Easter: Believing In New Life – Embracing Mission Anew
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After our journey of faith during Lent and Holy Week, today we arrive at the great celebration of Easter and rightly it is a celebration of life over death, Divine Light in the shadows. We come into Easter with appropriate joy and hope; perhaps even some relief. Yet, paradoxically the Easter season that we begin today can be experienced sometimes as an ending, a party before our return to the “humdrumness” of ordinary time. But Easter is never an ending. It is always our call to embrace and embody new beginnings. It marks always a freshness for mission.
N.T. Wright, in his moving book, “Christians at the Cross: Finding Hope in the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus”, reminds us that the whole point of Easter is that, “if God’s new creation has already begun, those of us who have been awakened in the middle of the night are put to work to make more bits of new creation happen within the world as it is. And that is why we need to leave behind, on the cross, all the bits and pieces of the old creation that have made us sad, that have depressed us and our communities, and start to pray for vision and wisdom to know where God can and will make new creation happen in our lives, in our hearts, in our homes and not least in our communities. That’s what ‘regeneration’ is all about.” That’s the meaning of Easter.
Whatever our vocational expression of God’s love and call together we walk the continuing journey of “regeneration”, praying for the graces we need to be new life in our world, to make present the hope and promise of Christ in the mission to which we are called as we celebrate this great feast of Easter. It is the celebration of the gift of God’s call to each of us in all the ordinary moments of life. It is the call to really believe in the possibilities that only God, working in us, can fulfill in our embrace of a new creation.
The Board and staff of NAVFD wish each of you, your families and communities all the joy, call, peace and promise of Easter.
Sisters Mary, Mary Clare, Joanne, Elaine, Nancy, Father Ray and our new project manager, Hector.