We’re here in Detroit for the weekend, taking advantage of the School of Dentistry’s services and seeing friends. It brings us back to two homes, Manresa and UDM. And as I asked you to do in "Yoooo Hoooo" on April 8th, I’ve been watching for appearances. And Fr. Greg’s smiling right through our not knowing what the heck Christos Aneste meant was the first thing that caught me. “This is Friday in the Octave of Easter,” he said, Catholicspeak for the eight days (octopus, eight arms, eight games to win the Stanley Cup in the old days) of celebrating the greatest party of the year, because The Big J beat death. “It’s a week of Sundays,” he said. In the Greek Orthodox Church the faithful greet each other during this week-long party not with whatever “Howdy” is in Greek, but Christos Aneste! (Christ is Risen) and the response is not the customary “Howdy yourself, Bub,” but Alethos Aneste! (He is risen indeed.)
A week of Sundays. I smiled. Retired for almost a year now, I still think I need to squeeze every minute of “free” time because Monday must be right around the corner; Monday, when I need to, you know, work. So Sundays were kind of the antithesis of work – no work allowed, bigger dinner than usual, maybe some friends over. Retired now, I have a year of Sundays, but somehow it’s like eating chocolate for lunch every day; it loses its specialness. So the “week of Sundays” started to lose its grip on me, even as Fr. Greg’s smile held right on.
Octave of…. Now that grabbed me, and kept holding on. Kathy is the queen of celebration of birthdays. She starts smiling funny at me a week before mine every year, and doing the same with the kids and grandkids. The table is set a week in advance of every gathering, and stays that way all week. By now I’ve come to understand and almost appreciate the custom, and certainly to appreciate her generosity of spirit. So if on December 15th she starts searching my face intently, I’ll remember, and say, "Oh, yeah; it’s Sunday in the Octave of my birthday!" And she’ll smile really big, gleefully joining me in my (feigned) anticipation. She has so much innocent goodness that my sarcasm bounces right off and hits me in the heart, and each year my resistance is worn down a bit more by my delight in her.
So I’m sitting there looking at Fr. Greg’s smiling face, and looking over at Kathy’s smiling face, and thinking about how I have a way to go to get into their spirit, their joy in how really cool this is, this Easter thing, like my life, something to really celebrate.
A week of Sundays: working folks, consider that. Eight days of celebrating your birthday: try that if the first doesn’t take. What are we missing in this Octave of Easter thing? Why’s that?
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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