Did Easter Come Early, Or Was It Just Me?

Of all the holidays that come and go, I think Easter causes me the most angst. And I'm not talking about the issues of faith, science, myth, and legend that crop up every year when the latest passion movie or play comes out and the History Channel or Discovery Channel respond with their series of "did it really happen?" shows. No, I'm just talking about the angst that comes from trying to figure out when Easter is going to fall on the calendar!

Unlike Christmas, which always falls on the 25th of December, Easter roams the calendar between March and April. This causes difficulty for parish ministers, because programs and sermon series have to be prepared for the 40 days (Sundays are not included) of Lent that precede Easter. So sometimes clergy are just barely recovered (or not) from Christmas before the church calendar again demands a ton of work outside of the normal pastoral duties. It's no wonder that ministers and priests can't be found the week following Easter. They're all in comas! Chaplains, fortunately, are spared, though I confess I wouldn't mind having one more day off to rest and recover from yesterday's sunrise service and church breakfast!

So how is the Easter date set? Well, here's the Wikipedia entry:

The canonical rule is that Easter day is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox). For determining the feast, Christian churches settled on a method to define a reckoned "ecclesiastical" full moon, rather than observations of the true Moon as the Jews did at the time. Eastern Orthodox Christians calculate the fixed date of 21 March according to the Julian Calendar rather than the modern Gregorian Calendar, and observe the additional rule that Easter may not precede or coincide with the first day of the Jewish Passover.

Get all that? Here's the rest of the article, which includes the algorithms (yes, there's MATH involved!).

There are two issues involved for the oddness of the movable date. One is Easter's connection to Passover - which, by the way, Jesus was celebrating at The Last Supper. It's amazing how many Christians overlook the simple fact that Jesus was Jewish, and never once deviated from that religion, save on ethical or moral principles in his teachings. Although I have attended several Passover events, I can't say I'm an expert, or know why Passover has a date tied to the lunar and solar calendars, so I'll leave that be for now.

The other issue is the connection to the Pagan celebrations that also occur on or near the beginning of Spring. The very word, Easter, comes from Eostre, who was a German pagan goddess. Her celebration time was on or around the Spring Equinox and, interestingly enough, had as parts of worship flowers, eggs, newly hatched birds, and newborn animals. Sounds familiar, huh? Chocolate came much later - we can thank the Aztecs for that!

The only reason I bring up the odd history of Easter and its movable date is because we need to remember that all religions, no matter how old (and I'm talking to you, Hinduism!), are connected to other religions. Christianity came from Judaism, which is connected to Islam by way of the Patriarch Abraham. Both Islam and Judaism were influenced by Zoroastrianism, which was in Persia (now Iran) much earlier. Christianity was also influenced by pagan mystery religions - see above, or ask me where the concept of "washed in the blood" came from! - Jewish seperatist groups such as the Essenes, and Greek philosophy (which created the Gnostic movement).

In the same way, Buddhism came out of Hinduism and radical Ascetic practices of the time. Over the centuries, it split into several lineages. When one ran into Christianity, Pure Land Buddhism was formed, resulting in a Buddha who guides people into nirvana (aka, the "Pure Land"), which looks a lot like the Christian idea of Heaven.

There's a couple of ways to look at this. One is in a negative vein, as in "there are no original ideas, so nothing anyone believes is true." That would be unfortunate, I think, because despite every faith being related to every other faith in some way shape or form, every religion brings a new and refreshing way of looking at the human condition, human relationships with one another and the divine, and the human potential for growth.

The other way to look at this, one that I espouse, is that because every religion brings something different to the table, it is vital that we all learn as much as we can about the religions of our neighbors. This was illustrated recently when Sen. John McCain was visiting Israel last week. As it was the celebration of Purim, he observed that children were moving about in costumes. He remarked to the media that Purim was the Jewish equivalent of Halloween. Which was unfortunate, because Halloween and Purim have next to nothing in common, save for the Purim celebrants use of costumes to dress up like characters in the story depicted in the book of Esther. Had he been more aware of religions other than his own, there wouldn't have been an awkward moment where Sen. Lieberman had to step in and explain the gaff.

Of course, knowing more about the beliefs of others is even more important when looking at the conflict in the Middle East, where both sides have used "God talk" to explain why they are engaged in this conflict. Perhaps if there was more talking instead of killing, we wouldn't be mourning 4,000+ of our soldiers and caring for the thousands more who are wounded, never mind the untold number of Iraqis (I've heard hundreds of thousands) who have been killed or injured.

Just a thought, as we move past the holiest of Christian festivals.

Peace.