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.

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

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........

© Canberra Times