DEAR FRIENDS, the good Lord has granted us the grace of another Easter. I imagine you are preparing your souls to participate in the liturgical services of Holy Week, and that you are also getting your homes ready for that special Easter meal to be shared among friends and relatives.
Easter is a truly extraordinary feast, and is celebrated to remind us that Christ’s Resurrection is the most fundamental tenet of our faith. It constitutes the guarantee of our own immortality because, by rising, Jesus opened the way to a new life for us as well.
I am but on ordinary human being. I am getting older, and fall ill more frequently than in the past. I am also racked by various aches and pains – in particular, I am suffering from hiatal hernia, a condition that is causing me considerable discomfort. To make matters worse, I am also suffering from gastritis, odd rheumatisms here and there and, on top of it all, the doctors have imposed on me a strict diet in the attempt to lose weight. But so be it! We all have our crosses to bear in life, and I am perfectly aware that many of you, dear readers, are in a far worse predicament than I am!
In all this, I find great comfort in the realisation that, sooner or later, one fine day my Guardian Angel will say to me: “Mario, your time has come. Say goodbye to the world you have lived in for so long. Today you will be with me in heaven”.
The Angel will bear me aloft on its wings and take me to the Lord’s House. Suddenly, I will be in another dimension – the realm of true, everlasting life. There, to my great joy, I will be reunited with my beloved parents, with the friars I have shared my religious life with, and with my long lost friends. I will also be thrilled when the Virgin Mary, our heavenly mother, will receive me. It will truly be a joy without end!
I will even have the great joy of seeing ‘Our Father in heaven’ face to face, and I can’t even remotely imagine what this will be like, but I know that God loves me, and that He has given me many opportunities in this earthly life. He has protected me from so many dangers and, above all, He has forgiven me so many times. I have turned to Him every day since I was a little child and feel sure that, on that day, He will hand me the passport to everlasting life in heaven.
All of this, my dear friends, has a lot to do with Easter. Jesus has risen to give us all the certainty that we also shall rise with Him in the kingdom of peace, joy, fraternity and love.
“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it! Christ is risen, truly risen”. These glad tidings are directed to the whole of humanity, but we must have complete faith in Jesus if we wish to live our lives according to His teachings. Unfortunately, our faith often resembles a feeble flame on a candlestick that is put out by the slightest whiff of wind, leaving us in cold and darkness.
In this Easter of 2012 let us ask God the grace of a faith that is as strong and powerful as the noonday sun – a faith that gives light, warmth, joy and meaning to life.
This is the wish I extend to all of you, dear readers: that your faith may be made perfect. The life and teachings of our dear Saint Anthony contain much that can strengthen and perfect our faith. This Easter, let us meditate on these words from one of his Sermons, “Faith without love is useless, with love, it is true Christian faith. It is one thing ‘to believe God’, quite another ‘to believe in God’. ‘To believe God’ is to hold what he says to be true, which even evil people do. ‘To believe in God’, on the other hand, means to believe with love, to go to Him with love, to be made one with Him in love. This is the kind of faith that justifies a person”.
A blessed Easter to all of you, dear readers!
Updated on October 06 2016