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O'Malley's Best Easter Sunday Why is this morning more important than any other morning? Teilhard de Chardin insisted that for all these countless millennia God has had in mind a future consummation-what he called the Omega Point-when everything comes together in a kind of "eruption" of humanity into divinity. If so, God sure didn't give himself a level playing field on which to pull off this plan. If fact, God seems to have doubled, redoubled, then metastasized the obstacles against him, like Elijah soaking the sacrifices again and again before begging Yahweh to set them ablaze. From the start God directed against his plan the paralyzing inertia of gravity that claws at the bottoms of everything and tries to draw it down into stasis, standstill, atrophy, death. Then he set up the vegetative imperialism of the jungle that creeps out of the darkness in remorseless yellow-green waves to embrace and smother and eventually crack apart the great temples of Mesopotamia and the Maya and thousands of once crucial aerodromes in our own time. And most reprehensible of all in the eyes of level-headed, rational observers, God gave freedom to an inadequately evolved tribe of apes-which guaranteed uncountable obstructions to his Master Plan. I find it surprising that, in the whole history of human thought, at least to my knowledge, no one has written a magnum opus called The Inexorable Triumph of Dumb. What other factor is more evident in God's plan since his introduction of homo (sic) sapiens into his equation? There's evidence of dumb too abundant to list even cursorily, beginning with the deplorable Adam-Eve Experiment and continuing through the mutual devastations of empires since as long as records exist, the imaginative changes rung on monstrous inquisitions, jihads, and holocausts over the ages. What led my withered mind to these thunder-thoughts was, if you can believe it, the Easter Bunny. How about that for the triumph of the trivial over the tremendous? A toothy symbol for innocent animal lechery and mindless spawning, edging the personification of the Omega Point right off-stage! Could you get any more casually blasphemous than that? Bugs Bunny grinning mischievously from the doorway of Jesus' empty tomb? Perhaps there has been a monumental study of how some well-intentioned do-gooders conceived the idea of making religion-all the God questions and answers and traditions-the purview of children. (Not the same folks who decided the level of television should be geared to the receptivities of eight-year-olds, but they're undoubtedly afflicted with the same cerebral cramps. Perhaps their motive for laying out the whole "God thing" for kids is their desire to nail down their allegiance before they can get away from us-which hasn't worked from Ananias to Adolf Hitler. They surely failed to consider that the only motive that can put real teeth into the God questions is a felt awareness of death and the utter absurdity of a godless, purposeless existence-which no child I've ever met could comprehend. As a result, now-just when the young come to an age to profitably probe the most essential questions of human meaning, they stop all such study because they're being called to far more important concerns. Like making a living- without troubling to find out what the hell living is for. So, as usual, underselling the intelligence of non-theologians, the Church elders grabbed hold of the already existing-and appealing--rituals of the pagan world for Christmas at the winter solstice and for Easter at the spring equinox-pine trees, candles, eggs, candy, plenty of grog, and presents! Ah, yes! Presents! (All the barkeeps and merchants in the parish liked that part.) So, in the general dumbing-down of the Christian message, from start to finish, our putative "best minds" have played right into the cooperative hands of the Enemy, making God's triumph over death more trivial than hard-boiled eggs no one will ever eat. But, before the day is over, think of what this day means: From beyond time and space, from the utterly Beyond, God himself came among us, fully embracing all the jarring and joys of being human, scattering along his way lessons about God's intentions for our fulfillment (no matter how contradictory to our own). His final cluster of lessons led him through a disgraceful, repulsive death. What could he have hoped to suggest for our consideration with that? Then, three days later, he-the same person-burst back into life! What could he have hoped to suggest for our consideration with that? His coming, his leaving, and his return defied all that we believe can be true! Did that ever occur to any of us--once we left the credulousness of childhood? But it's the most important event of all time. If what we celebrate today didn't in fact take place, each of our births invited us to an Easter Egg Hunt. But it's all a hoax. There are, in fact, no real Easter eggs. And the bogus ones we think we find turn to ash the moment we touch them. Why is this morning more important than any other morning? |
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