In the hours before Pope Francis's funeral, I was privileged to be interviewed on CNN along with my Beyond the Habit co-host, Sister Erin McDonald, about the impact of Pope Francis on women and young people in the church. Check out the segment below:
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
The Hopeful Tension of Eastertide
The following column was originally published by Global Sister Report on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025.
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Waking up this Easter Monday, I’m tired. Holy Week in a parish can be exhausting — a balancing act of liturgical celebrations and one’s own prayerful reflection on the story of faith we tell and take part in. With the marathon of the Triduum behind us, today is a day for getting our bearings and taking stock. Easter Monday offers us a moment to begin again, to rest for a moment and feel the tension and the triumph of what has been and is yet to be.
Easter Monday is a tension point. Two parts of the memorial
acclamation fall into place: Christ has died and Christ is risen. So what then
remains? Christ will come again.
Just as we wake up holding the fruits and foibles of our
Holy Week, the first followers of Jesus must have faced the same. For them,
waking up the day after that first Easter must have felt like whiplash. Imagine
everything the day before had held: the shock, the awe, the confusion, the
unbelievable joy. Perhaps Jesus’ first followers never even went to sleep that
first night and stumbled, in a state of emotional bewilderment, into what we
now know as Easter Monday.
For them, of course, it was simply a Monday like no other
they had ever experienced. I imagine that Peter and John could feel the tension
in their leg muscles, having run to the tomb; that the two who had trekked back
on the road from Emmaus kept playing that fateful journey over and over in
their heads, remembering what it felt like to be broken open like the bread
before them. I imagine Mary Magdalene awoke with puffy and swollen eyes, the
scent of oil and spices still on her hands as she rubbed her face and tried to
comprehend that the One she had so deeply mourned was once again alive.
There is an unbelievability to this day. The day after the
day that everything changed, which of course, is and was three days after the
day they thought was the day that changed everything. Yet, that is the thing we
often forget about the Easter story: no one who took part in it knew what was
going to happen.
In fact, I’d wager that it’s also the thing we forget about our
own experiences of Easter — not just that we don’t know exactly how it’s going
to turn out (which is true), but that (more often than not) we can forget that
we are a part of this ongoing story.
Jesus is coming
"Where can I find someone to talk about hope?" a
friend asked me a few weeks ago. That seems to be the perpetual question in
this Jubilee Year of Hope. My friend, it seemed, was coming up short and losing
hope in the process. "We’re not even halfway through this year, and I feel
like my well is running dry." She opined.
Even just a day into this Easter season, I can feel her
pain. Passion, death and resurrection feel like an all-too-common reality these
days, with resurrection hope pulling up the rear (and, at times, limping to
keep up!) With stories of deportations and job cuts, natural disasters and
military attacks, the suffering of the cross, it would seem, is more of a daily
occurrence than the empty tomb of Easter morning.
Still, as the day of the Resurrection opens into the Easter
season, the tension of our faith invites us to hold the balance between blind
hope and graced encounter. On Easter Monday, our faith invites us to hold the
tension of the already and the not yet of Christ’s coming within the context of
our current reality.
Christ has died.
Christ is Risen. Christ will come again.
In the tension of current events and the temptation to
despair, we hold firm to hope that Jesus is coming. This anticipation provides
the hopeful tension of our lives, a tension holding us in suspense, buoying our
spirits and pressing us to get over ourselves and on with life.
It’s in the hope of this coming that vowed religious life,
with its evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty and obedience, is rooted. We
make these vows to testify to the absoluteness of God. These vows also harken
to the Second Coming. After all, who needs a next generation or a lofty savings
or a 20-year plan when Jesus’ return is imminent?
Are such thoughts naïve? Or maybe idealistic? Is this the
stuff of dreams, or is it the call of the Gospel?
For centuries, believers have lived in that tension. God
makes all things new, including us. The fact that we can’t control or even
predict Christ’s coming asks us to surrender. If Christ could come whenever and
wherever, we best show up accordingly.
We are meant to be harbingers of hope. Jesus is coming. We
need to live like we believe this fact.
Nearly fifty years ago, theologian Johann Baptist Metz
underscored this point. "To live Christian hope on the basis of imminent
expectation of the second coming does not mean sacrificing its social and
political responsibility but the reverse," he wrote. Believing Christ will
come again means injecting urgency into our actions. It means living up to the
ideals we profess — living out of love and seeking justice here and now.
We can’t assume or presume that time will go on forever or
that Christ’s coming again is theoretical. Such a presumption robs the promises
of our faith of their "tension by extending the expectation of the second
coming to infinity."
If we don’t believe the Reign of God can be a reality… we’ve
already lost hope. In the words of St. Paul, "if Christ has not been
raised, your faith is vain." (1 Corinthians 15:17a) Therefore, it is in
the tension of faith lived in real life that we hold in tandem with what has
already been and what is yet to be.
In that sweet spot of Easter Monday, we wait and we hope and
we continue to act. To do any less is to dilute ourselves and our faith and to
blatantly deny the promises of Christ to come again.
In that tension, we remain, and we remember. We remember the
life of Jesus and give life to the Gospel in our day and age. And we do it all
in hope — hope in the One who is to come and who calls us into being. The One who held tension all his life and
continues to hold us in the tension of our day.
Just as the first followers couldn’t have known where they
were in the story of Easter, we certainly can’t know where exactly we are,
either. In that tension, we are stretched to find hope. Under pressure, we’re
transformed in our belief. In distress, we're called to lean more closely into
the One who knows the pain of injustice and the self-emptying way of love. And
together, we ultimately follow the Way into our Easter reality and beyond.
Friday, January 10, 2025
GUTD: Creating Supple Hearts
January 2025
Reflection
Creating Supple Hearts
Jesus prayed. It might seem like an obvious, and certainly fundamental, part of Jesus’ life, and yet I find myself captivated by the fact that amid everything else, the Gospel author chooses to make note that Jesus prayed.
I wonder what Jesus prayed about? How was the Spirit swirling on that hillside as Jesus looked out over the sea—having just fed the five thousand and watching his disciples struggle to understand everything that was happening? And if I were to sit with him in that moment, what might Jesus say to me?
Whatever Jesus prayed about, the example of his prayer reveals to us that remaining in God’s love is more than just a beautiful idea: it is essential to an active life of faith. The more we remain in God, the more supple our hearts become. Seated with Jesus in prayer, we sense the same calm that astounded the disciples—a spirit of Love so pure that it asks us to surrender everything to follow Christ. Offering this love in prayer and in practice, we are empowered to go out and do likewise—reconciling relationships, feeding the hungry, creating spaces of welcome, and listening deeply.
“No one has ever seen God.” The first letter of John attests. “Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us.” To remain in God, we have to be in relationship with one another. Only then do the words we pray take on flesh and the lives we live confront life’s storms, uttering a profound “amen” to the One who assures us “it is I, do not be afraid!”
Sr. Colleen Gibson
Colleen Gibson is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia who currently serves as coordinator of pastoral care at St. John-St. Paul Catholic Collaborative in Wellesley, Massachusetts. A writer and speaker, she cohosts the podcast Beyond the Habit (beyondthehabitpod.com).
[CREDIT] Sr. Colleen Gibson, “Creating Supple Hearts” from the January 2025 issue of Give Us This Day, www.giveusthisday.org (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2025). Used with permission.