A SONG FOR THE SEASON

 

FROM MY ARCHIVES: ONE HAPPY CAMPER AMONG HUNDREDS

OUTSIDE MY TENT IN TAIZE, FRANCE, IN 1972

age 28

 

Between 1971 and 1976, I made five trips to the Ecumenical Monastery in Taize (France) while I was serving as a part-time Campus Minister at Somerset Community College. Each week, there were hundreds of young people from around the world camping in the fields around the monastery. For me, it was like being at a religious "Woodstock" every summer for five years. Almost fifty years later, I am still friends with three of them from Belgium and Germany! 

UPDATE ON THE VOLCANO ON THE ISLAND OF SAINT VINCENT

The effusive eruption of the volcano continues characterized by the actively growing lava dome.

On 19 March the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre (UWI-SRC) monitored the volcano by drone to detect of physical changes of the new lava dome.

The central active vent continues to feed the growing lava dome in north-west and south-east direction. The extruded lava dome is currently about 105 m tall, 243 m wide and 921 long (511 m on 4 Feb) with a volume of 13.13 million cubic meters (5.93 million cubic meters on 4 Feb). Its length and volume is almost twice since the last update on 4 February.

The observations confirmed ongoing sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions concentrated on the top of the new dome as well as at the contact with the 1979 lava dome.

Source: University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre volcano activity update 22 March 2021

https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/soufriere-st-vincent/news/125255/Soufriere-St-Vincent-volcano-West-Indies-St-Vincent-twice-length-and-volume-of-new-lava-dome-since-l.html

I got this message this morning. 

"We are having earth movements at the moment so it's a matter of time! 

LIKE HIM, WE SHALL RISE OUT OF OUR TOMBS! ALLELUIA!

TO BE GIVEN AT 

SAINT JOSEPH HOME FOR THE AGED

Louisville, Kentucky

They have taken the Lord from the tomb and we don’t know where they put him.

John 20:9

Obviously, none of Jesus friends expected him to rise from the dead. In fact, they all assumed the grave had been robbed and the body had been snatched. Once the news gets out that the body was missing, everybody  runs around like chickens with their heads cut off! The word “ran” is used three times in this story.

Mary Magdalen got there first, not because she expected Jesus to rise and wanted to be there when it happened, but because she wanted to do what everybody else did after the funeral of a loved one. It was customary to visit the tomb of loved ones for three days after the body had been laid to rest. It was believed that for three days the spirit of the dead person hovered around the tomb, but then it departed because the body had become unrecognizable through decay in that hot climate. 

Jesus had died on Friday. By religious law, Mary Magdalen would not have been allowed to travel on Saturday, the Sabbath. That meant she had to wait till Sunday before she could make her first visit. She couldn’t wait till the sun came up, she got there before dawn. When she got there she was shocked to find the stone rolled back and the body gone! She concluded that the grave had been robbed. She ran back to town and got Peter and John out of bed. All three ran back to the tomb. John, being younger, outran Peter and got there first, with Peter soon following.  Before Mary Magdalen could catch up with them, they passed her on their way back to town to tell the others.

One by one, they began to believe that Jesus had indeed been raised from the dead, beginning with John and ending with Thomas. From their mouths to others’ ears, from their mouths to others’ ears, from their mouths to others’ ears, this story has been passed down to us some 2,000 years later.

This is the Easter story, but what does it mean and what does it have to do with us?

The point of Easter is not simply that life is sometimes troubling and difficult but that, by its very design, it needs to be troubling and difficult. This is because it is not ease but affliction that enables us to develop our very best. Those who grow the most are simply the ones who have weathered the most, endured the most, and struggled the most. And because such trial has been borne in the right spirit they have been strengthened, enriched, and deepened the most by it. Think about any of the heroes and heroines of the faith, and one will always identify persons for whom hardship, sacrifice, and pain are no strangers.  All breakthroughs are proceeded by breakdowns. No pain, no gain.

In short, we must not view death and resurrection as just an historical event from the past but as a life-giving way of living now. We are not here today to celebrate death and resurrection as an event that just happened in history, but death and resurrection as a way of living one’s life in the present.

People in recovery programs understand death and resurrection as a way of life. People who have unilaterally forgiven their enemies understand death and resurrection. Parents who have had to let go of their children understand death and resurrection. Anybody who has lost a job, only to find a better one understand death and resurrection. Anyone who has lost a spouse, only to find another chance at love, understand death and resurrection.

This Easter is special to me personally. Several times in the last 51 years of priesthood, I have gone from one of the worst years of priesthood to one of the best. The year I retired, five years ago at this time, I was in the pits. I knew I was in the pits, but I also knew that, if I would just hang in there, things would get better – and they did, in spades!

I always remember that engineer in Switzerland who designed a great tunnel between Switzerland and Austria. He proposed they did from both ends and meet in the middle, a risky method. When the day came when they were supposed to meet, but didn’t, he killed himself thinking that he had made a great mistake. On the very day of his funeral, the workers broke through and the connection was perfect! He gave up one day too early. An “Easter faith” means that you never give up, no matter how hopeless things appear to be at the moment.

So, in a nutshell, we are here to celebrate a way-of-living! By embracing difficulty, we can overcome it. And after a lifetime of embracing difficulties and overcoming them, we can even embrace our own deaths knowing that there is eternal life on the other side of even that!  Just as Jesus was raised, we who believe in him will also be raised.