Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb by Fra Angelico c. 1440If each year, we are faithful in sharing Christ's sufferings during Lent and Holy Week, each year, too, the celebration of Easter, the contemplation of the glory of Jesus triumphant over death, makes up participate more fruitfully amd more abundantly in the state of Our Risen Lord; it increases our detachment from all that is not God, and, by grace, faith and love it makes the divine life grow within us. At the same time, it enlivens our hope: for, says St Paul, when at the last day Christ, Who is our Life and our Head, shall appear, then we also, because we share inHis life, "shall appear with Him in glory."
This hope fills us with joy, and it is because the mystery of Easter, being a mystery of life, strengthens our hope, that it is also super-eminently a mystery of joy.
The Church shows this by multiplying, throughout Paschal time, the Alleluia, the cry of gladness and felicity borrowed from the liturgy of Heaven. She had banished it during Lent in order to manifest her sadness and communicate in the sufferings of her Bridegroom. Now that Christ is risen, she rejoices with Him; she takes up again, with new fervour, the joyous acclamation wherein is summed up all the ardour of her feelings.
Never let us forget that we make up only one with Christ Jesus. His triumph is ours, His glory is the principle of our joy. With the Church our Mother, let us, too, often repeat the Alleluia so as to manifest our joy to Christ in seeing Him triumphant over death, and to thatnk the Father for the glory that He gives to His Son. The Alleluia that the Church unweariedly repeats, during the fifty days of the Paschal season, is like the ever renewed echo of that prayer with which she ends Easter week: "Grant us, we bessech Thee, O Lord, ever to rejoice through these Paschal mysteries; that the contniual work of our regernation may ensure to us perpetual joy in heaven."
Taken from Christ in His Mysteries by Dom Columba Marmion OSB
This hope fills us with joy, and it is because the mystery of Easter, being a mystery of life, strengthens our hope, that it is also super-eminently a mystery of joy.
The Church shows this by multiplying, throughout Paschal time, the Alleluia, the cry of gladness and felicity borrowed from the liturgy of Heaven. She had banished it during Lent in order to manifest her sadness and communicate in the sufferings of her Bridegroom. Now that Christ is risen, she rejoices with Him; she takes up again, with new fervour, the joyous acclamation wherein is summed up all the ardour of her feelings.
Never let us forget that we make up only one with Christ Jesus. His triumph is ours, His glory is the principle of our joy. With the Church our Mother, let us, too, often repeat the Alleluia so as to manifest our joy to Christ in seeing Him triumphant over death, and to thatnk the Father for the glory that He gives to His Son. The Alleluia that the Church unweariedly repeats, during the fifty days of the Paschal season, is like the ever renewed echo of that prayer with which she ends Easter week: "Grant us, we bessech Thee, O Lord, ever to rejoice through these Paschal mysteries; that the contniual work of our regernation may ensure to us perpetual joy in heaven."
Taken from Christ in His Mysteries by Dom Columba Marmion OSB
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