Any number of things test the fortitude of people of faith. Relationships break, failures interrupt, and sometimes we feel keenly the inexorable nature of mortality. Easter, for me, has always been a time to sit in the brokenness of things, to absorb the dread and devastation that runs through the Triduum, and reel at the inexplicable sacrifice.
Crushing humility might have characterised my experience in previous years. This year, I feel formless rage.
I don't think Easter is meant to be entirely comforting. For people of Christian faith, touching base with our belief in salvation offers certain assurances. The scenes that we memorialise have an air of inevitability; we know how they play out to Sunday. We perform a sadness that is finite.
This can keep us from remembering to be angry. Jesus was taken, tried, tortured and tied to a tree. The human drama of Easter — with its various betrayals, moments of audacity and doubt, the machinations in shadow — bears the sting of injustice. The central narrative of Christian faith is political. Choices were made by people in power. They are still being made.
The past several months has been an exercise in managing anger at thousands dead in the Philippines, sanctioned by a president who retains popularity.
I have never been blind to the faults of my people, but it is difficult now to recognise our country. I do not understand the depth of callousness, the disregard for hard-won democratic institutions, the toxicity that runs through public discourse. It is not an inevitable state of things. People in power make choices.
The past several years has also been an exercise in managing anger at hundreds of thousands dead and millions fled from Syria.
We now know it as an intractable, multilayered conflict that has left little of Syria to govern. To think that it started as a protest against corruption, state repression and high unemployment six years ago in the southern city of Deraa. Chains of devastation are wrought. People in power make choices.
"It is good to be sad about the things that go wrong because it means we can still tell wrong from right. But it is also good to be angry about them."
The past several years has been an exercise in managing anger at more than 4444 incidents of child sexual abuse within Catholic Church institutions, as recorded by the Royal Commission. The number of alleged perpetrators is 1880. It is