Who can deny the power of : "Verily I say unto thee, that whoever shall give or receive a sweet egg in the days prior to Beltane (the name given to Easter before the crucifiction) does it in My name."
Who could neglect the lesson taught when eggs were rolled down the mount where the sermon was to be given to the assembled crowd: an event now remembered as the Feeding of the 5,000?
The fact that many of those eggs subsequently ended as relics in the various cathedrals and holy places across Europe reveals that those original recipients of the Word realised the importance of the eggs and stifled their hunger to take them home and bequeath them to future generations.
In England we, too, had our holy eggs as the Wife of Bath reveals in Chaucer.
The bacon was not brought home, I trow
That some men have in Essex at Dunmowe
Had it been I swear to Blessed Mary
I'd fry it with a relic in Canterbury
Of course, you have to go back a long way to find the egg in the history of the Church of England since Cromwell did so much to expunge it along with so many other colourful elements of Catholicism.
But the egg has been fundamental to the Christian church since the very earliest days when it vied along with the fish, as the very symbol of the faith. Thomas in his epistle to the Denargians also used the egg as a symbol explaining that the soul was like the yolk, hidden to sight but the very element that makes the egg an egg.
Even today when the Pope gives his Easter Ovum et Oospore message he wears a ceremonial hat made from the giant egg of a long extinct Pacific Elephant Bird. In fact, it is not widely known but one of the major qualifications to become Pope is that your hat size must be no larger 7 7/8 or 63 cm in circumference since it is felt that any bigger and the ceremonial hat would not fit.