On St. Patrick's Day I climbed up Slieve Donard. It was a lovely day, and very warm for the first six-hundred metres, a little gusty above the Mourne Wall. That was, however, where I made a mistake. Who else could take the wrong turning and climb the wrong mountain? We ended up 85m short of the highest point in Northern Ireland, instead finding ourselves on the very breezy summit of Slieve Commedagh, next-door to Donard. An old Monty Python sketch comes to mind, with the cross-eyed mountineer interviewing his new recruit for a trek up the two peaks of Kilimanjaro.
My other excuse? The Church's Ministry of Healing. For the past week I've been working hard to bring together their new websites for them, both for the Ministry of Healing, which handles spiritual and religious sides of healing, and also The Mount Help Centre, which is responsible for counselling and suicide prevention. You can visit them at http://www.healingireland.org, and http://www.mounthelpcentre.org.
Enough of excuses however, and onto the important stuff.

Easter Eggs and the Easter Bunny

Last year I became curious about how a rabbit can have anything to do with either eggs or Easter. You probably know already that the cartoon-coca-cola-santa-clause-americo-mcdonald's Easter bunny is a relatively new invention of the mass marketeers.

Inevitably, however, things aren't that simple. The traditions go back further, and rabbits being associated with spring is older than Irish christianity. Pagan tradition saw the rabbit as the symbol of fertility (think of our modern saying, As mad as a March hare, a reference to the skitish behavior of male hares in the mating season, around the Vernal equinox). Easter, I need not mention, is closely related to the Vernal Equinox. Thus we might string these rather poorly connected threads together: Rabbits are fertile around the vernal equinox, and Easter lies around the Vernal Equinox. We get the word Easter from the name of the Pagan godess of the Spring, Eostre (unrelated to the similar-sounding hormone, which derives its name from the Greek name of a species of gadfly). Thus the pagans associated Easter with rabbits, and like other Pagan traditions, it was absorbed by Christianity. So what sort of rabbit lays eggs? We should return to Eostre. Pagan mythology claimed that she once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Since this rabbit had once been a bird he was able to lay eggs. We have retained the egg in Christian Easter for several reasons. The passover seder includes a hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water to symbolize new life. An egg represents new life, and the resurrection represents new life for man. Eggs are banned during lent, like meat and dairy products, in the Eastern church. This is a continued tradition which has died out in the West. This is what Shrove Tuesday is all about - using up all of the eggs in the house.

So Easter Bunny explained it's time to have a few days off and wait for him to visit!