Daily Easter Reflections

Daily Easter Reflections: I was keeping 3-year-old Leo for the night. He wanted a snack before bed and I wanted him in bed, so I put some Cheerios in a plastic bowl and tucked them in together, a boy and his snack.

Daily Easter Reflections: After years of abandoning the practice, many Catholic parishes once again offer regular opportunities for eucharistic adoration. While some enthusiastically embrace this practice, others associate it with unappealing aspects of pre-Vatican II piety. 

Daily Easter Reflections: When I served as a college campus minister, a significant part of my job was to plan and accompany students on service immersion trips during school breaks. These trips took us to places from Native American reservations in northwest and southeast Montana; to inner-city settings in East Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Kansas City; to the mountains of Guatemala. 

Daily Easter Reflections: We hosted our rookie wedding in 2000. First daughter, first wedding. The reception was held just blocks away from St. Mary's on a hot summer night in the foothills of the Rockies. I don't remember who thought of it, but at the end of the liturgy, the presider invited us all to process together to the party, following the bride and groom.

Daily Easter Reflections: I've heard it described as "ships passing in the night." What do you imagine when you hear that expression? Do you imagine two giant liners that move silently past one another on a foggy night, going in opposite directions? 

Daily Easter Reflections: After the great 90 days of Lent and Easter and the two great feasts that American Catholics celebrate on the two Sundays after Pentecost, June sees the return of the "green Sundays." 

Daily Easter Reflections: Gaudium et Spes, one of the most significant documents coming out of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), was conceived during the lively interactions that occurred among the council participants. 

Daily Easter Reflections: It was a balmy Trinity Sunday and the door of the old neighborhood church was open. Four of us were taking a shortcut through the back streets of Bologna, rushing to get to a nearby tourist attraction. We heard the opening hymn and looked at each other, uncertain of what came next.

Daily Easter Reflections: You bring a little spring just by visiting. A bright smile and a warm hug bring a bit of warmth to the grayest day. But consider what more you might try.

Daily Easter Reflections: Should the Gospel we profess and the liturgy we do raise in us some great unease with the political, economic, military and environmental conditions that are our responsibility as U.S. citizens and residents? If so, how do we grapple with the apparent absence of such unease in our churches?

Daily Easter Reflections: African Americans still face a great deal of racism and poverty. American Indians face struggles against addiction and strive for dignity. Undocumented immigrants seek to be recognized for the work they do in a country where they can't legally have rights.

Daily Easter Reflections: Because the Trinity, the Incarnation and Redemption lie at the doctrinal core of our faith, they warrant exploration by preachers.

Daily Easter Reflections: The liturgical calendar offers us a number of beautiful feasts this June, each of which highlights a different dimension of the mystery of love as we have come to know it in our lives as Christians. 

Daily Easter Reflection: The feast of Pentecost is really a celebration of the triumph of community over the divisions created by selfishness, suspicion and sin.

Daily Easter Reflections: The choir was asked to sing at Mass for our parish confirmation liturgy. I'll admit: At first I had no particular excitement about this milestone in our teens' sacramental life. I didn't know any of the dozens of kids being confirmed that Tuesday evening.

Daily Easter Reflections: Because most of history relies heavily on literary records written by men, discovering reliable historical data about Christian women can be challenging. This search is further complicated by the fact that Christianity has relied heavily, if not exclusively, on the written word as a primary means of understanding its own history.

Daily Easter Reflections: I have always loved to walk hedgerows. They are unruly places that refuse to be mowed or that people forget to mow. They are untamed places, often as beautifully wild as they are magnificently unused. They have extraordinary biological density. In this space things are left alone long enough to mingle. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Why, day by day, in church and at work and as citizens and as human beings, why are we so often and so thoroughly being choked, our breath cut off, by what is petty, what is dull, what never sees to the depths of things, what never rises and sees how truths converge? 

Daily Easter Reflections: Globalization, driven by new technologies and economic expansion, is underway with both positive and negative impacts. What role will the church play, and what are the implications for the inculturation of the liturgy in a rapidly changing world?

Daily Easter Reflections: When the risen Jesus appeared for the first time to the disciples huddled behind locked doors, he spoke to them reassuringly, "breathed on them and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit' " (John 20:22). 

Daily Easter Reflections: It is providential that June begins with the feast of the Ascension. This celebration always brings up a basic biblical problem: What happened to Jesus after his resurrection? Our first two Gospels — Mark and Matthew — simply leave us hanging.

Daily Easter Reflections: This is what my mother tells me. She knows it's time for her to die, but she "doesn't know how to do it."

Daily Easter Reflections: For the Divine Presence is beside us and within us (John 14:15-21) empowering us to do what is right, to admit our need of assistance, to find our way in the midst of complexity.

Daily Easter Reflections: Imagining God in any form remains a tricky business. The cartoonist, blogger and former Pentecostal pastor David Hayward — who goes by the amusing moniker of "naked pastor" — developed a cartoon I often use teaching university theology classes. 

Daily Easter Reflections: We had sailed at dusk on Florida's Biscayne Bay. We were out for about four hours when our captain turned toward home. Usually, in other sails, she had turned on the engine as we approached the dock. Her boat, a sailing instructor's boat, is docked at the far end of the marina in a corner, a bit of a tight squeeze but not impossible, with the engine going. 

Daily Easter Reflections: We make the journey in the church, with the church, those living and those who have gone before us in faith keeping stride and holding us up when we falter, picking us up when we fall. It is the church who asks, "What name do you give this child?"

Daily Easter Reflections: In 1959, Pope John XXIII was already describing the council he convened as a "new Pentecost." The Holy Spirit was pouring out charisms to reinvigorate the church, its mission in the world, and its outreach to other Christian communions and religions.

Daily Easter Reflections: Years ago, but not all that many, there were two church organists who loved the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, for it brought a twinkle to their eyes. One of them, playing during the collection, would subtly work in just a little bit of a then-popular song whose words included "Up, up and away, in my beautiful balloon."

Daily Easter Reflections: Perhaps there is no prayer uttered more often by Christians than the Our Father. And there is good reason for this frequency, because Jesus himself taught it to his disciples when they asked him how they were to pray.

Daily Easter Reflections: We have celebrated the paschal mystery. Holy Week is over. We have journeyed through salvation history with the Easter Vigil and stand now in the light of the risen One. The purple vestments are put away until Advent. 

Daily Easter Reflections: The appearances of Jesus following his resurrection reveal how the risen Christ restores relationships by reconnecting with those who followed him. This is the work of reconciliation that begins with the forgiveness of sins.

Daily Easter Reflections: Film stories create a space, a table around which we can gather to share faith and create community that extends an invitation to transformation and even mysticism — especially in the Easter season.

Daily Easter Reflections: Like the Christians who came before us, we live in uncertain times. For us, Pentecost is much more than a symbolic celebration. It arrives each springtime as a new creation, heralding an extraordinary season laden with gifts, challenges and God-given surprises.

Daily Easter Reflections: During the Easter season we hear the comforting words of Jesus: "Peace be with you." This peace pushes and pulls us through the Fifty Days toward Pentecost and beyond to Ordinary Time. 

Daily Easter Reflections: For many years I kept a note card on my refrigerator that proclaimed the message: "We are an Easter people." I was sent the note from a parishioner, a mother of 13 and grandmother of more, who was living with advanced-stage breast cancer at the time the card was written.

Daily Easter Reflections: For the three years preceding the Second Vatican Council, and all during that council, Roman Catholics added to the prayers after Mass (does anyone remember those?) Pope John XXIII's "Prayer to the Holy Spirit" for the council’s success. 

Daily Easter Reflections: The psalms have long been a mainstay of Christian liturgical singing. While these songs of the Hebrew Bible first expressed the relationship of Israel to the God of salvation, Christians have heard in them words of Christ and words about Christ. 

Daily Easter Reflections: We talk, we read, we write, we listen. We surround ourselves with print on paper and walls and screens. We surround ourselves with sounds-making-words that convey meaning and images. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Fr. Mike Barrett, pastor of  Our Lady of Good Hope in Milwaukee, invited participants at a presentation on Mary in St. Joseph's Parish in Grafton, Wisconsin,  to write their own litany to the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

Daily Easter Reflections: The first baptism I remember was my cousin's. Nine-year-old Carol Ann was baptized by full immersion, "dunked" in the Southern Baptist way.

Daily Easter Reflections: At a time when division and polarization have come to characterize civil society and even churches, the celebration of the Lord's Supper stands as a sign of unity: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread."

Daily Easter Reflections: Boldly they proclaimed the mighty acts of God. They urged repentance and the forgiveness of sins. They promised the gifts of the Spirit. They preached despite persecutions. They prayed and broke bread. 

Daily Easter Reflections: In the 1990s a Peanuts cartoon featured Linus and Lucy waiting on Halloween for the mysterious Great Pumpkin. In one cartoon strip Lucy refers to the Great Pumpkin as a "she" and Linus looks at her shocked. "Never even occurred to you, did it?" she replies. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Easter is the linchpin of the Christian life. As St. Paul so bluntly wrote: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins."

Daily Easter Reflections: Have you ever had an instantaneous recognition that the Lord was present in a situation, a "God-is-in-the-details" moment?

Daily Easter Reflections: Turning the painting upside down is an artist's trick that helps you to focus on what your painting is, not what you meant it to be. It gets you beyond the idea stuck in your mind that you were bent on creating and leads you to see what’s actually there. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Those educated in vintage Catholic schools, like myself, were often supplied with seemingly iron-clad proofs that our church was the "true" church. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Thanks to the Vatican II reforms, the funeral rite no longer focuses on God's severe judgment. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Someone suggested that I reflect on Easter using my experience in rural Peru, where I had the privilege to live among people who were economically very poor. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Life is about transformations, and for most of us, the transformations take place so gradually and in such slow motion that we are hardly aware of the changes that are taking place. 

Daily Easter Reflections: Ancient literature indicates a comfort with the delights of play and the power of play in ways that our contemporary society, with its focus on tasks, productivity and material measures of value, seems to have entirely lost. 

Daily Easter Reflections: "There she was, calmly plotting the resurrection." E.B. White, the children's author who penned the famous Charlotte's Web, said these words about his wife Katharine, also a writer and editor, when she planted daffodils in late November during the last year of her life.

Daily Easter Reflections: "To the tombs I went to mourn the hope I thought was gone. Here among you I awoke to unexpected dawn."

Daily Easter Reflections: We American Catholics have internalized a cinematic calendar — think "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Easter Parade" — that dictates snow for Christmas and sun for Easter

Daily Easter Reflections: "Bursting forth from Pharaoh’s prison, Alleluia! Let us sing! Alleluia! Christ is risen. Alleluia to our king!"

Daily Easter Reflections: One of the most dramatic moments in the celebration of the Easter Vigil occurs just before the proclamation of the Gospel. The Alleluia, silent for more than six weeks, is solemnly intoned three times by the priest or psalmist, each time on a higher pitch, then repeated by all.