Category: Eternal Life

We’ll Meet Again

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Discipleship, dying, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith, Hope, Jesus, joy2 Comments

Friday of the Sixth Week of Easter

May 22, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, Jesus acknowledges the difficulty of living a Christian life in a hostile world, especially without his physical presence to lead the disciples.

John16_22 separation

He knows that his friends are anguished at the thought of being separated from him. He compares their heartbreak to the pain of a mother in labor. The comparison is a perfect one because labor pains yield a gift that washes away the memory of suffering:

… when she has given birth to a child,
she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy
that a child has been born into the world.

Jesus tries to comfort his followers with this analogy, but he doesn’t deny the sorrow they are experiencing. Jesus knows that separation from what we dearly love can be a crushing experience. He knows that change often carries unwanted loss.

joys and sorrows

Our lives are braided into this cycle of labor, birth, love, loss, sorrow and joy. Jesus assures us that if we live this cycle in faith and hope, all things return to him in glory:

But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice,
and no one will take your joy away from you.

At those times in our lives when we feel more the absence than the presence of God, (perhaps these pandemic days), remembering the endurance and bravery of others may help us. Although it’s not a religious song, this melody kept playing itself in my heart as I read today’s Gospel. It opened my spirit to a very comforting prayer time.

Music: We’ll Meet Again – Dame Vera Lynn

Dame Vera Margaret Lynn Welch, CH,DBD, OStJ, age 103, is a British singer of traditional popular music, songwriter and actress, whose musical recordings and performances were enormously popular during World War II.

She is widely known as “the Forces Sweetheart” and gave outdoor concerts for the troops in Egypt, India and Burma during the war. The songs most associated with her are “We’ll Meet Again”, “The White Cliffs of Dover”, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, and “There’ll Always Be an England”. For more on her generous and fascinating life, Click here

Remain

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Church, Community, Courage, Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith1 Comment

Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

May 13, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, Acts reveals the tensions in the Church between Jewish and Gentile believers. For the Jews, the ritual of circumcision was a key expression of covenantal faith. Some felt it was necessary for Gentile converts to undergo the ritual in order to become Christians.

Like all start-ups, the Church had many friction points which required decisions about what was essential and what was only customary. Those customs being thousands of years old, the decisions become even harder. Readings later this week describe more conflict points.

Nevertheless, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and despite the venerability of custom, the nascent Church was able embrace a new reality rooted in Christ’s inclusive love.

These kinds of philosophical and theological tugs-of-war have accompanied the Church down through history. Some of them have helped reveal deeper insights into our faith. But, as in all human communities, some of the tugs have been motivated by fear, greed, power, and other selfish interests.

Watching how the early Church handles their particular situation may give us hints about how we should handle them today.

In our Gospel, Jesus makes clear what is essential and inviolable to the faith:

I am the vine, you are the branches.
Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,
because without me you can do nothing.

John15_4 Remain

I think “Remain” is a beautiful word. In the dictionary, it will be defined as ‘stay’. But it connotes much more to me.  Re–main asks us not just to choose to stay with Jesus, but to choose it over and over – like reenlist, renew, recommit.

Remain means to endure with the Beloved Vine through every season – winter’s cold and summer’s heat, and all that’s in between.

Remain means “Love Me, stay beside me, even when others fall away.”

May we remain.

Music: I Am the Vine – John Michael Talbot

Don’t Linger in Darkness!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith, GospelLeave a comment

Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Easter

May 6, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, our readings have a global, even universal, feel to them. By the power of God, the Apostles begin to go out and preach to the whole world.

Acts tells us that:

… the Holy Spirit said,
“Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul
for the work to which I have called them.”
Then, completing their fasting and prayer,
they laid hands on them and sent them off.

Our Responsorial Psalm gives us this universal prayer:

May God have pity on us and bless us;
may he let his face shine upon us.
So may your way be known upon earth;
among all nations, your salvation.

And Jesus assures us in the Gospel:

I came into the world as light,
so that everyone who believes in me
might not remain in darkness.

Jn12_46 LightJPG

For our prayer, we might want to place before God’s Radiance all those places in the world, and within ourselves, which long for Light. The whole world shares at least one dark shadow in the global pandemic. That shadow has emphasized some of the tenebrous corners in our own hearts where fear, loneliness, loss, and doubt cower and now want to creep out in our required isolation.

And, spread across our world, there are so many other darknesses famished for Light!

Together, let us give all of these shadows to God’s power as we pray. May that power release us and all our sisters and brothers into its glorious resplendence. Like the Apostles, may a brilliant, steady energy go out from our hearts, convinced of and empowered by the Light of the Gospel.

Music: Two lovely pieces of music suggested themselves today.  I hope you enjoy them.

  1. Eric Whitaker  – Lux Aurumque (“Light and Gold”) is a choral composition in one movement. It is a Christmas piece based on a Latin poem of the same name.

Lux,
Calida gravisque pura velut aurum
Et canunt angeli molliter
modo natum.

Light,
warm and heavy as pure gold
and angels sing softly
to the new-born babe.
Edward Esch, b.1970
(Translated to Latin by Charles Anthony Silvestri)

2. Spirit Seeking Light and Beauty – Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ

Spirit seeking Light and Beauty,
Hearts that longeth for Thy rest,
Soul that asketh understanding, only thus can you be blest.
Through the vastness of creation though your restless heart may roam,

God is all that you may long for,
God is all His creatures’ home.
Taste and see it, feel and hear it,
Hope and grasp His unseen Hand.

Though the darkness seems to hide Him,
Faith and love can understand
God Who loveth all His creatures,
All our hearts are known to Thee.
Lead us through the Land of Shadows
To Your vast eternity

In God’s Hands

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith2 Comments

Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Easter

May 5, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, the image of God’s hands emerges in each of our readings.

preachers

There were some …. proclaiming the Lord Jesus.
The hand of the Lord was with them
and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.
Acts 11:21

shepherd

 

I know them, and they follow me.
I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish.
No one can take them out of my hand.
John 10:28

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all,
and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.
John 10:29

Each of these images evokes and inspires our trust that God abides with and sustains us – that we are in God’s hands.

We all know what it’s like to place ourself in someone else’s hands. Sometimes we do it willingly, sometimes not. Sometimes it is an act of trust, sometimes fear.

This morning, as I pray, I remember two parallel but distinctly different incidents of being in someone else’s hands. 

pikesIn the first, I went with friends on a drive to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado. It was before the serpentine road was paved in 1999. The driver was the young cowboy nephew of one of the passengers, and he thought it was really fun to scare us out of our wits. He took the many curves and switchbacks at headlong speed. I closed my eyes and started praying.

doctor-clipart-transparent-12The second memory is recent. Just before my knee replacement surgery, as I lay slightly anesthetized in pre-op, my surgeon came to the bedside. He sat down, took my hand and said, “I want you to know that I will do the surgery myself and be with you the whole time. I am putting my initials on your knee so you can be certain I’ll fix the right one.” He smiled, and I again closed my eyes and started praying.

What different prayers they were! One was begging God to intervene and save me. The other was thanking God for putting me in trustworthy hands.

Jn10_29 hands

With God, we are always in trustworthy hands. Indeed, sometimes it may feel like God is flying over the edge of Pike’s Peak with us in the back seat. But here’s the thing: God is in the car with us – and God always lives! If we give ourselves completely to God in trust, we will live too.

Eventually, our practice of trust grows enough to comfort us in all things. We realize God is always sitting beside us, taking our hand, assuring us of that Loving Presence Who always abides.

A great freedom comes with that realization, steeped in years of trust and understanding that God’s Will for us is our eternal good. The preachers in Acts today, and the disciples in John rejoiced and acted in such trust. May we too be strengthened, blessed, and impelled by it.

Music:  Into Your Hands – Ray Rep

Into Your hands we commend our spirit –Ray Repp

Into Your hands we commend our spirits O Lord,
Into Your hands we commend our hearts.
For we must die to ourselves in loving You,
Into Your hands we commend our love.

O God, my God, why have You gone from me,
Far from my prayers, far from my cry?
To You I call and you never answer me,
You send no comfort and I don’t know why!

You’ve been my guide since I was very young,
You showed the way, you brought relief;
But now I’m lonely, nobody’s by my side:
Take heed, my Lord, listen to my prayer.

A Shocking Gift

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, FaithLeave a comment

Friday of the Third Week of Easter

May 1, 2020

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Dali
Institution of the Eucharist: Salvador Dali

Today, in Mercy, our Gospel is serious business. In it, Jesus reveals the lynchpin of our sacramental faith.

Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.

It is a stark and shocking statement. The listening Jews “quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?’.”

Down through the ages, struggling believers have grappled with the same question. Or, perhaps less preferable, complacent believers have never even considered it.

I think Jesus wanted us to consider it, absorb it, be changed by it, live within it, because “unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you.”

Among the Christian denominations there is a range of interpretations of this teaching. 

Wikipedia has a very good summary. Click to read it.

As Catholics, we believe that Christ is truly and fully present in Eucharist and that, by Communion, becomes fully present in us, the Church.

When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the memorial of her Lord’s death and resurrection, this central event of salvation becomes really present and “the work of our redemption is carried out”. This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father only after he had left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there. Each member of the faithful can thus take part in it and inexhaustibly gain its fruits. This is the faith from which generations of Christians down the ages have lived.
(ECCLESIA DE EUCHARISTIA, Encyclical of John Paul II)

For me, it is a truth only appreciated when approached with more than the mind. It must be apprehended with the heart and soul. God so loves us in the person of Jesus Christ that God chooses to be eternally present with us, and in us, through the gift of Eucharist.

Praying with this truth over the years has led me to read authors like Edward Schillebeeckx (Christ the sacrament of the encounter with God), Diarmuid O’Murchu (Quantum Theology), and Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (Hymn of the Universe).

deChardin

But I will tell you that every time I receive the Eucharist, I let this little hymn play in my heart, one I learned for my First Holy Communion. It still unites my heart to my desired faith.

Music: Jesus, Jesus, Come to Me – sung by the Daughters of Mary
( I know the album art is not classic, but I can still believe I’m one of those little kids climbing into Jesus’s lap🤗. I think most of us are a mix of both unsophisticated and erudite theologies, so I hope you can enjoy this musical selection.)

Divine Inheritance

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Church, Community, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith1 Comment

Memorial of Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin and doctor of the Church

April 29, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, our Gospel gives us the sense of Jesus claiming his inheritance  from the Father. He makes it clear that the Father’s Will is the Redemption of all Creation. This is the divine charge given to Jesus. This is his mission.

Jn6_37

Jesus continues to use the symbol of bread to teach the forming community. 

Bread sustains life.
God’s Word is eternal life.

Sharing bread is an act of community.
In the Body of Christ, we are made One with God
and with one another.

Bread can stale and disintegrate.
Within the Body of Christ, we become eternal
and will be raised up unto the Last Day.

These are such BIG thoughts, amazing teachings. I always wonder how simple shepherds, fishermen and housekeepers were supposed to understand! I wonder how we, in our human limitations, could begin to comprehend the infinitely loving design of God revealed in Jesus Christ!

Today, as we celebrate the feast of the great Saint Catherine of Siena, we can learn from her spiritual wisdom. Without formal education, she grew by grace into a Doctor of the Church.

Siena

She was born Catherine Benincasa on March 25, 1347, in Siena, Italy, and was a twin, the 24th child of 25. She only lived to the age of 33, dying of a stroke in Rome in 1380. Catherine of Siena, often referred to as “great Kate,” is well known for her expressive life of prayer shared in three major sources of writings: over 400 letters, 26 prayers, and The Dialogue of Divine Providence, which she referred to as “the book,” written in the format of a conversation between herself and God. She was noted for her style of learning, not acquired from formal education and degrees, but gained from an interior wisdom that came from lived experiences and a mystical life of prayer. ( https://www.hprweb.com/2020/02/the-trinitarian-theology-of-the-eucharist-according-to-st-catherine-of-siena/)

Here are two selections from Catherine’s extensive writings which reveal her ever-deepening relationship with God through the gift of the Bread of Life.

Eternal God, Eternal Trinity, You have made the Blood of Christ so precious through His sharing in your Divine Nature. You are a mystery as deep as the sea; the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find the more I search for You. But I can never be satisfied; what I receive will ever leave me desiring more. When You fill my soul I have an ever-greater hunger, and I grow more famished for Your Light. I desire above all to see You, the true Light, as you really are.

St. Catherine of Siena, Prayer 12, V 124–157

And by the light of most holy faith
I shall contemplate myself in you.
And I shall clothe myself in your eternal will,
And by this light I shall come to know
That you, eternal Trinity,
Are table
And food
And waiter for us.

You, eternal Father,
Are the table
That offers us as food
The Lamb, your only-begotten Son.

He is the most exquisite of foods for us,
Both in his teaching,
Which nourishes us in your will,
And in the sacrament
That we receive in Holy Communion,
Which feeds and strengthens us
While we are pilgrim travelers in this life.

And the Holy Spirit
Is indeed a waiter for us,
For he serves us this teaching
By enlightening our mind’s eye with it
And inspiring us to follow it.
And he serves us charity for our neighbors
And hunger to have as food
Souls
And the salvation of the whole world
For the Father’s honor

So we see that souls enlightened in you,
True light,
Never let a moment pass
Without eating this exquisite food
For your honor.

Music:  Ave Verum Corpus – words attributed to 14th century Pope Innocent VI, melody to Mozart, sung by King’s College Choir

Hail, true body
Ave, ave verum Corpus 

Born of the Virgin Mary;
Natum de Maria Virgine

Truly offered,
Vere passum, immolatum 

In the cross for man
In cruce pro homine

Whose side
Cujus latus perforatum 

Water and blood
Fluxit aqua et sanguine

May we taste
Esto nobis praegustatum 

Time of death
Mortis in examine 

The time of death
In mortis examine

Life is the Miracle

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith, Jesus, Love, MercyLeave a comment

Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter

April 28, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, Acts recounts the sad but inspiring story of Stephen’s martyrdom.

To read an earlier reflection on St. Stephen’s death, click here.

In our Gospel, we continue to pray with John’s Discourse on the Bread of Life.

The setting is Capernaum, on the other side of the lake from where the feeding of the 5000 occurred. Rumors are flying about how Jesus got from one side to the other without a boat. In other words, the air is buzzing with whispers of miracles.

Some bright light in the re-gathering crowd decides to become their representative and inquisitor of Jesus:

inquisitors

“What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?
What can you do?
Our ancestors ate manna in the desert … ”
(how about something a long those lines, the questioner seems to imply????)

Where was this guy when the loaves and fishes were pouring out of a single basket? Where was he when Jesus appeared at the lake’s far side, already rested and waiting for the exhausted, arriving crowd?

But Jesus doesn’t take the inquisitor’s bait. He speaks as the Divine Teacher to help them understand that this is about a lot more than signs and miracles. 

Jesus reminds them that any “miracle”, any “manna” should lead us to God, in whose Presence the need and demand for continuing miracles ceases.

Jn6_35 bread

Jesus encourages them to get beyond their limited perceptions of signs, manna, bread, and miracles. He explains that all the Power of God stands before them in him, the Son, the Bread sent “down from heaven, and giving life to the world.”

It’s a lot to take in. But they want to: “Sir, give us this bread always.”

It’s a lot for us to take in too, don’t you think. I know I wouldn’t mind a regular old miracle now and then… a shower of manna or a cure for Covid19!

But instead Jesus asks us to live within the miracle of God’s Presence in all things, in the bread of our ordinary lives which He transforms by love.

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

Stephen had this kind of radical faith. “Filled with the Holy Spirit”,  he could – even in the throes of human contradiction – “see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

May our faith ever deepen that we too see God in the Bread of our ordinary daily lives. May that faith inspire us to act always with love, hope and mercy.

Music:  I Am the Bread, the Bread of Life – Brian Hoare 

Our Deepest Hunger

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Community, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith, Jesus, spiritualityLeave a comment

Monday of the Third Week of Easter

April 27, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, Acts introduces us to Stephen, so filled with the Holy Spirit that “his face was like the face of an angel”.

You may wish to refer to last year’s reading on Stephen’s introduction.

Click here to read about Stephen

For today’s reflection, though, our focus will be John 6 which is the beginning of a week-long journey into the discourse on the Bread of Life (Jn 6:22-71). These passages, going from today until Friday, are like a “faith boot camp” for Jesus’s followers. They contain the core message of who Jesus is and how we are brought into communion with him.

The reading seems so meaningful in these days when we are kept from shared communion and community in the Eucharist, when we long to be gathered again around that table of love.

John’s Gospel does not include an account of the Last Supper and institution of the Eucharist. The Bread of Life Discourse is where Jesus proclaims those teachings in John. It is a more detailed instruction and, as we pray with it over the course of the week, we may trace our own past and current awakening in faith.

painting
Limbourg Brothers, Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Jesus Feeding the 5,000 Source Wikimedia Commons

Today’s verses offer very basic training. Jesus has just fed 5000 people in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The crowds, not having a global view of the miracle like we do, are confused. They know they got plenty to eat, but did everybody? They heard many people ate, but they saw only their nearby neighbors. What really happened out on the green field?

Finding Jesus the next day, they are ready for another meal. They’re more interested in matzoh than miracles. Their basic hunger for physical sustenance consumes them. Jesus begins the task of opening their hearts to their deeper hungers and his desire to meet them:

Jesus said,
“You are looking for me
not because you saw signs
but because you ate the loaves and were filled.
Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life.”

Jn6_27 food

Praying with today’s Gospel, we might ask ourselves some basic questions about our own faith.

  • When we go looking for God, as these hungry people did, what is it that we are looking for?
  • Do we talk to God only when we need something the way these folks needed another loaf or fish?
  • Jesus is inviting us to Eucharist, to Communion with him. To what degree have we opened our hearts to that invitation by our reflective prayer and acts of mercy?

Jesus’s basic message to his flock today is this:

Don’t be satisfied by a tasty roll, a fat fish,
(or a fancy car, a good job, a comfortable life.)
God made you for much more than these things.
Come to Me and feed your deepest hunger.

Maybe, as we pray, we can ask the question posed at end of today’s Gospel and listen intently to Jesus’s answer:

So they said to him,
“What can we do to accomplish the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”

Music: Hungry – Kathryn Scott

Live Your Resurrection Power!

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Conversion, Courage, Discipleship, dying, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith3 Comments

Third Sunday of Easter

April 26, 2020

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Today, in Mercy, our Eastertide readings once again pull us into the full power of the Resurrection.

Act2_24

Just listen to Peter who stands and raises his mighty voice over the gathered crowd:

Let this be known to you, and listen to my words.
You who are Israelites, hear these words.
Jesus the Nazarene was a man commended to you by God …
This man … you killed, using lawless men to crucify him.
But God raised him up,
releasing him from the throes of death,
because it was impossible for him to be held by it.

There is no fear in Peter. There is only the courage that comes from certainty in God’s power over death. This is the grace of Resurrection Faith.

Resurrection Faith is a power we intensely need in these times that so test us. 

We may be severely tested like those suffering illness and loss; like those valiantly serving the suffering. Or we, like many, may simply be challenged by our self-isolation and radical disruption of routine.

emmaus nuns
In that, we may be like the disciples walking home to Emmaus. They didn’t die on Calvary. They weren’t even retained as followers of Jesus. They simply drifted away from their Hope. They were going home to a sad but comfortable dinner adequate enough to invite a stranger.

Yet they were heartbroken. The world they had loved and hoped in had been shattered. Everything they believed in appeared to be contradicted by the Cross. Most devastating of all, they were at a loss to imagine a future. 

Aren’t we at least a little bit like them?

Aren’t we dazed that the reality we trusted seems to have disappeared overnight? Aren’t we too trying to figure out what we do now in the vacuum? Aren’t we too so blinded by sadness that we might fail to see God walking right beside us?

In our second reading, Peter gives us the formula to break through such blindness:

    • Invoke God as your Father
    • Remain faithful to your good works
    • Conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your sojourning,
    • Realize that you are already ransomed from death by the precious blood of Christ

Practicing this kind of Resurrection Faith in troubled times makes us not only unafraid of death but, more importantly, unafraid of life. Because I think that is what really most cripples us – not any fear of dying, but rather our fear of fully living our life in God.

We worry about what we have to lose if we live like that, don’t we?

By jeopardizing everything most precious to us, these pandemic times make clear all that we have to lose. But they also make clear the powers in us impossible to chain: how we love, hope, serve and believe. Neither death nor pandemic has power over these living graces.

Like the Emmaus disciples, our hearts burn within us, too, with an ardent mix of longing, confusion, and stubborn trust. Like them, let us sit down with Jesus at the table of our lives. Let his patient voice speak to our souls and clear our vision. The Resurrection power of God is alive in all things. May we recognize that Power even in these seemingly contradictory times.

cross

Because Christ rose from the dead, it is impossible for any form of death to hold us captive. On this Third Sunday of Easter, our readings invite us to truly believe that. Let’s fully accept the invitation, dear friends. Let’s live like we believe!

Music: Christ Our Hope in Life and Death – The Gettys 

Easter 2020

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Courage, Discipleship, Eastertide, Eternal Life, Faith6 Comments

Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord

April 12, 2020

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This is the day the Lord has made.
Let us rejoice and be glad. Alleluia!
Psalm 118

Alleluia

They woke up one morning beside each other as they had for fifteen years. The scent of last night’s acrid argument lingered in the corners of the room. After a few moments, he turned to her and said, “We need to learn how to love each other again. Can we try?”  

Over the course of long-term relationships, the parties change. Phil and Judy wanted to remain committed to their marriage, but they found themselves strangled by years of unpruned misunderstandings. All heart commitments meet similar challenges. All dreams fray a little on their way to fulfillment. 

We have followed Jesus through Holy Week on such a road. Passover Sunday filled his spirit with the fresh scent of palms and possibilities. But as the week waned, the Father led Jesus in a daunting direction. He asked his Son to pay the ultimate price for love. 

Our lives too will teach us this: every ride on a palm-strewn road meets a fork toward Gethsemane. There is no true love without sacrifice. But the road does not end at the foot of the cross. Loving sacrifice lifts us to see this morning’s Easter sunrise. The life that had lain hidden in darkness now rises triumphant in our hearts. Today, we are offered the grace to live this mystery on our own journeys. Amazingly, Easter invites us to fall in love again with God and to begin our lives anew.

Easter 2020

In this time global shadows, may the Easter Truth strengthen us to deepen in faith, hope and love. Yes, darkness can feel like a place of undefined danger, but it can also be the cocoon where the bulb gathers power to break forth in unimagined Life.

Music:  Alleluia! Alleluia! (Lyrics below)

Alleluia, alleluia!
Let the holy anthem rise,
and the choirs of heaven chant it
in the temple of the skies.
Let the mountains skip with gladness
and the joyful valleys ring,
with hosannas in the highest
to our Savior and our King.

Alleluia, alleluia!
Like the sun from out the wave,
he has risen up in triumph
from the darkness of the grave,
he, the splendor of the nations,
he, the lamp of endless day;
he, the very Lord of glory,
who is risen up today.

Alleluia, alleluia!
Blessed Jesus make us rise,
from the life of this corruption
to the life that never dies.
May we share with thee thy glory
when the days of time are past,
and the dead shall be awakened
by the trumpet’s mighty blast.