Easter

My great aunts in Belarus.

My maternal grandmother came from a small farmstead near the primeval forests of Belarus. She was illiterate for her whole life. She could not add or subtract. She thrilled me with stories in Russian of howling wolf packs on winter nights. Her amusement at terrifying a three-year-old child with wolf stories sheds some light on her character and general disposition. I think of her at Easter.

Russian Orthodox Easter occurs a week later than Roman Catholic Easter. My parents were Roman Catholic. My grandmother was Russian Orthodox. These calendar discrepancies between two brands of the same religion launched mini-jihads every year at Easter and Christmas in our household, which we shared with my Russian grandmother.

Easter is a bigger holiday in Orthodox Catholicism than in Roman Catholicism. Our local Russian priest, a jolly fat man with a funny hat and a waist-length beard, visited houses on Russian Easter morning to bless traditional egg-bread and white boiled eggs. He also expected a shot of good vodka and a roll of cash pressed to his palm discreetly. The cash was tucked quickly into a slit of his black cassock just to the right of the large gold-and-jeweled Orthodox cross that hung from his neck. My rapt attention to every detail of his visit usually gained me a firm, head-shaking pinch to my cheeks with his plump fingers.

The charming multiculturalism of all this, from today's American cinematic perspective, was overshadowed by the heated arguments in Russian between my grandmother and mother that persisted for weeks around the holiday. Easter to me entailed the descending of a black cloud over our house for weeks. While my peers reveled in coloring Easter eggs, I was more fascinated with the white eggs of my grandmother's holiday. "Who wants to eat a purple egg? I like the white ones." This questioning and statement of taste fueled my mother's American-acculturated fury. "What is the matter with you?" She would ask and tilt her head at me, a cuckoo in her nest. 

The old priest retired, and the new, much younger priest stopped doing Easter visits. My grandmother stopped going to the Orthodox church shortly thereafter. I could see her bitter disappointment at losing this last strong link to her homeland as she had known it as a child at the turn of the twentieth century. The Tsarist White Russia which she had left at seventeen to work in American textile mills had still existed in her mind decades after it was changed by The Revolution. The young priest had brought The Revolution to her new home as well.

My grandmother's troubled journey with religion and culture informed me at an early age: Her 'mixed marriage' to a Roman Catholic blacksmith from Lithuania, the conflicts she experienced with family and community over this religious difference, her lack of assimilating mentally and culturally into the society where she was a naturalized citizen for over 50 years. All this comes to me today at Easter. I think of her inability to reshape and resurrect a new life in her adopted country due to her lack of education and lack of intellectual curiosity.

This personal history has consciously fueled my enthusiasm for change, education and maintaining a humanist practice over the years. Despite her anger and depression over her own life's disappointments, I know that my grandmother held out some hope for me that my life would be different. She did not know how to encourage me in that direction, but her example provided its own form of incentive for me to be different. A form of turning poison into medicine, in the Buddhist sense. My humanist practice first developed as a walking away from divisive rituals and anger-provoking difference in beliefs in dogmatic nonsense. Rolling away the darkening stone from the stifling tomb of tradition and convention.