More than a week has passed since Easter and there is still chocolate sitting in the Easter baskets. We are gradually learning that joy can be spread over many days in small doses, rather than trying to consume it all at once. Though the Easter baskets appear on Sunday morning, the resurrection in my life rarely arrives overnight. New life is emerging more than arriving suddenly.

Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Calgary recently hosted a Theology of the Body Conference at which I spoke. My assigned topic? “Authentic Femininity.” Collectively, we were going to talk more about gender ideology, but Antifa, yes Antifa, was threatening for weeks to shut the whole conference down. Inside a Catholic church. These are the times we’re living in. However, this opposition got us thinking: Why not turn away from addressing the woes of gender confusion and toward positively outlining what authentic masculinity and femininity are? To boot, we got a free police detail who put the protesters on notice that if they went into a house of worship and disrupted the goings on, they would be arrested for hate crimes.

We who celebrate Easter are those who have died and risen with our Lord.

The reality of life-giving sacrificial love is at the core of our 2,000-plus year existence as the community of believers. How we are called to live this existence together has been a matter of reflection from the very beginning. The first fruits of this reflection are famously captured in Acts of the Apostles, “Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned they held in common” (4:32).

As we journey through our life as Christians, seeking to grow in faith and wisdom, we discover we are hard-wired as human beings that bear God’s image and likeness to seek truth, beauty and goodness. These are properties of being, of God. He reveals this to Moses in Exodus chapter 3 when Moses asks God what His name is. God tells him, “I AM WHO I AM.”

I’ve read many — far too many — Holocaust accounts, and despite too much familiarity with the horrors and depravity, my emotions usually get the better of me. It’s not unlike from what I’ve heard from friends who have walked under the Auschwitz concentration camp’s entrance gates and its ominous “Arbeit macht frei” — “Work sets you free” — and are reminded of horrors past: you arrive knowing fully well what to expect, yet the tears still flow.

The first I heard of Fr. Ron Rolheiser was when I was a bushy-tailed editor of the Western Catholic Reporter in Edmonton still in my 20s. An article he had written showed up in the mail one sunny day in 1982 from Belgium where he was studying, and he wanted to know if we would publish it. The subject was revirginization, a possibility that had never previously crossed my mind. Nevertheless, the brilliance of the article astonished me, and I eagerly published it as well as another article he sent.

I never knew the lady’s real name. When I met her she said, “Just call me Chilli, that’s my street name.”

Readers of this column will know her as “The woman who lives in a doorway downtown.” It has been 10 months since we first met. At that time, she gave me some money to go and buy clothes for her from a nearby shop. When I returned, we sat on the step together as she poured out her grief for her son who was taken from her at nine years old.

Years ago, musician Audrey Assad released “I Shall Not Want” on an album called Fortunate Fall. She had discovered a Litany of Humility and set it to music. At a concert she did at my parish, she told us that she wrote it so that she would be inspired to pray it more often.

That has worked for me, and the chorus has become a measure of my spiritual health: “When I taste your goodness, I shall not want.”

Both at the national and international levels, Church leaders along with their supporting committees are making significant strides in addressing clergy sexual abuse prevention policies, as well as procedures for making complaints, and are beginning to explore how to accompany those who have been abused.

Although it is encouraging to hear about such progress, it is not realistic to expect that our bishops alone can discover and respond to all victim-survivor needs.

Give your children L-O-V-E

It’s legislation long overdue. The introduction of Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, is badly needed protection for the vulnerable — particularly children and youth — against traumas arising from an unsafe and unregulated digital world.

The proposed act identifies seven categories of harmful content, three of which directly relate to children. These include content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, bullies a child and induces a child to harm themselves.