Easter (Пасха)
Plan.
I. The moral lessons given us by Jesus.
II. When is an Easter?
III. Eastertide.
IV. Easter egg and Easter hare.
V. Thoughts from Ireland.
VI. Easter in England.
VII. Easter in Ukraine and Russia
I. The moral lessons given us by Jesus.
Celebrating Easter, seeing the happy faces of people around, hearing
the joyful announcements “Christ is risen”, and, on the whole, enjoining
these God-blessed sunny spring days, let us pause for a moment and ponder
on some of the moral lessons given us by Jesus.
We well know that Christianity is ethical through and through, but
strange as it may seem, the moral teaching of Christ himself is not very
circumstantial. On the contrary, He appears rather terse on these matters,
and it is in His deeds, not words, that the larger part of His mission
found its expression. As a person, with all His inclinations and
intentions, He does not seem to be a determined moral reformer, not to
speak of a revolutionary; and he was not in the least a scholar or a man of
letters. He wrote nothing. He mowed quietly and slowly along the highways
and among the villages of Galilee and Judea and spoke to people not about
any intricate problems of human existence, or theology, or the mysteries of
life and death, but about things which belonged to the realm of daily life;
and the words he chose for that were the words of common men, not those of
a professor of ethics.
He summed up His “theology” in an amazingly short and simple phrase
“God is love”; and meeting people He very often did not teach them, as He
actually did from time to time, but offered them a ready sympathy and
understanding, even to the degraded and the outcast. To them He spoke in
the language of tolerance and benevolence, forgiveness and mercy. That was
His love – and that was the beginning of the moral revolution that
transformed the world.
II. When is a Easter?
The greatest Christian festival of the year is Easter. It is either in
March or in April, and millions of people joyously observe Christ’s
resurrection. This holy day never comes before March 22 or after April 25.
When is an Easter? That, of course, is celebrated on the first Sunday
after the paschal moon, which is the first full moon that occurs on or next
after the vernal equinox, March, 21st. So all you need to do is look at the
sky? Afraid not. For the moon in question is not the real moon, but a
hypothetical moon. This one goes round the earth one month in 29 days, the
next in 30 days, though with certain modifications to make the date of both
the real and fictional full moons coincide as nearly as possible. It yields
a date for Easter that can be as early as March 22nd and as late as April
25th. Today, Easters variability suits antiquarians, and the makers of
pocket diaries, many of which devote a Full page to the calculation of
Easter in perpetuity. But, nearly 1,700 years on, it does not suit those in
(mostly European) countries such as Britain and Germany where both Good
Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays. Early Easters are too cold to
enjoy. Late Easters are jammed up against the May Day public holiday.
III. Eastertide.
Passion Sunday or Care Sunday two Sundays before Easter, is still
known as Carling Sunday in parts of the north of England. Carlings are
small dried peas, which are soaked in water overnight and then fried in an
almost dry pan – when they start to burst they are ready. Greengrocers sell
them, pubs serve them, and people eat them at home in a basin with a small
piece of butter and plenty of pepper and salt. There seems to be no good
reason, apart from the strength of the tradition, why they are eaten on
this day.
Palm Sunday is the Sunday before Easter; for people near Marlborough
in Wiltshire it meant following a long-established custom in which willow
hazel sprays – representing palm – were carried up Martinsell Hill.
Maundy Thursday is the Thursday before Easter: the ‘royal maundy’
describes the gift which for the last five hundred ears or so has been
given out by the sovereign on Maundy Thursday to as many men and woman as
there are years in his or her age. Once it was clothing which was given
out, now it is a sum of money; on odd – numbered years the ceremony usually
takes place at Westminster Abbey, in even – numbered ones at a church or
cathedral elsewhere in the country – though 1989 seems to have been an
exception, for the distribution took place at Birmingham Cathedral in honor
of the centenary of the city’s incorporation.
On Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion, hot cross buns are always
eaten as a sign of remembrance, and in some baker’s shops and supermarkets
they are on sale for many weeks before. It is a nationwide tradition,
though hot cross buns were unknown in some places – Bath, for example –
until the twentieth century. The buns may in fact pre – date Christianity,
since bread consecrated to the Roman gods was marked with lines
intersecting at right angels.
People celebrate the holiday according to the beliefs and their
religious denominations. Christians commemorate Good Friday as the day that
Jesus Christ died and Easter Sunday as the day that He was resurrected.
Protestant settlers brought the custom of a sunrise service, a religious
gathering at dawn, to the United States.
Today on Easter Sunday, children wake up to find that the Easter Bunny
has left them baskets of candy. He has also hidden the eggs that they
decorated earlier that week. Children hunt for the eggs all around the
house. Neighborhoods and organizations hold Easter egg hunts, and the child
who finds the most eggs wins a prize.
In England, children rolled eggs down hills on Easter morning, a game
which has been connected to the rolling away of the rock from Jesus
Christ’s tomb when He was resurrected. British settlers brought this custom
to the New World.
One unusual Easter Sunday tradition can be seen at Radley, near
Oxford, where parishioners ‘clip’ or embrace their church – they join hands
and make a human chain round it. It is Easter Monday, however, which sees a
veritable wealth of traditional celebrations throughout the country: to
name bat’ a few, there is morris dancing in many tows, including a big
display at Thaxted in Essex; orange rolling, perhaps a descendant of egg
roiling, which takes place on Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire; and for
perhaps eight hundred years or more there has been a distribution of food
at the Kent village of Biddenden, ten miles from Ashford.
Then there is Leicestershire’s famous hare – pie scramble and bottle –
kicking which also takes place on Easter Monday; and another custom kept up
in many parts of England and Wales and called ‘lifting’ or ‘heaving’ was
taken by some to symbolize Christ’s resurrection. On Easter Monday the men
lifted any woman they could find, and the women reciprocated the following
day; the person was taken by the four limbs and lifted three times to
shoulder height. When objections were made that this was ‘a rude, indecent
and dangerous diversion’ a chair bedecked with ribbons and flowers was used
instead – it was lifted with its victim, turned three times, and put down.
The Easter parade.
The origin of this very picturesque traditional occasion, known
affectionately as Easter Parade and starting at 3 o’clock in the afternoon
of Easter Sunday, is not as remote, or mysterious, as many of the
traditions and customs of England; there is no religious, or superstitious
significance attached to it whatsoever.
In 1858 Queen Victoria gave it the ultimate cachet of respectability
and class by paying it a state visit in the spring. For the occasion she
wore, of course, a new spring bonnet and gown. This set the fashion for a
display each spring of the newest fashions in millinery and gowns, and from
then onwards that traditions has expanded; every society lady vied with her
rivals to appear in something more spectacular than anything that had seen
before.
IV. Easter egg and Easter hare.
An egg has a symbolical meaning in many centuries. It’s well known
that eggs had a special significance even in the times of ancient Romans.
Eggs were their first disk during meals (“ab ovo”) and they were also in
the center of competition as a memory of Zeus’s sons, who hatched from
eggs. Such competition took place in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Eggs
was a sign of hope, life fertility even in the early epoch. In
Christianity, the Lord’s gift, which has begun in Jesus Christ. Eggs’
spreading as the Easter symbols turned to be possible because they sewed as
an original rent or as a tax. The Easter was one of the days when this pay
could be accomplished.
Excavations witness that traditions of paintings on eggs have been
existing for 5000 years and have their regional peculiarities. Especially
in Slavonic countries eggs are decorated with many colored pictures of
Christian motives. As expensive souvenirs it was a habit to give eggs made
of noble metals, marble, was and wood.
The Easter hare, which, children believe, brings the Easter eggs, may
be understood as a transformed Easter lamb. In those places, where there
was no sheepbreeding, a hare substituted for a sheep in the Raster meal.
Страницы: 1, 2
