In the Season of Seeing
The enriching season of Easter has come, and we are well into what is a 50-day journey to Pentecost. Lent brought us to Jerusalem and to the passion and death of Jesus on the cross. Easter has brought us to the Resurrection and to new life.
The Day of Pentecost comes on Sunday, June 5 and between now and then, we will use our Friday Reflection Blog Posts to illuminate the journey to Pentecost. Last week’s posting from Suzanne Glover Lindsay offered an insightful essay on the transitions that come with Easter and the Resurrection and serves as the introduction to the seven Friday Reflection Blog Posts to come in the next six weeks. We are calling this period the “Season of Seeing” and next week Bao Radcliffe will write about “seeing” as discovery.
In many ways, the church year is meant to sustain our commitment to our Christian faith and to enrich both our communal and our personal spirituality. The Easter season with its readings from scripture and the celebration of the feasts and remembrances of holy people offers us so much to think, wonder, and pray about. What’s more, the liturgies and special services associated with the eight Easter season Sundays and the celebrations of the lives of the saints and holy people (the Day of Pentecost, for example), offer many important reminders of how we are to live our lives in the here and now in the presence of God, in everything we do. There is so much for us to see, and to hear and remember.
It is often difficult to live in the present and recently, even more so. Henri Nouwen and Thich Nhat Hanh, among others, remind us that to live in the present, as difficult as it can be, is to live in the here
and now. And, of course, the “here and how” of the Easter Season is the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit and its capacity to “repurpose” our lives and lead us to reassess our spirituality. Theologian and spiritual writer, Ronald Rolheiser, has said that “spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside of us…[and]about what we do with our spirits, our souls…A healthy spirit or a healthy soul must do dual jobs: it has to give us energy and fire…and all sense of the beauty and joy of living…[and it has] to keep us glued together, integrated, so that we do not fall apart and die.” (The Holy Longing, pp.6-12). The “fire inside of us” is rekindled by all the elements of the Resurrection, by its very story. It is this “fire” which ignites the “holy longing” Rolheiser writes about.
In this “Season of Seeing,” it is through the Resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit that we can see and act anew, but only if we pay attention to the here and now.
— Father Peter