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Celebrating Resurrection

For centuries, the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris has been a symbol of humankind doing its best to glorify and worship God. Then, last Monday, fire ravaged the historic treasure, leaving part of it a blackened shell.

What followed was appropriate to the season. Even as the flames continued to light up the night sky, French officials vowed the cathedral will be rebuilt. It will, in other words, rise again. That is a promise, people around the world were assured.

Today is Easter Sunday, on which Christians celebrate another promise made — and kept.

Just as many around the world felt sorrow at the cathedral conflagration, there was despair more than two millennia ago when Jesus Christ was crucified, pronounced dead, and interred in a cave-like crypt. He had promised followers forgiveness and eternal life. All that was asked in return was faith.

That faith was tested on the first Good Friday. Jesus had been executed. That, his foes hoped, would be an end to the upstart new religion and its threat to the existing order. Many of Jesus’ followers feared his enemies were right.

They were not.

Christ had promised eternal life to all who embraced him. On the first Easter, he arose — making it plain the promise would be kept.

That is why Easter is the most holy day in the Christian calendar. It is the reason those of the faith devote untold wealth and effort to building beautiful churches and cathedrals both in which to worship and as a means of worship.

Notre Dame Cathedral can never be what it was for more than 850 years. But it will rise again in, we trust, a different but even greater splendor.

That, too, is appropriate for Christians. Today, we celebrate resurrection.

Joyeuse Paques!

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