URSABLOG: Time for Redemption

Spring has crept up on me this year, and as Easter approaches, it’s as though subtle heralds of the season are sneaking up on me through my senses. I am intermittently blinded by the still low sun: bright enough to startle in the day, not yet warm enough to linger on into the evening. The oozing fragrance of jasmine permeates the cigarette smoke as I drink my coffee on my balcony in the morning; I inhale wisps of orange blossom as I drive down certain streets in Athens on my Vespa. Sounds of boisterous children – young and old – compete with blackbird song in the sunset. The touch of warmer breezes – interspersed with bolder gusts – accompanies me as I walk down Akti Miaouli. And I can taste fresh hope in the air. All enough to prick my subconscious to prepare itself for change, even here in the urbanised confines of Attica.

And the change is welcome: dark clouds – literally and metaphorically, burdened with the yellow sands of deserts far away – have been stalking my steps of late. I stand on my balcony, listening to the bells of sentinel churches – at sunrise and at sunset – and my gaze searches for small oases of peace, calm, joy, even as cold-eyed windows reflect back the ancient Attic light.

The cease-fire in the Middle Eastern Gulf is as welcome as it is fragile, suspicious and resentful. A Pandora’s box of fury and latent retribution has been released into the world by a President who has no thought – or apparent care – of the terrible consequences that hubris and a low attention span can cause. Ships and seafarers are now in constant danger in a way I had long feared – and hoped would not happen, but inevitably has – as they have been transformed into viable targets by powers they have no relation to, let alone threaten. Years of being softened up by attacks in the Black, Red and White seas have done their job. It is terrible – and tragic – that attacks on non-combatant ships are seen not only as nothing out of the ordinary, but legitimate. This has never before happened in my shipping career, and I fear that this will get worse before it ever gets better: a new normal in a disorienting world.

And this is a world where – just as with Ever Given – armchair and smartphone experts can provide spurious and impractical solutions to intractable problems – now with helpful AI-generated illustrations – whilst at the same time massively missing the point. This is a world that has ceased to fear real catastrophe, and pain, and death, insulated as we are from it by distance, time and history. This is a world where we worry about the cost of travelling increasing, or of goods delivered to our doorsteps, having no mind for the men and women on ships that carry the fuel, or the goods, overlooked, or at best catalogued as ‘necessary if unfortunate’ collateral damage in wars between the arrogant and the narrow-minded, carried out by actors with their own personal – and mostly irrelevant – axes to grind.  This is a world where, as long as you can remain in your bubble – emotional, professional, psychological, physiological – you have no need to fear the heat of the sun, the winter’s rages, the frown of the great, the tyrant’s stroke, the lightning flash nor the all-dreaded thunder stone. This is a world where – too late now to prevent it – trouble will be arriving on our own doorsteps only too soon.

And yet even now, as the Northern Hemisphere has already tipped over from an equable equinox and is leaning into the sun, spring will not be denied, the coming summer will not be outdone. Hope – it has feathers after all – flies in the face of doom, challenging it to reconsider its lazy assumptions. And even as we find that threats are as easily made as they are withdrawn, and nothing is believed anymore, let alone believed in, the world resolutely keeps turning, and the force that through the green fuse ignites the pyrotechnic explosions of blossoms to salute renewal, regeneration, ανάσταση.

I had arranged to go to Folegandros for Easter to stay with a friend of mine who was preparing some family properties for the summer season. But, in his enthusiasm and recklessness – caused by the season perhaps – he injured himself and had to come back to Athens for medical examinations. Nothing too serious as it turned out, but no running around for him any time soon.

I was left with a dilemma: go by myself to this most beautiful of Cycladic islands and experience Easter alone, or stay in Athens with familiar and loving company to celebrate together. I had already booked my tickets on the ferry, but I could transfer them to later in the season. I was genuinely torn.

In the end Folegandros – being on a slow ferry for a few hours, absorbing the beauty of the island, taking walks through fecund fields wildly extravagant with flowers, the mystery of the Anastasi at midnight on Saturday at the monastery, sheltering my candle against the brisk Aegean breeze, the food, the light, the people – won. I will leave early Good Friday morning from Piraeus.

But it’s also a bit of a gamble: the risk of being alone with my own thoughts, the risk of smiling – enviously at times – at families and friends enjoying food and drink together, the risk of being apart from the very essence of Greece whilst experiencing it in the best way that I can, the risk of trying to communicate through the eternally stubborn barrier of my stuttering Greek.

But Folegandros itself upbraids me, and bids me welcome: “Come!” it says. “Come, and sit, and eat, and drink, and dance, and be.”

Yes, we live in dark times. Yes, the markets are a mess. Yes, the furies are loose in the world, vindictively avenging our complacency and ignorance.

But also yes, children are excitedly anticipating the actions, sights and sounds (and smells and tastes) of the coming festivities, teenagers are dreading the long, restricting family meals ahead, parents – young, old and about to be – are preparing their homes, the food, and the music to accompany the days ahead. And life shall, will, must go on.

Although I lost my own religious faith many years ago, I hope I have not become blind, or jaundiced, or resentful of the message of Easter. Resurrection, renewal, new life, hope are universal, and are not restricted only to those that observe the liturgies of Lent and Holy Week. The beauty of those ceremonies is open to all: believers, non-believers, believers of different faiths, and even those who question the concept of belief itself.

For those of you less fortunate than us who will have the privilege of celebrating Easter here in Greece, I hope you had a good Eastertide under the Gregorian Calendar. For those, like me, anticipating Easter here, in Greece, I wish you joy, peace and love, and renewal too, in whatever form you choose. I hope Easter will help ease your pain, heal your wounds, give you strength, and that it will also inspire you to do the same for others.

One of the most resonant themes of Easter is redemption, and not just in the sense of being saved from sin or error through redemption by the blood of Christ. Redemption has other meanings too: we can redeem ourselves through our future actions, we can earn redemption by being forgiven by others (and forgive others too), we can redeem payments due to us, or repay our debts. We can, simply by changing how we do things, redeem an otherwise unpromising situation, however slightly. Perhaps I am going to Folegandros in search of some kind of redemption, risking only what kind of redemption I may find there. Whatever it is, it will be what I deserve.

Simon Ward