WalkingtowardsEaster Reflections by don Tonino Bello

Longing to walk Cheer up, people! Easter tell us that our history has a sense and it isn't a set of useless shocks. That those we are running along aren't interrupted paths. That our personal existence is neither suspended in the empty space nor consists in a show without net. We fall in God. In Him we live, we move and exist.

Cheer up, people! Easter dry the stagnation of disperation which have sedimented in our heart. And, together with the courage of living, give us again the desire of walking.

From the desert of fast and temptation as far as Calvary mount, peace passes through all steep roads of the Lent. And when it arrives to first windings of Calvary, it doesn't look for confortable diversions, but it climbs as far as the cross. Yes, peace, before than a goal, is a walk, a climbing walk. From desert to Calvary

And who leaves shall be blessed, being operator of peace, not who pretends to arrive without having leaved. With the mirage of a stay ever joyfully foreseen, even if never (on this earth, obviously) fully reached.

A new world Let's become reconciled with joy. Easter defeat our sin, shatter our fears and make us see sadnesses, deseases, abuses and even death, from the right versant: that one of the «third day». From that versant, crosses shall seem antennas, allocated to make us listen to the sky's music.

World's pains will be not for us the wheezes of an agony, but the labour of a birth. And the stigmata, caused by nails in our crucified hands, shall be slits through which we'll see since now the lights of a new world.

Cheer up, brothers Cheer up, brothers who suffer. There is also for you a deposition from the cross. There is also for you a superhuman pity. Already there is a perforated hand which unnails yours from the wood. Here is a sweetest bosom which surrounds you with tenderness. In those maternal arms it shall reveil itself, at the end, all the mistery of a pain which now seems absurd to you.

Cheer up. There are only few instants for the three hours of your afternoon. In a short time, the dark shall be substituted by the light, earth will acquire again its colours and the sun of Easter will burst among the flighting clouds.

Woman, don't cry Woman, no more reason for pouring of your tears. Look: the top of Calvary, which the day before yersterday was only a skull covered by mud, today has been suddently covered by flowers. We are only at the third day: but these few hours have been sufficient for world to make a jump of millennia.

No, Don't measure on human calendars the distance between this brilliant dawn and the livid sunset of the last friday. Not the time has passed: the eternity has passed. Woman you don't know it, but today new creation has started.

Easter bursts Cheer up! Easter bursts! It's the day of the boulders which roll away from entrance of sepulchres. It's the exultation for a news which was feared not to arive anymore and runs from mouth to mouth so creating new relationships among old friends.

It's the joy of the Risen's apparitions which incite embraces in the Cenaculum. It's the feast of previous disappointed by life people, in whose heart now hope floods. Be too the feast in which the communion comes and licks banks of our lonely isle.

A great hope Help us, Lord, to bring in the world and into us your resurrection. Put a great hope in the men's heart, expecially for who cry. Grant who doesn't believe in you to understand that your Easter is the only history's strength etermally subversive. And then, at the end, oh Lord, bring again also us, your believers, to our condition of men. Amen. Amen. Elaborated by Antonio Barone