The Hope of Easter

On Easter day, this year at the small St. Mary’s Parish, the church was packed to capacity with some standing in the back. There were so many families and lots of children and babies. The atmosphere was full of activity and energy. If only these people would want to come to mass every week. What a blessing that would be for themselves and for the church, the body of Christ.

I used to be one of those twice a year Catholics. Going to mass on Christmas and Easter was a pleasant experience that I looked forward to and enjoyed. The question is, why don’t Catholics attend mass weekly? There are a lot of reasons for this, but the bottom line is people are too full of and preoccupied with the world and living lives that are self-centered and not God centered. I lived that life and I was never truly happy or knew what real joy was. I spend the first 28 years of my life as a clueless and sinful Catholic, lacking in any depth of understanding of scripture or the catechism of the Catholic Church. I did have a guarded reverence and awe of God, from my youth, when I attended weekly mass. However, after going away to college, I quit going to church. I remember thinking that going to church was for families, and I was a single person, who like most other single people, preferred living a life of sin rather than the virtuous life the church calls us to.

At twenty-eight years of age, and after breaking away from a toxic relationship, I found myself pregnant. I also found that I was not alone, because God was right there for me, picking up the pieces and helping me put my life back together. I have spent the rest of my life getting to know and love Jesus. True love and joy is only found in a relationship with Jesus.

I would like to share an excerpt from “The Hope of Easter” written by Pope Francis, found in my Magnificant.

"We, like Peter and the women, cannot discover life by being sad, bereft of hope. Let us not stay imprisoned within ourselves, but let us break open our sealed tombs to the Lord- each of us knows what they are- so that he may enter and grant us life. Let us give him the stones of our rancor and the boulders of our past, those heavy burdens of our weaknesses and falls. Christ wants to come and take us by the hand to bring us out of our anguish. This is the first stone to be moved aside this night: the lack of hope which imprisons us within ourselves. May the Lord free us from this trap, from being Christians without hope, who live as if the Lord were not risen, as if our problems were the center of our lives….Let us not allow darkness and fear to distract us and control us; we must cry out to them: The Lord is not here, but has risen! (Luke 24;6). He is our greatest joy: he is always at our side and will never let us down…. Today (Easter) is the celebration of our hope; the celebration of this truth; nothing and no one will ever be able to separate us from his love. (cf. Romans 8:39)"

Alleluia

Week 5 of Lent

Each liturgical season of the past few years, I begin with the desire to make it the best ever. I began Lent with that same intention. I failed my giving up coffee after a few days. Silly of me to give up a medicinal item. I must have forgotten how a cup coffee can sometimes ward off a migraine or at least take the edge off a migraine headache. Instead, I have been trying to give up small treats like eating out when I have work meetings or appointments in the city and avoiding unnecessary food items when I am grocery shopping. This is all small change in the big picture of life and poverty that so many people live in and hardly worth mentioning.

What I have enjoyed most this Lent is the mass readings. I am a big fan of Word on Fire and listen to Bishop Barron’s weekly homilies from the website https://www.wordonfire.org/  I discovered that you can listen to homilies that go back to 2001, and narrow your search by the “season” or one of five other categories of searches.  I have been listening to current and past homilies on each week’s readings across all the cycles. To do this you go to the main website. Click on resources on the top menu > Homilies> Season > Lent. It has been an amazing experience to drench in the Word this way. It’s a type of Lectio Divina, with Father Barron painting the picture of each biblical story. Father Barron has a gift for preaching that brings scripture to life and he has a way of putting it in the context of life today. Everything that happened in bible has relevance to life today.

In the past, I have struggled with Lent and Christ’s Passion because it is so brutal and unfair that Jesus had to die for us. I understand St. Peter’s wish for Jesus not to die.

Matthew 16: 21-23

21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Jesus had been trying to prepare the apostles for what was going to happen, but poor Peter could not understand why it had to be this way. This is where Jesus’s divinity is not altered by his humanity. Jesus always did the Father's will in everything. We, on the other hand, are constantly swayed off the narrow path by our human concerns. In this season of Lent we are asked to get back to the basics and identify, what are the stumbling blocks in our lives. What takes our focus off of God’s will for us?
Next week is Holy Week and we will again walk with Jesus through the scriptures and revisit his Passion and Death and Resurrection. This is the week that changed history. Don’t miss it.   

Paula