power and authority of Jesus who is the Lord of History. As the blessing of the Paschal Candle recalls: "…all time belongs to Him and all the ages". The sacred cycle thus becomes a sacrament of God's time. Salvation history is among us here and now... "my time" rests in God's hands (and) is a call to trust, to faith, to letting go of self."

The real question is not whether we will mark time but how we will do so? For the Christian time is not meant to be a tyrant ruling over us with impunity. Rather, it is a teacher, inviting and instructing us to choose to enter more fully into our relationship with the Lord and in Him with one another for the world. Time is not our enemy, but our friend. It is a part of the redemptive loving plan of a timeless God who, in His Son, the Timeless One, came into time to transform it from within.

The Lord gives us time as a gift and intends it to become a field of choice and a path to holiness in this life and the window into life eternal. Through time the Lord offers us the privilege of discovering His plan for our own life pilgrimage. Through time He invites us to participate in His ongoing redemptive plan, through His Son Jesus Christ who has been raised, by living in the full communion of His Church which is the seed of the kingdom. That redemptive plan will find its final fulfillment in the recreation of the entire cosmos in Christ. Time is the road along which this loving plan of redemption and re-creation proceeds.

At the very epicenter of our Liturgical Calendar is the great Three days we celebrate, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Resurrection of the Lord, the Sacred Triduum. Good Liturgy is not simply a re-enactment of something that happened over 2000 years ago but an actual participation in the events themselves through living faith. These events are outside of time and made present in our Liturgical celebrations and in our reception of the Sacraments. Just as every Mass/Divine Liturgy is an invitation to enter into the sacrifice of Calvary which occurred once and for all.

We will soon attend the Last Supper and receive the gift of the Holy Eucharist, the Body, Blood Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ. We will enter into the deep meaning of the Holy Priesthood. We will be invited to pour ourselves out like the water in the basins used to wash feet on Holy Thursday. We will be asked with the disciples in the Gospel accounts we will hear proclaimed to watch with the Lord. We will be invited to enter with Him into his anguish by imitating His Holy surrender in his Sacred Humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Through the stark and solemn Liturgy of the Friday we call "Good", we will stand at the Altar of the Cross where heaven is rejoined to earth and earth to heaven, along with the Mother of the Lord. We will enter into the moment that forever changed - and still changes – all human History, the great self gift of the Son of God who did for us what we could never do for ourselves by in the words of the ancient Exultet, "trampling on death by death". We will wait at the tomb and witness the Glory of the Resurrection and the beginning of the New Creation.

The Liturgical year in the words of Monsignor Peter Elliott "… transforms our time into a sacrament of eternity."  Let us enter fully into the Sacred Triduum Liturgies. The Great Three Days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Invite Us into Heart of the Mystery of Faith.Let it Begin!