The Lay Cistercian Review · Easter Season 2026
From the Editor
The first issue of The Lay Cistercian Review appeared at Christmas. Since then we have passed through the long quiet of Ordinary Time, then Lent, then the Triduum, and now the fifty days that follow. The journal is finding its rhythm with the liturgical year and the year is doing what years do in a contemplative life: shaping us slowly, almost without our noticing.
This is the Easter issue. The cover gathers the five Glorious Mysteries: the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Assumption, and the Coronation. They are not a single event but a sequence, a slow unfolding of what the Resurrection makes possible in us and in the Church. Easter itself is not a day. It is a season, and contemplative life takes its time within that season as it takes its time within every season.
The pieces in this issue trace different points along that arc. Brother Gregory writes from the cloister on the strength that grows where the Spirit grows it. Christopher Longhurst asks whether Easter has anything to say to those wounded by the Church itself. It is a hard question, asked honestly. Scott Hodgman walks with Mary Magdalene through the slow conversion of her senses into a different kind of seeing. I have offered a reflection on Saint Dismas and the kerygma — the thief on the cross who heard the gospel before there was a gospel.
In the prose and poetry section, Puri Mercedes writes from Galicia on absence becoming presence. The piece appears in both Spanish and English. This is the first time the Review has published in two languages and we are still learning how to do it well. We welcome the reader’s patience and any thoughts on how multilingual work might be best presented in future issues. Pat Klus closes the issue with poems that, like good poems, ask only to be read slowly.
What unites these voices is not a single subject, but a shared way of attending. Each writer attends to the Paschal mystery as it is actually lived: in the cloister, in the wounded body of the Church, at the empty tomb, on the cross’s own shadow, in the slow turning of absence into presence, in the quiet of a poem. The Cistercian charism, lived in the world, takes these shapes and others.
This Easter issue, like the one that came before it, is a small place of stillness where the charism of Cîteaux can continue its gentle work in us. May it be a companion to your reading this season and a reminder that the Resurrection is not behind us but unfolding still.
God bless you,
John Pestian
Editor
Easter Season, 2026