Life multiplies at an alarming rate. It springs fecund and prolific from an amazing variety of astonishing places. Birth and death and resurrection are everywhere, part and parcel of each other.
When I was I grade school my family had a dog that in one litter had 17 puppies. The poor thing.
In the 17th C the first wife of Feodor Vassil-yev of Russia gave birth to four sets of quadruplets, 7 sets of triplets and 16 twins. In her 27 pregnancies she produced — 69 children!
And some think two children are a challenge.
The insects easily top that. A queen bee can lay up to 1500 eggs per day. That’s scary prolific.
A powerful fecundity is pulsing through the blood stream of the universe; on earth every spring life even shoots up out of death.
We make goofy movies about death turning back to life, movies like “The Mummy,” where the dead are accidentally awakened for unknown reasons. Silly Hollywood; resurrection isn’t weird and paranormal; it is as common as birth and seeds and eggs. It is part of nature, built into life, how things normally work.
Take red tail hawks. My dad tells me a red tail hawk lives near his apartment in Alhambra. My dad has never seen his hawk friend eat. There is a McDonalds nearby. But sometimes my dad says he finds a pile of pigeon feathers and bones on the ground. I guess his hawk doesn’t eat fast food. Obviously, not fast enough! The slow pigeons die for the fast hawk to live. Wendell Barry, the great environmentalist wrote in his famous essay “Wilderness:” “We can only live at the expense of other lives.” Every death fuels another life.
Take seeds. Burbee seed companies sale are up. Why? Seeds work. Well, they work for most of us. When it comes to planting things, some people claim they have the death touch. Really? Most everything everyone plants, dies and lives again.
Take a poppy seed, put it in the ground, it sprouts, a plant appears, it grows, it flowers in a kind of celebratory shout at the end of a stem, and then the poppy drops in head in death and out of it salt shaker pod falls seeds. They are buried in the ground; they winter over and then with the warm of spring and the rain they rise again with new life. Every sprouting seed is a kind of resurrection.
Resurrection is more common than that: it is familiar as your bed. Every day you lay down and sleep; you temporarily die, and you are resurrected, with some variation, the next morning. Working people resurrect as early as 5 am; teenagers left undisturbed, resurrect closer to noon or one. Whatever the hour, a rebirth begins everyday life.
Getting up is resurrection. And the older you get, the more it feels like you are emerging from the grave.
We were at the tide pools recently. We found a Sea Star. It was regenerating an arm. A few species can grow an entirely new sea star just from a portion of a severed limb. Amazing, but we share this power. After we are cut, our skin heals over. Our livers can regenerate from as little as 25% of the original.
It is widely claimed that God raised Jesus from the dead. I believe God did that. It follows logically from what most of us believe. Most people on earth believe there is a God. And they believe he made the universe. So if God did that, and he built life and death into it, then he has the power of life and death, and he can raise the dead. This resurrection of Jesus has been called the grand miracle of creation. It is. It is a unique, special, death-reversing, life-giving, new order of events.
But it is not weird, it is not beyond what we would expect of an all-creating God, and it is not entirely unlike other things we can see all the time; the resurrection claim is reinforced by similar events every day. We continuously see things regenerate themselves. In the resurrection of Jesus, God regenerated himself.
Odd to you? Then you must think the universe odd. Odd? We need this kind of odd. We need to tap into this class of oddity.
History is full of kinds of resurrection, artistic, social, psychological, technological resurrections — the renaissance, the reformation and the scientific revolution.
So is the history of finance. Businesses are revived all the time. Careers are resurrected every day. So are aging rock stars. So are wounded soldiers. So are defeated psyches. So are sick children.
Resurrection is normal. Look around. Look inside. Are you going through a death-like experience? You can be resurrected. Believe that. It happens all the time.
Open your eyes. Is it death? Out of that can spring new life.
Thrive! 