Easter message: Father James Bell, of St Mary's Catholic Church, Inverness
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With church congregations across Inverness unable to gather for the most important festival in the Christian calendar due to coronavirus restrictions, Easter this year will be very different.
Although the buildings may be empty, many are reporting growing online audience figures while this year the Easter messages from city church leaders are of hope and love.
Father James Bell, of St Mary's Catholic Church, Inverness, gives his message:
The Friday we call 'Good' is sometimes seen as ‘the end of the beginning’, all that had happened in the life of Jesus had led to the dereliction of the Cross.
Indeed, it is there on the Cross that all men and women are drawn to Jesus. It seems a spectacular and ghastly end to so much good and early promise.
If we see this Friday differently, as ‘the beginning of the end’, we are in more familiar territory, for do we not all realise that after the death of Jesus, something more dust-defying, earth-shattering was born?
It shapes our life together as we look towards the End.
The new beginning of Easter, is the dawn of vitality, of healthy life, the resurgence of the good.
After the ‘lock-down’ of the tomb, the grave clothes are strewn away, and in the freshness of the garden, ‘deep down things’ are there for the tender-hearted and the seeking spirit, so then and so now.
The End, is for us both personal and corporate, and how we are made aware of it in our perplexing times. The End gives us a texture and a perspective for living.
Many will miss the spaciousness of our church buildings, the richness of worshipping with others, and the vibrancy of Easter praise, yet in our seclusion we can effectively be ‘little churches’.
There are treasures within the tradition of ‘ecclesiola in ecclesia’, the ‘little churches within the Church’.
Deprived of the ‘outward and visible signs’ of so much of our worship, we can become more aware, by prayer and reflection, of the ‘inward and spiritual graces’ that are the sinews of our Common Life in the Body of Christ.
And, we can reach out to all corners of the globe and find that the world-wide web, offers us a rich diversity of worship, and the television can bring us into networks of praise and prayer. Thanks be to God.
