Easter Saturday
(Two) holiday thoughts
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As W.C. Fields might have said if he’d worked in IT, I’d rather have a rack of lamb than a lack of RAM. I recently bought a new laptop and we’re having lamb for Easter, and I’ve wanted to use that line for awhile, so there you go.
Today is Easter Saturday. Easter is interesting to me because the secular/American version of it is so anemic compared to Christmas: bunnies, flowers, eggs, brunch? Secular Easter is sort of just “spring.” As a Catholic, I love Christmas because it feels like two holidays: everything an American kid and adult learns to understand as “Christmas” and “the holiday season,” that mix of winter and consumerism and decorations and cheerfulness—but also, the silent, spooky idea that somehow, unknown to the vast majority of mankind, God himself walked among us.
I’ve always preferred Christmas to Easter because of this double-header, but Easter is the more sacred Christian holiday. So in a sense it feels appropriate that it doesn’t have such a large secular analogue.
Good Friday has almost no cultural recognition—the curiously opposite name, or at least it appears that way—doesn’t help. The only thing I can think of is the fact that the stock market closes on Good Friday, which I don’t even think most people know. (I actually misremembered this as the stock market closing an hour early, at 3pm instead of 4pm, because 3pm is the time Christians observe Christ’s moment of death on the cross. Funny how memory works.)
It’s our second Easter hosting in our new house—I think I’ll probably be saying “new house” for years—and I always think about an interesting little framing of holiday consumerism I read once. It isn’t that we go overboard during holidays with fancy food or gifts or what have you. It’s that our everyday standard of living is so high that it becomes difficult to mark a holiday as “special” without seeming to go overboard.
This is one of those arguments where a temperamental conservatism and an old-school Catholicism intersects with hairshirt environmentalism. And I kind of like it. Holidays are times to celebrate and go all out, but also times to cultivate a sense of contentment and gratitude. And that might mean doing more with less.
Whenever Lent is over, I sort of miss it, maybe because I never observe it as fully as I want—the spirit is willing, etc. etc.—but also because it’s almost refreshing for the culture (and Lent is sort of understood in the secular culture) to momentarily tell you to slow down and look inward.
That’s all I really have to say, and I again wish everyone a happy Easter, or (even though it’s a little later this year) a happy Passover. Thank you for reading, and check in here this coming week.
Related Reading:
The Thanksgiving Table and the Settlement Table
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“It isn’t that we go overboard during holidays with fancy food or gifts or what have you. It’s that our everyday standard of living is so high that it becomes difficult to mark a holiday as “special” without seeming to go overboard.”
- from a couple of Lutheran pastors, thank you for this. There is lots to chew on here, and it’s a very helpful framing. Hmm…this will be good pondering for the next 50 days. Happy Easter! Christ is (almost!) risen!
I don’t know if one is supposed to have a favorite Mass, but if we can, mine is Holy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. The layers of tradition are just so deep. The Last Supper is the Passover meal. [I was blown away when I attended a Passover Sedar and heard the presider say, “Blessed are you Lord, God of all creation. Through Your goodness we have this wine to offer …”] The First Reading was from the OT institution of the Passover. The grand metaphor, the blood of the sacrificial lamb or goat that saved the Hebrews in Egypt and the sacrifice of Jesus – Angus Dei.
And the Mass parts in five languages English & Spanish (in our parish), Latin (Pange Lingua/Tantum Ergo) Greek (the Kirie), Hebrew (Hosanna). [And because I’m a nerd, I recall that “Lord” comes from the Anglo Saxon, “loaf warden,” though not because of any relation to the bread and wine of the eucharist. 😊]