Loretto celebrates new life of the Easter season!

At the conclave in 1958 before his election, then Cardinal Angelo Giuseppi Roncalli, said, “We are not here to guard a museum but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life.” He who would become Pope John XXIII called the historic Second Vatican Council, just one of his many accomplishments. While he was specifically talking about the Catholic Church in the quote above, his comment made us wonder, what exactly is a “flourishing garden of life?”

During this magical season of spring, our hearts and minds often are refreshed by the glory of new growth, budding flowers and trees and crops seeded and planted the year before pushing up with miraculous energy through thawing winter earth. So many stimuli bathe our senses. Moment to moment — if we are observant — we see new life, new growth. Can this metaphor of a “flourishing garden of life” be applied to our lives today? Do we believe that this “flourishing garden” is planted both with the hands of the “Master Gardener” and our own hands, that we plant together?

We often speak of living in the present moment. For many of us, it is difficult to do so. So many distractions make us look toward the past or cause us, in our impatience, to jump ahead to an unknown future. The truth of the one precious moment that we have is to acknowledge and appreciate it for the new life that has emerged and will emerge just like the gardener who revels in the new spring growth. We know that each present moment is a time of planting and reaping and seeing new life in our lives.

This week on our Facebook page Loretto shows off the new growth of spring as inspiration to look at the seeds we are sowing in our garden of life. We invite you to do the same. What do we need to make them flourish and bloom with the same beauty of a new green spring garden?