“Lord,” I prayed, “I know you know that Restoration needs this column. Give me a word, an inspiration. Something to get me started. Anything. Please.”

Nothing.

I prayed again. After a little while, two words came to me: pain and joy.

Well, pain and joy are certainly very much a part of the fiber of our Madonna House life. I glanced again at my list of the events of the past month or so. They were certainly major elements in these events.

Tom Egan’s death was the first thing on my list. Yes, suddenly on an ordinary Thursday afternoon, we received word that Tom had been found dead in his room. We grieved, prayed, and shifted gears to prepare for a funeral. A group of people made plans, another, a group of men, dug the grave (under several feet of snow), others made numerous phone calls, the women in the kitchen prepared food for the reception, the sacristan ironed the funeral pall, and the priests prepared homilies for the wake and funeral Mass.

There was pain for our loss, joy for Tom, and love and laughter as we shared memories of our brother both in small groups and all together at our memories night.

There are many simple joys in our life. In March one of them is our maple syrup operation.
What’s called “the sugar bush crew,” (Fr. Louis Labrecque and helpers) bored approximately a thousand holes in sugar maple trees (which grow in abundance on MH property) and hung buckets under the holes. When the weather is right (the contrast of above freezing temperatures in the daytime and below freezing ones at night), the sap flows in the trees and drips into the buckets.

The Sugar Bush

Every day the sugar bush crew, often walking on snowshoes over the still-deep snow, collected it, brought it to the sugar shack, and boiled it down in a long, narrow vat over a wood fire. (Forty gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup.)

And all during the season, which lasts approximately one month, people could visit the sugar shack on their days off or on Sunday afternoon. There they could help collect sap, watch the boiling, and throw a bit of hot syrup on the snow where it congeals into a delicious taffy-like candy. If they came at the right time, someone might have made them pancakes. And sometimes, when there was a group on a Sunday afternoon, someone pulled out a guitar or fiddle and played music.

Maple Syrup

Yes, the sugar bush brings joy, as does the delicious maple syrup it produces.

Then there is the joy of celebrating the feasts that, as someone put it, “soften our Lenten journey.” On St. Patrick’s Day, we had Irish soda bread for breakfast and a little entertainment after supper—a few women guests (taught by one of them who has been taking lessons for years) did a bit of Irish dancing, Mike Fagan who is originally from Ireland, told stories and sang “Danny Boy,” and Peter Lyrette recited the prayer of St. Patrick.

On St. Joseph’s Day, we had coffee cake for breakfast and a special supper. In the evening the men staff and applicants, whose patron is St. Joseph, had a party.

The Feast of Joy

But, of course, the time of the marriage of pain and joy, the holiest time of the year, is Holy Week. And Easter, the feast of feasts as Catherine used to say, is the feast of joy—the feast on which we proclaimed over and over the great truth that “Christ is risen!” “Truly he is risen!”

This year, on Easter Sunday, a very beautiful event happened—one of those events which, though people plan them, God transforms into something way beyond what was planned.

Christ is Risen

It started very simply. On Holy Saturday, Ruth Siebenaler asked for volunteers to go to the local hospital to sing “Christ is risen!” on Easter Sunday to Archbishop Joseph Raya, who is slowly but continually weakening. Over twenty people offered to go.

In order to appreciate fully the beauty of this story, you have to know something about Archbishop Raya, our Melkite Rite archbishop. I don’t think I have ever known anyone with a greater life force and love of life. And his major message to everyone, which he proclaimed over and over to Arabs and Jews in Israel, to blacks and whites in Birmingham, Alabama, in the American South, to all of us at Madonna House, and to everyone he met everywhere, is the triumphant joy of the Resurrection.

When Toni Austin, the one who stayed with the bishop on Easter Sunday morning, arrived at the hospital, the bishop, ever the pastor, ever the teacher, was teaching the nurse the Eastern Rite traditional Easter greeting, “Christ is risen!” and the response, “Truly he is risen!”

Then as he was wheeled to the dining room for breakfast, he greeted everyone he passed—staff, visitors, and fellow patients—with “Christ is risen!” Those who hesitantly replied, “Happy Easter,” he looked straight in the eye and repeated, “Christ is risen!”

Live Music

At the breakfast table, one patient, very ill with cancer, said that she had heard that people from Madonna House were coming to sing to the bishop. Would it be all right if the other patients could hear, too? “Live music means so much to us,” she said. “It really picks up our spirits.”

Toni checked it out with the head nurse, who said, “Let’s just have it in the dining room.”
But by one p.m. when the singers arrived, the bishop’s energy had plummeted. He’d been awake until three a.m., and had been up and excited all morning. He had even had a few phone calls. All he wanted to do—all he seemed able to do—now was go back to bed. So they brought him to bed, but then he ended up agreeing to be wheeled back to the dining room, bed and all.

There the exhausted bishop greeted each of the MH singers with “Christ is risen!” and blessed them individually. Zoyla Grace placed a huge Easter card, which we had signed, next to him, and the singing began.

The Singing

The bishop was clearly moved, and in some of the songs, he accompanied the singers with his hand, keeping time with the music. His face, too, moved at certain parts of the hymns. People started to cry.

Patients and hospital staff joined in the refrains of songs they knew. After one song one young man, a quadriplegic, waved his arms as a way of clapping.

After it was over, another patient said, “Thank you for coming. When you are a patient here, your days are very full of many things. It is work. When others come in and sing, it’s not just entertainment. You bring us hope.”

A mantle of gentle peace filled the room and went down the corridors. The bishop had had someone buy baklava, a Middle Eastern pastry, and Toni gave a piece to everyone, greeting each one with “Christ is risen!”

The hospital staff passed out juice to go with it, and over and over, one could hear people saying to one another, “Christ is risen!” “Truly he is risen!” You could feel joy and radiance transforming that hospital and filling the hungry hearts.

In that hospital that Easter morning, amidst the pain and suffering of the bishop and all the other patients, the joy of the Resurrection had conquered.

And truly, through Christ’s Resurrection, for those who have faith, life contains not only an intermingling of joy and pain, but ultimately, the triumph of joy.