Lent and Easter Traditions

Lent approaches.

Many familiar traditions will appear, from ashes of its first Wednesday to “Spy Wednesday” in Holy Week. (The “spy” being Judas, who in that day’s Gospel plots the betrayal of Jesus.) But many Lenten customs are purely secular, even pagan. As in much of our culture and religious tradition, the sacred-secular intermingling abounds.

We begin to appreciate this holy season by examining its name, surprisingly a totally secular word, from the Anglo-Saxon lencten, also lengten, in later Middle English lenten or lente. Simply  put, Lent signified spring’s arrival, the “lengthening of days” with noticeably increasing daylight. The Church thus used “Lent” for the penitential season preceding the fullness of spring, Easter, the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox on March 20-21, the start of spring.

The sacred name of Easter is even more secular – totally pagan, actually – in origin. Cosmology and religion merge again, but here via Norse theology. Easter, and “east,” derive from Eostre (also, Eastre), Germanic goddess of dawn and spring. A pre-Christian festival around March 20 honored Eastre, heralding spring’s return.

Familiar animal symbols evolved. Christ the Paschal Lamb fulfills the Passover lamb of the Book of Exodus (ch. 11-12), when the blood of the lamb on the Hebrews’ door posts alerted the death angel to “pass over” them in the final plague, the death of the Egyptian first-born. As Pharaoh released the Chosen People, Christ liberates us from enslavement of sin into new freedom and life with Easter, our Pasch: Jesus ate the pesach, or Passover meal, at the Last Supper, commemorating the exodus from Egypt.

Bunnies do not share this rich Biblical reference, but the rabbit, curiously, summons up the grander symbol, the egg – generator of new life, in Greco-Roman mythology. Medieval Christians placed colored eggs in a symbolic tomb of Christ, celebrating rebirth, as in Chinese culture where dyed eggs link new life to the colors of nature reborn in spring. For Christians, red eggs signified drops of Christ’s blood. Blessed with holy water, for St. Augustine (4^th century) the life-giving eggs meant hope for eternal life.

Medieval analogies abound: yolk as Christ’s body wrapped in white linen; cracked eggs as tomb broken open at Easter dawn, and egg rolling symbolizing rolling away the tomb’s rock; cooked eggs in pockets at Mass, cracked when the priest proclaimed “Christ is risen”; Trinity signified by yolk, white, and shell; and in one legend, the Virgin Mary amusing the boy Jesus by coloring eggs, later given to Pilate to represent tears in pleading for her son’s life.

The Easter bunny? Breeding rabbits, synonymous with fertility, found German-American immigrants hiding eggs in baskets – rabbits’ nests – found by children told they were left by the fertile bunny of life. (Egg-shaped colored jelly beans share this one.) And it all comes back to the eternal life promised at the start of Lent and revealed in the Resurrection. In our Lenten-Easter heritage, sacred meets secular, as in all of God’s, redeemed, divinized, sacramentalized creation.