The Easter Story

Here BM Animations tells the Easter story using Legos:

Celebrating Easter in Preschool

There has been a lot happening at Sacred Heart Preschool during this Easter season.

 We have learned about Jesus’ Holy Week

We have had an Easter egg hunt

 We have played in our “Garden Center”

 We have done some real planting

 We have watched caterpillars turn into butterflies

 And we have set them free

Happy Easter everyone!

Jesus' Easter Game of Hide and Seek‏

Our Tabernacle doors, created by artist John Lajba, depict
the disciples recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever."

    - Hebrews 13:8

Most of Jesus' life on earth is hidden from us, including His Risen Life.

Even now, He is risen and among us but chooses to remain hidden, wrote Caryll Houselander in her book The Risen Christ.

"He is 'the Way'; the Way does not change," Houselander said. "We are helped by this consistency to recognize Him in His hidden life in ourselves."

Like his disciples, we don't always recognize the Risen Lord. But His appearances in Scripture highlight Jesus' gifts to us and give us some clues on how He reveals Himself to us, the author said.

"To the stricken world in the person of Magdalene, compassion: 'Why are you weeping, for Whom are you seeking?'

"To the apostles, His first word, 'Peace!'

"To Thomas, 'Believe' because of the wounds -- 'the courage of faith.'

"To Peter, the wonderful opportunity to affirm His love.

"To the disciples who mourned Him as lost, communion with Him."

Jesus continues his hidden, daily miracles, appearing to us in the breaking of the bread and through many other "unobserved, unguessed miracles of grace, contrition, conversion, hope, forgiveness, love, taking place secretly in the human soul."

He is hidden in everyone, Houselander said, but we must have the eyes of faith to see Him.

 "He may come as a little child, making enormous demands, giving enormous consolation; He may come as a stranger, so that we must give the hospitality to a stranger that we should like to give to Christ; He may come to us in His Passion, disfigured by our sins and all sin, asking the utmost courage of us, that we may not be scandalized and may believe. He may come to us as a servant and compel us to the extreme humility which accepts His service, as Peter had to do, when He washed his feet, and as the disciples did with unquestioning joy, when He cooked their little meal on the seashore."

Perhaps the most difficult place to find the Risen Christ is in ourselves, she said, because we see ourselves as so unworthy. But we all have the means to radiate our Lord to others: "words, a human voice, sympathy, hands to serve."

Remember, the Risen Christ is appearing to us, and "the only condition for finding and recognizing the Risen Christ today is that we love Him: not power, chance, or virtue, but only love."

Inspired by the Year of Faith, Susan Szalewski began writing weekly columns for us. Although that year is over, we liked them so well that we asked her to keep writing. Thankfully, she said yes. So watch for these on Thursdays and see the Year of Faith Blog here.

Happy Easter!!

Happy Easter! Rejoice! Alleluia!

We shouldn't tire of those words because Easter is not over yet. In fact, it's just begun. We're only on Day Five of one day, Easter -- thanks to the Easter Octave, one day the Church joyously prolongs over eight days.

And the Easter season is 50 days, so this year we can stretch our Resurrection joy all the way into June (kind of like professional basketball and hockey seasons).

For fun, take a look at one Catholic blogger's list of 50 ways to celebrate Easter, one for every day of the season.

 

At the end of the blog, the writer suggests using Chris Rice's Cartoon Song as a ring tone. If you haven't heard the song, you should look it up. It made me smile, and I hope it will bring some Easter joy to you, too.

Happy Easter! Rejoice! Alleluia!

Inspired by the Year of Faith, Susan Szalewski began writing weekly columns for us. Although that year is over, we liked them so well that we asked her to keep writing. Thankfully, she said yes. So watch for these on Thursdays and see the Year of Faith Blog here.

Preparing the church

It took a lot of work by a lot of folks to prepare the church for the Triduum and Easter Services. Thank you to all of you!

Happy Easter

The image above is in Fr. Damian's office. It depicts the disciples Peter and John (the other disciple whom Jesus loved) as they rush to the tomb as described in today's Gospel. John is young, Peter is old, and each runs with their own thoughts. Here is today's Gospel:

On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.”

So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first; he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.

When Simon Peter arrived after him, he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place. Then the other disciple also went in, the one who had arrived at the tomb first, and he saw and believed.

For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.

Welcome to the Church

Happy Easter

 As always, the Easter Vigil began outside with fire.

 The church was lit by candlelight and became brighter ...

 ... as the Exultent was sung.

We had baptisms.

 

 We had Confirmations.

Welcome and congratulations

 to our newest members.

Happy Easter to Everyone.

He is Risen!

Divine Mercy Sunday

The message and devotion to Jesus as The Divine Mercy is based on the writings of Saint Faustina Kowalska, an uneducated Polish nun who, in obedience to her spiritual director, wrote a diary of about 600 pages recording the revelations she received about God’s mercy. Even before her death in 1938, the devotion to The Divine Mercy had begun to spread.

The message of mercy is that God loves us — all of us — no matter how great our sins. He wants us to recognize that His mercy is greater than our sins, so that we will call upon Him with trust, receive His mercy, and let it flow through us to others. Thus, all will come to share His joy. It is a message we can call to mind simply by remembering ABC.

A — Ask for His Mercy. God wants us to approach Him in prayer constantly, repenting of our sins and asking Him to pour His mercy out upon us and upon the whole world.

B — Be merciful. God wants us to receive His mercy and let it flow through us to others. He wants us to extend love and forgiveness to others just as He does to us.

C — Completely trust in Jesus. God wants us to know that the graces of His mercy are dependent upon our trust. The more we trust in Jesus, the more we will receive.

From Pope Benedict's Easter Homily

At the beginning of the Liturgy of the Word on Easter night, then, comes the account of the creation of the world. Two things are particularly important here in connection with this liturgy. On the one hand, creation is presented as a whole that includes the phenomenon of time. The seven days are an image of completeness, unfolding in time. They are ordered towards the seventh day, the day of the freedom of all creatures for God and for one another. Creation is therefore directed towards the coming together of God and his creatures; it exists so as to open up a space for the response to God’s great glory, an encounter between love and freedom. On the other hand, what the Church hears on Easter night is above all the first element of the creation account: "God said, ‘let there be light!’" (Gen 1:3). The creation account begins symbolically with the creation of light. The sun and the moon are created only on the fourth day. The creation account calls them lights, set by God in the firmament of heaven. In this way he deliberately takes away the divine character that the great religions had assigned to them. No, they are not gods. They are shining bodies created by the one God. But they are preceded by the light through which God’s glory is reflected in the essence of the created being.

What is the creation account saying here? Light makes life possible. It makes encounter possible. It makes communication possible. It makes knowledge, access to reality and to truth, possible. And insofar as it makes knowledge possible, it makes freedom and progress possible. Evil hides. Light, then, is also an expression of the good that both is and creates brightness. It is daylight, which makes it possible for us to act. To say that God created light means that God created the world as a space for knowledge and truth, as a space for encounter and freedom, as a space for good and for love. Matter is fundamentally good, being itself is good. And evil does not come from God-made being, rather, it comes into existence only through denial. It is a "no".

At Easter, on the morning of the first day of the week, God said once again: "Let there be light". The night on the Mount of Olives, the solar eclipse of Jesus’ passion and death, the night of the grave had all passed. Now it is the first day once again – creation is beginning anew. "Let there be light", says God, "and there was light": Jesus rises from the grave. Life is stronger than death. Good is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate. Truth is stronger than lies. The darkness of the previous days is driven away the moment Jesus rises from the grave and himself becomes God’s pure light. But this applies not only to him, not only to the darkness of those days. With the resurrection of Jesus, light itself is created anew. He draws all of us after him into the new light of the resurrection and he conquers all darkness. He is God’s new day, new for all of us.

Happy Easter

On the last day of preschool before the Easter

Break, we set out for an Easter Egg Hunt.

It was a beautiful day to be outside.

Once inside, we compared eggs.

We prepared to go home with an Easter surprise on our heads.

 We wish everyone a Happy Easter!