When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain thy touch can call us back to life again;
fields of our hearts, that dead and bare have been; Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Through the austere and testing days of Lent, we may have been particularly challenged by this year’s circumstances. However, after the example of a gardener sowing his seed in hope and expectation of pleasures to come, we recognize that nothing will be forthcoming unless the seed falls into the earth and dies: there is a disintegration of a former mode of being in order that another may begin. This new life is the realization that love is at the heart of reality which changes existence into life.

Lord of all life and power stir our hearts and minds to declare and sing our thanksgiving for your transformation from the dead to the living, so that others may hear and believe how in every nation those who are God-fearing, and do what is right, are acceptable to God. Let us with great joy draw water from the wells of salvation, and cease to dwell on days gone by but rather comprehend the new thing that breaks from the bud of the tree of life.
Let us sing aloud with thankful hearts, ‘This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.’

Unless the gardener continues to tend his seedbed and lawn with regular watering and weeding, the seed will not flourish and the green lawn will become mottled with unsightly brown patches thus losing the potential to cheer hearts and broadcast the joy of good news.

Lord, may we ever hold onto and proclaim the power and promise of your resurrection. Help us by daily and sacramental grace to resurrect the patchy deadness of our souls, and to ascend in mind and will above the temptations and dis-ease of mortal concern and faithless worry. Grant that Easter joy may show itself to all whom we meet and may radiate the good news of mankind’s salvation and the pattern of mankind’s fulfilment.

For Mary, early that first Easter morning, life, hope and love had all died, squashed and squelched behind that stone that sealed the tomb. The stone, though the symbol of everything that separates the Father from the Son and the Son from humanity and all creation, yet is part of God’s good creation. The bondedness of Christ and the Father together with the Holy Spirit, is the most fundamental truth there is. The coming of Christ among us shows that God’s determination to make us companions in the life of the Trinity is as true and permanent as the life of the Trinity itself. Nothing whatsoever in all creation can separate Christ from the Father, or us from Christ.

Lord for the years your love has kept and guided
urged and inspired us, cheered us on our way,
sought us and saved us, pardoned and provided,
Lord of the years, we bring our thanks today.

Lord, for ourselves, in living pow’r remake us,
self on the cross and Christ upon the throne;
past put behind us, for the future take us,
Lord of our lives, to live for Christ alone.

Easter is about a heaven-quake that rolls away the stone. Let it roll. Feel the joy of all your grief and folly and fragility and failure rolling with it. Feel your heart burst with the wonder of resurrection. Jesus is risen. The stone of death and grief, the stone of sin and control, the stone of fear and paralysis have rolled and your past and present have rolled with them. But, your future is still open. The stone has rolled away and the future is exposed to the fresh air of early morning and new life.

We shall go out with hope of resurrection; we shall go out from strength to strength go on;
we shall go out and tell our stories boldly; tales of love that will not let us go.
We’ll sing our songs of wrongs that can be righted; we’ll dream our dreams of hurts that can be healed;
We’ll weave a cloth of all the world united within the vision of a Christ who makes us free
We’ll leap and dance the resurrection story including all within the circles of our love.