Be hope to others this Easter
Listening to Pope Francis’ Easter vigil homily, I was struck at the end by his call to all Catholics to go out to the world to bring hope.
[T]he message of hope should not be confined to our sacred places, but should be brought to everyone. For everyone is in need of reassurance, and if we, who have touched “the Word of life” (1 Jn 1:1) do not give it, who will? How beautiful it is to be Christians who offer consolation, who bear the burdens of others and who offer encouragement: messengers of life in a time of death!
This is the message we all need today. Times are hard for everyone: those that are dying alone; those that are exhausting themselves caring for them; those that cannot make rent because of layofffs; those who have nowhere to go to deal with their addiction; those struggling with new demands of childcare; those afraid of losing their jobs; and so many others.
Never in most of our lifetimes have we faced such massive fear. How can we respond? The Pope’s answer: with courage.
You might say, as did Don Abbondio (in Manzoni’s novel), “Courage is not something you can give yourself” (I Promessi Sposi, XXV). True, you cannot give it to yourself, but you can receive it as a gift. All you have to do is open your heart in prayer and roll away, however slightly, that stone placed at the entrance to your heart so that Jesus’ light can enter. You only need to ask him: “Jesus, come to me amid my fears and tell me too: Courage!”
I’ve learned stories of courage in recent years that suggest to me something of what he means here. I think about people in Puerto Rico who went door to door after Hurricane Maria, seeking the good of others even as they themselves dealt with loss of food and clean water for months.
I think of an exhausted pastor in El Paso who attended 17 funerals of people killed in the mass shooting in El Paso in August 2019.
I think of a youthful octogenarian nun who lived through bombing of her home in Belgium, escaped militants while serving in Paraguay, and who now serves a poor community in New Mexico, spending her spare time visiting prisons.
None of these people gave themselves courage, but they opened their hearts to it when it was most needed.
Pope John Paul II famously called Christians an “Easter people.” He was no stranger to suffering, having five years earlier survived an assassination attempt and having lived through the dark days of communism in his native Poland. He called to mind Christians’ call to live mindful of the Resurrection of Jesus, and its call to serve others. In the address where this term appears, he continues:
We are not looking for a shallow joy but rather a joy that comes from faith, that grows through unselfish love, that respects the “fundamental duty of love of neighbour, without which it would be unbecoming to speak of Joy.”
We cannot whitewash the challenges we are all facing. In the face of them, it is easy and indeed tempting to collapse into a fearful self-interest. But Easter people are about courage, discerning the needs of others so that they may live in service, however small.
I’ve written elsewhere of how the lessons of Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl stay with me in these difficult days. Another one comes to mind, that of a patient he saw who was devastated by the loss of his dear wife of many years. Frankl posed a question to him: what if you had died before her? The man’s answer was that she would have suffered greatly. Frankl suggested that his outliving her, however difficult, was yet meaningful, in the sense of having spared his wife the pain of dealing with her husband’s death.
That knowledge — that his present suffering was an act of love for his wife — was a great comfort to him. Meaning transforms suffering.
To be an Easter people is not to bang a triumphalist drum. It is to remind Christians of a hope that transcends death, that allows us to turn any suffering into an opportunity for deepened love.
