This year the Easter message has been masked by a societal, even global, lack of faith – in ourselves

A Happy Easter to you all.

“Christ is risen, hallelujah” would be the message my late father, a parish priest all his adult life, would have given. Part of the job you understand, but the Easter message of death and rebirth, the resurrection, the tomb stone rolled away, Jesus walking in the garden  – I’m channelling childhood memories of Sunday school now – was perhaps more important than any to both my dad, his church and Christians everywhere.

Certainly, though unfathomable to us vicarage kids, more important than Christmas. Still Easter had always been more central to the Christian church since the two Roman Empires adopted it as the state religion in 380 AD.

The thing is, the messages we’ve had broadcast to us this Easter – minus one from the King – have been less Sunday school doctrines of faith, and more Saturday night dockyard fighting.

Donald Trump used Easter Day to tell the Iranians to ‘open the f***ing strait you crazy b*****ds’ in what can only be a signal that his plan, whatever it was, isn’t going according to plan, despite the quite astounding ‘back from almost certain death’ rescue of a downed American pilot inside Iran.

The President and his hyperbolic defence secretary have repeatedly threatened to send Iran back to an age where there were no religions, but stones. There may have been however the odd findable, edible, egg.

Obviously as a child the big thing with Easter was a boundless supply – this is the bit vicarage kids never really admit – of chocolate Easter eggs from the congregation. But this Easter I got a share in a single box of chocolates, but a bunch of teenagers took the Easter egg hunt to a new dimension when they went on a rampage in a supermarket in London in order to pilfer as many eggs as they could.

In a separate incident a supermarket employee of 17 years got dismissed for actually confronting and stopping a teenager stealing a bag of chocolate bunnies. Chocolate is just one product that has seen a huge rise in price in the midst of the ever present ‘cost of living crisis’ and right now we don’t know if the Government will eventually succeed – though seems unlikely now – in assisting us to die.

Docters can’t actually raise from the dead, but these days with huge medical advances in techniques and medicines they can just about claw you back from the brink – at least they can when they aren’t on strike. Remember how Labour was going to stop all this industrial action, and spent a ton of our money to buy the strikers and the unions off. How’d that tactic work out?!

The whole ‘vibe’ of our public and political discourse is currently as far from the message of Easter as four astronauts are from the Earth.

The crew of Artemis II NASA’s test flight of the Orion human support capsule around the Moon may have been freed from the bounds of Earth, but not it’s earthy problems. Despite approaching the key part of their mission today, to go around the Moon, completely cut off from everybody on our entire planet, and to go – boldly or otherwise – where no human has gone before having had problems with the on board toilet. I don’t know why but that seems very 2026.

However the mission path they are most following is that of Apollo 8 where three astronauts astounded the world in 1968 by going into the total isolation of the far side or dark side of the Moon, where to all intents and purposes they were ‘dead’ to anybody on earth, and emerged ‘reborn’ at AoS (Acquisition of signal) having achieved something never done before.

The country they had left was riven with civil strife, deep divisions in society, pockets of extreme poverty and involved in an unpopular war, but on the Christmas Eve of 1968, they made a television broadcast where they read the first ten verses from the Book of Genesis.

At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever.

I have no idea whether, when, as I fully expect, the crew of Artemis II emerge from the darkness NASA will have them say something quite so overtly religious as reading from the bible, but a message of hope would not go amiss right now.

The offer of hope is still a powerful one. One Kemi Badenoch took this Easter to try and get across as she looks at the somewhat hopeless state of our government and system of government, as part of her attempt to resurrect her party. A party her rivals endlessly claim is already long dead. We’ll see.

But our politics, whoever is responsible for changing it, needs a reboot, our country a rebirth. All parties say they have the solution, and that I find highly doubtful but the aim, the desire to see that national resurrection is out there.

Trying to find ways to deliver it may actually be rocket science, wanting to try really isn’t.