Only this I want

You might never have heard of the St Louis Jesuits. In the 1970s and 80s they were the Church’s answer to The Beatles. Wonderful engaging tunes with lyrics drawn directly from or with beautiful allusions to and images from the sacred scriptures of our forebears.
In 1981 one of their members, former Jesuit Dan Schutte, penned an extraordinary song, one of my favourites, Only this I want:

Only this I want, but to know the Lord,
And to bear his cross,
so as to wear the crown he wore.
Let your hearts be glad,
always glad in the Lord,
So to shine like stars
in the darkness of the night.

This is the plaintive call from the depths of the heart: if I have faith, what I am asking for? For me it is to have that relationship with my Lord, Jesus, and that while I acknowledge what he has done for me in his dying and rising, I want to share part of that agony, that suffering so that I too can make a difference, and share in his rising. And in the final verse, the gladness that comes from knowing Jesus, from sharing his cross and his crown is like the shining of stars in the darkness of the night.
These next few days are the most sacred days of our religious calendar. The fascination and focus we have on the events of Jesus’ last days are not morbid. If at one end Jesus’ incarnation is the most radical event in human history, then our salvation, our redemption through suffering, death and rising fundamentally moves the boundaries for all eternity. It is the total transformation of creation. Christ continues to suffer and die each day – through our inhumanity to one another, and yet each day there is resurrection. This mystery is past (what happened circa AD 30 – 36), present (what we now experience in our daily lives) and future (what is yet to come, what is yet to be fully revealed).
Don’t underestimate this mystery, for the huge armada we call the church is founded upon, driven and directed towards its understanding, of living it out, day by day.
Your child’s awareness of this mystery must go beyond chocolate eggs and the Easter bunny. As appealing as they are, they are distractions from the main event. While we have sanitized so much of our civilization, there is no escaping that our faith is balanced on the beams of the cross upon which Jesus was hung.
Wishing you a holy and happy Easter.