Our house diary tells the story plainly enough: the Easter Octave is crammed with appointments, visits and business of various kinds. Of course we are always glad to welcome people, especially when they wish to join us in prayer, but often we have little choice in matters; as to the more "commercial" side of things, neither the monastery nor its charitable works can be sustained by pious wishes alone so we cannot just "shut up shop" for a week. But the Easter Octave is too precious to waste on things that can be done at other times. Every year we try to make sure that it retains its religious character, and every year we wonder whether we have tried hard enough.

It does not really matter where we look for the origins of the octave, e.g. the dedication of Solomon's temple on the eighth day, Early Christian baptismal practice, or the dedication of Constantine's churches in Tyre and Jerusalem in the fourth century. What matters is what the octave has become in Christian thought and practice. It is a privileged time for teasing out, as it were, all the richness of the great event we are celebrating. The Triduum is so full of drama, the liturgy so demanding, that one really needs eight days in which to reflect on the Resurrection. It is good that during these days we hear the different resurrection narratives in their proper context and are able to sing the psalms with a sense of completion, of victory won.

Perhaps the very busyness of the Easter Octave is an opportunity to ask ourselves what it means to be a Benedictine today, to live with the tension, so to say, of being contemplative in a world that is anything but. I am reminded yet again of the "eye of the storm" idea. It is, paradoxically, at the heart of the tempest that the deepest peace and stillness is to be sought and found. Maybe that is what is being asked of all of us, whatever our state in life, this Octave.