Easter Sunday, 4/16/17
With Easter coming on, I can’t keep from recalling the late
spring in 1964, when for ten years I had been pastor of a parish in Korea. That
year, with the ground frozen hard, was the cruelest winter ever. The families
that had cooked their last bit of grain were making dinners of grass, and the
little girls responsible for those kitchen fires, had to go farther and farther
into the hills to build up the bundles of twigs on their backs.
With our church sitting on a hill fifty feet above the town,
each morning, coming out from my 6:30 Mass, I would pause to scan the whole
scene. The town’s primary school was just below us; and I liked watching the
town’s kids skirting to school around the bottom of our hill.
Each morning I was particularly taken by one ten- year-old boy
who, instead of following the easy path around the base of our hill, chose to
struggle up one side, then, after pacing across our yard, he would carefully
let himself down the path on the other side. of our hill.
One morning just before Easter, the little boy, with his
book pack on his back, altered his routine. He stopped and hunkered down on one
side of our yard; and as I was going in for my breakfast, I briefly wondered about
the boy acting differently. But at ten in the morning when I was waiting for the
mailman to come up and cross to our door, the matter became quite puzzling. The man had stopped and bent down at the same place
on the edge of our yard.
That got me out of the house. Walking across the yard to
where the mailman was hunkered down, I saw he was studying a bit of green that
resembled a single shoot of asparagus.
When I asked him what kind of shoot that was , he said, “Paik-hwa gott-jeda.”
I knew that a “gott” was a flower, but I had to check
my dictionary to find out that a paik-hwa
was a lily.
It wasn’t so much that first lily that held the attention of
the little boy and the mailman. It was its announcement that the cruel winter
was over. So, in seeing Jesus as our Easter Lily, we go beyond him to the
promise he brings that our cold hard winter is coming to an end..
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