Pass(ing)over into Easter

When it comes to observing religious holidays, I am about as far from “traditional” as you can get.  If you doubt me, let me tell you about Easter dinner this year.  My father, my husband and I celebrated the holiday at Ichiban Japanese Steakhouse very happily eating various combinations of seafood and chicken.  Enough said.

As a kid, I loved Easter.  It was the most important religious holiday in Catholicism, and even as a child I understood its significance.  I loved dressing up in my new Easter dress and hat with my mother and sisters (yes, we wore our Easter bonnets) for church on Easter Sunday.  And any holiday involving jelly beans and baskets of chocolate candy couldn’t be all bad.
  

However, the primary reason I liked Easter so much is that it meant that Lent was – finally!- over.  Lent was six weeks of penance.  You had to give up something you liked, and we were taught that you weren’t supposed to have any fun at all during Lent.  I was bitter about this because my birthday always  fell in Lent and I wanted to have fun on my birthday.  Easter meant the end of that excruciating period, and also coincided with the beginning of the Spring season.  Ah, yes, a most welcome holiday, all the way around.

The revelation that some Christian churches have re-named Easter “Resurrection Sunday” was surprising and disturbing to me.   Wasn’t Easter always the Sunday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus?  Why did they feel it was necessary to do this?

I suspected that perhaps this had something to do with the origin of the name, and I realized that I had absolutely no idea what that might be. My crackerjack internet research revealed that the name “Easter” may have been derived from Eostre, a Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility.  http://www.history.com/topics/history-of-easter  So, was that the problem?  That “Easter” may have had less-than-Christian origins?  Even though this most Christian of all holidays has been signified by this name for centuries, and even though a lot of us, I suspect, were unaware of the name’s origins.

For me, "Easter" will always evoke this holiday - the Resurrection, the rebirth, Spring arriving, and all my childhood memories.

 

As always, my husband and I celebrated this holiday season in a most interfaith way.  We kicked things off a week ago by attending Pittsburgh Musical Theatre’s fine professional production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,”  a rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice commemorating the events leading up to and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

On Friday and Saturday, we attended Passover Seders, which as you may or may not know, involve wine consumption.  At the first one the words the Apostles sang in “The Last Supper” portion of Jesus Christ Superstar came to mind:

Look at all my trials and tribulations
Sinking in a gentle pool of wine
What’s that in the bread it’s gone to my head
Till this evening is this morning life is fine.

At first this seemed incongruous, but then I realized that it was appropriate and historically accurately as the Last Supper WAS a Passover Seder.  The events leading up to Easter took place during Passover, so what better way to prepare for Easter than to attend a Passover Seder or two? 

Sure, when the day itself arrived, I ate hibachi shrimp, but I did it on Easter, not Resurrection Sunday.