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It’s Easter, Time to Rise Up! [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-22
Sunday was Easter, the most important holiday in the Christian calendar, commemorating the resurrection of Jesus, but the name Easter itself comes instead from the Anglo-Saxo goddess of the dawn, the light of the rising sun, Eostre, as recorded by the Venerable Bede in The Reckoning of Time, in which he describes festivals in her honor in the month named after her Ēosturmōnaþ (April). Eostre has cognate dawn goddesses in other Indo-European languages such as Ostara (German) Eos (Greek), and Aurora (Latin). Linguists reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂ewsṓs. Elsewhere in the non-English-speaking world Easter is often known by some variant of the name Paschal, simultaneously invoking both Jewish and Christian mythologies, deriving ultimately from Aramaic pasha and Hebrew pesach, Passover. In all these traditions we find the theme of new beginnings, at a time roughly corresponding to the Spring Equinox and increasing light. The connection between the risen Christ and the rising sun is explicitly made in the common practice of Easter sunrise services. And of course Easter is always on a Sunday, the day of the sun. The spring renewal of life is why we celebrate Easter with colored eggs and chocolate rabbits, and in my secular house, we acknowledge the sacrifice of the lamb of god by eating lamb moussaka.
Traditional Croatian pisanika
My father Arthur (Art) Talbert was born on Easter, which in 1927 was on April 17. He died just a month before his 60th birthday of primary or AL amyloidosis, a disease in which the body overproduces antibody light chains until they precipitate in the tissues, with debilitating effects on heart, kidneys, and other organs. He died long enough ago that I usually barely notice his birthday, but in this year of tumult he has been on my mind. Since he would be 98, I am frankly glad he doesn’t have to witness the catastrophe encompassing our country. He would be writing letters furiously and protesting if he were still able.
He was born in Berkeley, but spent most of his childhood in Santa Monica, where (he discovered years later when his class photo turned up in a Life magazine article), he went to junior high with Norma Jeane Mortenson, the future Marilyn Monroe. He joined the navy during WWII, but fortunately he used to say that the gravest danger he had to face in the navy was freezing to death when he walked along the shores of Lake Michigan in an ice storm. He graduated from UCLA, where he met my mother in a church group, and moved with her to Milwaukee to work for Allis-Chalmers as an engineer.
Within a few years, though, he decided to go to Chicago Theological Seminary and become a minister for the United Church of Christ, which you may recall was Barack Obama’s home denomination as well. For his thesis work, he participated in an archaeological dig at Shechem in what was then Jordan, before the 1967 war. From that experience, he became a life-long advocate for Middle East peace, and for justice for Palestinians.
He served at several small churches over the years, but ultimately I think he felt more valuable and in tune with his view of God’s purpose in social service jobs than in preaching from a pulpit. When he was an assistant minister in Muskegon, Michigan he organized a drop-in center for inner city youth in the church basement that ruffled some feathers upstairs. In rural Kentucky he worked for Johnson’s War On Poverty to bring community services to the folks in “the hollers” of poverty-stricken Appalachia. We got anonymous messages presumably from the racist neighbors about the kind of people on our lawn when he brought mixed race youth groups to our yard for a social get-together. In Utah he worked for the Salt Lake County Council on Aging, providing services like Meals on Wheels to the elderly, and then for Utahns Against Hunger. He was a volunteer Witness for Peace in Nicaragua in the Reagan years. He wrote frequent letters to the editor on social justice topics. He wrote a story about the ostracism and fear experienced by a gay man (probably loosely based on his own brother) in the 1960s before Stonewall, when the subject was still generally taboo, especially in churches.
I met a lot of other ministers growing up, and consequently I associated their progressive values with Christianity, up until the news media latched onto Billy Graham and the Moral Majority as the representatives of Christianity, and I slowly came to realize that there are actually more self-identified Christians who are not social justice advocates than those that are. This came as a surprise to me, but has since been repeatedly confirmed, most notably when Pew Research polls showed that a higher percentage of self-identified American Christians supported torture at Abu Ghraib than the population in general, even though this torture was first documented and exposed by Christian Peacemaker Teams.
“The results of the survey revealed that those who attend weekly church services are more likely than those who rarely or never attend services to say the use of torture on suspected terrorists is justifiable. Going to church increases the likelihood that people will support torture, especially if they are white evangelical Protestants. This is not good news.
But is it a surprise?”
This is a far cry from the moral sense of Black churches when they led the Civil Rights Movement.
I should be clear that I am an atheist and am not here either to defend Christianity, or to ridicule and condemn it. Christianity is what its adherents make of it, and clearly different self-identified Christians make very different things of it. But since polls indicate that at least half of Democrats identify as Christians, I happily accept them as Dem team members even if I do not take literally resurrection, walking on water, raising the dead, eternal life or eternal damnation, virgin births, or a host of other mythological elements in Christianity.
My father was a biblical scholar who taught me about textual criticism, not biblical literalism, but he did believe in the central message of Easter. He was musically inclined, and this time of year you might hear him belting out Handel’s The Trumpet Shall Sound on his trumpet. He loved to sing, and taught me to harmonize (not very well, I’m sorry to say). We sang not only hymns and church music, but camp songs and songs to sing in the long car rides that comprised our annual summer vacations. He and my mother both loved the outdoors, camping, hiking, and canoeing. The natural world rubbed off on us kids: my brother became a nurse and a white-water rafter, my sister became a forester, and I became a geneticist and a naturalist. Theology did not stick to us nearly as well, since we all became atheists or agnostics. Whatever “spiritual” feelings I have are rooted in gazing into forest canopies and understories, listening to the ocean, watching the planets move among the stars, feeling the wind, tracing sedimentary layers in thrust-up mountains or trying to fathom the streaks and dikes in metamorphic rocks, tracking the explosion of flowers from spring into summer, staring into tidepools, watching the sunrise, or similar encounters with the abundance and power of the natural world.
Independence Monument, Colorado
My father was of course imperfect and could sometimes be impatient, judgmental, and pre-occupied. He always took the lead in disciplinary matters, which usually involved substantial lectures on proper moral behavior. He was not as intimately involved in the emotional lives of us kids as my mother was. But he worked long hours, and was tireless in his desire to help others. He and my mother had been Democrats at least since the pink-washing, anti-Jewish campaign of Richard Nixon against Helen Gahagan Douglas. The last Republican they liked was Eisenhower. In keeping with the non-profit status of churches, my father’s political activity was focused on things that were mostly viewed as non-partisan: feeding the hungry, caring for the elderly and disabled, providing guidance and support to youth, promoting inclusion and acceptance, alleviating poverty, stewarding the environment, and waging peace.
Sadly, these values are often not viewed as non-partisan in today’s climate. Even Pope Frances was criticized by conservatives for actually caring for the marginalized and for the planet. Buzzfeed reports that he left us with this final message yesterday (which seems directed to Vance among others):
"How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants! On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life, and ideas."
After my father went into semi-retirement following a heart attack, he was free to be more partisan in his letter-writing and advocacy, but for the most part he stuck to the same universal themes of basic care, decency, and dignity for all humans. In the current chaos I think of him often, and how he shaped my own values. He gave me as a confirmation verse (before I became an atheist, obviously) Matthew 5:6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.” I have tried to keep this as a foundation in both my political activities and interpersonal relationships. He sketched out his own funeral service before he died, and quoted Micah 6:8 “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” I know he would be out humbly, kindly working for justice in this current crisis if he were alive today.
During the pandemic 9 year old Kaitlyn Saunders, the Skate Kid, filmed a beautiful performance celebrating freedom on Black Lives Matter Plaza to the accompaniment of Andra Day’s inspirational song Rise Up. This song seems to me an appropriate anthem for this Easter, in whatever way you understand the holiday.
The Black Lives Matter Mural has of course now been removed from the ironically re-named “Liberty Plaza” under extortion by Trump and the Republican Congress. And every day they try something else truly evil. Never in my lifetime has the Zoroastrian struggle of asha – truth, order, goodness – against druj – lies, chaos, and defilement – seemed so real. Zarathustra thought the ability for humans to defeat druj lay in good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. I hope he was correct. We could certainly use more good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.
Rise up, folks! Save the people, save the children, save the country! See you at the protests!
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