MANY things can be said about what the Easter spirit is. In fact, I don’t think we can ever exhaust them. The implications we can derive from the consideration of what the Easter spirit is would be endless. But what we already can say about it should already be enough to make us so understand it as to live it adequately. So what is the Easter spirit?
The Easter spirit is about God’s tremendous love for us. It’s a love that knows no bounds. It’s rather us who can give it limits since we are capable of rejecting it. But on his part, he loves us all the way, no matter what. He is bent on doing that, no matter what it would cost.
The Easter spirit is about God sending the son to become man to save us. It’s about God adapting himself fully to our condition, even to our worst condition without committing sin, so that we can have a way to identify ourselves with him, which is what he wants for us.
The Easter spirit is about Christ, the son of God and our redeemer, eager to fulfill his redemptive mission to the end. Christ does not shy away from the most difficult human task he has to carry out. And in so doing, he assumed all the sins of man and gave them the death blow with his own passion, death and resurrection.
The Easter spirit is about Christ sharing his triumph over sin and death with us. What we cannot do, he does it for us — but also, with us. Since on our own, we cannot turn around the infinitely evil effects of our sins, suffering death, Christ does it for us.
And so, the Easter spirit means that we have every reason to be joyful, hopeful and, of course, most thankful, which would put us in the ideal condition to keep our intimate relation with God and to live our life that is proper to us, that is, as children of God, created in God’s image and likeness, meant to share in the very life of God, created out of divine love and for divine love too.
The Easter spirit should give us an invincible sense of being a victor and conqueror, oozing in peace, serenity, confidence and security, despite whatever. Because no matter how wounded and broken we are, we have the assurance that God will mend us always with his mercy and restore us to the dignity he wants to give us.
The Easter spirit, of course, would also make our sense of responsibility over our life keener. We would more sharply realize that we have to do our best to conform ourselves to God’s will and ways, taking up all the spiritual, supernatural as well as the human means to that ideal.
If we have the Easter spirit, we would know how to always live in the presence of God, driven always with love that can conquer all things. It would give us an apostolic zeal that would provide us with a burning desire for the salvation of all souls. The Easter spirit is the slayer of complacency, lukewarmness and the other weaknesses we have. It, for sure, will protect us from all sorts of temptations.
There are still many things we can say about the Easter spirit. But for now, let us see if we have these marks of the Easter spirit in our life!/PN
