In the 17th century, a Jesuit priest named Father Kircher famously speculated, after visiting the coast of Sicily, that “the shells of shellfish, after being ground to powder, come to life again.” This gave rise to the theory of the shell as a water phoenix.
The myth is an old one, and in the medieval ages, burial grounds often had snail shells mixed into the soil. The shells were an allegory of a grave from which the dead creature would awaken. They were resurrection shells.
It’s such a fascinating idea, that the earth-bound, slimy, mottled snail shell would come to symbolize invincible hope. The ancients were very observant in their understanding of the world, and to them everything in nature contained deeper meaning. They observed how, in the depth of winter when all the world is skeletal and lifeless, snails plunge into the ground and shut themselves up inside their shells as though in coffins. There, the snail quietly dreams of better days. In the spring, Easter arrives and sings its hallelujahs over the earth and the snail resurrects.
Shells are mysterious artifacts, found at the seashore but also at the top of mountains. They’re everywhere. A man named Nicholas Steno, who lived in the 17th century and was beatified in 1988, traveled the world looking at shells, cataloging and examining them. He eventually proposed the theory that the tops of mountains had once been the floors of ancient oceans. In doing so, he revolutionized geology.
In his book The Seashell on the Mountaintop, Alan Cutler writes about pilgrims who visit Steno’s tomb in Florence and how all of us, as much possible, take annual pilgrimages of our own, perhaps not to the tomb of a holy man, but rather to the mountains or the beach, and Steno is right there with us as a patron saint to all who pick up rocks and shells to bring home.
Perhaps you’ve picked up a shell to hear the ocean waves inside, or knelt down to examine fossilized ammonites embedded in Missouri sandstone. Shells are little homes grown by their hosts, spun out from an axis, emulating the mathematical golden ratio, spiraling, unending, widening, like a whirled galaxy of stars, brightening and glimmering, eventually encompassing the cosmos in pure light. The beauty and transcendence of a shell is manifest. Once you see it, once you take the time to look closely, you can intuit why, in the hands of a priest, a scallop shell is transformed, submerged not in salty brine but into the waters of baptism. It gathers and pours living water over the head of one who thereby becomes a new creation.
We, as new creations born from the waters of baptism flowing from the side of Christ, define ourselves by this same relationship to an axis. Our relationship with Our Lord is there in the decisions we make, the way we think, the sort lives we dream of living. He is at the heart of everything. Even those who don’t know him well, or don’t know him even at all, are constantly winding around or away from him. He is the still place at the center of creation, the resurrected life-giver. The way we turn round him reveals the dignity inherent in each of us, his unquenchable life drawing us onward into the next life.
In the sacraments, through the power of his resurrection, there is such an abundant outpouring of God’s grace that it flows everywhere, whether we are aware or not. We are to be filled with it. We are to be remade by it. He has conquered death and the grave is an empty shell. That which we feel emanating from ourselves, Christ within us, poured out and expressed like shells from the bodies of the humble creatures that we are, it is the stirring of eternity.
St. Peter puts it quite simply, “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree. This man God raised on the third day…To him all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.”
He died, death could not conquer him, and now he offers to share his life with all who believe in him and repent of their sins.
It sounds so simple, but it describes a reality that is more expansive than the entire universe.
There’s a shell out there in the wild known as the Grand Benitier, or the Grand Baptismal Font. It weighs up to fourteen pounds and it’s rumored to require four horses all working together to pry it open. It’s almost too big to image actually existing. But exist it does. Consider what that shell is meant to hold, the sacrament for which it is named – it becomes the container for the water of life, the sacramental reality of the resurrection. Consider how it, a simple creature, is filled with grace. Consider that you, a creature even closer to the heart of God, in your own way, are a kind of shell, a resurrection shell curved around Christ, filled with grace, who even though you will die you will live again, reaching from the winter earth to the sky in the sure and certain hope that you will meet your Lord there, someday. By his mercy, you will.
Happy Easter.
Pondus Meum Amor Meus 