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All things Easter, Spring Solstice, Passover, or Ostara

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Jeff Wrangler:
I'm sorry to hear you had a strange Easter, FRiend. It was nice but nothing especially special in these parts. I even got a seat on a very crowded train back to the city late yesterday afternoon!

Jeff Wrangler:
I really don't mean to beat a dead horse over this Easter Sunrise Service business, but here's something interesting that I just found:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_service

Of course, this article is a bit self-referential: A Moravian Church history magazine credits the Moravian Church with beginning the tradition of holding a sunrise service on Easter Morning (check the footnote). This may well be the case, or it may not. I think the point I'd like to make, or the question I'd like to ask, is whether anyone of whatever religious tradition who claims that an Easter sunrise service is a survival of pagan sun worship has actually bothered to research the history of the tradition of an Easter sunrise service, or just jumped to a conclusion?

Front-Ranger:
No, I really can't say whether the author of that Guardian piece did his/her due diligence and traveled back in time to ask the early Christian leaders whether they deliberately modeled the first Easter sunrise service on a pagan sun worshiping ritual. But it seems logical to me that when the early leaders were designing the first Easter celebrations, they probably chose to have some kind of a recognition at sunrise to mark the glorious moment when Mary and the other Mary found the stone rolled away. And one of the leaders might have mentioned in passing that they were likely to have a good turnout because the pagans (pagan means "people of the country") were used to worshiping at sunrise at that time of the year anyway.

One thing I do know is that it's called Easter, which is what the pagans called their spring rituals. My daughter's church doesn't use Easter. They call it "Resurrection Sunday." When to celebrate Easter and some other traditions were decided at the Synod of Whitby in 664. The date of Easter is calculated using the lunar calendar, and that is not particularly Christian. I've been to Whitby and studied the early Celtic church. It's really very fascinating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Whitby

CellarDweller:
No strange Easter here.  Had a nice time with the family, and a big Italian meal.

Jeff Wrangler:
So what was Easter dinner, lamb, ham, or lasagna?

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