Easter Fades Away.

The Flower Ladies hard at work.

The Paschal candle and the Sacrament House.

Flower arrangements in the old pulpit.

Our Lady and lillies.

After all the excitement of Holy Week, then my week in Wakefield afterwards, followed by the week in Krakow, Easter seems a long way away. There are still plenty of Easter flowers in the Church though, but they are a shadow of what we had on the day itself. These too will become less and less as time goes on although we always have excellent and abundent flowers at St Hildas except in Lent and Advent, which makes their appearance at Easter and Christmas all the more joyful. The time for the Annual General Meeting is drawing upon us, indeed I spent much of last night helping to write the Annual Report and trying not to slip into the Byzantine English that so often overtakes such documents with a sense of their own importance. The Easter Garden will have to come down soon I suppose, indeed may well come down this Sunday after Mass. There are only two more White High Masses before Ascension Sunday (under the new and not entirely welcome dispensation) comes in a riot of gold and reliquaries, rapidly followed by Pentecost Sunday when I have to try and find twelve tall candles for the Altar, then Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi again on a Sunday under the new order. This glut of feasts, each to be marked with a different character and decoration lest they all meld into one, is then followed by Ordinary Time again and the return of green vestments and the realisation that we still lack an adequate green High Mass set. But for the time being, we are still in Eastertide, we still have the Paschal Candle in the sanctuary which is still lit for daily and Sunday Mass as a reminder of what has happened and the joyful round of Parish life still goes by, with the occasional blip, but that is what makes us human, is it not?

O Jesus, King,
receive my supplication,
And consider my supplication,
As a pledge to You.
For you, O living King,
Have gone forth and gone up,
Out of Hell, as Conqueror.
Woe to those who have rejected you;
For, to evil spirits and demons,
You are sorrow, to Satan and to Death,
You are pain,
To Sin and Hell,
You are mourning.
Yet, joy has come today,
For those who are born anew.
At this great season therefore,
We give great glory to You,
Who died and is now alive,
That to all you may give
Life and resurrection!