Dear siblings in Christ,
Even as we are only just entering into Holy Week, Easter will be here before we know it. And Easter isn’t just one day – it’s 50 days of celebration and feasting! (It says a lot about our faith that Easter is a longer season than Lent!)
On Easter, we light the Paschal candle again, shout Alleluia again, enter the church in noisy procession (bring bells and pots and pans!), return to using home-baked bread for the Eucharist, and sprinkle everyone with holy water every Sunday.
In addition to these things, this Eastertide the altar ministers will wear full “vestments” during worship. Vestments are the distinctive garments worn by the leaders of the church’s worship, and Fr. Matt and I already wear vestments in worship every Sunday. The long strip of cloth we wear around our necks with the liturgical color of the day is called a stole. Stoles came into use in the 4th century, and are worn by ordained ministers. The stole represents the yoke of Christ, a symbol of the vows made at ordination.
So during Eastertide, we are just adding two things:
- the alb (a white, full-length garment worn by all ministers, lay and ordained), and
- the chasuble (a robe covering the front, back, and shoulders, worn by the priest presiding at the Eucharist that Sunday).
We’re doing this to add some fun, festive flair to our Eastertide worship, and to symbolize our connection to Christ’s one, holy, catholic church throughout the world and throughout time (vestments have their roots in the ordinary clothing of the Greco-Roman world in which the early church came into being).
Vestments are symbolic of the role a person fulfills in the church’s worship, much like any other “uniform”, and lend a sense of dignity, beauty, and enchantment to a worship service (graduations and other important ceremonies often include special dress for those participating). If you have any questions about this, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
I’m finding that I really need Holy Week this year, and also that I really need Eastertide this year! Thankfully, you can’t have Holy Week without Easter. Easter’s the reason we call it Holy Week in the first place. Here’s to a joyful, exuberant Eastertide.
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Ben
P.S. We are grateful to be borrowing our Eastertide vestments from St. Christopher’s in Carmel. They recently created new ones and thus have vestments to spare.
