President's Message
Easter Season, 2012
Dear Friends of the Prep,
One of my Jesuit teachers, Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., believed strongly that the women and the apostles who went to Jesuss tomb after his death found it empty. He rejected any modern day speculation questioning the tombs emptiness or the sign of the empty tomb as an act of God that signified the Resurrection. In an image borrowed from the earliest centuries, we imagine the angels somehow assisting in Jesus release from the tomb and accompanying the risen body of Jesus to a place we call heaven. A resurrected body, the first in a heaven renewed by its presence! The fourth century Church Father, John Chrysostom, announces in one of his Easter homilies that, when Jesus returns to Heaven, the angels are wild with delight.
Fast forward to the 21st Century and contemporary science offers us different language expressing physical reality. Jesus living body like our own is a specific arrangement of relativistic quantum fields. No more is solid matter a useful scientific concept. So we can think of the God and Father of Jesus as causing this specific arrangement of fields to assemble in a different universe where all such fields are governed by His reign. Sustained by God this new universe is free of sin and death. You might view this as a cold image lacking poetry compared to that of angels wild with delight. But in this universe besides the song of angels we can hear the music of the spheres.
We humans are not likely as centuries unfold to plumb the mysteries of the variety of possible universes that modern science now posits. Father Nicolas, the General Superior of the Jesuits, reminds us educators that our students of Jesuit schools, like students everywhere, will need to find the answers to future questions that we now cannot even imagine. In our Jesuit schools we help them prepare for these questions with an openness to growth, an intellectual competence and a desire to perform the works of justice.
But let us this Easter focus on the one universe that Jesus announces when he says the Kingdom of God is at hand. Jesus offers us, in his life and teaching, a Way. It is not simply science fiction to imagine Jesus Way as a way in which we cooperate, with loving and religious spirits, to arrange those relativistic quantum fields to bring about His kingdom.
Happy Easter!
George W. Bur, S.J.