When is a Friday not a Friday? →

We had pasties for dinner tonight. For those unfamiliar with this gourmet treat from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a pasty is a mixture of chopped or ground beef, potatoes, onions, and (in its original form) rutabagas, baked inside a flaky half-moon crust. Pasties have their origin in Cornwall, England, which is why they are sometimes referred to as Cornish pasties, and they came to the U.P. along with Cornish miners during the copper rush of the 1840’s.

The best pasties, though, are made (in my humble opinion) by the descendants of Finnish miners, and the recipe Amy uses is from Lehto’s, a little pasty stand seven miles outside of St. Ignace, just across the Mackinac Bridge on the eastern end of da U.P.

By now you’re probably wondering what my point could possibly be.

Christ is risen! →

I rarely disagreed with the Catholic historian John Lukacs, my mentor and friend for a quarter of a century until his death during the Easter season a year ago. One thing we never saw eye to eye on, though, was the celebration of Easter in the Eastern Church. John preferred the reverence and beauty of the Easter liturgies of the West, which I love as well. But at Easter celebrations in Byzantine churches, I have also quite happily been swept away in what John called the orgiastic shouts of “Christ is risen! Indeed he is risen!”

‘Help my unbelief’ →

In the traditional Lectionary, there is no three-year A-B-C cycle, and those who attend the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite or any of the Eastern Rites hear the same readings in the same order every Lent, just as their forebears did from the fourth century on. That builds among the faithful a comforting familiarity with those readings, and I came, in our 20-plus years at an Extraordinary Form oratory, to look forward to particular selections, which always seemed to arrive at just the point in Lent when I needed them most.

Christ in our midst →

At the Easter Vigil, after weeks of Lenten Masses without the Gloria, the priest intones the opening words: “Gloria in excelsis Deo.” Then, as the choir and the rest of the congregation join in, every bell in the church is rung, and, if the church has a bell tower, those bells are tolled, too. The return of the Gloria is a glorious thing (no pun intended), and the ringing of the bells invites all who can hear them, both inside and outside the Church (in both senses of both words), to join in the joy of Christ’s resurrection.

About two weeks ago, I wrote that “In times like these — but not only in times like these — we need more bells in our lives,” to remind us both of our mortality (“It tolls for thee”) but also of our hope in the Resurrection.