Fifty days of Easter
In his Monterey days of the 1930’s, John Steinbeck and his friends met often, and often the meetings turned into “parties.” They lasted all the night, and sometimes through the next day, some of them. One fabled time, the party went on for four days, just because no one wanted to stop.
While their stamina was impressive, they clearly had nothing on the Christians, of that time, or of any time, in their celebration of Easter. The 50 Days from the Sunday of the Resurrection to the Sunday of Pentecost are celebrated in joy as one great feast day. They are a single Great Sunday, St. Athanasius called them. These are the days when we slow ones learn to say “Yes” to the Resurrection.
The trouble is that few of us can say “yes” to anything for very long. We find it hard to think of 50 days of anything. They would strike most people as “mad” (even Steinbeck and his friends, I’d imagine).
Most would cast a skeptical eye on such a thing, for our feasts and holidays tend to be mindless things, as a writer for the Liturgy Training Publications once put it. Party-time is an invitation to obliterate our consciousness, to get wasted, to veg out, to forget.
But the season of the Christian celebration is just the opposite. It is meant to be a time of intensified consciousness. It is meant to be a time of finely tuned awareness. It is meant to be a time of awakened memory.
The Great Fifty Days leading up to Pentecost are not an unrealistic call to “party-on.” They are an invitation to explore more deeply the “weather of the heart.” They are a time to awaken our memory to God’s presence and power in our lives. They are a moment to say “Yes” in a culture that wants to keep on saying “No.”