Holy Saturday - the "In-between" Day

Today is one of the two days of the year when there is no Mass. Yesterday's service (which was called the Mass of the Pre-Sanctified when I was a kid) wasn't really a Mass - it was a prayer service with Holy Communion. There is no Mass today until the Easter Vigil Mass at night. According to an authoritative source I read, I think Father Zuhlsdorf's site "What Does The Prayer Really Say," the Easter Vigil Mass must take place during darkness, to symbolize the darkness without Christ. The new fire, the blessing of water, remind us that Christ is the Light of the World, and, as He said, He makes all things new.

There are very good reasons the Church uses material things to symbolize spiritual realities. One is that we humans are both material and spiritual beings. What happens to the body affects the soul and vice versa. I know that when I'm tired and draggy, or spiritually downcast, I go to Mass or Adoration anyway, say my morning and night prayers anyway; "Bring the body and the mind will follow." I'm blessed to be as old as I am and have sixty years of habit behind me; that helps (even though in habit there's a danger of doing things without paying attention).

Another reason is that Jesus is both human and divine. Another is that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and said "This is my body," likewise the wine. This is one instance where we Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox) take Scripture more literally than our Protestant brothers and sisters.

Anyway . . . .

Here are some odd facts that you probably never needed to know, but I'm foisting them on you anyway just for the fun of it because I don't feel like doing anything today.

An acre-foot of water (that is, one acre in extent and a foot deep) weighs 2722500 pounds.

The triple point of water means the circumstances under which water can exist as vapor, liquid, and solid at the same time, such as mist over a partly icy lake.
This is 0.01 degree Celsius.

Homoskedasticity and heteroskedasticity have nothing to do with sex.

20-pound paper is called that because of the weight of one ream (500 sheets) of the "parent stock," in this case 17" x 22"; thus one ream of ordinary typing or copy paper weighs five pounds.

The Gregorian calendar in common use is five years off.

The solar day is longer than the sidereal day.

The 45th parallel of north latitude runs through north Minneapolis, between West Broadway and 21st Avenue North.

Happy Easter!