Dear Friends and Readers,
I offer this essay to facilitate a more fruitful celebration of the Easter season.
Peace,
Fr. Jim Bacik
On Easter Sunday over 1 billion Catholics around the world celebrated the hopeful good news that Christ has been raised to life. In the poetic Sequence proclaimed at the Mass, Mary Magdalene declares that Christ himself is our hope. The five-week Easter season, culminating in the feast of Pentecost offers us an opportunity to deepen and practice the virtue of hope. To this end I invite reflection on what I call the dialectical virtue of “hopeful realism,” which involves facing life in all its ambiguity, accepting the inevitable struggle between good and evil, learning to cope with the full range of our emotions, acknowledging our strengths as well as our limitations. This virtue reflects the teaching in the Letter to the Phillipians (2:1-10) that Jesus was obedient to death, even death on the cross and therefore God raised him to life and exalted him as “Lord.”
Hopeful realism is based on a faith that is reasonable but which transcends empirical analysis and logical deduction. It involves the faith conviction that the process of life can be trusted, that absurdity fits into a larger context of meaning, that the good will prove stronger than evil in the long run. We can bear grief because we believe our tears will be wiped away one day. We can continue the struggle because we believe all human effort is finally worthwhile. We can face our sins and weaknesses because we believe in a God who loves us and never tires of forgiving us.
In order to maintain faith in God’s promise of salvation, we need signals of hope in our everyday experience. We might consider the times when we fought our personal demon and with God’s help found a way to manage it; when we admitted a weakness and made progress; when we suffered through heavy moods and emerged with a lighter spirit; when we confronted death and felt hope enkindled. Such experiences suggest that a friendly power, well named the Gracious Mystery, is at work in our lives.
The Easter season provides an opportunity to develop practical ways to maintain hope in the midst of disappointments and frustrations. For example, limit time watching television news; seek guidance from the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete; spend more time with up-beat friends; and thank the Source of all good gifts for progress toward a more peaceful world and a more just society. Our shared hope is that by the great feast of Pentecost we will be better Christian disciples, more open to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
The Pentecost liturgy celebrates the Holy Spirit, who is the Source and Goal of our hope. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles (2:1-11) tells the story of the Galilean disciples preaching the good news of God’s great saving deeds and being heard by people from different countries and locations in their own language. This reminds us of the power of the Holy Spirit at work in our world today to overcome differences and to bring people with different perspectives into fruitful dialogue and collaboration. In the ninth century poetic Sequence proclaimed at the Pentecost Mass, we pray: “Come Holy Spirit from heaven and direct on us the rays of your light. Kindly Paraclete, in your gracious visits to our soul, you bring relief and consolation. If it is weary with toil, you bring it ease; in the heat of temptation, your grace cools it; if sorrowful, your words console it. Wash clean the sinful soul, rain down your grace on the parched soul and heal the injured soul. Soften the hard heart, cherish and warm the ice-cold heart and give direction to the wayward. Amen alleluia”