The Science of Resurrection
A transcript from The Liturgists Podcast Episode 22: Who Am I?
In the beginning there was a rapid expansion of a singularity. 380,000 years later there was light. When there was light there was hydrogen and helium. And there were stable fundamental forces of physics that worked together to birth the first stars. And those stars lived for hundreds of millions of years before they died and exploded and spread their essence across the sky into clouds of heavier dust than existed before. The forces of physics worked together once again to craft new stars now tightly packed into the first galaxies.
And the cycle repeated. That cycle had to happen several time before we could have planets. Planets could only exist because a few generations of stars died and were reborn. And it was from that process that this planet that we live on was allowed to exist.
This planet that we live on is covered with a film of life, unlike any we have seen in the universe. As far as we know today it is unique. That life is fed by a process where carbon from the air and minerals in the soil, are attached together with the energy of photons through photosynthesis.
So everything on this planet lives by the constant sacrifice and dying of the nearest star. Every single blade of grass every tree every bush on this planet is a resurrection of the sun’s energy. And I exist because I steal that energy by consuming other things that have died. That dead matter literally returns to life in my body through my metabolism, and one day I will die and a lot of my atoms will go right back to being alive in something else. One day our sun will explode and spread its guts and its essence across the sky, and will then form new planets and new stars.
Resurrection is the pattern of the physical reality we see today. Resurrection is the language of creation, death, burial and renewal; is the way that change occurs. Do I find it that incredulous that somehow, the source of all, left his signature on our civilization through resurrection. I don’t know, but that seems to be poetically appropriate.
