THE Feast of the Resurrection, called Easter, is the most important feast on the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar while Christmas comes second. African-born Pope Victor 1, who ruled as supreme pontiff from 185 to 195 AD, decreed that Easter was to be celebrated according to the culture of the Romans. At the time the Romans were pagans and had a goddess of spring, called Eostre. She was worshipped at the first full moon after March 21.

To celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ like spring that brings new life, Pope Victor 1 placed the Feast of the Resurrection (Easter Sunday) as the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21, the first day of spring. Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of Lent, is roughly 40 days before Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. Holy Thursday, which is being celebrated today, is the day when Jesus turned bread and wine into His body and blood and the day when he washed his disciples’ feet.

Lent this year culminates as Pope Benedict XVI announces that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Montego Bay Charles Dufour is to be installed as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Kingston on June 16, succeeding Archbishop Donald Reece. While the Roman Catholic Church is only three per cent of Jamaica’s population, happenings in the church in general are no longer front-page news. Understandably, Queen Elizabeth II of England who turns 85 today is no longer local news as her relevance to Independent Jamaica has diminished.

But when the happenings in religious groups are no longer considered news, it is a sign that virtue is no longer considered important and that sin is on the rise. Adolescent crime can be linked to undeveloped consciences as few adults bother to mentor the young. This has long been a problem in Jamaica as even the Kendal Crash of 1957 has been linked to children of absent parents. The crash took place because, instead of disconnecting the lights to rob, rape and plunder, which had happened before on the trains, the brake cable was mistakenly disconnected.

Today we have the problems of corruption, dishonesty, sexual promiscuity, lewd music and pornography, to name a few. The stress that the police undergo has led to the murder of family members before committing suicide. This shows that the volume of crime in Jamaica is more than dangerously high.

Advent before Christmas, and Lent before Easter are times for deep reflection and repentance. Both Advent and Lent are times when we should reflect on our own sins as we remember Jesus Christ who came into the world (Christmas) and died for our sins (Good Friday). For example, five minutes before midnight, the last five minutes of August 5, 1962, the lights went out in the National Stadium as planned. The lights were turned on again at the stroke of midnight on August 6, 1962 to herald a new day in Jamaica.

The period of reflection and fasting that Christians do in Lent for 40 days can be likened to the five minutes of darkness in the National Stadium before Independence Day in 1962. In a sense, the five minutes of darkness represented the years of slavery and colonialism. Jesus Christ chose the Passover Feast, a combination of Jewish emancipation and independence or “emancipendence” to institute the Holy Eucharist. Jesus came essentially to give the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, to show us the way to salvation and to die for our sins.

But many live with undeveloped consciences and therefore do not know what is sin and what is not. The present debate about Jamaican dialect is a case in point. Yes, it is important to teach the English language because it is either one of, or the most spoken language on earth and therefore important for communication. But the anti-dialect campaigners seem to be convinced that speaking patois is a sin. Indeed, the time that some spend ranting and raving against patois should be spent in stamping out real sin.

God works through culture but some unfortunately look down on themselves despite the teachings of Marcus Garvey and the promotion of the Jamaican language in prose and poetry by Louise Bennett-Coverly. Christians are supposed to empower people, and one way to do this is to teach people that they have nothing to be ashamed of if they speak their local language. In the same way that Jamaica might prepare items for the export market in the way that foreign buyers want it, we need English for that same reason.

But in the same way that we might prepare items differently for the local market, we should also take pride in our Jamaican speech. Professor Carolyn Cooper made a very important point in her column in the Sunday Gleaner recently. The Jamaica Constitution protects our dialect by stating that anyone charged with an offence is entitled to hear of the charges spoken in a language he or she understands. Have a Holy Easter.

ekrubm765@yahoo.com