Daily Reflection:
Easter Vigil, Saturday, April 11
This is my homily for our Easter Vigil.
We gather together to day to celebrate the Easter Vigil…an unprecedented Easter Vigil, one like none of us have ever celebrated before…
No Blessing of the Easter fire, no Blessing of the Paschal Candle, no Elect, no Candidates, no Sacraments of Initiation, no Baptisms, no Receptions into the Catholic Church, no Confirmations, no First Eucharists…no Sprinkling of Holy Water, and only Spiritual Communion for the Faithful of the Church…
But we have the Exsultet, one of the most beautiful and meaningful Prayers of the Church, we have the Renewal of our Baptismal Vows, and we have the priests at the altar presiding and praying on behalf of our people…
We persist…we continue in faith and trust…we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and we celebrate the new life, the new hope, and the new beginnings that His Resurrection have made possible for all of us…
And we do so, while we are still in a tomb, the tomb of the Coronavirus, awaiting the call from God, when all is safe, “to come out”… “to come out” and experience the new life, the new hope, and the new beginnings that will be offered to us, and which we will celebrate with great joy…
How do we celebrate while still in a tomb? We take time this Easter to reflect upon our lives in the past…reflecting about those many times when we were in other tombs of death, and how, because of Jesus and his Death and Resurrection, we were freed, the stone was rolled back, and we came back to life, with new hope and new beginnings…
As we look back upon our past lives in these days and once again experience the many ways in which God, through Jesus, brought us back from the brink and pulled us, once again, into the center of life joining family and friends, and the communities in which we find ourselves…when we do this, we will be strengthened for this moment and this time…
In this tomb of the Coronavirus, we will still celebrate because we are mindful of what God has done in our past, and our faith gives us hope for what God will do for us in the future…
When we surrender to this reality, when we surrender to Jesus’ gift of sacrificial love, when we accept this gift, when we become sacrificial love for others in imitation of what God does for us, we help unleash the most powerful and transformational force for good in the Universe.
We are personally transformed and the little corner of our world is transformed as well.
We discover and experience this love in the midst of our daily sufferings, pains, and tragedies.
Because of God’s love, out of death, comes life!
And even in this moment, in this painful time in the Global Village, and in our lives, with great joy and trust, we can shout out “Happy Easter everyone!” "Happy Resurrection Sunday!”
--Fr. Mike
