April 15th, 2001 - Easter

"Happy Easter!"

(The Feast of the Passover of the Lord)

Why is it that this festival, a feast of the resurgence of life, seems to often to lead to the most pompous, the most triumphalist, the most BORING homilies of the year? Perhaps the reason is that homilists are reluctant to cope with the implications of Easter and substitute high flown and empty
rhetoric. Or perhaps they are unwilling to deal with the hints of
resurrection which are part of daily life, promises and foretastes of the ultimate resurrection. Easter did not happen just once in the past. It happens every day. Easter is not merely a harbinger of ultimate resurrection when life triumphs completely over death. It happens every day. Each of its experiences death and rebirth often. Today is the festival when all those "little" resurrections are brought together and integrated with the overarching resurrections, once and future, which are at the core of our faith.

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Once upon a time there was a terrible fight in a certain family. The father and the mother had slipped into the habit of low level nastiness with one another and were drifting apart. The children (teenagers) were routinely snarling at one another and at their parents. Sometimes they joined in the mean-spirited exchanges between the parents. No one left the house, there was no divorce nor even the talk of divorce --but there were lots of thoughts about it. What was once a happy and loving family, as families go, had turned into a battleground in which four armies were fighting, and not taking any prisoners. Then, the girl teen was in an auto accident in which her car was totally by a drunken driver. The other three rushed to the hospital and
found her in bed, covered with bandages, but able to smile weakly. I had one of those near death experiences, she informed them (what self-respecting teen in an auto accident doesn't have one of them) and God told me we're a bunch of geeks and we should stop fighting with each other. Now. So they all hugged one another and cried and promised they'd start over again. Now the family had new life and it was Easter.