Septuagesima

The soon to be buried "Alleluia" resting at Our Lady's feet before the procession

"Benedicamus Dominio, alleluia, alleluia!" With this last chant, the word alleluia ceases to pass our lips until Easter. We are now just nine weeks from the commemoration of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our sweet Savior. The Church will soon be placing these mysteries before our eyes and it is time for us to turn our thoughts to the contemplation of our redemption, so we bid farewell to the alleluia as a word too highly expressive of joy and exultation to be with us during the somber days of Lent.

​"The word Alleluia signifies praise God: but it says much more than this, and says it as no other word or words could. The Church is not going to interrupt Her giving praise to God during these nine weeks. She will replace this Heaven-lent word by a formula also expressive of praise: Praise be to Thee, O Lord, King of eternal glory! But this is the language of earth; whereas Alleluia was sent us from Heaven. ​"Alleluia," says the devout Abbot Rupert, "is like a stranger 

amidst our other words. Its mysterious beauty is as though a drop of Heaven’s overflowing joy had fallen down on our earth. The patriarchs and prophets relished it, and then the Holy Ghost put it on the lips of the Apostles, from whom it flowed even to us. It signifies the eternal feast of the Angels and Saints, which consists in their endless praise of God, and in ceaselessly singing their ever new admiration of the beauty of the God on Whose Face they are to gaze for everlasting ages. This mortal life of ours can in no wise attain such bliss as this. But to know where it is to be found, and to have a foretaste of it by the happiness of hope, and to hunger and thirst for what we thus taste, this is the perfection of saints here below. For this reason, the word Alleluia has not been translated; it has been left in its original Hebrew, as a stranger to tell us that there is a joy in his native land, which could not dwell in ours: he has come among us to signify, rather than to express that joy."

- Dom Gueranger