LET YOUR HEARTS ABOUND WITH JOY1

It is meet and just for us to stand awe-struck before such marvelous beauty. Spring beckons us. Creation calls us. This is holy time when God splashes the landscape with colors of every kind and earth is birthing anew. Spring stirs our souls and invites people of every kind to marvel at the universe story. In The Great Work Thomas Berry writes: "Only if the human imagination is activated by the flight of the great, soaring birds in the heavens, by the blossoming flowers of the Earth, by the sight of the sea, by the lightening and thunder of the great storms that break through the beat of summer, only then will the deep inner experience be evoked within the human soul."

The soul soars with resurrection life when we connect the story of salvation with the story of creation. We do this on the great night called the Easter Vigil. We watch and wait for the radiant dawn. We gather in deep darkness and we unroll the ancient scrolls that tell the story of creation and redemption. Unhurriedly, the archetypal and elemental symbols engage our imagination and our hearts. Roberto Chiotti, the Canadian liturgical architect writes, "Water, fire, oil, the shared meal, and touch are all archetypal symbol grounded in the depth of human experience. They are trans-cultural and timeless. In them, the human spirit recognizes meaning without the need for further definition or explanation in words. This is why we choose them to mask great transitions in our human journey. Elemental symbols mediate experience, having the capacity to affect our awareness of reality, to move a person's feelings, and to open us to transcendence. Like archetypal symbols, they too operate at the depths of human experience, moving us into the process of mystery and of the ground of our being. The ritualized action of the liturgy, the art and architecture of the worship space are all illuminated and nourished by the elemental symbols."

On this night we torch our liturgical space with abundant light-from the great fire, from the paschal candle that illumines our steps as we walk our way through the night. We listen and skillfully the tale is told. God created primal light. We see wondrous light spreading our form the great candle to the edges of the church. We thrill with the sound of chant hymning our salvation. We again hear the story of the exodus. Then we ritually act out our deliverance from sin and Satan in the refreshing baptismal bath, in the lavish anointing with aromatic oil, and in the generous table-sharing. The church is turned into a lustrous banquet hall. This is holy time, one of the few times when we are leisurely enough with our symbols, when we are patient enough with the retelling of tales of biblical remembrance, and when we are alert enough to relate it all to our faith experience now. This Easter night overwhelms us, intoxicates our senses with God's largesse, and invites us to luxuriate in the paschal mystery for the next fifty days. We need not understand or explain it all. The generous love of God escapes our cognitive categories. The beauty of creation and of redemption is breathtaking blessing today.