Fr. Manuel João Pereira Correia: “An Easter of Wishes and Promises”

AN EASTER OF WISHES AND PROMISES

The Lord God proclaims: I’m opening your graves!
I will raise you up from your graves, my people!

(Ezekiel 37,12)

Dear friends,
the Easter of the Lord is the time when this extraordinary promise is fulfilled. It is the time to regain lost hope. A fresh spring wind shakes the stale air of the tomb in which the pandemic has kept us locked up, to renew our will to live!

In particularly difficult times like ours, full of uncertainty, it seems to me important to get in touch with our deepest desires and deepest fears, which ultimately lead us back to the perennial desire for life and the threatening fear of death.

We live every day with desires and hopes. Small or great, transient or persistent, personal or altruistic... I believe, however, that we Christians are called to live above all by the promises God makes to us. "God does not fulfil all our desires, but all his promises", says the theologian Bonhoeffer.

Easter is a passage from an existence lived mainly under the sign of desires to an existence illuminated by God's promises. I would rather talk about a promise, in the singular. It seems to me that we all live by a personal promise that God made to us when he made a covenant of love with each and every one of us. This promise hidden in our hearts corresponds to the "new name that no one knows except the one who receives it" (Revelation 2:17) and which God says He has written on the palm of His hand (Isaiah 49,16).

Unfortunately, this "personal promise" is often unknown to us, or without precise contours, entangled as we are in the meshes of our desires or due to a lack of attention to the motions of our spirit. Mine, it seems to me, is very clear. I remember precisely the time, the place and the circumstances. It was during the summer of 1977, in London, during a study and work experience. I was then in a state of inner turmoil, beset by doubts and fears as to whether to consecrate my life definitively to God as a missionary. The Lord's promise resounded within me: 'Whatever happens, I will be with you to give meaning to your life! There, in a restaurant near Westminster Bridge in London, where I was working on a part-time basis with other students, on that day, strengthened by that promise, I joyfully gave my definitive YES to the Lord. This 'promise of meaning' has guided my whole life, from the enthusiasm of my youth, to the time of my apostolic maturity and now the illness of ALS.

This is my Easter wish: may the light of Easter illuminate the hidden depths of our spirit, and may the personal promise of the Risen Lord reach us with all its power in that tangle of desires and fears: Here I am, I am and I walk with you!

Christ is risen, yes, he is truly risen! Alleluia.
Fr. Manuel João Pereira Correia mccj
Castel D’Azzano (VR), 4 April 2021
[Combonianum]