Easter Prayer

The Church’s liturgical life moves on, but believers within the Church have a hard time keeping their prayer rhythm in sync. The unfolding of the mysteries of redemption in the liturgical year is an invitation to explore our faith mysteries and allow ourselves to be embraced by them.

At the moment, we find ourselves during the Great Fifty Days of Easter. We have gathered our Hallmark cards after the holiday and the lilies and the spring flowers are a faint memory of Easter past. Sure enough, we are in the middle of the fifty days, but “great” to describe our prayer and celebration is a bit questionable. After a Lenten Season of preparing to celebrate the Easter mysteries, we soon return to our normal patterns of prayer.

After a Lent full of devotional and penitential practices and the solemnity of Holy Week with the Triduum with its Great Vigil, we have a difficult time sustaining our spiritual energy in prayer and reflection much past Easter afternoon. After the wonder of our annual incorporation into the death and rising of the Lord, the ordinary comes all too quickly.

Ritual Moments
Part of the challenge is our own culture which presents religious festivals as ritual moments. They are seen as specific times and events. They lack the traditional movement and thematic of a broader experience of the mysteries which we celebrate. Easter, for example, is more than a specific past event. Easter celebrates the conquering of sin and death in the person of Christ himself. In faith we believe that this faithful movement and action of Christ continues into our present world and history. By remembering the past moment we are changed. In Christ we continually move from death to life and that is our energy and hope.

In the actions of the community of believers we see the transformation of our times. Those chosen for baptism and confirmation are presented in Lenten scrutinies as searching for God in the scriptures and in the sacraments of the Church. At the Great Vigil, those chosen are baptized as they pass through the waters from death to life. They come out alive and energized by the Spirit in Confirmation. They are so changed that they find new identity in Christ at his Eucharistic Table.

This is permanent transformation in grace and in their way of life.

Why these extra ceremonies throughout the Easter Season? Throughout the season we continue to baptize children and adults. Children are fully incorporated into the Church. Adults are baptized and confirmed. The Church is made new because believers have discovered Christ anew in their lives.

First Communion
Children will be sealed in their initiation into the Body of Christ by their First Communion. Literally hundreds of children will come forward within the faith community. They are intensely joined to Christ and to other believers in the Church. They walk forever in new hope and in new life.

Rituals are more than one day and one pattern of liturgical actions. Rituals allow us to be touched by Christ and allow us to touch him. As members of his Body we continue in his presence and in our faithful love of each other in the Church. That becomes our new reality.

Storytelling
The rituals of Easter offer us new relationship in Christ. The mode of discovery of this graced friendship with the Lord is storytelling. The stories are told within the worshiping community. Believers tell the stories in words, in songs, in ritual action. We continue to know the Lord in the “breaking of the bread.”

Central to our reflection and prayer is the proclamation of the scriptures. We proclaim them and hear them first of all within the Sunday Assembly, which meets precisely because Jesus rose on that day from the dead. What we remember is that we have risen with him.

The Easter Season offers us the gospel stories of the resurrection, of the encounters of the disciples with their Lord, and of their eating and drinking with him. We read and pray in the Acts of the Apostles of how the community received and celebrated those stories. We see how the early Church grew in the Lord’s presence and by the action of the Holy Spirit. These stories become our stories. Easter Day may be passed, but our Passover from death to life in Christ is everyday and every moment into tomorrow. That’s what the Great Fifty Days of Easter are about.

CDH