East meets West as Christians celebrate Easter

Easter seems to tug at the hem of Christians’ faith like a stubbornly persistent pup.

Even those who claim to have lost their faith or “retired” from religion return to church on the day of Christ’s Resurrection. They sit snug against others they only see once or twice a year or stand at the back of a church chock-full of more worshippers than it should safely hold.

Sunday was not so different. Families donned new clothes and jockeyed for parking spaces along narrow streets adjacent to overflowing parking lots in order to celebrate the promise of renewal and everlasting life brought to earth when the son of God rose from the dead.

The calendar is what made this Easter different from others. This year, religious holidays overlapped as Western Christians and Eastern Orthodox Christians observed their most sacred Sundays and Jews marked the last day of Passover.

Western Christians use the Gregorian calendar to calculate when Easter will fall. The Eastern Orthodox Church continues to use the Julian calendar to set the date for Easter. Both traditions determine Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon which happens upon or next after March 21. If the full moon is on a Sunday, then Easter is the following Sunday.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, still observes the rule laid down by the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. – Easter shall never precede or coincide with the first day of Passover, but must always follow it.

That makes perfect sense to Lambros Karris, the chanter at St. Georges’ Greek Orthodox Church in Bangor.

“The Last Supper was a Passover Seder,” said Karris, who teaches psychology at Husson College. “How can you have Easter before the Last Supper?”

Worshippers who observe the traditions of the Western church and rose early to worship at scenic vista sunrise services were not the first Christians to celebrate the Resurrection. Eastern Christians – Russians, Romanians, Ukranians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others – beat their Western counterparts by a few hours by gathering at 11:30 p.m. Saturday at St. George’s on Sanford Street in Bangor. It is the only Eastern Orthodox Christian Church north of Lewiston.

At 11:55 p.m., the church was plunged into darkness. Tiny candles illuminating the faces of saints painted on icons provided the only light. Precisely at midnight, the Very Rev. Peter C. Chrisafideis lit his large candle.

He lit the candles the altar boys held, who lit the candles of worshippers sitting on the aisles. They, in turn, lit the candles of fellow worshippers, until the dark church, representing a world plunged into darkness following Christ’s death, was aglow in light as Earth was on Resurrection day.

As the two-hour service ended, the pastor sent each worshipper out into the cold, dark night with a hard-boiled egg died blood red to represent Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. For many attending St. George’s in the wee hours of the morning, the service was a way to reconnect with their native cultures a continent away.

Members and visitors at North Brewer-Eddington United Methodist Church were given tiny bags of colored jelly beans as they gathered to worship at the church along the Penobscot River. With the candy was a poem.

“Red is for the blood He gave. Green is for the grass He made,” it read. “Black is the sins we made. White is for the grace He gave. Purple is for His hour of sorrow. Pink is for our new tomorrow.”

Newness appeared to be the theme of the day as girls decked out in pastel-colored dresses and white shoes sang with the children’s choir. A new array of white silk flowers appeared to encircle the plain wooden cross above the altar and behind the choir a just finished quilted banner mirrored the stained-glass window at the back of the church.

“Easter is the most important Sunday of the whole Christian year,” observed 18-year-old Matt Mellott of Brewer and a lifelong member of the church. “It is sort of like starting over. It’s a new beginning, a new change. It’s like spring when everything gets green and pretty.”

Easter in the two Christian worlds will coincide again on April 11, 2004. Between 2000 and 2050 the holiday will be celebrated on the same Sunday a dozen times.