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WE say HAPPY EASTER!

2020

Dear Friends,

Let this EASTER be the moment to reunite with yourself. Never before have we experienced such a profound renewal, with so much hope, for a better world. Easter is saying YES to fraternity, to LOVE! Let us celebrate life and renew our spirit.

With plenty of joy and certain of your delight, I leave you below the beautiful words, from our FRIEND, very and good FRIEND Father João Pedro Fernandes, who writes us from Luanda. May his words illuminate the communion of humanity, and allow us to harmoniously live this beautiful moment of union.

"EASTER: VICTORY OF FRAGILITY!

Certainly, this Easter of 2020 will be unique. Covid-19 brought the world together like never before! Perhaps because it touched deeply what makes us human beings: our fragility! In the face of a pandemic of this magnitude, which demonstrates that we are deeply vulnerable. Rich or poor; powerful or simple people; Europeans, Americans or Africans… we feel small and vulnerable. Stripped of our pretensions of omnipotence!

But we must not be ashamed of our fragility. God himself wanted to be as fragile as we are. In Jesus, his Son, he showed solidarity with our human condition, up to the last point, or the lowest: death. In difficult times, he did not use the power he had to settle things in his favor. I accept or risk living in a condition that is vulnerable to human beings, with all its consequences. When the time came for his arrest and death, he ordered Peter to keep the sword. It is facing that critical moment totally unarmed, without violence, force by force, blood on blood. In the face of the hatred, He choose a response from love - a unique ability to save the world!

We should not be ashamed of our weakness. We must learn from it. Accepting our fragility makes us see how false all pretensions of greatness, power, self-sufficiency, arrogance and other ways of thinking we are 'superior' to others. This pandemic says that nobody is superior to anyone, nobody is more important than anyone. We are all just human beings! Daughters and sons, loved by God. Yes, all those loved by God, just as we are: fragile, limited, sinners ... What saves us and makes us great is the Father's Merciful Love. What saves us and makes us great is learning to love with the breadth of Love and the Mercy of God.

We are already in Holy Week, which takes us to Easter. During these days, the figure of Jesus appears to us in all greatness. Let us follow the celebrations through the media and in personal and family prayer, with a grateful heart, because Jesus Christ wanted to be our Brother until the end, assuming all our fragility, to redeem us and renew us from within. “He loved us to the end” (John 13: 1), giving his life for us, “when we were still weak” (Romans 5: 6).

On Holy Thursday, we will not have the symbolic gesture of foot washing. This emptiness helps us to move from the rite to life. Like Jesus, let us strip off our ‘cloak’ (our ‘greatness’) and discover the greatness of the human vocation in service and generosity, “washing our feet” with one another. As He, in giving bread and wine, gave his whole life ("This is my body", "This is my blood"), so we can give every small gesture a taste of gift to others. With the greatness of the little things. Like a loaf of bread given out of love ...

On Holy Friday, we will follow the Master in his total stripping, humiliation and death. We will feel, from the Cross, his cry: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" ... Then, it will be Silence. And we will hear the echo of that Scream rising from the earth, from the torn humanity, in this hour of planetary pain. And we will add to this Scream all of our “why?…”, Which seem to have no answer. Because the only possible answer is the total solidarity of the Man of Sorrows with the pains of humanity. And then the stone will close the tomb. And it will be Night! And then, in that dark tomb (but full of Light!), We will deposit all our fears and anxieties. But no - it will not be total darkness. We will watch with the disciples who have followed Jesus since Galilee. In the intuition of faith, they make us feel: the dream of Life was not swallowed up by Death! ...

And we will continue to pack the dream on Holy Saturday. It will be mainly a day of silence. Not an empty silence, but full of Presence! A silence to be welcomed, perhaps uncomfortable (due to the inconvenience of meeting with ourselves). But only that way it is possible to empty ourselves of our fears and pretensions. And let the Presence heal us from our orphans and fill us with Love and Hope.

And then, we will light our candle, to cross the Holy Night of that Saturday, Easter Vigil. It will be a light still small, but charged with the Hope that already inhabits us. A light that will grow, as the narrations of the History of Salvation unfold ... until the Hallelujah of the Resurrection! And the words of the psalmist will remain in our ears, but above all in our hearts, for a long time: “The stone that the builders rejected, became the cornerstone” (Psalm 118, 22). We will understand, after all, that God has reversed human logic: he rejects nothing that is weak; saves from fragility. We will understand that, with the death and resurrection of Jesus, the New Humanity was born: the one that chooses to serve instead of dominating, loving instead of hating, caring instead of exploring, walking together instead of being self-sufficient.

It will truly be Easter!" (Father João Pedro Fernandes, CSsR - Luanda, Angola.)

From the deepness of my soul, I wish you a resurrected JESUS CHRIST, in each of your lives. HAPPY EASTER! A tight and virtual HUG to you! Fátima C. Brízio

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