4/8/22 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Second Graders hard at work.

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

From a holiday standpoint, Easter is no Christmas. You don’t hear Easter songs playing on the radio. Some people decorate for Easter, but certainly not to the extent of Christmas. In fact, people do more gussying up for Halloween these days than they do for Easter.

Commercially, the season of Christmas starts at Thanksgiving and continues through the first of the year. The “holiday” of Easter gets a day—maybe a weekend. There is Easter candy and baskets and colored eggs, but that’s about it in terms of celebration. Part of the reason is that before Easter comes Lent. For those of us who acknowledge the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, those 40 days seem to be a season of endurance. We give up something we like and eat fish, or pizza without the pepperoni on Fridays. When we finally get to Easter, there is almost of a sigh of relief. We get to eat that chocolate again or drink that soda. The pepperonis are back on the pie and we keep the fish sticks in the freezer.

On the liturgical calendar, the Church considers Holy Week and Easter Sunday the most significant time of the year. So why is it marginalized? Why isn’t it a bigger deal? Part of the reason, I think, is that we are celebrating a birth at Christmas time. Everyone can get excited about the arrival of a cute little baby and, with Jesus’ particular birth, there are lots of great stories surrounding His arrival. No room at the inn. Born in a manger. Shepherds watching their flocks and angels coming to them in the night. Three kings following the star. Good stuff!

Easter, on the other hand can seem, at least in the lead up to the day, like kind of a bummer. Ashes on our heads, sacrifices during Lent, the long Passion reading on Palm Sunday, the awful death of Jesus on Good Friday. As a kid I could never figure out why they called it “good.” I knew that even if we didn’t go to church that day we had be sit and be quiet for three hours from noon until 3pm. And while we have the glory of the opening of the tomb and the Resurrection on Easter Sunday morning, it is a harder concept for us to wrap our heads around. We have all experienced newborn babies. We’ve never seen someone rise from the dead.

With Easter not being as commercialized as Christmas, the good news, I think, is that we don’t have to say, “Keep Christ in Easter.” While we fight every year to keep Christmas from being completely taken over by Santa and Rudolph and Frosty, aside from Easter egg hunts and gorging on Peeps, the Resurrection of Jesus is hard to secularize. And how in the heck does an “Easter Bunny” fit into it all?

Putting aside society’s view of these “holidays”, the birth of Jesus, His death on the cross, His resurrection from the dead and His ascension into heaven are all significant events that benefit each and every one of us in ways that we tend to overlook. But we shouldn’t. The story of Jesus is the story of our own salvation. And salvation is a really big deal that should be a cause of a major celebration.

When I think of salvation, I put it in purely personal terms. One day I will die. I pray that when that happens God will grant me the ability to be united forever with family and friends who have gone before me in the presence and embrace of the God who loves me so much that He sent His only Son to achieve that goal for me. That is really something to look forward to. Almost makes me want to sing the upbeat Christmas song, “Joy to the World!”



May your Easter be a time of renewal—not relief—and may your hearts and minds and souls rise with Christ and sustain you through the year.

Jim Silcott