A Sunday Thought to Start the Week Off Right

It's now the Fifth Sunday of Easter, or, as the older traditional calendar would have it, the 4th Sunday after Easter. These Easter Sundays we've tried to convey not only the glory of the Easter Season, but it's special importance to our spiritual lives. Last week we saw how the lessons of the Passion and Death of Our Lord, followed by His Resurrection, call us to draw closer to Him. And this drawing closer ultimately ends with true and complete union with Him. How awesome it is to think that we might achieve this union during this brief journey of our life on earth! And how hopeful we become to learn that if not now, then in eternal life will we be united, once and for all, with Our Divine Savior, under the loving gaze of His Blessed Mother, in the Communion of Saints.

If union with God seems now to be beyond our reach, we saw last week that this shouldn't deter us in our pursuit. After all, while our pursuit requires our own efforts, it's accomplishment relies strictly and totally on God's grace. And so we remember that all will be accomplished in His own Way, in His own time.

And so a simple thought for this Fifth Sunday of Easter/4th Sunday after Easter: His Will be done! We don't have to have a degree in theology or a spotless life of pure, undefiled virtue to understand this. It's right there in the Our Father - and we've likely known both known and, at least in some fashion, understood it for as long as we can remember. With that in mind, here's a lovely poem to remind us of what we surely already know. Perhaps in time, with God's grace, we will desire it despite the difficulties it sometimes entails, just as He did in the Garden.

Thy Will Be Done

The sun is sinking fast,

The daylight dies;

Let love awake, and pay

Its evening sacrifice.

As Christ upon the cross

His head inclined,

And to His Father's hands

His parting soul resigned,

So now herself my soul

Would wholly give,

Into his sacred charge

In Whom all spirits live;

So now, beneath His eye,

Would calmly rest,

Without a wish or thought

Abiding in the breast,

Save that His will be done,

What'ere betide;

Dead to herself, and dead

In Him to all beside.

Thus would I live, yet now

Not I, but He,

In all His love and power,

Henceforth alive in me.

One Sacred Trinity, 

One Lord divine!

May I be ever His,

And he forever mine!

- Caswell's Translations


Happy Easter!