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A joyous, peaceful and Happy Easter to all my fellow FReepers, especially those who have enriched my life with their correspondence and posts! Have a special and beautiful day full of blessings, love, and gratitude! He is Risen!

I was assisting in a history class one day shortly after my conversion. I was wearing a crucifix and the history teacher, who happened to be a Baptist, commented that crucifixes always bother her. She asked me why we Catholics kept Jesus on the cross when he was risen from the dead. She expressed her offense at the sight of Jesus hanging there 2000 years after the fact. Prompted, I believe, by the Holy Spirit, I broke into a chorus of an old hymn traditionally familiar to Baptists:Lest I forget Gethsemane, Lest I forget thine agony, Lest I forget...

Saturday March 30, 2002 Easter Vigil Reading (Romans 6:3-11) Gospel (St. Matthew 28:1-10) My dear friends, we celebrate this night the greatest of all the liturgies of the Church, and all of the symbolism that we celebrate is packed into one Mass. We start, for instance, with that dichotomy between darkness and light, and we recall that Jesus is the light that came into the world, that came into the darkness, and the darkness was not able to overcome the light. The Easter fire was lit in the darkness and the light then spread throughout the entire church. We also,...