesus, perhaps because social justice never really featured in the church she grew up in. She and the youngest both bristled as I read out the familiar story of Jesus dying, the centurion’s declaration, Joseph of Arimathea loaning his tomb, the bereaved and traumatised women following the body to see where it was buried. I could practically hear them grinding their teeth.
The youngest one then declared the darkness, the candle and the music all ‘culty’, and the two of them whispered and kicked each other under the table during the silence like eight-year-olds (they are 17 and 20).
Unexpected pyrotechnics
Ceremony over, we remained sitting at the table, where the single tea light burned on top of the now closed tomb. And not every strip of toilet paper had been used up mummifying Jesus. So inevitably, we started to play with fire.
We discovered a magical thing. Do you know what happens when you set fire to a very small strip of single-ply toilet paper? If you lift it up as it catches fire, it continues to rise. It becomes a glowing ember that twists and writhes upwards, then a single piece of delicate ash that descends like a feather.
There is something very captivating about the way it moves and glows, like a firefly or another living thing, and something very poignant about the way it seems to die. Both the youngest and I let out an identical ‘Ahhhh’ as one of the pieces came to land, writhing, on the table, before its embers faded and it lay still.
We did it again and again, using all the tissue on the table and then getting more from the bathroom and carrying on. By the time we finally stopped and turned the lights on, the table was covered in ash and the whole flat was smoky.
I didn’t mind. It felt like a holy intervention. My clumsy attempts at meaning hadn’t landed, but instead God had spoken through the element of fire (and, er, toilet paper – is that an element?) – because the divine infuses and is present in and speaks to us through the whole of creation. The tiny living, flying, dying creatures communicated the beauty of life and death to us, of how interconnected we all are, how we love and grieve for everything that is born and suffers and dies.
It’s an Easter I will never forget.
I’m pleased to report that on Easter Sunday morning, lo, Christ was risen! – and there was chocolate. Clearly the para angel had managed to roll back the stone.
now for the real thing 