Alleluia! Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Hello to you, whoever you be.

I've been practically dancing with joy since the vigil. Christ is risen! I have missed saying "Alleluia!" Great Lent was not a chore for me this year, it was not dismal, but it was a definite change. The joy was put into a closet for a while, and I had not realized how much I missed it until the Vigil. I am appreciating the wisdom of traditional Christian practices more and more each year. One can never forget the Resurrection, of course, not even during Holy Week. But to put it in abeyance, to wait for it, to focus on other things for a time, makes the joy all the greater. Christ is risen! Yee-hah! The Lord is risen indeed! Yippee skippee!

All day Holy Saturday, as I was practicing the chants for the vigil, I kept encountering "the A word." Normally, when it crops up in practicing I substitute "ah-ah-ah-ah" for it. (We take the not saying of Alleluia during Lent very seriously.) But yesterday I could hardly contain myself. I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve with the tree surrounded by presents. For-me presents! I wanted to shout out that word so loudly. At the vigil, I did. I shouted.

We had two baptisms, boys seven and nine years old. The seven year old was asleep for almost the entire service. He practically had to be propped up to be baptized. And he didn't get his first communion, since he was un-wakable. I suppose I could have pried his mouth open and shoved the Sacred Body of our Lord down his throat, and we could have poured the Life-giving Blood down his gullet via a funnel, but that seemed to lack a certain something. Oh well, next Sunday he will receive communion and the bells will ring as he does so and it will be a little touch of glory all over again. (When the newly baptized receive communion for the first time, the sanctus bells trill just as they do during the Epiclesis. The Holy Spirit is entering the person in a particular way for the first time.)

That's it for now.

Alleluia!

Christ is risen!

-- Fr. Sean