Principal’s Blog
Have you noticed how amazing the moon has been this week? You may have seen it as it rises in the east or have caught it about to set as you prepared to start a new day. I have wondered how it could be any fuller knowing that Easter is accompanied by a full moon each year. Our universe and natural world present to us reminders of the expansiveness and mystery of our Creator God each day. These moments at times can be beyond our comprehension, hard to put into human words. Maybe it is because they touch us in a heart and soul space.
The events of Easter are known as the Paschal mystery. The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus are central to all we believe as Christians. The use of the term mystery is key to our experience of faith and to our understanding of wonder. Mystery implies that there is always more to come to know, always something beyond which we can truly understand from our human experience. Faith, however, assures us that through the grace of God little by little we will come to know more of God at work in our world and how we to can bring about a world of peace, reconciliation and justice.
Last Sunday as the gospel was read for Palm Sunday I noticed myself paying attention to parts of the story that perhaps I had not listened to before. Having not had the opportunity to participate in the rituals of Holy Week and Easter last year I came to the gospel this year with fresh eyes and ears. I was curious as to why these details were there. At the heart of this mystery is that life can come out of suffering and death. Perhaps this is the most difficult thing for us to grasp as humans. This is what God offers us freely through God’s grace – life, hope, peace, reconciliation, justice. However, to fully experience this in the resurrection, Jesus and the disciples faced the suffering of rejection, prejudice, injustice, brokenness, denial, weakness of character.
In our celebrations of family, holidays and Easter eggs let us not lose sight of those who have not yet experienced the fullness of life promised through the Resurrection. In the freedoms that we will experience this year to gather with loved ones, unlike last year, may we take a moment to sit in the wonder of this mystery and be moved by the events of the first Holy Week so that we might become Easter people to others.
I leave you with a message from the Kildare Ministries Trustees and wish you all and happy and Holy Easter.
Grant that we Christians may live the Gospel
Discovering Christ in each human being
Recognizing him/her
In the sufferings of the abandoned
And forgotten of our world
And risen in each brother or sister
Who makes a new start
So that we may discover anew
That all are important and all are necessary,
Different faces of the one humanity
That God so loves.
(Adapted from Fratelli Tutti)
Blessings
Luci
