Happy Eastre, friends and family,
Here it is! I’ve held this one back for the actual Easter celebration weekend.
This story celebrates the history of Christianity’s most important holiday. From this story, I hope everyone can learn a bit of history that maybe, cements their Faith with their chosen religion (or non-religion). Dad was very good at comparing history and religious beliefs and finding ways to boost his unique Faith through the process.
Dad also gives a minor admonishment about “reading the newspaper”. Well . . . Sorry, dad. I have to admit, I have stopped buying newspapers. Mostly because the paper medium is becoming extinct. I get my news from online media, radio and some video/television. I get to choose what I read or watch at my leisure and am not tethered to a bulky mess of newsprint having to juggle through to the (continued on page . . . )
So here’s my own admonishment . . . READ! READ! READ! If you are an avid reader of all kinds of genre’s, you are able to make better informed choices about what you believe you are hearing/seeing in the news media . . . READ! READ! READ!
Sorry about the rant. I just strongly believe that if you don’t . . . Or won’t . . . read, you should not trust your ability to make judgments on important matters.
I hope you all are able to celebrate this holiday with friends and/or family in your own unique way.
Happy Eastre! (Not a misspelling),
David T
p.s. Comments are very much appreciated.You can write comments below each story.
“It’s Spring, Again”
By Don Tschirhart
Excerpted from the unpublished book “It’s a Wonderful World II: A Retired Reporter Looks At Life“
It’s Spring, Again
It’s that time of the year. It’s spring. Life begins again. Flowering trees are blooming.
Dressed up people with smiles on their faces. Church attendance up. Little girls in white, pink or lavender dresses with cute little hats. Boys wearing once-a-year ties and suits. Ladies with corsages proudly marching at the head of their families.
Bright blue skies. A sun made just for warming you, personally. Signs at the side of the road offering bunnies and chicks. Flowers sticking their noses above the ground that will soon mirror the beauty of the creator. Kids playing baseball on any place with green grass.
Some people like the fall of the year with its colorful tree changes. Spring is my favorite. Everything in my life seems to fall into place when March 21 rolls around.
Many years ago I delivered U.S. Mail on Detroit’s 12th Street, a mostly Jewish neighborhood in mid-town Detroit.
When the sun shone storekeepers would open their doors. Wonderful aromas gushed out — delicious baked goods, odors of live fish in tanks, leather from shoe repair shops, cooked food from small restaurants and the unique smell of freshly laundered shirts and cleaned suits at dry cleaners.
Most fascinating, though, were mothers pushing baby strollers — dozens of them in just a few blocks — showing off infants that ‘hibernate’ during the cold winter months.
People change in the springtime — nearly always for the better. The world seems to be a good place as life begins anew. Smiles rather than grimaces. Laughter, not angry words.
And, of course, spring brings the two major religious events — the Christian feast of Easter and the Jewish feast of Passover. There are no synagogues in the Lapeer area. That is unfortunate because we can all learn from that great religion and culture.
Jewish Passover is a week-long, joyous celebration sometimes known as the Festival of Freedom. It commemorates the Jews escape from Egyptian slavery more than 3,000 years ago.
It comes from the time when God sent an angel to slay the firstborn son in every Egyptian household, “passing over” homes of Jews marked with the blood of a lamb.
As the Resurrection of Christ, a Jew Himself, is regarded as the cornerstone event in Christianity; without it, the faith would not have flourished, Passover is celebrated as the key event in Jewish history; without the escape from slavery, the Jews would not have become the people they did.
Symbolically, the two events are linked in the upper-floor Passover meal hosted by Jesus Christ.
Easter completes a special Holy Week for Christians. It begins with Palm Sunday commemorating Jesus’ triumphant entrance into the city of Jerusalem.
On Thursday of that week — when our Jewish friends begin their Passover celebration — Christians remember Jesus use of the Passover meal to give himself to the world. On Friday, Christians memorialize Jesus’ death on the cross.
The big ceremony of the week, though, comes with Easter Sunday when Christians believe Jesus miraculously rose from the dead.
Jesus’ death and resurrection was remembered from the beginning. But for hundreds of years persecutions made it difficult to celebrate.
Technically, Easter is observed on the Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, falling between March 22 and April 25. I bet you didn’t know that.
While it is Christendom’s most treasured feast, the name derives from an ancient pagan festival and is the name of the Saxon goddess of spring and offspring, Eastre. I bet you didn’t know that, too.
Second-century missionaries, spreading out among the Teutonic tribes north of Rome, encountered many “heathen” religious observances. Because they didn’t want their heads chopped off missionaries tried not to interfere too strongly with entrenched customs. Slowly, but surely, they transformed pagan practices into ceremonies that harmonized with Christian doctrines.
The missionaries saw the centuries-old festival of Eastre, commemorating the start of spring, coincided with the time of Christ’s Resurrection.
So they folded into the Eastre festival the spiritual observance of the resurrection. Thus, the resurrection substitution under the protective rubric Eastre — later spelled Easter — saved countless Christian lives.
A few Easter oddities: Eastre was the fertility goddess and had an earthly symbol — the prolific hare or rabbit. Thus the origin of the Easter bunny.
Isn’t it interesting that Christianity’s most sacred feast — Easter Sunday — bears the name of the pagan sex goddess Eastre and the pagan sun-god Solis?
Isn’t it also surprising what you can learn by reading the newspaper?
Happy Eastre.
Don Tschirhart
