The Easter of our lives

It is the 30th of March, Holy Saturday. I have just come back from Tagaytay where my family and I had been since Wednesday. We decided to come home Saturday after lunch in order to beat the traffic and I know now that we made the right decision. My daughter Michelle has just lent me her "little book" after I told her that, though I write for the Business Life Section which is not meant to be a religious column where I am certain I do not have any competence, I felt like writing about Easter. It is not unusual to get pensive during these days of the Lenten season which ends on Easter Sunday, the Feast of the Risen Lord. I read the book Michelle gave me, and as I was about to sleep, tried to gather my thoughts for my column.

One of the first things I saw the next day, Sunday, was a message of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo captioned "There is rebirth awaiting." She called Easter the most awesome of the mysteries of faith because of the profound truth it offers mankind – that after death, there is resurrection, and that after every trial and suffering, there comes redemption.

This brought me back to the line I read in my daughter’s little book which had struck me the night before, a line in fact from the famous Teilhard de Chardin: "May the risen Christ keep me young for God’s greater glory, young, that is – optimistic, active, smiling, perceptive..." I know that many of us who have reached a certain age, and even those that are much younger, men and women alike are intent, hell-bent in fact, if not obsessed to keep young, and look as young as possible... An extremely thriving industry, and unbelievably successful medical professions and innovations provide testimony to this basic fact. But we know that what Monsieur De Chardin was referring to was youth that springs from within, which could keep us "optimistic, active, smiling, perspective..."And I think he is thoroughly right because the underlying feeling here is HOPE, a sense of great hope, hope for the next day, hope for the next month, hope for the next year, and hope for better times.

When President Arroyo talked about "rebirth," she was hoping for an Easter that would resurrect in us "the noblest virtues that will make us endure as a nation and as a people." We love our land...we love our country, with a strength that affirms our commitment to her everyday of our lives. William Faulkner once wrote, "One never loves a land ‘because’ – you love ‘despite,’ not the virtues, but despite the faults." If we can accept the fact that our solutions could be incomplete, and yet not let that possibility, that fear paralyze us into inaction and indifference we may still be able to achieve a better, if a still imperfect world.

From a Yale newsletter many years ago, I read something interesting that William Zinsser, a well-known American humorist and writer about "life and its many twists and turns" had written about the sportswriter Red Smith who was one of his heroes. Not long before Smith’s own death, he had given the eulogy at the funeral of another writer and had said something, which line simply stuck in my memory:"Dying is no big deal. Living is the trick." Living is indeed the trick...it can be pretty tricky. That’s what we’re all given, one chance to do well. Zinsser wrote about one thing he admired about Red Smith which was that he had written about sports for 55 years, with elegance and humor without ever succumbing to the pressure which ruined many sportswriters, that they ought to be writing about more "serious matters than sports." Red Smith found in sportswriting exactly what he wanted to do and what he loved doing. And because it was right for him he said more important things about American values than many writers who wrote about serious subjects – so seriously in fact that nobody could read them.

One of the celebrated themes that Zinsser wrote about was on defeat in the face of a hard-fought sports battle – football, baseball, boxing, golf and the pain and agony that went with a great loss.

Life is like that...you can get "knocked down," I have always said but it is up to you not to allow yourself to get knocked out. You’ve just get to get up and fight. In any emotional crisis, it is really and truly up to us to get up and slug it out. It is up to us to substitute determination for helplessness, activity for passivity, and hope for despair...it is up to us to create our own personal resurrection, perhaps a re-inventing of ourselves, a re-birth, our very own Easter. The Easter of our lives may come only once. I personally experienced this 24 years ago. I know for certain that no one, but no one, can get you up but yourself. Friends and relatives who love you deeply may endeavor to help, but in the ultimate analysis, it is you that will have to get up on your own.

I have a friend who had so much money and the promise of so much more of it. Everyone considered him a great "success." Associates in business admired his business skills and respected his business ethics. He led such a fine life – self-made man who knew that he had worked for everything he had, and at age 48, felt he was on top of the world. He had fine manners, was extremely attractive and well educated, and had a family that loved him (a wife and two sons). That was the error and fallacy of those who knew him. With a situation such as this, it is so easy to mistake what the real test really is, which brings me to one famous line that the great American football coach Vince Lombardi said: "The test in this life is whether we have so easily mistaken a growth in wealth and power for a growth in strength and character." For this friend of mine lost everything he had including his wife who left him when he suffered a great financial reversal after the currency crisis not too long ago.

He was now faced with what Lombardi had referred to as the real test. It was his inner strength, his unbelievable determination, his faith in God, that made him get up with every fiber of his being.

He passed life’s only true test with flying colors. He now lives in California, with a good business that is thriving slowly but surely, and knows so well what truly saved the day for him – his character, his strength and his deep faith in God. He misses having a wife, but knows that he may eventually get there. His two sons have grown up with him and are such fine professionals forging lives of their own. "I never lost hope! What more can I ask for!" HOPE! Hope towards our beloved country’s own easter...hope towards our own easter. Leonard Lauder, a successful American businessman speaking before the graduates of Connecticut College in 1989 talked about Victor E. Frankl, a friend of his who was a renowned Viennese psychologist before the Nazis threw him into a concentration camp. "Look," Frankl had told him when they first met, "there is only one reason why I am here today. What kept me alive in a situation where others had given up hope and died, was the dream that someday I would be telling you how I survived the Nazi concentration camp. I have never been here before. I have never seen you before, but with all the HOPE I could muster in my heart, and in my dreams, I have sat before you in this room and said these words to you a thousand times."

Certainly with the deepest, most fervent hope, we can have the Easter of our lives.