During these forty days after the Rising of Christ from the dead, it is not particularly difficult to imagine what the disciples did. They surely gathered in groups large and small and talked together about what had happened since the Lord entered their lives. There is healing in sharing, and in this sharing something new was created. The Gospel story begins to take shape and the genesis of the Church, that creative gestation before the coming of the Spirit and the birth of the Church on earth.

Overwhelmed, bewildered, and frightened, Christ's own went back over the last three years -- maybe it wasn't even three -- and tried in some way to put it all together, if only by remembering what He said, what He did, and where, and when. The historical myth began to develop. Oral history in formation. And now and again perhaps -- who knows how many times and in what circumstances -- Christ Himself took His place among them for comfort and encouragement, filling in details perhaps, or being sure their memory was correct. Distraught they surely were, overcome by reality. In a state of shock, no doubt.

Primitive people I knew found our rites of death and watch, of burial and mourning unbelievably brief. All over in a few days. And then back to work. Life goes on. We do mourn, of course, and often a long time, but it is a private grief. Theirs was public and prolonged.

And if that seem a human reaction to the mystery of death and loss, what state would the apostles, the disciples, have been in, given Who He was, what He did? The enormity of His tragic death, followed so soon after by His glorious return to life. It's a bit much to cope with.

Do you suppose they broke the bread and drank the cup in His memory, even before He was wholly gone in the flesh?  Who knows? What we do know is that they gathered and talked and prayed. And waited. What next?

I used to feel bad for tourists who came to New Guinea. A quick look and then gone. And very expensive. What could they have gotten save some series of vivid impressions, like someone leafing through an album of photos in a few moments and calling it some grasp of you, and your family, and your world.

So, we can see at this distance the marvel that was shaping in their days. Call it the beginning of the liturgical life, to use professional terms. For we too gather as they did, we reminisce, as they did. We tell again the familiar story, as they did. And then act it out in the memorial meal, as they did.

Yet far more than mere memory. For we know what they cannot have grasped yet: that Christ lives on in His mysteries, and the events of His life. We are not on a mere memory trip. Not even when the story took particular shape and was put down in writing. For we do not merely read the story, hear it read. We do it.

Time and time again, for a lifetime. The whole cycle of the year is the story told from beginning to end, and the story is re-enacted, entered into, and lived. In that sense, we mourn the death of Jesus for a lifetime, and we celebrate His birth and all else to the Rising, over and over, each time hopefully in grace and gift, grasping just a bit more what it all means.

The gift of a long life means a repeated participation in the greatest of human events. In terms of salvation, once is enough. In terms of full grasp, a lifetime is but a beginning.

One Christmas, one Holy Week, one Easter, one Pentecost would do. Yet who could say even a lifetime of the mystical life is enough? Rather, only eternity will suffice.

So, by some strange Providence, we have been caught up in some magnificent drama of enormous consequence for the world, for time, and for eternity. And as casually, and as innocently as the call of the first ones. He came walking down the shore of the lake one day and said, now to this one, now to that one: Come, follow Me. They could in no way have sensed what it would mean. Neither can we.

Catholic, as it were like them, by happenstance, incident. We have some smidgen of understanding of what we are about in His grace. But not much more.

And so we gather in prayer, we talk about Him, we hear the story again, and we break the bread and we drink the cup and are seized up in the mystery of God come among us. And the salvation of the world is in it all.

How blessed you are.