17 April 2010

The Shape of Eastertide

In the book which everyone is reading, Bishop Andrew Burnham's Heaven and Earth in Little Space, Monsignore writes:
In any reconsideratiion of the hermeneutic of reform, the post-conciliar refashioning of the liturgical calendar and year, and particularly of the Easter cycle, will inevitably figure. ... there are ... costs in limiting Eastertide to fifty days: the destabilization of Ascension Day, the loss of the Rogation Days, the loss of the Pentecost Octave, the loss of the Pentecost ember days, and some diminishment of Trinity Sunday ... the short season of rogation usually falls early enough in the year to counterpoint with harvest - Rogation asking for a blessing on the cropsand fields and harvest a time to give thanks. Nor is Rogation irrelevant to urban communities: here is a timely reminderfor the needy to pray and to pray for the needy. What is perhaps most concerning is the moving of Ascension Day. There may be communities for which Ascension is feasible only on the Sunday but, in the movability, there is a hint too of some of the reductionist theology of a generation ago ... Moving Ascension to Sunday creates a further problem ... to lose the nine days between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost ... is to obscure the first novena (Acts 1:14) ...

1 comment:

Doodler said...

Extending Easter beyond the 50 days of a "Week of Weeks" would give more time for Easter eggs!