Forming Saints in the Domestic Church (Easter)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb, while it was still dark, and she saw the stone taken away from the tomb. She ran therefore and came to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him’” (John 20:1-2).

It’s curious that the story of the most important event in human history opens with Mary Magdalene. One might have thought that the story of the Resurrection would open with Our Lady or St. John or St. Peter, but Mary Magdalene steals the show.

She's the sinner, the great sinner who learned how to love, and so she's the model for the whole of humanity. She's the one who gets up early in the morning. She's like the patron saint of all early risers.

She can't sleep. If you have something on your mind or something you're bothered about, often you may suffer from insomnia. It sounds like the apostles did not have too much trouble sleeping.

But Mary couldn't sleep. Why?

Because there's a hole in her heart. John Paul II says that we all suffer from a hole in the heart, and that hole can only be filled by God.

Mary seeks to fill that hole. There's an emptiness in her. It's like a model for all of us, when somehow we have lost Christ, particularly through sin.

She's searching for Jesus. She needs to be with the Body of Jesus. Nothing holds her back. She's ready to overcome all obstacles.

She makes her way through the town early in the morning, not worried about what people will think or what people will say if they hear her going through the streets, peering out from behind the curtains, wondering, Where is this one off to?

She's not worried about the stone that will be rolled away, or that will not be rolled away, although she'll find it rolled away from the tomb. Love has made her all-powerful.

The story of Easter Sunday morning is a story of love.

It also speaks to us of the gravity of sin and how we have to avoid sin. In the context of our theme this morning—Forming Saints in the Domestic Church—we have Mary Magdalene as a great model, but also as a great encouragement.

Christ is here for us sinners. She seeks out His love and mercy. She's the beneficiary.

Her example can lead us to focus on our cleanliness of soul—cleansing our souls from sin.

If we were to form saints in the domestic Church, we could try to help our children with a great awareness of sin.

And for that, a great awareness of the sacrament of Confession is particularly relevant. Regular Confession for children can be a great benefit.

I can tell you with personal experience of forty years that children acquire great joy from the sacrament of Confession because often they have very sensitive souls. They can have a great sense of sin: “I told a lie. I stole 10 shillings.”

Sometimes from the other side of the Confessional grill, you can hear a great sigh of relief when they get that off their conscience. The sacrament of Confession is a sacrament of joy.

One of the ways to help your children to be full of youthful joy is to help them keep their souls clean. One saint used to say, “Bring your children to God and to Confession before the devil gets into them.”

Early Confession for children carries with it great messages. It carries with us that sin is the only real evil.

Often modern culture tells us that not having certain material things is evil, or unemployment, or cancer, or diabetes, or COVID, or all sorts of other things.

But all those things can be our means to achieve heaven. The only thing that can keep us out of heaven is sin.

If your children can get that message before you die, then you've left them a great legacy that may stay with them all through their lives.

There was a Dutch missionary priest in Singapore who told me that the most impressive priestly moment of his life was when he was asked to go and visit a Dutch lady in hospital who had cancer.

Her death wasn't imminent, but she'd been away from the sacraments for many decades. He was asked to go and see her.

He went to see her and he said, “I chatted with her for a while. And then there came the moment when I had to ask her the $64,000 question, which was, ‘Would you like me to hear your Confession?’”

And she gave the $64,000 answer, which was, “Oh, I have nothing to confess.”

He chatted with her a little more and tried to persuade her a little bit, and finally, she said, “OK, if it will make you happy, I will go to Confession.”

She went to Confession, and when she had finished her Confession, she put her head back on the pillow. She said, “Now it is really Easter.”

The priest said, “I was very moved by those words, because here was this woman who had been away from the sacraments for decades, but she remembered all the things that she had learned at the time of her First Holy Communion.

“She knew what Good Friday was. She knew what the death of Christ on the Cross meant. She knew what divine grace was, how it washes away our sins and lifts us up onto a whole new supernatural plane.

“She knew how we get the great treasures of grace with the sacraments. We get the virtues, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit—wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, fear of the Lord.

“She knew how we become spiritual millionaires when we are in the state of grace. God is in our soul; the devil is no longer there. She knew what Easter Sunday was, how Christ had conquered death and punishment and the devil and sin.”

“Her short phrase, ‘Now it is really Easter,’ seemed to be a summary of the whole of Christian doctrine. In her dying days, she had this great Easter joy.”

Every time that we go to Confession and bring our children there—it's very good for them to see you going to Confession occasionally—we help them to participate in that Easter joy, which may be the greatest joy that they can have in their heart and soul and mind when they face eternity.

It may be the greatest legacy that you ever give them, that awareness of their soul and of its eternal destiny and being called to the eternal wedding feast.

John Paul II in his Theology of the Body liked to talk about how the real marriage comes later. Marriage in this world, he said, is just a preparation for marriage in the next.

St. Josemaría Escrivá used to say something similar, that marriage is a pathway to holiness (J. Escriva, Conversations, Point 91; Christ Is Passing By, Point 23).

Even if something goes wrong with our marriage here in this world, it's not the end of the world, because this is just our passport to eternity.

We're all called to the eternal wedding feast. What a wonderful thing if we can experience that Easter joy in those dying moments of our life because we have stored up for ourselves treasures in heaven.

Easter Sunday morning is a story of hope, of joy, of love. Mary Magdalene goes in search of love. She goes in search of Christ. In Christ, she finds the meaning and the purpose of her life.

We're told that she finds the body has been taken away; a major disaster. So she goes running to find Peter and John. She reveals this new piece of news to them, and they come running. She said, “They've taken the Lord from the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

“Peter therefore went out with the other disciple and went to the tomb. The two were running together. The other disciple ran on before faster than Peter, and he came first to the tomb. Stooping down, he saw the linen cloths lying there, yet he did not enter” (John 20:3-5).

John was younger, faster than Peter. But out of detail of deference to Peter, the primacy of Peter, the rock, the vicar of Christ on earth, he waits for Peter to come.

“Peter therefore came following him and he went into the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there, and the handkerchief which had been about his head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded in a place by itself” (John 20:7).

One little lesson you could tell your children these days is to remember this little detail of Our Lord, how He pays attention to little things.

Every time that you fold the towel in the washroom, try to fold it nicely—to leave the washroom in a state that you would like to find it, because that's how Christ left the tomb.

He took the time and the trouble and the energy and the love to take care of that tiny detail that St. John records for all eternity, like a message about the importance of little details in the domestic Church.

We think of others, we live for others, we forget about ourselves. Christ is passing on this nugget of formation with this particular detail.

“Then the other disciple went in and would come to the tomb, and he saw and believed” (John 20:8)—the first demonstration of faith after the Resurrection, for as yet they did not understand the Scripture.

All through the story of the Passion and Easter, with all the great things happening, we're also told all the time how the apostles did not understand. They did not get it.

They're still “too dull of wit, too slow of heart” (cf. Luke 24:25). The Holy Spirit has not yet come.

“They did not understand that He must rise from the dead. The disciples therefore went away again to their home. But Mary was standing outside weeping” (John 20:9-11).

Mary didn't go home. We're almost told that the apostles went back to bed. But Mary didn't.

She's the model for us to imitate: the great sinner who has received the great treasure and who has this sense of treasure, a sense of what she has received.

Help your children to have a little glimpse of what supernatural grace in our soul means.

“As she wept, she stooped down and looked into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been laid. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him’” (John 20:11-13).

Mary has no material concerns. The only focus is the body of Christ. I need to be with Christ. I need my God.

She says she's willing to go and take Him away. But Christ was six feet tall. He must have weighed 75 kilos. Mary may have just been a little slip of a girl. But she feels all-powerful.

“When she had said this, she turned around and beheld Jesus standing there, and she did not know that it was Jesus” (John 20:14).

Our Lord doesn't reveal Himself to her in a bang. He does so slowly, little by little, beautifully.

How often in your home, in your marriage, Our Lord is standing right beside you in the midst of your domestic Church, but He does not want us to recognize Him—maybe in a pain, in a cross, in a contradiction, in a setback.

But Christ is always there with us as He was with Mary, there to communicate joy and hope and reassurance to us that He's Our loving Father. All we have to do is try and be close to Him.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?’” He teases things from her, little by little. “She, thinking it was the gardener, said to him, ‘Sir, if you have removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away’” (John 20:15). Our Lord appears as the gardener.

Recently, I was talking to a man who told me a very interesting anecdote, how he was in a boarding school forty years ago.

He has great memories of a gardener who was there in this boarding school, who looked after a little special garden that there was.

He remembers this man kneeling down to pull out the weeds or to pluck the flowers or the vegetables or whatever. He said this man used to work with great devotion.

He was very struck by the way this gardener worked. And this man now is a successful executive.

After he worked, the gardener would go to a little image of Our Lady that there was in a corner of the garden and kneel down there, as though offering to Our Lady the work that he had just done and thanking her for the talents that she had given him to be able to do that work.

It's interesting how we're struck by such things. You might have expected him to talk about all his great teachers who taught him about literature or mathematics or science or something.

But with the passage of time, he learned so much from the gardener, and in his professional life, he wants to emulate that gardener, to learn how to work the way that man worked, sanctifying his work, obviously.

Christ comes as the gardener. In a school, in a parish, in any place that you may be, in an organization, watch out for the gardener. He may be transmitting more formation than everybody else in the whole organization. Sometimes we have to be that gardener.

Christ appears as the gardener. “She says, ‘Tell me where you've put him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ Turning, she said to him, ‘Rabboni!’” (John 20:15-16).

In other places of Scripture, Our Lord is the one who turns. He turns to the woman with the issue of blood (Mark 5:25-34). He turns away from the crowds to the individual. But here's the individual who turns to Him.

“Rabboni! He said, “Do not touch me for I have not yet ascended to my Father.’” He makes it clear that now this is His risen body, spiritual body, glorious body, and He says, “‘Go and tell my brethren and say to them, ‘I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

Pope Benedict liked to say that Mary became the apostle of apostles (Benedict XVI, General Audience, February 14, 2007; Thomas Aquinas, Lectura Super Ioannem). She is the one sent to the other apostles.

The greater role of women, the power of women—our Church promotes women all over the place. Don't ever let anyone say the opposite.

She becomes the apostle of apostles. Mother and father of family, you have a similar role as Mary Magdalene, to do the apostolate of the family, within the family and from the family.

That's a great mission to our profession, to our club, to our schoolmates, to our environment. We said the theme today is forming saints in the domestic Church.

I heard somebody say that when the Church beatified and canonized the children of Fatima, the Church was making a statement that seven-, eight-year-old, twelve-year-old children can be saints. We're all called to be saints.

At the end of this recollection, we can turn to Our Lady and begin to participate in her joy. Perhaps these days, try and teach your children the Regina Caeli:

Queen of Heaven, rejoice, hallelujah.
For he whom thou was worthy to bear has risen as he promised.
Rejoice and be glad, O Virgin Mary, for the Lord has truly risen.

Help them to know these words, to experience the joy of Easter, and maybe try and have some specific material thing in your home to help the children get that message.

John Paul says we go to the great spiritual messages through physical signs and symbols. And sometimes those are gastronomic signs and symbols.

We can ask Our Lady, that she might help us to grow this Easter and a deeper understanding of this great mystery, and that we might truly see the importance of our domestic Church and how God may want to use our specific domestic Church in forming the saints for the future.

Mary, Queen of heaven and earth, full of Easter joy, pray for us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW