Easter of the Shipwrecked

The Dilemma of Winston’s Diary

That topic is a lot to take on, so I’ll start by acknowledging two inherent challenges it’s posed.

First is the difficulty of writing about Easter as a former believer. There was a time back in the 90s and early 2000s when “being saved” meant a lot to me, and Easter was bound up with that identity. Now I no longer see myself that way. But especially since I’ve let it go for so long, “old me” still asks: Why would someone who’s rejected that very serious, religious identity have anything to say about Easter? Why would they even care?

More on that later.

There’s the question of why a former true believer would write about Easter, and then there’s a question of whom I’d write it for. I’ve always called this question “the dilemma of Winston’s diary.” In the book 1984, as the main character Winston starts writing his diary, he pauses over the date—which, coincidentally, happens to be April 4th—to consider his audience:

In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him….

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? … How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

For those who’ve been steeped in a religious milieu but no longer belong in it, writing about the experience can feel very much like Winston’s dilemma. Do I write for those on the inside, who have a frame of reference to understand the content but would likely disagree with the content? Or do I write for those on the outside with no frame of reference?

Myself, I believe the answer is both and neither. Even in the most warped and fascistic environments, whether of a religious subculture or a totalitarian regime, some readers will understand and be transformed by an honest account. And even in the most perfect society, there’s enough continuity in human nature that readers can understand what other humans are capable of. After all, people still read Orwell, Kundera, and Dostoevsky.

More than that, in the context of this article, plenty of people are in the middle between those extremes: acquainted with the basics of Easter and Holy Week, but not firmly in the camp of the indoctrinated. For this piece, I’m going to assume no prior knowledge of the holiday season, and walk through the basics of Easter and Holy Week from the get go.

Don Francisco

I’d like to start, perhaps unfairly, with a song. I say unfairly because the song embodies all my least favorite views of Easter! But it’s where we’ll start because it’s vivid, and the ballad will set the scene for even those least familiar with the story. It’s written from the perspective of Peter, one of Jesus’ closest followers, in the pre-dawn hours of the first Easter.

You should know that the piece has a clear devotional tone, but it’s enough of a populist storytelling affair to be sung by the likes of Dolly Pardon. I’ve included the video for full effect, or of course you can read the lyrics below. The song is called He’s Alive, by Don Francisco:

The gates and doors were barred
And all the windows fastened down
I spent the night in sleeplessness
And rose at every sound

Half in hopeless sorrow
And half in fear the day
Would find the soldiers breakin’ through
To drag us all away

And just before the sunrise
I heard something at the wall
The gate began to rattle
And a voice began to call

I hurried to the window
Looked down into the street
Expecting swords and torches
And the sound of soldiers’ feet

But there was no one there but Mary
So I went down to let her in
John stood there beside me
As she told me where she’d been

She said they’ve moved him in the night
And none of us knows where
The stone’s been rolled away
And now his body isn’t there

So we both ran towards the garden
Then John ran on ahead
We found the stone and empty tomb
Just the way that Mary said

But the winding sheet, they wrapped him in
Was just an empty shell
And how or where they’d taken him
Was more than I could tell

Oh, something strange had happened there
Just what I did not know
John believed a miracle
But I just turned to go

Circumstance and speculation
Couldn’t lift me very high
’Cause I’d seen them crucify him
Then I saw him die

Back inside the house again
The guilt and anguish came
Everything I’d promised him
Just added to my shame

When at last it came to choices
I denied I knew his name
And even if he was alive
It wouldn’t be the same

But suddenly the air was filled
With a strange and sweet perfume
Light that came from everywhere
Drove shadows from the room

And Jesus stood before me
With his arms held open wide
And I fell down on my knees
And I just clung to him and cried

Then he raised me to my feet
And as I looked into his eyes
The love was shining out from him
Like sunlight from the skies

Guilt in my confusion
Disappeared in sweet release
And every fear I’d ever had
Just melted into peace

He’s alive, yes he’s alive
Yes, he’s alive and I’m forgiven
Heaven’s gates are open wide

He’s alive (he’s alive), yes he’s alive (he’s alive)
Oh, he’s alive and I’m forgiven
Heaven’s gates are open wide

He’s alive, he’s alive
Hallelujah, he’s alive
He’s alive and I’m forgiven
Heaven’s gates are open wide

He’s alive (he’s alive), he’s alive (he’s alive)
He’s alive
I believe it, he’s alive
Sweet Jesus

The Backstory: Holy Week, from Triumph to Tragedy

The air is tense in Don Francisco’s Easter morning. One could make the case that it should have been.

A week prior, on what Christians today celebrate as Palm Sunday, Jesus and his followers had entered into the holy city of Jerusalem. It was a triumphal entry: Crowds waived palm fronds to hail his arrival; hence the name.

Expectations were high for Jesus’ debut. Jesus had spent his ministry so far out in the countryside, and now the itinerant preacher was coming into the center of it all for Passover.

And as the story goes, some of Jesus’ followers thought he was preparing to overthrow the government. Jerusalem was not just the religious and cultural center of the province; it was also the capital city. Rome had established a secular government there atop a thriving religious society. These zealots expected Jesus to end all that.

As I’d describe it, this zealotry was much like what we’d call conspiracy theory today. Jesus didn’t have the Romans outmanned or out-weaponed. These followers thought that, when the chips were down, God would come through and intervene dramatically in the course of history. At least, that’s how they were always painted in the Easter stories I heard. They were true believers.

On Thursday of the week, Jesus shared an intimate Passover meal with his closest followers. It would be their Last Supper together. Per the story, Jesus had gathered some enemies by that point in the week. There was an incident where he went off on money lenders in the temple. And of course there were rumors that he intended to stage a coup.

So in a twist that would echo through literature and art from Giotto’s The Last Supper to Cypher from The Matrix, one of Jesus’ followers named Judas left from that intimate meal to hand Jesus over to the authorities. The Bible account says Judas was paid for his betrayal, and Wikipedia says he may have been a disillusioned follower. In Evangelical circles, I’d often heard the theory that Judas thought he was hastening things along: If the authorities came for Jesus, he’d have to show up in force! Again, Judas was the true believer.

And then came Good Friday: the real test of it all. After all that wind-up, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the rumors that Jesus was going to change history in a dramatic turn—and maybe even a move to force his hand when things weren’t heating up fast enough!—the revolution came to an end. God did not save the day. No one overthrew the government. History continued its boring, ineluctable march. The Romans has Jesus executed publicly as a common criminal, as they did all rabble rousers, to serve as an example.

An Echo through History

I’d like to pause to draw an explicit parallel here. At this point in the story we have a group of true believers in crisis. They thought they were at the forefront of a vital culture war (or literal war) between their religious way of life and the secular powers that be. They’ve advanced on the capital, certain of the rightness of their movement. They were absolutely certain they’d see their chosen figure emerge victorious in a dramatic break from history.

And yet now that none of that happened, they’re confused and troubled. If you listen between the lines of Don Francisco’s story, they have a bit of a persecution complex, now that they’ve made enemies of the secular powers of the day. You might say a bit anachronistically that they’re afraid of a world who literally believes their God is dead.

And while that last note would be anachronistic—Jesus’ followers didn’t think he was God at that point—it hints at a deep connection to modern society: a resonance between the zealots of Jesus’ Easter morning and America’s post-Trump religious right. More pointedly, though not all Q-Anon followers are Evangelical Christians, those last two paragraphs describe the true believers of the American followers of Q.

Every true believer eventually has a Good Friday. It may not be as dramatic as Don Francisco’s ballad, or as publicly shared as January 6th or 20th this year in DC. But whether we’re talking about a resurrection in the first century or an insurrection in the twenty-first, there’s a reckoning to be had.

Do you continue doubling down on your current direction? Do you hold to your zealotry, or fundamentalism, everything you’ve believed and predicated your life on? Or do you pause to reconsider from a different angle? At least, that’s been my experience.

An Unsatisfying Easter

To me, in that context, Don Francisco’s Easter is… too easy. His triumphant refrain—

He’s alive, he’s alive
He’s alive and I’m forgiven,
Heaven’s gates are open wide.

—seems to hearken back to the naivety of Palm Sunday, a week before, rather than squaring with what happened on Good Friday. The video itself even makes the connection explicit! It overlays the chorus with footage of Palm Sunday from Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth.

To me his Easter is too easy, and his ballad speaks to what I might call vindicationalism. It resonates with all the wrong parts of me: the parts that, as a believer, didn’t want to be wrong, didn’t like the discomfort of thinking I’d made a fool of myself before the unbelieving world by throwing my lot in with zealots. On Easter morning, of all mornings, there was a triumph of my beliefs over the mundaneness of history—a triumph the secular world may not have seen, but that I believed, and could rest my faith in nonetheless.

I’ve never been an extreme cynic, but the parallels are there between those who said Jesus had risen and was coming back—someday—and those who even today say the 45th American president is running politics from behind the scenes.

Isn’t it worth a moment to consider the myths we hold dear, what they mean, how we relate to them, and how they resonate with the rest of our lives?

And so this year I’ve been considering what it looks like to celebrate Holy Week as a former believer and as a skeptic. In fact if I’ll be honest, I’ve been thinking about it since last Holy Week, in 2020. It just took me a year to get there.

Good Friday without Easter

My first reflection along those lines has been, “What if I were to celebrate Good Friday, without celebrating Easter?” For someone who doesn’t actually believe in the resurrection, or any resurrection per se, it would be a lot more appropriate!

Not only would it be more appropriate or intellectually honest to celebrate Good Friday without Easter, but it would also give me space, a special time of the year to commemorate the loss of faith, that moment of going from “true believer” to something else, whatever that something is, if it’s even defined at all (which to be honest it doesn’t have to be).

And I sat with that prospect for a long time: Good Friday without Easter. Many preachers would use the concept as a foil: What would Good Friday be, without Easter? But I asked unironically. I liked the grittiness of the question. Could I sit with it? I decided I could. As former true believers, we can absolutely reclaim Good Friday as a memorial day to commemorate that transition.

The loss of belief is, after all, like a death. It’s the death of an identity, and of a way of thinking where everything made sense, albeit at a price. It’s the death of connections and friendships in many cases, even marriages. Going from “true believer” to something else, anything else, is a change, and it is healthy to grieve it.

A Truly Good Friday

We can grieve the loss of belief, and at the same time we can also celebrate it. We celebrate because when we lose absolutist forms of belief we gain so much more. We gain perspective, nuance, openness, contentment, intellectual honesty, better friendships. For some and in some ways, losing absolute forms of belief opens us for the first time to happiness.

So when I say I celebrate Good Friday, I don’t just mean I commemorate it in sackcloth and ashes. I also mean I remember it with joy. The death of belief is a gate to new ways of life.

And it’s as I thought of what Good Friday opens us to that I realized I was already celebrating Easter, after all. But it wasn’t the same Easter as before.

The Ideas of the Shipwrecked

Many former Evangelical Christians—Exvangelicals, as we often call ourselves—use the term “deconstruction” to talk about dismantling the unhealthy, untrue, or unwanted aspects of our former faith. Deconstruction is often kicked off by a “Good Friday” experience.

We talk about deconstruction, but it’s also common to talk about “reconstruction.” Reconstruction is not necessarily a movement back toward faith—certainly not toward the same faith, but just as often not toward any. Instead, it’s a movement of building our own moral, ethical, or spiritual framework to cling to and work from as we move through life: not a framework that was handed to us this time, but one that we own our part in creating, one we take full responsibility for as we make meaning with our fellow humans.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote about “the ideas of the shipwrecked”:

And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.

Nothing makes me feel shipwrecked like a solid, Good Friday deconstruction. And what is reconstruction if not the self-aware, honest survival of the shipwrecked?

And that—the survival of the shipwrecked—is where I place my Easter. It’s a resurrection of sorts, a new life after a death. But it’s a new life we knowingly make for ourselves.

There is no vindicationalism in my Easter; there is no triumphant chorus, no Mary coming to tell us the stone’s been rolled away. It’s not about us having been right, or him having been right, all along. It comes after a full reckoning of all the ways in fact we got it wrong. It pierces our heart with the joyful realization that there might actually be many ways to be right, that we can now make friends with a lot of people we might have once written off as dangerously wrong.

More than a vindication, we might say it’s a challenge, and an invitation to live into the reality of Good Friday in a new way.

A Different Christianity

You might say that I could say all this, the best parts anyway, and still be a Christian. After all, the message of Christianity is—or should be—that Jesus came not to be served but to serve, not to overthrow the government but to show a different way of living. And one can’t really live into all that until one’s grappled with Good Friday.

You would be right, of course. In fact I always leave the door ajar, aware that my journey may one day find me back in the church. But to me, no faith is real that doesn’t square with the reality of Good Friday, or that doesn’t look full in the face of its own Good Fridays.

I still contend that that’s a different kind of Christian faith: one held as a personal choice, to which culture wars, persecution complexes and the vindication of having been right are utterly foreign.

And it may be that that’s most Christians’ faith! I certainly know plenty of individuals who fit the description. But there’s a strain of Christianity in America, an influential and powerful one, a strain that does not mix well with politics and yet mixes with it all too easily, that does not work this way. It’s the faith of the “true believer,” from Don Francisco to Q-Anon. It’s a kind of faith whose natural and proper end is a Good Friday, no matter what Easter may, or may not, look like.

If even a former true believer such as myself can reclaim Good Friday and find a new Easter—the Easter of the Shipwrecked—maybe those remembrances can give us hope amid our broader cultural and political divisions. If I can square with reality and find a new moral and spiritual fiber, maybe the Q-Anon conspiracy theorist, or the anti-LGBTQ religious zealot, or the right-wing insurrectionist can, too.