Happy Easter everyone
And what a different Happy Easter it is for all of us this year.
We are still here, still breathing, still within our various bubbles thankful and grateful for so many things. Grateful for the gift of life, the gift of one another and for the gift of our faith. I know you will be marking the day in the best and most appropriate way you can.
You will be mindful too and praying for many people throughout the world whose Easter this year will be a sad time given the loss of life, illness and separation from loved ones that they are enduring. Even without this world’s pandemic, there are many who deal with immense suffering every day. Let’s hold them in prayer too.
Christ as he did for the disciples in the upper room breaks through into our bubbles and says to each one of us today ‘Peace be with you’. Don’t be afraid, I am here. Christ doesn’t enter a perfect little world but a world as it is. Our world with all its strengths and contradictions.
It is a very different Easter because under lockdown circumstances we are celebrating Christ’s resurrection from the dead. The stone has been rolled away and the body is no longer there. Christ has been liberated from the dead, freed, no longer held captive. He is alive. He can go from house to house, heart to heart to share the gift of his life with us. That life we share when we pray together, prepare food together, sing, laugh, cry, keep in touch and be human together.
The great feast of Easter is the promise of eternal life to which we look forward in hope and it’s the freedom from all those things that hold us captive, our constant failings, our worries and our fears. We have been won at such a great price. We can celebrate that anywhere and at any time. Lockdown can’t get in the way of that. However, I am sure you are like me looking forward in hope to when the lockdown will be over, and we will be able to get back to normality whatever that is going to look like. We simply need to wait and be patient a little longer for that to happen.
Our focus this morning is the Easter Candle, the symbol of Christ’s light and risen presence among us. The song I have chosen for today is ‘All in All’ from ‘Ignatian Inspiration . The life-giving presence of Our God is all around us. And this is our Easter Joy.
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