Easter Season Devotions

Growing up I was surrounded by images, medallions, and elements for devotional prayer.  As a family of six siblings, my parents led us each evening in recitation of the rosary on our knees in the living room.  On the wall we all shared in seeing an image of the sacred heart of Jesus, a crucifix and a large beautiful landscape painting of the forested mountains in some part or other of British Columbia, painted by our sister-in-law.  All of these were sacred, beloved symbols of intimacy with God - for myself, none less than others.  I still hold my sister-in-law as a saint in our family, though she'd likely cringe at the thought, and with my father's farming and my mother writing songs about the sacred and wondrous beauty of the mountains, daily life lent nature a place in my devotions, though I wouldn't have been able to articulate it at the time.  

Then there were mom's vials of holy water, holy salt and holy oils used frequently and liberally when praying with others for their needs.  Many a stranger came to our doors for prayers with my mom.  The elements of the earth were vital sacred sources, or sacramentals as they're called in Roman Catholic parlance, for making Jesus present, for healing.

Later, pilgrimage to sacred places (my first being to the Holy land at fourteen), and sites that held sacred clothing, (the mantle of Guadalupe; the Holy Shroud) or healing waters (i.e. Lourdes, France; Lac St. Anne's, Alberta), incorrupt bodies, or monstrances with Eucharistic miracles (like the one in O'Cebreiro along the camino de Santiago in Spain) all allowed for the natural environment to be elevated as part of our journey of transformation into Christ.  

When hail storms were forecasted, my father would take holy water in small vials and bury them in the four corners of the fields to protect the fields.  Sounds like magical thinking to some, but is it?  Now, it seems to me to be a graceful ritual, a reverencing of nature and an understanding that the earth is the Lord's and we are earth as well...one body transformed together in hope and faith and most of all love.

How did we lose the connection with devotions, and pilgrimages as reverencing creation; as forming the larger part of the web of relationships we encounter daily? Devotions may tend the affective, emotional intelligence of our nature; but they are largely the language of nature itself, sacred and penetrated with the incarnation of Christ.  For me the holy sites are not separate from the rest of nature, but rather resurrected signs of the whole of nature redeemed in Christ.  

My Easter season devotion is a daily walk with rosary in hand praying for the needs of the world, an end to COVID 19,... and watching for pussy willows as they bud and open on branches, Canada geese as they return from their migration south and waters make their way and run into the river as the snow melts.  Thankful for resurrected life.

The Resurrection and the Life

Sunday Readings - Ezekiel 37: 12-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:8-11, Jn 11: 1-45

"I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me, even though he die, will live, and everyone lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?" Jn. 11,25

"True joy, genuine festival, means the casting out of wickedness.  To achieve this one must live a life of perfect goodness and, in the serenity of the fear of God, practice contemplation in one's heart."

St. Athanasius

Jesus asks Martha the question.  "Do you believe this?"  She responds faithfully, "Yes, I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."  Her words are profound.  However dimly, she is given to see with the eyes of faith, Christ, the anointed one, will die too, will rise, and will pour his Spirit into the world, and the whole of creation will be blessed in his resurrection; will be raised up with him.  Do you believe this?  Have you ever seen the dead raised?  Have you ever been the dead raised?

In my twenties, I spent much time with a friend dying of cancer.  Our faith was young.  We kept hoping for a cure, and praying for healing.  We prayed and waited, but the cure did not come. We were present to each other, in joy and in sadness.  We loved in our waiting.  We played games, we talked late into the night about what the next life might hold, what resurrection meant, and we prayed together with each other and often in a community of loving prayer.  

In August she lay dying in the hospital.  I see her at noon, and sit by the bed holding her hand.  Her arm is exposed and I can see the cancer spreading to the surface of her skin on her arm, neck and face, in large blisters of purple/black blood.  She is breathing heavily with eyes closed.  I know she wants so badly to stay alive to attend her sister's wedding...to be present for her children.  The last time I had visited she was smiling brightly through a clear physical, emotional and spiritual suffering, sewing her daughter's dress on the hospital bed.  She made it plain to me she planned on making it till the wedding was over.  

Now, days before the wedding, she is clearly not going to make it.  I say to her, "I love you. ...Don't be afraid.  It's o.k. to go home whenever you want to go.  God is here.  He will take you home. " I said the words and I believed them.  I lacked imagination to see what this might be like or look like.  But I know I believe.

After this brief time with her I go home and I am supposed to return to be with her in the evening.  A few of us friends rotated visits so that someone would be with her until she died.  It turns out that the person who says he will come after work to look after our two boys - their father - doesn't show up.  I try calling to get someone to look after them so that I could be with her.  There was no one to help.  I felt frustrated and bewildered.  I felt so let down by the boys' father who was supposed to show up and chose instead to stay out drinking half the night.  I prayed asking for a passage to help me.  When I opened the Bible I read, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.  Love those who persecute you."  I was angry with God.  I couldn't see how this was helping me or anyone under the circumstances. My reaction was confusion and bewilderment, not unlike the disciples when they heard Lazarus was dying and Jesus waited two days to go see him.  

I went to bed and I lay facing a crucifix on my wall.  I continued to pray, asking God to help me to forgive, asking God to show me I was loved because I was feeling so rejected and unloved at that moment.  At about 3 or 4am I was filled and overwhelmed with Christ's Spirit of love so completely, I saw only love within me and all around me.  I knew clearly that my dear friend had passed, and I felt her spirit flow through me and through my bedroom, as though telling me she was released and raised high with a joyful heart.  When the father of my children came in and crawled into bed after what had clearly been a night of drinking, I wept with forgiveness and love in my heart.  I knew pure joy inside of me for the first time in my life....though not for the last time.  

I woke at 8am to the phone ringing.  I knew it was going to be the news of her having died in the night, and so it was.  Our mutual friend, a nurse working at the hospital, told me she died around 1pm.  I rose up to a bright sun shining in a clear blue August sky, and went to be with her children and her husband at their home not far from mine. 

I woke understanding for the first time, clearly and without doubt, the meaning and the truth of resurrection life.  Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life and of this there will be no doubt ever again.  The story of Lazarus is a window into the truth of resurrection in Christ.  Wrestle with it and we discover the jewel of life waiting for us there.