Hopefully every adult grows into an awareness of who they really are. Who is the personality that other people know and have to deal with on a daily basis? This is hard work because the hardest person to get to know will always be yourself!
Getting to know yourself is hard work for the individual. The Church getting to know the Church is equally hard work!
In the Church we have such a high need of security (we need to have the doctrines of our faith clearly mapped out) but we are weak in listening to what the folks actually know and how they practice their faith. How is all this religion-stuff actually lived out in practice?
Almost a century ago serious students of the Scriptures recognized that the very center of our faith is the death and resurrection of Jesus. But in actual fact so much attention and energy was focused on the suffering and death of Jesus that the resurrection was almost an afterthought. On practical terms the resurrection of Jesus did not occupy sufficient energy in the life and prayer of the average believer. We were people of the cross, but only weakly, people of the resurrection.
The Second Vatican Council (ended in 1965) called us to make the death and resurrection of Jesus the center of our faith, our liturgy and our prayer. These are not two unconnected events, but like your physical hand, two sides of the same mystery. They must always be held together.
We are working to re-establish Easter as the central, three-day festival our redemption. Like all good celebrations it takes a lot of energy. When parishioners say they are tired at the end of the Easter Vigil, I caution: “If it is meaningful, you will be tired!”
We must be recaptured by the resurrection of Jesus. This is the great work of God revealing and sharing the very Son of God with us. The resurrection was an actual historical event (it happened during the night) but it is a revelation that must now happen in the lives of each one of the believers (the present moment). The very person and salvific power of Jesus, Son of God, must now happen in each one of us!
We in the West (Catholic and Protestant) have grown up with almost all our focus on the suffering and death of Jesus. We are Christians of the cross. But we are weakly embraced by the outpouring and revelation of the risen Jesus. The resurrection is all about the Son of God being given to the people (i.e., the disciples). We must now become the living continuation of the mystery of Christ in our time and our place.
This means that we must work hard to make the fifty days of Easter (Easter to Pentecost) as meaningful and as spiritually enriching as Lent has been. This is an entire season to deepen the mystery of the resurrection within the people of the Church. This process will take another two hundred years but we are on the right tract to creating a balanced understanding and practice of the death and resurrection (the Paschal Mystery) of Jesus Christ.
Have a great Holy Week! We have a lot of work to do!
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