A Sunday Thought About Taking This Easter Season Seriously

On this Sunday in our glorious Easter Season, a reminder that this holy season lasts 50 days: 40 from Easter through the Ascension; another 10 until Pentecost. Today is only the third Sunday after Easter Sunday. There's a lot more Easter to go!

Are we taking this holy season seriously? Or have we slipped back into a kind of "same old, same old" mentality? 

Father Willie Doyle's diary notes which preserve his thoughts and experiences of Easter Sundays during his life. This particular note reveals his missionary zeal. He never ceased to reach out to those who needed hope despite their current state. Here's a remarkable note that demonstrates that zeal and his dedication to bringing others to Christ. It was written on Easter Sunday 1908, during a mission in Yarmouth: 

I had a strange experience which seemed providential. In my wanderings through the slums I came across by accident an old woman over ninety who had not entered a church for long, long years. ‘I have led a wicked life,’  she said, ‘but every day I asked God to send me a good friend before I died and I feel now my prayer is heard.’ The next day I came back and heard her Confession, and brought her Holy Communion on Easter Sunday. As the tears streamed down her old withered face she said, ‘Oh, Father this is the first happy day of my life, for I have never known what happiness is since I was a child.’ I could not help feeling that the opening of heaven to that poor sinner was a reward more than enough for all the long years of preparation now passed.

While we may not be missionaries as was Father Willie, we still share with him a love and devotion to Our Lord - right? And this love and devotion cannot help but overflow during this Easter Season - right?

But in case we fall short here, we have this Sunday in Easter to recharge our spiritual batteries as we continue through this glorious Easter Season. As is true with all of us sinners (and we, as the saints themselves acknowledge, are all sinners), we may not always be at the top of our spiritual game. We may fall short of the love and devotion we know we ought to have for Our Lord. We may fail to elevate our souls as might be appropriate during this greatest of holy seasons. 

But what of it? We know that one of the marks of the saints is not necessarily that every thought, word, and deed of their lives was perfect, that they never fell short, that they never fell, period. The mark we must acknowledge is that they always picked themselves up and began again. Always.

And so can, no, must, we. There is no other way for us to strive to become saints. And there is no better time to develop this holy habit than during this Easter Season.

We might think specifically of Our Lord's Resurrection as the ultimate example and thus motivation topick yourself up and begin again. What more could He have endured than His Passion and Death. ‘The pain suffered by our Lord,’ says St. Thomas Aquinas, "was the greatest pain possible in this life." The intensity of it was the result of His having taken upon Himself the sins of the whole world, from its creation until the end - whenever that may come; in other words, every sin of every created person past, present, and future.

Add to this Father Edward Leen's words: "The sufferings of Christ, intense in themselves, were inconceivably bitter because of the extreme sensitiveness of Him Who suffered. The exquisite sensibility of His Sacred Body added a peculiar intensity to the sufferings of the Savior. The finest and most delicately  balanced nature that we could imagine would be blunt of perception compared with the Christ."

And carrying all our sins, He picked Himself up and began again with His Resurrection - to show us that even we can, despite our sins, look forward to eternal happiness some day. Our Easter Season comes to us now to allow all this to sink in and become the center, the entire focus, of our lives now until the day we die. 

If we are to take Easter seriously, we can only do so by taking our spiritual life seriously.  

Seriously.

 

Happy Easter!