Happy Easter! It’s wonderful that this edition of In the Word is published in Easter Week, just days after the celebration of the resurrection of the Lord. What a joyful time this is.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song! This is what we profess, but what does it mean for us in our life and our mission?

This Easter I have, of course, been meditating on resurrection and new life. But we don’t get to Easter Sunday without having walked solemnly through Good Friday, and it’s the two things together that have been really meaningful to me this Easter.

In the missionary life, and in all Christian life, we are constantly called forward to new things. It might be a missionary assignment in a new country, with a different culture and unfamiliar language, or a new ministry in our current place. As Provincial, I must remain always open to asking our confreres to respond to new needs in new places.

But sometimes, to take up something new, we have to let go of something else. There has to be death before we can pass through to new life. For missionaries, this can mean letting go of the friends, parishioners, and a familiar way of life in their current assignment to take up a mission in a new place. For a Province it can mean moving on from mission activity that might no longer be needed or might have grown to such strength that it no longer needs us to keep it going. These points of change can often feel like small deaths, especially to those most deeply involved.

As Divine Word Missionaries we are always looking to the margins of society and asking “where is the need?” Living like this, planted in Christ, with complete openness to the movement of the Holy Spirit, will always bring us through change, sadness and points of death and into new life.

This Easter Season I pray that the radical gift of new life we have been given in the resurrection of Jesus Christ will set your heart, and mine, on fire. May it shake us out of comfort and complacency and impel us forward to wherever we are being called to be.

We are an Easter people and Alleluia is our song. Happy Easter!