If my resurrection is to be a real one and is to produce fruit, it must be external, so that all may see I am not the same man, that my life is changed in Christ.
COMMENT: Just as Christ rose from the dead, in a sense we too much continuously rise from sin, from spiritual death. Fr Doyle makes an extremely important point in today’s quote – if the reformation of our lives is real, it should manifest itself in virtuous external acts.
St Josemaria Escriva also touches on this point:
How I wish your bearing and conversation were such that, on seeing or hearing you, people would say: This man reads the life of Jesus Christ.
Have our days of penance in Lent, our commemoration of the Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, produced any external fruit that enriches the lives of those around us?
This has been a spiritually odd Lent for me. I am the music director of a children’s musical, and it has consumed so much time, and so many spoons*, that I haven’t felt so much in the desert as out to sea.
One of my Lenten goals was that I wouldn’t let the show come between me and God, and it’s been primarily this blog that has helped me not utterly, completely, and miserably fail at that goal. I am looking forward to the end of the show though, when my nights are “mine” again, and I’ll have the chance to work on making them more fully God’s.
*I have lupus, if anyone is curious about spoon theory for explaining chronic illness, you can Google “The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino But You Don’t Look Sick” (It feels rude to post a link here)