The Paradox of an Autumnal Easter

Celebrating the harrowing and renewing of the world at precisely the wrong time of year.

In the Outback of Australia (about a day’s drive west of where I’m writing this), you will find the red-dirt town of Bourke built on the opposite side of the globe from Jerusalem — as far from where Christ was crucified as you might seek to settle without leaving the planet.¹ These two places are not exact antipodes of each other (the exact antipode of Jerusalem would be off the east coast, in the sheolic exile of the vast South Pacific Ocean) but Bourke, as a meeting point of the wild Outback and the more ‘settled’ parts of Australia, is perhaps a fitting town to juxtapose with Jerusalem.

This might be why they call this place the land down under, and why they say that folk here are walking around upside down. We seem to be under Jerusalem, which would mean that the holy city is the right-side-up place.

Because make no mistake, we are upside-down; so upside-down that it seemed to make sense for the church where I keep the grounds to be built by the unpaid labour of convicts under armed guard²; so upside-down that we celebrate Easter in autumn.

The convict-built St Thomas's in Port Macquarie.

The Contradiction

In this land down under, you will seldom come across Easter reflections that highlight the importance of the celebration occurring in spring. Last year, in the midst of reading many seasonally focused Easter reflections from the northern hemisphere, I found myself wondering about the backwardsness of celebrating Easter in autumn, as the growing of verdure slows, as the days shorten, as the wind cools and as the sun wanders away northwards. Perhaps this is evidence that we crack our eggs in quite the wrong season … at the very least, it is evidence that we celebrate a rather paradoxical Easter.

In a Universal History conversation (The End of Babel), Richard Rohlin put forward this rhetorical question and assertion:

“Well let’s just push [Easter] down a month — it doesn’t really matter when we celebrate it, right?”

If you live this way, your life and your society — your culture — will be scattered and overtaken by a roiling chaos of competing principalities, because all of these lower principalities are basically fighting over a vacant throne.

So why do we denizens of the southern hemisphere celebrate the rebuilding of our world — the arrival of the Kingdom of God and the triumph of life over death — within the slow darkling of autumn?

While contemplating this topic, I posted a few thoughts in a note on Substack and received some really excellent, thoughtful feedback from a few people (

Colin Miller

,

Cormac Jones

,

Derek J Fiedler

,

David Joseph Brodeur

,

Dan Ackerfeld

and

Brother Alexander

), which helped me put together the rest of this piece. For instance, Dan Ackerfeld made this insightful observation:

It is a strange situation - I think it’s even more stark with Christmas, with its strong tradition of Wintery symbols and stories. Maybe it’s just the difference between being a child and an adult, but I often feel that Australians don’t place a strong emphasis on actually celebrating these holidays (shopping centres excepted), and I wonder whether this disconnect between the holiday and our own seasons is a part of that.

I wonder about that, too — and I agree that the disconnect seems even more stark with Christmas. If the season in which we celebrate these holidays in Australia seems arbitrary or incorrect, it probably does contribute to the general feeling that they are simply a few days off work and have no greater importance.

The Edge and The Upside-Down

Dr Paul Roe is an Australian historian, a champion storyteller and a personal friend and teacher whose impact permeates many of the thoughts and stories I write. In the third chapter of his terrific book Tell Me Another, he writes:

There is no map of the Australian Outback. It has no known boundaries. Historian Patsy Adam Smith described it as ‘an elusive acreage of the mind.’

[…]

Bourke itself was a metaphor — the custodian of a national myth much bigger than itself. For coastal dwellers, the expression Back O’ Bourke morphed into the definition of a place balanced precariously on the edge of nowhere — ‘at the end of the line’, ‘on the lip of the far horizon’, ‘out-to-blazes’ at the entrance to the ‘Never-Never’. For a century and a half, it has sat alone on the wide Darling River flood plain under an infinite dome of pale blue, with stories rolling through its streets like tumbleweeds.³

Those familiar with the aforementioned Universal History conversations (especially this one about the Far East) know that Jonathan Pageau and Richard Rohlin share the idea just expressed by Dr Paul Roe: that Australia (and the Outback in particular) is part of the edge of the world — perhaps even over the edge — where many animals are slightly hybrid, monstrous or chimeric (just observe our platypuses, echidnas, shingleback lizards, thorny devils, Tasmanian devils, Tasmanian tigers, leafy sea dragons, spinifex hopping mice and, of course, kangaroos — or, as Pageau suggests, dog-headed men).

So, for one thing, this autumnal Easter paradox does remind us where we are — on the edge and upside-down, waiting for the rebuilding of the world to be completed — and it allows us to celebrate and worship in a kind of unison with the northern hemisphere.

David Joseph Brodeur drew my attention to two good points about the upside-down. (1) The harrowing of hell is the conquest of the land down under (which seems a close and symbolically rich synonym for hell) — meaning that the down under or Far East is not only the first to receive the sunrise but also the first to encounter the Son’s triumphant resurrection. (2) Christ comes when the whole world is upside-down.

More on these points soon …

Pesach, Yom Kippur and the Ambiguity of the New Year

Cormac Jones noted that the Jewish feasts of Pesach (Passover/Easter) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) are complementary in a similar way to the north and south hemispheres. In researching these feasts, I did indeed find some fascinating connections:

The Messiah is contemplated as a lamb during Pesach (specifically, the sacrificed lamb whose blood is spread on the entrances of the homes of the Israelites to guard them against the angel of death). In contrast and complement, the Messiah is contemplated as a lion during Yom Kippur (specifically, the Lion of Judah that harrows hell — or conquers the land down under).

Furthermore, during Yom Kippur, there is a ritual involving two goats. One is sacrificed in a conventional way ‘to the Lord’, and the other — once the sins of the Israelites are confessed over it — is sent into the desert ‘to Azazel’, one of the fallen angels named in the book of Enoch (or, according to a different translation, the other was ‘the goat [ez] that was sent away [azal]’ — which led to the term ‘scapegoat’ being coined in 1530).

Aaron shall take the two he-goats and let them stand before the LORD at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting; and he shall place lots upon the two goats, one marked for the LORD and the other marked for Azazel. Aaron shall bring forward the goat designated by lot for the LORD, which he is to offer as a sin offering; while the goat designated by lot for Azazel shall be left standing alive before the LORD, to make expiation with it and to send it off to the wilderness for Azazel.

[…]

When he has finished purging the Shrine, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar, the live goat shall be brought forward. Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness through a designated man. Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.

Leviticus 16:7-10 and 20-22

At that first Easter, when Christ was crucified, something like Yom Kippur’s ritual of the two goats occurred. In a way, Christ was both goats at once. One goat was sacrificed in Jerusalem, and the other, the scapegoat, was sent — ladened with all the iniquity of the world — into the wilderness of the Back O’ Bourke. There, hell was harrowed. Christ came carrying proof of the acquittance of all its denizens — their sin was on Him. There, with His heel, the Scapegoat silenced the serpent that had poisoned His beloved; they were set free.

This scapegoat is certainly also symbolically related to the Australian exile meted out to many British and Irish criminals and protestors in the colonial era — the casting away of sin and excess into the margins of civilisation. In Protest and Punishment (Part Four — Chapter Two: The Convict System), George Rudé writes:

The convict system was designed to meet three needs: to remove what were believed to be dangerous criminals from England’s (and Ireland’s) prisons which were overcrowded or said to be so; to regenerate men who were deemed to be in particular need of moral regeneration; and to provide labour for the colonial government and settlers.

Cormac Jones also pointed out that there has, historically, been some ambiguity about whether the Judean ‘New Year’ should be celebrated on the spring or autumnal equinox — the former usually occurring about two weeks before Passover (Easter) and the latter a week before the Day of Atonement (when the ritual of the two goats is held)⁴. When we tie this together with a few of the ideas previously examined (that Australia could be considered a nation of convicts, exiles or scapegoats, and that the land down under could be considered the far edge of the world — or hell), we see another partial reasoning for the paradox of an autumnal easter emerging:

It makes some symbolic sense for the southern hemisphere to celebrate the beginning of ‘the year of the Lord’ in the fall if we seek to highlight the conquering lion nature of Christ — His going down into death (an autumnal journey, to be sure) and His harrowing of hell; it is fitting that we should celebrate this aspect of Christ as we are (symbolically) the exiled or convicted denizens of the edge or the underworld.

Foundations and Commemorations

Colin Miller drew my attention to the symbolic relationship between the down under and the foundation — Christ is the lamb that was slain at the foundation of the world (the foundation of time and matter, as His sacrifice redeemed and re-created both).

Colin also shared a passage from Fr. Alexander Schemman’s For the Life of the World, which provides two valuable observations: (1) that ‘the whole life of the Church [is] a constant remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ’ (the liturgy and the octave structure of the week, especially⁵) and (2) that ‘the understanding of feasts as historical commemorations […] divorced them from their living connection with real time. Thus in Australia today Easter is celebrated in the fall and no one seems to find it odd, because for several centuries the Christian calendar was understood as a system of holy days to be observed within time, that is, among “profane” days, but without any special relation to them.’⁶

A system of set-apart days — removed from the turning of the seasons. This removal might seem proper right up until I remember that Christ created the patterns of the seasons, setting them apart from each other. Every autumnal equinox (and every Saturday/Saturn-Day/Satan-Day/Sabbath) is a descent into hell.

(A note about the connection between the sabbath and hell: they are both symbols of fluidity, rest/restlessness and pointlessness/aimlessness. Hell is simply a blasphemous sabbath; once Christ harrowed it — revealed Himself as Lord of the Sabbath — he opened the way to move homewards from a sabbath of restless exile to a sabbath of true rest.)

Every winter solstice is a turning-around in the dark of exile. Every vernal equinox (and every Sunday) is an intimation of our final home, a fleeting manifestation of the eternal spring in the Kingdom of Heaven. He was set apart from eternity for thirty-three years for the very purpose of marrying earthly patterns to holy ones — patterns both weekly and seasonal.

This makes Easter quite the seasonal paradox; in fact, the closer we look at the cross, the more we see all the complexities and perpendicularities of the world’s patterns brought into paradoxical alignment.

The Paradox Stands

Paradox has been defined as ‘Truth standing on her head to get attention.’⁷

Remember Richard Rohlin’s assertion about the danger of celebrating Easter at an arbitrary time? ‘If you live this way, your life and your society — your culture — will be scattered and overtaken by a roiling chaos […]’

I do think that this autumnal celebration is, in some ways, yet another indication that our culture is being overtaken — turned upside-down — by roiling chaos. If it is, then let us take some comfort in David Joseph Brodeur’s reminder that Christ comes when the world is upside-down — and in these words from G K Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

At the same time, I think it makes some sense for the southern hemisphere to celebrate an autumnal Easter. The paradoxical symbol stands — just as Christ’s victory through dying stands — and disintegration and renewal cleave to complement one another, balancing each other in just the same way as the two hemispheres of our globe.

Visiting the red-dirt town of Bourke, you probably wouldn’t think it quite glorious enough to balance the fabled city of Jerusalem. You would have to wait until nightfall, I think, and then look up and find the southern cross set against the soft velvet disintegration of the dark (and thus appreciate the kind of stargazing only possible in the Outback). Jerusalem saw Christ raised on a throne of deadwood and crowned with thorns — a servant lamb slaughtered. Bourke, though? Perhaps, at that first Easter, Bourke saw Christ raised beyond the confines of the earth on a throne of stars; crowned forever in silver splendour — the triumphant lion proclaiming victory over hell itself.

Those feeling too at home in the world — too close to Jerusalem — must remember that Christ is a servant and an exile. Those drifting too far in exile — too distant from Jerusalem — must remember that Christ is the king who has conquered the whole world (above and down under); there is no realm we can reach that is beyond his dominion.

1. Dr Paul Roe makes this observation in the second chapter of Tell Me Another:

Robyn and I joked as we drove the 800 km North West of our comfort zone in Sydney that Bourke was indeed located at the uttermost part of the earth from Israel where Jesus had walked. […] It was becoming clear to me that not only had Australia helped form modern Israel, but also in a far more profound way, ancient Israel had played a significant part in shaping modern Australia.

2. Click here to watch Paul Roe tell the fascinating story of St Thomas’s Anglican Church in Port Macquarie.

3. This observation regarding the lack of boundaries in the Outback makes me think of the countless (contested) borders increasing around the Middle East. It is as if, two thousand years ago, something solid and sharp struck the glass that covered the map — struck it right over Jerusalem — and the cracks have been inching out from there ever since. Apparently, they have not yet reached the Outback.

4. There are, in fact, four ‘New Years’ in most old Jewish calendars — 1 Nissan (New Year for Kings and Festivals), 1 Elul (New Year for Animal Tithes), 1 Tishrei (New Year for Years) and 15 Shevat (New Year for Trees) — though only 1 Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah) and 15 Shevat are still celebrated.

5. For more on this, see Cormac Jones’s Reuniting time and eternity via the Christian week as revealed in the Octoechos.

6. The full passage from Fr. Alexander Schemman’s For the Life of the World that Colin Miller shared:

For us today Easter and Pentacost—to limit ourselves to the two initial and fundamental feasts which give true significance to the Christian year—are primarily the annual commemorations of two events of the past: Christ’s resurrection and the descent of the Holy Spirit. But what is “commemoration”? Is not the whole life of the Church a constant remembrance of the death and resurrection of Christ? Is not its whole life called to be the manifestation of the Holy Spirit? In the Orthodox Church, each Sunday is the day of resurrection and each Eucharist a Pentecost. In fact, the understanding of feasts as historical commemorations which emerged little by little after Constantine meant a transformation of their initial meaning and, strange as it may seem, divorced them from their living connection with real time. Thus in Australia today Easter is celebrated in the fall and no one seems to find it odd, because for several centuries the Christian calendar was understood as a system of holy days to be observed within time, that is, among “profane” days, but without any special relation to them.

7. G K Chesterton (The Paradoxes of Mr Pond).