Alleluia!  How good it is for us once again to sing this song of Easter victory.  Having fasted from this word throughout Lent, resuming its usage should fill out hearts with joy as we recall the victory of light over darkness in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  During these next 50 days of the Easter Season, this light will shine brightly in the form of the Easter Candle, placed prominently in the sanctuary near the ambo where the Good News of Easter is proclaimed in the Scriptures.

For those who were at the Easter Vigil, this theme of light was present throughout the liturgy.  I never cease to be moved by the scene of the newly-lit Easter Candle entering into the darkened Cathedral.  When the deacon chanted for the first time: “The Light of Christ”, we responded with a resounding “Thanks be to God!”  We thank God because this light reminds us that in the midst of the darkness of the world in which we find ourselves, Christ’s light of hope, Christ’s light of victory burns undimmed, inviting us to follow that light as He continues to lead us.  This is expressed in the words that the bishop said as he lit the candle from the blessed Easter fire: “May the light of Christ rising in glory dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.”

On this day, we are reminded that, as Christians, we should never succumb to despair in the face of evil, suffering, or sorrow, for Christ has transformed death into life and defeat into victory.  Yet, we still find ourselves going through life as though we do not really believe this.  There is still doubt in our hearts because we do not see the victory taking hold.  We continue to see war and strife, oppression, persecution, hatred, pain, and darkness all around us.  We look at the circumstances in our lives, in the world, and the Church, wondering what the outcome might be.  Will good win out over evil or not?

As I said, as Christians there is no room for us to doubt what the outcome will be.  The outcome has already been decided.  This victory of the Resurrection was one that He won not just for Himself, but for us, to set us free from sin and death, and to give us the gift of eternal life.  When we are confronted with darkness, as we are each day, the Lord invites us to turn to the light of Christ, burning from the Easter Candle, but more importantly, burning in our hearts by virtue of our Baptism, the gift which marked us as recipients of His victory.   In that light we receive strength to press forward in hope, following His light.  But this victory is not something the Lord will force upon us.  He will only grant it to those who desire it.  And if we desire it, we commit to following the only path that will guarantee it – fidelity to His teaching and His Church.  If we think we can reach victory by another way, we have been deceived by one of the many false lights that promise hope, but in the end, only lead to defeat.  May we not fall victim to these false, worldly lights, but keep our eyes fixed on the true light of Christ who will lead us on to victory!

Without peeking at the answer below, try to guess what year this statement was made by a Catholic bishop: “On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body.” Most people of every culture seem to accept that there is some sort of spiritual existence in the afterlife, and it is usually thought to be a good thing for everyone. We do have an instinct in our human nature that there must be something after this life, because our hearts desire eternal fulfillment, and we recoil at the thought and experience of death. 

Recently in his Sunday homily, Bishop Paprocki gave a teaching on the resurrection of the body. He made the point that when we say every Sunday in the Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” we are speaking about our bodies – not the body of Jesus. We profess belief in his resurrection earlier in the Creed. Contrary to some popular beliefs, we do not become angels after we die. Angels and human beings are very different types of creation, although we do share some similar qualities. 

What happens after we die is in one way a very mysterious process, but also fairly straight-forward according to the teachings of Jesus. When we die, we will be judged in an individual judgment, face to face with God. After this moment, our soul will proceed immediately to the blessedness of heaven (maybe after a purification), or to everlasting damnation (CCC 1022). When the world ends and Jesus comes back a second time in glory, the bodies of all human beings will be reunited with their souls. Jesus said, “The hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out, those who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation” (John 5:28-29). God forbid that any of us would miss out on the blessedness of heaven! However, Jesus made it sound like a very real possibility that even people who claim to follow him can be separated from him forever. In the bible, nobody talks about hell more than Jesus. 

When we receive a challenging teaching from Jesus or the Church, it could be tempting to despair or feel totally inadequate to follow the teaching. But God instead invites us to a greater trust in him. He never asks us to do something that is impossible. If we make the conscious decision to follow God’s laws in our lives to the best of our abilities, God will shower graces upon us and help us in many ways to become holier and more authentically human people. 

I hope this is far enough down to not give the answer away from my initial guessing game – the bishop and doctor of the Church St. Augustine said this quote sometime during his ministry between 396 and 430. I thought it was interesting that the same quote could have been said by a bishop today, because some people scoff at the idea of our bodies coming back to life, in an even more “alive” way than before! It has always been the case that some people try to find every sort of pleasure and happiness in this life, which we all know will not last forever. There is always some new “fountain of youth” that is promising to make us look younger for longer. But behind this obsession with living forever is the knowledge that we were made for more than this life. God made our hearts in such a way that they will not be fulfilled until we have found him. 

Easter Sunday is a taste of heaven on earth. Maybe today we are thinking about loved ones who have died and we hope to see again someday. Sometimes our personal lives and the liturgical calendar line up in interesting ways. Wherever we are in life – in the best year ever or the year that we can’t wait to end – Jesus is risen! The problems that we have in life will not last forever, and Jesus wants to live through us on both the good days and the bad days. We at the Cathedral have the privilege of accompanying many people in their spiritual life, on both the best and worst days. Jesus has something to offer to everybody. If we live with Christ in this life, we will also live with him in the next! 

For Christmas and Easter instead of picking a saint who’s feast day falls on that week, I usually choose a saint associated with that feast-day of Our Lord.  This year, I find myself meditating not on a member of the beatified, but on bees. During the most stupendous moment of the Easter Vigil, after the Paschal Candle has been solemnly consecrated, kindled, and carried into the darkened Cathedral … as the priest, other ministers, and then entire congregation, light their candles from that pillar of fire shining with the light of the Risen Jesus … as flames flicker throughout the nave, and every light is set to 100% … the Deacon solemnly incenses the Paschal Candle, enthroned before us all, and begins to sing:

Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven, … 
This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.
Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and hour when Christ rose from the underworld!

This is the night of which it is written: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness. The sanctifying power of this night dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners, drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty. On this, your night of grace, O holy Father, accept this candle, a solemn offering, the work of bees and of your servants’ hands, an evening sacrifice of praise, this gift from your most holy Church.

This song praises God for all the tremendous moments of His mercy down through human history.  It has been sung for at least a thousand years, with our current version recalling the work of bees twice, and earlier editions harping upon their labors with even greater emphasis.  Why, amid creation and fall and exodus and resurrection, do we turn in praise to bees … humble, buzzing, bees?

For the entire season of Easter, at every Mass, we will relight the Paschal Candle, drawing near again and again to the triumphant light and unending fire of love that is Our Risen Lord, yet that flame that shines His light, that white column decorated and distinguished in the center of our Church, surprisingly depends on the industry of a whole lot of honey-bees. The strength and success of Christ, is here symbolically reliant on a swarm of insects! The Church Fathers, and writers of Scripture, had a more sanctified imagination than we do these days, and it is they who remind us of this and other  ways that bees remind us our own position in the Body of Christ.

Bees live in colonies with thousands of members, each one taking a specific, and essential, place – queen, drones, workers … governing, gathering, directing, defending, reproducing, guarding, clearing, and laying down their lives – for the hive.  We too must submit to, and be sustained within, our communion around Christ. Bees produce honey and wax, both marvelous substances – sweet, nutritious, and incorruptible; strong, malleable, and sterile – all for the sake of a project so much larger than each individual bee, and even the entire hive. In this way, they speak to us of our own call to the work to a charity like Christ, for the salvation of the Church and the world.  Bees, lastly, Augustine, Isidore, and other saints point out, represent to us an example of the virtue of chastity. Of course, those saints did not understand exactly how bees reproduced, yet our modern science only strengthens their point.  Male bees literally give up their lives in order to mate with a queen-bee and continue the life of the hive – talk about laying down one’s life! Yet the queen, as happily noticed by Augustine, can also reproduce asexually (laying unfertilized eggs that do develop into bees) – one of those peculiar natural reminders of Jesus’ own virginal conception as well as the supernatural fecundity and example that celibacy can have.

Community, charity, chastity … all discovered in the buzzing of bees, in some ways dependent on them!  Christ’s victory depends on you too! Our world will not find the perfect Communion that Jesus has won for us if you and I don’t live it out, submitting to His reign, surrendering to His will, and abiding in Him. Our world will not receive the persevering Charity that cascades from Our Lord’s Heart if you and I don’t receive it from the cross and chalice, bearing the Love He entrusts to us and defending that flickering flame through the storm. Our world will not know the victory and delight that is Chastity, if you and I do not take on the burden and freedom of authentic love, upholding ours and others’ dignity, defending ours and others’ bodies, consecrating our and others’ hearts.

– Fr. Dominic Rankin sometimes falls into thinking that carrying the Gospel these days is akin to a single-rep barbell squat: heaving upward hundreds of pounds against the pull of gravity. The truth is that Jesus has borne the bulk of the cross’s weight! We need not lift the entire beam, rather, He asks us to simply approach the flowers of His grace and carry away a few grains of pollen for the nourishment and transformation of the world. I think even I can manage that!

During my time in seminary formation, I would often go to a certain church in St. Louis for confession.  The parish was served by two older Capuchin Franciscan priests and they heard confessions every day at 11:00 am.  On one occasion, after making my confession, the priest invited me to reflect on the Cross in a way that I have never forgotten.  He invited me to look at a crucifix (like the one on the end of a Rosary, or one hanging on a wall) and to ask three questions:

1. Who is that?
2. Why is He there?
3. What does it mean to me?

The first two questions were easy to answer, especially for a seminarian who thought he knew pretty much everything about Jesus!  But that third question was much more difficult.  What does the Cross mean to me?  It is a question that I still struggle to answer adequately.  It is this question that the entire Church is being invited to consider each year when we celebrate Holy Week.  We always begin on Palm Sunday by listening to the Passion narrative from one of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, or Luke).  We then return to the Passion narrative on Good Friday, this time from the Gospel of John.  The Church offers these two narratives in order to keep the Cross before us.  We look to the Cross, we hear the stories, and we each should ask: “What does this mean to me?” 

For your prayer this week, I would like to invite you to pray with the crucifix and reflect on those three questions as a way of coming to better appreciate the love Christ showed for us in His Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  But this is not my challenge for the week!  Instead, I want to invite you to something a little more difficult, but much more fruitful, in fact, I think this will be the most fruitful of my Lenten challenges should you choose to accept it:

Challenge:  Attend all the Paschal Triduum Liturgies
Fruit:  Deepened appreciation for Christ’s love for us

Because these liturgies are not “days of obligation”, we do not always give them a lot of priority, opting to focus on Easter Sunday.  But these liturgies are so extremely important to us as Catholics, because they place before us the culmination of God’s saving work for His people.  We are invited to celebrate these liturgies with a real awareness that all that Jesus did, especially in these sacred days, He did for you and for me.  Our relationship with Him becomes much more personal to the extent that we enter into these mysteries with this awareness.  And as we see these events unfolding for us once again, answering that third question – “What does it mean to me?” – will be much easier to answer and will enkindle with in us a desire to live for fully for Him who has died for us.

Father Alford