Easter Sunday: Dinner With Friends

Place some ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, asparagus, strawberries and chocolate cake on the table, raise your glasses to the cry "Christ is Risen" , then add plenty of spirited conversation about church matters and you have a very Catholic Easter Dinner. Our dinner with friends was perhaps more spirited than usual, not because of the news beat being pounded by the secular press, but because right at home in our parish we had a controversy brewing. People with strong opinions, too little sleep due to the late hour of the previous night's Easter Vigil, and a deep commitment to the church are bound to raise their voices in what my aunt used to call a brawl around the dinner table. It was a good-natured brawl, though there were undercurrents. One might even say it was a festive brawl, flowers and champagne mimosas in abundance.

It had to do with whether under any circumstances a lay person can offer a "reflection" in the place of a homily at Mass. And what a homily is versus a reflection. And what the role of women is in the church and , well, you can imagine the rest.At one point it was my turn to defend the role of the clergy in the pulpit, convert that I am, and to explain why I, a former pastor do not mind the fact that I cannot and should not be ordained a priest. I suppose I have earned the right to speak about this issue since I have been "on the other side." Though I don't believe it is my previous experience of twenty years that directs my thinking. It is simply the beauty of the Catholic position.

Catholicism asks us to be more than we think we can be, or know ourselves to be; it asks us to scale heights of virtue and self -sacrifice that the culture around us may never require or dare to consider.

Instead of simply writing checks for charity we are asked to see Jesus in the poor among us: the odd person who comes into a church meeting and asks for money to get on a bus, the woman holding up a sign asking for help on the edge of a shopping center, stifling a yawn because she is weary from so much poverty, the teenager with no shoes who walks quietly into a restaurant and sits down waiting for someone to help her find a meal.

Instead of cultivating relationships that are convenient and give us mere pleasure, we are asked to put aside our needs and look for joy. Joy in chastity, in love that endures, in prayerful self-giving.

Instead of locating happiness in endless parties, and trivial distractions, we are offered the Holy Spirit whose unseen presence fills us with the wine of contentment.

Instead of self- fulfilment we are led to lose ourselves, relying not on our own fixed notions of who we are, but opening ourselves up to who God knows we are.

Instead of the ordinary we are offered the holy.

In the light of holiness, all the issues we talked over at dinner reduce to one: not my will, but thy will be done. To live that prayer every day is to climb the Mt. Everest of virtue and faith. And of course we never do that on our own.The Catholic faith holds out grace as the daily means to live lives we could not otherwise live. It is the grace of the risen Lord in whom we live and have our being. As our Easter dinner conversation demonstrated, we are , each one of us, at a different point on the path to holiness. And so we talk and share opinions, and feelings, and disappointments, and we argue about interpretations. But the amazing truth is that God is there anyway.

The church does not permit women to be ordained to holy orders, or to preach. That is only a problem if it is viewed from a place which says, my will, not your will, my Lord. A call to the priesthood is not after all a personal life choice, but a very particular calling from God. No one of us can manufacture it, man or woman.

Once we are free to say with Mary, fiat, we are free to lose ourselves in the beautiful calling to holiness which belongs to each one of us. And quite frankly, the road to holiness gives me quite enough to do and be. It is truly all I need. And for that I am grateful.

The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed!