When
I was a child Easter always came in conjunction with a week off from school;
Spring Break we called it, and still do.
Spring
Break always came with Eastertide, but in the public schools we were not
allowed to call it Easter Break, we could not do this on account on account of
the separation between church and state.
I
am not sure when it happened, but at some point those conventions began to
change, school boards stopped planning the spring break to coincide with the
Christian holiday.
Perhaps
this was due to a sensitivity to such constitutionally required separations, or
maybe it was just because the Easter festivities follow an erratic cycle. It
defies the regularity of our solar calendar.
Easter,
like Passover, follows Selene, the wandering Titaness, the silvery-moon.
Sometimes
Easter comes as late as my birthday, April 22nd, Earth Day, other
times it is as early as my sister Raney’s birthday, March 28th. In
those years, when we were growing up we were able to experience the sense of
being overlooked that other kids feel whose birthdays fall on holidays like
Christmas or New Year’s Eve, Thanksgiving or Halloween.
In
one sense Easter is about the palette of pastels, the donning of spring
garments, the greening lawns and budding trees. It is about hard-boiled eggs
died with bright colors and hidden around the house, and it is about jelly
beans, chocolates and other candies.
There
is an Easter feast, ham being the most common thing on the Easter table.
For
many people Easter has little to do with the commemoration of the risen Christ,
which is at the root of the holiday. Jesus, the new lawgiver leading the people to a new promised land in a new Passover.
When
we were young we would always watch the Cecil B. De Mill epic, The Ten Commandments, featuring
Charleton Heston as Moses, leading the people from bondage.
It
was a tradition that more clearly connected the Christian holiday to its Jewish
roots than any sermon I ever heard in church.
My
family rarely went to church on Easter, we hardly ever went to church at all.
For
many folks, Easter marks the equinox, a celebration of the change in the arc of
the sun, the angle of light, the change from the dark days of winter, to the
brightening of the day. Whereas at solstice in winter we celebrate the
lengthening of the day and the light’s return, at the equinox in spring we
celebrate the rising of the increased warmth of the sun and the thawing of the
fields.
Easter
and the equinox are slightly out of step, but the spring ritual is the same
nevertheless.
The
Christian tradition is a celebration of the risen Christ, it is a celebration
of the power of life over death, and the expectation of summer, the season of planting
and of hope for the future.
This
Easter came late in the year, falling on the day before my birthday.
This
is was marred by religious violence in Sri Lanka, more than two hundred
Christians killed in bombings across that country, the bombers targeted
churches.
This
Easter we were witness to the destruction of one of the world’s great cathedrals,
Notre Dame in Paris.
This
Easter, as with every Easter since the murder of Jesus, there are causes to
mourn the terrible state of humanity, and reason to hope for its betterment.
It
is a day that we can ask ourselves how best we can return to life? How can we be
restored in ourselves, in our families, in our communities, and how we can
share that hope with the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I am very interested in your commentary, please respond to anything that interests you.