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.