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The problem with non-Christian religions is this: On the one hand, without the supernatural help of God, man will end up worshipping himself.
On the other, this self-worship can be seen as the despairing response to the (almost) universal sense of a hunger for something somehow transcendent and awareness of the numinous, the transcendent glimmering behind the everyday and immanent.
Just for truth's sake, we have to sympathize with everyone who longs for the some kind of relationship with something somehow "beyond," and we must acknowledge at least the truth-bearing parts of the pagan perception of the mystery. In fact, I think we would say that some pagans, though they may not be quite awake, nonetheless have useful dreams of what waking life might be like. They have, that is, a more urgent awareness of mystery than many purported Xtians.
At least, the mystery of vegetative growth, of the weed-like hydra which only multiplies in the face of opposition, ought to give everyone who has weeded a garden some wry amusement!
But it is a great sadness that the greater wonder of the germinating seed has been lost by so many. We plant something small, dry, and hard. Up comes something large, moist, soft ... and sometimes good to eat!
It is not just sowing or planting. Some pine cones, I am told, need to be scorched by fire if they are to open and release their seeds. Can anyone fail to see the wonder in that?
Paul says it is sown a "psychikon" (physical? natural?) body, it is raised a spiritual body.
And so we come to the entombment of the Sacred Body of our Lord. It is recorded that the Twelve didn't understand what IHS could have meant by "rising from the dead." But I wonder if any of them, years later ever thought, "What dunderheads we were! So he said it would be! So the Law and the Prophets told us! So our wise folk wrote, and our psalmists sang! And without and around them, so every molting locust or growing stalk of wheat proclaimed. Even the serpents slough off the old dull skin and slither away shining and new.
This is not to proclaim some spaced-out environmental mysticism which lifts us above the trials of life. We are creatures of mind and will, fallen creatures of sin and remorse. It is therefore unavoidable that we sow in tears. But it would be a shame if we let those tears blind us to the coming reaping in joy.
A body was laid in the tomb. A wonder burst out of the tomb.
