“Knock knock!” “Who’s there?” Why are you looking here! The tomb is empty.”
“Christ is risen, alleluia alleluia!”
“He is risen indeed, alleluia alleluia!”
Happy Easter and blessings in this season of the Resurrection. The Paschal Greeting (above), whether in Greek, Latin, English or Spanish, should be on our lips these days. See if you can start every conversation this week with that Paschal Greeting! The Easter season also sees us welcoming the telling of Paschal Jokes. Hopefully yours are better than mine though!
When you attend Mass on Easter Sunday of the Resurrection be sure to bring home some of the newly blessed Holy Water with which you renewed your Baptismal Promises. Place the Holy Water in a beautiful crystal bowl or some other dignified vessel and set it at the center of your prayer table. You might also put around it your baptismal candle or photos of your and your children’s Holy Baptism or baptismal garment to be kept unstained (literally “immaculate”) for eternity.
Each of the days of Easter Week, known also as Bright Week or the Octave of Easter, offers us great opportunities to deepen our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and our immersion into that through the sacraments especially Holy Baptism. Almost twenty years ago I was working at a large parish and had just attended a workshop/retreat on fully implementing the RCIA (catechumenate or process for Christian initiation). I knew from personal experience and also heard many colleagues sharing their challenges with the period of mystagogy or seeking to understand the profound invisible mysteries conferred through the visible sacraments (see CCC 1074-1075). Neophytes, those newly initiated such as Josiah whom I was blessed to accompany at the Easter Vigil last night at St. James Cathedral, were in the standard practice expected to keep meeting every week for the whole Easter season just as they had been when they were preparing for initiation beforehand. But the neophytes themselves were telling us that they had been changed by their Christian initiation and they needed a new and different kind of ongoing formation. They no longer needed initiatory catechesis. At the same time I discovered, as I was reading early Church sermons contained in the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours and an old graduate school textbook, that this First Week of Easter was the original intense time of mystagogy. This honeymoon after the nuptials is the time to explore the many different dimensions of what the whole Christian community experienced by the rebirth of these new Christians at the Easter Vigil. I therefore developed an eight-day retreat during this Octave of Easter where each evening, beginning on Easter Sunday evening, the newly baptized and the whole community would gather at the font for Vespers and then share reflection on specific sacramental experiences. This was a chance for the community to hear from their newborns how God’s work through the sacraments of Christian initiation had not only changed the neophytes but also, through them, the whole Church sent into the world. The neophytes it turns out are uniquely positioned to share their good zeal with others! Families and parishioners would swap photos and talk about their life in Christ, informed by texts from the Liturgy of the Hours, and grow together in their new shared sacramental life. You can check out the full scope in “Going an Octave Deeper,” which I published in LTP’s Pastoral Liturgy, for points of reflection each evening in your own home perhaps around your own holy water stoup placed on your prayer table. https://tinyurl.com/56yxzkf2 The Octave of Easter (or Easter Week) concludes with Vespers on the Second Sunday of Easter, known as Quasimodo Sunday (from the Entrance), Thomas Sunday, Sunday for depositing the white baptismal robes in which the neophytes were clothed at the Easter Vigil, or, more recently, Divine Mercy Sunday. I look forward to celebrating something our living on Vashon anniversary with you at our Divine Mercy lamb roast next Sunday afternoon.
One of the hallmarks of the Easter season in the Liturgy of the Eucharist is that we hear for the next fifty days from the Acts of the Apostles as out First Readings. The Acts of the Apostles is the second volume in a two-part work by St. Luke (the Gospel of Luke being the first part of course). The Gospel of Luke tells us all that the Holy Spirit did from the moment of God becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary until the Ascension when God, now incarnate forever as the Resurrected Jesus Christ, opens the way for all human beings to be united with him. The Acts of the Apostles then tells the story of how that same Holy Spirit animates the early Church who becomes the extension of the incarnation of the Body of Christ to our world. Make some time during Easter to explore the Acts of the Apostles. I will be having my freshmen at O’Dea High School read through Acts guided by this series from The Bible Project. https://youtu.be/JQhkWmFJKnA Younger readers might enjoy the graphic novel continuation of The Diary of a Disciple: Peter and Paul’s Story. https://content.scriptureunion.org.uk/diary-disciple
The Acts of the Apostles and Eastertide teach us that the Church is not merely some human institution but is Christ’s mystical Body. Thus, when we talk about the Church we have, as we have in Christ, one that is fully human and fully divine. Ours is a Church filled with fallible people like me and yet is at the same time animated by the Holy Spirit who guards, guides, and protects her and makes her sacramental life efficacious. As we’re in the midst of our Partners in the Gospel I would propose that, if you’re interested in reimagining what a parish can be, how new life can rise in this Eastertide, and taking time to think and pray together how we can be more effective missionary disciples here on Vashon Island, check out Fr. James Mallon’s Divine Renovation: Bringing Your Parish from Maintenance to Mission (Twenty-Third, 2014) https://a.co/d/6ed8ZG4 Together with a few other parishioners I have been rereading this book to which I was first introduced almost ten years ago and in which I find a new paradigm of how to think about a parish, a plan which makes real, makes incarnate you might say, the vision of a resurrected, Eastertide parish that Pope Francis articulated so beautifully in his Joy of the Gospel (2013). I hope you’ll pick up a copy of Divine Renovation and, in this Easter Season in which we hear about the mighty deeds God did in the early Church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, that you’ll also listen for and imagine together how the Holy Spirit is working in our parish to reach even more people with the Good News of the love of Jesus Christ. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have been called as missionaries with stories to be told in what is, in effect, Acts of the Apostles chapter 2024. Our island community longs to experience that love of God which is so great that not even death could hold him bound. Filled with that same Holy Spirit let’s start a renovation, a Divine Renovation, and make real a love which is just waiting to burst forth here and now as we look toward a new Pentecost on Vashon!
In the online course I am currently teaching for Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life, “The Liturgical Year: What is it and why does it matter?” one text from which we’re reading a section each week is the Directory for Popular Piety which I’ve mentioned previously. Some years ago, when this Directory first came out from the Vatican, I was introduced through it to the Via Lucis a wonderful Easter devotion synthesized by Fr. Palumbieri. The Via Lucis (Way of Light) is a Stations of the Resurrection parallel to and continuing the story we marked in Lent with the devotion of the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) or Stations of the Cross. The Via Lucis traces these 14 stations throughout the Easter season: https://tinyurl.com/buecyfxd
A closing note on this Easter Sunday of the Resurrection: as you sit down this morning to enjoy your Hot Cross Buns and coffee (once again with cream and sugar!) or as you carve into that Easter ham, be sure to look back at your Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving not as something you leave behind but rather as a struggle through which God helped you so that you can now enter into this newness of life. Savor the goodness of that new life and walk freely into his Promised Land, a filled with rich and choice foods in which you can now truly delight. And not just chocolate and ham but tasting and seeing the goodness of God himself. Whatever table you’re at lift up your voice and with us sing, “Alleluia!” For “Christ is risen, alleluia alleluia!” Let your whole being echo in reply, “He is risen indeed, alleluia alleluia!”
iCasad 