Getting to the Point: Easter

Showing posts with label Easter. Show all posts

Monday, March 28, 2016

This Week in Madonna House - March 20-28

Christ is Risen, alleluia! Truly, He is Risen, alleluia! Such is the refrain ringing through the chapels, dining rooms, highways and byways of Madonna House the past two days. It is Easter, and we are celebrating.

Celebration for us means... well, pretty much what it means for anyone anywhere. A little bit of time off from work. Nice food. Decorations. And beautiful, beautiful liturgies done up with maximum solemnity and care.

Getting here was, of course, a lot of work on many levels. Holy Week in Madonna House is a time of great beauty, profound traditions, and an awful lot of elbow grease and sweat on the brow. Palm Sunday we began with our usual procession from the dining room of St. Mary's to the chapel, with banners and candles and cross. All crowding into the foyer in front of the chapel until we sing those magic words, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, lift up your gates and sing..." and the doors fling open and we all stream into the church, symbol of the heavenly Jerusalem, led by Christ in the person of the priest.

The three weekdays of Holy Week all had their own busyness and special quality. Monday was our communal penance service, always a very precious time for us, when the whole community together enters into the mercy of God in a very basic and elemental way. Tuesday, many of us went to the Chrism Mass in Pembroke to celebrate the mystery of the sacramental priesthood and the blessing of the oils with our local bishop, Michael Mulhall, and the larger diocesan church. Every year, for me, this event has deeper meaning and import.

Wednesday evening we all gathered together to dye the Easter eggs which feature as part of our post-Vigil festivities. Our handicraft people have managed to develop ways of egg dying that ensure really beautiful eggs no matter the talent or lack thereof of the dyers. I have absolutely no skill in this matter, so stick to a form of tie-dying that yields very nice results. Others use a drop-pull method involving melted crayons on spoons mounted over candles and... well, it sounds a bit weird when I put it that way but the results are remarkably good.

Of course there is ferocious activity in the kitchen, the handicraft, the library, the laundry all through these days, to prepare for the Sacred Triduum.

Which began on Thursday with our 'Supper of the Lamb', a simply gorgeous ritual meal (not a Seder supper, but influenced by that Jewish sacred ritual), where the farmers process in a whole lamb, roasted, to make very visible and tangible Christ the Lamb who was slain. Readings and prayers taken from the Office and the Gospel of John bring home the sacred importance of the day, and a simple (but delicious) meal of lamb, bread, and wine, links together the Eucharistic mysteries with the agape love of the community.

I was the celebrant of the Mass that evening, and had the privilege of washing the feet of six of my MH sisters as well as six of my brothers, that particular rubric having changed this year.

Good Friday brought us hot cross buns for a simple breakfast, the traditional 'clacker' replacing the bells that normally signal the beginning and end of meals, said bells being a symbol of joy that is muted on that day. The afternoon service was one familiar, I am sure, to all readers of my blog. I myself was out in a parish on the Quebec side of the diocese for it--other priests were out helping in parishes as well for various liturgies.

Friday evening we had the Burial of Christ service, the Jerusalem Matins of the Eastern Church--a rich and beautiful service in which the lamentations of grief and loss yield slowly to the dawning hope of the resurrection, but still in a mode of solemnity and sober reflection.

Saturday morning at Lauds this mingling of sadness and hope continued as we sang the Byzantine hymn, "The Lord awoke as one asleep, and arose, saving us," a favourite moment for many of us in our movement towards Pascha.

The Vigil had the special gift this year of one of our guests making her profession of faith and being confirmed in the Catholic Church. We opt to go big for the Vigil--all the readings are read, and we take our time with every last rite. So it lasts about two and a half hours, and we settled into our post-Vigil collation around midnight, cracking together the eggs we had dyed a few days previously while proclaiming 'Christ is Risen! Truly He is risen' to one another. And then... the feasting began, and it hasn't stopped yet.

Yesterday and today (and tomorrow, too!) are days off, with nothing on the schedule but evening Mass followed by supper. People can sleep, go for walks, play games, hang out... eat when they want and do as they please within reason. In MH, where our ordinary life is very good and wonderful, but also very regimented, this is the great modality of festivity for many of us, to be a little less scheduled like that. And eating lots and lots of good food, especially the koolitch bread and paska spread that are our special Easter foods.

So that's most of it--all of the above of course required enormous work from everyone, so we are all a bit tired, but very joyful in it. The weather added a wrinkle, as we were hit by that same massive snow and ice storm that most of North America got, on Holy Thursday. The days since have been favourable to the sugar bush, and so many have gone up there on the days off to help collect the huge runs of sap that are flowing daily right now.

And that's that. Please be assured that as we go about all these most festive and joyful days of the year, our prayers and love are offered up for the world, and particularly for those suffering at this time. May Christ's Resurrection be in the end victorious in every human heart and win the world to the Gospel of mercy and love.

Saturday, March 26, 2016

The Meaning of Easter

And... since I seem to be in a bit of a 'bloggity' mood right now, here is the homily I will be sharing with the good folks in Otter Lake QC this evening, for your Easter reflection:

This liturgy, so filled with beautiful words, does not perhaps require a very long homily from the celebrant. We have heard, through the proclamation of the great Exultet, the Easter Proclamation that I was privileged to offer you (and I hope my French was not so poor that you were unable to understand me!), through the beautiful readings of this liturgy, and through above all the Gospel of the Resurrection of Christ, we have heard the message loud and clear: Christ is risen from the dead, and the world is reborn, recreated, in the glory and light of his Resurrection.

But the question may emerge at this point, after all this verbiage, all these words presenting us with this proclamation. Namely, ‘so what’? What difference does it make? What’s it about, really? Is it just a fabulous story of some amazing thing that happened 2000 years ago? Did it really happen at all? Is it just some sort of symbol of something or other – new life or some such thing? And what’s it all got to do with us – what practical difference does it make in your life and my life and the life of the world in the year 2016?

Well it is an amazing thing that did happen 2000 years ago, that’s for sure. And it is deeply symbolic as well – the Resurrection of Jesus has profound meaning for you and for me and for everyone, whether we always know it or not. But it is more than a symbol, and more than a historical event. It seems to me that the one word that sums up what Easter means for us, the difference Easter makes for us, is the word ‘hope’. Because of Easter, because Jesus died and then rose from the dead, really, we have hope. Real hope. Indestructible hope. Hope that endures not only for this life, but beyond it into eternity.

And hope is the deciding factor in the world. Those who have hope are the ones who can make the real difference in life, can make the kinds of choices we need to make if, in the year 2016, love is to overcome hate, and light is to overcome darkness.

It is hope that gives us the strength to do this. And the Resurrection of Christ gives us hope. How? Because in this resurrection, into which we enter and have a share in by baptism and persevere in by the life of grace nourished by the sacraments and by faith, we know that death is not the end of the story.

Every human life is a story; every human being has a story to tell. Some stories are happy and prosperous and filled with sunshine and laughter; other stories are filled with tragedy and sorrow. But all human stories seem to have the same ending, regardless, and that ending is the grave. Seemingly.

But the Good News is that there is One who has entered the grave, entered the tomb, and found the way out again. Because He is man, He could die, and did die. Because He is God, He conquered death and rose, and is alive. And He is here in this Church. And we eat His Body and drink His blood, and He lives in us. And because of that, when we die, our story does not end, but a new story begins, a story that has no end, and is all joy and beauty and glory.

And so we have hope. And because of that hope, we can persevere in love, in charity, in kindness, in goodness, in living the Gospel of mercy to the very end of life no matter what it may cost us. Because life for us is not a dreary trudge towards the grave, but is lived bound for heaven and for eternal joy and glory, we can lay down our lives for one another and for the world, like Christ did. And it is this kind of love and mercy and generosity that the world needs so desperately in the year 2016, and it is this love and mercy and generosity that the Risen Lord Jesus wishes to give us this Easter. Amen.

Happy Easter

Well, after the long Lenten fast from blogging, I will indeed be resuming the regular blog shortly. I may not quite get to the 'week in review' tomorrow, though, it being Easter Sunday and all.

But I just stumbled across a blog post from four years ago that spoke to me today. I am shortly off to celebrate the Easter Vigil in a parish on the Quebec side of the diocese, celebrating it in both our official languages, to boot.

So the words of the Easter Exultet, the great proclamation of the feast, are much in my mind these days, and here is something I wrote about it a few years ago, reprinted in full in this post. Here it is, and a most happy and joyful Easter to you all:

I would like to add one more thought about light and illumination. On Easter night, the night of the new creation, the Church presents the mystery of light using a unique and very humble symbol: the Paschal candle. This is a light that lives from sacrifice. The candle shines inasmuch as it is burnt up. It gives light, inasmuch as it gives itself. Thus the Church presents most beautifully the paschal mystery of Christ, who gives himself and so bestows the great light. Secondly, we should remember that the light of the candle is a fire. Fire is the power that shapes the world, the force of transformation. And fire gives warmth. Here too the mystery of Christ is made newly visible. Christ, the light, is fire, flame, burning up evil and so reshaping both the world and ourselves.

“Whoever is close to me is close to the fire,” as Jesus is reported by Origen to have said. And this fire is both heat and light: not a cold light, but one through which God’s warmth and goodness reach down to us.

The great hymn of the Exsultet, which the deacon sings at the beginning of the Easter liturgy, points us quite gently towards a further aspect. It reminds us that this object, the candle, has its origin in the work of bees. So the whole of creation plays its part. In the candle, creation becomes a bearer of light. But in the mind of the Fathers, the candle also in some sense contains a silent reference to the Church. The cooperation of the living community of believers in the Church in some way resembles the activity of bees. It builds up the community of light. So the candle serves as a summons to us to become involved in the community of the Church, whose raison d’être is to let the light of Christ shine upon the world.

Let us pray to the Lord at this time that he may grant us to experience the joy of his light; let us pray that we ourselves may become bearers of his light, and that through the Church, Christ’s radiant face may enter our world (cf. LG 1). Amen.

Easter Vigil Homily, 2012

Reflection – We were all quite happy this year to see the bees restored to the new English translation of the Exultet. The light of the candle is once again “fed by melting wax, drawn out by mother bees to build a torch so precious.”

What an extraordinary image this is, what a poetic genius the anonymous Latin author of this hymn was, and what a powerful interpretation Pope Benedict gives it in this Easter homily.

When you look at the Paschal Candle in your church, do you think of it as a summons to become involved in the community of the Church? I have to admit, that thought has never remotely crossed my mind… but it will now.

‘This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine…’ That’s a catchy and very sweet song, but the theology in it is lousy, you know. The light is not mine. It would be better to sing ‘This little wax of mine, I’m going to let it burn.’ Or, ‘This little life of mine, I’m going to let it die….’ so that Christ’s life in me may shine out.

And that all our little waxes may melt together to create, not just flickering flame that burns for a minute and then dies, but a torch, a fire, a blazing firebrand illuminating the night of the world not for a minute but for millennia. This is the Church.

Each of us is a ‘mother bee’ (yes, I know that only the queen bee is literally a mother in the hive), bearing in our lives that little bit of wax, that little contribution of sacrificial love that goes into the Candle. To each of us, in ways impossible to understand, predict, or control, the light and fire of Christ comes. We grow warm, we melt, our lives are taken up into this light and fire. We become part of the light of Christ shining into the darkness. This is our Christian faith; this is Christianity.

I was serving at a retreat this past weekend where a speaker challenged the retreatants, “What does it mean to be Catholic?” My own answer, which I gave in my homily yesterday, was that it means we believe that Jesus is alive, that He gives His life to us by the gift of the Spirit, and that this life given to us is one of love and mercy for the whole world.

This little light of His – I pray that it may shine, may it shine, may it shine, may it shine. There – I fixed the theology, even though I ruined the rhyme. Can’t have everything.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Our Plan, and God's Plan

Shout for joy in the Lord, O you righteous! Praise befits the upright.

Give thanks to the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings!

Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.

For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.

He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

and by the breath of his mouth all their host.

He gathers the waters of the sea as a heap; he puts the deeps in storehouses.

Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him!

For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing;

he frustrates the plans of the peoples.

The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,

the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!

The Lord looks down from heaven; he sees all the children of man;

from where he sits enthroned he looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth,

he who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds.

The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.

The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue.

Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him,

on those who hope in his steadfast love,

that he may deliver their soul from death and keep them alive in famine.

Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.

For our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.

Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us, even as we hope in you.

Psalm 33

Reflection – Our Monday Psalter has brought us to a happy place where the psalm we have reached is most suitable to the liturgical season we are in. I would have hated to have to write about a psalm of lamentation or great distress when the Church’s liturgy is calling us to rejoice in the Lord’s victory.

Well, here we are, and here is God’s victory. I haven’t written about Easter yet, except for the news roundup of how we did it in MH this year. It is good to reflect on it from this angle of Psalm 33. I especially like the part ‘he frustrates the plans of the people. The counsel of the Lord stands forever.’

The human plan for God was to kill Him and be done with Him forever—to be able to write our own story, make our own way, be saved in the way we chose to be saved, decide for ourselves what is what and what will be.

This is the human plan, although we usually dress it up under a hundred fair-looking costumes. Our plan is ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ God’s plan is a simple one: ‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling on death by death, and on those in the tombs lavishing life.’

And this is the victory of God over the world and over you and me—not a victory that destroys us, but certainly a victory that destroys our rebellion against Him, our self-willed autonomy and self-determination.

We are not self-determined, which really means self-limited, self-defining, self-enclosed. God bursts forth from the tomb, and God bursts forth from the tomb of our human smallness, the ‘place of the skull’ which we all carry around just above our silly necks. God was put to death in that place, but He rises and in rising shatters the limitations of human ideas and plans and purposes.

And the rapturous praise, the delight, the joy, the singing with ten-stringed harp—all of that good stuff is the only thing we can do, the only fit response we can have to this victory of God in the world. So—and I do realize this is a very simple and obvious word for the Easter season—let us remember to praise God this day, this week, these next weeks of the year until Pentecost wraps up the Paschal time, and beyond that to eternity. Alleluia.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

These Weeks in Madonna House - March 27-April 8 II

So much has happened in the past couple of weeks in MH that I couldn't cover it all yesterday. Mamie Legris' death and burial merited a post all to itself. But meanwhile there was Holy Week, Easter, and a whole host of related seasonal events.

On the work front, the farm is dominated by the bleatings and cavortings of baby lambs, the cutest little creatures God ever made. We are having an unusually good year with the lambs, with many triplets and even one set of quadruplets being born and enjoying a high survival rate. This is a reflection on the care and skill of our farmers who truly pour their lives into the work of feeding this family.

Speaking of pouring, the maple syrup season is underway, albeit slowly and hesitantly. It has been unseasonably cold so far, and the warm days needed for sap flow have for the most part failed to materialize. So we'll see - the likely thing is that it will be a short season as temperatures are going to sharply increase over the next week, which will make the trees bud out, at which point the sap no longer produces a palatable syrup.

The gardens are moving forward, however, with greenhouse lettuce being planted along with other greenhouse plants. The winter bush work of harvesting trees for firewood and lumber is over--now comes the long work of moving, splitting, stacking, filling wood sheds, and so forth that takes up a lot of our men's time.

But all of that is mere backdrop to the real 'work' of these days which was the celebration of the holiest season of the year. Adding to the usual beauty of the Triduum this year was our having a catechumen among our guests, a young woman who was baptized and confirmed at our Easter Vigil. Her journey into faith, combined with Mamie Legris' journey into eternity, made our Easter here almost too rich to bear.

Those familiar with our MH customs know what we do here. On Holy Thursday we arrange our dining room tables into a 'banquet hall' format, with table cloths and festive centers, for the 'Supper of the Lamb'. This is not a seder meal, but does draw on elements of that Jewish ritual. At the beginning of the meal a whole roast lamb, mounted on a cross-shaped frame, is solemnly processed through the dining room to the strains of Psalm 136. There are readings and prayers, highlighting the theme of Christ the Lamb who was slain for us. Then we feast, richly and beautifully, on lamb, bread, wine--a deeply symbolic and most joyous agape meal. At the conclusion we read a long excerpt from the farewell discourse of Christ in John's Gospel. And of course we celebrate the evening liturgy that is familiar to every Catholic, complete with foot washing and solemn Eucharistic procession.

Good Friday we breakfast on hot cross buns, symbolic of the sweetness of the Lord's cross, and sup on a fast meal of plain boiled potatoes. We refrain from ringing bells (a loud 'clacker' is used in their place), lighting candles, and so forth. In addition to the 3:00 service of the Lord' Passion we celebrate the Byzantine service of the Burial of Christ, in which the lamentation over Christ's death repeatedly is broken by joy in his impending resurrection, and in which the epitaphion, or burial shroud, is carried in solemn procession through the chapel. At the end of this service all present go 'into the tomb' with Christ to await the resurrection, processing under the shroud and blowing out their lit tapers, as they are now with and in Christ and do not need their light any longer.

Holy Saturday is a day of furious activity in preparation for the feast (actually all the days are that, as the preparations for these meals and liturgies and the decorating of the house are monumental tasks). At Lauds we sing a beautiful Byzantine hymn - 'The Lord awoke, as one asleep, and arose, saving us,' that has such beauty and power in it that some of us consider it a high point of the liturgical year.

But of course the real high point is the Vigil itself. We seem to have opted in MH to do all seven Old Testament readings (as the priest celebrating the Vigil said in explanation, "What else do we have to do?"). The liturgy of baptism and confirmation was stunningly beautiful in its essential simplicity. I am the spiritual director of the woman who was baptized, so had the immense privilege of administering those sacraments to her - a moment of awe and sacred delight, about which I can say very little, really.

After the Vigil, we celebrated with a festive late night supper. Our Russian Easter foods of paska and koolitch (a sweet cheese confection and a special Easter bread) were consumed in large quantities (note my use of the passive voice in this sentence!). And so it went - a joyous happy celebration of Christ's victory and gift of new life.

The normal Easter days off were shifted on account of Mamie's funeral, and are occurring today and tomorrow. And... that's the news for now from here! I am travelling today and tomorrow to the great Canadian prairies, as I mentioned yesterday, but do plan to keep blogging as much as possible (it is a busy week coming up, mind you, so I make no promises). And to all of you a happy Easter Octave and a blessed season of light and mercy.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Out of the Fire and Into the Light

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time ' beats level.

Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

GM Hopkins, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Reflection – Another great poem from another great poet. If, as I said yesterday, I am a poetry geek, I am a Gerard Manley Hopkins uber-geek. Love the man.

He can be a difficult read, mind you, and this is a good example of that. This particular poem is in particular an Easter poem, as the title suggests. One can get a bit hung up in the verbiage, mind you, and lose the plot of it. Something about clouds, something about dough and crust (is he writing about pie? Now I’m all hungry…), then a residuary worm (whatever that is), and then Christ shows up and there’s something something something immortal diamond. Ummm… OK? I want some pie.

Well, let Fr. Denis explain it all for you. (Not really – ‘explaining’ a poem is one of the mortal sins of literature). What is this ‘heraclitean fire’ of the title? Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, who held that all of being was in a state of constant flux. Nothing stays the same; nothing abides through all the changes of nature. ‘You cannot cross the same river twice’ is the Heraclitean maxim, since the water of the river is different each time.

Hopkins first rejoices in the splendor of this Heraclitean fire, this pageant of unending change in nature, the roystering of the clouds, the endless variation of rain and sun, the glittering and gushing and run of water, the constant saturation of the earth and its drying up, the shaping and reshaping of all the natural order all around us—nature’s bonfire burns on.

But we do not rejoice quite so much when we see this Heraclitean fire burning up that one part of nature most dear to us—the human person, the mind and heart and soul of man himself caught up in transience and brought to an ‘enormous dark drowned.’ We rejoice in the pageant of nature and its seasons and moods, but ‘o pity and indignation’ when those seasons drag us down, when ‘time beats level’ the human person.

This bugs us, which is an interesting argument against atheistic materialism. Since it is the plain nature of everything to come in and go out of existence, to be born, to live, and to die… why does the prospect of human death bother us so much? How on earth did we randomly evolve in such a way that we rebel against the plain natural heraclitean order of things? Why do we say ‘Enough!’ to death which rules all material being, if we are not something besides a material being? How would we even think of such a thing?

At any rate, the poem takes this great muscular leap towards faith in Christ, in the resurrection, to there being something that happens after death and the residuary worm has its go at us. There is a flash, a crash, a trumpet and something shines forth, something not subject to the heraclitean tyranny of fire and destruction. Death presses us down, pushes us deeper and deeper into the earth, into the very pit of natural oblivion… and up rises the immortal diamond from the bowels of the earth—Christ, acting in us, making us what we are not since He became what He was not, the great hope and joy of humanity, the answer to the ‘Enough!’ of our objection to death.

The great thing is that God shares that objection with us, and has acted to carry us out of the fire and into the light, and that is the hope of Easter and its promise. (But I do still want some pie...)