I wish more bishops understood this:
(from Pope Emeritus)
Since the most ancient times the Church has underlined her great feasts by not restricting them to a single day but giving them a whole octave of days. The celebration resounds for a whole week and is renewed on the eighth day. The seven days, completed by the eighth, symbolize the totality of time and its transcendence into eternity. The week-long feast encompasses a basic unit of human life an thus stands as a foretaste of the freedom of eternal life, a sign of hope and peace in the midst of earthly days in toil. The Church has rendezvoused to help us experience Easter as the feast of feasts, as the basic reason for all celebration and joy, by causing the Easter octave to last for seven times seven days. So the feast of Pentecost on the fiftieth day after Easter is not in fact an entirely new feast; it rounds off the circle of the seven times seven days which signify our breaking out of subservience to time into the boundless joy of the children of God, a joy uninterrupted by any striking of the hour.
These fifty days are the answer to the forty days of tribulation and preparation by which the Church leads up to Easter. In the Old Testament numerology, forty signified the age of the world: it is an intensification of four, which recalls the four corners of the earth and hence the brokenness, the finite, incomplete and toil some nature of all earthly existence. The forty prepare for the fifty, the fragmentary for the complete; and the Lord’s Resurrection is at the axis of both. Even through this temporal arrangement the Church has provided a profound psychological interpretation of what Easter means and of how we can and should celebrate it. For all these things, far from being liturgical games, are translations of the mystery in terms of our life; they are where the unique and once-and-for-all Event meets life in its daily newness.
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