A blessed Easter to all, and thanks be to God for Thomas Merton:
"Christ is risen. Christ lives. Christ is the Lord of the living and the dead. He is the Lord of history.
"Christ is the Lord of a history that moves. He not only holds the beginning and the end in his hands, but he is in history with us, walking ahead of us to where we are going. He is not always in the same place."
Jerusalem's Community of the Holy Sepulchre "is Christian only in so far as it is...the place where Christ is no longer found." Similarly, we are called "to move on, to follow him to where we are not yet, to seek him where he goes before us--'to Galilee.'"
"We are called to experience the Resurrection in our own lives by entering into this dynamic movement, by following Christ who lives in us. This life, this dynamism, is expressed by the power of love and of encounter: Christ lives in us if we love one another. And our love for one another means involvement in one another's history.
"Christ lives in us and leads us, through mututal encounter and commitment, into a new future which we build together for one another. That future is called the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is already established; the Kingdom is a present reality.
"Such is the timeless message of the Church not only on Easter Sunday but on every day of the year and every year until the world's end.
"The dynamism of the Easter mystery is at the heart of the Christian faith. It is the life of the Church.
"The Resurrection is not a doctrine we try to prove, or a problem we argue about: it is the life and action of Christ himself in us by his Holy Spirit.
"A Christian bases (their) entire life on these truths. (Our) entire life is changed by the presence and the action of the Risen Christ."
--Thomas Merton, monk, writer, peacemaker
Every Easter for many years now, I have prayed this poem, written by a dear friend, Rosalind Green Russell, who was also a painter. Here is her poem, "Dawn of Day":
Dawn of Day,
new hope aglow with celestial light,
transforms in pastel glory
the deep, cold shades of night.
Boldly over awakened earth
rises clear the Morning Sun,
brightly rearranging all
for the crisp new day that's come.
Thomas Merton, "He Is Risen" (Niles, Illinois: Argus Communications, 1975), p. 1-2.