Dear All,
A very happy Eastertide to you all. We hope last weekend was a happy one for you – and that you are taking Easter with you into these days of Eastertide – six weeks which will culminate with Pentecost – the Feast of the Spirit. The reflections we are sending you are, I hope, ones that will bring you joy and the other blessings of the Resurrection.
Some of our Community and friends are in Ireland at the moment coming to the end of wonderful walking in the steps of St Patrick. The land and sea scapes are just amazing.
From Ireland we send you every Eastertide blessing with John Glynn’s wonderful ‘Song of Blessing’,
With our love
Eastering is a Slow Process
The earth’s greening after a long winter reminds me of our spiritual ‘eastering’, the inner transformation & rebirthing that comes after we’ve had a long winter spell of the spirit. No amount of hurry, or push, or desire can make the green come any sooner. I think of people I know who are longing for an inner greening, & are yet in the throes of a spiritual winter. Each one needs an ‘eastering’, a bright greening, & oh, how they long for it to come soon.
But it may be a painfully slow, a tiny bit of life gradually weaving through the pain & questions. Easter isn’t always a quick step out of the tomb. Sometimes rising from the dead takes a long, slowly- greening time. It cannot be hurried. If you are one of the fortunate ones whose soul has sung with happy alleluias this Easter, may you turn often to those who are still awaiting their greening & walk hopefully with them.
Joyce Rupp
Joy – Henri Nouwen
Joy does not come from positive predictions about the state of the world. It does not depend on the ups and downs of the circumstances of our lives. Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world. Jesus says it loudly and clearly: “In the world you will have troubles, but rejoice, I have overcome the world.”
The surprise is not that, unexpectedly, things turn out better than expected. No, the real surprise is that God’s light is more real than all the darkness, that God’s truth is more powerful than all human lies, that God’s love is stronger than death.
“Let him easter in us….” That is one of the last lines (line 277) in the poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerald Manley Hopkins (July 28, 1844 – June 8, 1889), an English Jesuit priest and poet. Hopkins is writing about a steamship, The Deutschland, that ran aground about twenty-five miles off the English coast. His poem is dedicated to five Franciscans nuns who were fleeing persecution in Germany and died in that shipwreck.
Towards the end of the poem Hopkins speaks of his hope that Christ will enter our lives. “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.” Hopkins understands and uses Easter as a verb rather than a noun. It is a reminder that Easter is something that happens to us. Easter is about action, about living, about transformation. Christ enters and easters in us. He shares his risen life with us. As St Paul says,
‘It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’. (Gal. 2:19-20)
Christ eastering within us means we have a new centre and core from which we live. We now live Christ’s life. Easter is more than a day, an event, a remembrance. It is a way of life.
The Meditation of Mary Magdalene
I was distraught,
eyes blinded by grief,
heart numb with sorrow,
for I honestly believed they’d taken away his body
and I’d never see Jesus again.
All right, he was dead,
so what does it matter, you say?
But it did to me,
for I wanted to pay my respects,
to gaze on that gentle face,
that lovely man,
just one more time.
I wanted to remember him at peace,
not groaning on a cross;
to see him laid to rest
and know his suffering was truly over.
And now, it seemed, I was to be denied even that,
his corpse stolen like some grisly trophy,
pursued to the last by his enemies.
It all but finished me,
and I broke down in tears,
conscious of nothing and no one but my grief.
Not even those strangers in the tomb could shake me from it –
my only thought being that someone had taken away my Lord,
and I’d no idea where they’d laid him.
No point looking, I thought –
he was gone,
lost to us for ever.
But I was wrong –
wonderfully, gloriously wrong –
for I’d no need to find him at all:
he found me!
Nick Fawcett