I am walking on a path by the river. Ice has now completely silenced the waters. Snow has blanketed the ground. Trees silhouette their bare and mute forms against the grayish sky. All seems at a standstill: life stymied by some invisible inner forces. I remember witnessing all the letting go, the surrendering, the stripping, the dying that nature underwent as it transitioned from autumn to winter just a few months ago.
Because I am made of the stuff of the earth myself, I know that there is more to earth’s cycles than what I can observe above the ground. Underneath my feet, at this very moment, death is slowly yielding to the same invisible inner forces that brought it about in the first place. A whole new gestation process is underway; new life is taking shape, vibrating, readying to spring forth in new manifold expressions. For, in all of nature, nothing lives that does not die only to be reborn again, changed by the very experience itself towards something ever new. Such is God’s marvelous design.
I see the same birth, death and rebirth pattern imprinted in our evolving universe, from the first flaring forth, through billions and billions of years of evolution, to now. Galaxies collide, implode. Out of the fragments, new galaxies are born, stars are formed and new astral configurations appear, including a Supernova, home of our solar system, of our earth. Some stars age and die only to have their dust gift us with all the elements that constitute life today, including my own. I am made of star dust. How awesome!
As science gradually elucidates the Creator’s design, evolution emerges as a continuous movement from life to death, to more and more complex life manifestations. It is not a random process but a movement towards a greater level of consciousness and unity, towards what Teilhard de Chardin calls the ‘Omega point’. And for Teilhard, all is a ‘divine milieu’ and Christ is the Omega point. (1) Is He is not, according to the Scriptures, the one ‘with whom and for whom God created the whole universe’ and through whom ‘God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself’? (2) Is he not the cosmic Christ?
As I prepare to ritually remember with my faith community Jesus’ passion and death and resurrection, I can’t but note how fitting it is that, for those of us living in the western hemisphere, the rhythm of our annual celebration of these paschal mysteries should be anchored in the rhythm of the natural world on the cusp of spring. Effectively, since the fourth century, our Resurrection celebration has been set to coincide with the Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.
In celebrating the paschal mysteries, I also celebrate all that has been life, death and resurrection on our planet earth and in our evolving universe from the moment our Creator set life in motion. I embrace the pattern of life, death and resurrection within my life and around me. I also hear the longings of my own being for greater consciousness of the oneness of all that is in the cosmic Christ.
The Future of Man (1957), The Divine Milieu (1960)
Col.1:16, 17, 20
