Paschal Cycle...

You know what...?

I look back to my formative years growing up in TSA, there is a lot I am thankful for? I might know the fingering for C# on my BBb tuba, but there seems to be so much that I feel acutely ignorant about that I wish I had stumbled on earlier.

Thanks to a friend sending me a chapter of Ronald Rolheiser's Seeking Spirituality: Guidelines for a Christian Spirituality for the 21st Century to check out, I stumbled into the Paschal Cycle - a journey from Good Friday to Pentecost. Rolheiser puts it like this:-

  • Good Friday: 'the loss of life - real death'
  • Easter Sunday: 'the reception of new life'
  • The Forty days: 'a time for readjustment to the new and for grieving the old'
  • Ascension: 'letting go of the old and letting it bless you, the refusal to cling'
  • Pentecost: 'the reception of new spirit for the new life that one is already living'

Or in other words...

  • 'Name your deaths'
  • 'Claim your births'
  • 'Grieve what you have lost and adjust to the new reality'
  • 'Do not cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing'
  • 'Accept the spirit of the life that you are in fact living'
This cycle is something we can engage in daily in reflection. Rolheiser suggests different areas that represents a death, whether that be our youth, wholeness, our dreams, our honeymoons even certain ideas of God and the Church.

Today is Ascension Day - Rolheiser would have us reflect on what we are clinging onto that we need to let go of as we prepare for Pentecost.

Comments

Kathryn said…
That is really helpful Gordon...thanks for posting. Doing it, of course, may be more demanding, but that's rather the idea...
11:28 AM
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