The feast of Easter is the central event of the Church year, the solemnities of solemnities. Easter is every Christian’s birthday in the faith, even for those who were baptized on another day of the year. We mark it by beginning again, renewing the promises of our baptism.
As part of the celebration of this new life, what can we do to show this separation of old and the new? What new opportunities of life might Christ be presenting us?
In the face of struggles and the anxieties of family life, personal life, relationships, jobs, and everything else that seems to go wrong – may we grasp for hope. What hope can ground my life and give it purpose and direction?
As someone has pointed out, hope is a discipline. Like love, hope is born and developed in the gritty reality of daily circumstances; it must be chosen anew over and over again.
I believe that like love, the discipline of hope is a gift. On my own strength, I do not have the virtue and the willpower required to keep choosing to hope, but through my relationships with others and with my belief in resurrection and new life, God can keep encouraging and empowering me to make that choice.
The hope we celebrate today at Easter claims that redemption not suffering has the final word. Resurrection proclaims that by God’s power and Christ’s new life, all that is broken can be healed, all pain and suffering will find both relief and resolution, and all that seems meaningless will make sense. May this Easter bless us with a newfound hope – in ourselves, our family, our neighborhood, our workplace and in our world – where the small, humble work in the place we call home points to a much larger home where everyone and everything belongs.
God bless! Have a wonderful week and a blessed Easter!