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Easter: A Season of Great Joy.

Easter is not over! Lent, our preparation for Easter, lasts for 40 days. For 40 days we deny ourselves everything from candy to hot showers and even sleep. We are putting aside our creature comforts in order to bare our souls and make room for a greater relationship with our Lord. So intent, somber and focused is our preparation that even at Mass we omit the beautiful music of the Gloria and the Alleluia before the Gospel. The point is, Lent is a time of long and intense preparation for Easter.

So we spend all of this time, 40 days (46 counting the Sundays and Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday), preparing for the joy of Easter. When Easter Sunday comes in the church the penitential purple of Lent is taken down and replaced with the gold that signifies the great celebration that is the Easter Season.

What you will notice for the next 50 days when you are in church is that the gold remains. The church will remain decorated with the gold of great celebration because the celebration of Easter is not over. However, in day to day life it seems that the importance of Easter is lost. In fact, the world would have us believe that Easter is one Sunday a year when we hunt colored eggs and shove our faces with candy and then it is back to business as usual. Is this what we spent 40 days preparing for? Or could it be that we have forgotten something or been mislead?

Don't settle for the impostor that would have us believe that Easter is about bunnies and candy! Easter is much more than this. Easter is central to our faith. We are celebrating the Glorious Resurrection of the Lord in which he has defeated  our enemy sin and death. Our joy at this should know no bounds. Such an earth shattering thing this is, can we even fathom what it means? Let's look past how comfortable we have grown with the idea. Let us stop seeing it as something that we are detached from. Let's take a moment (or 50 days) and see Easter for what it is; a great thing the Lord has done!

Alleluia!

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Jenny R. Sherrill said…
I grew up in a church that celebrated Easter but no church seasons, no Lent, etc. For some that's okay (I guess), but I have really grown to love the process of Easter -- the progression through Lent, the removal of alleluia and the somber tone, the purple of Lent and the black of Good Friday leading to the glorious joy of Easter AND the Easter season. Christ is risen!!!
April 13, 2012 at 8:10 AM
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