© 2012 Mary van Balen
Originally published in the Catholic Times
We ended the Easter season with the wonderful feast of Pentecost, the outpouring of the Spirit that continues throughout all time. The entrance into Ordinary Time reminds me of Fourth of July’s fireworks finale. The impressionistic splattering of night sky with color, pattern, and smoke has ended and you begin to pick up your blanket or fold up your chairs when suddenly spheres of intense brightness light up smoke trails left in the sky and deep booms vibrate through to the bottoms of your feet. A last hurrah. Feasts pile up like that these weekends: Pentecost, Holy Trinity, and Corpus Christi. Not Easter, exactly, but the glory and mystery of Easter threading through life as it does all year.
Sunday we celebrated our God who is family, relationship, and love. I always think of Rublev’s famous icon written around 1410. It depicts three angels at table, the three angles who visited Abraham at the oak of Mamre, but is often interpreted to represent the Trinity. The table has an empty place at the front, an invitation to come, sit down, and be part of the family. Easter leaking through. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and sending of the Spirit who dwells in each of us. We are not strangers to this divine Family; we belong, related through our brother, Jesus.
Then comes the feast of Corpus Christi, celebrating the Eucharist. We owe this feast in great part to St. Juliana, a nun of Liege, Belgium, who had a great devotion to the Eucharist and was the driving force behind the establishment of the commemoration. She was an interesting figure, having been elected as prioress of a double monastery (Common in the Middle Ages, such a monastery combined a section for monks and one for nuns, both united under one superior, sometimes a man, sometimes a woman.) Read More