Please allow me for a moment to turn the calendar back to this day, April 7, in 1977.  It was Holy Thursday.  At 1:30 in the morning, my mother came into my bedroom & woke me.  When she turned the lamp on, I saw that I had fallen asleep with my rosary wrapped around my left hand and a pink & white teddy bear that my father and I won at a church festival clutched in my right arm.  I guess I needed things nearby that night that comforted me, for I knew that my father’s death was imminent.  “Anne,” my mother said, “Dad’s gone.  He died about an hour ago.”  She wept.  I felt as though the world had ended.  How could my family go on without my dad?

In the days that followed, I remember my desperation.  I wanted everything to be normal again.  My feeling was reinforced by well-intentioned comments of family and friends, who encouraged my family to find ways to pick up the pieces and get on with living our lives.  But it quickly became apparent to me that what I knew as “normal” before Dad died was never to be again.  His death changed everything – in the present and for the future.

At a very young age, I had to wrestle with the paradox we Christians know as the Paschal Mystery – the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ but also the mystery we who share in Christ’s life are called to live – to look to Jesus Christ as our model for living and for seeing the potential for life in the dyings we experience.

Each of us here can tell our stories of living out the paschal mystery – of having before us the challenge to discover new life in events that are tragic, painful, and difficult.  We would find that we have much in common…chances are we have all had to search for newness of life in the deaths of people we love, in lost or damaged relationships (with spouse, family members, friends), in the loss of a job or even the insecurity of our job, in sickness, dashed dreams that leave us disappointed and frustrated…and so on.

Where is the new life – the experience of resurrection – to be found in such stories?

This question weighed on me just in the last several months – after the flood waters caused by hurricane Isabel destroyed my home and many of my possessions.

What was particularly striking to me then were the words of many people – words similar to what I heard after my father’s death:  “I hope things will get back to normal for you soon.”  “Are you getting the pieces of your life put back together?”  “All will be well when you are able to move back home.”

I would bet that many of you have had similar words of support and reassurance said to you in difficult times.  I have no doubt that the people who expressed them to me did so out of genuine care and concern – and I am very grateful for this.  People who love us become upset when we are upset; they grieve when we grieve.  They want things to return to “normal” for us – back to a place where we are not in pain, not confused, not grieving.  It’s harder for us to be with one another in the wilderness of life than it is during times of “normalcy.”

During a conversation with my spiritual director post-Isabel, I said to him that the images of “return to normal, to what was,” of “putting the pieces of my life back together – as though they would fit together in the same way,” were suddenly not helpful.  They seemed inconsistent with what I was seeing as a profound opportunity – an invitation directly from the hand of God – to examine my life, to identify dimensions of myself that need conversion, to live life anew – not as before.  The images seem inconsistent with our understanding of the paschal mystery – for if we take it seriously, there’s no return to what was; rather, there is the invitation to live life anew.

Of course, recognizing the invitation is one thing; saying “yes” to it is another.  There is a choice to be made – we can resist and go on living as before, we can become resentful and bitter, or we can say “yes, Lord – walk with me and we’ll do the hard work of conversion together.”

It is hard work, you know – and it can be painful, tumultuous, confusing, uncertain, not to mention an ever so subtle and slow process – unless of course, we have a lightning bolt, knocked off our horse, blinding conversion experience like that of St. Paul.  I wonder whether anyone said to him at the time, “Paul, you need to get back up on your horse!”  But no doubt that as Paul lay flat on his face – reeling from what happened – he knew it wasn’t a matter of getting back up on his horse and continuing on as though nothing had happened.  God’s invitation to embrace a lifelong process of conversion – to become more and more Christ-like – was presented to Paul in a big way! But Paul still had to say “yes” -- without knowing all that his “yes” would mean.  His commitment to transformation of life is certainly reflected in his letters to the various Christian communities.  We see this even in the short passage from Ephesians that we heard proclaimed this evening.

The few lines we heard are taken from the section of the letter where Paul is instructing the Christians of Ephesus on the rules of living a new life – a new life given when they were baptized into Christ.  The bottom line for Paul seems to be…live your life so that you become “imitators of God,” so you “live in love as Christ did.”

This, I think, is where we can find new life in the dyings we experience. Experiences that invite transformation or conversion of life are always opportunities to be formed more deeply in the Divine image – to be imitators of God who mirror God’s love, justice, mercy and compassion in this world.  To be more and more Christ-like in how we live and relate to others and all of creation.

And what makes this possible for us?  The life, death and resurrection – the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. It is this Paschal Mystery that forever changed – and continues to change the world.  This Paschal Mystery makes it possible for us to discover new life in the dyings we experience; it is this Paschal Mystery that gives us the courage to die unto ourselves in order to become more and more the person our Creator knows us to be; it is this Paschal Mystery that gives us hope and encourages us to be a source of hope in the world; It is the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ that makes it possible for us to share in the life of God – to live in right relationship with God.

But we always need to say “yes” to the invitations to be transformed.  We need to identify in our life the experiences that are the sources of these invitations – to pay attention to when and where God is inviting us to deeper conversion of life.  We have a choice – we can try to suppress the invitation, we can try to get over it and avoid what seems to be more of a paschal mess than a paschal mystery, or we can say “yes” to the difficulty, the uncertainty, the pain, the grief, the confusion and be assured that by saying “yes” we are promised that newness of life will ultimately triumph and we will live a more and more authentic life in Christ.