A new reality

I love Easter. I love going for morning mass, reliving the mystery of Christ's resurrection and singing exuberant Easter hymns.

I love receiving chocolate or decorated eggs and I love celebrating the newness of life and all the promise that comes with it.

The feasting that usually comes with the season is reason to celebrate as well

Easter is for me a season of grace.

While there will always be scattered throughout life, periods of pure joy, utter contentment and immeasurable pleasure - times of grace - our lives remain grounded in reality. A reality that includes hurt, loss, conflict, violence, suffering, pain, sickness and death.

Moments of grace, what I call God-reality, are also opportunities to perceive and acknowledge the presence of God in our lives every day, and His manifold and unique blessings. Some of them so small that they are often overlooked as we go chasing after the BIG moments.

We each have an in-built survival instinct to avoid pain and avoid getting hurt, but that should not lead us to escape from the reality of life in its routine, mundane existence and the challenges that it presents.

To live only for pleasure, going from one high to the next, dismissing everything else in between as insignificant and irrelevant.

Or worse, relying on substances, people and activity to run away from what is undesirable in life, creating a make-believe world, editing out all the unsavoury, unwanted bits.

Real life can be painful and downright difficult, hard to make sense of at times, but we should never be defeated by it nor should we go into denial and stay there, buffered by a substance-induced fog.

Instead we can learn to live in the reality of life, relying on Jesus (who is the ultimate model of courage and sacrificial love) for the strength and wisdom to embrace the experience and use it to transform us into more human and humane beings.

God never promised a life without suffering, but if we trust in Him, then we will be given what is necessary to grab adversity by the horns and deal with it in a constructive, life-enriching manner.

So seek Him in all things and allow Him to transform reality into something new, making each day an Easter experience.