I normally find Easter a rather sombre time as year. As a small child I would spend the latter part of Lent sobbing from genuine distress at the fact that Jesus was about to be crucified. In our primary school assemblies we used to sing a hymn called “They hung him on a cross” and when it got to the penultimate verse which starts “He hung his head and died”, most of us would have tears rolling down our cheeks, despite the fact that we knew the final verse would start “He’s coming back again!”. I would also dread Good Friday weeks in advance – partly because my mother would take out the Bible (the only time in the year when she would do so, I hasten to add) and read the Passion aloud, and party because we had to eat fishfingers. I hate fishfingers and as a child I wanted to be a Protestant so that I wouldn’t have to eat them. (more…)

My GCSE in Catholic RE was divided into two modules. The first module consisted of a detailed study of Mark’s Gospel, and the second was titled more ominously, Catholic Social Teaching. This mostly involved a valiant attempt on behalf of the religious staff to initiate us into “understanding” why we were not permitted to do pretty much anything fun we could think of. Our most infamous essay title ever involved explaining why contraception was a form of abortion. Prolife as I am, I nevertheless find that a virtually impossible argument to make, bearing in mind that this was ten years ago when the Morning After Pill was not really a concept which anyone was familiar with. But one of the things we covered in this course was Catholic feast days, and this obviously entailed a fair bit of time spent studying the feast of Easter; the most important festival in the whole calendar of the Church. One worksheet we were given really stood out for me; it listed alternative theories to the hypothesis that Jesus had risen from the dead. (more…)

I officially now have the best boyfriend ever I arranged to see him for Easter today, because various other things mean I’m not sure when I’ll next get to see him before and after that, and was admittedly hoping to get an Easter present. I had hinted strongly that he ought to buy me an egg this year and was prepared to be quite impressed if this hinting had paid off. Last Easter my boyfriend managed to have his phone switched off for about 48 hours whilst at a party and thus didn’t respond to my text wishing him a happy Easter until about Easter Tuesday, so this year I was hoping for a better experience, but all the same nothing could have prepared me for what actually took place today! (more…)