Welcome to The Examine, your daily prayer hosted by Father James Martin and brought to you by America Media, a Jesuit ministry.

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I'm Father Jim Martin. I'm about to lead you through a traditional Jesuit prayer that will

help you notice where God has been in your day.

But first, let's begin with our weekly reflection, which is released every Sunday.

This week, we mark the third Sunday of Easter.

For those of us with children, and I am not one of those, but I do have nephews, the Easter baskets and chocolate eggs and jelly beans and marshmallow peeps are long put away or eaten up.

But the church in its wisdom gives us a whole liturgical season to celebrate Easter.

That has always made a great deal of sense to me, because the life-changing mystery

of Easter is too great for just one Sunday or even one week. For one thing, we have a lot to

think about in terms of what the disciples' experiences of the risen Christ were like. Did you ever

wonder why what are called the post-resurrection narratives

present such different images of what Jesus looked like? In some gospel stories after the

resurrection, he seems recognizable. In others, the disciples can't recognize him at all. In some, he

seems ghostly, as when he suddenly appears to them in a room

in which the doors are locked. In others, he seems physical and even says, I'm not a ghost. So which

is it? My sense is that it was hard, maybe impossible, to describe what Jesus's glorified body looked like.

And so even the gospel writers struggle with it.

It's a reminder that our spiritual experiences sometimes are hard to explain, and that's okay.

It doesn't mean that they're any less real or meaningful.

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