The world watched in horror as some of history's most beautiful works of religious art became flame, then smoke, then atmosphere. Stunned to our bones, again, by the mystery of death.
Only in the rarest places, including the poetry of our most profound mystics as well as the ravings of our saddest lunatics, is death admired. Our fear reveals our intense love of our fragile lives. Even pyramids fail as bargaining chips.
Though the universe has been creating itself for fourteen billion years, only recently has any Earthling pulled back the blanket of time to contemplate the whole. We are astounded to discover the ways the universe thrives on death. Ninety-nine percent of all the species Life has concocted have gone extinct.
We do not have words for the fire that destroyed Notre Dame forever. We shiver when we hear St Francis call holy the burning firebrand pressed to his eye. Or the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin discovering, at the front of war, the Cosmic Christ. But they force us to wonder. Does the universe have the creativity to turn our dread into astonishment as something new, something erotic, something death-defying comes forth?
Image by: Brian Sebastian Swimme
