Resurrected Christ is my joy!!!

My beloved lay brothers and collaborators in the Lord, I wish you a happy Easter

The mystery of the death and resurrection of the Lord offers us, once again,
the possibility to rethink about the “pass” from death to life.

We feel challenged to abandon many internal heart attitudes, in order to conquer and assume new others. We are called to “celebrate”, to live in abundance. In this celebration we want to show our faith and taste in advance, from now on, the “fullness of life “. St. Paul reminds us that “But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep… , so too in Christ shall all be brought to life” (1 Cor. 15, 20.22). Is in this Easter where we wish to find the place for the memory and the hope. In the memory, the personal history receives the light for the road it is walking and impulse for a future of hope, keeping alive the trust in the fullness of life: “Jesus asks us for a better life than
the one we have been living until now” (Let. MF 672).
Mother Francisca, like the disciples before finding Resurrected Christ, you must live the painful experience of being “at the bottom of the cross”
and the “empty grave”.

As the disciples, we also experience, in the daily life, at work, in the tiredness, in the sufferings that interweave our lives, being at the bottom of the cross. The celebration of Easter invites us not to suffocate by futile regrets, but instead to trust in His generous suffering for love, in his attempt to became closer to each one of us as a man “overwhelms by pains” (Is 53, 3). His sacrifice makes us to question and worry ourselves because it extends to our sick, exploit, oppressed, excluded brothers, who are always at the bottom of the cross.

Not only… when Peter, coming into the empty grave, perceived the absent of Jesus’ body, his inconsolable look appreciated every single detail creating a silent environment
and asking so many interrogations (Jn 20, 6-7).
Together with Peter, with mother Francisca, with every brother and sister who live next to us, with our doubtful faith we scrutinize the empty grave, the grave that invites us to have hope
while we grow in our confident devotion to God.
We must always listen with hears open to the faith, we must look at each person with the eyes of a pure soul, we must get close to everyone touching them with the empty hands of poverty
and we must walk every day with the naked feet of hope.

“Resurrected Christ, my full pleasure”

It is from tiredness that joy is born, from confusion the growing, from the “death” the joy of life.
Receive you all a kindly and sincerely wish of peace.

Sr. Carmen Cimarolli
General Superior
Saint Easter 2009