Poetic Herald

May can see snow. More welcome is the poet’s sharp sight: “the lights of the flowers / coming on in waves.”

Poem of the month: Primavera by Robin Robertson https://t.co/GPRf8xPTOJ

— The Guardian (@guardian) May 9, 2020

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Later: Sunday’s 2^nd Reading

Gospel of Easter Wednesday and . . .

...more on mystagogy. The church recovered that ministry of helping baptized people enter the Resurrection mystery. The vitality of the early church hummed with the presence of the risen Christ. From the late 1960s the Catholic Church drank anew from that vitality. Jesuit “James Crampsey explores some passages in the Synoptic Gospels against the horizon of Mystagogy.”

He begins with the Easter Wednesday gospel: two disciples encounter the Risen One while walking. The first hearers were at home with features of the gospel we might find strange. They were like us, too: their experience of the Risen One and their convictions about human living and dying were not in synch. Without leaving home the pandemic has put us on an unexpected, unwanted road. How welcome is the Risen One in 2020?

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Wiki-image The Pilgrims of Emmaus on the Road by “James Tissot | PD-US"

Continued Entrance into the Mystery

The first witnesses to the Resurrection catechized others so they could enter the mystery. Catechesis come from  Greek: to echo down into the ears. Once a person began to reverberate with the Resurrection mystery baptism was celebrated. Baptism began the process of mystagogy: being led more deeply through the same mystery. The Church takes time for both catechesis and mystagogy.

The Christian conception of time is not limited to the modern one in which humans usually operate: unilinear and forward. It is an intersection: human time with divine time. The Kairos video exemplifies the intersection as it leads through the Resurrection mystery from our present moment.

Living It Better

A friend required immune-suppressive therapy last month, and the incursion of Covid was terrifying. Wondering about God in our current crisis came up in the conversation. It influenced this post.

The Coronavirus causes suffering for societies and individuals. Suffering spurs many to question God. First, the experience.

Suffering is not one-dimensional; its “dimensions [are] the physical, the psychological, the social, and the spiritual,” noted  Passionist Father Robin Ryan in a March 2016 U.S. Catholic interview. [Context: Fr. Ryan referenced Paris often; suffering was experienced because of the November 2015 Paris attacks.]

Suffering is a “mystery.” As a result, “Human beings will never understand why suffering exists. But even in the midst of our pain, there is God.” As in 2016 God remains present now and every day. This interview can assist us to live this “mystery” better today.   

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Wikimage Schwanenstein, Lohme, Insel Rügen by "Ansgar Koreng / CC BY-SA 4.0"