Hands up everybody who’s been thinking about the meaning of Easter. Apart from the church, and other than true Christian believers, has anybody thought of Easter at all? I had to be reminded that it was Good Friday. Even in non-pandemic times, I probably wouldn’t even remember Easter if it weren’t for school holidays and chocolate eggs appearing in shops. If you’re not devout, Easter just doesn’t cut through as a religious event.
Christmas has long been scorned as a grotesque display of vapid commercialism, but even the irreligious play along with festive rituals. They go to church services, sing along misty-eyed to carols, explain to children that it isn’t all about presents. Forget all that with Easter. The crucifixion and resurrection barely register. It says it all that Jewish people have complained about the Church of England giving advice (now withdrawn) for a “symbolic” meal that sounded suspiciously like the Passover Seder ritual. Has the church given up trying to get across the message of Easter?
Unlike the Christmas nativity, maybe it’s tricky getting the bloodthirsty Easter narrative into the school/family dynamic. You can’t really have kids enacting crucifixions on each other in front of cooing parents: “I’ve got a lovely photo of Joshua driving the nails in.” Still, this alone doesn’t explain the essential blankness of our relationship with Easter.
For most people, Easter is about chocolate eggs, bank holidays and plotting routes to avoid traffic jams. The traditional Easter debate is not about Christ dying for our sins, but whether it will rain and spoil our picnics. Nor does this ecclesiastical void seem to upset people in the same way as trashing the meaning of Christmas. Say what you like about the festive season, but the branding is powerful. Easter as a branding exercise is a failure; when spiritual meaning trails behind moulded chocolate shells and a weird bunny fixation in the collective “Easter” consciousness, you know something has gone wrong with the messaging. So who’s to blame? The church? Society? We, the faithless heathen hordes? Or perhaps no one at all.
It could be that it’s taken a pandemic to teach people that the true meaning of Easter is… being with other people. This isn’t a criticism of the church, which is grounded in community. Just as with Christmas, people are mainly upset about not seeing relatives this Easter or not being able to go away with their families for a break. The focus is on the humanist principle that such occasions, with or without a religious element, give or take a chocolate egg, are fundamentally meaningless without people. Maybe think of that as we grind our way through our second Easter lockdown. Easter may have been cancelled yet again, but people haven’t.
This Easter, learn to love a narcissist. No, really
Photograph: Classic Image/Alamy
Aw, poor narcissists, it appears they hate themselves almost as much as we do. A New York University study says that narcissism isn’t always about excessive self-love – it can also be about self-loathing. So there are “grandiose” narcissists, who believe their own hype, but also “vulnerable”/“proper” narcissists who don’t and flail around desperately seeking status to make up for the void within.
Sympathy for narcissists is a hard sell, because, frankly, they get on everybody’s nerves. You’d need to be a saint to come away from an encounter with a posturing narcissist, thinking: “Poor soul, I hope they get the help they need.” Such is their unpopularity that it has become quite common for people to solemnly diagnose others as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, a condition that seems remarkably prevalent among people’s exes, especially immediately after the split.
It’s odd how narcissism has become one of the few psychological conditions where people don’t even pretend to have sympathy, merrily stigmatising, and consider themselves to possess astute diagnostic powers with no formal training. Perhaps we ought to think more carefully about how mean we are to narcissists – it appears that some of them truly can’t help it.
No Michelle Obama, the pandemic is not a blessing
I consider myself a shameless Michelle Obama fan girl but, after all this time, has the former first lady finally said a Very Stupid Thing?
To mark the young reader edition of her memoir, Becoming, Obama spoke by video link to London schoolgirls whose schools she’d previously visited as first lady. Addressing past and present pupils of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson school in Islington and the Mulberry school for girls in Tower Hamlets, Obama said that the girls should look on the pandemic as an opportunity to grow as people. She said: “I would view this as a great blessing to all of you… you’re learning how to get through something hard and uncomfortable and unpredictable.”
A “great blessing”. Was this appropriate? This isn’t about twisting what Obama meant. Clearly, she wasn’t referring to the pandemic as a blessing in itself. It was rather that she wanted the girls to recognise that such terrible situations can be survived and that even young people can find strength they didn’t realise they possessed.
Still, it came across a bit clunking. Had Donald Trump said something similar, in his own inimitable style (“This pandemic has been the greatest test of loser-kind…”), we’d have all been up in arms. If Boris Johnson had tried to run this past us, he’d hardly have stepped away from the microphone before being pelted with critical headlines. It’s the inference that a pandemic – full of the dead and the suffering, exacerbated by appalling political mismanagement on an international scale – could ever be spun as a “teaching moment” for those who’ve managed to survive.
As I say, this clearly wasn’t Obama’s intention and she’s banked more than enough trust and goodwill for this one to slide. Still, had anyone other than Obama said this, would more people have taken umbrage?
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
