At Easter, the universe is made new. It was the cosmic heartbeat of the drums, the primeval minor key and haunting, pounding refrain, “This is the night the Light broke the chains of death …” of Jesuit Roc O’Connor’s setting of the Exsultet that brought home to me, for the first time, creation’s groaning in one great act of new birth. The Easter mystery embraces the cosmos.

But is our sense of the Easter event as big as—or bigger than—the liturgy that celebrates it? It must be. For the first 2010 program of CBC Radio’s science show, Quirks & Quarks, its producers assembled ten top scientists from around the world, and asked them to identify the biggest question that science had not yet been able to answer. The vastness of their insight revealed in the questions stunned me, inviting me to ponder the awesomeness, not just of Earth itself, but of the cosmos. Furthermore, that sense of awe and wonder took me back to the beginning, when the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. A flood of images overturned the tidy cosmology depicted in Genesis, and I remembered the psalm refrain “All the ends of the earth have seen the power of God.” I imagined today’s psalmist penning instead, “All the furthest galaxies have seen the power of God.” Another description of the outer boundaries of the known world, “from sea to sea and from the River [the Euphrates] to the ends of the earth,” now is clearly too small for our knowledge of the universe. To break through the cosmology that confines it, we must look to the ancient gamma-ray burst, the most distant object in the universe at 13 billion light years away, to maintain the same proportions that the ancient writer wished to convey. God’s world is vaster than most of us can imagine; God’s love and salvation are not limited to Earth, but penetrate to the furthest limits of the cosmos.

The resurrection of Christ, the Morning Star that knows no setting, is equally cosmic. Too often we reduce it to a solution to our own fear of personal extinction, a personal event in the life of Jesus, or the dénouement of the “real” salvific events of the last hours of Christ’s life. This limited understanding slips into Catholic consciousness via Praise and Worship music and Christian rock borrowed from the Evangelical tradition where the intensely personal event of salvation through the blood of Christ dominates theological imagination. Such atonement theology cannot bear the weight of this cosmic event. Like all cell life, like our own bodies, the incarnate body of Jesus depended on the light of the sun and other stars, and so, in the resurrection of the Morning Star that knows no setting, all creation—the stars and galaxies and nebulae and supernovas—is raised up, too. Christ, image of the invisible God, first-born of all creation, is the one in whom all these things hold together (Col. 1.15-17). Saint Paul gives us the cosmic picture: Resurrection is not just about “me and Jesus.”

How do we let ourselves be converted to this cosmic Easter? First, wake up your imagination. Refuse to let it be enslaved to literalism. Listen to the scriptures but listen to the meaning, not just the words. Reimagine the ancient worldview of scripture and liturgy in the context of a contemporary cosmology. Be inspired by efforts such as this reworking of the Christmas Proclamation that begins “Twenty billion years after the first crescendo of God’s creative power, when all the morning stars sang together” … and concludes “Jesus the Messiah, son of the eternal God, conceived of the Holy Spirit, was born as one of us” (Pastoral Music,18:2). Imagine that falling on the ears of the young science majors in our assemblies—in contrast to the traditional proclamation that begins “In the five thousand, one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world, from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth …”

[Re]-read Pope Benedict’s message for World Day of Peace, 2010. We cannot wax eloquent about the wonders of creation while ignoring our responsibility for the protection and care of our near and dear planet Earth. Benedict wrote: “We are all responsible for the protection and care of the environment. This responsibility knows no boundaries.” This consciousness of responsibility for creation needs to become part of our ecclesial consciousness, for all creation shows the presence of God. All creation speaks resurrection, both the fire of a newborn planet and the new fire that ignites the Easter candle. Take Earth Day seriously—a kind of Easter feast for the planet! Celebrate its 40th anniversary on April 22. Since it falls within the Easter season, connect it with the Easter mysteries. Check out the possibilities for action at www.earthday.net/earthday2010. Commit to care for creation as a parish community.

On the evening of that first Easter, Jesus greets his disciples: “Peace be with you.” Make it a universal Easter prayer celebrating the Morning Star whose risen presence we glimpse in the twinkling of the stars of night even as we sing: “Peace to those both near and far, Peace to ocean depths and mountains, Peace on furthest newborn star.” (“Peace Be With You!” B. Gasslein, 1999, LWC Sunday Missal, p. 671). May you and all the cosmos share Christ’s Easter peace!

Bernadette Gaslein

Editor.celebrate@novalis.ca