by Father Mark Goldasich
Finally, spring has sprung. Let’s welcome this new season with this beautiful prayer by Heather Barr found on ibelieve.com:
“Father, thank you for a fresh start today. Thank you for the reminder of ‘renewal’ that spring represents to us in the earth. You ‘spring forth’ a new thing! I am excited and expectant of your goodness in this spring season. Thank you, Father! Prepare me for all the new and wonderful things you have for my life. Help me to let go of the old things that hold me back, the things that do not bring me life, the things that keep me living in the past. I will cling to my new identity in Christ! Help me to keep ‘springing forward’ in my journey with you.”
The changing of the seasons calls us to shift our perspective. That’s especially true with springtime. As Christians, we move from the fasting of Lent to the feasting of Easter. This lesson was clearly brought home to me growing up during the shortest celebration in the Triduum.
On Holy Saturday afternoon, families streamed to my home parish of St. John the Baptist on Strawberry Hill for the blessing of food. The aisles of the church were crammed with baskets stuffed with kobase (smoked sausage), green onions, hard-boiled eggs, bread (often decorated with braids on top), šunka (ham), chocolates (I usually was able to sneak these in) and povitica (nut bread), to name just a few of the delicacies. Never did the church smell so fragrant.
After some prayers, our pastor would walk down the aisles and bless the baskets with holy water and then incense. And unlike many times when we brought food to church to donate, this time we got to take the food home to enjoy as the first meal of Easter. We were careful as we ate the food to collect all the crumbs from the “blagoslov” (“blessing”) to be burned, since we couldn’t just throw out what was blessed.
It’s a tradition that I’ve carried with me to Tonganoxie. It wouldn’t be Easter without it.
Shifting perspective is what spring is all about: fasting to feasting, darkness to light, death to life. The season of Lent has been preparing us for this: our prayer reminded us that we are not self-sufficient, but dependent on our God for everything; our fasting made clear that while we are blessed to choose to do without, many in our world are denied that choice; and our almsgiving moved us from selfishness and greed to selflessness and generosity, especially to those in need.
Perspective can enable us to transform even the most mundane things. It can turn the chore of spring cleaning into a spring treasure hunt — unearthing stuff we may have forgotten we had or pushing us to make use of the “good stuff” that we often save for a special occasion.
Perspective can turn the sneezing and sniffling of spring allergies to humble amazement at the beauty of creation bursting forth in green grass, budding trees and fragrant flowers. It can turn the grumbling at darker mornings that daylight saving time has ushered in to relishing the longer time of sunlight at the end of the day.
The Triduum invites us to a change of perspective as well. We can move from avoiding the liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil because “they’re just too long,” to seeing them instead as a privileged opportunity once a year to accompany Jesus with gratitude during all he endured for our salvation.
Let’s “see” to it that we make this Holy Week truly holy.
