Craig’s thoughts for Easter
Gentle reader,
We have reached the end of our Lenten journey. Forty days of fast, prayer, and soul searching. All culminating in a week of processions, meaningful meals, and agony and death. The week ends in what seems to be ultimate defeat, despair, and hopelessness. How often in our own lives have we experienced these same emotions. Everything seems black, bleak, no hope left. Hopefully not often, yet there comes times for all of us when we sink to a kind of overwhelmed hopelessness. For the young, for those suffering from depression or melancholia, for those who live in abusive situations; maybe these feelings come more often than we would want. And they are harder to deal with in those situations. The young have no experience to show them differently, those suffering from depression and melancholia are often having to overcome a chemical imbalance in their bodies, those in abusive situations often can see no way out. And in all of these cases, what is needed is an outside person or persons to intervene and help.
Easter offers a ray of hope for those in despair. When the day ends on Good Friday it seems there is no place left to go. Yet when the sun rises on Easter Sunday, the Son has also arisen. Despair turns to hallelujah. And the joy of Easter season is fifty days long, or rather it’s all year long, but we choose to celebrate it for fifty days just to show that it’s more important than Lent. Christians should be a people of joy and celebration ready to dance in the streets. Not somber, dour, killjoys ready to shake a finger at everybody else. We are to be a sign that joy, life, and celebration is God’s ultimate plan for his creation. She did not bring us into being and hold us in being so that we can wallow in misery and regret. Nor did she call us in our baptism to be the world’s ethical police. Always trying to force others to live like we think they ought to live. The book of Revelations ends not with everybody going to heaven. But instead with creation being made anew. A New Jerusalem, and a New kindom where people live together with all of creation in harmony and joy. We need to be that sign for those who are in despair, those who struggle everyday with the bleakness of life. We’re not going to convince them by preaching to them about all they’ve done wrong, on the contrary we’ll just make them even more depressed. But if they can see in our lives that slight but irreparable shimmer of hope. We can show them through our lives that even the blackest times are not endless. Share your joy, share your hope share your hallelujah!
Roll away the stone, see the glory of God
Craig
Saint Ann Catholic Church - Spokane 