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The Joy of Easter

How is your Easter going? Are you still celebrating the joy of this season?

Sometime I think we, as a Catholic church, don’t put enough emphasis on the Easter season. The same is true of the Christmas season. We put so much emphasis on the preparation, the repentance, the waiting of the purple seasons. We fill our calendars to the brim with ways to engage Lent, to dive in and dig deep. And then the Day comes – Easter, Christmas – and it’s over and wrapped up like a wedding day. No more programing. No diving in or digging deep together. Just life as usual, as if nothing happened. As if nothing changed. As if we hadn’t changed.

That’s not the way it is supposed to be, right? Lent is not more important than Easter. But the way we engage the two would suggest that it is. We only “do” Lent for the purpose of better “doing” Easter. We practice repentance to allow our hearts and spirits to more fully embrace the fullness of Easter…that is all seven weeks of it. Easter is almost twice as long as Lent. So why do we treat it like it is a single day?

It is the fifth week of the Easter season, but I invite you, challenge you even, to look at how well you are celebrating – or not celebrating – the Resurrection. You have a few more
weeks to go. What is something you can do to reignite the joy of Easter and celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death? What were the practices you took up for Lent? How have you seen a change in yourself through those practices? How can you carry that transformation forward throughout the Easter season and beyond?

Jesus, Make Yourself at Home!

In October of 2023, I attended the Madison Eucharistic Congress with other members from St. Dominic. I was able to see and pray with the Eucharistic Miracles from around the world on that occasion, a work that was researched and published by Blessed Carlo Acutis. How fitting that this coming week, we will have the exhibit available here at the parish for us to meditate on and be drawn into the miracles of Jesus revealed in his body and blood. Carlo died at the age of 15, and was beatified in 2020. A first class relic of Blessed Carlo will also be available for us to venerate and reflect on this young man’s life and love for Jesus. May he become one of your new favorite “saints.”

While I was in Madison and was praying in front of his relic, I was drawn to one of his prayers: “Jesus, make yourself at home! Live within me as if it were your own dwelling!”  I meditated a long time on this reality, ‘live within me as if it were your own dwelling.’ How insignificant and unworthy I felt. I found myself in tears realizing the gap of this reality. This amazing God within me. How can this God come into my life, unworthy, sinful, doubting, imperfect, weak, and broken as I am? 

Lent is the time we look back at the past year, acknowledge our brokenness, and allow our Lord into our hearts, to heal us and open ourselves to His love. His love is what we often run from because we don’t feel worthy. We don’t want to look at our flaws and sins, our failures and wrong doings. It is tough to acknowledge where we failed. Yes, it is in our brokenness that room can be made for repentance that can bring us home to His heart. It is confusing to believe that it is in our brokenness that God can work in and through our lives. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians we read, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ.” (Eph. 2: 4-5).

What a great hope we have that our Lenten journey can bring us to new life by “cleaning out the crud in our lives.” Friends, let us make this Lent a new season for our souls. How can we do this? Come to Jesus in the Mass, in adoration, in silent prayer, and in the sacrament of reconciliation. When receiving Him in the Eucharist, allow Him to penetrate your heart, to change and renew you in His love. His love will transform you. Then together with Blessed Carlo, our prayer can be, “live in me as if it were your own dwelling.” Blessed Lent my friends.  Blessed to journey with you to His heart.

The Hidden Room

Whenever I am invited over to a house I am always reminded of the times when my family had the priest over for dinner. I remember how special it was that Father so and so was going to be sitting at our table. I also remember how much work it could be as well. While the visit itself was fun, the preparation for the priest’s visit was a different matter. Growing up in a family of seven, our house was not the most organized. This meant that afternoons were spent with every child’s favorite past time: chores and cleaning.

On the day of Father’s visit, all hands were on deck to make the house presentable. As the hours ticked by, my siblings and I used every trick we knew to excuse ourselves from the task at hand (much to the frustration of my parents), until time inevitably began to run out.

With plenty of toys and hobbies still spewed throughout the house, my Mother would give one final desperate command: “throw everything in the bedroom”! It was an easy, efficient, and effective solution. When Father arrived he walked into a clean and put together household. Little did he know that behind a certain closed door lay a chaotic mess.

I am sure many families share this particular experience (which is why I don’t go opening closed doors during visits), but all of us can also relate on a personal level as well. How many of us do exactly this in our interior life? How many of us, worried about the mess in our emotional, spiritual, physical house, throw it all into a hidden room of our heart? How many of us hide our mess even from God?

I know I do. I want people to see me as an organized, well put together person. In a strange way I even want God to see me in this way. So I hide my mess, I stressfully gather it all up and throw it in a separate room to be dealt with later. The problem is, I often do not deal with it later and I keep piling the mess even higher. Even more ironic, it’s the houses that are not the most organized which make me feel right at home, partly because it makes it all more human.  

God did not become man in the person of Jesus Christ because we are organized and put together. God became man because we are a mess. The more we hide our mess from him the less he can help us truly clean up. So I guess the question is: what mess are we hiding from God?