Le blog de la Bergerie

Short Reflexions on the season of
Lent, Holy Week, the Triduum and Easter 2017

These crucial and essential moments of the year

For a variety of reasons I have not updated this site recently as often as I wanted, although we just went through the most crucial, fundamental and formative moment of the year (and if you know me, you know I believe them all to be absolutely crucial) but the season of Lent, Holy Week and Easter? It is such an amazing feast of crucial moments, an avalanche of sign posts revealed along the way, culminating in one life-changing moment: his Resurrection. The Victory of the Cross, the Glory of Easter, which is for all of us, believers (timid or not), the moment has happened and is still unfolding, for the world, for all of us, whether we realize it or not, whether we are showing gratitude loud and clear or not….

The three layers of our time-life.

Life has many layers and they are all connected and intertwined and feeding each other:
1) The liturgical season of Easter 2017 is going on right now and will go till Pentecost.
2) The global Easter Season of our human race will unfold till the Second Coming…
3) The personal, private and innermost Easter Season of our own soul.

All three layers being played out in every breath we take and it will bloom when fed by love, hope and joy, compassion and forgiveness, less it shrinks and withers in their absence. But every one of our days on this little planet of ours is a new beginning. Our capacity to fall and get up again, to redress the course and aim for the highest good is within our reach, every day. Our freedom to seek one more time the good, the true and the just, our ability to want it and to will it, again and again, on our own and supported by the grace of the liturgy, carried on the shoulders of all the saints and all the angels, fed by prayers, our own or the ones of our neighbors, next door or across the globe, this is offered to us, every day. And the biggest gift is knowing that it is possible BECAUSE of the Passion and Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord…

The resurrection changed (and is still changing) everything!

*He* did it. It's done.
We only need to follow him, to listen to him, to love him…
Isn't this something?

Joyeuses Pâques à tous!

The season of Lent is right here and it is such a good time to think, to review, to reevaluate and to start again... The biggest shift in human history is about to happen, it is quite a long journey (so much can happen in 40 days) and it ends in glory but starts with such a simple and humble thing: ashes on our forehead, a very public reminder of our own frailty... "On ne nous dit pas : Allez vers l'Orient pour chercher la charité, naviguez vers l'Occident pour trouver l'amour de Dieu. Non, c'est à l'intérieur, dans notre cœur - dont nous avons constamment à chasser la colère - qu'il nous est ordonné de rentrer"; lire ici extrait d'un sermon de Cesaire d'Arles Fast from unkind words, from indifference, from self-absorption, but on the contrary make a point of smiling at strangers (and friends and neighbors, of course, but this should already be obvious to us, right?), finding strength in a bouquet of tulips or lighting a candle, asking for blessings on someone you actually (perhaps) do not even "like".... I'll try it! it's Lent.

MicheleSzekely@March-April-2017-2022