On Faith: Easter is complicated
John Nassivera On Faith
Bear with me, please, this might be a bumpy ride. For those of us whose mother tongue is English, Good Friday and Easter are especially complicated holidays. Right off, we have this word “holiday,” a word that many are unaware actually comes from the two words “holy” and “day” being elided together to create “holiday.” Most of us think of “holiday” as just a day off, such as Labor Day holiday, etc. In the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese), the words are variations on “dia santo,” literally “sanctified day.” English, unfortunately, encourages us to forget that a holiday is (or at least originally was) holy.
Then we have this word “Easter.” Oh, Lord help us, this is a bad word. Its origins have nothing whatever to do with Christianity or Judaism. “Easter” comes from the Germanic word “austron” meaning “dawn,” and the Old English “Eastre,” an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn. So our English word Easter is actually thoroughly pagan in origin. But this is perhaps not all that surprising because we know that the Catholic Church, as it spread around the world for many centuries, willingly employed syncretism (a blending of religious systems) in order to Christianize peoples away from paganism, which often included blood and human sacrifice.
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