The High Holy Days of America

There are so many high holy days this time of year for us who teach and profess the Catholic faith. There’s Palm Sunday, with the drama of the reading of the Passion. Holy Thursday reminds us that God loved us enough to leave himself to us in ordinary bread and wine transubstantiated.

Good Friday reminds us of the God who loved us enough to become man to live and die for us. Holy Saturday reminds us that he shared in our very real, and often very painful, death.

Easter Sunday, without question the greatest of all holidays, reminds us of the conquest of sin and death in the resurrection of one who disobeyed the ultimate order of the civil state in his refusal to stay dead against the penalty of death.

There is no replacing a single moment of any of these days for the devout. We who love Christ rightly live these days with prayer and solemnity, and rejoice in their outcome. Still, we live in the world, and we live a hope that so many beyond the Church also live this time of year, when the world springs to life.

For Americans it has a silly civic root, which we should allow to dare us to remember the depths of the humanity with which God created us all.

We need to be filled, Christian and Non-Christian alike, with the hope that life begins again. We need to be filled with the reality of spring and the simple reminders of all that we once were and could be. Today is one of those days. Today reminds us that Spring and life, and not Winter and death, win.

Today we dwell in this peculiar time in a holiday which calls us all, whatever we believe, back to ritual, to the anthem and the first pitch, to the anticipation and the Home Run. That’s right… there’s another day to remember in these days, and though it is not high, there is surely something holy about it in how it unites us, and in that it gives us the ability to talk to those who might not agree with us.

Today is opening day for Baseball in the United States of America.

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