Happy Easter Friends!
Our odd Holy Week has come to an end and we now celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and the promise of life eternal for all who choose to follow. Thank you for your ongoing care for our community and for your faithfulness during this COVID-19 crisis. Thanks to everyone who continues to help in our production of liturgies online so that we can continue to pray together as a community even though separated.
It can be tempting to feel sorry for ourselves as we feel forced to remain at home or to practice social distancing with our loved ones. I know for me that this is only the second time in my life that I will not be with family members for an Easter dinner.
Yet Holy Week and its reflections were important for all of us. We are all being asked to take an unusual share in Christ’s Passion this year. Still, it is a soft road to Golgotha for most of us: just staying home! During my reflections this past week, I sometimes felt like we are the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night in which Jesus was betrayed: we cannot even stay awake to pray and wait with him. I want to sleep when I want and not to have my life disturbed. Or we are like Peter, we want things to go the way we want. We do not want to surrender to the ways of Jesus. In the garden, the difficult struggle for Peter was sheathing his sword and allowing what had to happen, to happen. The struggle for Peter was the inner struggle to stand still and abide with Jesus. So it is with us.
Our liturgies this past week have reminded us that we cannot celebrate Easter unless we are willing to walk with Jesus through his passion and death. Only when we can embrace the cross will Easter truly make sense. When we can let the gospel guide us and when we are shaped as disciples of Jesus by his own example, then we will know its freedom and glory.
Now we turn to the Easter Season and do so in our continued time of seclusion and distancing. We should live as an Easter people – free of fear and free to love as Jesus teaches. Yet, we will have to do this by practicing that in little ways this year. Years ago, I was moved by a story that the Jesuit priest, Walter Burghardt, told. Let me leave it with you as an Easter reminder to practice little things:
“There I was sitting restlessly in the office of the Division of Gastroenterology at Georgetown University Hospital, waiting for the nurse to prep me for a feared colonoscopy. And there in front of me, perhaps twelve feet away, sat a little black lady. She must have been all of 80, with no teeth but the most entrancing smile this side of the beatific vision. The smile simply lit up the little room. A few moments went by, and I could no longer restrain myself. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you always smile like that?” She said she did. “But,” said I from the deep gloom of my diverticula, “how can you?” Her response I shall never forget. “Ah lives every hour. Some of them are sad…but even so, ah lives every hour.”
My Easter prayer for all of us at Frances Cabrini is to live every hour…every hour. Live it for God in the risen Jesus.
Peace,
Fr. Damian