Skip to main content

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!
Labels:

Comments

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carmel Marathon 2020 Weeks 2 & 3

Training for the Carmel Marathon on April 4th, 2020 in Carmel Indiana Goal: 2:51 Week 2 Runs: 8 Weekly Milage: 72 Cumulative Milage: 139 Workouts / Long Run: 17 with 8 at Marathon Pace Performance Management Chart for the week showing my running fitness progression from the beginning of the cycle through the current week. The main focus this week was just building my milage a little from last week, about 5 more miles, while being ready for my first MP workout. I am pretty focused right now and I struggled some last week with wanting to do more that the plan called for. I really wanted to add in a threshold workout. Marathon training is about discipline and long term thinking though. I could have added in some threshold miles and it probably would have been ok but doing the plan the way the plan is written will get me where I want to go and will keep me feeling on track and help me from wavering in the other direction as well. I'm doing the plan, period. I ran my fi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Running Goals or Running Goal; What is it That I Want?

The other day I got all caught up in setting running goals for myself for the rest of the year. After the goals were set, I found myself starting to worry about how I was going to reach them. Wondering if there would be time to sufficiently prepare for them all. My goals were to run a 5k in under 20 minutes, to run a half marathon in 1:25 minutes and qualify for and run in the Boston marathon in 2014. At first, I thought that setting and meeting these goals would make me a more serious runner. In fact, I thought that to be the "serious" runner I want to be that I needed these goals. However, while I was running the other morning I realized that first of all, I was thinking about how to shift my training to meet my 5k goal. Then I began thinking about the right approach to a 1:25 half while training to qualify for Boston in a full marathon a month later. That is when I realized that the ancillary goals were starting to consume my focus and quite possibly i...
4 comments
Read more

The Gosh Darn Tuesday Morning 15-Miler

What can you say about a 15-mile Tuesday morning run? I can say a lot. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I can say about a 15-mile Tuesday morning run on more 15-mile Tuesday Morning runs than I can count. You see, they are a main stay of the marathon training plan that I use. That plan being Pete Pfitzinger’s Advanced Marathoning 18 week 70-85 miles per week plan. The first thing I can say about the Tuesday morning 15-mile run is that it’s not a long run. Pete clearly defines long runs as starting at 16 miles. So, the 15-miler that begins so many Tuesdays of my life is not a long run. I mean, who ever heard of doing a “long run” on a Tuesday morning. That would just be insane. Being that it’s not a long run I can’t do all of the things that I do around a long run. I can’t obsess over the weather for the 15-miler, I can’t eat extra carbs in preparation for the 15-miler, I can’t expect my family to give me deference and make accommodations for me ...
Post a Comment
Read more