Technical difficulties have delayed today's post. Perhaps that was for the best. I started the morning feeling empty of words. It seems too soon to have run out of ways to say Happy Easter. Yet with Easter only a few days past, I already sense the joyful expressions of the season slipping away. Of course, all signs and symbols of Easter have been long removed from stores. If any remain they are stashed in haphazard piles on endcaps or stuffed less-than-delicately into shopping carts and parked in front of register lines in the hopes of catching the eye of thrifty shoppers or starry-eyed children.
Like the day after Christmas, we've already moved on to the next holiday. But if you happen through the doors of any Catholic church, you will find the beauty and blessedness of Easter lilies and spring flowers, white cloth and freshly blessed waters of Baptism to remind us that Christ is risen and the Easter season has only just begun. Perhaps we need to remember this even more this year. Times are difficult for many. While we are all poor and needy in our own ways, many more of us are feeling the pains of real hunger and thirst.
Lingering long on joy is certainly harder in tough economic times. But with this reality in mind, I take comfort in the words of Raymond Brown, a wonderful priest and Biblical scholar. He reminds us, "Even after the Resurrection we may have to carry the cross and experience suffering and rejection before we reach a real understanding of the Jesus in whom we say we believe."
This thought makes me realize how important it is to hold tight to these days of Easter. Don't let them fade too quickly into the fabric of another season past. They hold for us the tangible threads that make real, even in difficult times, the promise of the risen Christ, "I am with you always, until the end of the age." (Matthew 28:20)
Don't stop saying Happy Easter. The season continues!
[Source: Reading the Gospels with the Church by Raymond E. Brown. St. Anthony Messenger Press ©1996]
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