A cloudless sky. Spring birdsong. White, pink, red and yellow blossom on the trees. Sitting in the hot tub taking it all in. A perfect Easter Sunday morning. In years past I have been mildly disappointed to awake on Easter morning to an overcast sky—or one year (our first in the USA) to a six-inch blanket of freshly fallen snow! The Easter season is the season of life, of spring, of newness. Around the world today congregations will echo with the refrain "Christ is Risen!" I will gladly join the refrain. But, what is it we celebrate? Not the mere resuscitation of corpse. Something much more profound than that. I will celebrate something fundamental about the nature of the universe. There is something rather the nothing.
Death is nothing—literally no-thing. Death is the absence of life, the ceasing to be, the void, the absence of consciousness. When push comes to shove, is the universe we inhabit a universe of absence , or of presence? Of death (no-thing) or life (some-thing)? My money is on life! Christ is risen! Death is not the final word, for out of death comes new life.
Of course, I can't prove this. Nothing or something? Toss a coin? Heads is something, tails is nothing. Or is there something a little less haphazard?
While the "big" question is outside the realm of proof, its answer is not merely a lottery. We move into the realm of plausibility based upon our experiences of life, and by our observations of life. (The deck is already loaded—it is experiences of life, observations of life, rather than death that is our subject.) Nature points in a certain direction.
I am a fan of the seasons—fall, winter, spring and summer. I love each in its own way. I love the distinctiveness. I love that each contains the season to come. In the fall, you get the occasional deep chill that promises winter is coming. In the middle of winter, if you look closely you will see the beginning of buds on the trees. Spring surprises us with the occasional June day of summer warmth and scents. In the middle of summer, you notice a few leaves turning. There is always something, always change. The darkest night contains the beginnings of morning. These are nature's clues.
All is connected. When I "shuffle off this mortal coil"—from Hamlet: how much the quaintness of the English language owes to Shakespeare!—which I undoubtedly will, likely as not my body will be buried. In a short while, as my body decomposes it will bring nourishment to the soil, and through the soil to everything that grows. That which grows will be consumed by others, and nourish them until they too return to the earth. Earth, plants, animals, people—we are all of the same stuff. There is something rather than nothing, and we are an organic and intimate part of that something. Interconnected. In interbeing.
So much for bodies. But we are more than bodies. We are conscious beings—bodies and souls, or bodies, souls and spirits. We feel, and know, and experience, and sense. Descartes reached for something important with his cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore, I am. Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted. That I am conscious of my thoughts, my wondering, my doubting all that can be doubted, that is foundational. And like material reality that goes on and on, and changes, and transforms, and becomes, so too does consciousness. For if consciousness, like the body, is something rather than nothing, then something wins the day.
Christ is risen! For Christ is not nothing, but something. And if Christ is something rather than nothing, then all those who have lived and died are also something rather than nothing. For nothing has no existence. Existence is reality. If nothing has no existence, and that which exists is the real, then nothing is unreal.
But how do we know that there is something rather than nothing? Here we are beyond the realms of proof. There are certain "basic beliefs" that we hold because we can do no other. These basic beliefs come from our culture, from common sense, from intuition, from great minds. Of course, they can, and should, from time to time be challenged and questioned and examined. That there is existence rather than nonexistence makes sense of life and experience.
On this Easter Sunday morning I celebrate that Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!