Easter Vigil April 4, 2026
Fr. Alexander Albert St. Mary Magdalen, Abbeville
N.B. This is the third of a three-part series of homilies on the topic of desire. The first part can be found here and the second part here.
Three days ago, 4 people sat atop 6 million pounds of machinery filled with 700,000 gallons of fuel for 3 hours, waiting for the whole thing to explode and launching them into an environment completely incompatible with human life: the vacuum of space. Now, at this very moment, those 4 people are closer to the moon than they are to us. There are 10,000 things that, if they going even a little wrong, would mean they never set foot on earth again. When I put it that way, it should make you wonder, why? Why do something so… out there?
Because for thousands of years, the human race has looked up and seen… light. We can’t help, human beings are attracted to light. We desire it. It’s part survival instinct, part comfort, and part divine symbolism… this desire for light. It is a fitting conclusion to our three day reflection on the importance of desire. Not long after the Artemis II rocket blasted into space, we gathered here for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper to start this reflection on our desire for love, focused on communion, conversion, and service. Yesterday, we followed the Lord to the Cross, considering our desire for suffering in the forms of penitence and sacrifice. Tonight, we look at our desire for light.
Millennia of scientific advancement, trillions of dollars, and countless dreams and prayers have brought humanity to the point of not only going to the moon once, but of trying to go again and from there to the stars. That is what our desire for light can do. There’s a reason the proverb “light at the end of the tunnel” remains relevant. We even talk about invisible things like thoughts and feelings using words like “I see,” and “it dawned on me.” Did you know that even people who are totally blind can detect light? Studies show physiological responses to light in people without vision and even without eyes.
Just so, our desire for light goes much deeper than its usefulness in the present moment. The moon and the stars are slightly useful for traveling at night, but that doesn’t explain why we’ve always found fantastical shapes in the stars, written poetry and songs, and painted visual masterpieces about them. A caveman name Grug Grug 15,000 years ago probably looked up at the moon, pointed, and said to his buddies, “me want to go there” and got laughed at. He must have shrugged and kept hunting, yet the light of the moon was still visible night after night. People like him all around the world must have thought and felt and eagerly desired something similar. On July 20, 1969, someone finally did it, taking the giant leap for mankind all because our desire for light was strong enough to not give up, to keep going. They could never have imagined how it would come about or how long it would take, but hanging onto that light in the darkness, stoking and nourishing and feeding that desire to see light, to go after the light… that was all a necessary part of the cosmically-sized chain of events that led to Apollo Eleven and now Artemis Two.
I’ve repeated the refrain that desire is destiny, reminded you that your destiny is a result of the desires you choose to nurture and the ones you choose to deny. If you would have a destiny among the stars, nurture your desire for light by nurturing your hope. When I say a “light in the darkness,” I’m talking about hope. Hope is more than wishful thinking, it is a steady ongoing conviction that something good will eventually come about, especially in moments when you don’t see how it will come about. The fictional Grug Grug couldn’t see how we’d get to the moon, but something about his desire for light and the memory of seeing it there was enough to keep going even when it was dark.
And if you think going to the moon is amazing, if you think flying through the stars is cool… Try shining brighter than the stars yourself. There’s a reason Jesus shone with light at the Transfiguration, a reason the sun went dark when he died. Human beings don’t just want light, they create it! No, literally. It’s called “ultraweak photon emission,” and is the result of biochemical processes in our body. We normally cannot see it, but the light is there just as the light of the sun is there even when the moon is totally dark. Our bodies only stop shining when we die. And can you guess which part of the body emits the most light? The face.
Babies are born with an innate attraction to human faces. Put a face on something and we immediately start assigning more meaning to it, even if it’s not alive. The human eye is also instinctively attracted to light – it’s part of the reason screens are so addicting. Everything else in the world reflects light, but screens emit light directly, triggering a neurological response that makes the screen inherently more attractive.
But combine these realities: our attraction to light, our attraction to faces, and the fact that human faces emit light and you start to see yet another one of the fingerprints of God. It’s why scripture often speaks the human desire to “see the face of God” from Genesis through Revelation and even in one of tonight’s psalms. It’s why, after spending so much time with God on the mountain, the light coming from the face of Moses was so bright, it was not only visible, but hard to look at.
And then God became a human being. He took on a human face and a human heart. He desired love in the form of food and friendship. He desired to suffer in the form of sacrificial love. He desired light and so restored sight to the blind, taught truth to the ignorant, and gave hope to the hopeless. Then we killed him, leading to the most important event in the history of the universe. Jesus rose from the dead. In a dark tomb in the middle of the night, a human body that was no longer emitting light suddenly rose from the dead. It didn’t just rise, though, it burst into light. We even have a picture of that moment – the Shroud of Turin.
Other than a now-debunked carbon-dating test, every study done on it shows it to be a pure linen cloth from 2000 years ago from the region of Israel. A photo-negative is on its surface… photo-negatives weren’t even invented until 200 years ago. Even as we are sending astronauts to the moon, we at this very moment lack the technological capability of recreating the Shroud of Turin even if we wanted to. The best guess for its cause is an instant super-massive burst of light.
Jesus, who is God-made-man, who created the universe with the words “let there be light,” rose from the dead in a flash of light estimated to be 34 Thousand Billion watts. That’s 34 with thirteen 0s after it. It’s 10 times all the electricity used on earth at one time. Jesus rose from the dead in an impossibly bright flash of light – the brightest thing to have ever happened on earth. And then what did he do? He ascended into heaven; he went beyond the moon, beyond the sun, beyond the stars. God’s shining human face came to earth to catch our eyes and draw them beyond space and into eternity, to heaven. He did it to harness our desire for light in order to grant us the destiny of eternal life.
So what? What does that do for you and me right now? For all it’s power, it was a long time ago. How does that help today in the darkness and mess and failures of the world and myself? The same way a thousand generations of star-gazing helped Artemis II launch on Wednesday night. Hope – our desire for light – is a practical thing. To consciously stir your desire to see more, to let that desire pull you along even when you cannot see how it will work out… that is powerful.
To overcome the darkness, you simply cannot just keep your eyes on the darkness. You simply cannot rely on what you do or don’t see. Saying, “the light at the end of the tunnel” implies that you’ve been walking in the darkness without light for a while, relying mostly on your desire for light to keep you moving. That’s what I mean; to allow yourself to believe in the light-made-flesh who is Jesus Christ. Let this truth inflame your hearts with a desire for that light so that, even when you cannot see how God will make it all right in the end… when you’re in a proverbial eclipse of the moon or sun and cannot see their light, you can nonetheless keep going, knowing your desire for light is not in vain.
When you cannot see him, when you cannot see that light, There will be a Mary Magdalen, a friend, our parish community, a priest, a teacher, or some other disciple who will come to you with a word from Jesus’ own shining lips “Do not be afraid… go to Galilee, and there [you] will see me.” That “Galilee” is not Palestine, but the tabernacle, the liturgy, the charity of Christians, and the words of scripture.
Desire is destiny and we desire your destiny to be eternal life. So it is that we call upon you to recognize and feed that desire for light, that desire to see. Follow it with us, even when it’s dark. Be not afraid! The day is coming, the sun is rising, and soon you will see the face of God.