ALIVE!

We have just been celebrating Easter. Perhaps we were present at the Salubong, this necessary encounter of the Risen Lord with his mother in the Filipino religious tradition. What will remain special about this year’s celebration of Easter on our vocation journey? I would like to believe that it is a very personal encounter with the Risen One for each one of us.

We cannot believe with our head alone. This means that, besides making every effort to understand the content of our faith, we need to experience very concretely the presence of the Risen Lord in our lives. We need to experience Him to the point of being shaken to our human foundations by this unique mystery. So, have I experience personally the presence of the Risen Lord in my life?

One of you commented on my reporting last month about some Evangelicals asking: “when did you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour?” I found that the question is lacking an ecclesial dimension, as if I was the only person believing in Him. True, my faith needs to be anchored in a personal relationship with Jesus. But it comes through the mediation of solidarity with other Christians (communio) and a commitment to help others discover the powerful salvation offered by Christ (missio). Thus my faith in Him is necessarily ecclesial and missionary.

To love the Church, as d’Alzon insisted, with all its weaknesses (mine too !), its true universal dimension (cultures alien to my own, religious expressions different from mine), across centuries (not always brilliant history !) yet turned definitely towards the future (transmissio).

To love the world, as Saint Marie Eugénie puts it: “this world crooked with corruption… that God himself loves and saves”. This concrete world flows through my veins and I cannot flee from it lest I lie to myself or turn into the worst pessimistic person. So, to love this world with its limitations and its potential, its creativity, its energy: God created this world out of love !

I am tasked to grow to the best of my capabilities; I am brought to the cliff of my potential. In pure hope, I am asked to live in solidarity with people of all beliefs and ideologies, building a better world to live in. To love this world like God loves it is to work for the healing of its contradictions and mistakes, its limitations, its wounds and its sin.

The resurrection of the Lord will then take a serious meaning for me today. Not so much an event of the past so strange in itself that it looks like nothing known to our human experience but an event of today that changes my life and breaks open to new perspectives my commitment.

No one can believe for me. I myself have to take the risk of believing in the Risen Lord. If I do, then I can experience the same emotional conversion that the first witnesses had in the Acts of the Apostles: joy, strength, assurance, courage to proclaim the newness of life with the Lord. The Easter experience is a solid rock on which I can build my life.

There is nothing greater I could wish for you during this Easter season: that your faith and love for Jesus, renewed at the empty tomb, become communicative so that people around you may taste also the joy of a new life in Christ, the Risen One !

Fr. Gilles Blouin
Assumptionist

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