Happy Easter of Resurrection! Today we are starting the longest of all liturgical seasons, 50 days that offer a unique opportunity to savor and make ours what we have just celebrated. Jesus, alive and present among us, is the reason of our joy; otherwise, our faith would be void.
In this season of Easter we celebrate the great feast of the Love of God, that has been bestowed on us with no merit of our own, as the Gospel of John states clearly: “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son” (John 3, 16). We recognize, as our liturgy points out, what God has done for us, out of love, by offering us salvation in his Son, even in death. Easter is a feast because we celebrate the gift of life that comes from God, and which none of us have merited or achieved of our own.
Our main attitude in this season of Easter and, therefore, in Christian life, has to be gratitude: being and living in thankfulness is a virtue that should define our lives, signaled by Faith, for, while embracing the experience of Easter, we recognize that life is always a gift. This is the very essence of our faith, as the Easter proclamation goes: “Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed. O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling!”
In this season, more than ever, we celebrate the love of God in our lives. It is only fitting to ask ourselves if the way we live our faith reflects this gratitude for the gift we have received or, if more often, we go back to religious practices where we try to please God with our worship, our piety or even discipline to show him our love. A truly Easterly faith will not try to “gain” God’s love, for redemption can only be understood as the free outpouring of divine love, and the only way to respond to this gift is gratitude, the truly Easterly virtue of Christian life.
