Chances are this Easter season your parish will celebrate someone’s first Holy Communion, which is a beautiful manifestation of joy of the Resurrection.
In these days between Easter and Pentecost, we recall when the Church was first “knitted” together. Those early days of coming together under the guidance of the apostles were the seedling days of what would become the tight-knit family of the Roman Catholic Church. The joy and excitement of the infant Church is palpable in the many readings we hear from Acts of the Apostles during the Easter season. That same joy can still be experienced in every sacrament and especially every time a child receives Jesus in the Eucharist for the first time.
When our youngest made her first Communion at the Easter Vigil this year, I was struck by the reaction of the parishioners who were there to celebrate the Church’s most important liturgy of the year but also ended up being witnesses to this pivotal event for our daughter. Several people, some of whom were probably present when I made my own first Communion in the same church 40 years prior, took the time to congratulate her and tell her what a special night it was for her. They were beaming. She was beaming. It was the celebration of a tight-knit family and so appropriate on the night when so many are welcomed into the fold of the Catholic family throughout the world.
This family of the Church has been knitted together for well over 2,000 years now. That’s a lot of knitting, a lot of yarn. Each strand has been carefully woven by God over the centuries to build His Church. Like any family, there are good days and bad days (years?), difficult relationships, strong personalities, painful growth, suffering, but, also, sacrificial love and much joy.
It's easy to forget sometimes that as Catholics we are a family. We tend to stay in our own lanes and not “interfere” with others in their faith journeys. But that’s not how it was in the early days of the Church. As we heard in the first reading on the Second Sunday of Easter, “The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favour was accorded them all” (Acts 4:32-34).
Sigh. It sounds rather idyllic, doesn’t it? The community was of one heart and mind. What happened to this Church? How did we go from what is described above to rushing in and out of Sunday Mass once a week? If we can’t even make eye contact with one another, how can we help build up each other?
Part of the answer is the early Church was basking in the new joy of the Resurrection of Christ and what that meant for them and for the world. For those who were anxiously awaiting a Messiah at the time, the realization that Jesus Christ was the Messiah and his promise of eternal life was real would have been such a life-changing moment. It is no wonder all what they were able to accomplish as a faith community.
Why is this not the same for us every Easter? Why do we not respond with the same enthusiasm as the first Christians? Partly, because the good news isn’t “new” to us anymore. We’ve heard it all our lives and we are almost too familiar with it to appreciate it. But when we participate in a moment of newness, like a baptism or a first Communion, and we see the joy that comes with experiencing Christ intimately for the first time, we can recapture the Easter newness.
As a faith family, let’s seize the opportunity of the Easter season and these sacraments of initiation to try to reignite the atmosphere of the early Church described in Acts of the Apostles. Shouldn’t each child who is baptized or receives Jesus in the Eucharist for the first time be able to experience the full rejoicing of the Church around them?
We need to do better about expressing our joy with every first communicant or newly baptized member of the Church being tightly knit into the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church. Perhaps the best way to do this is to be more visible about our own joy of receiving the sacraments – every single time. If we truly are an Easter people, we need to rejoice always in our participation in the sacraments that are God’s megaphone of the good news of the Resurrection.
Lazzuri writes from her home in Nova Scotia, where she lives with her husband, six children, and her mom. She can be reached at [email protected]