Easter Mystery - CathNews New Zealand https://cathnews.co.nz Catholic News New Zealand Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:28:51 +0000 en-NZ hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://cathnews.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-cathnewsfavicon-32x32.jpg Easter Mystery - CathNews New Zealand https://cathnews.co.nz 32 32 70145804 Searching for Sugar Man a prophetic Easter yarn https://cathnews.co.nz/2013/04/05/searching-for-sugar-man-a-prophetic-easter-yarn/ Thu, 04 Apr 2013 18:11:13 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=42284

Searching for Sugar Man is a strange story. On the face of it, a documentary about a musician famous in one country and completely unknown in his own. Within the layers it becomes an Easter tale. David Letterman called it jaw droppingly fascinating and that about sums up this movie about Sixto Rodriquez, a musical political from Read more

Searching for Sugar Man a prophetic Easter yarn... Read more]]> Searching for Sugar Man is a strange story. On the face of it, a documentary about a musician famous in one country and completely unknown in his own. Within the layers it becomes an Easter tale.

David Letterman called it jaw droppingly fascinating and that about sums up this movie about Sixto Rodriquez, a musical political from Detroit.
Rodriquez made a few albums in the 70's, which bombed in the United States. Unbeknownst to him, one of those albums went platinum in South Africa as his music helped galvanise anti-apartheid activists.
But he remained a mystery man; his fans believed he was dead and even stranger, that he had killed himself during a concert. In reality, he'd gone back to hard manual grafting and studied for a degree in philosophy.
By the end of the movie my friends and I were stunned, bewildered, jaws dropping like Letterman's. Somehow in the telling of this story, one reality shifts and another appears. It becomes a prophetic yarn, an unpalatable truth.
Imperceptibly, the illusion that we are just bodies wrapped in skin, existing in one place and one time, accessible and known to others as a neatly tied package and to ourselves as a slightly more askew version, melts away.
We are not that. Not ever, however much we might want to delude ourselves, perhaps to make life a bit less fraught and slightly more manageable. Despite our best efforts it seems instead that we are inter-connected in some inexpressible, unconscionable and uncontrolled way beyond our physical body.
Under these circumstances getting to know our own self is a life's work, to know someone else, impossible. The layers within and between us are arranged differently and in some strange way, not even visible. We stumble at the start, searching for a doorway.
The direct approach, however appealing, is limited. Instead, it is story or a set of stories that act as portals or doorways to the human person. We tell them to ourselves, gossip them amongst our friends and recite them at family gatherings. Continue reading
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Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and blogger.

Searching for Sugar Man a prophetic Easter yarn]]> 42284 The sad, secular substitutes for Easter https://cathnews.co.nz/2012/04/03/the-sad-secular-substitutes-for-easter/ Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:32:02 +0000 http://cathnews.co.nz/?p=22316

Perhaps no period of the year — not even when Christmas is reduced to XMAS — tells us better how impoverished are the sad, searching celebrations presented as stand-ins for Passover and Holy Week. Like a journeyman basketball player who lacks the magic of Michael Jordan in his prime, these events, sent in as subs, Read more

The sad, secular substitutes for Easter... Read more]]> Perhaps no period of the year — not even when Christmas is reduced to XMAS — tells us better how impoverished are the sad, searching celebrations presented as stand-ins for Passover and Holy Week.

Like a journeyman basketball player who lacks the magic of Michael Jordan in his prime, these events, sent in as subs, lack the Mystery generated spontaneously by these feasts whose date is set by the first full moon after the spring equinox. They are born, so to speak, from the inexhaustible symbols whose energy affects the tides of the oceans as well as those that rise and fall within us.

The dating of these feasts flows from the ancient practice of attempting to coordinate the lunar and solar calendars, symbolizing the two modes of eternal life. At the vernal equinox, when dark and light are in balance, the sun and the moon stand across the sky from each other. The moon, as Joseph Campbell once explained to me, "represents engagement in Time, like throwing off death, as the moon its shadow, to be born again. The disengaged sun represents the Eternal, the moon's source of light and the source of light for all of us who live in Time."

Setting the date of Easter according to this interplay of sun and moon "suggests that life, like the light that is reborn in the moon and the eternal in the sun, finally is one." We actually experience this mystery in the plangent longings we feel inside ourselves when the light and warmth of spring return, why folk medicine offers prescriptions for "spring fever" and we speak of being "moonstruck." Continue reading

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