A note from Fr. Scott
“He is Risen!”
“Alleluia, Alleluia!”
Or the more common “Happy Easter!”
Greetings all for this celebration marking the Resurrection
of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.
We can all go back to eating candy or chocolate or whatever else we gave
up for Lent. We can turn in (and stop
saving) the coins and dollars for Operation Rice Bowl or any other worthy cause
we targeted through the Lenten portion of the Lent-Easter-Pentecost
season. We can relax and go back to our
normal routine before it was interrupted by extra prayers or Masses or Stations
of the Cross. We can have our fill of
meat on Fridays without the guilt.
Or maybe not.
Easter
promises us eternal life—Jesus was raised; we’ve been baptized into Christ
Jesus; we share in Christ’s resurrection; eternal happiness is ours. That’s the simplified version of how it
works.
However,
it’s not so simple.
Being
baptized into Christ Jesus means we are called to imitate Jesus in life. No, we are not called to be crucified and
we’re not called to work miracles that seem to defy nature, but we are called
to love God with our whole being, love our neighbor as we love ourselves, forgive
seventy times seven times (always), turn the other cheek, and help those in
need. (There’s more—Jesus did a lot of
teaching.)
The
point is that we must be Christ-centered all year long, not just during
Lent. That doesn’t mean we don’t have
our share of celebration and fun—Jesus went to a lot of dinners and parties and
the Easter portion of the Lent-Easter-Pentecost season is 50 days—but his words
and actions always reflected His relationship with His Father. Our words and actions must be a reflection of
our relationship with Jesus. That’s not
such an easy task in our world of today, when people prefer to focus on
short-term (earthly) pleasure rather than on long-term (eternal)
happiness. The search for earthly
pleasure is a self-centered endeavor; the search for eternal happiness is a God-centered
and other-people-centered endeavor.
Those
disciplines of Lent are apropos all year long because they help us focus on God
(prayer) and others (almsgiving) by reminding us (through fasting) that most of
our desires are wants and not needs. (We
survive very well without fulfilling our wants.) While the nature of Lent helps us focus on
those disciplines, there’s no reason why we can’t focus on them at other times
throughout the year. In fact, maybe we
have a need to practice those disciplines throughout the year, because they
assist us greatly in living a life centered in Christ.
And
that’s really what it means to be a Catholic Christian.
Easter reminds us that
our ultimate goal in life is a long-term goal: eternal happiness. It doesn’t happen when we center ourselves in
ourselves; it happens when we center ourselves in Christ Jesus and His command
to love God with our whole being and our neighbor as ourselves.
Have a Blessed and Happy Easter
season . . .
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