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    American Catholic
    Exercises/Week Four/The Resurrection

    Day 1

    The Resurrection

    The stone is rolled away

    Grace to ask for

    Lord, let me feel the joy of the Resurrection — not as a doctrine, but as a reality I live inside.

    ""He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.""

    Matthew 28:6

    Composition of Place

    Come to the tomb before dawn. The stone is already rolled away. The guards have fled. An angel is seated on the stone, his appearance like lightning.

    Points for Meditation

    The empty tomb

    The tomb is empty. The burial cloths are lying there — not scattered in haste, but folded, as if left behind deliberately. The Resurrection is not a ghost story: the body is gone. Something has happened to matter itself. Death has been defeated not by escaping the body but by transforming it.

    Go and tell

    "Go quickly and tell his disciples: He has risen from the dead." The first evangelists were women whose testimony was not accepted in a court of law. God consistently chooses the overlooked. He consistently upends the world's hierarchies of credibility. The news of the Resurrection was entrusted to the margins.

    He is going before you

    "He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him." Galilee — not Jerusalem, not the Temple, not the seat of power. He goes back to the ordinary place, the place of work and fishing and everyday life. The Risen Christ is not in the sanctuary only. He has gone ahead of you into your Galilee.

    Colloquy

    Week Four is a week of joy — not forced joy, but the real joy of someone who has accompanied Christ through his Passion and now accompanies him in his rising. Ask for the grace to believe, not just intellectually but in your body and your choices, that death is not the end.

    Remain in silence for a few minutes.

    Do not rush to the next exercise.