I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to admit, even to myself.

There have been mornings, more than a few, when I have stood at the altar on Easter Sunday, incense rising, the Exsultet still faintly echoing in the stone, the congregation watching, and felt almost nothing. No doubt exactly what it should be. Something quieter and harder to name. A kind of interior distance from the very thing I was proclaiming with my whole body. The vestments, the candles, and the Alleluia returned after forty days of silence, all of it beautiful, all of it real, and somewhere behind my eyes, a man standing very still, watching himself perform a conviction he could not, in that moment, fully feel.

Nobody told me that would happen. Nobody in formation said: there will be Easters where you hold the faith more than it holds you, and that is not a sign that you have failed. It is a sign that you are human and that the resurrection is not a feeling.

I think that silence has cost us something. Because religious men and women are carrying this more than we say. And the weight of it, the gap between public proclamation and private experience, can quietly hollow a vocation from the inside if it goes unnamed long enough.

So I am naming it. Because the empty tomb, of all places, is where honesty belongs.

Tuesday Is the Real Test

The alarm goes off at five-fifteen. There is the Office to pray, the same psalms you have prayed ten thousand times, some of which still catch you off guard and some of which you now recite from a place so far behind your conscious mind that you could not later tell anyone what you prayed. There is the brother at breakfast who chews with his mouth open and has done so for eleven years and will, God willing, continue to do so for eleven more. There is the meeting that should take forty minutes and will take two hours. There is the retreatant in genuine crisis. There is the email from the provincial that requires a careful reply. There is, by three in the afternoon, a tiredness that is not quite physical.

And somewhere in the background of........

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