A Spiritual Gem for This Sunday in the Easter Season

We're continuing our Sunday thoughts in the midst of the Easter Season. As we've noted, the Easter Season typically doesn't get as much attention as Lent. It simply doesn't get 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, here's our next special spiritual gem for these Easter Sundays. As with the first we posted last week, we hope they'll help us to give this glorious Easter Season our full attention and devotion.

Today we turn to Fr. Bertrand Weaver, C.P. His remarks are especially pertinent to our series. He was known as the author of His Cross in Your Life. From the introduction by Ralph Martin:

"The cross has the answers you're seeking. And Fr. Bertrand Weaver's powerful book, His Cross in Your Life, will help you find them. In just 112 pages of always practical--never theoretical--advice, Fr. Weaver reveals how the cross can bring you peace, joy, and happiness. And he shows how you can unite any suffering in your own life--large or small--with the sufferings of Christ."

Father's spiritual work focuses on the Cross and how we may unite our own sufferings to Our Lord's. But here he teaches us that we must see all this in the light of the Resurrection - a perfect spiritual gem for this Sunday in the Easter Season:

“There is always danger, when we consider intensively one mystery of the Faith, that we will not keep it in context with the other mysteries of the Christian religion. If any member of the Church were to concentrate his gaze on the Cross and Passion of our Lord, and hardly ever think of His triumphant rising from the dead, there would be a lack of balance in his very devotion to the Sacred Passion. We can be authentic members of the mystical body of Christ only if we ‘think with the Church.’ The mind and spirit of the Church is made clear in the liturgy. In the liturgy, the Church constantly associates the sufferings and death of Christ with His Resurrection. That some members of the Church do not keep the Passion and the Resurrection in context is evident from their attitude toward Lent and the Easter season. We cannot but rejoice that a multitude of Catholics enter wholeheartedly into the spirit of Lent, attending Mass daily, and performing acts of penance and charity. This is what the Church desires and urges us to do during Lent. She is, however, far from wanting us to make Good Friday the climax of this outpouring of devotion. The Easter liturgy, which begins with the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night, and which continues for the eight weeks following Easter, is the true climax of the Lenten liturgy. It should not escape our attention that Eastertide, the season of joy and fulfillment, is longer than Lent, the season of sorrow and penance.    

“If we do not keep our Lord’s Resurrection in view, we are not going to keep the whole mystery of Christ in focus. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that they would be saved if they held fast the gospel, ‘as I preached it to you.’ He then went on to summarize it, as he had preached it to them: ‘For I delivered to you first of all, what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, and after that to the Eleven. Then He was seen by more than five hundred brethren at one time. . . . And last of all … He was seen by me.’ The Apostle could not have made it clearer that those to whom he had preached could not be saved unless they understood and accepted Christ as crucified, and as risen from the dead. The Passion of Christ, without His Resurrection, would have availed us nothing. St. Paul makes this evident when he says: ‘and if Christ is not risen, vain is your faith, for you are still in your sins.’ Nothing could show better than these words how important for our understanding of the Faith, and our spiritual progress, is the association in our thinking of our Lord’s Death and Resurrection.”

Father's spiritual gem makes it clear that we must not think of Easter and the Resurrection as a kind of "relief" from Lent and the Passion and Cross. The Resurrection completes the mystery of the Passion and Cross. Whatever progress we made with our penitential Lenten spiritual discipline now serves as the source of a glorious, joyful spiritual discipline. 

Our Lenten discipline has strengthened our spiritual life. It has helped us bulk up on spiritual muscle. Now we can exercise even greater effort to grow in holiness and perfection.

Happy Easter!