Tendring Topics – on line
The Date of Easter
The very early arrival of Easter this year seems to have brought to many thousands of people the realisation that the date of Easter Sunday is determined each year by the date of the equinox (daylight and darkness of equal length) and the phases of the moon.
I learnt this nearly eighty years ago when I was one of those angelic, rosy-cheeked little choirboys who are nowadays to be found mainly on Christmas cards. During the course of a long and tedious sermon I leafed idly through the Book of Common Prayer. Among its prefaces, I found the following under the heading 'Tables and rules for the moveable and immoveable feasts':
Easter-day, on which the rest depend, is always the first Sunday after the Full Moon, which happens upon, or next after the Twenty-first Day of March; and if the Full Moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter-day is the Sunday after.
The Eastern Orthodox Church (in Greece, Russia and much of eastern Europe) uses much the same rules but ends up with a different date for Easter because they still use the ancient Julian calendar whereas western European Christians long ago switched to the Gregorian one.
It all depended, in the first instance, on the date of the Jewish Passover. Christians will know that Jesus shared the Passover meal with his disciples 'on the night that he was betrayed' and thereby instituted the Lords Supper, the Holy Communion Service, the Holy Eucharist, the Mass – whatever you may call it. We are also told in the Gospels that it was, 'early in the morning, while it was yet dark, on the first day of the week' that Mary Magdalen made her pilgrimage to the sepulchre in which the body of Jesus had been laid – and found it to be empty.
At the risk of being considered hopelessly heretical I have to say that I can see no really sound reason why we can't have a fixed Easter. Few people nowadays imagine that Christ's nativity actually occurred on the 25th December 1 BC – or was there a year Zero? But 25th December is the date on which, for centuries, we have celebrated it.
We could equally well celebrate Christ's resurrection on the first, or perhaps the second, Sunday in April (and remember his crucifixion on the preceding Friday) every bit as solemnly and sincerely as on dates determined by the phases of the moon.
Mind you, however the date was chosen – I bet the weather would still be awful!
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A Prophecy fulfilled?
In February I suggested in 'Tendring Topics – on line' that ancient folk lore forecast that because Candlemas (2nd February) had been 'clear and bright, winter would have another flight' and that it might therefore be unwise to put the winter coat away for a while.
Watching the snow falling on Easter Day and listening to the icy wind whistling round my bungalow over much of the holiday weekend, I find no satisfaction whatsoever in being able to say 'I told you so'.
It seems that one thing worse than a prophecy proved false, can be a prophecy fulfilled!
Having said all that though, it must be added that sunny Clacton-on-Sea and, I imagine, the rest of our stretch of the north-east Essex coast, had rather less rain, snow and sleet and rather more sunshine over the Easter holiday, than practically anywhere else in Britain
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A Story for Easter Week
A few weeks ago I was again asked to record a 'Thought for the Week' for the Tendring Talking Times, the 'talking newspaper' (audio-tape) that is sent weekly free of charge to every blind and visually impaired person living within the Tendring District. The tape that includes my 'five minute sermon' was to be distributed on Thursday of this week – Easter Week. It occurred to me that, like my earlier 'Thought for the Week', it might be of interest to readers of 'Tendring Topics – on line'. So, here it is:
Hello Friends. Ernest Hall here with your 'Thought for the Week'. I am, as you may remember, a Quaker and a Member of the Clacton Quaker Meeting, and am now also a communicant member of the Church of England.
Many years ago my wife and I would sometimes spend holidays on England's south coast. When we did so, we never failed to visit the village of Bosham, which stands on an inlet of the sea near Chichester.
Bosham has a long history and part of its ancient church dates back to the earliest days of the Christian faith – to Roman times, fifteen hundred years ago. The greater part of it though, was built in the Saxon era – before the Norman Conquest.
Some well-known historical characters have worshipped there – as well as unknown multitudes of humble peasants and craftsmen, merchants and tradesmen, domestic servants and seafarers.
Bosham had been the family home of King Harold, slain at the Battle of Hastings. He is depicted at prayer in the church, its chancel arch clearly recognisable, on the famous Bayeux Tapestry.
Before King Harold, King Canute and his family had lived there. It has been suggested that it was at Bosham that Canute demonstrated to his flattering courtiers that neither he, nor any other man, could stem the course of the tide. I can well believe that it was. On one occasion I parked my motor caravan on firm and dry sand several hundred yards from the water's edge. Leaving my wife for an after-lunch rest, I strolled off to explore the village. Returning after about three quarters of an hour, I found my wife marooned in the van, which was now surrounded by the rising tide! The water rose to the van's hub-caps before it, very slowly, subsided. Fortunately it was a still day with scarcely a ripple on the surface of the water.
It was said that King Canute had had a well-loved twelve year old daughter who had been accidentally drowned in the mill-stream that still runs through the village. She had, tradition asserted, been buried in the nave of the village church.
There was no written record whatsoever of this, but the story persisted in the village from generation to generation throughout the centuries. In the middle of the 19th century – some eight hundred years later - the then-vicar decided that he would test the truth of this persistent legend. Some building repair work was being carried out on the church at the time, and the vicar asked the builders to excavate the nave. Precisely at the spot where it had always been claimed that Canute's daughter had been buried, the builders found an early eleventh century stone coffin containing the skeleton of a twelve year old child.
The skeleton was reverently reburied and later the children of the parish raised the money for the provision of a stone memorial plaque for the little Anglo/Danish princess, complete with the image of a Danish raven, which remains there today.
You may well be wondering by this time, 'What on earth has this story of a thousand year old tragedy to do with us today?'
Just this – it seems that today's unbelievers, unlike the few that I can remember from fifty years or more ago, seem to feel that they have a mission – I almost said a sacred mission – to spread their lack of faith; to attack every manifestation of Christianity, and to try to undermine the faith of the rest of us.
They are opposed to the provision of faith schools and are envious of their success; they would like to see such programmes as Songs of Praise and Thought for the Day banished from tv and radio; they would like to see Christmas replaced by a God-free 'mid-winter festival' and they endeavour to popularise the use of CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) instead of AD (Anno Domini or 'Year of our Lord') and BC (Before Christ) to qualify the number of a year.
Attempts to undermine our faith are particularly evident, I think, around the time of the great Christian festivals of Christmas and, of course, Easter the greatest of all, that we celebrated last weekend.
The Gospel accounts can't be believed, they suggest, because they weren't written down until a few decades after the events that they describe. However, they were written down and widely circulated well within the memory of many very diverse people who had witnessed them. The writers of the Gospels were clearly four men of very different character and background, and the small differences of fact and of emphasis between their accounts, themselves carry what J.B. Phillips, Biblical scholar and translator describes as 'the ring of truth'.
I have an idea – please forgive me if I am wrong – that recipients of the 'Tendring Talking Times' know better than most of us that truth isn't limited to what appears on a printed page.
Those who are still in doubt should consider the story of King Canute's daughter, the account of whose death and burial survived accurately and intact, without ever having been written down, not for just two or three decades – but for eight centuries.
As this is still Easter Week perhaps I may conclude with the salutation that is used on their Easter morning between members of the Eastern Orthodox Church from the Isles of Greece to Archangel in the Arctic and from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on Russia's Pacific coast. The greeting is, 'Christ is risen!' and the response, 'He is risen indeed!' With that salutation Friends, I will leave you.
May God bless you all.
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