The Taste of Victory: Introduction

Retreat Overview

The liturgical season of Advent lasts four weeks — almost six if you tack on the days from Christmas through Epiphany. The season of Lent lasts six weeks. And the liturgical season of Easter lasts… seven weeks: from Easter Sunday through Pentecost Sunday. Of all the special liturgical seasons, Easter is the longest.

What do you usually do for Advent and Christmas? Certainly you usually do something — after all, they are special liturgical seasons. What do you usually do for Lent? No doubt you think about that question every year as Ash Wednesday draws closer.
But what about Easter? What do you usually do for the liturgical season of Easter? If you are like most Christians, you probably don’t have any personal or family traditions to help you live the Easter season to the full.
Even though it’s the longest of the special liturgical seasons, which would seem to indicate that is the most important of them all, most of us forget about Easter after Easter Sunday. And that’s a shame.
Easter is seven weeks long for a reason. It’s because Easter is the time when we celebrate Christ’s victory. And that victory was so stupendous that the Church gives us seven weeks to enjoy the celebration, and to let its power and grace nourish our souls.
In this Retreat Guide, “The Taste of Victory,” we will take advantage of this usually-overlooked opportunity to savor the taste of Christ’s Easter victory.
In the first meditation-starter, we will simply take time to savor the first Resurrection appearance recorded in the Gospels — that of the women who went to the tomb hoping to anoint a corpse, and returned from the tomb having embraced God.
In the second meditation-starter, we will turn our attention to the most dominant flavor in the taste of this Easter victory: joy. And we will see what the difference is between Christian joy and worldly pleasure.
Finally, in the conference, we will savor the rich flavor of the many symbols involved in the ritual of Catholic baptism — the sacrament that brings the victory of Easter into the souls of sinners.
Before we dive in, take a few moments simply to enjoy the presence of God, who is with you right now, eager to speak to your heart, glad that you have taken some time to spend with him in quiet prayer.
Thank him for the many blessings he has given you, and ask him for the graces you need to grow spiritually, and especially for the grace to experience more fully than ever before, the joyful taste of Christ’s Easter victory.