Our Multi-faith Network members, Radek Kowalski, SEO Director and Gavriel Wershbale, Performance Marketing Manager, share their personal reflections and traditions, offering thoughtful guides to Easter and Passover .
Radek's Guide to Easter
If I’m honest, Easter used to feel a bit overshadowed. Christmas is easier to recognise — the build-up, the atmosphere, the shared cultural moment. Easter, by contrast, can seem quieter, almost understated. And yet, over time, I’ve come to realise that for Christians, Easter isn’t secondary at all.
It’s the centre of everything.
As a Chrisitan, I’ve found that Easter is less about a single day and more about a journey — one that unfolds gradually and, if you let it, reshapes how you see faith, life and even the world around you.
The Journey Through Holy Week
For me, Easter really begins with the rhythm of Holy Week.
There’s something quite grounding about following the story step by step — from Palm Sunday’s sense of expectation, through the reflective tone of Maundy Thursday, and into the starkness of Good Friday.
Good Friday, in particular, has always stayed with me. It doesn’t try to soften anything. It’s honest about suffering, about injustice, about the reality of death.
And then comes Easter morning.
Not as a gradual improvement, but as a turning point.
The claim at the heart of Christianity — that Jesus has been raised from the dead — is either extraordinary or nothing at all. And over time, I’ve come to appreciate that it’s not meant to be taken as a vague metaphor. It’s presented as something that changes the direction of the story entirely.
Seeing Easter Through Passover
One thing that has deepened my understanding of Easter is recognising its connection to the Jewish festival of Passover.
The Last Supper — which sits at the centre of Holy Week — is a Passover meal. That context matters. Passover remembers liberation: the story of God bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into freedom.
When you place Easter alongside that story, it starts to feel less like an isolated event and more like part of a much bigger narrative.
For early Christians, many of them from Jewish background, this wasn’t coincidence. They saw Jesus’ death and resurrection as a new kind of liberation — not from political oppression, but from sin and death itself.
It’s a continuation of the same theme: a God who steps into history to rescue and restore.
Different Tradtions, Shared Meaning
Working in a global environment like THG, I’ve come to appreciate how widely Easter is celebrated — and how differently it’s expressed across Christian traditions.
Anglican (and Protestant) Experience
In the Anglican Church, Easter tends to unfold quite gently.
There’s a clear movement from the simplicity of Lent into the brightness of Easter Day — often marked by early services, familiar readings, and a shift in tone that feels both joyful and reflective.
For me, it’s always been less about spectacle and more about space — space to think, to pray, and to take in what the season is pointing to.
Roman Catholic Tradition
The Roman Catholic Easter Vigil is something I’ve always found compelling.
Beginning in darkness and moving into light, it tells the whole story of salvation in one service. The symbolism is hard to miss — light overcoming darkness, life emerging where there was none.
It captures something essential about Easter in a very tangible way.
Eastern Othodox Churches
In Eastern Orthodox traditions, Easter — or Pascha — feels more like an eruption of joy.
The midnight service, the proclamation “Christ is risen”, the strong sense of celebration — it all reflects a slightly different emphasis: not just reflection, but victory.
A reminder that Easter isn’t only about renewal, but about triumph over death itself.
Coptic and Eastern Traditons
In the Coptic Orthodox Church, the journey to Easter is marked by one of the most disciplined fasting periods.
That makes the celebration itself feel even more significant — a genuine transition from restraint to joy, from preparation to fulfilment.
Across all these traditions, the details vary. But the core message doesn’t.
More than just a day
One thing I’ve come to value is that Easter doesn’t end on Easter Sunday.
In the Church calendar, it continues for fifty days — a reminder that this isn’t just a moment to observe, but something to live into.
And that’s probably where it has become most meaningful for me.
Easter isn’t only about what happened in the past. It’s about what that means now — in how we think, how we act, and how we understand hope.
Why it still matters
In everyday life, it’s easy to get caught up in routines, deadlines and the next thing on the list.
Easter cuts across that, even if only briefly. It invites a different perspective — one that acknowledges difficulty and uncertainty, but doesn’t stop there. It points instead towards the possibility of renewal, of new beginnings, of things not being quite as fixed as they sometimes seem.
As an Anglican, I’ve come to see Easter less as a dramatic moment and more as a steady anchor in the year.
A reminder that faith isn’t just about tradition or habit, but about a story that continues to unfold.
And whether that’s experienced in a quiet morning service, a shared meal, or simply a moment of reflection, the message at its core remains surprisingly simple: that even in the midst of everything else, new life is possible.
Gavriel's Guide to Passover
Passover is the Jewish festival commemorating the Israelites escape from Egypt and freedom from the slavery of Pharoah, as told in the book of Exodus. Passover is considered one of the highest holidays of the year, with many special customs and observances during the period.
The Passover period begins with Seder night: “seder” is a Hebrew word meaning “order” as we go through the customs of Passover “in order”, beginning with washing hands, going into telling the story, and finishing with a full belly.
The centerpiece of the evening is the “Seder Plate”, a special dinner plate holding 6 particularly symbolic foods. Over the course of the evening we go through each food “in order” (b’seder) explaining the symbolic meaning behind each item, as we tell the story of the plagues of Egypt and the Exodus of the Israelites.
The most famous symbol of Passover is matzah, which looks very much like an enormous cracker to the untrained eye. Matzah is an unleavened bread, which in layman’s terms means that the dough was not baked long enough in the oven to rise.
Matzah symbolizes the rushing of the Israelites, who did not even wait for the bread in their ovens to rise before escaping Egypt. Matzah is also called “poor man’s bread” as when we were slaves in Egypt many of us could not afford the fuel for our ovens to bake our bread fully. We are therefore discouraged from eating “puffed up” foods during the Passover period in order that our egos don’t get “puffed up”, and to remember: even though we are free now, we once were slaves in Egypt.
This restriction on leavened food means no bread, no cake, (for some no corn, no lentils, no rice) and no beer! This means that matzah becomes an essential replacement staple food and we enjoy matzah ball soup, matzah sandwiches, and fried matzah ( a favorite for generations in my family, the Jewish equivalent to French Toast).
Passover is a celebration of our freedom, a time to reflect on how far we have come since the bad old days in ancient Egypt. Passover is also a festival of hope, when we remind ourselves that no matter bad as things can get things can get better, that even though things get dark there is always the light of hope.
Sometimes even in the modern world we can feel like we have no control, powerless, that some Pharoah is still ruling over us, and so we finish every Seder night with the hope that we can experience our own Exodus from bondage (whatever it may be) to return home, as we say “Next Year In Jerusalem”!