A Week of Weeks Kept as One Feast

Eastertide is the oldest season of the Christian year after the paschal feast itself: fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, kept not as an aftermath but as one continuous celebration. The early church called the whole span Pentecost, from the Greek for fiftieth, and treated every day of it as a Sunday. The marks of that festal status were concrete and are recorded early: no fasting through the fifty days, and prayer made standing rather than kneeling, a rule thought fitting for a season of resurrection and confirmed by the Council of Nicaea, whose twentieth canon directs that prayer be offered standing on Sundays and through the days of Pentecost. The arithmetic of the season is a week of weeks, seven sevens of days with one added, a deliberately overflowing measure.

Within it the church now keeps the Ascension on the fortieth day, following the count in the Acts of the Apostles, and the final ten days look toward the coming of the Spirit. The paschal candle lit at the Vigil burns at every liturgy through the season, the alleluia suppressed through Lent returns everywhere, and the readings run through the resurrection appearances and the Acts. Where Lent is the year's long inhale, the fifty days are its exhale, and the calendar gives the rejoicing ten days more than the fast.