Easter

Easter is both a feast in the church calendar and a vivid family ritual in John McGahern’s childhood. His mother made the resurrection’s joy visible in the sun, while the wider cycle of prayer and ceremony gave sacred time a steady place in ordinary life. Later, Easter also marks the moment when a new pregnancy brings the family’s faith and fear into sharp contrast.

The Sun at Easter

Each Easter, Susan McGahern drew her children’s attention to the sun as an image of the joy surrounding Christ’s resurrection. When the sky was overcast, she did not abandon the image; she assured them that the sun was dancing behind the clouds. Her explanation joined what could be seen to what had to be believed, and made the feast’s promise accessible through the natural world around the family.

The scene belongs to a childhood in which religious ideas were treated as immediate realities, not distant abstractions. The narrator’s mother spoke of heaven as concretely as she named wild flowers, and the children heard about the worlds beyond earthly life as part of their future. Easter’s celebration of resurrection therefore resonated within an already vivid imaginative landscape of death, heaven, and hope.

A Feast Within the Household’s Religious Rhythm

Easter stood within a daily pattern of devotion. Prayers were said each morning; the Angelus bell stopped work and conversation at noon; and the Rosary closed the day. At home, the family prayed together beside the fire, beneath the picture of the Sacred Heart. These repeated practices made religious time part of the household’s ordinary routine, while Easter gave that routine an especially joyful focus.

The childhood account distinguishes the Easter when the sun was visible from those when clouds hid it, but the meaning of the feast did not depend on clear weather. The mother’s reassurance turned the unseen sun into an occasion for trust. In that small exchange, Easter’s central promise was conveyed not through formal explanation but through a parent’s way of interpreting the sky for her children.

The Church Year and Its Ceremonies

In the parish church, Easter formed part of a sequence that carried worshippers through Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ascension Day, and All Souls’ Day. The narrator remembers the ceremonies as a source of beauty, ornament, and mystery in an impoverished time. Even the cardboard boxes that brought red, white, and yellow tulips for the altar remained memorable against the scarcity of flowers elsewhere.

The narrator’s recollection gives particular attention to the Stations of the Cross during Lent and to the public procession for Corpus Christi. The Lenten devotions took place in a dim, nearly empty church, with altar boys carrying candles from Station to Station as rain and wind beat against the windows. Corpus Christi, by contrast, filled the village streets: banners and streamers crossed the road, flowered altars stood at familiar stopping places, and priests carried the Host beneath a gold canopy. Easter belonged to this larger ceremonial calendar, through which the year acquired religious meaning and the church became, for the narrator, a first book.

Easter and the Family Crisis

Easter also fixes the timing of a later crisis. After her cancer treatment, Susan McGahern’s expected monthly visitor had not arrived; by Easter, she was certain she was pregnant. Francis (Frank) McGahern, away at the barracks, responded by beginning a novena and fasting, and he contacted her oncologist at Mater Hospital in Dublin.

Susan’s letters register a different posture. She said she felt well, placed her trust in God, and did not want to be rushed or panicked; although she agreed to see Father Ignatius, she also observed that doctors were not infallible. An appointment with the oncologist was arranged, and her mother was to stay with Bridgie while Susan travelled to Dublin. The Easter setting thus holds together religious confidence and medical uncertainty: the same faith that had given the feast its childhood brightness now accompanied a grave and intimate family decision.