Easter Weekend Reflections
The Easter weekend begins with the last supper, which took place during the Jewish Passover festival. At traditional passover meals the evening begins with the lighting of the candles, and a ritual prayer of bringing in the light. The Hebrew prayer can be translated into English as: Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation who invites us into wholeness of being, and who shines your light into our hearts.
So I invite you to have a candle ready, and after the video introduction we will pray this prayer together as a way of opening our hearts and inviting the light of God's Spirit to bring fresh insight and clarity during this Easter journey. Using your candle and any other symbols you would like to include, you could create a sacred space that you can return to through the weekend for these times of reading and prayer.
Below and on the next few web pages you will see an outline with readings for us to reflect on at various times during this Easter weekend, together with songs and questions for reflection. I suggest that we do these readings in a reflective way, allowing times of silence before and after each reading so that we can sink deeply into the readings and reflections, allowing the Spirit to touch and stir us from within.
If you would like to read some tools for approaches to scripture reading, you can find them by clicking the links below:
I also encourage you to build in a time of centering prayer or meditation at the start of each session, as a way of bringing our intention to opening our hearts in quiet surrender to God's presence and action within us during this Easter vigil. Here is a link to a brief set of guidelines on Centering Prayer offered by Fr Thomas Keating.
Preparatory Reading
Below are the readings that were quoted in the introduction for further reflection:
Warsan Shire:
later that night
I held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
It answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
Matt Licata:
“The ancient path of Love may never conform to our hopes, fears, dreams, and fantasies, for it is emerging in the here and now as an emissary of the Unknown itself. Let us rest in the aching truth that one of the primary roles of the Beloved is to seed deflation in the field of separation", [in other words, to undo all that separates and divides us from God, from Love and from one another].
"Yes, awakening may always be a disappointment, from the perspective of egoic organization. In this sense, the journey is eternally hopeless" [we need to come to the end of our ego hopes and the expectations of how our lives should turn out] - "but it is in the creation of a home for our hopelessness, [as we sit with our hopelessness and our despair that it is not as we had hoped it would be] ... that we are finally able to step into a world beyond our wildest imagination."
Listen to this piece of music as you prayerfully open yourself to the mysterious, creative, unsettling and unpredictable work of Love: