Alleluia, Christ has risen! Happy Easter!

But wait … there’s more!

Easter is more than just a one-off celebration on Easter Sunday to be put aside until next year. Far from it. Easter is an attitude, and the fun is just beginning.

Easter Sunday starts the Easter Octave, the eight-day span of Easter Sunday through Divine Mercy Sunday. In this issue of the St. Louis Review, there’s a list of parishes celebrating the feast of Divine Mercy, which falls this year on Sunday, April 8.

There’s more.

This also is the Easter season, the 50-day span of Easter Sunday through Pentecost,which is Sunday, May 20. The Holy Spirit dramatically descended upon the apostles on the first Pentecost with wind and tongues of fire, giving them the ability to proclaim the Good News each simultaneously in multiple languages. That scene, recounted in Act 2:1-11, is astonishing.

Imagine it happening today in a cosmopolitan city such as New York. Massive wind in Times Square, tongues of fire everywhere, and individuals speaking in multiple languages at the same time and stunned onlookers hearing them in their native languages.

The first Pentecost was just the beginning, too — the nascent days of the Catholic Church, which grew into the universal Church with a global reach in multiple cultures with multiple languages.

So, 2,000 years later, we still celebrate our savior’s Resurrection and victory over sin and death, and there’s still more.

Easter is way more than just a one-day celebration … and also more than the Easter Octave and Easter season. It’s 24/7, because His death and Resurrection — Easter — is commemorated and celebrated at each and every Mass on the planet — every Sunday, every weekday, at all hours of day or night, all around the world.

Easter is 24/7, an on-going celebration, an attitude, eternal.

Alleluia, Christ has risen! Happy Easter!