A Sunday Thought About Easter in This Easter Season

We're in the midst of the Easter Season. It's the most glorious Season in our Liturgical Calendar. Today we want to simply remember where we are.

The world won't care about any of this. It's chugging along as if nothing special is going on. Just another weekend, another block of time to...well, to what? The secular world takes Sunday and makes it something to serve mammon; or maybe a time to drive kids to various sports and other activities; or a time to shop; or...well, you get the point.

That's not for us Catholics. We know our Sunday's are given for a purpose. And when those Sunday's fall in the Easter Season, the respite provided allows us to spend a little time remembering just what Our Lord did and continues to do for us.

His Sacrifice on Calvary opened the Gates of Heaven, sealed shut when Adam and Eve rebuffed Him in the Garden in their disobedience. Paradise Lost. But all that ended when our Lord offered Himself to His Father. His Sacrifice made that Great Reparation for that Original Sin. Every Sunday, we attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, where His bloody Sacrifice on Calvary is reenacted and offered to the Father in an un-bloody manner.

And it paved the way for the Resurrection - the source of our hope for eternal happiness. 

Christ rose from the dead. And in doing so we understand that this Rising awaits us too. When the day of our death arrives, our soul will leave our body and appear before Jesus to be judged. If our soul is in the state of grace, we may enter into our glorious eternal life right away. If it needs some further conditioning - to rid it of any of the leftovers of our sinful life (and we are all, after all sinners, right?), we may need a period of purification in Purgatory. (The third alternative is too terrible to mention here; and we should make it our business to stay as far from it as possible!)

When Christ rose from the dead He showed us that we too will rise, on the Last Day. Our bodies will somehow "reconstitute" (not a theological term for sure!) and be re-united with our souls. Somehow we will all be assembled before Our Lord Who will oversee the Last Judgment. Each of us now will go to one of two places with our body and soul reunited. Our whole self, the result of all our thoughts, words, and deeds while we lived on this earth, now faces its just reward.

Perhaps this attempt to "summarize" these truths of our Faith suffices to give us a moment of Easter recollection. In any case, let's take our Sunday in hand and make some Easter of it (as it it needed us!)

Let's not allow the secular world to erase or drag down this glorious Easter Season. As long as it lasts, let's do our best to keep it in our own way. 

It doesn't take much if being recollected throughout the day (and night) will keep us close to our Lord, our Risen Christ. If recollection has been a struggle (as it likely is for most of us), but we have the habit of keeping Sunday in some way as "The Lord's Day," then we can pause and recollect ourselves here and now, on this Sunday in the Easter Season. Whether today's summary suits our recollection or we have something different or, likely, better to meditate on for a few minutes, now is the time.

And if we can take our Sunday recollection as a spark to be more recollected during the week - especially in this Easter Season - so much the better.

 

Happy Easter!