Chapter 18: Paths of Easter
Spiritual Experiment: Vigils
A vigil usually means staying up all night. It also includes the idea of keeping watch. The word vigilant comes from the same word as vigil. One keeps a vigil with a sick child or perhaps even a dead relative. Having an all-night party is not a vigil. Vigil usually has a semi-religious connotation or at least is an expression of something important. Usually only a few people keep vigil together. Usually they are silent. Usually there is a prayerful or meditative atmosphere.
Keeping a vigil is difficult because it is easy to fall asleep or get silly. If you have stayed up all night, you know how you begin to get a bit giddy near dawn. If you continue to stay up past sunrise, by mid-morning you get a second wind. So long as you remain moving and active, you feel awake and alert. Going without sleep all night in a vigil atmosphere may weaken the border between the conscious and the unconscious mind. This can bring insights and intuitions, but persons who go without sleep for too long a time begin to hallucinate.
Vigils are very important in the Catholic religion. The most important event of the Church year is a vigil, the Easter Vigil. In the early days of the church, people stayed up all Holy Saturday night waiting for Christ to return to earth.. They filled the night with the most sacred and secret rituals for welcoming new members into the Christian community. At sunrise they celebrated Easter Mass.
If you do not want to try spending a night of vigil, you might try greeting the sunrise. This should be a quiet and reverential experience. Drinking at dawn on graduation morning is not in the right spirit. You might try getting up well before sunrise during one of the warmer times of the year and bicycling down to some park or special place. Biking down empty city streets that are usually congested with traffic is an unbelievable experience . Whatever you choose to do, you will enjoy and be moved by the vigil experience.
Death and Transformation Prayers and Meditations
Relaxation
For this week’s relaxation you can use any of the breathing relaxations you have already learned.
Prayer: Jesus’ Passion and Death
Open the Gospel of Mark to chapter fifteen. Read it to yourself slowly, but wherever you find the words “Jesus,” “He,” or “Him” (when those pronouns refer to Jesus), change the words to “I” or “me.” In this way you can put yourself into the Gospel story as if you were Jesus. Stay in touch with how you feel about Jesus when you are experiencing things as He did. If you had really been in His place, would you have acted the way He did?
Prayer: The Stations of the Cross
Turn to Chapter Thirteen and pray the Stations of the Cross.
QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU DESCRIBE YOUR EXPERIENCE
- Could you put yourself into the events of Jesus’ passion and death? What was that like?
- What would you have done differently if you had been there?
- What did you learn about Jesus and about yourself from this prayer?
Guided Fantasy: Your Own Death and Afterlife
Take the elevator to level ten. Level one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. The elevator stops, and you step out. Imagine yourself lying on your deathbed. Your friends and relatives have gathered around you. What do you say to each of them before you draw your last breath?
Even before you have finished speaking, you notice that your visual perspective has changed. It is as though you were floating near the ceiling and looking down on everything. You see yourself and the other people gathered below you. People have begun weeping. Someone closes your eyes and then pulls the bed sheet over your head.
All at once the room fades away, and you find yourself at the entrance of a tunnel. At the far end is a brilliant light. You walk toward the light. When you arrive there, you know you are in the presence of God.
The clarity of that light illuminates your whole past life as everything you have ever thought, said, or done passes through your mind. Luckily for you, your life has mostly been one of love and openness. You know you want to spend your heavenly eternity with God and with other people who put the good of others before their own good. You are glad that your life had not been a hellish one of self-centeredness and lies.
But your life did have many imperfections. You were a good person, but not as good as you could have been. As you look at the evil you did in your life, your eyes fill with tears and your heart breaks. Somehow you are almost able to get inside of other people’s hearts and feel the pain and suffering you caused them. This painful review of the evil of your life seems to take an eternity, but then it ends. You know you could never do those sorts of bad things again. You are ready for heaven.
And what might heaven be like? Of course, we do not know, but here are some possibilities. Imagine a never-ending timelessness of exploring the farthest reaches of the universe. We Christians believe that heaven will be our universe transformed into something glorious. Imagine a never-ending timelessness of getting to know every intelligent being who ever lived, getting to know these people not from the outside by just seeing what they did, but from the inside by experiencing life as they experienced it. Finally, imagine a never-ending timelessness of getting to know God, the One who created the universe and all the beings in it.
Now take a minute to talk to God about this guided fantasy. Take the elevator back and then open your eyes.
QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU DESCRIBE YOUR EXPERIENCE
- How well were you able to imagine this guided fantasy?
- What do you think will happen to you when you die?
Prayer: Lectio Divina on Easter Themes
Pray with lectio divina, using either the background material which follows or with the “Rebirth” or the “Transformation into Another Christ” background material in Chapter Seventeen.
Background: Death
Without death, there can be no new life. It seems obvious once you think about it. Picture our Planet Earth so overflowing with living beings that there is hardly room for any more to be born.
Nature is filled with hints of resurrection. Nature always shows us the balance, the yin and the yang. Night yields to day. Winter arrives, but spring follows. Plant a seed in earth rich with rotted leaves. New life emerges. In nature, the dead nourish the newborn.
In some deep level of our mind, we do believe that we will live forever. We keep living as though there were no end to our life. We plan for future years, expect to see generations of our grandchildren, and manage to forget that death eventually waits for all of us. But at some point we remember. Even though we are part of nature, when we enter our winter years, we worry that no spring will follow. We find it hard to believe that within our fleshy being is the seed of immortality.
We turn to Jesus in our hope for eternal life. He encourages us not only by His words about a heaven God has prepared for us, but also by His death and God’s raising Him to new life. And so we can believe that if we die with Jesus, we will rise with Him, also. Our religion is a religion of transformation. Because we can experience rebirths in our lives, we also believe in a rebirth that arises from our death. We will become new and transformed persons. We have God’s Word on it.
Background Material: Rebirth and Transformation into Another Christ
Please read the reflections that are found in Chapter Seventeen, “Christmas,” beginning on page ___________.
Review Questions
Copy each of these descriptions on your paper. Then supply the correct term for each.
- Staying up and keeping watch all night.
- Process of being born again.
- A rebirth that is a complete change of heart and life-style.
Write each question and its answer.
- How did Jesus’ death/resurrection bring Him freedom to be closer to us?
- What quote from Saint Paul’s letter indicates that we can become another Christ?
- What does it mean to say that we are “other Christs”?
- What would it be like to be “another Christ”?
Self-Reflection Question
Choose one of the following:
- Write about the death or burial of someone who was close to you.
- Write about a rebirth that has happened in your life.
- Write a grave inscription that would be appropriate for you.
Spiritual Experiment Questions
- Describe some occasions when you were up for the whole night.
- Have you ever had a vigil experience? Describe it.
- Have you ever greeted the sunrise in a reverential way? How?
Weekend Eucharist
Try to attend some church services during Holy Week and the Easter season. Be extra attentive to the readings and prayers.
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