Easter: It all leads up to this.

      I love the Easter Triduum. The symphonic rises and falls of the Liturgical Year reach its great Crescendo at the Vigil. Easter makes the entire year a meaningful journey. If the Annunciation was the moment the Universe held its breath, then Easter is when it exhaled. It is because of Easter we have the Church and Her Priests. We have poetry, art, music and all inspired things that profess the beauty of this world magnified and made ever more beautiful by the victory won by the Resurrection.  I love that moment, when we hear the Gloria for the first time in weeks at the Vigil, that hair-standing-on-end moment of loud happy praise of the Glory of God. The bells ring, the lights turn on, and we see the Kingdom of God revealed before us. It is as if we are opening our eyes to a new world of hope and victory. Easter gives everything we do purpose. Every action small and great done by the Church is given a deeper purpose and meaning through Death’s Defeat. Without Easter, Christmas would just be another birthday.

     Today is Holy Thursday. It is the beginning of our New Beginning. Today we remember the establishment of the Eucharist at the Last Supper: The climax of the Greatest Love Story in all of history. The moment we re-experience every time the priest places his hands over the altar; the moment when God, the Creator, chose to suffer for his Creation, a Creation that chose to commit deicide. God, who is Love, allowed his own creatures to thrust him so low so that He might lift us up out of the muck and filth. Our own propensity to brutalize and kill was used to facilitate our salvation. Today, we remember that God not only chose to do this once, but established a Sacrament through which this Sacrifice would be experienced again and again. This Sacrament, brings God to us, brings us into Him, and is the Source of all Love. It is the Love from which all other loves flow. When we receive this Love, we become the vessel through which this Love flows.

     We hear that we become living tabernacles. Consider that image. WE are the CONTAINER that is to carry Love into the world. In the most humble way I will say: we become the vessel which contains the Center and Source of Love, A vessel that All the Heavens and Earth bow to what is contained within. All Souls, great and small, Angels and Demons, Light and Shadow, must bend the knee to the Presence that is carried within us at that moment. We contain what the Angels and Saints love, and the Enemy and his demons FEAR: Love that shakes the foundations of the universe, Love that changes what love is. We carry Love that shattered Death’s finality, won us eternal life, and won us a victory to a battle that we fight today. We already have the outcome of the war. Love wins. Carry on.

I love Easter.