Alive in Christ

There are so many facets to this time of year: Spring, the end of Lent, the Triduum, Easter Sunday, and the Easter season it inaugurates, the approaching month of May with the end of school activities. And before you know it, summer arrives with surprising speed… it can almost make your head spin. I think part of this phenomenon is that the passage of time with its many activities can easily make us unaware of how quickly Spring arrives and how swift it passes.

I found this to be so true of the Lenten season – all of a sudden it was Ash Wednesday, and then Holy Week, and then Easter! What I find for myself is that I try to refuse to allow the passage of time to cause me to forget where I am at any one time, losing the holiness of the moments as they pass. I have to force myself to stop, to pray, and to spend much-needed time reflecting on the sacredness of each day, each week, each seasonal moment, and how God is asking me to focus on the journey such as it is at the time. Doing so then finds me deeply immersed in the place where God wants me to be, and to allow Him to speak to my heart about what He wants for me, what He desires of me.

I know, looking back as Lent approached this year, that I set before me certain spiritual goals that I had hoped to achieve, so that when Easter arrived I would discover that I am that much closer to the Lord than I was when ashes were sprinkled on my head. Some years we are more successful than others, but that only means that our journey is a constant in life and that once the Easter season begins, a new journey does too. “Good intentions” are not meant only for New Years or Lent. Such new spiritual goals, no matter what they are, should be a constant state of renewing our relationship with the Lord and moving on from there.

This is especially true of the Easter time, when we, as Christians look back over forty days of penance, prayer, and self-sacrifice and arrive at the joy that fills our souls with the profound awareness that Jesus is Risen, that the powerful celebration of Easter keeps our focus on the gift of eternal life He has given to us, and of the opportunity for another fifty days to renew our relationship with Him. And if such penetrates our prayer life, then it also penetrates our daily lives and keeps afresh for us the spiritual goals we made when the Lenten season began, and when it culminated in the hymns of “Alleluia” which fill the Easter time. It just makes you feel more fully alive – alive in Christ, and alive in the mystery of His love for us as we continue our journey.

May this be a powerful Easter season for you – and may your Easter journey this year not pass so quickly as for us to forget why we celebrate it at all!