MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: ROMAN CHARIOTS OF FIRE

It was a challenge trying to put on the Easter Vigil Mass that normally takes about 100 ministers with out only seven people.  On top of that was the extra workload of trying to record and live-stream the event!  The Roman Rite isn't really written for pandemics, stay at home orders, or a dearth of people.  And the priests could only take on a limited number of extra tasks during the liturgy.  That left the remaining FIVE to take up the slack.  Of that number, one was an organist and one was cantor and THEY were in the CHOIR LOFT.  So, in actuality, that left Ian (our seminarian intern), Karen (our sacristan) and Wayne (half our technical team) to do EVERYTHING ELSE!

There were all kinds of behind-the-scenes goings on that, for the most part, I think people missed.  For example, during our rehearsal I realized there wouldn't be a bevy of servers around to pick up the purple material as I stripped it from the Cross on Good Friday.  So I dropped the material on the ground and the cameral followed me to the left of the sanctuary as I put the Cross in the stand and Karen would run out and pick it all up.

Also, I think we were able to hide most of our mistakes.  I had at least two major gaffs at the Easter Vigil that so far nobody has brought to my attention and so, for now, they will remain a mystery to all but me (and I am fine with you letting me live in my fantasy.)

One of Ian's jobs was to make all of the responses.  When we came to the Renewal of Baptismal Promises, his job was to come to the ambo and say, "I do!" when I asked, "Do you reject Satan?"  "And all his works?"  "Do you believe in God the Father," so forth and so on.  And I really wanted the people at home to get into this so I talked it up.

Ian, busy with - well - just about everything else heard that I was beginning the promises and had to come running from the other sacristy which at this point might as well have been in Iowa.

The hallways were crowded with all of the furniture and other things that we weren't using since there were only two of us in the sanctuary and much of the Easter Vigil was cut due to lack of people present.  But Ian was faster than a flying thurible, leaping over prie-dieus, dodging wires, cameras and extra chairs . . . 

He skidded out into the sanctuary, patted his hair and straightened his vestments, and the hardy voice and full lungs was able to shout out . . .

And that is the excitement and drama of live-streamed liturgy.

Great work Ian!

GETTING READY FOR THE TRIDUUM

Tonight begins the Sacred Triduum.  For anybody who may not be aware, St. Sebastian has a YouTube Channel HERE where you can see our Triduum live-streamed.  

One of the things St. Sebastianites will miss out on is our annual setting out of our Passion clock.  I saw one of these online YEARS ago - Fr. Pfeiffer was still here.  (I hope you don't mind that I stole your idea.  If you want credit let me know friends - I'd gladly post it.  Maybe send a picture of yours so I can show how a well done one looks like!)  I found an old, broken clock at a junk store down in Portage Lakes (not too far from our friend at St. Francis de Sales) - $5 - ordered at twenty four hour clock movement - $12 - and spent several days drawing the face.

As you can see, it starts with the Last Supper at 6 o'clock (where 3 o'clock normally is) and goes for twenty four hours until Christ is laid in the sepulcher.

Here is where I would normally write that, because of the Triduum and Easter I might not be posting for a spell (and still might not) but since things are little strange - sometimes busier than every before, sometimes oddly quiet - who know, I might just post again durning this time.

Many blessing on you all!

DON'T STOP NOW!

I like to use sugar cubes in my coffee.  It helps me regulate how much sugar I am dumping into my mug.  I used to love about 6 of them per steaming cup of Joe.  Over the years, with the help of Lent, I have been able to wean myself off of so much sugar that I do not even enjoy the sickening sweet way I once loved so much.  This Lent I am down to one cube (except on Sunday when I have two.)  

In very short order, Lent will be over.  There are some choices to be made.  It does mean that I could up my sugar intake again - OR - it could mean that I keep up the health strides that I have made and keep it low and contemplate maybe dropping sugar all together next year.

If your Lenten practices were successful in making you a better version of yourself - more spiritual, healthier, kinder, more charitable - don’t chuck it on Easter - or at least keep some aspect of it going.  Hopefully your practice assisted you in becoming someone a person for whom you have more respect, someone who exercised more discipline, stepped up to some responsibility, made more of a positive impact on the world.  Why stop - or at least, why stop all together?  

It is like exercise.  NOBODY (and by nobody I guess I mean me) likes it in the doing of it.  But boy, are you glad later that you did.  Celebrate Easter and the Resurrection of Christ by keeping the gains you made over the past (almost) 40 days.  What better way to mark our salvation and keep the hope of becoming saints alive?

MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: AND THE WINNER IS . . .

And now the award for the best Easter Vigil incident:

As most of you are aware, the Easter Vigil is by far the most complicated Mass that the Church celebrates.  It is full of intricate ceremonies which are only celebrated once a year and each of these in turn have some variations depending on the particular year's circumstances such as if there are baptisms that particular year to take place.  As such, the ceremony is rife with things that can go wrong.  That we make it through relatively unscathed is a miracle in and of itself.

 

To help celebrate surviving this wonderful celebration we have the Easter Vigil Best Goofs Award.  This year's nominees are: 

WHAT ABOUT AFTER THE PARADE?

Everybody cheers for the parade.

Most are appreciative of the work that went into floats and music.

Few think of all those who clean up after - unless they don't do their job.

Here's to the unsung heroes who cleaned up after Easter at your parish on Easter Monday when most parishes were "closed."

The counters who came in to tally the collection.
The cleaning crew that mopped floors and tended to bathrooms.
The sacristans that cleaned put all the of the stuff away used during the Triduum.
The guys who hauled the extra chairs away.
The crew that pinched the dead blooms and watered the lilies.
The ministers that took the Easter Sacrament to the shut ins.
The maintenance person who was busily fixing broken kneelers and doors.

Thank you.  You are not often recognized but we sure do know it when you don't perform your vital duties.  Happy Easter to you.

MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TRUE STORIES: CHILD'S PLAY

So,

 

Just before Easter I came across an egg dying kit that had I picked up years ago at a yard sale.  There was a little time that I sewed together during Holy Week and I decided to try dying eggs.  I hadn’t really attempted to do this since I used to do it with Mom.

 

Let me take this opportunity to thank all mothers who make egg dying seem like effortless fun.  It was definitely not the relaxed, joyful experience I had when I was a kid.  Kids, don’t try this at home without professional around.

 

Full disclosure: it was not a typical egg dying kit.  It was some Ukrainian or some such place egg dying kit.  The directions were missing so I looked it up on line.  Everywhere it said, “Follow these direction eggsactly and precisely or you’ll regret it now and for the rest of your life.”  If it says, “for best results used distilled water,” do it.  Obey in all things.  Submit only to God more deeply.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Firstly I hadn’t boiled an egg in years.  But I got out my “Joy of Cooking” cookbook and that went Okay.  The Okay part ended there.

 

I was going to be SO INCREDIBLY CAREFUL that my incredibly careful mother would have been proud.

 

Not so the wicked, not so.

 

I should have known this beginning with the mixing of the dye.  I boiled water and poured it in what later turned out to be WAY too small dying cups and got ready to put in the powder.  I carefully cut the top off of the package, made an “O” of the top of the envelope and tilted it toward the mug.  It was not powder that came out but a non-waterproof inner package containing the dye.  (Who does that?)  So of course the package soaked through and as I am trying to retrieve it with my fingers in boiling water, dye is being spread out over the kitchen, remnants of which still pop up from time to time when a wet rag is passed over the counter.

 

Five minutes into it my fingers looked like this:

 

THAT was going to look great for Maundy Thursday Mass.  I learned that there is a reason it is called “DYE” and not “Temporary Coloring.”

 

Okay, so I wasn’t COMPLETELY obedient to the laws of egg dying.  The instructions said that the dying mixture must be room temperature.  Who has hours to wait for the water to cool?  What’s the worst thing that can happen?

 

I tell you:  The Ukrainian egg dying kit involves wax and guess what happens to wax when you put it in hot water.

 

Exactly.

 

So, cleverly I thought, the dye was put in the freezer for a spell to cool it down.  This is a great idea as long as you remember to put the ice cream back into the freezer that you supposedly took out temporarily to make room for the former boiling egg dye.

 

Giant mess #2.

 

While not great, things went decently after that, for a while.  One of the things that the instructions said was that all the colors would turn out great in the end because you were supposed to hold the egg over a candle and melt the wax off revealing the vivid colors beneath.

 

There is obviously a technique to this that they are not telling us.

 

The wax, instead of turning to liquid and flowing off gently, turned BLACK from the flame.  I tried to wipe it off with a towel and only succeeded in spreading its blackfulness over the whole egg.

 

And no matter how many times you wash your hands, there is dye on them and everything you touch from eggs to rubbing your eye will leave happy reminders of your egg dying joy.  In that way it is like Ash Wednesday.  “Hey, you’ve got something on your face.”

 

All done, the clean up began.  Picking up all of the newspapers of which my mother would be proud that were placed all over to protect furniture, I found that I has still succeeded in dying the table cloth.

 

Giant mess #3.

 

I think I have this out of my system now.  Next year I will just pay some kid to make me a couple of eggs.

WHAT IF WE SERVED FREE BEER?

So a group of priests were talking about the Triduum services – from Maundy Thursday through the Easter Vigil.  One thing lamented was that there were not more people at these various celebrations.  (Apparently we were a bit better attended than many other parishes for these specific events.)  So the conversation turned naturally to what can be done to increase attendance.  Some of the suggestions were to adjust the times.  7:00PM was too late for Thursday, 3:00 is too early on Friday, and the Easter Vigil (in our diocese it was decreed that we have this Mass at 9:15) was too late.  All of the times should be adjusted in order to make them more convenience and therefor more attractive.

 

The Easter Vigil was critiqued for being too long which exacerbated the problem of it starting rather late.  Also Thursday and Friday were too penitential and Saturday was not celebratory (or relevant) enough.

 

“If we begin the Easter Vigil before it is night out will anybody go to hell?” was put forth.  Well, no.  At least not for that reason simply.  But then again, why do we do anything?  What if we didn’t make the Sign of the Cross with holy water in the way into church?  Would God consign the Church to hell for no longer doing this?  What if we bowed instead of genuflected before the Blessed Sacrament?  Will Divine Justice want us to suffer the eternal fires of hell for this?  What if the priest faced sideways instead of facing the same way or confronting the people?  None of these would bring on eternal damnation.  But we do these things just the same and sometimes it is damn inconvenient.  But people in love do things that are damn inconvenient, extravagant, and sometimes silly by a practical standpoint.

 

Granted that we do not want to put anything too taxing in the way of celebrating the mysteries of the faith.  Conversely we don’t want to make the practice of the faith trivial.  (If you have time and nothing else more important to you is happening, consider, maybe, coming to Mass.)  As one of the priests present (later) put it, “I don’t want it to be more convenient for those who were not there in order to make it so that they come and keep looking at their watches considering when they might escape.  Like Midnight Mass or Thanksgiving Day Mass, only those who really want to be there are there.”  All true love is sacrificial.  If you want assurances that you will be out in under an hour at a convenient time, come on Sunday. 

 

This is not to put down the Easter Sunday goers.  You are there!  Sad are those who cannot bother to celebrate and thank God with their brothers and sisters at all.  It is for this latter set that it seems we always want to make concessions to at least get them in the pew.  But how many concessions can one make before you have nothing grand to say? 

MONDAY DIARY: ALMOST EXCRUCIALTINGLY TRUE STORIES: THE EASTER STORY BEHIND THE SCENES

As much as I absolutely love the Easter celebrations, I am glad they only happen once a year!  It takes hundreds of people and hundreds of hours to pull together the Triduum and Easter Masses and getting everybody on the same page takes lots of energy.  And the Easter Vigil begins in darkness and quiet.  The calm before the storm.  But in reality, the sacristy does not mirror this before we get started.  It can't.  Not when there are dozens of people who need to get their jobs done.  It is more like the storm before the calm before the storm:

And it doesn't help that I am an introvert.  I need to time to think and process before such an event as the Easter Vigil.  There's lots of things that go on that do not happen the rest of the year and most of the time you just need to remember.  Not one of my strong points.  So I ditched the chaos and went out to where the boy scouts were starting the fire for the beginning of the Mass.

There were a number of compliments concerning the night and how flawless it seemed.  Well, "seemed" would be the operative word.  One of the first things you teach a server is that no matter what you do, make it look like you were supposed to do it.  The clergy and seminarians have an "afterglow" party and call to mind all the things that went wrong that we hope nobody noticed.  Some things were difficult to hide like the flower that fell off of its stand and landed upside down on the altar of repose.  Other things I think we were able to cover:

There are also lots of subtle gestures and facial expressions in order to help move things along in the correct order.  In all of the practicing there are little details that might have been overlooked, or something springs up that we were not expecting, or someone just didn't remember well from practice.  Here are some the facial clues to convey information without overly alerting the congregation that is (hopefully) praying.

One of the strangest sights for me at the Easter Vigil was when Fr. P went over to the ambo to sing the Exultet (in the dark.)  While he was waiting for the congregation to return to their pews after the blessing of the fire, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his Magic Phone and placed it next to his text.  Afterwords at the afterglow we were joking about what he might have been doing.

 

Sending an Email to the ushers to get the people in more quickly?

 

Turning on his flashlight app?

 

Tweeting #I'm singing the Exultet what are you doing?

 

As it turns out he was turning on his keyboard app in order to get the first note.

"Last year," he informed us, "I started too high and suffered through the rest of the singing.  I was going to start on the right note this year no matter what."  (It was his finest singing of the Exultet yet.)

 

Today (Easter Monday) the offices are closed.  No school either.  Quiet, quiet, quiet.  People were saying, "Oh Father, it will be a wonderful day for you to spend in peace and get rested up.

 

Not quite.

HAPPY EASTER!

HE IS RISEN!

HE IS RISEN INDEED!

 

 

 

May the fullest blessing of the Resurrected Lord

be upon you and your loved ones

today and throughout the whole year.

 

 

Some Easter Games for kids - look here.

 

Some interesting "Easter Eggs" for adults.  look here

MONDAY DIARY: SO I WOKE UP ON SPY WEDNESDAY WITH A SORE THROAT SURE THAT IT WAS STREP

It is very quiet.

There are no school children around. No secretaries. No janitors or maintenance personnel. Most of the seminarians that have been staying with us over Easter have vamoosed. While filling Sebastian’s water bowl my phone fell out of my pocket and right into the water so THAT’S not working. We have for all intents and purposes fallen off the face of the earth.

It is a guilty pleasure.

One of the seminarians, Joe, asked me if I was going to take an Emmaus Day. In his country the priests all disappear on the Monday after Easter calling it the Emmaus Day to relax and recharge. I am not going anywhere. This is one of maybe five or six days out of the entire year that the rectory is empty and I fully intend to enjoy it.

The Triduum went well. All the rehearsing and work by our behind the scenes people paid off. We looked like we knew what we were doing. Mundy Thursday went without too much of anything by way of hitches but then again Fr. Pfeiffer had the Mass. My job was to be decorative altar furniture and sit next to our pastor emeritus.

I was plenty nervous about Good Friday having to remember everything that had to happen with the rubric changes. Reading the Passion we had a Federal Prosecutor reading the part of the Voice. He read it well. “Truth! What is truth?!” I felt like I was on the set of Perry Mason. It took everything within me not to smile.

Most of the “difficulties” happened at the Easter Vigil. Fortunately most of them happened in the dark so nobody saw them. Entering the church the Paschal candle went out about which we were alerted by a concerned parishioner in much the same way somebody might have brought to our attention a raging fire in the basement of the church.

We lost one of the priests in the initial darkness of the procession and after the third “Christ our light!” the Paschal candle took off before the servers could light their tapers which they were to use to light all of the candles at the shrines. They went off chasing the candle into the sanctuary.

Half way through the offertory the music stopped. We still had a bit to go through. The altar had yet to be incensed and we just kept continuing on in silence. I was thinking to myself, “Well, I am not going to hurry this along simply because there is no music! I wish they would at least fill with something!” As it turned out, the organ, once again, just stopped playing – some sort of computer failure - not unusual as of late unfortunately.

The organ is being ripped out tomorrow.

I’m not kidding.

At the end the choir invites the congregation to sing the Halleluiah Chorus and then the priests stand in back and shake hands and wish people a Happy Easter. We change, lock up (just in time as it turns out. The alarms came on shortly after) and then, as is our tradition, we headed over to the rectory and had a shot or two of slivovitz and had a play by play recounting of the night laughing about things that went wrong (or right.) Sebastian still needed to go for a walk and so the lot of us, priests and seminarians, took the dog for his nightly airing out before all good clergy headed off to bed.

Easter Sunday was packed. Chairs needed to be brought up from the basement. Altar servers turned out in droves. “Can you use another server?” “Sure! The more the merrier!” So the Masses grew in numbers of ministers and in pomp. In some ways they went better than the vigil – though they were far less complicated.

The day ended with a friend coming over to share a bottle of Easter wine. Before he left I said, “You know, the organ is being ripped out on Tuesday. Do want to go climbing?” He was game and so we went exploring into the inner chambers of the organ.

“Stay here,” I told him sitting on a perch among the pipes, “And I’ll go play a march and you can see what it is like in the organ chamber when it is playing.” So I opened her up and gave her all that she is worth. It is a neat thing to experience. Instead of sound simply coming out of a speaker, thousands of flutes or pipes all around you play their individual notes and sounds in an orchestrated manner to make music.

The last song I played before shutting her down was, “Lepa si lepa”, a Slovenian hymn to Mary saying something along the lines, “You are a beautiful rose Mary . . .” Mom (rest her soul) always told me that I should always christen an organ by playing a Marian hymn. Thinking of her at Easter, I put this organ to rest having the last song being dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

BLESSED TRIDUUM AND HAPPY EASTER

A very grace filled

Good Friday

to you.

Pope Benedict XVI’s meditations for the upcoming Good Friday Stations of the Cross ceremony have been written by an Italian couple that has been married for nearly 50 years.  Read more here.

Vatican Player is a multi-functional, multimedia tool which groups together content from Vatican media and is managed by Vatican Radio.  See more here.

On Holy Saturday there will be the traditional Blessing of the Foods at 1:00 at St. Sebastian.  For more information on the Blessing of the Foods look here.

And since I will not be blogging until after the weekend . . .

A BLESSED AND HAPPY EASTER TO YOU!

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: KEEPING UP WITH THE TIMES

Things you may or may not see over the next two weekends at Mass:

The Church has symbolic options to perform over these next two weekends to help us move along with the liturgical calendar. This Sunday marks 50 days since Easter – Pentecost; the descent of the Holy Spirit, the last day of the Easter Season. After evening prayer on Sunday we begin ordinary time.

In the extraordinary form of the Mass the Paschal Candle (or Christ Candle or Easter Candle) would have been extinguished after the homily on Ascension Thursday. Symbolically this is terribly practical. Since the candle represents Christ and He ascends into heaven symbolically during the Gospel on that day, it makes sense that it be extinguished.

This does not happen in the ordinary form of the Mass. Instead it remains lit during the entire Easter season. An option (which I use if we have a strong altar server) is that the Paschal Candle is borne out of the sanctuary after each Mass on Pentecost at the end of the procession. This marks the end of the Easter season.

Failing this, when you come to Mass the following weekend you should see the following: The Paschal candle is no longer next to the pulpit/ambo but has been moved to the baptismal font. White altar clothes and vestments have been exchanged for green ones during the week (there are a couple of feasts on following Sundays not directly connected to the Easter season on which white will still be worn.) If there was a font set up for Easter, it should now be removed, and the flowers should change. There may still be flowers because of the feasts, but they should be less reminiscent of Easter and move on to more summery varieties.

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: THE LIGHT THAT PIERCES THE DARKNESS

It is an odd thing that we light and bless a fire. It all sounds rather pagan like turning toward the four winds and praying to the elements. But there are practical as well as spiritually orthodox symbolic things going on here.

Much of the practical is lost on moderns particularly in westernized countries. Do you need warmth? Turn the thermostat up. Do you need light? Flip the switch. Do you need help hearing? Speak into the microphone. For most of the history of mankind and indeed for most people alive today this is not always a ready remedy. Things are much more basic outside of our little bubble of existence. Is it dark? Go to bed or light a candle. Are you cold? Bundle up together under a blanket and light a fire.

The candles at Mass have nice symbolic meanings which have been reported on here in the past, but they are also immensely practical: They provide light so we can see to pray the Mass, proclaim the readings and etc.

So back to the Easter fire. Fire is used for warmth, light, in preparations for nourishment, for sanitizing and purifying, and even protection. (Who doesn’t feel better sticking closer to the fire at a campout after a good ghost story?) The symbolism is clear then: Fire represents Jesus. This is the light that we carry into the Church, the light that destroys the darkness, Jesus, the light of the world and gives life and warmth. This is what we are to become and that night so we do as we each carry our light of Christ – “a light divided yet undimmed.”

The prayer over the fire points mightily to all of the symbolism going on. “We share the light of your glory through your Son, the light of the world. . . inflame us with new hope . . . purify our minds . . . bring us to the feast of eternal light.”

Finally, in some ways it undoubtedly has some roots in paganism. According to the OSV Catholic Encyclopedia, though the lighting and blessing of an Easter fire seems to have been present since the beginning of the liturgical celebrations of Easter, “in a custom attributed to St. Patrick, the Celtic Church began with the lighting of an outdoor fire, ‘baptizing’ the practice of local pagan priests, the warmth of the fire no doubt evoking the sense of the ‘quickening of life’ accomplished definitively for the Christian by the resurrection of Christ.”

Some Christians strongly object to the “baptizing” of anything pagan and using it in the worship of the one true God. As G. K. Chesterton once pointed out walking on two legs should be done away with also because they were used in the worship of the pagan Gods. The same would go with singing, the raising of hands, standing, sitting, the use of buildings, the non-use of buildings, silence and making noise, the use of incense and the non-use of incense. It all becomes rather convoluted. But if these practices bring us closer to God, make us understand His way better symbolically, help us relate better by using those things that are so part of the human experience, then it would be silly not to make use of them.

FRIDAY POTPOURRI: THREE FOR THE PRICE OF ONE (IRONICALLY APPROPRIATE TITLE IN MORE THAN WAY.)

We are heading into Holy Week. Holy cow! Soon enough we will be celebrating the Triduum. The Triduum is a three day celebration which is composed of Maundy Thursday (or Holy Thursday,) Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Evidence of the fact that it is indeed one long celebration you will notice that there is not (or shouldn’t be) a closing hymn at the end of Maundy Thursday (we go into adoration) there is neither an opening nor a closing hymn on Good Friday, and Holy Saturday begins with the blessing of the fire.

For Catholics then that means we do not stop our observance of this holy time when we leave church. We carry it with us to the domestic church – to our homes – work place – school - wherever we may be we carry with us the Passion of our Lord and mark it in any special way we can. So get ready! It is almost here! What will you do?


As a complete side note - Blogger seems to be working much better now!  My frustration is passing quickly.

ALRIGHT! WHO STARTED THAT?!

We are hard to please. We can be bedazzled by something one moment and completely board by it the next. Last week many people gravitated to the local gadget store to see the latest and greatest gewgaw that modern science has to offer the masses. That is not to say that, whatever it is, (it will eventually make its way into my life with no effort on my part) is not truly something of note and wonder, but it makes everything that comes before it old and useless. Yesterday’s marvel is today’s landfill. (If you think this is harsh, remember that this is coming from a man who still listens to a gramophone from time to time.)

Think of the innovations of the past that we now take for granted. There was an article in the newspaper the other day about the invention of the gas lantern. Previously at best a room would be lit by candles or a fireplace. But now there was a lantern that could be hung in the center of a room and everyone in the room could read from the one light source! Now that was a show! To them, the paper reported, the simple gas lamp would have been a spectacle like a laser show to us. Perhaps not though since we grow used to laser shows.

Then a book I was reading, Pillars of the Earth, told the story about an architect and his first encounter with stained glass windows as they were just coming into fashion. The character told at how amazed he was at the color and the light streaming in to the cathedral like nothing he had ever seen before. Today the simplest of churches seem incomplete unless they have some sort of colored glass in their windows.

Things get even more basic than that. Reading for leisure is a relatively (considering the total history of man) recent phenomena. And at some point reading silently was a new fad. If I remember my history correctly it was Saint Ambrose who taught St. Augustine this novel way of reading. Could you imagine what a modern library would be like today if everyone read aloud? Oh wait. Yes we can. It’s called cell phones going off.

There is a certain danger in getting too used to things of the earth and to be in the constant practice of setting them aside for the newer and (usually) better. Not that we cannot come to appreciate the new, but we should also remember that the new was built on the shoulders of the old; that the simplest of things were once marvelous, new, innovative achievements without which we would not have magic phones that can give us movie reviews, tell us where it is playing, buy our ticket, tell us how to get there, and enable us to call friends to meet us there.

Goethe said, “He who cannot live on 3,000 years of history is living hand to mouth.” It is only when we can look back and marvel that we can come to fully appreciate the Resurrection. A good historian knows how the world changed through the invention of the stirrup, which was not an original part of a saddle. We too must contemplate what it meant to be looking forward to a coming Messiah, to not have assurances of life after death, to not have God fully revealed to us through His Word. It is only then that we can fully and most joyfully celebrate this modern Easter Season.