The emotion of Easter
by Fr. Padraig Standún
FIFTY-ONE Easters ago I got my first taste of Holy Week ceremonies as an ordained minister, and it was in the parish in which I am now priesting.
I went as a deacon to Cill Chiaráin in Carna parish in 1971, a few months before being ordained priest. I wanted to experience the ceremonies in the Irish language in which I was anything but fluent.
There was an element of being thrown in at the deep end about it as the local priest had the flu and I found myself struggling through readings in a language which I, the stranger, did not know very well.
It was a good baptism in both language and ceremonies in that I was celebrating the passion and death of Christ on my own the following year in Irish, on the Aran islands of Inis Oirr and Inis Meáin, in which I had been curate since the previous November.
I have mentioned in the past that the revival of the Easter ceremonies in their present form in the mid-50s was one of the best things done by the Roman Catholic Church in the last century. Easter ceremonies have been remarkably well attended since then, even though there was never any element of compulsion involved.
Our local curate, Fr. Tommy Gibbons, was usually joined by members of the staff of the nearby SMA College in Ballinafad at a time when clergy were anything but scarce.
Space was made inside the altar rails for Minister for Lands and Clann na Talmhain party leader Joe Blowick, TD.
It had been reported on the radio that Archbishop John Charles McQuaid had given a similar honour to Taoiseach John A. Costello in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral.
Anything Dublin could do, Belcarra could do better!
I have always enjoyed Easter but never more than this year as I am in retirement.
In previous years there was always an underlying fear that I will make a mess of things in that readings and prayers are unfamiliar as a year has passed since last dealing with them.
The nerves left me when I reminded myself that it is not about me. Even if I was to mess up it would not prevent Jesus from rising from the dead.
What I like best about it is that even though we know the story will have a happy ending, many of us still get caught up in the emotion of it all – a good person wrongly convicted and put to death after a night of needless and senseless torture and violence.
Worse things have happened in the world, of course, but the idea of the one who links us closest to God ending up like that makes Good Friday one of the saddest days for believers.
It also makes Easter Day one of the best.