A Dying ... and Hope for Resurrection

Dear Our Lady of Ransom Family,

Over the past week, I’ve had to say to you things I never expected to say in my entire priesthood, let alone in my first year as your pastor. As you probably have already heard, the Archdiocese of Chicago has told us that no public Masses will be celebrated on Holy Week or Easter. To be honest, I feel like the darkness of this dark Lent of 2020 just grew a little more ominous.

Yet, at the same time, we are an Easter people, as Pope Saint John Paul the Great famously remarked. And while the holiest days of our year will now only be celebrated privately by priests behind closed doors, it in no way diminishes the truth and power of the bodily Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord is Risen, and no virus can change that!

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul proclaims the centrality of the Resurrection: “For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.” (6:5) In this way, Paul describes what Lent  should be.  Lent offers us a path to die to self – or, more accurately, to our false self – so that we can live in the newness of life that comes through the Resurrection; a new life that begins in part in this world, and finds its fullness in the world to come.

We have, almost overnight, entered into a dying to old ways of doing things, a dramatic shift in how we live our lives. The world is different. At least for now, maybe for a while. No matter how we began our Lent, we are living in this dark Lent of 2020 in a way that we couldn’t have imagined. Because of that, we live in a very graced time. As Paul said, the more we grow into union with Christ through a death like His, the more we will experience the beauty and love of the Resurrection. As dark as this Lent is, the joy of the Resurrection will be ever-the-more bright.

Even though it has only been a week, I miss you. The normalcy of seeing you in the gathering space, of running back and forth two minutes before Mass desperately trying to find additional communion ministers, is gone. In a certain way, the parish is now too quiet. But this quiet is the quiet of newness, the quiet of the tomb, a quiet that is a prelude to the explosion of new life that comes through the Resurrection. Apart, and yet together in the Mystical Body of Christ, may we all experience a passionate desire for that great and joyful day of Resurrection.

In Christ,

Fr. Matt Bozovsky