Fr. Phil's Easter Letter

What difference would it make to you if you knew your soul was immortal?
 
               A reasonable and healthy trend in contemporary spirituality is to live in the moment.  Call it mindfulness; stop and smell the coffee, sniff the roses, and take one day at a time.  That consciousness is a welcome antidote to the frenzy of tomorrow’s worries, tomorrow’s threat, and tomorrow’s unknown. Yet, there is an aspect about living into the future that is as valuable, as healthy, and as liberating.  Maybe even more so.
               The great author Victor Hugo observed:  For half a century I have been writing my thoughts in prose and verse; history, philosophy, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode and song; I have tried all.  But I feel I have not said the thousandth part of what is in me.  When I go down to the grave,  I can say, like many others, “I have finished my day’s work.”  But I cannot say, “I have finished my life.”  My day’s work will begin again the next morning.  The tomb is not a blind alley but a thoroughfare.  It closes on the twilight, opens on the dawn

​                We believe in immortality because it is promised in our faith and celebrated in the Resurrection of our Lord.   And equally, we have experienced a deep encounter within our own souls - a thing too precious to be cast into the void.  Surely, if there is any higher power at all, such a precious gift as a soul could not be jettisoned at the conclusion of a material and finite existence.   We are unique, unrepeatable and irreplaceable.  We all live different lives.  And most certainly, the quality of our lives is not determined by length.   A care letter written by a grade schooler to a soldier overseas concluded, “I hope you will live all your life.”  Ah.  Do we live all our lives?   Or do we, too simply, think of life chiefly by its length?  Consider our Savior.  Jesus had thirty-three years and his public ministry was but three.
A former and rather eccentric parishioner, who now lives in the Perfection of God, was a man of deep and serious conviction.  I observed him spending a great deal of time with another parishioner whom I happened to know he disliked with some vigor.  I queried him as to this sudden shift in behavior.  “I realized I would be spending eternity with her and thought I better try to get along now, maybe I can help her be more pleasant before we get there.”    A more powerful eternal motivation is expressed in the martyrs Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Martin Luther King Jr. who knew their protests would risk everything while never completing their cause.  Through eyes of infinite continuity we can bring about more peace, justice, meaning, and love. 

The “everlasting” vision offers concrete inspiration for greater living in our moment, and not merely propelling us to care for those who rub us the wrong way.  Eternity empowers us to bravely endure sufferings, insist on justice for the oppressed,  find grace and grant forgiveness, claim power over the overwhelming, discover new beginnings in old endings, uncover triumph where all is doubt and darkness, walk in tranquility and peace where all is strife, stand with the troubled, and befriend the friendless.
 
This is why we believe in immortality, believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and why we shout with all our being, ​

      “Alleluia Christ is Risen, The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!”