Vigisl: Easter Weekday
May 16
THE LIGHT THAT IS LIFE
By Fr Gerald Vann 6
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The tree of death is also the tree of life; the tomb of death is the womb of life; it is through going down with Christ into his death that we are to be ourselves reborn; the dry bones shall live again because the Lord will send his Spirit into the bones: the rebirth is made possible through water and the Holy Spirit. Life, in other words, must come from without, from God; but at the same time we must be able to receive it: there are conditions to be fulfilled on our side and it is these that are expressed in terms of going down into the darkness, into the dark waters, into death.
For in death and darkness we can be freed from our pride and learn to be humble of heart: we can imitate the Word who ‘dispossessed himself and took the nature of a slave’ and then ‘lowered his own (human) dignity, accepted an obedience which brought him to death, death on a cross.’ And that is why, St Paul goes on, that is why ‘God has raised him to such a height, given him a name which is greater than any other name’: that is why: because of his self-humbling even to death.
Everywhere the spectacle confronts us of the destruction of what makes life worth living: our garden is laid waste, the beauty we have made is ravaged, the home is destroyed, the hearth a heap of dead ashes; and these things are images of a much deeper tragedy, the death of the soul. And the dry bones, it is clear, will never find life again of themselves, from within themselves. A dead heart can live again only if the two conditions are fulfilled, a dying world can live again only if the two conditions are fulfilled: if life is brought them from without, and if they themselves are able to receive it. But to be able to receive it they must first admit their own death; and human nature finds that very difficult to do. People will sometimes say that God is dead; they will very seldom admit that they themselves are dead; and if they do, it is all too often, like Judas, only with the sterile voice of despair.
In the Garden of Eden, the symbol of the life we might have had, the life we long for but have lost, there is a tree of life and a tree of knowledge: but we would not receive life, we wanted to seize it for ourselves, dominate over it; we would not receive knowledge of the truth, we wanted to fashion it for ourselves; and so the life is lost; we are expelled from the garden, and the soul dies. The soul dies because we wanted in our pride to make ourselves God; we tried to take to ourselves a glory that was not ours.
But now there is hope for us again because the Son of God did exactly the opposite: he dispossessed himself of the glory that was his and became a slave; and so in him humanity was healed, and in him we may each of us be healed, provided only that we in our turn do the same thing, reverse in the same way the primal sin, become humble enough to admit the death that is in us, the evil that is in us, and so, in that act of going down into the darkness where pride is killed, find again the light that is life.
6
The Water and the Fire, Gerald Vann O.P. Collins 1953 p.181-2.