The Sundays After Easter Begin

Easter Sunday has passed. Now we commence the Sundays of the Easter Season.

The Easter Season typically doesn't get as much attention as Lent. It doesn't the attention it deserves. Since the Easter Season is significantly longer than Lent we should take the hint: We need to pay as close, if not closer attention.

Christ is risen! Lent which focuses more on the Passion and Death of Our Lord, has no meaning without the Resurrection. If we made something of our Lenten discipline, it behooves us to make even more of what we might call our Easter Discipline. 

With that in mind, we'll post special spiritual gems for these Easter Sundays. Ideally they'll help us to give this glorious Easter Season our full attention and devotion.

We begin with Father Bernard Wuellner, S.J. He died in 1997 at the age of 92. And don't let the "S.J." distract you. Despite the problems the once faithful Society of Jesus present these day, Father is one of the good guys. He's Catholic. So we won't find any of the awful "Jesuit spirituality" the modernist Jesuits have concocted. It's all real Catholic stuff.

Isn't it crazy that we have to qualify him this way. But we do, lest you think he's one of "those" Jesuits - the ones who chucked their history and tradition in favor of modernist nonsense and heresy. But that's our world. It is what it is.

Here we go:

“The Christian puts to himself one searching question at Easter: Am I risen with Christ? One proof that one is living the risen life of grace is a heart burning with love of Christ and all that belongs to this Friend of our souls. For this must be a feature of the new life of grace, that we have a buoyant interest in Christ and a keen ambition to possess His treasures. If we listen to the Church urging us to live the Christ-life more fully these days, we will spiritually rise from our religious sloth, our moral faults, and our absorption in worldly interests that take the mind and heart away from the risen Lord. It would be a pitiable mistake to let the slackening of the Lenten penances become at Easter a signal for a decrease in our daily living for and yearning for Christ. The paschal season ought rather to be a sustained climatic union of our souls with His joy and victories…. The swinging of the mind towards higher things and its flight from the lower may be a critical moment in the development of the interior Christian life. As the divine captures our attention and deepens our motives, we begin to get rid of our preferences for bodily comforts, worldly honors, and temporal blessings. These things lose their former importance in our estimation. Earth, after all, is but for a little while; heaven is forever. The means, the goods of time, are far below the end – God – in value. A true rating of the worth of earthly things is sometimes spoken of as contempt for them. Though we need not regard them as wicked or worthless, yet part of the spiritual effort to live with Christ risen must consist in counteracting all those desires that shut spiritual goods out of our lives. Those things which the world, hostile to Christ, our own unreasonable flesh, and the tempting devil, would give us if we but wanted them, must be banished from our choices. We must not let ourselves be overthrown by worldly desires, as was the rich young man who approached our Lord. Love of the pleasures of sense is cockle that chokes the good seed of Christ’s truth in the lives of average sinners. Love of honors in this world pulls other stronger souls away from Christ. All such desires that stand against Christ’s mastery within us must be controlled, starved, and never allowed to compete with our desires for the gifts of Christ. To win this freedom from choosing these earthly, selfish, and evil things usually takes long spiritual training. That is why the ascetic life must mark those who are risen with Christ. A religious vocation, by demanding daily sacrifices, greatly assists this denial of self; and this death of self leads to detached purity of heart with regard to lower goods. But in or out of the religious state, every Christian who would be close to Christ must labor for his spiritual freedom from all things except God and His will.” 

Thank you and Happy Easter Father. And if you can, please pray for us, that we may give this Easter Season the full attention and devotion it deserves.

Happy Easter!