In him was life....

So many times when I hear about the birth, life, and death of Jesus, it always surrounded by the significance of what the Son of God's presence has meant for humankind. Don't get me wrong. I am a Christian and obviously for me, the significance is profound. But I feel like so many times we stop there. I love to set my spirit a little further out to see the bigger picture.

One of my favorite meditations to do is to "float" up and out to get a picture of all of creation. To imagine how the incarnation would have been felt and experienced by bird and beast and plant and earth. "Even the stones will cry out!" Wasn't all of creation consecrated at that moment in time? The sun, the moon, the stars? At Christmastime we tend to leave the ox and the donkey and the sheep in the background of the creche scene. Sometimes we get sentimental children's stories that have a mouse trying to come up with a gift for the baby, supposedly portraying metaphorically the child herself and how the littlest gift we have if given with our dearest heart is enough for the Messiah. But, why wouldn't the mouse give a gift. Am I really to believe that all of creation wasn't effected by their Creator God stepping down to live in the creation? that the sheep were unaffected by the heavenly host? that the first small cry of the Creator born into the presence of the ox and donkey didn't make them quake?

It is the same for me this Easter. I do not picture the moment of Resurrection as a "lightning bolt" scenario. God had already shown in another cave in Bethlehem that that wasn't his style. I picture it like the first breath of his first birth. That small intake of breath conquering fear and death. That didn't just reverberate throughout all humankind by its saving power, but also like the theoretic flap of a butterfly wing, the whole of God's creation was sent into a chaos of hope and life.