Feeling the Pull of Easter

Dear Friends,

There’s a story about Easter I have been carrying in my heart for years. I used it only once in a blog. That was 2015, so I’m due to tell it again, so you can hear it and experience it’s meaning.

A German seminary professor of theology was fond of vacationing on the moors of England. On one such trip, he walked along a path still thick with morning mist. The professor came upon a group of cherry-cheeked boys and girls, gazing upward. One child was working the string of a kite.

“You can’t see it,” the professor said, announcing the obvious. “How do you know it’s there?”

With the exasperation that children have for clueless adults, a little voice piped up: “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

Back in Germany, refreshed from his holiday, the professor took up the task of shaping the theological thought of the seminarians in his class. Seminarians, by their nature, loved to challenge their teachers. His class excelled in this way.

On one particular day, the topic under discussion was how to convey the deep abiding truths of Christianity in homilies for the great feasts.

“Take Easter,” one earnest student began. “What do we say? How do we make people know it’s real?”

Remembering the children with the kite on the moors, the professor replied very simply: “We know because we feel the pull of it.”

On this “day which has no sunset,” as the 12th century abbot Guerric of Igny, describes it, do you feel the pull of Easter?

~ Sister Joan Sobala