At the Easter Vigil we celebrate the great story of salvation. But it is not just religious people that have salvation stories. Every culture (even the most secular) has them, and they provide the basic logic for our morality and ideas.
One popular salvation story goes something like this: There was a time long ago (say, the Middle Ages) when people lived in ignorance, and were slaves to superstition, religion and tradition. This led to religious wars and violence — a sort of war of all against all — as they competed for scarce resources. Life was mostly suffering and squalor. But at some point, so the story goes, people started to use reason (which they apparently hadn’t before), invented modern science, and learned that religion must be kept private and could not be the basis of objective thinking, much less of public policy. We discovered modern forms of government, economics and technology, which brought about peace, convenience and prosperity like never before.
Now, this is not a prelude to bashing anything in our modern world. I quite like our world most of the time, and we all benefit from its advances in countless ways. My point, rather, is that this can be a salvation story. It can tell a story of humanity as isolated, ignorant, suffering and violent, only recently reborn by a process of enlightenment.
The Easter Vigil tells a different story, which goes something like this: Once, there was a time when people lived in harmony with each other and the earth, for their Creator had made them for this. Not individuals, competition and scarcity, but rather unity, the common good and abundance ruled. Religion and tradition were the very foundations of this, for it was God who gave both. Only later did sin enter — a sort of unfettered universal competition — in which oppression and bloodshed became the norm. But our instincts for our original unity were never completely lost, and so God slowly called us back from fragmentation toward him and each other. Like the first Adam, Jesus Christ’s body became the center of unity, and called all to become part of it by baptism. Being Christ’s body means we have already died and risen with Christ, and so are freed from the fear of death, on which all the world’s violence is based. Though we know our bodies will die, we can offer them freely for our neighbors, even to death, knowing that when we do, eternal life lies just beyond the veil.
Let me note just one difference between these two stories. While the first story can seem optimistic at times, at its core it is very pessimistic. For it usually implies that, without modern institutions and technologies as external safeguards, human beings tend to be extremely dangerous to one another. Lust for power, violence and greed is who we essentially are, and the modern world is so much better than all others because we have discovered techniques that keep us from destroying each other. That is a very pessimistic view of human nature because it means that each of us is most fundamentally a threat to one another, including our closest friends or our spouses.
That is just about the most depressing and lonely story I can imagine. It says that no matter how much we put on our “Minnesota nice,” each of us is really out to get one another. Fear all around. Universal suspicion. No real intimacy. What a nightmare.
The Christian story is utterly different. The deep reality of sin is firmly acknowledged, but not as a necessary part of human nature, for we are fundamentally made for each other. Our deepest reality is not war but peace. In baptism, we receive the forgiveness of those very sins by which we fragmented ourselves and re-become one in Christ’s body with both God and man. In our story, the “law” of scarcity and competition is a lie. Life is a party, a feast. That’s what Easter is all about.
Miller is director of Pastoral Care and Outreach at Assumption in St. Paul. He has a Ph.D. in theology from Duke University, and lives with his family at the Maurin House Catholic Worker in Columbia Heights. You can reach him at colin.miller1@protonmail.com.
