Happy Easter

Easter is the principal feast of the ecclesiastical year. Leo I (Sermo xlvii in Exodum) calls it the greatest feast (festum festorum), and says that Christmas is celebrated only in preparation for Easter. It is the centre of the greater part of the ecclesiastical year. The order of Sundays from Septuagesima to the last Sunday after Pentecost, the feast of the Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi, and all other movable feasts, from that of the Prayer of Jesus in the Garden (Tuesday after Septuagesima) to the feast of the Sacred Heart (Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi), depend upon the Easter date. Commemorating the slaying of the true Lamb of God and the Resurrection of Christ, the corner-stone upon which faith is built, it is also the oldest feast of the Christian Church, as old as Christianity, the connecting link between the Old and New Testaments.

from: Catholic Encyclopedia

Holy Saturday

In the primitive Church Holy Saturday was known as Great, or Grand, Saturday, Holy Saturday, the Angelic Night, the Vigil of Easter, etc. It is no longer, like Maundy Thursday, a day of joy, but one of joy and sadness intermingled; it is the close of the season of Lent and penance, and the beginning of paschal time, which is one of rejoicing.

from : Catholic Encyclopedia

 

 

 

Good Friday

“Good Friday, called Feria VI in Parasceve in the Roman Missal, he hagia kai megale paraskeue (the Holy and Great Friday) in the Greek Liturgy, Holy Friday in Romance Languages, Charfreitag (Sorrowful Friday) in German, is the English designation of Friday in Holy Week — that is, the Friday on which the Church keeps the anniversary of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Parasceve, the Latin equivalent of paraskeue, preparation (i.e. the preparation that was made on the sixth day for the Sabbath; see Mark 15:42), came by metonymy to signify the day on which the preparation was made; but while the Greeks retained this use of the word as applied to every Friday, the Latins confined its application to one Friday. Irenaeus and Tertullian speak of Good Friday as the day of the Pasch; but later writers distinguish between the Pascha staurosimon (the passage to death), and the Pascha anastasimon (the passage to life, i.e. the Resurrection). At present the word Pasch is used exclusively in the latter sense. The two Paschs are the oldest feasts in the calendar.

From the earliest times the Christians kept every Friday as a feast day; and the obvious reasons for those usages explain why Easter is the Sunday par excellence, and why the Friday which marks the anniversary of Christ’s death came to be called the Great or the Holy or the Good Friday. The origin of the term Good is not clear. Some say it is from “God’s Friday” (Gottes Freitag); others maintain that it is from the German Gute Freitag, and not specially English. Sometimes, too, the day was called Long Friday by the Anglo-Saxons; so today in Denmark.”

excerpts from :Catholic Encyclopedia

photo:Ave Maria Church, Ave Maria, Florida (near Ft. Myers)

When you travel

“It is the fate of most voyagers, no sooner have they discovered what is most interesting in any locality, then they are hurried from it; but I ought, perhaps,  to be thankful that I obtained significant material to establish this most remarkable fact in the distribution of organic beings.” (The Voyage of the Beagle).

I finished reading The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin, read some sections of the Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man  for my eCourse, The Modern and the Postmodern. I did not realize how clear and fluid Darwin’s writings. I have read and enjoyed also the works of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Freud for my eCourse.

 Now I’m on Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, a required ( or rather optional) reading. 

For contemporary fiction I finished and enjoyed reading Alif, the Unseen, a mixture of cyberspace intrigue, glimpses of Islamic theology and mysticism and romance.

 

Invitation

photo: Bubble Room, J Winery, Healdsburg,CA 

Moment of insight

“The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.In a religious experience, for example, it is not a thing that imposes itself on man but a spiritual presence. What is retained in the soul is the moment of insight rather than the place where the act came to pass. A moment of insight is a fortune, transporting us beyond the confines of measured time. Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time.”

from: The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

the Sabbath

“There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”

 from: The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Stillness

“Stillness is more than silence and beyond solitude. Interior stillness is too deep for words. Unhampered by self-consciousness, our attention is focused entirely on God and His love.”

from: The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus by Brennan Manning

Expose yourself to art

photo: at Clos Pegase Winery, Napa Valley,CA

flamingo

To see a live flamingo is to understand elegance

Gravity is not just a limitation, but a potential partner in exploring the world.

 from: 

http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/nature/2013/03/see-live-flamingo-understand-elegance