Once upon a childhood, on a Fourteenth Street haunted by the grimy ghosts of its glorious Gilded Age past, there was a wonderful little bakery shop called Valencia. They made absolutely yummy cakes that were to die for. Literally if you were a diabetic. The pineapple flavored filling layered in between soft sweet sponge cake was gosh gooey good. The fabulous frosting was pure super saccharine sugar. To a poor kid in the tumultuous tenements of the crime ridden New York of yore there couldn’t be enough birthdays to celebrate.
Liturgically the Church, in both Latin West and Greek East, recognizes only three births in the natural order: that of Our Lord, that of his Precursor, and (the subject of this e-pistle) that of his most Blessed Mother. The date, September 8, was chosen as the octave day after the former Byzantine Civil New Year which was marked on the first of September. (For those of you who are counting it is the year 7521, computed as it is “from the creation of the world”.) Although Mary’s birth was celebrated on various dates throughout the centuries, September 8 predominated. The feast celebrating Mary’s Immaculate Conception, December 8, (a liturgy instituted later) was set to correspond to nine months before Mary’s birth. By the seventh century the liturgy was also celebrated in Rome where it had been introduced by monks from the Byzantine East. (The transmigration of monastics was in part occasioned by, how shall we say it politically correctly, the theological transformation in an obscure corner of the Empire.) From there, it spread throughout the West, and by the thirteenth century the liturgy had developed to a solemnity with a major octave and a solemn vigil which prescribed a day of fasting. Pope Sergius I (687-701) established a procession (known as a litania) from the Roman Forum to St. Mary Major for the feast. During the reform of Saint Pius X at the dawn of the twentieth century, the octave was simplified, and in 1955 the octave was abolished during the (in)famous reform undertaken under the authority of Venerable Pius XII.
(As a piously personal aside, this feast also marks the natal day of a terrific treasure that one has singularly solitary responsibility for nurturing therefore one beseeches your gentle generosity in simply offering some pithy prayers to the guiding glance of the Divine Providence of the ever serene Trinity as she blows out the candles. Although effective effigies of past Presidents would not necessarily be unwelcomed.)
So what are you waiting for? Even though greedy gentrification forced reluctant relocation to the bucolic Bronx, the sinfully super sweet cakes are still made by Valencia Bakery: http://valenciacake.com/
Mr. Screwtape
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