“Silver and gold I have not,”
said Peter to the cripple after the Resurrection,
“but what I have, I will give you.
In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,
arise and walk.” (Acts 3:3) He did.
Silver and gold indeed, in the high gleaming power of the Resurrection to heal a crippled world.
In that holy sense of life rising out of death, our minds are taken to the silver anniversary of the death of Oscar Romero on March 24, 1980, 25 years ago, and the golden anniversary of the death of Teilhard de Chardin, April 10, 1955, 50 years ago. Men of the Resurrection.
“If they kill me,” said Romero shortly before he was murdered, “I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.” Days before his murder he told a reporter, “You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish.”
Chardin, who died on Easter Sunday 1955, was an Easter man every day of his life. “Throughout my whole life,” he said, “during every moment I have lived, the world has gradually been taking on light and fire for me, until it has come to envelope me in one mass of luminosity, glory from within….the purple flush of matter fading imperceptibly into the gold of the Spirit, to be lost finally in the incandescence of a personal universe.”
My favorite book is Chardin’s The Divine Milieu (1927). On page 55, he says: “Christ conquered death, not only by suppressing its evil effects, but by reversing its sting. By virtue of the Resurrection nothing any longer kills inevitably but everything is capable of becoming the blessed touch of the divine hands, the blessed influence of the will of God upon our lives. However compromised by our faults, or however cast down by circumstances our position may be, we can at any moment, by total redressment, wholly readjust the world around us and take up our lives again in a favorable sense.”
In his lifetime, he, like Jesus, was maligned. Only two people went to his burial in Poughkeepsie and one of them was the driver of the hearse. But seven years after his death, his name was mentioned four times at the Second Vatican Council and the great document, The Church in the Modern World, had the stamp of his magnificent theological gift to all humanity. A martyr in the “dry” sense as they say. Romero in the bloody sense. Both great witnesses to us of the Resurrection. Gold and silver gleaming across the world.
Happy Easter!
Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen!
