Saturday Octave Easter 2012 Easter Season Reflection

Scripture Readings for today's Mass are here


    

 

 

 

                                                                      Image source

Gospel Mk 16:9-15

When Jesus had risen, early on the first day of the week,

he appeared first to Mary Magdalene,

out of whom he had driven seven demons.

She went and told his companions who were mourning and weeping.

When they heard that he was alive

and had been seen by her, they did not believe.

After this he appeared in another form

to two of them walking along on their way to the country.

They returned and told the others;

but they did not believe them either.

But later, as the Eleven were at table, he appeared to them

and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart

because they had not believed those

who saw him after he had been raised.

He said to them, "Go into the whole world

and proclaim the Gospel to every creature."

So how can we start living the Resurrection Spirit ?

This is a lovely Easter Season Reflection from Loyola Press by Vinita Hampton Wright which gives some practical steps we can take.

Thao and Mirah

Hallelujah

If you start to think that it's all over now
That the work you have done has been lost somehow
You wake up hungry in this world you've made
So much so how could you be turned away

Under thunder we drove through a black sky,
Paved with the threat we might die, oh we were so afraid
You can throw your body up against the glass but you can't stop the rain
From pouring in once the cracks have been made

But there's still time to sing
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
Who could stay sleepin' when that garbage man came? 
 
He stormed up the street 'cause we called out his name
With the sounds of us choking on the mess that's been made
Dig us out from this slumber

We've given salt, we've sweated off, done all this and more
So heed when you hear us knockin' on your door
We don't want to be the currency gets spent on war
And then come home wondering what was it all for

That's no way to sing
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah

We been hard hard working
We've got a plan
Send home dollar bills

And fistfuls of honey
We've been working working for that money

Discipleship

In this poem, Jane Kenyon contrasts wealth and poverty, conventional piety and true devotion. 

An artistic rendering of the crucified Jesus creates an emotional response in a viewer, but the response for which Jesus asks is not for believers to feel a certain way but rather to act a certain way. 

The poem’s final stanza quotes the risen Jesus talking with Peter and explaining that to love the Lord is to feed the hungry, something the poem’s speaker has clearly failed to do in the midst of her “piety.”

Back from the City

Jane Kenyon

After three days and nights of rich food

and late talk in overheated rooms,

of walks between mounds of garbage

and human forms bedded down for the night

under rags, I come back to my dooryard,

to my own wooden step.

The last red leaves fall to the ground

and frost has blackened the herbs and asters

that grew beside the porch. The air

is still and cool, and the withered grass

lies flat in the field. A nuthatch spirals

down the rough trunk of the tree.

At the Cloisters I indulged in piety

while gazing at a painted lindenwood Pieta –

Mary holding her pierced and dessicated son

across her knees; but when a man stepped close

under the tasseled awning of the hotel,

asking for “a quarter for someone

down on his luck,” I quickly turned my back.

Now I hear tiny bits of bark and moss

break off under the bird's beak and claw,

and fall onto already-fallen leaves.

“Do you love me?” said Christ to his disciple.

“Lord, you know that I love you.”

“Then feed my sheep.”

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[1] “Cloisters” – The New York City building that houses the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval European collection.

[2] “lindenwood” – a type of soft wood sometimes used for carving. “Pieta” – an image of Mary cradling the dead Christ