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.