To celebrate Easter is to experience that Life conquers death. That the Cross leads us to the Light. The liturgical intensity of this season that we continue to celebrate leaves our feelings afloat. The beauty of the washing of feet on Thursday; the radical nature of the Cross on Friday; the light and living water on Saturday; the stone slab that opens to make way for Life on Sunday. And Easter begins: fifty days, nothing more and nothing less. How can we ensure that this time of grace does not go to waste?
1. Prayer
Let us begin with prayer. Set aside a specific, special time in your day. Make room for the power of the Resurrection to soak into your whole life, to flood every pore of your skin. Feel loved.
Offer your very life: your marriage, your family, your community. Place them in God’s hands. Recognize God’s greatness in the small events of everyday life, in the beauty of creation. Experience the radical transformation that God’s action brings about in your life.
2. Change your perspective
The same problems can be approached as challenges, to be addressed through faith. Live with confidence in the certainty that God has a plan for you.
God loves you above all else. It does not depend on whether you fail or fall. God’s love transcends all behavior and attitude. It is eternal and immeasurable. You, too, can look upon others as brothers and sisters.
3. Change your inner self
Only you know that failing into which you fall again and again. Let God love your weakness or your sin. Allow yourself to be enlightened by the Holy Spirit.
Put all your strength into changing that aspect of your character that you cannot overcome. Love yourself, because God loved you first. If He can forgive you, you can do so as well. The Resurrection is the proof. Live in the fullness of what you believe.
4. Change your desires
Change your desires in order to change your actions. First of all, you must desire conversion from the depths of your heart, and then make that will for personal transformation a reality.
Feel that this is your moment, that you must die, like the grain of wheat, in order to bear fruit. Dare to break with the habits you do not like in yourself. Make your life a prayer. Bring prayer into your life. And experience the joy of changing your heart.
5. Live the joy
Live an overflowing joy, like the disciples and the women who ran to remove the stone slab from the tomb. Perhaps you can live in wonder that the tomb is empty.
But then you must run to announce to your brothers and sisters the best news: that death is not the end. Perhaps you can believe it without living it; Easter is the time to feel it. To fill your routine with joy—explosive and also restrained—with complete happiness.
6. Walk with Christ
You, who have accompanied Jesus on the way to the Cross, now have the mission of living glory with Him.
How? By walking with Him the distance that separates Jerusalem from Emmaus. By letting Him explain the Scriptures to you while your heart burns within you. By sitting at table with Him and discovering that He is the living God when He breaks the bread. Even if you experience His absence, you will feel that your soul is full of life.
7. Live the Eucharist
How should we live the Eucharist? If every Mass is a feast, a joyful celebration of death and resurrection, this Easter season is especially fitting for living each moment with passion.
Like a puzzle in which each piece finds its place, the Eucharist is an assembly in which we all have a leading role. It is the sacrament in which God allows Himself to be eaten and drunk to nourish our existence.
Each Eucharist is unique, because our life arrives differently at each moment. How do you enter the Eucharist? How do you leave? What has changed in you?
8. Easter is life
Easter is Life. We have journeyed forty days through the desert, overcoming temptations and seeking conversion. Now we enjoy fifty days of lasting joy.
The challenge is to keep that joy alive, to keep the fire of the Easter Vigil from going out, so that the water that renewed us may continue to give life to our daily challenges.
Easter is nothing other than Life lived to the full.
9. Live Sunday
Each Sunday we celebrate Easter, the death and resurrection of Jesus. The grain of wheat dies, yes, but in order to bear fruit.
In Communion we receive God Himself, the source of life. It is a constant invitation to live from faith and hope.
10. Let yourself be shaped
“My life is Christ.” And Easter is the definitive proof.
Do you want to truly live? Do you desire Christ to take the helm of your life? Let yourself be shaped.
