From Deacon Dick

The Comfort of the Resurrection

The Easter Season invites us to reflect ever more deeply on our foundational Christian hope … the Resurrection. Spiritual writer Fr. Ronald Rohlheiser teaches that our belief in the Resurrection of Jesus offers us a comfort so deep that there is nothing and no one in this world that is an ultimate threat to us.  We might say that, even now, we rest in the comfort of God’s embrace.  For God continues to make new life … and to make life new.  In this sense, you and I experience the comfort of the Resurrection each day.

Sociologist Peter Berger illustrates this point in what he calls “rumors of angels in everyday life.”

“Consider the most ordinary, and probably the most fundamental of all---the ordinary gesture by which a mother reassures her anxious child. A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats.  At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred and invisible, in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at his moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order.  It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world.  And, of course, any good mother will do just that.  She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna.  She will turn on the lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light.  She will speak or sing to the child and the contents of this communication will invariably be the same – ‘Don’t be afraid’ – everything is in order, everything is all right.”

The mother’s comforting words and gentle actions were her profession of faith in the Resurrection … yes … “don’t be afraid; it is all right.” It is also our profession of faith, isn’t it?