Easter Thoughts: Etseri, Svaneti
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This year has been one of the many when, if you miss one Easter, you can try again, due to the different dates for the holiday observed by Eastern Orthodox and Western churches around the world. I found myself in such a situation, away from my wife for the Western one, together for the Eastern.
Both dates were badly troubled by the world’s current insane trends of violence and terrorism. The ongoing deadly tit for tat between “Christian” racist nationalists and extremist Muslims, both claiming to have the purest interpretations of their religions, does nothing to improve their standing in people’s eyes in general.
Neither do traditions which have encrusted them since the founding of each but are often far from, or even directly contrary to, their received scriptures.
Given the state of the world now (where do I begin to describe it?), even as an unswayed believer that God actually will set all things everywhere right forever, I despair at how bad it might get before then. Messy, ugly, terrifyingly confused and deceptive, upside down and backwards, with all bad things called good and vice versa. Our very conscience, our innate moral compass, ruined. Simple greed calling the shots.
If this sounds overly pessimistic, it’s what my perusing of the internet has led me to.
The number and type of scenarios available for our destruction are ridiculous. “ApocAIlypse”. Global warming and flooding, “climocalypse”. Super-hackers. Nuclear renegades, either state-level or smaller scale. Bio-disaster, deliberately human-caused or accidental. Solar-flare EMP.
Political unrest, civil and interstate war. Racism, sexism, trafficking, our insatiable appetite for women and ever younger children to enslave in various ways. Mass extinction of whole vital groups like the insects. One good meteor strike.
All I can do is remind myself what I do, stubbornly and desperately, believe: that Easter still has meaning, that light will shine in and overcome darkness, that the One who seems impossibly far away and disinterested in our petty affairs on a planet rendered microscopic in comparison with the universe, CARES and will set it all right. Not just us frail, evil-bent humans, but all of creation itself, the whole shebang, which currently groans to be perfected. Such prophecies, as mythologically impossible-sounding as fairy tales in this breathtakingly advancing 21st century, remain my anchor.
I still love science, the very scientific method of reasoning, hypothesis, testing, discovery and reiteration; but I refuse to believe that this, what we can sense, is all there is. What gives rise to mind, to love, to art, if not spirit?
If the first Christmas is the start of Light taking human form on Earth, Easter is the culmination of the battle three decades later, although the enemy of God either does not know it yet or is taking all he can get until his fate rushes to meet him. This, and little else, gives meaning to my life in what feels like an incoming storm which will shake everything (everything which can be shaken, that is). It allows me even to contemplate that my own life given in sacrifice to what I believe, never done lightly but done if called for, would also not be a waste or an unused event. If love truly does conquer all, as the Book I believe says it does, what else is there to say?
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer