I wish all my readers a happy Easter full of the joy and hope that comes from the risen Lord. Should any of us have the slightest doubt, let us remember that there is no otherwise explicable way an image could be printed on the Turin Shroud. I leave you with a little definition given by the great Benedictine monk Dom Odo Casel of the Abbey of Maria Laach.
The pasch is a sacrifice with the consecration of the person that flows from it; it is the sacrifice of the God-man in death on the cross, and his resurrection to glory: it is the Church’s sacrifice in communion with and by the power of the crucified God-man, and the wonderful joining to God, the divinization which is its effect.
Both of these sacrifices flow together; they are fundamentally one; the Church, as the woman of the new paradise and the bride of Christ, acts and offers in his strength. Christ living in time made his sacrifice alone on the cross; Christ raised up by the Spirit makes the sacrifice together with his Church which he has purified with the blood from his own side, and thus won her for himself.
Because of the inmost oneness of being, and the realm of action following upon it, which grows up between bride and bridegroom, between head and body, it follows that the Church must take a share in Christ’s sacrifice, in a feminine, receptive way, yet one which is no less active for that. She stands beneath the cross, sacrifices her bridegroom, and with him, herself. But she does so not merely in faith or in some mental act, but rather in a real and concrete fashion, in mystery; she fulfils the ‘likening’ of that sacrifice through which the Lord offered himself in the presence of earth and heaven, in utter openness, in the total giving of his body, to the Father. Here again we meet the essential meaning of the mystery of worship.
The Blue Flower 
Thank you – and a Blessed Easter (as the Dutch – or some of them – still say: “Zalig Paas!”) to you and yours!
I have been happily wishing people a “Happy St. George’s” all day long (and Shakespeare’s (probable) Birthday), and only now see Fr. John Hunwicke’s interesting post (with interesting comments), “S George??”
May I lazily ask (lazily, in not first checking if your welcome online resources have the answer for easy finding), how Sarum did (and does!) that? Has today been Sarum St. George’s, or must one wait?
Conditional Greetings of the Feast (in case it endures yet an hour in our time zone)!
P.S.: Thinking of Shakespeare and St. George brought me to looking up the Agincourt Carol, whereupon Wikipedia happily introduced to a new work and composer (sadly slain young):
I’ll have a look at Fr Hunwicke’s post, which I haven’t yet read.
For the feast of St George, Dr William Renwick gives it as a [Lesser] Double Feast with Rulers of the Choir, iii. lessons. The Easter Octave, especially Easter Tuesday (like Easter Monday), is absolute. Therefore, St George is deferred to 9th May.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating St George in a non-liturgical way. Boys’ Brigade blowing bugles around the church hall and all that, what, what!
Thank you! I suppose the first three Bach cantatas in the Christmas Oratorio are a Lutheran continuation of something like the same thing, where Christmas is concerned. (The Dutch still generally talk about Easter Monday as ‘Second Easter Day’ and St. Stephen’s as ‘Second Christmas Day’…)
In Sarum, like in the pre-novus ordo Roman rite, and also in the novus ordo, Easter Monday and Tuesday, and Pentecost Monday and Tuesday have the same solemnity as the feast. The novus ordo doesn’t have a Pentecost octave. The other days of the Easter and Pentecost octaves have a lower degree of solemnity. The octave days of the two feasts are the following Saturday, the last days on which the proper Communicantes and Hanc igitur are used.
Again, thank you! I had some sense of Octaves (and, if I may say so, their glory), but not of these traditional distinctions within them!
There is the pure octave and the Pythagorean octave (the difference being the Comma which is the “devil” in tuning, pure fourths and pure fifths…. Just joking! 😀 My brother priest in England, Fr Jonathan Munn, is a mathematician and has studied the allegorical meaning of numbers. Likewise, Boethius saw music in mathematical and philosophical terms. Here is a reconstruction of Boethius’ music:
In all the other liturgical octaves, as a general rule, the days of the octave are only commemorated when there is a feast of 9 lessons.
Thank you! That little documentary is fascinating! I should go trying to listen to what reconstructed meters of Boethius I can find online…