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EASTERTIDE: The Great Fifty Days (from Easter Sunday to Pentecost). Once there was a seven-year-old boy whose family took in two young women who had come from out of town to attend a week-long conference in the family's church. The house guests shared breakfast with the family each morning. During the women's stay, several adjustments were made in the household. The boy had to give up his bedroom and he had to sleep on the couch in the living room. The bathroom became a hive of activity, especially when everyone was getting ready to go to work or church or school. And the mood of the home was noticeably light, too, as the usual daily concerns of the family were displaced by a common concern to make their guests' stay as pleasant as possible. Breakfast was normally a routine and rushed affair for the family; more important than food and the fellowship were their obsessions with getting out of the house on time. With house guests, however, things were different: breakfast was now served with elegance and taste, and was something of a feast, as the family shared the extravagance of an entire "Variety Pack" of cereals, and bacon and eggs and fresh-baked muffins. And to top it off, all of this was consumed not in the kitchen, but in the dining room on a starched linen tablecloth.... The little boy noticed the effect that the house guests had on his family; he knew the house guests were special and that something exceptional had transpired in their coming to visit. He felt that they must be royalty! And their royalty had evoked the royalty too long dormant in the little boy's family. And so the little boy wept when the women said goodbye. He wept not only because he sensed he would miss them, but even more because of a deep awareness that his family would quickly forget its own royalty, and put away its finery, and succumb to the routine of rushed, silent breakfasts, served in the kitchen; they would forget that they were bearers of crowns and coronets, and so become servants to a "lord" who confined their attention to clocks and costs and kitchen.... Easter is a time of sumptuous breakfasts and extraordinary suppers in the dining room of radical changes in our expectations and priorities. And yet too soon we feel compelled to return to the tensions of workday routines, and instant breakfasts grabbed on the run, and of the immovable nature of certain "powers that be." But during the fifty days of Easter (Eastertide), we recall for an instant that we, like Christ, are royalty, heirs of God, the King of Creation. And surely the season of Easter's fifty days is providential (50 being ten more days than the sobering 40 days of Lent) because in truth it takes longer to grasp the grace of our being "royal" than it does to accept our status as sinners. Throughout this joyous season of Eastertide, let us remember that we are a royal household, called to extend extravagant amounts of hospitality, in all places and at all times.

What might we be if only we tried?                  What might we become if only we'd listen?
(Amanda Gorman)

Only the person who has experienced it can believe what the love of Jesus Christ really is. 

(Bernard of Clairvaux)

Live Your Faith