Dear Friends,
This year, Holy Week found the Jewish calendar coinciding
with ours, with Muslim Ramadan not far behind. A significant convergence of
the special holy days of the People of the Book. Yet, news outlets recently
reported that, in the United States, less than 50% of the American public would
be gathering to mark these important spiritual feasts.
Some will say COVID-19 has blown us off course. Others point
out that there was a growing decline in religious observance long before that.
Lack of interest? Lack of belief? Individualism? We can speculate all we want.
Let me ask the Catholic/Christian readership of this blog: Do
you wish to keep Holy Week and Easter at the heart of your faith and
practice? I’d love to have you write some comments at the end of this blog
that I share in future blogs. If you need to prime the pump, here are a few
thoughts to build on.
Before the Resurrection of Jesus, the operative word beneath
the narrative of these holydays was “closed”: closed minds and closed
hearts did not recognize Jesus for who He was, the closed door kept Him out,
the closed tomb said all was over. Only with the Resurrection of Jesus did
people open their minds and hearts, their arms and their future to the
seemingly impossible. Christ, who was truly dead as Good Friday ended, was
truly alive on the third day. How do we become open to this remarkable reality
of God in our midst today?
Jesus was the same yet different, transformed through death
to new life. How do we come to be open to His presence today?
His presence today not in some distant future. As the farmer
and New Testament Greek scholar, Clarence Jordan, told us “on the morning of
the Resurrection, God put life in the present tense, not in the future. He gave
us not a promise, but a presence, not so much an assurance that we shall live
someday but that He is risen today.”
The Risen One is with us as we plow ahead, tired of the
miseries, the isolation, the suffering of this last year. Do we feel the
pull of it? To capture the meaning of this phrase “feel the pull of it,” go
back to last week’s blog to grasp the meaning of Easter – not intellectually
understood but held in our hearts as true and real.
Can we touch Him today, risen as He is? How do we touch Him?
Mary Magdalen wanted to touch Him as He was before He died, but she couldn’t.
Thomas was invited to touch His wounds but found that he didn’t need to in order
to believe. Do we want to touch the Risen Christ? How do we do that?
On Good Friday, as they were dying, Jesus turned to Dismas,
the good thief, to accept him. Jesus wanted Dismas. Jesus wanted then, and even
now, excluded people. Today, in our land, they are Asian Americans, black, brown
and red people, gay and transgendered people. We say we are one with the Risen
Christ. Do we accept the excluded?
Easter is a threshold feast. We need to step into it
and step over it to find the Risen Christ on our side of history. May I hold
your hand as we step across to Christ and his people awaiting us?
~Sister Joan Sobala
