"Where Hope Lies"

The Carmelites of Indianapolis' website, praythenews.com, has featured Carmelite sisters' perspectives on events in the news for years now.  The latest is a perspective on Holy Week, drawn from an article about Holy Week that appeared in The Voice.  Sister Ruth's perspective is well worth reading:

"For too many people, there is that mistaken belief that Easter was something that happened long ago and that it's merely a once a year commemoration. A day to show off a new spring outfit, consume chocolate bunnies and revel in the joy of a spring break. But the true significance of what happened has not been totally saturated within for so many. Especially in these times of terrorist bombings, wars in distant lands, people are wondering where hope lies.

"In every age, there has been evil done by human beings in the name of God. Those who think they were doing God's will instead inflicted terror on those who had different beliefs, never realizing that these too were God's children. In the death of Jesus, those responsible must have felt they were doing the will of God in getting rid of this "troublemaker," this One who was advocating justice for the poor and the afflicted, who insisted that all people were to be held in reverence, who came with the universal message of love. Or so they thought they were going to get rid of him. But God had another plan. Truth could not be denied, justice would not wait and love was not to be squelched. The message of Easter is a message that is not confined by space and time. Karl Rahner writes in a meditation on the Easter event:

"'Easter is not the celebration of a past event. The alleluia is not for what was; Easter proclaims a beginning which has already decided the remotest future. The resurrection means that the beginning of glory has already started. And what began in that way is in process of fulfillment. Does it last long? It lasts thousands of years because at least that short space of time is needed for an incalculable plentitude of reality and history to force itself through the brief death agony of a gigantic transformation (which we call natural history and world history) to its glorious fulfillment.'

"We live in that eschatological tension that the reign of God is both realized and not yet. There is both the agony and the ecstasy, that which is fulfilled and that which is in the process of fulfillment. But in all this, there is for me, that one core belief, that the Lord is truly risen. And in believing that, believing that truly all will come to its glorious fulfillment. For as the Exultet proclaims "Christ has conquered! Glory fills you! Darkness vanishes forever!"