The Other Easter

Dean Langis, pastoral assistant at St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, still remembers the year a local bank changed its sign to mark a holiday he sees too often ignored. Instead of flashing time and temperature, it blared: “Happy Orthodox Easter!”

“It was such a thrill,” Langis said. “It recognized the other part of the Christian world. Sometimes it goes by without a comment and there is some feeling of being left out.”

On April 4, while millions of Western Christians around the world gather at Easter services to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, millions of Eastern Orthodox Christians will just be starting their own Holy Week, leading up to Easter one week later.

Known as Pascha--the Greek word that signifies the passing of Christ from death to life--the Orthodox Easter sometimes falls a full month after Westerners have hunted their eggs, eaten their chocolate bunnies and sung the last hymn for Easter.

“It’s true we get no notice,” said the Very Rev. Wayne Wilson of St. Barnabas Orthodox Church in Costa Mesa. “From a practical point of view, it’s harder to buy palms for Palm Sunday, harder to buy Easter lilies and harder for kids to get their candy.”

Except for a blurb in the papers or on television news, the Orthodox celebration rarely rates much attention in Southern California, home to 40,000 Orthodox Christians.

Pascha is a huge holiday in Greece, Russia, Romania and other Eastern European countries, where whole nations stop to observe the holiest of days. Even the eastern United States, where most Eastern European immigrants live, is more likely to see widespread celebration than is Orange County, which has just seven Orthodox churches.

The cause for the division between the East and the West dates to even before the schism of AD 1054, when Roman Catholics broke off from the Orthodox church.

For one thing, the two use calendars that differ by 13 days--the Gregorian calendar in the West and the older Julian calendar by some in the East. The calendars formed the basis for how ancient scholars figured the vernal equinox, or first day of spring.

The split is widened by differing methods for setting the date of Easter. Although both churches mark the holiday on the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox, Orthodox churches still follow a decree by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. That decree says Easter must fall after the Jews have celebrated Passover to be faithful to the biblical sequence of events of the crucifixion and resurrection.

It’s confusing even to Orthodox Christians.

“I don’t even go there because my people don’t even understand the difference,” said Father John E. Constantine of St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in Anaheim.

But that does not diminish the significance of Easter in the East. In fact, the world’s 250 million to 300 million Orthodox Christians consider Easter the holiest day of the year, surpassing even Christmas, because this “feast of feasts” symbolizes the culmination of what Christ was meant to do on Earth.

Many Orthodox Christians are glad for some degree of separation from the Western version of Easter, which some in the United States believe has been commercialized. The purity of the ceremony is uncontaminated by capitalist dynamics, some priests said.

“Ours is a celebration of the death and life of Jesus, instead of the Easter bunny,” Constantine said dryly.

“In a way, we do feel saddened because that is a visible sign that Christians are not united in the world,” he added. “But I would do my best to keep the secular and commercial aspect from coming into the orthodox tradition.”

The highly ritualized Pascha service also varies substantially from those of Catholics and Protestants.

Instead of heralding Christ’s rising with the break of dawn, the Orthodox gather at midnight, the darkness symbolizing the tomb motif of Christ’s death.

The parishioners each hold one unlit candle and the priest emerges, basked in the small light of one candle’s flame. From that fire, all the candles will be lit.

“It’s a very dramatic and emotional moment when, in the midst of the tomb, the light of Christ comes and conquers the darkness and conquers death,” Constantine said. “In the villages of Greece, in the darkness, it’s like a river of fire coming down the hillside. It’s very emotionally charged.”

The service ends about 2 or 3 a.m. when the parishioners move outside and the priest proclaims the resurrection from the church doorway.

Calls for unifying the Christians’ celebration of Easter persist over the years. Due to the coinciding of the calendars, Passover and other astronomical details, Orthodox and Western Christians will all celebrate Easter on April 15, 2001.

But nobody expects permanent reconciliation soon.

“Orthodox means correct worship, correct belief,” Langis said. “We wanted to maintain the faith with the early church intact and I think we’ve done so.”

There is push and pull however, said the Very Rev. Michael Laffoon of St. Mark Antiochian Orthodox Church in Irvine, who admitted to feeling ambivalent on the matter. Some years, the gap between the two celebrations spans five or six weeks.

“That’s what makes it more of a challenge for our people here,” Laffoon said. “We have a week of services leading up to Pascha, meant to be experienced one after another to celebrate this feast of feasts. In a country like Greece, accommodations would be made [in] people’s work schedules.”

Besides that, he added, Little League, school events and other distractions take no account of the Orthodox holiday. “They start scheduling heavily again after [Western] Easter and that is a conflict for us.”

Many parishioners, however, would be reluctant to change tradition simply to share a calendar with Catholics and Protestants, he said.

“I think a lot of Orthodox folks don’t want to play with things,” Laffoon said. “This has been this way since 325. It’s a long precedent to be changing.”