A FEW WORDS FROM FATHER MICHAEL
Happy Easter To You
In our annual Via Crucis on Good Friday this year, people walked on a few streets surrounding Sacred Heart Church and stopped 14 times for our local stations of the Cross…the spots where people were murdered. It is always a pain-filled walk. We remember 22 people on our 14 stations. Within one block of the church, we remember 11 people.
One of the graces of the prayer walk is the pounding physical and spiritual sense of urgency for restoration, redemption. A cry to God from our helplessness. A cry for Resurrection. Like Abel of old, the blood-stained spots cry out to God for solutions and the only solution that will not let us down again is Resurrection!
We sometimes find it easier to get our arms around the death of Jesus than get our hearts around Resurrection. While death is so emphatic and always hauntingly near, Resurrection is not as clear to us.
On Good Friday night, the Internet could bring up graphic depictions from the planet of crucifixion but will not be able to do as well with Easter Sunday.
The public presentation of rabbits is fairly pathetic. One artist who always seems to be catching the dance of Resurrection from the dead is Brother Mickey McGrath who loves to come to Sacred Heart. His paintings of the late Sister Thea Bowman shout Easter morning on the darkest night. Better than the paintings was the light of dancing hope in those icon-eyes of hers and the cancer slowly killing her. It even came through her tears like rainbow light in the rain.
Even in the Good Friday walk on the broken glass of previous wholeness, God’s face in the insistent Spring was everywhere evident. Green from the cracks or sheltering under trash, but coming…come to life!
How great this year to celebrate Passover and Easter (Russian Church and the Christian West) all in this one converging week of Spring! “Life has the edge on death,” as Dan Berrigan says, “not much of an edge but an edge.” Enough!
Happy Easter to you!
Kristos Voskrese! Voistinnu Voskrese!
Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen!