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?