As we continue in the Octave of Easter, Father Dave welcomes speaker and author Laura Kelly Fanucci to discuss how we can celebrate all 50 days of this season. Laura is the founder of “Mothering Spirit,” and her new devotional is called, “Living Easter: 50 Days to Practice Resurrection.”
Laura discusses how there are more resources available for Lent than the Easter season. “I just had this image of Lent kind of dropping us off at the door of Easter like, All right, we’ll see you later. You’re like, Wait a minute, that was the whole ride?” She says, “I did prayer, fasting and almsgiving, didn’t I do the thing? Is there the gold medal of Catholicism waiting for me at the end? It turns out that these seasons of preparation are for the high feasts. So the whole point of Lent is to prepare us for Easter, but I felt like I needed a guide through Easter.”
“It sounds great — rejoice for 50 days — but that’s actually harder to do than you would think,” Laura continues. “The world is hard. There are still a zillion emails to answer, and our lives are messy. How [do we] actually keep the resurrection before our eyes and say we’re really called to live out Easter for 50 days. This is one of those classic [cases where] the writer wrote the book she needed, because I was not good at celebrating Easter.”
Father Dave adds, “We hear a lot in the Catholic Church and in Christian circles that we are an Easter people. If that’s the case, let’s not just dispose of it in 24 hours. The Church does give us this great gift of seven weeks to unfold it, with all the resurrection appearances and the Acts of the Apostles. The early Church is like opening their eyes for the first time and saying, What is going on?”
For each day in “Living Easter,” Laura includes Scripture, a reflection, prayer, and a call to action for living out the season. “I really love helping people see God in their everyday lives, and to know that their ordinary life and work is holy,” she says. “For every day of Easter, I wrote a really simple, practical, sometimes a little creative way to live out the spirit of Easter. [For example,] invite a neighbor over for dinner, or just go outside and look at how beautiful it is this time of year. Maybe slow down on the road and don’t ride on people’s tails, like maybe just have a spirit of generosity when you get behind the wheel. There are things that we can do that can actually bring this spirit of resurrection into every day of Easter.”
LISTEN: Creative Ways To Celebrate 50 Days of Easter With Mari Pablo
They discuss Laura’s reflections on different characters in Scripture, specifically Peter’s encounter with Jesus after his resurrection. “I just think it’s such a tender moment,” Laura says. “It is so beautiful that Jesus doesn’t actually bring up to Peter, like, what happened? He just keeps saying, Do you love me? Do you love me, Simon, more than these?”
“I have such a passion for Scripture, and it was really fun to dive into one story with one of the figures of the Easter Scriptures for each week…there was something about slipping on their shoes and looking at Easter through their eyes that made it all fresh for me again,” Laura continues. “We hear these stories every year at Mass, and they’re beautiful, but sometimes we can zone out and [think] I’ve heard this a million times before.”
“What does [Scripture] say to me this year?” Laura asks, “What does looking at the events of the resurrection and the truth of what happened through Mary’s eyes looking at her son, or looking through Mary Magdalene’s eyes [offer us]? You just get a different window on the story. I think that’s the beauty of having all these different Gospel narratives.”
