One of the monastery’s rose chasubles used for Gaudete and Laetare Sundays of Advent and Lent

“Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad because of her, all you who love her; rejoice with her in her joy, all you who mourn over her” (Isaiah 66:10) Thus the verse from Isaiah that opens Mass for this Fourth Sunday of Lent. “Rejoice” - “Laetare” in Latin. This Sunday is the most extraordinary day in Lent. Already, Sundays offer a Lenten reprieve of sorts, and are not counted in the forty days of fasting. This Sunday, in particular, reminds us that our Lenten journey is brief, and that our penitential path leads to a God of loving mercy. The rare color of rose makes its liturgical appearance, mirroring the third Sunday of Advent, “Gaudete Sunday.” The color is used for only these two Sundays, injecting into the darker violet of Lent and Advent a greater share of the light, visually illuminating the liturgy to remind us of our hope. We may experience this sensibility in a new and related manner this year, as we may begin to see a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. Pope Francis, at the Angelus of Laetare Sunday of 2020, said, “...it is not enough to receive the light, one must become light. Each one of us is called to receive the divine light in order to manifest it with our whole life. The first Christians, the theologians of the first centuries, used to say that the community of Christians, that is the Church, is the ‘mystery of the moon’, because it gave light but it was not its own light, it was the light it received from Christ. We too can be ‘mystery of the moon’: giving light received from the sun, which is Christ, the Lord.”