Happy Easter!
May it be blessed with many colorful chocolate eggs (of the healthy 85% / raw cane sugar kind of course!).
Have you ever asked yourself what a cute, fluffy bunny and painted eggs have to do with Christ's resurrection? Or even considered that Easter originally might have nothing to do with the crucifixion and Jesus' journey?
Well, (and you could see this one coming): I have.
Since a very early age I've been fascinated by stories of saints, both Eastern and Western; by who and what we're really meant to be and what our spiritual roots are here in the West. Over the last years I've been delving more deeply into those roots so that we, from native European descent, can learn to build upon our own heritage rather than a borrowed paradigm from another culture.
Don't get me wrong here: I love many spiritual paradigms from other cultures and initmately know the value and grace of some of them. I even incorporate Japanese Buddhist practice into my daily routine, so I'm definitely no stranger to 'spiritual adoption'.
Still, in my own journey - and as I see it in the bigger picture of our more or less derailed western culture - I feel a strong need to reclaim our European spiritual roots so we can realign ourselves with what flows through our veins.
Part of my 'job' is to hold a door open for others so they can experience that reconnection and realignment and learn to live from that base, and I'm finding that knowing our own heritage is imperative in order to create a solid foundation upon which to build a sustainable future with and for our communities.
Anyway, Easter...
The first clue is that Easter is one of the so called 'movable feasts', which means so much that the actual date depends on something else than our Gregorian (solar) calendar. With Easter it is the moon in relation to the sun that determines the date. Originally Easter is observed on the first Sunday after the 14th day of a calendar lunar month (full moon) on or after the day of the vernal equinox.
But why? What is the significance of that?
For the answer we have to take a closer look to the natural rhythms of the year in the temperate regions of our Northern hemisphere and realize that our inner spiritual lives mirror these rhythms. More so, the mythology and spiritual symbolism develops and adjusts itself in close relationship to the geography (nature around us) and the climate we live in (but that's a whole other blog, so just forget I mentioned it).
Cycle of the earth and sun
In the yearly cycle of the earth around the sun we recognize four major events: the two equinoxes, when the tilt of the earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the sun, the sun being vertically above a point on the equator, resulting in an equal length of day and night, and the two solstices when the tilt of the earth's axis is most inclined toward or away from the sun, causing the sun's apparent position in the sky to reach its northernmost or southernmost extreme, resulting in the longest day and longest night of the year.
If you look at the sun's influence in this cycle you see six months of its power increasing (December 21st - June 21st) and six months of its power decreasing (June 21st - December 21st). The equinox in March (around the 21st) signifies the point in the year when the balance of the sun's influence on live on earth shifts. From this day onward the days will become longer than the nights and the solar influence grows in strength.
On the equinox itself the energies of form and formlessness, of moving inward and moving outward, of introspection and extroversion, of gestation and blossoming are equal. In spiritual terms you can say that the dance of the Creator and Creation on this day is in perfect harmony: both are expressed equally with the energetic shift towards greater externalization (incarnation) just about to happen.
On this day Spirit (the sun, the masculine principle) connects with the Earth (the form, the feminine principle) and the life force that has been gestating over the winter months is now about to express itself in all its glory in nature.
The moon cycle speaks of this power of embodying; giving form, becoming a reality in this world.
With Easter falling on the first SUNday after the full moon on or after the day of the equinox our ancestors were celebrating this solar shift in combination with the lunar influence. They were looking at the point in time, closest to the moment upon which Spirit imbued the Earth, when the solar and lunar influences are strongest and celebrated this particular day as the resurrection of life!
Where do the bunny and the eggs come into the equation?
Well, we have adopted the hare from Egyptian lore, where it symbolizes the gestation and growth power of the moon. The hare (the spirit of life) brings us the eggs that symbolize new life that's about to be born.
Of course our own human cycle mirrors this movement and after the long winter months of introspection and purification we now also resurrect, take initiative and external action in our lives and set out to birth life into the world in a myriad of ways...
Happy resurrection to you!
