Pres­i­dent Chris­tine Kan­ga­loo has called on the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to re­flect on the cen­tral themes of East­er — hope, re­new­al, and trans­for­ma­tion.

In a Good Fri­day mes­sage, Kan­ga­loo ac­knowl­edged the deep emo­tion­al jour­ney that Chris­tians un­der­take dur­ing this sea­son, be­gin­ning with the sor­row of Good Fri­day and cul­mi­nat­ing in the joy of East­er Sun­day.

“On the hu­man lev­el, Christ’s death must have brought un­speak­able de­spair and paralysing con­fu­sion to His fol­low­ers at that time,” she said.

“It must have seemed to them, that all hope had been lost – that all of their dreams had been swal­lowed up by the grave. They must have felt ut­ter­ly de­ject­ed and dis­heart­ened.”

She said these feel­ings res­onate with many peo­ple to­day.

“What Christ’s fol­low­ers felt at that time, might well not be dif­fer­ent from what many of us feel in our lives to­day, from time to time. Of­ten­times, we feel over­whelmed by sor­row; we feel crushed by de­spair.”

She not­ed the re­demp­tive pow­er of East­er as a re­minder that even the deep­est sor­row can give way to re­new­al.

“Yet, af­ter the an­guish and the hope­less­ness that gripped Christ’s fol­low­ers on Good Fri­day, East­er came. And, on that first East­er morn­ing, those of His fol­low­ers who had man­aged to hang on to hope, ex­pe­ri­enced the full re­al­iza­tion of their faith and were able to par­tic­i­pate in the most pro­found joy imag­in­able: the joy of res­ur­rec­tion – of re­birth and of new life,” she said.

She added, “The Chris­t­ian jour­ney of East­er – the jour­ney from the depths of sor­row to the heights of joy – is a re­flec­tion of the jour­ney of every hu­man be­ing. It is the sto­ry of walk­ing through the dark­ness, know­ing and be­liev­ing that there will be light at the end of it all.”

She en­cour­aged cit­i­zens to re­flect deeply on the mean­ing of the sea­son “which speaks to the very heart of the hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence — the tri­umph of life over death, of joy over sor­row, and of hope over de­spair.”

“Christ’s vic­to­ry over the grave reaf­firms to all of us that, in the face of loss, un­cer­tain­ty and de­spair, there is the pow­er of re­new­al and restora­tion, and with it, the promise of sal­va­tion and trans­for­ma­tion for all of hu­man­i­ty.”

Call­ing for per­son­al and col­lec­tive com­mit­ment to growth and uni­ty, Kan­ga­loo said: “Let us, on the in­di­vid­ual lev­el, com­mit to do­ing every­thing we can to gen­er­ate, in our own lives, a res­ur­rec­tion and a re­new­al of pur­pose, spir­it and re­solve.

“Let us each rise to the chal­lenge to be ac­tive par­tic­i­pants in our own re­new­al — to find strength in ad­ver­si­ty, joy in hard­ship, hope in de­spair and uni­ty amid di­vi­sion.”