"I won't let you be orphans... I am with you forever."

Roger introduces the Holy Week in April 1998...

"I won't let you be orphans... I am with you forever. »

Without Jesus’ life, our lives would have the consistency of bubbles of soap. They were beautiful at a certain point, for those who looked at them, and then they disappeared and even the memory of them faded away. Left to our own devices, we cannot hold the presence of someone else.

That is the reason why the Church has named this week the Holy Week. This word should not be misunderstood. This word means that holiness is what characterizes God's eternal impulse. Holiness is God who sees everything through and thus shows us the consistency of our existence.

While we celebrate these days at a specific point of time, it does not mean that the other weeks are not holy weeks. Every day, every moment, there are constant holy moments, but we mark those days in time, with a particular sign, when some 1968 years ago, probably on April 6 of the year 30, Jesus who is recognized as a man in all respects died. And when he died, he did not die as an acclaimed man. He died rejected, turned away and neglected. Yet, this is where something that is inconceivable to mankind happened, and it remains inconceivable, until such time as we have experienced it; the inconceivable, for us who live in the measured time and who think that everything stops when a being dies, or when we die ourselves. Those who remained without this presence, which they had lost and could not hold on to, experienced the reality that they were not being left alone. Over time, they had returned to the painful aspect of the last few days and even evoked and kept in their hearts something of the beauty that they had experienced with this man, but even so, they could not keep his presence. This would have felt like an illusion to them…

And then they find themselves visited... This presence, they could not make it up, they could not make it resurface in their lives as one brings back a memory ... And here is, this totally unexpected encounter!

Without Jesus, our faces fade away. No matter how much we look at ourselves, without Him, our faces will soon disappear. One can collect everything that a being could have said or may have lived through, remembering events or look at photographs of moments together, it is like wanting the other in an impulse of the heart that says to him: "You are present for me, always"! We can do it with all the love that is in our hearts, but it only holds as long as we can hold, which is not long... But, thanks to the intensity of presence that appeared with Jesus and thanks to this statement: "I won’t let you be orphans. (John 14,18) I am with you forever. (Matthew 28,20)" We can now welcome all the other presences.

The death of Jesus will reveal the eternal beauty of our existences to us, because what happens with Him, what we learn from Him, is that He is the guarantor of the relationship.

As we move forward in this companionship with Christ, we discover that Only God loves us like this! Instead of keeping our memories, our arms are now opened and there are new perspectives in us, new worlds that are being discovered. The person whom we loved comes back to us, not just by calling on memories, but brought by God's very love.

The first to cherish our existence, our existences, is Him. Everything we cherish as humans,  all that we have been able to express is right and is true, there is no need to minimize it at all, but until we have seen the eternal existence of a being, it will only hold as long as we hold. In our relationship to Jesus, we discover, with delight, how cherished each of us is.

It is Jesus who gives us to ourselves and gives us to each other. He is the guarantor of our relations of eternity. And it is only through the experience of an impulse, on this Holy Spirit path of love that probes our depths and the depths of God, that we have access, not only to the words that expressed the inner universe of Jesus but also to the inner space of those we have loved. Here we are given back the presence of the loved one with all the intelligence and the sheer strength of heart that there is in God. So, everything we have been able to experience is irradiated by a power of light that supports what we had already seen, or enlightens it and brings an echo, an eternal echo!

F. Roger Robert

French to English translation by Debbie Garrick and Cécile Simonm