How many Easter Sundays are there in ten years? Most people responded “ten”. But there are really eighty! This is because every day of the Easter Octave (from Easter Sunday to the following Sunday) is celebrated as Easter Sunday.

I was inspired by Pope Francis’ Easter homily. Here are a couple of paragraphs. You can read the full text at this link.

“Why do you think that everything is hopeless, that no one can take away your own tombstones?  Why do you give into resignation and failure?  Easter is the feast of tombstones taken away, rocks rolled aside.  God takes away even the hardest stones against which our hopes and expectations crash: death, sin, fear, worldliness.  Human history does not end before a tombstone, because today it encounters the “living stone”, the risen Jesus.  We, as Church, are built on him, and, even when we grow disheartened and tempted to judge everything in the light of our failures, he comes to make all things new, to overturn our every disappointment.  Each of us is called to rediscover in the Risen Christ the one who rolls back from our heart the heaviest of stones.  So let us first ask: What is the stone that I need to remove, what is its name?

“Often what blocks hope is the stone of discouragement.Once we start thinking that everything is going badly and that things can’t get worse, we lose heart and come to believe that death is stronger than life.  We become cynical, negative and despondent.  Stone upon stone, we build within ourselves a monument to our own dissatisfaction:the tomb of hope. Life becomes a succession of complaints and we grow sick in spirit.  A kind of tomb psychology takes over: everything ends there, with no hope of emerging alive.  But at that moment, we hear once more the insistent question of Easter:Why do you seek the living among the dead? The Lord is not to be found in resignation.  He is risen; he is not there.  Don’t seek him where you will never find him: he is not the God of the dead but of the living (cf. Mk 22:32).  Do not bury hope!