To Live Would Be

We are an Easter people. The Pope has said this. My principal says this every time he stands in front of the school. Liz quoted Augustine saying it on her blog. It's true.

If you really pay attention to the Catholic Church, it's obvious that we are. The essential Liturgy of the Church, the Mass, changes for three days at Easter time. We bring out bells, incense, fire, water, lights, darkness, processions, and music like nobody's business. We celebrate Easter in highest form for not one but 8 days -- and then carry on for 42 more days before our season finally comes to an end. Even during penitential seasons, Sundays merit a break -- because every Sunday represents an Easter moment.

That's how we show it. But what does it mean?

It relates to the title of this blog. (Yes, I know it's Peter Pan.) "I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly," Jesus says. Easter isn't a fluffy holiday about jelly beans (yum!) and a bunny and the arrival of spring. It's about the action that made life meaningful. Without Easter, to live won't be "an awfully big adventure." Without Easter, life is just about coasting along until death catches up with us. With Easter, to live is an awfully big adventure. And Peter Pan's words in the movie ("to live would be an awfully big adventure") relate beautifully to his words in the novel : "to die would be an awfully big adventure."

Death was the end of life. The separation of body and spirit, the taking away of what (remember Theology of the Body?) makes us human. The sin of Adam and Eve won that end for us.

Yet priests everywhere sang in the Exultet last night : "Oh happy fault! O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!" We are an Easter people because we live according to that redemption, rather than according to that death. Body and soul may be separated, but we believe in the Resurrection of Christ and because of that, the resurrection of our own bodies. We also believe in death to an existence rooted in sin and life in Christ in the here and now -- life and death are bound up together. And so our Easter salvation encompasses all that we are : in it we live and move and have our being.