Spirituality

Today is the annual celebration of Earth Day on which events are held worldwide to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and is celebrated in more than 192 countries every year.

In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, the holiday was first proposed with a date of March 21, 1970 being put forth as that day corresponded to the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970 and it is this fixed date that is now used for the holiday today.

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Today is the celebration of Easter, a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of
Jesus Christ. Easter is celebrated on a specific Sunday in late March or early April followed by a fifty-day period called Eastertide or the Easter Season, ending with Pentecost Sunday. The festival is sometimes referred to by a variety of different names including Easter Day, Easter Sunday, Resurrection Day and Resurrection Sunday.

Easter is a moveable feast, meaning it is not fixed in relation to the civil calendar. The
date of Easter is calculated as the first Sunday after the full moon following the northern hemisphere’s vernal equinox. Ecclesiastically, the equinox is reckoned to be on March 21 (even though the equinox occurs, astronomically speaking, on March 20 in most years), and the “Full Moon” is not necessarily the astronomically correct date. The date of Easter therefore varies between March 22 and April 25.

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Today is the celebration of the festival of Hola Mahalla, a Sikh event which follows the Hindu festival of Holi and was derived from Hindu celebrations. Sikhism is a monotheistic religion that originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of northern India and eastern Pakistan, an area which is still considered the historical homeland of the Sikhs, although significant communities exist around the world.

The word “Hola is derived from the word halla (a military charge) and the term mohalla stands for an organized procession or an army column.

The event usually lasts for a week, and consists of camping out and enjoying various displays of fighting prowess and bravery, followed by kirtan, music, and poetry. For meals, which is an integral part of the Sikh institution known as Gurdwara, visitors sit together and eat vegetarian foods. The event concludes with a long, military-style procession near Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib, one of the five seats of temporal authority of the Sikhs.

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Today is the special Christian religious holiday of Good Friday which commemorates the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ. The holiday is observed during Holy Week as part of the Paschal Triduum on the Friday preceding Easter Sunday, and usually coincides with the Jewish observance of Passover.

The Catholic Church in the Latin Rite has no celebration of Mass between the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday evening and the Easter Vigil after sundown on Saturday. In its place there is a special Celebration of the Passion of the Lord which takes place on this day during where the biblical account of the Passion of Jesus is proclaimed and the Eucharist which was consecrated the night before is distributed to the faithful. During this period crosses, candlesticks, and altar cloths are removed from the altar which remains completely bare.

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