Celebrating Pasch
Michele Marr, For the Daily Pilot
Today the congregation of St. Barnabas Orthodox Church in Costa
Mesa will complete a long, arduous journey -- a spiritual journey through
Great Lent to Pasch.
Early in the morning, they will gather at the church to pray and sing.
They’ll read passages from Scripture about the saving acts of Jesus
Christ. As a symbol of his victory over sin and death, they will scatter
bay leaves throughout the church.
“On Holy Saturday, the church doesn’t pretend not to know what will
happen with the crucified Jesus,” said Father Wayne Wilson, pastor at St.
Barnabas.
Those who gather at the church will come with great anticipation. They
will stand at the threshold of Pasch -- the day their church calls the
“Feast of Feasts” -- a feast known more commonly in the United States as
Easter.
Pasch is a movable feast. It’s not fixed to a particular calendar day
like Christmas.
“Pasch, Easter, must fall on the Sunday after the first full moon
after the vernal equinox,” Wilson said.
The rules for calculating the date of the feast are essentially the
same throughout Christendom, both East and West. But the calendars used
for the calculation are different.
Western churches -- Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant -- use the
reformed Gregorian calendar to arrive at the date for Easter. Eastern
churches still figure the date based on the Julian calendar.
“In some years, like last year, the feast falls on the same day,”
Wilson said, “but in other years the dates are much farther apart, like
this year. Easter in the West was on March 31.”
So while many Christians celebrated Easter at the end of March --
setting out feasts of ham and yams, potato salad and deviled eggs --
Wilson and others among the Orthodox faithful set out to fast and pray.
For nearly seven weeks, they do not eat meat, fish, dairy foods, oil
or alcohol. They spend more time in prayer. They confess their sins and
ask God, their family and their friends to forgive their transgressions.
They cut back on entertainment and diversions. They give more
generously to others in need. Together they walk the long, difficult road
known in Eastern Orthodox churches as Great Lent, a pilgrimage toward
Pasch sometimes described as a “bright sadness.” It is a journey from
sorrow and repentance to the bright, transcendent joy of Easter.
It has been more than 20 years since Wilson and many of the early
members of St. Barnabas embarked on a journey of another sort that
brought them to where they are today.
“In the ‘60s and ‘70s, many of us were involved in Christian work and
evangelism. I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ,” Wilson
recalled.
He and the others were fervent about their faith, yet they began to
wonder if there was something more to it than they knew. Their questions
set them on a quest that eventually led them from their evangelical and
Protestant roots to orthodoxy.
The congregation began as a Bible study group of about 15 people. They
were part of a loose federation of home churches called at the time the
Evangelical Orthodox Church.
It wasn’t until February 1987 that Wilson and the others were received
into the Eastern Orthodox Church. They were among nearly 2,000 people
across the United States and Canada -- most associated with the
Evangelical Orthodox Church -- who were brought into the church.
The congregation, which started in Huntington Beach, grew. They met
for a time at the YMCA in Huntington Beach. Then they met for nearly
seven years at a onetime school building on Lighthouse Lane.
When the congregation grew to more than 100 members, it began to look
for a larger, more permanent place to meet and worship. In 1997, the
church bought its current home on Cadillac Avenue in Costa Mesa. Last
year, the church celebrated 15 years in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian
Archdiocese of North America.
“It’s been a wonderful time for us. It’s a wonderful life for us,”
Wilson said. “Every day we discover more and more -- on the one hand our
sinfulness, and on the other hand the beauty and the glory of God.”
At 10:30 p.m. today, the faithful at St. Barnabas will gather for the
final leg of this year’s Lenten journey. They will read the Gospel and
sing the Pascal, Easter greeting in several languages as a reminder that
Christ came for all mankind.
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