When I was a child Easter always came
in conjunction with a week off from school; Spring Break we called it, and we still
do.
Spring
Break always came with Eastertide, but in the public schools we were not
allowed to call it Easter Break, on account on account of the separation
between church and state, a separation that we are wise to maintain.
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.
Maybe
this was due to a sensitivity that had begun to develop in the broader culture,
or a desire to cohere more closely to such constitutionally required demarcations,
or maybe it was just because the Easter festivities follow an erratic cycle,
because it does not follow the 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
the years when Easter fell on our birthday 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, the Fourth of July or Halloween.
In
one sense Easter is all-about the palette of pastels, donning spring garments, hats
and dresses for the ladies, pressed suits for the boys, it is about greening
lawns and budding trees, and it is about hard-boiled eggs died with bright
colors and then hidden around the house. It is about jelly beans and chocolates
and other candies.
There
is an Easter feast, ham being the most common thing we put on the table in
America.
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 Passove,
leading the poor and downtrodden
to a world beyond the veil of time and space, one that is free of pain and
anguish.
When
we were young my brothers and sisters and I would always watch the Cecil B. De
Mill epic, The Ten Commandments, featuring
Charlton Heston as Moses, and we watched him transform from prince to exile as
he discovered his identity and lead his people away from a life of 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
bright days of spring.
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 at the median, falling just about in the middle of its shifting
arc.
This
Easter is different from any other Easter that has come before as the whole
world experience a devastating pandemic, and we are all shuttered in our homes.
In
America twenty-thousand people have died from it in a matter of weeks.
Church
bells are ringing above empty halls. Families dine with one another by
teleconference.
This
Easter, as with every Easter since the murder of Jesus, there is good reason to
mourn the terrible state of humanity, and some 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.
Blessings,
and peace be upon you…may the force be with you, always!
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