Saturday, April 23, 2011

The earth is a giant graveyard but we have hope because one of these graves is empty

The earth is a giant graveyard.  But we have hope because one of these graves is empty.  Christ Jesus came to save us from sin and its consequence: death (Romans 6: 23).  And as Dr. Peter Kreeft once said, "The Resurrection also sharply distinguishes Jesus from all the other religious founders.  The bones of Abraham and Muhammad and Buddha and Confucius and Lao-tzu and Zoroaster are still here on earth.  Jesus' tomb is empty.  The existential consequences of the resurrection are incomparable.  It is the concrete, factual, empirical proof that: life has hope and meaning; 'love is stronger than death'; goodness and power are ultimately allies, not enemies; life wins in the end; God has touched us right where we are and has defeated our last enemy; we are not cosmic orphans, as our modern secular worldview would make us.."

In his poem entitled "The Convert," Gilbert Keith Chesterton so eloquently presents this truth:

After one moment when I bowed my head

And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.


The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.


"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" (Jn 1:5).  And it never will.  Not even that supreme darkness and deception which is fast-approaching (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 675).  Our sad broken world is dying.  Heaven and earth will pass away.  But not the word of the Living God.




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