Orthodox Christians Celebrate Easter Tonight

Eastern Orthodox Christians throughout Southern California celebrate Easter tonight in nearly 2,000-year-old rites of sacred pageantry and tradition.

For Antiochian, Coptic, Greek, Romanian, Russian and Serbian Orthodox Christian, the Resurrection of Christ comes a month after Roman Catholics and Protestants commemorated Easter.

This has been Holy Week for more than 40,000 Orthodox Christians across Southern California, and the observance was dramatic at the white-domed Saint Paul Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, where hundreds of families attended services daily to “relive” Christ’s last week on earth.

This year will be the first Pasch, or Easter, in Greek, for Vicki Cochetas, 46. She recently converted to her husband’s faith in the Ancient Christian church 25 years into their marriage. “In the last five years I’ve been seeking for the truth,” said Cochetas, of Irvine. “I was looking for immediate answers. But through the Orthodox life, I’m finding that answers don’t come instantly. It’s about going through an entire process, a continual search.”

Throughout Orthodoxy, Holy Week observances including those on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, which marks the Crucifixion, point to the single defining event of Christianity--the belief in the Resurrection of Jesus.

“Through prayer and gospel, we spend the entire week retelling the whole life of Christ, not just to remember, but to relive what happened during Holy Week,” said Father John Konugres, the interim pastor at Saint Paul.

At the Friday evening service, the cherrywood pews were filled with parishioners glorifying Christ’s life and reenacting the crucifixion. An image of Christ’s body was removed from the cross and then wrapped in white linen. A procession led to a wooden-carved tomb, also known as a kouvoulikon, where the body was placed.

This evening, Christ’s resurrection will be celebrated. Churches still darkened from the solemn observance of Good Friday come alive after midnight tonight with candlelight amid chants and ancient prayers and the proclamation, “He is Risen!”

Greek Orthodox services include the triumphant hymn, “Christos Anesti, Christ is Risen!.” Indeed, the Greek church also calls Easter by the name, “Lampra,” or the brightest day of all.

“There is no greater exultation on earth than the Orthodox liturgical experience of our Lord’s glorious resurrection,” said the Very Rev. Protopresbyter Alexander G. Leondis of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

For a group of teenagers designing mosaic crosses at a children’s retreat at Saint Paul on Friday, each year of Pasch brings new enlightenment.

“I know the story of Christ,” said Mary Tibbs, 16, of Yorba Linda. “But each year, you put all the parts together and everything seems to make clearer sense.”

To Nicole Britiga, a 12-year-old from Orange, “Holy Week offers hope.”

Russian, Serbian and other Orthodox Christians also commemorate their belief in the Resurrection in equally moving rites.

Orthodox Easter this year comes one month after Western Christianity’s observance of the Resurrection. The Orthodox church follows a decree of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, which said that Easter must be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon of the vernal equinox, but always after the Jewish Passover in order to maintain the biblical sequence of events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Marking the sacred observance, Archbishop Spyridon, spiritual leader of more than 1.5 million Greek Orthodox in America, said in his Easter message, “We sorely needed a God enfleshed and entombed that we might live.”

Part of that living, is living for others, said The Very Rev. John S. Bakas, dean of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Los Angeles. This is especially true, he said, at a time when the neighborhood around Saint Sophia, near Normandie Avenue and Pico Boulevard, includes so many non-Greek immigrants from Central America.

“The light of the Resurrection must be shared with our neighbors,” he said in an interview. “We can not longer be an isolated ethnic community. True light shines upon all those who seek it.”

Bakas said the cathedral has joined with nearby St. Thomas (Roman Catholic) Parish and other groups in “Genesis Plus,” a program to revitalize and improve the neighborhood. With a $300,000 federal grant channeled through the City of Los Angeles, he said Genesis Plus will join in job creation efforts.

For Bakas, such efforts are a visible manifestation of an Easter faith.

Also contributing to this report was Times staff writer Tina Nguyen.