Letter of June 2, 2006

Easter Is Life - Now and Forever
The Most Reverend Carl F. Mengeling, Bishop of Lansing

Easter is the supreme celebration of LIFE. The very origin, meaning, mission and goal of Christianity is LIFE, now and forever! Christianity and life are inseparable. Christians respect and treasure human life as a gift of God.

Our Lord’s life and teaching centers on human life and its restoration to fullness - "I have come that they may have life and have it to the full".

At his Inauguration into the Petrine Service on April 24, 2005, Benedict XVI spoke of LIFE. He reminded everyone of a basic truth. There is an essential and dynamic CONNECT between God and Human Life. It begins, continues and is fulfilled in God.

He said: "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is a result of the thought of God. Each of us is willed! Each of us is loved! Each of us is necessary! Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is".

This year, on March 2, the day after Ash Wednesday, he expanded on that CONNECT between God and Life. At a meeting with the priests of his diocese of Rome, he responded to fifteen of their questions. His first response reflects his total oneness with the basic words of the great legacy of John Paul II: "CHOOSE LIFE".

Here is most of the Holy Father’s response:

"Yesterday, we began Lent. Today’s Liturgy gives us a profound idea of the essential significance of Lent: it is a guide for our life.

It therefore seems to me - I speak with reference to Pope John Paul II - that we should insist a little on today’s First Reading. Moses’ great discourse, the 40-year pilgrimage in the desert, sums up the whole of the Torah, the whole of the Law. Here we find the essential, not only for the Jewish people but also for us. This essential is the Word of God: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore, choose life" (Dt 30:19).

These fundamental words of Lent are also the fundamental words of the legacy of our great Pope John Paul II: "choose life". This is our priestly vocation to choose life ourselves and to help others to choose life. It is a matter of renewing in Lent our own, so to speak, "fundamental option", the option for life.

But the question immediately arises: how can we choose life, how should we do this?

Reflecting upon this, I remembered that the great defection from Christianity which has occurred in the West in the past 100 years was precisely in the name of the option for life. It was said - I am thinking of Nietzsche but also of so many others - that Christianity is an option opposed to life. With the Cross, with all the Commandments, with all the "nos" that it proposes to us, some have said that it closes the door to life.

But we, we want to have life and we choose, we opt, ultimately, for life, freeing ourselves by the Cross, freeing ourselves by all these Commandments, by all these "nos". We want to have life in abundance, nothing but life.

Here, the words of today’s Gospel immediately come to mind: "Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it" (Lk 9:24). This is the paradox we must first be aware of in opting for life. It is not by arrogating life to ourselves but only be giving life, not by having life and holding on to it but by giving it, that we can find it. This is the ultimate meaning of the Cross; not to seek life for oneself, but to give one’s own life.

Thus, the New and Old Testaments go together. In the First Reading from Deuteronomy God’s response is: "I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statues and his ordinances, then you shall live" (Dt 30:16). At first sight we may not like this, but it is the way: the option for life and the option for God are identical. The Lord says so in St. John’s Gospel: "This is eternal life, that they know you" (Jn 17:3).

Human life is a relationship. It is only in a relationship, and not closed in on ourselves, that we can have life. And the fundamental relationship is the relationship with the Creator, or else other relations are fragile. Hence, it is essential to choose God. A world empty of God, a world that has forgotten God, loses life and relapses into a culture of death.

Choosing life, taking the option for life, therefore, means first and foremost choosing the option of a relationship with God. However, the question immediately arises: with which God? Here, once again, the Gospel helps us: with the God who showed us his face in Christ, the God who overcame hatred on the Cross, that is, in love to the very end. Thus, by choosing this God, we choose life.

Pope John Paul II gave us the great Encyclical Evangelium Vitae. In it we can clearly see - it is, as it were, a portrait of the problems of today’s culture, hopes and dangers - that a society which forgets God, excludes God, precisely in order to have life, falls into a culture of death.

Precisely in order to have life, a "no" is said to the child, because it takes some part of my life away from me; a "no" is said to the future, in order to have the whole of the present; a "no" is said to unborn life as well as to suffering life that is approaching death. What seems to be a culture of life becomes the anti-culture of death, where God is absent, where that God who does not ordain hatred but overcomes hatred is absent. Here we truly opt for life.

Consequently, everything is connected: the deepest option for the Crucified Christ with the most complete option for life, from the very first moment until the very last.

To me this also seems in some way the nucleus of our pastoral care: to help people make the true choice for life, to renew their relationship with God as the relationship which gives us life and shows us the way to life. And thus, to love Christ anew, who from being the most unknown Being whom we did not reach and who remained enigmatic, became a known God, a God with a human face, a God who is love.

Let us keep this fundamental point for life before us and consider that this programme contains the whole Gospel, the Old and the New Testaments, that centre on Christ. Lent should be for us a time to renew our knowledge of God, our friendship with Jesus, to be able to guide others in a convincing way to opt for life, which is above all the option for God. It must be clear to us that in choosing Christ, we have not chosen to deny life, but have really chosen life in abundance.

The Christian option is basically very simple: it is the option to say "yes" to life. But this "yes" only takes place with a God who is known, with a God with a human face. It takes place by following this God in the communion of love. What I have said so far is intended as a way of renewing our remembrance of the great Pope John Paul II.