From Will to Embrace: Living Easter as a Joy Born from Encounter.

Happy Easter! What better way to experience the triumph of life than alongside another? By walking together, we gain the strength of unity and the joy of living a sensory spirituality.

God does not hide in the abstract; He reveals Himself in the tangible: in the warmth of an embrace that sustains, in the generosity of healing listening, and in our connection with nature, which shows us that everything is reborn. As Pope Leo XIV recalled in his Easter homily of April 2026: “Today all creation shines with a new light… Christ has risen, and with Him, we rise to a new life where the encounter with our brother or sister is the true banquet.”

To embody this banquet, we sometimes need examples who show us through political and spiritual action how to break barriers and defend human dignity. This is the legacy of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who invites us to move from hatred that kills to the joy that resurrects, reminding us that we always have the power to choose. He said: “Joy is much bigger than happiness. Happiness often depends on external circumstances, but joy is an inner state.” Only from that inner state can we transform our surroundings.

To contemplate Easter means translating it into a daily praxis that turns the spiritual — the encounter with the other — and the psychological — the choice of joy — into a coherent way of life. To live with joy born from the discipline of soul and body, I share with you, from my perspective as a psychologist, four activators of will:

1. Reconnecting with identity and life: Recognising who we truly are when we strip away fear. ● Activators: If you woke up today with absolute certainty that everything painful was behind you, what would be the first physical sensation you would want to experience? At what exact moment of the day do you feel that “life beats strongly within you,” and what are you doing in that moment?
2. Safe places: Dwelling in spaces of peace that allow us to be authentic before God and others. ● Activators: Describe that physical place where you need not pretend. Is it a forest, a corner of your home, or the shore of the sea? How does the light of God appear in that place? If you could capture peace in a single object or a specific scent, what would it be?
3. The banquet of companionship: Transforming shared life and shared meals into a sacrament of fraternity. ● Activators: Easter is often celebrated through food. If you had to design the dinner of joy, what dish could not be missing, and why does that flavour connect you with fullness? Who are the people whose mere presence makes the world feel safe? What do you see in their eyes when they laugh?
4. Transcendence in the ordinary: Training the eyes to discover the sacred in the simplest details of everyday life. ● Activators: How do you find the divine presence in acts as simple as breathing deeply or celebrating a friend’s birthday? What sensory certainty do you choose to imprint on your body today so that your will may sustain, from now on, a constant revolution of joy?

And as Mother Marie Eugénie of Jesus would say: “Our gaze must always be fixed on God, but our action must always be with people. True joy is born from this balance: being a transforming presence in the world because we carry heaven within us.” Under this premise, the banquet of existence reaches its fullest meaning when we choose to live in fullness, delighting in our people and making every space a place fit for a revolution born of gratitude. Because life is an encounter that is only complete in that perfect companionship: with oneself, with the other, and above all, with God. May this Easter not be a distant memory, but the beginning of a life in which every sensation whispers to us that, above all else, we were born for joy.

Marlé Uribe Ortiz Educational Psychologist at the Assumption Institute of Querétaro

(1) If you wish to learn more about this philosophy, look for the meeting between Tutu and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala (2025), which gave rise to The Book of Joy.