I wish you a happy Easter!
We are the Easter People. Alleluia is our song. Easter brings us peace individually and joy as a community. Having walked for forty days with the Lord and having accompanied him in his passion, suffering and death in the Holy Week, now we are participating in the joy of the Resurrection of Our Lord.
"The earth itself is our home" wrote Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. "In his death the Risen Christ has become the heart of this earthly world, the divine heart in the innermost heart of the world… we do not need to leave her, for the life of God dwells in her. When we want both the God of infinity and our beloved earth – when we want both for our eternally free home, there is but the one path." It is this, in coming home to ourselves we come home to our world.
That is the meaning of the Easter homecoming – it is a coming home to the divinity in ourselves in an earth that is now established as our true home, because it is the home of God. Our homeland is not in a faraway heaven any more: it is to be found at our own neighbourhood.
The journey of Easter is a journey of salvation. This happens here and now. We are part of this bigger picture of God's rising from the world which he created. The Incarnation meets its fullness in the Resurrection of Our Lord. The man who walked length and breath of of Israel continues to walk in the entire cosmos taking the whole creation unto himself. So that the creation could see the glory of God. Being the image and likeness of God we are led into that glory we can attain once again the likeness of God because the treachery of sin and power of evil have been destroyed once and for all. Now, we can see God of light, truth and life face to face along with heavenly beings of angels and seraphim's.
This Easter has made us once and for all the partakers of divine nature. Let this Easter Season help us to discover the divine goodness that carry with us here on earth and spread the fragrance of it to each and every person around us. My Easter prayer for you comes from the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Let Him Easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.”
- Olvin Veigas, SJ
23rd April 2019
