In the Footsteps of St. Louis Marie de Montfort
"Footsteps Online"
Easter 1997 (Volume 2, Issue 2)
New Life
EASTER is the season when we celebrate the new life won for us by Jesus. It is such a wonderful gift of life that we celebrate it for seven weeks, leading up to the feast of Pentecost, when we commemorate the moment at which this new life of the risen Christ burst upon the world as the Apostles received the gift of the Spirit. So, throughout this season we sing: "Allelujah! Praise the Lord!" And the Church in this season reflects on the meaning of this new life for us. For Jesus did not rise simply for himself. The Church, with St. Paul, tells us that, when Christ rose from the dead, we too rose to a new life: "When we were baptised in Christ Jesus, we were baptised in his death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father's glory, we too might live a new life" (Rom 6:3,4). And we see from this, too, that this new life becomes ours by Baptism. It is at our baptism that we are introduced into the new, risen, life of Jesus.
But of course it is not enough to have received this new life - we must live by it. As St. Paul again says: "Since you have been brought back to true life with Christ, you must look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is, sitting at God's right hand. Let your thoughts be on heavenly things, not on the things that are on the earth, because you have died, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God" (Col 3:1-3). In other words, the new life we have received in Christ must make a difference to the way we live.
St. Louis Marie de Montfort recognised the importance of the dedication to God and to his ways brought about for us in our baptism. It was because of this that, in all his missions, a major concern was to persuade the people to renew their baptismal commitment. And he saw the Total Consecration of oneself to Jesus Christ through the hands of Mary, which he preached constantly and wrote about in his major works, as a perfect renewal of this baptismal commitment or "consecration". It was for him a re-igniting of the fire first lit in our hearts at baptism. In this Easter season, let us ourselves rekindle the fire in our own hearts. This year, the feast of the Annunciation or Incarnation of the Lord, fell in Eastertide, an appropriate moment for renewing our consecration.
