May Day Thoughts

May Day Thoughts

Waverly Fitzgerald
May Day is one of the corner days that fall between the solar festivals of the year (the equinoxes and solstices). The ancient Celts called this holiday Beltane and began celebrating at sunset on April 30^th. It marked the beginning of summer, time to move with the flocks up to the summer pastures.

Dwight Longenecker
I think we don’t celebrate May Day because we don’t celebrate much at all. We’ve lost the rhythm of feasting and fasting. We’re caught up in the holidays manufactured by the retailers.
We don’t celebrate May Day because we’re out of touch with the natural world and cannot celebrate the joy of the natural world. We also don’t celebrate May because we don’t celebrate motherhood and Mary. May is Mary’s month, and in this month of May there is something more alive and beautiful and innocent and free about the world. That May is Mary’s month is somehow fitting. The whole world is alive in a fresh way in May, and the whole world came alive in a fresh way with Mary….
I remember when I first started to pray the rosary – it was in Spring and as I prayed a strange thing happened – a new dimension of reality in the natural world opened up. It was as if the leaves and trees, the sky and the breeze had an edge – as if they all each and every one were minute doors into another dimension….
I don’t mind that May is Mary’s month and if somebody thinks it is all a little bit too pagan, then let them continue to suck their lemons. As C.S. Lewis observed, while there is something dark and violent and demonic about paganism, there is also something natural and free and innocent and joyous.

Harvey D. Egan S.J.
Karl Rahner was never one to wear his heart on his sleeve. But he did not hesitate to pray publicly. In fact, he often prayed the Rosary while his lectures were being read to American audiences by an interpreter. He enjoyed relating how he and Cardinal Ottaviani – the same cardinal responsible for a Vatican slap on Rahner’s wrist – once prayed the Rosary and the Litany of Loreto while travelling together. That the senile St Albert the Great could do nothing more at the end of his life than pray the Hail Mary impressed Rahner as a great blessing….
Rahner – whose name is often associated with highly speculative theology – never hesitated to exhort people to “pray in the everyday”. By that he meant “regular prayer which is practiced without regard to the desire and mood of the moment…. Prayer at the ringing of the Angelus, the rosary by oneself or with one’s family, the silent private visit to a church and the tabernacle”.…  “Beware the person of no devotions and the person who doesn’t pray,” he once said to me….
To Rahner, the prayer of everyday life exists not only as the immense longing, or even only as the undertow, vector, or implicit call to holiness found in every person’s deepest interior. It becomes more explicit in the many good and lovely experiences that punctuate even the most banal lives. Hence Rahner calls attention to joyful experiences, to the good and beautiful things of life, because they “promise and point to eternal light and everlasting life”. Since God can be found in all things there is certainly an Easter faith that loves the earth, a radical prayer of joy in the world.