Dear Friends and Benefactors,
As we celebrate the greatest feast in the Church’s calendar,
Easter, with its three admirable manifestations of divine power and love, the
Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost, I wish you many
graces. May these produce in you the true spiritual joy that every soul risen
with Jesus Christ possesses. "Joy is not mirth, neither is it clever speeches
nor repartees; . . . it is habitual serenity." (Golden Sands)
Holy Mother the Church so desires to impart this joy, which
is a foretaste of eternal happiness, to all her children that She urges us to
consider it a duty to keep within us. Thus, after Lent, when we are reminded of
the necessity to expiate and given forty days to do penance, there follows fifty
days of gladness, light, life, joy and the sweet hope of immortality without a
single fast. Furthermore, She seeks to produce such sentiments even in those who
have no elevation of soul, so that all, both fervent and tepid, unite to praise
our risen Christ. What a happy time it was, says St. Bernard when there was not
one in the whole Christian army who neglected his Easter duty; a time when both
sinner and just walked on the same path of the Lenten observances.
Unfortunately, many today are influenced by a worldly spirit
at variance with the Church’s. This spirit produces a love of ease and a false
conscience in Christians, who either treat the law of Lent with such
indifference as to deny its very existence or think it too severe and so refuse
to observe the fast or abstinence even in its mitigated form. Nor is this spirit
accidental, for the Resurrection puts the seal of truth upon the deposit of
faith which Christ left us. If the enemies of Christ can mislead people
regarding this fact then the whole of Christian doctrine is open for attack. For
as St. Paul says: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and
you are still in your sins" (I Cor. xv. 17).
We may well find ourselves among those who take up the spirit
of the Church by lamenting our shortcomings during the time of Lent. Yet instead
of truly rising with Christ to new life at Easter we return to our spiritual
maladies and find ourselves as slothful and negligent, as talkative, as curious
or as infected as ever with our various vices. Thus we return rather than pass
on, we fall rather than rise and so empty the holy Resurrection of the Lord of
the title of Pasch. St. Bernard tells us what the Pasch signifies in his first
sermon for Easter Sunday: "For Christ, dearest brethren, has not fallen back
today, but has arisen; He has not returned, but passed on; He has transmigrated,
not retraced His steps. The very word Pasch, the name of the feast we are
celebrating, signifies, not a going back, but a passing over; and the name
Galilee, where it is promised us that we shall see Him Who has arisen, means a
transmigration, not a return."
But how is it that we relapse so easily? After all, we show
Christ reverence during the time of His passion and prepare lodging for Him in
our hearts by confessing our sins with tears, chastising our bodies, and
distributing alms to the poor. Unfortunately we easily forget that the reverence
His resurrection demands is no less. Christ no sooner becomes our Guest when we
oblige Him to withdraw from our souls because we readmit our former vices. By
acting such we show that we have no respect for the Resurrection or the Passion.
For if we really died together with Him we would also rise to a new life
together with Him. In the same sermon St. Bernard says: "Now the humility
practiced by you worldlings during the time of Lent is proved to have been only
conventional and simulated by the fact that it is not followed by a spiritual
exaltation."
It may very well be that the spirit of the world is silently
creeping in, drawing our attention away from the purpose of our creation. If so,
let us remember the words of St. Paul: "Therefore, if you be risen with
Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right
hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the
earth" (Col. iii. 1).
Let us recall that everything here on earth, both in the
order of time and in the Liturgy, is a preparation for Easter. The four thousand
years that followed the fall of our first parents and the promise made to them
by God were crowned by the Resurrection. Likewise all that the Church does from
the beginning of the ecclesiastical year has this same event in view. It should
be the same for us. We should consider it a duty to keep the spiritual joy of
this holy season within us throughout the year, by ardently seeking to rise to
that life found in our divine Head, and by carefully shunning sin which causes
death. By so doing we will imitate our divine Model and prepare for that union
which St. John says is "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor
of the will of man, but of God."
