Hello Brother Zehr,
As a little background, in reading works by William Law and others, I tried to discern what "watchings" were - as in Law's encouragement for devout Christians to keep "watchings, fastings, and prayers." It turns out that "watchings" would be what we often call vigils and they were a practice of the early church.
As I researched what I could find, I saw that keeping a vigil until daybreak of Easter (called Pascha at that time as it was associated with the Passover for obvious reasons) was common if not the norm. (I would say it seemed to be the latter.) Fasting was also the norm.
(In fact, I was surprised to learn that this is where the season of Lent comes from - I thought it was invented by the Catholic Church more recently, but that is not so.) Some Christians fasted for just Saturday, some for a week, some even for 40 days. I believe that Brother Bercot says, in his talk on "Holidays", that a fast including Friday and Saturday were most common.
There's really not much (anything?) out there about what this looked like in the first or second century, just that it was marked in some way. However, Tertullian indicates that Christian men and women met "all the night long" for "Pascha solemnities." We get more information from the Apostolic Constitutions but those were written around 390. The passage in the Apostolic Constitutions instructs the church to assemble on Saturday evening until cock-crow on Sunday.
During that time they would "watch and pray, entreat God. When you sit up all night, read the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms - until cock-crowing. Baptize your catechumens and read the Gospel with fear and trembling. And speak to the people such things as will assist their salvation... And from that point on leave off your fasting and rejoice! Keep a festival for Jesus Christ, the pledge of our resurrection, is risen from the dead!"
As far as what our family will do, that isn't nailed down yet. We have 3 minor and 1 adult child at home as well as my husband and myself. We will likely be joined by another adult. We actually live on a ministry ranch and on the hill behind (east of) our home sits a cross and some benches. We intend to be up there when the sun rises (in part because we cannot see the sunrise due to said hill) and will celebrate the Eucharist up there after sunrise.
Then we will return to our home for a celebratory feast. It's the hours preceding daybreak that are challenging. I am certain that there will be much flexibility as far as sleep needs for various family members. I'm sure there will be singing of worship songs focused on Jesus's death and resurrection, I'm sure there will be the reading of Scripture out loud, and prayer. However, how much, when, where, together, independent, etc... Well, that has yet to be fleshed out.
Will we begin the evening before? Just before midnight? Midnight? (It seems that early church vigils often included the midnight hour because, based on the parable of the 10 virgins, there was a belief that Jesus would return at midnight.) A number of groups (like Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, etc...) do keep a variation of an Easter Vigil and I did find some of their practices interesting.
In the Book of Common Prayer (which I believe is Anglican) there is an outline of their Easter Vigil and part of it includes a renewal of baptismal vows. While I don't believe it's necessary, I admit I like the idea of an annual reminder of our commitment to God on the day we celebrate our Savior's resurrection. (We rarely remember to do it, but my husband and I always intend to read/recite our wedding vows on our anniversary.
It hasn't negatively impacted us the many years that we have forgotten to do this, but it is a tender and convicting time when we do read them.)
The existence of this vigil and fast isn't surprising to me - it seems completely in line with the Christian self-denial and watchfulness that we read of in the New Testament and the early church writings - I just wish we had more information about what it looked like and the internal preparation ahead of time because this (like everything else we've learned about the early church the past 10 years we've been on this journey) is a completely new thought and we don't want to diminish its
meaningfulness by making it ritualistic.
I imagine what little I know hasn't been terribly useful, brother, but I hope some of it has. If you decide to look into it, I'd be interested in hearing what you learn.
