Risen With Christ

This morning I came across this piece written by Elisabeth Leseur, who was a French married laywoman and died in 1914. Her cause for canonization is in process. Her sentiments, nearly 100 years old and from a culture which for the most part has disappeared in France, are amazingly Marist and relevant to us American Marists in the 21st century. They echo my desires, perhaps yours as well.
"I want this Easter-time to become both more 'interior' and more 'exterior,' however paradoxical that may seem. I want to live a more complete, intimate union with God. I want prayer to be the foundaiton of my spiritual life, my surest means of ministry, my best form of charity; my suffering, with my usual voluntary mortifications, will also be the means I will use for doing some good for ohers and drawing near to the heart of God.
"But exteriorly I will become, through God's grace, more gentle, more loving, engaged always and exclusively with others, their pleasure, their good, and above all, their spiritual well-being. This in all simplicity, forgetting myself, and making of my entire spiritual life a life hidden in Jesus Christ.
"And then I want more and more through prayer and my simple effort to establish in myself and manifest to others the joy, the holy, tender, unspeakable joy of Jesus. My immense weakness allows me to approach him only with great effort. He often makes me walk in darkness, on a dry path where the flowers of joy can scarcely grow. Yet my will to be his is stonger than ever, and he will accept, as a sacrifice of love, the gift of these struggles, these multiple sufferings."
May our ponderings over these words of wisdom help us penetrate more deeply what it means to have risen with Christ.
Bro. Rene