Let Him Easter in Us
Let Him easter in us,
be a dayspring to the dimness of us,
be a crimson-cresseted east.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
As Christians we especially rejoice on Easter Sunday that Jesus has risen and saved us, through not despite our weaknesses and wounds.
But that is the “Good News” many of us, including me, find very hard to accept.
The Easter season is a good time to reflect on why we all stubbornly resist God’s deep love for each of us.
I know only too well how I can find it difficult to really stop, be still and enter into this inner journey.
Strangely, something in me persists in the continual search for a “perfect” friend, partner, church, priest, parish or family or whatever. It is so very hard to accept God’s love deep down.
For the disease of “perfectionism” eats away at us all in a society that celebrates “success” as the ultimate goal of life. We all want to get it “right”, look “good” and please others!
Christian discipleship instead demands “falling in love with God”. It is a paradoxical call, at once very simple, yet very demanding. Its territory is tolerating “messiness” and imperfection.
For it involves having learnt the “hard” truth of what Richard Rohr OFM often points out about the spiritual journey: “You can’t come to God by doing it right – you come to God by doing it wrong, otherwise, you don’t fall in love with God, you fall in love with yourself.”
Rohr reminds me of Tony de Mello SJ’s paradoxical saying, “Be grateful for your sins. They are carriers of grace.”
Sooner or later – we must all come to the realisation that only God can save us from our fears and our addictions.
Many of us need to “hit a wall” in order to have a chance of waking up to the reality that we are living “insane” lives as long as we believe that we can “control” things on our own.
When “we wake up” to the real world, we find God patiently waiting for us, ready to help, ready to save us and make us whole.
That is the resurrection in our lives – often “frozen” or “dead” because of self-hatred and sin.
May this Easter 2020 challenge me and all of us, to “let Him Easter in us” – so that we let go and “fall in love” with our God who loves us beyond our wildest dreams.
Jesus is risen! Alleluia!
Br Mark O’Connor FMS is the Vicar for Communications in the Diocese of Parramatta.
