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Hallo again to all.

For us the centre of our worship life has always been Eastertide. We are grumpy about Lent, but Easter and Eastertide are steeped in Christ and Christianity and renewal and rebirth and new life. There is nothing quite like the sense of Jesus' presence that starts with the assertion of resurrection 'He is risen!'. We always walk out after an Easter mass pumped with adrenaline and optimism and faith, certain that however bad things have been, they are going to get better.

On our way home from church we pass by people who weren't there to celebrate, people who didn't recently experience the joy of new fire and new life. We've sometimes wanted to run up and tell them 'You don't know what you are missing!' But of course they'd have to wait a year to experience it, because the mass is ended, the celebration complete.

A couple of days ago much of the world celebrated the arrival of a new year. Unless a country has its own calendar, or had police watching to ensure that there are no celebrations, the chances are good that nearly everyone who is old enough to celebrate and young enough to stay awake until midnight was involved in some sort of New Year's festivity. We saw news reports and photographs of huge celebrations in Sydney, Hong Kong, Dubai, New York, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Moscow, New Delhi, Hanoi, and thousands of other cities large and small. Millions of people stayed home but celebrated quietly at home, with some ritual recognition of the event.

The church has its own marker of the new year, of course: the First Sunday of Advent. But our liturgy notes that arrival of the new year without greatly celebrating it (perhaps getting emotional while singing 'Lo! he comes with clouds descending'), because we know that the Big Event will come in a few months, and that we celebrate.

It's fun to celebrate New Year's with family and friends, acknowledging the changes and passages since last time. But the joy of the resurrection and new life isn't there. We go to bed happy, with a smile on our face, after a New Year's evening, but it has never brought us the manic joy of Easter. We suppose that if you aren't a Christian churchgoer, you probably aren't ever going to experience first-hand this 'He is risen' joy that we are harping on; you might as well go out and get emotional about New Year's. But you're always invited to church at Easter or any other time. You don't know what you're missing.

Easter is April 24 this year; Lent starts on March 9. And Easter is thrilling enough that we don't need to set off fireworks. Brace yourselves.

See you next week and next Easter.

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Last updated: 2 January 2011
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