The Night Redeemed
Michiel Peeters - “This is the night.” Dear friends, this Vigil’s liturgy expresses visibly and tangibly what we are celebrating, first of all through the rite of the Easter candle with which it opens. Let me recap a few phrases from the Hymn of the Easter candle.
“Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.” Redeemed means saved. When you save a file, you safeguard it so it is not lost but kept. To save means to ensure that something precious that would otherwise get lost, say by nature or out of inertia, is preserved.
To “redeem” or “save” also means to “liberate”: to release from a situation of captivity, of suffocation; to unleash, unchain one’s potential, that would otherwise remain suppressed, unused.
We are made to live, but we die. This dying begins with our not being serious with ourselves, with our being made, with our depending, with our infinite desire. We live distractedly; we want to live distractedly, not to be disturbed. In this way, life creeps by until we end in nothingness.
A nothingness that begins now, when we decide not to heed what the Mystery says through the things, through the fact that we do not make ourselves, through our infinite needs. This attempt to live unconsciously, to stop at the appearances, without considering what we deeply are, is called “sin.” Sin is not seeking what is good for us.
“This is the night.” But He who made us, and made us for happiness, has had pity on us, on us who tend to “go through life in silence, taking [our] unexpressed cry with [us] into the grave,” as the Soviet dissident Andrey Sinyavsky wrote. “In this night,” within history, Mystery created a particular history, to save us, liberate us, prevent us from getting lost; “in this night” and through this night.
“This is the night, when once you led our forebears, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea. This is the night that, with a pillar of fire, banished the darkness of sin.” This is the night in which You planted a light, hat first consisted of what You did with Abraham and his descendants, and culminated in the incarnation of “Jesus Christ, your Son, your Only Begotten.”
“O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine to the human.” It was a dot in history, a man born of a woman, a small flame like that of the Easter candle, but real. For those who live the night and look for the light, like sentinels for daybreak, that flame, that little light, was and is the beginning of the day, as when we entered the dark church with the paschal candle.
They killed him, for man preferred darkness to light, and night seemed to be total again. But this death was not the end of the small light, but the beginning of a new presence of it, now no longer limited by time and space. The light continued to burn, but now it began to spread to all those who adhered to it, just as the light of the Paschal candle spread to all of us: “a fire into many flames divided, yet never dimmed by sharing of its light.”
Those who, “in this night” (in this life, in this reality, in this history) seek the light and run into Christ, those who, once they have seen that light, don’t avert their eyes from it, become part of it themselves. Whoever is in the night and decides to look, to keep looking at this light, in all the night’s circumstances, will experience the night to become “as bright as day”: “dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.”
Christ is “the Morning Star: the one Morning Star who never sets,” since He has come “back from death’s domain,” which, by nature, would be the worst and definitive darkness. Since then, the risen Lord sheds “his peaceful light on humanity.”
The visibility of Christ’s luminous presence in history, able to save people, not let them get lost, to unchain their potential, depends also on us: by looking at his light, we become part of it, like the many little candles lit at the Paschal candle. We will become carriers of His peaceful light for our fellow women and men in the measure that we look at his risen presence and follow it.
Therefore, “we pray you that this candle … [in our lives] may persevere undimmed, to overcome the darkness of this night…. Let it mingle with the lights of heaven,” reflect that what never quenches, and grow brighter and brighter.
