Growing up Easter was one of my favorite holidays because we celebrated it twice! As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we celebrated Easter in ways similar to many in the United States. We participated in the secular Easter traditions by dying hard-boiled eggs, carefully placing them in baskets, only to have the Easter bunny hide the eggs and the basket. Finding the basket was exciting because it was filled with lots of candy treats and trinkets.
Much more importantly and in the true spirit of Easter, on Easter Sunday, we attended our Easter Sunday School and Sacrament Meeting. We sang songs such as “He is Risen” and “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” We celebrated and learned about Jesus Christ as the literal Son of God and his mortal mother, Mary. We expressed gratitude for His atonement for our sins in Gethsemane where he shed great drops of blood from every pore. We rehearsed His betrayal, trial and conviction, and then His crucifixion on a cross. He was laid in the borrowed tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. Most importantly, we rejoiced that he rose again the third day and that, like Him, we will someday rise again. These were joyful truths, and are even more so today for me!
But as the granddaughter of a Russian Orthodox grandmother, we also celebrated Orthodox easter — we called it Russian Easter. Russian Easter is usually celebrated a few weeks later than Easter in other Christian denominations because they follow the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar used by churches in the west. Traditionally, their celebration does not involve easter bunnies or chocolate treats, but it does involve eggs.
My great-grandparents left their Polish towns and came to America near the end of the 19th century. Grandma was born in America, and grew up in a largely Eastern European community in Pennsylvania. Anyone meeting her would have thought that Grandma had been born in Poland. Although she spoke fluent English, it was with a heavy Polish accent. She practiced and shared with her family all the traditions of a good Polish grandmother.
Each year as Russian Easter approached, I would spend a day with Grandma preparing for the Easter celebration. We would draw on Easter Eggs with darkened beeswax. Days before, she had melted amber beeswax in an empty tuna can on her wood-burning kitchen stove for hours until it was a rich dark brown color. Using a pin stuck into a small stick, we dipped the head in the hot beeswax, making traditional designs on hard boiled eggs. Then we dyed the eggs.
Grandma would take these eggs, and special traditional foods she had prepared to a Saturday night service. While my personal memories of these Saturday night Easter events have dimmed, it has been instructive and inspirational for me to review the traditional Saturday night service and its symbolism. At the Church, the lights are turned off for a period of time. The priest lights a candle, and in turn, uses it to light the candles held by those in the congregation. He then leads a procession around the church, stopping at the closed doors representing the tomb of Jesus. He reads from the Gospels, bells ring, and the doors are opened.
The congregation then enters the church, where the priest blesses the baskets of Paschal eggs. And having begun the Easter season 40 days earlier with the Great Lent, he would also bless the foods that were forbidden during Lent. Easter Sunday is a day of celebration, with families and friends gathering for shared meals that include the foods forbidden during Lent. Often passages about the resurrection are read in multiple languages indicating the universality of the Resurrection.
Easter is the most important and sacred of holidays for Orthodox churches as well as other Christian denominations — my own included. Even with Easter on different days, together as Christians, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. My own faith in Jesus Christ is enriched by the Easter traditions of my ancestry.
by Cindy McDavitt is chairperson and a Councilor of the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council. Her faith tradition is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.