It is so easy to let satanic Donald Trump and the Hell-bent America that has spawned him drive us all to drink, to despair, to the psychiatrist's couch. But instead, over Easter, fighting back, I allowed Trump and America to drive me to church and to religion.

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When one switches on ABC Radio National at dawn the news and then the breakfast current affairs program keep up a resounding repetitive thump thump thump of mentions of the word Trump Trump Trump. How to escape this horror?

Then I brainwaved that church services during the holy tide of Easter would surely be blissfully Trump-mention-free events. How soothingly soul-restoring it will be, I anticipated, to spend time somewhere where the name on everyone's lips is not the name of a sociopathic POTUS but the name, Jesus Christ, of the revered central figure of Christianity.

And so it came to pass that your columnist, sometimes a lapsed Christian/sometimes a lapsed atheist, went to church. I hoped that if my atheist heroes Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were watching they would forgive me my lapse, that they would understand that it was Trump's fault.

And so I was in a packed and welcoming Canberra church on Good Friday for a beautifully melancholy observance of Jesus's ordeals and death and then in the same packed and welcoming church on Easter Sunday for a soul-stoking service of rejoicing over Jesus's resurrection from the dead.

And, to digress a little, what a psychotherapeutic thing it is for each of us, a believer or not, to get to sing the word "Alleluia" with gusto.

One of the mighty hymns we got to warble on Sunday, Charles Wesley's Christ the Lord is Risen Today!, bristles with Alleluias. There are 20 of them, punctuating every line of the hymn's rapture-packed five verses.

Dictionaries advise that the word can be both a religious and a secular "shout of thanksgiving" and expression of "rejoicing". Perhaps those of us who are not especially religious but who are always enthusiastically counting our blessings (and citizens of plush, lucky, privileged and lovely Canberra have a superabundance of blessings to be thankful for) should often be emitting a heartfelt "Alleluia!" whenever we need to let off a head of gladsome steam.

Perhaps our national anthem, its words already figurative shouts of thanksgiving, could, for an even greater patriotic impact, be Alleluia-enriched, thus:

Australians all let us rejoice

For we are one and free. Alleluia!

We've golden soil and wealth for toil,

Our home is girt by sea. Alleluia!

The unexamined life is not worth living and so settling into my pew last weekend I wondered "Ian, what are you doing here! Have you only come to sentimentally sing the lovely olde hymns you have known and loved since you were a cherubic little Anglican urchin? Are you an imposter, there in your pew?"

Yes, the hymns may have something to do with it, I confessed. Some of Easter hymns are splendid, AI-uncontaminated old masterpieces of musical and lyrical art.

But being fair to myself, I reasoned that what I was doing there made Trump-avoiding, Trump-transcending sense. Perhaps the usually agnostic churchgoer in these shocking times is looking for a Bigger Picture of Life than the picture we see when we are preoccupied with Trump-trapped current affairs.

The way these two fine church services dwelled on Higher Things, on life's meaning, on everlasting issues, on an eternal conflict (God and Good versus Satan and Evil) rather than the passing skirmishes (like this Gulf War) of our pathetically warlike species, was a timely dose of sanity-preserving perspective.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN:

Why Constable's clouds are the escape we need right now

The absurd tragedy of genius minds trying to comprehend a moron's actions

When the news gives us the blues

In his poem, the half-agnostic Philip Larkin says of the isolated church he is visiting (he has propped his bicycle against a hedge) that the building is "a serious house, on serious ground".

Inside the church he imagines these old churches falling into neglect in these post-Christian times, and yet:

A serious house on serious earth [a church] is,

In whose blended air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious ...

Spot-on, Philip. I felt that of the suburban Canberra church that I haunted this Easter (propping my little VW in the church's carpark) was a serious house standing on serious earth, and that the matters spoken about, prayed about and sung about there were serious matters, engagement with them satisfying one's hunger for some seriousness.

And how they, these serious matters of eternal importance (is there or isn't there a God and is there or isn't there hope of a life after death?) contrast with our preoccupation with the sickening frivolity of current affairs.

Please don't think me blasphemous when I reflect that the joyous optimism of Sunday's service, with all of its promises of wondrous things to come, one day, (now that Jesus is risen from the dead, thus thwarting death and Satan) is an infectious thing for believers and non-believers.

It was a reminder that a Trump presidency is a teensy-weensy, ephemeral blip in the great, eternal scheme of things.

Mankind's post-Trump times are coming soon. Alleluia!

Ian Warden is regular contributor

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