40 Days of Lent

 

Religious Season of LENT- Period of 40 days

Lent 2014 began on Wednesday, March 5 and ends on Thursday, April 17

 

forty  40

In the Roman Catholic Church, Lent officially ends at sundown on Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday), with the beginning of the mass of the Lord's Supper. The period of forty fast days and Sundays before Easter are known as Lent

 

http://catholicism.about.com/od/holydaysandholidays/f/Counting_Lent.htm

 

 

Question: Lent, the period of prayer and fasting in preparation for Easter, is 40 days long, but there are 46 days between Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, and Easter. So how are the 40 days of Lent calculated?
Answer: The answer takes us back to the earliest days of the Church. Christ's original disciples, who were Jewish, grew up with the idea that the Sabbath—the day of worship and of rest—was Saturday, the seventh day of the week, since the account of creation in Genesis says that God rested on the seventh day.
Christ rose from the dead, however, on Sunday, the first day of the week, and the early Christians, starting with the apostles (those original disciples), saw Christ's Resurrection as a new creation, and so they transferred the day of rest and worship from Saturday to Sunday.
Since all Sundays—and not simply Easter Sunday—were days to celebrate Christ's Resurrection, Christians were forbidden to fast and do other forms of penance on those days. Therefore, when the Church expanded the period of fasting and prayer in preparation for Easter from a few days to 40 days (to mirror Christ's fasting in the desert, before He began His public ministry), Sundays could not be included in the count.
Thus, in order for Lent to include 40 days on which fasting could occur, it had to be expanded to six full weeks (with six days of fasting in each week) plus four extra days—Ash Wednesday and the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday that follow it. Six times six is thirty-six, plus four equals forty. And that's how we arrive at the 40 days of Lent!
For a more in-depth explanation of the history of the Lenten fast, why it has been and remains 40 days long, why Sundays have never been part of the Lenten fast, and when the Lenten fast ends, see The 40 Days of Lent: A Short History of the Lenten Fast.

 

 

 

 

The article below is stating that now "they" hope the batteries it he black boxes last  40 DAYS

 

Missing plane's black box batteries may have died

Reuters: Richard Wainwright, Pool

Royal New Zealand Air Force Captain Flight Lieutenant Timothy McAlevey sits in the cockpit of a RNZAF P3 Orion maritime search aircraft as it flies over the southern Indian Ocean looking for debris from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, April 11.

5 hr ago By MARGIE MASON of Associated Press

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PERTH, Australia — Following four strong underwater signals in the past week, all has gone quiet in the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, meaning the batteries in the plane's all-important black boxes may finally have died.

Despite having no new transmissions from the black boxes' locator beacons to go on, air and sea crews were continuing their search in the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday for debris and any sounds that may still be emanating. They are desperately trying to pinpoint where the Boeing 777 could be amid an enormous patch of deep ocean.
Photos: Missing Malaysia Airlines jet
Related: Ocean debris left by jet depends on angle, speed
No new electronic pings have been detected since Tuesday by an Australian ship dragging a U.S. Navy device that listens for flight recorder signals. Once officials are confident that no more sounds will be heard, a robotic submersible will be sent down to slowly scour for wreckage.
"We're now into Day 37 of this tragedy," said aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas. "The battery life on the beacons is supposed to last 30 days. We're hoping it might last 40 days. However, it's been four or five days since the last strong pings. What they're hoping for is to get one more, maybe two more pings so they can do a triangulation of the sounds and try and narrow the (search) area."
Recovering the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders is essential for investigators to try to figure out what happened to Flight 370, which vanished March 8. It was carrying 239 people, mostly Chinese, while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing.
After analyzing satellite data, officials believe the plane flew off course for an unknown reason and went down in the southern Indian Ocean off Australia's west coast. Investigators trying to determine what happened to the plane are focusing on four areas — hijacking, sabotage and personal or psychological problems of those on board.
Two sounds heard a week ago by the Australian ship Ocean Shield, which was towing the ping locator, were determined to be consistent with the signals emitted from the black boxes. Two more pings were detected in the same general area Tuesday, but no new ones have been picked up since then.

Fading signals add urgency to search for missing jet

1 day ago Duration: 1:52 Views: 17k

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has expressed confidence that the pings picked up by the Ocean Shield were coming from the plane's two black boxes, but he cautioned that finding the actual aircraft could take a long time.
"There's still a lot more work to be done and I don't want anyone to think that we are certain of success, or that success, should it come, is going to happen in the next week or even month. There's a lot of difficulty and a lot of uncertainty left in this," Abbott said Saturday in Beijing, where he was wrapping up a visit to China.
Searchers want to pinpoint the exact location of the source of the sounds — or as close as they can get — before sending the Bluefin 21 submersible down. It will not be deployed until officials are confident that no other electronic signals will come, and that they have narrowed the search area as much as possible.
The underwater search zone is currently a 1,300-square-kilometer (500-square-mile) patch of the seabed, about the size of Los Angeles.

AP Photo: Richard Wainwright, Pool

Sgt. Trent Wyatt, a crew member of a Royal New Zealand Air Force P-3 Orion, searches for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 over the Indian Ocean on Friday.

The sub takes six times longer to cover the same area as the ping locator, and will need about six weeks to two months to canvass the current underwater zone. The signals are also coming from 4,500 meters (15,000 feet) below the surface, which is the deepest the sub can dive.
The surface area being searched on Sunday for floating debris was 57,506 square kilometers (22,203 square miles) of ocean extending about 2,200 kilometers (1,367 miles) northwest of Perth. Up to 12 planes and 14 ships were participating in the hunt.

 

 

 

 

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