Eastertide

Now that's how you know that God can do all things: he can wash away your sins and that annoying stain on your blouse! Me, whenever I look at the piles of laundry at my house, I ask that this cup be taken away. (That would be my toddler's leaky sippy cup full of red juice.)

Yes, and what an octave! It is surely one of the most high-tech of the many tech things in the liturgy of our Church.

We could even call it a "week of Sundays"! For during these eight days, each Mass uses a special Preface, with the words "on THIS EASTER DAY" (no, not "Easter season"!) and in the Roman Canon the prayer translating the Latin Communicantes has a special formula "...we celebrate THAT DAY when Jesus Christ rose from the dead in His human body..."

And in the Office (aka the Liturgy of the Hours), most of the ever-advancing pointers which indicate the current day DO NOT ADVANCE for the whole week - they stay pointing to Easter Sunday! (wow, very special-case software coding here!)

Another way it is NOT like the Christmas Octave with St. Stephen and St. John and the Holy Innocents and the Holy Family, and the Circumcision/Mary-the-Mother-of-God - so privileged is this week (as is Holy Week itself) that NOT EVEN St. Joseph - not even the ANNUNCIATION! can be celebrated during it. (Every once in a while both these feasts occur during Holy Week or the Octave, and have to shift to the next available day (of course they are too important to ever skip!)

Note: I do not speak from authority, but from my recollection of the technical documentation for the system. I am a computer scientist and not a Church liturgist, so I often deal with operating systems, and hence I have kind of a special interest in the subject. As Chesterton put it, long before his conversion, when he happened to visit a French church:

"There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all the time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it were a sort of mystical inn." [GKC, A Miscellany of Men 158]

And (except for those special hours of the Triduum) at every hour of the day, somewhere on Earth, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is being offered. It really is a perpetual process, like an OS component - it's going on all the time!

Now this is what I call, classic.
Thanks

Happy Easter week....are you enjoying the gifts? We are blessed aren't we!

Happy EasterTide to you! Having been purified and cleansed by the blood of the Lamb, I pray that we are all enjoying the the fresh new whiteness of our souls this Easter season.

And wasn't there once a soap called Lux? Christ our LUX shines in the griminess and the griminess comprehended it not.

If you like this Easter TIDE, you may like the new traditional Catholic newspaper The Four Marks. They’ve got cartoons and answers to questions I didn’t even know to ask! THere is so much to read about, a lot of variety. Check out their website. http://www.thefourmarks.com/

It's all temprament Eastertide!

I love the colors it brings out.

Now I knew there were four johns (the Gospel, the first and Second epistles, and the Book of Revelation) but Four Marks? nah- I am just putting you on, the Church is...
One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic!