Is it necessary to explain that Easter is much more than one of the feasts,
more than a yearly commemoration of a past event?
Anyone who has, be it only once, taken part in that night which is “brighter than the day,” who has tasted of that unique joy, knows it.
On Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us.
For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and live by it.
It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death.
It makes it possible for us to joyfully affirm: “Death is no more!” Oh, death is still there, to be sure, and we still face it and someday it will come and take us.
But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage — a “passover,” a “Pascha” — into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann