Embracing the Easter Mystery

There is beauty and giftedness in our ashes and  alleluiahs

by Sister Elise Cholewinski

Every year during Lent I have the practice of meditating each morning on a section of the Passion of Christ from one of the four Gospels. Recently, as I was contemplating Jesus dying on the cross, I experienced some intense emotion, and out of nowhere I heard myself say, “I love my vocation.”

As Jesus hung on the cross, enduring horrendous pain and receiving the taunts and spitting and ridicule from onlookers, I wonder if he would have said to Himself, “I love my vocation.” In those awful hours of agony was He again aware of that moment after His baptism when He heard the voice of the Father, “You are My Beloved Son”? In total emptiness and nakedness, was Jesus gradually visualizing the dawn of a new day, the fruit of His labor, the fulfillment of His mission? Could He acknowledge with trust and confidence that He truly loved His vocation?

The Easter season is a time when we repeatedly renew our Baptismal vows. Our undergoing Baptism was nothing less than an immersion into the Paschal Mystery, an acceptance of all the dying and rising events that would come our way in life, a commitment to viewing all of the crosses in our lives with Resurrection eyeglasses. Identified with Christ through that holy sacrament, can we trust that in this time of crisis in our world, when faith is often shallow, we are called to plant the seeds of Resurrection? Shouldn’t this inspire us to love our vocation?