The same reason its always sunny on my birthday.
Some of you might want to point to a particularly memorable Easter weekend when it was a washout, or it snowed, or that you live in a part of the world when Easter is not a springtime festival and so my claim makes no sense (whether because of course it isn’t sunny or because ‘weather’ is a foreign concept because it does the same thing every day). I live on a windy rock at the edge of the world where we get four seasons a day. A Texan I know who has lived here for a few months has exclaimed that they’ve never been so damp.
Sunny in March or April is not England’s strength. It clearly is not a verifiable fact that it’s always sunny at Easter. Except I want to argue that it is.
Perhaps the truer way to put it would be this: we don’t remember the Easter Sundays when it rains. When the weather suits the nature of the day, we remember it. It’s rare that it snows at Christmas, but we remember the times it did strongly enough to convince ourselves that our childhood was full of snowy Christmases (a skim through the weather on December 25 through the mid eighties to mid nineties will not yield any evidence to this). Memory is a powerful force.
We might be tempted to think this should give us some pause about our own recollections of events. It probably should, if we’re honest, memory is often constructed. My earliest memory is from a time before I could be reasonably expected to form lasting memories unless they were traumatic. I remember sitting in my pushchair surrounded by birds, feeding them with seed. I was not upset. Except, I don’t remember this. I’ve been shown the photo so many times that it’s impressed itself on me. The clue is that my memory has third person perspective like the photograph, but I convinced myself I did remember it until I really reflected on it.
When our recollections of events and interactions with others differ, we should pause and consider and reflect that we might have got it wrong. The story can grow in the telling.
I’m more interested in the other side of the equation. I’m convinced that when my memory forgets the Easter’s when it rained it’s not because I’m deceiving myself. The cold rationalist who checks the weather to confirm whether it has always been sunny has missed the point of Easter, of weather, and probably of memory. What my memory is doing, I would argue, is recalling the occasions when the weather fit the event, by which I mean when the situation was consonant with the story. My mind is doing the literary device ‘pathetic fallacy.’ Of course that might make us nervous about the nature of truth, but before it does, we should allow ourselves to notice that we are at heart story creatures.
When the surroundings fit the imaginary—the controlling story of the events we’re remembering—they impress themselves on us in a way that they just don’t if that they aren’t so fitting. It’s not that our memories are inventing events, but we remember the ones that fit the patterns we’ve noticed in the world.
Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Perfect recall, as R. F. Kuang outlines in her novel Katabasis, would be truly hellish. You would, for a start, have a much better idea of what you’re actually like, and therefore find yourself much harder to live with. We cannot quite bear the sight of our own sin.
I remember the Easter of 2021 particularly well. I sat and watched the sun rise in an armchair. It was the tail end of Covid but long before my church could find a building willing to rent to us on a Sunday morning. Lent’s long shadow had felt like the nature of the world. I’d written lots of hopeful poetry as the world budded into spring but our lives didn’t. Then Easter’s bright surprise arrested me: the sun rose to remind me that the Son rose. That’s what the sun is for; one of its primary purposes is to tell us a story of death and resurrection every day, written on the sky for us (in two axes: both the sun’s daily travel and its passage across the sky through a year are chiasms). I remember it because I was hit by the reality of the resurrection anew in a year full of death. I remember it because it was sunny.
Our hearts know what our minds often don’t. The world is a story, a poem to the creator, the gospel writ large. We spot the patterns even if we don’t spot the patterns. Your soul might be a better exegete than you realise.
Of course, your mind does this using the imaginaries you’ve fed it. If you’ve deliberately renarrated your life in the stories the Bible gives you, repeating them as they’re embedded in Christian practices, your mind will use those patterns to remember the past and to frame the present. If, instead, your controlling narratives are the prevailing imaginary of the culture(s) that you find yourself swimming in then those will be the narrative framing of your life.
You can renarrate your life. It’s not short work. You don’t have to be the sort of person who notices the stories you’re being told to manage this, though that can help. Stories are embedded in things we do. Practice gratitude; go to church; eat with other people; participate in the Lord’s Supper; pray. These are renarrating activities. Scale back, or cut out entirely, those activities that counter-form you in competing visions of the world. Do this in community so that a shared vision is formed, and you’ll find you read events quite differently as you’ve renarrated your life. It might always be sunny at Easter.
Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash
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