Easter, A Holiday Reflection

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 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 old-conventions began to change, school boards stopped planning the spring break to coincide with the Christian holiday.

Maybe this was due to a sensitivity concerning cultural hegemony of Christianity that had begun to develop in secular society, or perhaps the change reflected a desire to cohere more closely to such constitutionally required demarcations as the freedom of religion, and the freedom from religion, or maybe it was just because the Easter festivities have an erratic cycle and at variance with the solar year, and therefore it presents a complex set of challenges for curriculum schedulers.

Easter, like Passover and Ramadan follows Selene, the wandering Titaness, our silvery-moon.

Sometimes Easter comes as late as my birthday, April 22^nd, which is Earth Day, other times it is as early as my sister Raney’s birthday, March 28^th.

In the years when Easter fell on our birthday’s we were able to experience that same sense of being overlooked that some kids felt whose birthdays fell on holidays like Christmas or New Year’s Eve, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July or Halloween…just a taste of it, every now and then, because, as I mentioned, the cycle is erratic.

There are many ways to celebrate Easter and many layers to the Holiday.

In America, Easter is most clearly represented by its palette of pastels:

The donning of spring garments, flowered hats and dresses for the ladies, pressed suits for the men, greening lawns and budding trees, crocus and lilies.

Easter is about hard-boiled eggs died with bright colors and hidden around the house, in the yard and garden.

In America Easter is means jellybeans, chocolates and other candies, for my family it meant a feast of baked ham, green beans and potatoes au gratin.

For many people Easter has little to do with Jesus, and the commemoration of the resurrection, which is at the root of the holiday, the good news that Christ has risen.

In the Christian context Easter is a celebration of Jesus, the new lawgiver, guiding the people to a new promised land in a new Passover; it is the foundation of the church leading the poor and downtrodden to a world beyond the veil of time and space, beating down the doors of death and arriving in a place that is free from pain and anguish.

When we were young my brothers and sisters and I would always watch Cecil B. De Mill’s epic, The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses; we watched his transformation from prince to exile, as he discovered his identity and freed his people from a life of bondage.

Watching this movie was a tradition followed by millions of Americans, and it more clearly connected the Christian holiday to its Jewish roots than any sermon I ever heard in church…though we were ostensibly Christian, Lutherans and Catholics, 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, in the angle of its light, a change from the dark days of winter to the bright days of spring.

It is a celebration of life over death and the expectation of summer, the season of planting and hope for the future.

This year Easter comes at the end of an mild winter on the northern plains. It comes in the midst of the ongoing war in Ukraine, and war between Israel and Palestine, it comes as women in the United States are step by step losing the franchise of citizenship, it comes with church bells ringing and with Christians on either side of the political divide both cheering and lamenting the autocratic forces that threaten our own democracy, promoting political violence and even civil war.

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 our future.

It is a day on which we should ask ourselves what the best way is to be restored to ourselves, reconciled with our families and our communities,  and how we can share those hopes and expectations with the world.