Book Review: "The Fourth Cup" by Scott Hahn

On Holy Thursday and Good Friday last week I read Scott Hahn's The Fourth Cup: Unveiling the Mystery of the Last Supper and the Cross. I received this book in 2018 but had not read it until now. Scott Hahn combines his conversion story--familiar to some readers from his best-selling book written with his wife Kimberly Rome Sweet Home--with his scriptural and theological investigations of the meaning of the words Jesus spoke on the Cross before He died (quoted in St. John's Gospel) "It Is Finished." In the introduction Hahn mentions that he has presented his talk on "The Fourth Cup" many times and this book represents a fuller telling of the background to that presentation.

As he notes the question he sought to answer is "What" Is Finished? What is "It"? He was a Protestant when he first considered the question and as he studied it studied Jewish and early Christian sources it influenced his decisions as a pastor and professor. Those decisions led him and those attending his church and his classes to say that he was beginning to sound too much like a Catholic. In this book (I read Rome Sweet Home years ago and can't remember if he mentions this particular issue of his reading and research before his conversion) Hahn reveals that this effort to answer the question What is "It"? led him to study the teachings of the Catholic Church and to an even more momentous decision: to become a Catholic.

I do recall that he highlights the experience of attending Mass in the church at Marquette University and the great impact of that experience in Rome Sweet Home--and he includes that story in this book too.

Each chapter is divided into sections with punning headings: Hallel Can You Go?; Pasch, Presence, and Future; Sealed with a Curse; Seder Rite Words; Justin Case, etc. Those puns and word play shouldn't make the reader think that Hahn is not dealing with these questions of ritual, sacrifice, and salvation with appropriate depth and reflection. 

As I attended the Holy Triduum, especially as the Gospel of John was proclaimed on Good Friday, echoes of Hahn's book were in my ears.

Highly recommended. He succeeds in presenting his research and conclusions dramatically as they occurred in his own life and theologically in their meaning and impact on how we worship in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Quasimodo Sunday and Notre Dame de Paris

In the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite, this Sunday, the Sunday that ends the Easter Octave, is called either Low Sunday or Dominica in Albis, referring to the neophytes who had been baptized at the Easter Vigil putting aside their white baptismal garments and becoming part of their congregations. It has also been called Quasimodo Sunday because of this Sunday's Introit, whether Ordinary or Extraordinary Form:

Quasimodo geniti infantes, alleluia: rationabiles, sine dolo lac concupiscite, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk, that in him you may grow to salvation, alleluia.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia explains this traditional nomenclature:

The origin of the name is uncertain, but it is apparently intended to indicate the contrast between it and the great Easter festival immediately preceding, and also, perhaps, to signify that, being the Octave Day of Easter, it was considered part of that feast, though in a lower degree. Its liturgical name is Dominica in albis depositis, derived from the fact that on it the neophytes, who had been baptized on Easter Eve, then for the first time laid aside their white baptismal robes. St. Augustine mentions this custom in a sermon for the day, and it is also alluded to in the Eastertide Vesper hymn, "Ad regias Agni dapes" (or, in its older form, "Ad cœnam Agni providi"), written by an ancient imitator of St. Ambrose. [An English adaptation is "At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing"] Low Sunday is also called by some liturgical writers Pascha clausum, signifying the close of the Easter Octave, and "Quasimodo Sunday". . .

In the Ordinary Form it is called Divine Mercy Sunday or the Second Sunday of Easter. 

But to continue with the theme of Quasimodo Sunday: that's how the fictional "Hunchback of Notre Dame" gets his name. Because Claude Frollo, the Archdeacon of Notre Dame found the hunchbacked, deformed baby on the Second Sunday of Easter he named him after the introit's first word. As this website explains the word Quasimodo, we can see the sad joke Frollo was playing on the poor baby as he is "almost" "the standard of measure":

The word quasimodo is a compound of two Latin words (split in the Missale Romanum), quasi and modo, meaning “almost” and “the standard of measure.” Thus, the combination means “almost the standard of measure,” which in the new translation is reduced to “like.”

The quotation takes its cue from 1 Peter 2:2, which in the RSV reads, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation.” (Incidentally, the Latin in the Vulgate reads, “Sicut modo geniti infantes, rationale sine dolo lac concupiscite, ut in eo crescatis in salutem.”)

In her current state, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is "almost the standard of measure" of herself: she is standing, but she is deformed and damaged by the fire. She cannot be used for her true purpose of the worship of God the Father through the Sacrifice and Sacrament of the Mass, for prayer and devotion, for Baptisms, Confessions, and Weddings, etc. Her parishioners, those who go there every Sunday and throughout the week, have to go to other churches for Mass (although not technically a parish she serves as one for those in the neighborhood). As we continue to celebrate Easter and the new life Jesus brought us through the forgiveness of sins, I am sure that Notre Dame de Paris will someday be like herself again if we remember and protect what she is supposed to be: a church, not a monument, an Altar and a Tabernacle, not a tourist destination.

Christ is Risen! Truly, He Risen! 

Happy Easter to all Orthodox Christians! Alleluia! Alleluia!

"A Relic of Papistry?" The Simnel Cake

History Today shares this post about the history of the Simnel Cake, a lighter fruit cake enjoyed either on Laetare Sunday as a break from the Lenten fast or at Easter. Alexander Lee cites the tradition as described by Elizabeth Gaskell, novelist and biographer of Charlotte Bronte, as she grew up in Cheshire after her mother's death:

Writing to her friend, the poet Mary Howitt, on 18 August 1838, she recalled with delight the local festivals she had enjoyed as a girl. There was ‘Lifting Monday’ and ‘Lifting Tuesday’, when the village girls would burst into houses and lift the menfolk into the air until they were given a gift. Then there were the May Day celebrations, when the streets were decorated with coloured sand and branches were hung above everyone’s doors. But by far the tastiest time of year was mid-Lent Sunday – also known as Laetare or Mothering Sunday. For then, Elizabeth explained:

Instead of frumenty [a sort of sweet porridge], we eat Simnel cake: a cake made variously, but always with saffron for its principal ingredient. This I should fancy was a relic of Papistry, but I wonder how it originated. Lambert Simnel, the imposter in Henry the Seventh’s time was a baker’s son, I think. The show windows are filled with them, [and] high and low eat them.

Since Gaskell’s day, simnel cake has changed a great deal. Now eaten at Easter, rather than in the middle of Lent, it tastes – and looks – quite different from how it did in the early 19th century. Although it is still a light, rich fruit cake, packed with raisins, sultanas and lemon zest, saffron is now rarely used. Two layers of marzipan or almond paste – unknown to the Georgian recipe – are also added, one in the middle and one on top; and 11 marzipan balls – said to represent the 11 faithful apostles – are generally used for decoration. The method is different, too. Whereas it was once boiled, then baked, it is today baked and then grilled.

Lee explains the supposed Tudor connection:

For some time, simnel remained an ambiguous word. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it continued to be used primarily to describe a type of flour – or occasionally as a metonym for baking generally. Lambert Simnel, the Tudor pretender who briefly threatened the rule of Henry VII in 1487, was, as Gaskell noted, probably the son of a baker who owed his name to the flour that was his father’s stock in trade. But at the same time, simnel could also be used to refer to any sort of bread or cake made with the flour. When Myles Coverdale produced his English translation of the Bible in 1535, he rendered Ezekiel 16:19 – which in the Vulgate reads Et panem meum quem dedi tibi, similam, et oleum, et mel (‘And my bread, which I gave to you, the flour and oil and honey’) – as: ‘Thou didst eate nothinge but symnels, honney and oyle’; but when Thomas Cogan’s The Hauen of Health (1584) was published five decades later, it included a reference to ‘Cakes of all forms, Simnels, Cracknels, Bunnes … and other things made of wheate flour’.

Please read the rest there. Modern recipes: Mary Berry, Nigela Lawson, and the BBC.

Lambert Simnel was the pretender who survived during Henry VII's reign. He was pardoned, employed by the king in his kitchen and as a falconer, married, and died between 1525 and 1535. He may have been the father of Richard Simnel, an Augustianian canon at St. Osgth's Priory in Essex, suppressed in 1539.

All Together Now: Holy Week In East and West

All Christians--East and West--are celebrating Holy Week and Easter at the same time this year! There are some differences, of course, as this Antiochian Orthodox website explains, including exactly when Lent ends:

Great Lent and Holy Week are two separate fasts, and two separate celebrations. Great Lent ends on Friday of the fifth week (the day before Lazarus Saturday). Holy Week begins immediately thereafter. Let's explore the meaning of each of the solemn days of Passion Week.

Lazarus Saturday: Lazarus Saturday is the day which begins Holy Week. It commemorates the raising of our Lord's friend Lazarus, who had been in the tomb four days. This act confirmed the universal resurrection from the dead that all of us will experience at our Lord's Second Coming. This miracle led many to faith, but it also led to the chief priest's and Pharisees' decision to kill Jesus (John 11:47-57).

Palm Sunday (The Entrance of our Lord into Jerusalem): Our Lord enters Jerusalem and is proclaimed king - but in an earthly sense, as many people of His time were seeking a political Messiah. Our Lord is King, of course, but of a different type - the eternal King prophesied by Zechariah the Prophet. We use palms on this day to show that we too accept Jesus as the true King and Messiah of the Jews, Who we are willing to follow - even to the cross.

Holy Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: The first thing that must be said about these services, and most of the other services of Holy Week, is that they are "sung" in anticipation. Each service is rotated ahead twelve hours. The evening service, therefore, is actually the service of the next morning, while the morning services of Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday are actually the services of the coming evening. . . .

Please read the rest there. Here is the schedule for services at St. George's Orthodox Christian Cathedral this week.

In honor of the occasion, I'm listening to Maximilian Steinberg's Passion Week!

Now: The Epiphany Season Begins!

The verse for this Parochial and Plain sermon is, "This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth His glory; and His disciples believed on Him." John 2:11.

THE Epiphany is a season especially set apart for adoring the glory of Christ. The word may be taken to mean the manifestation of His glory, and leads us to the contemplation of Him as a King upon His throne in the midst of His court, with His servants around Him, and His guards in attendance. At Christmas we commemorate His grace; and in Lent His temptation; and on Good Friday His sufferings and death; and on Easter Day His victory; and on Holy Thursday His return to the Father; and in Advent we anticipate His second coming. And in all of these seasons He does something, or suffers something: but in the Epiphany and the weeks after it, we celebrate Him, not as on His field of battle, or in His solitary retreat, but as an august and glorious King; we view Him as the Object of our worship. Then only, during His whole earthly history, did He fulfil the type of Solomon, and held (as I may say) a court, and received the homage of His subjects; viz. when He was an infant. His throne was His undefiled Mother's arms; His chamber of state was a cottage or a cave; the worshippers were the wise men of the East, and they brought presents, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. All around and about Him seemed of earth, except to the eye of faith; one note alone had He of Divinity. As great men of this world are often plainly dressed, and look like other men, all but as having some one costly ornament on their breast or on their brow; so the Son of Mary in His lowly dwelling, and in an infant's form, was declared to be the Son of God Most High, the Father of Ages, and the Prince of Peace, by His star; a wonderful appearance which had guided the wise men all the way from the East, even unto Bethlehem.

This being the character of this Sacred Season, our services throughout it, as far as they are proper to it, are full of the image of a king in his royal court, of a sovereign surrounded by subjects, of a glorious prince upon a throne. There is no thought of war, or of strife, or of suffering, or of triumph, or of vengeance connected with the Epiphany, but of august majesty, of power, of prosperity, of splendour, of serenity, of benignity. Now, if at any time, it is fit to say, "The Lord is in His holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before Him." [Hab. ii. 20.] "The Lord sitteth above the waterflood, and the Lord remaineth a king for ever." "The Lord of Hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." "O come, let us worship, and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker." "O magnify the Lord our God, and fall down before His footstool, for He is Holy." "O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; bring presents, and come into His courts."

Read the rest here.

After the Gospel is sung at Mass, the date of Easter and other movable feasts is announced:

Know, dear brethren (brothers and sisters),
that, as we have rejoiced at the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ,
so by leave of God's mercy
we announce to you also the joy of his Resurrection,
who is our Savior.

On the first day of March will fall Ash Wednesday,
and the beginning of the fast of the most sacred Lenten season.

On the sixteenth day of April you will celebrate with joy Easter Day,
the Paschal feast of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[In those places where the Ascension is observed on Thursday:
On the twenty-fifth day of May will be the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.]

[In those places where the Ascension is transferred to the Seventh Sunday of Easter:
On the twenty-eighth day of May will be the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ.]

On the fourth day of June, the feast of Pentecost.

On the eighteenth day of June the feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.

On the third day of December, the First Sunday of the Advent of our Lord Jesus Christ,
to whom is honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Blessed John Henry Newman on Easter

From Parochial and Plain Sermon "Christ, a Quickening Spirit":

O blessed day of the Resurrection, which of old time was called the Queen of Festivals, and raised among Christians an anxious, nay contentious diligence duly to honour it! Blessed day, once only passed in sorrow, when the Lord actually rose, and the disciples believed not; but ever since a day of joy to the faith and love of the Church! In ancient times, Christians all over the world began it with a morning salutation. Each man said to his neighbour, "Christ is risen;" and his neighbour answered him, "Christ is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon." Even to Simon, the coward disciple who denied Him thrice, Christ is risen; even to us, who long ago vowed to obey Him, and have yet so often denied Him before men, so often taken part with sin, and followed the world, when Christ called us another way. "Christ is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon!" to Simon Peter the favoured Apostle, on whom the Church is built, Christ has appeared. He has appeared to His Holy Church first of all, and in the Church He dispenses blessings, such as the world knows not of. Blessed are they if they knew their blessedness, who are allowed, as we are, week after week, and Festival after Festival, to seek and find in that Holy Church the Saviour of their souls! Blessed are they beyond language or thought, to whom it is vouchsafed to receive those tokens of His love, which cannot otherwise be gained by man, the pledges and means of His special presence, in the Sacrament of His Supper; who are allowed to eat and drink the food of immortality, and receive life from the bleeding side of the Son of God!

Happy Easter!

The Miracle of Miracles in Holy Week

I love being Catholic every Passiontide and Holy Week. Our Church has a series of rituals and special hymns to accompany us on the journey from Passion Sunday through Palm Sunday and the Triduum to Easter Sunday:

~Veiling the statues
~Receiving and blessing palms
~Processing with palms
~Washing the feet of 12 men
~Stripping the Altars
~Processing with the Eucharist
~Reposing the Eucharist
~Adoration at the Altar of Repose
~The empty, silent church on Good Friday, without His Presence
~The open Tabernacle doors
~Reading the Passion
~Venerating the Cross
~Lighting the Easter Fire
~Marking and Lighting the Easter Candle
~The Exsultet
~The bells ringing when the Gloria is sung at the Easter Vigil
~The Elect receiving the Sacraments of Initiation
~Candidates receiving Confirmation and First Holy Communion
~The renewal of Baptismal promises

These are the Roman Rite rituals that I'm familiar with; I know that many of these rituals are observed in other Christian communities, but they are fundamentally Catholic rituals, and they remind me how blessed I am to be a Catholic.

Robert Royal writes in a different way about the blessings--the miracle--of being Catholic in his reflection on the greatest miracle of all, that in spite of all that Catholics and outsiders do to Jesus's Church, it endures:

Ezra Pound once felt the need to observe: “Any institution that could survive the picturesqueness of the Borgias has a certain native resiliency.” But it’s not only the Borgias. The number of things that we clearly see the Church has survived is quite impressive, indeed unprecedented compared with any other human institution: The death of Jesus. The betrayal of all the apostles (not just Judas). The martyrdom of all the apostles (except for John). Early heresies (so many they would require a separate list). Persecution and martyrdom by the Roman Empire. Acceptance by the Roman Empire. Collapse of the Roman Empire. Barbarian invasions. Saracen invasions (Old St. Peter’s itself sacked in 846). Conflicts with medieval (Christian) kings and emperors. Medieval heresies (Albigenses, Franciscan Spirituals, etc.). The Fall of Byzantium. Renaissance corruption. The Reformation (Rome sacked again in 1527 by the Lutheran troops of Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V). The wars of religion. Late assaults by the Turks. Baroque corruptions. Pascal’s Jesuits. Kings claiming divine rights. Revolutions claiming absolute power. Napoleon. Freemasonry. Liberalism. Socialism. Nazism. Communism. Darwinism. Limp modern liturgies. Priestly sexual abuse. “Women religious” who believe in the Goddess or the cosmic process or whatever, and are proud of it.

This is just a partial list, which would at a minimum also need to recognize the constant presence of bad bishops and priests, and an ever-fickle laity. Under such circumstances – and given the tendency of all things to decay over time, it’s a miracle – perhaps, in a way, the greatest miracle of Christianity, that the Catholic Thing has survived, as Aquinas suggested. If we believe that Jesus is the God who created the universe, his rising from the dead was mere child’s play. Keeping together billions of fallen human beings, whom God has taken the risk of endowing with the freedom to choose their own ways, in a real historical Communion via the fragile earthen vessel we call the Church, may very well require even more divine powers. 

Also, every Holy Week when I experience these rituals, I think how horrible it would be to lose these outward representations--some are sacramentals and some are Sacraments--of the great Paschal Mystery. The Catholic people of England lost these rituals, and many others in the Sarum Use, in the sixteenth century. They were taken away in the name of preventing superstition but these rituals were not superstitious; the Church had developed these rituals to remind people of all that Jesus had done for His people, the Church. 

The rituals of Holy Week were taken away because the reformers did not trust the unity between Jesus and His Church; the reformers were complicating the matter in a way that St. Joan of Arc had warned against: "About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they are just one thing and we shouldn't complicate the matter." Because the English reformers complicated the matter, the Catholic people of England ended up with palmless Palm Sundays, candleless Candlemases and ashless Ash Wednesdays not to mention Shrovetide without Confession and Communion without the Real Presence. So within a couple of generations, they weren't the Catholic people of England anymore and yet a few endured, suffered, survived and revived three centuries later--which is another miracle indeed.

Of course anything good can be abused; even replacing rituals with a non-ritual can be abused and even reading the Bible could be abused superstitiously. Our Christian faith is an incarnational religion that unites the human and Divine in the great mystery and miracle of Jesus and His Church, His Bride for whom He lived and died and rose and lives always. The Catholic Church, messy and sinful as we certainly are with people like me among us, displays that mystery most miraculously every Passiontide, Holy Week, and Triduum.

Both pictures provided and copyright by Mark U. Mann (c) 2013-2015; used by permission. (Holy Week afternoon at Blessed Sacrament; Easter Sunday at St. Anthony of Padua.)

Peter Paul Rubens and the "Counter-Reformation"

The Wall Street Journal reviews this new book on the Catholic art Peter Paul Rubens created in Flanders as part of the Catholic Church's famous effort to revive religious art in the service of reviving religious devotion and doctrine. The cover of the book is well chosen, as it presents an obviously Catholic and Marian interpretation of St. John's vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun, fleeing the dragon that threatens to devour her and her baby, Jesus Christ (Mary, the Mother of God!). But according the WSJ reviewer, the author of The Catholic Rubens begins with Ruben's famous Deposition from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral, because Sauerländer wants to emphasize Rubens' work in situ, not in a museum:

Today most of the significant altar paintings by Rubens (1577-1640) have been transplanted to art museums. There, scholars have concentrated on their formal qualities and more overt religious subjects. Often overlooked are the additional meanings tied to the pictures' original ecclesiastical settings.

This lacuna has now been brilliantly filled by Willibald Sauerländer in "The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs." An esteemed historian of medieval Christian art, Mr. Sauerländer follows the ways in which Rubens's pictorial inventions accorded with the doctrinal changes set in motion by the Council of Trent (1545–63). 

"The Catholic Rubens" begins with the artist's most famous altarpiece, "The Deposition" (1611-14), still at the Antwerp Cathedral. Since it serves as a model for understanding Rubens's religious genius, it is considered at length. . . .

In keeping with ecclesiastical tradition, the center panel offers a major episode from the Passion, the crucified Christ's lifeless body being taken down from the cross. Clearly working in concert with Rome's goal of the renewed veneration of holy persons, Rubens portrays differing figures beginning the process of carrying Jesus' body to the tomb. The Virgin Mary too is present, standing on the left. Rubens's innovations are seen here in the way he brings the scene toward the viewer and sets the body on a bold corner-to-corner diagonal, with the participants gathered around to receive it. 

"The Deposition" is only one of 20-some altarpieces of saints and martyrs discussed by Mr. Sauerländer in this amazing book. These include Rubens's church commissions for pictures about the Disciples, early Christians St. Paul and St. Stephen (the first martyr). His lingering caveat is that Rubens's narratives "belong to an order of terrestrial and celestial things that is deeply foreign . . . to us." To the secular world, perhaps, but the import of Rubens's "Deposition" is still familiar to many of the faithful.

 

I visited Antwerp Cathedral during a trip to Belgium when my husband went there for business. I went on a bus tour which included a stop at a diamond store! and then dropped us off at the Grand Place. Great as the Deposition is, I was most inspired by the Resurrection of Christ, with Our Lord striding forth from the tomb, with the soldiers huddling in darkness while He is radiant!

 

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! Happy Third Sunday of Easter!

 

More about the book here--and remember that this Catholic Rubens was one of Charles I's favorite painters!

English Martyrs on April 20

From 2012, here is a compilation of posts on English martyrs from the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I--the Nun of Kent and her companions might not be considered martyrs for Jesus Christ and his Church, but they certainly were victims of Henry VIII's break from the Catholic Church.

On April 20, 1534, Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent, was executed at Tyburn, London, along with monks and priests named as her co-conspirators.

On April 20, 1584, Father James Bell and layman John Finch were martyred in Lancaster. Pope Pius XI beatified them in 1929.

On April 20, 1586, two priests captured in the house of Roger Line, the husband of St. Anne Line, were hung, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn: Blessed Richard Sargent and Blessed William Thomson--both beatified by Blessed John Paul II. Roger Line and William Heigham, Anne Line's brother, would both be exiled as they were taken in the arrest of the two priests.

On April 20, 1602, three more priests were executed at Tyburn--and among them another with connection to St. Anne Line--Blesseds Thomas Tichborne, Robert Watkinson, and Francis Page. Father Francis Page was the priest who was beginning to say Mass for the Feast of the Purification (Candlesmas) when the safe house St. Anne Line was managing was raided. He escaped, and she suffered in his stead--that time.

While it at first seems strange to post about this series of executions and martyrdom on Easter Sunday, we should remember that the promise of resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come were not just notions the martyrs held. They believed in Faith and thus would suffer and die. As Chesterton and others have noted, no one would dare die for Jesus and His Church if they did not believe in the glories of Easter!

Happy Easter!

Alleluia!

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

Happy Octave of Easter! with John Mason Neale

Just like Christmas, Easter is not just a day--it is a season of the Church's Liturgical Year. There are forty days between Easter and the Ascension and ten more until Pentecost. Liturgically, each day in the Octave of Easter is Easter Sunday, and so the hymnology of the Easter Season warrants some posts. And just as I did last Christmas, I'll focus on John Mason Neale's hymns and translations. He translated this hymn from the Greek by Saint John of Damascus, the great defender of Icons:

The day of resurrection! Earth, tell it out abroad;
The Passover of gladness, the Passover of God.
From death to life eternal, from earth unto the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over, with hymns of victory.

Our hearts be pure from evil, that we may see aright
The Lord in rays eternal of resurrection light;
And listening to His accents, may hear, so calm and plain,
His own “All hail!” and, hearing, may raise the victor strain.

Now let the heavens be joyful! Let earth the song begin!
Let the round world keep triumph, and all that is therein!
Let all things seen and unseen their notes in gladness blend,
For Christ the Lord hath risen, our joy that hath no end.

Happy Easter

Christ is Risen!

Truly, He is Risen!

Or, in Charles Wesley's words:

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!

Love's redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!

Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!

Where's thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!

Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!

Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

Hail the Lord of earth and heaven, Alleluia!

Praise to thee by both be given, Alleluia!

Thee we greet triumphant now, Alleluia!

Hail the Resurrection, thou, Alleluia!

King of glory, soul of bliss, Alleluia!

Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!

Thee to know, thy power to prove, Alleluia!

Thus to sing, and thus to love, Alleluia!

Holy Week Break

I'm taking a break the rest of this week to observe Holy Week and the Triduum.

I'll be back during the Easter Octave!

God bless you all.

Another Easter Hymn from John Mason Neale

John Mason Neale also translated this hymn from St. John of Damascus, one the last of the Greek Fathers of the Church:

Come, ye faithful, raise the strain
of triumphant gladness!
God hath brought his Israel
into joy from sadness:
loosed from Pharoah's bitter yoke
Jacob's sons and daughters,
led them with unmoistened foot
through the Red Sea waters.

'Tis the spring of souls today:
Christ hath burst his prison,
and from three days' sleep in death
as a sun hath risen;
all the winter of our sins,
long and dark, is flying
from his light, to whom we give
laud and praise undying.

Now the queen of seasons, bright
with the day of splendor,
with the royal feast of feasts,
comes its joy to render;
comes to glad Jerusalem,
who with true affection
welcomes in unwearied strains
Jesus' resurrection.

Neither might the gates of death,
nor the tomb's dark portal,
nor the watchers, nor the seal
hold thee as a mortal:
but today amidst the twelve
thou didst stand, bestowing
that thy peace which evermore
passeth human knowing.

Alleluia now we cry
to our King Immortal,
who triumphant burst the bars
of the tomb's dark portal;
alleluia, with the Son
God the Father praising;
alleluia yet again
to the Spirit raising.

The Octave of Easter: Each Day a "Day of Resurrection"

Just like Christmas, Easter is not just a day--it is a season of the Church's Liturgical Year. There are forty days between Easter and the Ascension and ten more until Pentecost. Liturgically, each day in the Octave of Easter is Easter Sunday, and so the hymnology of the Easter Season warrants some posts. And just as I did last Christmas, I'll focus on John Mason Neale's hymns and translations. He translated this hymn from the Greek by Saint John of Damascus, the great defender of Icons:

The day of resurrection! Earth, tell it out abroad;
The Passover of gladness, the Passover of God.
From death to life eternal, from earth unto the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over, with hymns of victory.

Our hearts be pure from evil, that we may see aright
The Lord in rays eternal of resurrection light;
And listening to His accents, may hear, so calm and plain,
His own “All hail!” and, hearing, may raise the victor strain.

Now let the heavens be joyful! Let earth the song begin!
Let the round world keep triumph, and all that is therein!
Let all things seen and unseen their notes in gladness blend,
For Christ the Lord hath risen, our joy that hath no end.