Forces and events vastly larger than us

...the key to the enigma of the universe and to all history

Maria Popova enjoys the richness of the autobiography Let Your Heart Be Broken by classical composer Tina Davidson. Entering into the spirit of Davidson's story of her life, Popova writes:

We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life — life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control — to rush in.

Those words, that in life we often "find ourselves [...]bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us" took me just the few weeks back to the Easter night celebration of the rising from the dead of Jesus, who is God who took flesh to come among us. I want to complement Popova's sentiments of wonder with a perceptive reflection on the understanding of life that Christians express at Easter:

The  Easter Vigil begins with a wonderful ritual. In the darkness of the night, out under an open sky, before a fire, a candle, the work of the Mother Bee, is blessed as the priest prays: ‘Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him and all the ages, to him be glory and power, through every age for ever.’ Christian hope is rooted in more than the story of an individual who once vanquished death, whose victory can still affect the life of other individuals. Christian hope is rooted in the certainty that Jesus Christ is the key to the enigma of the universe and to all history.

Easter is more than a firework of revelation preceded and succeeded by dark silence. God’s incarnate Word is the same Word that was from the beginning, that speaks in Scripture and still operates in the Church, Christ’s Body. That is why it is essential for us Christians to be deeply rooted in the past. It is essential that we know Scripture well, that we know the history of the Church and of the saints.

Avoid, then, a disproportionately contemporary and self-centred vision of things which may make the faith more graspable, perhaps, but also reduces it to something banal. No political or sentimental aim will rejuvenate our soul and inflame our heart, but only the unchangeable promise of God revealed in Jesus Christ, the same today, yesterday, and forever.

— Erik Varden, a Trappist monk and bishop of Trondheim, Norway

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