I’m writing this on the evening of Easter Sunday. We celebrated Easter at church last night; the mass began at 10PM and ended this morning a little before 1AM. This Lent has been difficult for me in that I haven’t been able to get a handle on it. At the beginning of the mass as I watched the lighting of the fire I realized that perhaps that was the point. We see Lent through the eyes of Jesus and the 40 days he spent in the desert before his entry into Jerusalem; during that time he was presented with certain temptations (presumably including the temptation to forget the whole thing and fade into obscurity). In a sense to try to “do Lent” is to miss the point. The inability to control my experience of Lent became for me exactly the desert experience it was supposed to be.

The most poignant part of the mass for me was the beginning. The Easter fire was lit at 10PM and the image of light out of darkness was clear. As I watched the fire I thought that the mystery of Easter is …. well, a mystery. OK, I know that sounds like a horrible cliché but we (I) spend so much time trying to understand what is simply to be believed in all of its shrouding. Jesus died, rose from the dead, and has promised that same resurrection for us all. I don’t know what that means, and I work in a profession where I can’t count the number of people I’ve seen die. I believe what I believe not because it makes sense, but because it doesn’t make sense. More later…