Cuban priest on Palm Sunday: there is never resurrection without the cross

In a Domingo de Ramos message, Cuban priest Alberto Reyes recalled that only hugging the cross is reached.

“The cross tells us about a life choice: that of the gift of itself,” wrote Fr. Reyes, of the Archdiocese of Camagüey, in Your social networks This April 13. He added: “Every cross is a memory that someone donated everything for us, and it is at the same time the invitation that this spirit of donation is the reference point of all our decisions.”

The priest proposes to look at Holy Week as a mirror of existence: “Every Holy Week is like a summary of life: of the years, of the days … we know that neither the passion, nor the cross, nor death are the end, we know that always, in one way or another, we will enter the resurrection, But never without passion, never without the crossnever without dying to what slows or prevents living in the key of offering, of Don, of blessing. ”

However, he acknowledges that choosing that path is not easy. “Who, for fidelity to the Gospel, decides to arrange for others, must know that, at crucial moments, it can be left alone, be betrayed by someone close, suffer rejection, even their own family, and what is worse, feel abandoned by God,” he says.

In that sense, he said that “it is precisely the possibility of abandonment and the feeling of failure where we can find The reason for choosing to live in Don”.

Palm Sunday’s message resonates even stronger in the midst of the social context of the Cuban. In one Column published days beforeentitled I have been thinking about the spiral of miserythe priest denounced the national economic collapse: “We are a country in bankruptcy, where the fence closes more and more about the most vulnerable.”

He recalled a pilgrimage, a few years ago, in which he shared food with a family that only had rice and “squalid fish.” It was then, he confesses, that he understood what misery means: “There are people who can never get out of misery as long as a social change does not occur, a change of structures, a change of system.”

The current situation, according to Fr. Reyes, is even more serious: workers without salary, pensioners who cannot withdraw their money, unpaid farmers, and a population trapped in silence. “That unsurpassed misery that nobody speaks because they don’t even have a voice that defends them.”

Despite this gloomy panorama, he invited to find meaning in the faithfulness to Christ, even when there are no responses in sight. “It’s not about denying our feelings. It’s about following the chosen path despite them.”

And he concluded his reflection on Palm Sunday with a phrase: “The others can cheer us up as kings or condemn us to the crucifixion, but the important thing will always be to be able to put your head on the pillow, every night, and looking at the good and chosen, to be able to rest in the father and say: ‘Everything has been fulfilled, today everything has been fulfilled.'”