Easter and its light

Apr 13, 2020 Editorial, Features / Columnists

Over a billion souls around the globe identify with the life and teachings of a man, which culminates in this time and season of Easter.
In Guyana, a sizable segment of the population comes to this same place of belief and faith.
For those who fervently believe, there are so many things represented and projected by Easter which, when examined at the core, could be of immense benefit not only to those who identify with the messages, but to all of the peoples of this country.
Among the timeless and transcendent messages of Easter are these: love, mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation, and restoration.
We could use some, maybe all of these ingredients in our way of life in this society, can’t we? We need them, and never more so than now, in this time of great social and political challenges that test the spirit and resilience of Guyanese, don’t we? And in this hour of great physical danger that come from a worldwide scourge for which there is yet to be discovered a medical remedy, we could use some of those resonant elements of Easter in our daily interaction with one another, in our personal vision of how we ought to be before each other. But we are not doing so, are we?
For whether Christian believer or not, where is the appreciation that has to be, if only to bring our national motto to that place of oneness? The scant toleration of each other, such as we have, and as forced by circumstances, leaves us in the worst place imaginable at the worst time possible.
No reminder is needed, but we do: it is a place and time of elections, now long disputed and forever unsettled in the piercing emotions of sharp hostilities that fuel reciprocal hatreds. This is hurting us and disastrously.
Where is the love, understanding, and mutual respect when we need those the most? What we have in the places of those are not going to lead us anywhere. Not anywhere, but which hurries us to a fateful confrontational pass. And in this worst of places and worst of times, we have a virus that menaces the world, and which now threatens our fragile existence.
When the house should stand through the unity of one people (again that stirring national motto, all but cosmetic) to combat what comes, it is shattered with the political and associated racial passions that imperil.
At Easter time or any other time, no society, no grouping of diverse peoples can succeed in getting anywhere that is wholesome, that is incentivizing as to its powerful possibilities. There is no one destiny. Truth be faced, there is no destiny, only the diminishing weaknesses of division and all the dangers that are a part of them.
And yet we are here grasping from some strain, any feather, of communal and national fellowship. Since the liberation that came from Independence, we have allowed ourselves to be enslaved by calculations and visions that pave the way toward a trickling form of self-destruction.
Easter climaxes in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice; we talk about it and ponder over it at length, yet when called upon to deliver some semblance of that same self-sacrifice for nation building, we are found wanting.
All of us, whether followers of the man from Galilee or another from wherever in the fullness of faiths, we are found wanting and shrinking, because we limit ourselves to the narrowness of the self-serving.
We may dismiss love and mercy as having no place in our political paradigms, but when we do so, we might as well jettison any hope we entertain, any vision we harbor, for the truths that could come out of something called reconciliation.And when there is no reconciliation, there can be neither reformation nor restoration. Surely, it is not to this most dismal of dark existence to which we condemn ourselves so willingly… One does not have to believe in Easter or anything that it represents. But if anyone says that he or she loves Guyana, and believes in the future of Guyana, then we know what our duty is, our responsibility, if only to carve out for ourselves a different Guyana.

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