Alleluia! Christ Has Risen!

Christ has risen, Alleluia!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!

After this holy time of preparation during Lent, we burst with the spirit of Easter joy which will carry us forward as we share the truly Good News with a world that is sorely in need of good news.  How will you celebrate this Easter?  A joyful Easter liturgy?  A quiet day with a chocolate bunny?  A gathering with family or friends?  An Easter hike?  Hopefully, there is some way for each of us to experience that sense of Easter joy which is a gift from God.

For myself, Easter Sunday will start with mass at the Cathedral in Hamilton, followed by coffee with some of the Sisters.  In the afternoon, I will join my family in a long standing family tradition of an Easter Egg hunt and Easter Quiz at my brother’s house.  Being COVID times, it will be held outside.  [A side note:  As this will be the first time we are gathering in over two years, we will meet the new babies in the family who arrived during the COVID pandemic including one little fellow who arrived at the very start of the pandemic in January 2020 and whose name is Cove.  No, it is not short for Covid.  His father is Irish so he was named after the city of Cobh in Ireland but knowing that most people would not know how to pronounce Cobh, they decided to spell it as it sounds.] 

This joy we experience as an Easter people who recognize and rejoice in the Resurrection needs to be shared with whoever crosses our path.  How it is shared can be summed up in the words of one of our wise Sisters:

‘The most important thing is loving the person in front of you’.

Amen.  Alleluia!  Alleluia!  Alleluia!

-Sister Nancy Sullivan, csj

---

Image: Unsplash/Bruno van der Kraan

Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday

Maybe it was the phone call from a friend who mentioned how wonderful it was to be able to share a meal with her extended family again, even though their tables were separated by plexiglass and the music in the restaurant was too loud, that caused me to notice the phrase in the first reading of Easter Sunday: “we… ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:41)

The disciples and Mary Magdalene did not recognize him immediately. In the gospel, Mary thinks she is talking to the gardener until he speaks her name in love and opens her heart and eyes to see him. The disciples on the road to Emmaus had their eyes opened and only recognized him when he broke bread with them.

During this year-long Lent of a pandemic, we have been starved of so many ordinary, everyday things that we took for granted:  family celebrations, hugs, visits, the ability to celebrate together the death of a loved one, etc. How do we celebrate Easter joy in such a time which is not over yet although, with vaccines, there seems to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel?

John O’Donohue in his book Anam Cara reminds us “Behind the façade of our normal lives eternal destiny is shaping our days and our ways” (p.90) We need to wake up and see behind the façade of the familiar where God is woven into our lives. Can I sing with the psalmist: “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad!” (Psalm 118) My friend could marvel at being able to eat with family again although it was certainly not as she would normally have wished it to be.

““Behind the façade of our normal lives eternal destiny is shaping our days and our ways” ”

Maybe the gift of this Easter for me is to decide to begin to shape in my life the “new normal”. Try to live my life with my eyes wide open to the beauty of Springtime coming alive all around me. To accepting each day as a gift and to look for ways to be a gift for everyone I have contact with even if it is only by Zoom or a phone call. Thus, in my own small way, I hope to be ready to participate in a kinder and more loving world when we leave this time of Covid19.

-Sister Catherine Stafford, csj