With You Always

In the Catholic Lectionary, today is the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. Forty days after Easter Christ was taken up to Heaven before the eyes of His Apostles, who still expected the earthly Kingdom of Israel restored. If you ever think you don't 'get' it, remember that neither did His closest followers at first. To add to their confusion the famous men in white appeared, asking, "Men of Galilee, why do you stare into the sky? This Jesus...will return." Yet in the Gospel of Mark read during today's Mass, we are left with Christ's promise, "I am with you always, until the end of the age."

It's a wonderful, consoling, hopeful, thrilling consolation. He is with us always. 

When we are dealing with death, He is there.

Illness? He holds our hand.

That aggravating coworker? Christ is by your side, ready to help you deal with that rascal with all the Christian Charity you can muster.

He is even there when we face too much. I am not one to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle. Neither do I believe in Jesus, take the wheel. We are here to do whatever job the Lord wants us to do. It's our task, not His. That might mean we are allowed to become overwhelmed precisely so that we get it in gear, to get our house in order, to be in a sense told to stop. You can't handle all that. Prioritize. Learn to focus. Do what you can and let go of what you can't. And Christ will still be there through it all for support.

His physical self left us. But Christ the Son of God remains with us as God. Until the end of the age. 

Weeping for Lazarus

In today's Gospel in the Catholic lectionary, we hear the story of Lazarus raised from the dead. Lazarus was the brother of Martha and Mary, and Christ was personally close to them. 

While two days away preaching Christ was informed that Lazarus was very ill. By the time he reached Bethany where the three friends lived, Lazarus had been dead four days. As Christ approached the tomb, He wept.

That's rather peculiar, isn't it? In the moments before Our Lord was to pray to His Father for help, He wept. He was soon to command, "Lazarus, come out!" surely knowing he would, yet Jesus cried. But why should He?

Because he understood the evil of death better than we can. Christ understood it on a deeper, more profound level. He became man precisely to do that, to take on fully what it means to be human and to atone for evils such as death. He would eventually die for that, hung from a tree as the Apostles would say, to make a better life possible for you and me.

That's love. That's why we need to accept as our Savior, Christ Jesus.

On A Friday Afternoon

Death on a Friday Afternoon by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is the most recent book that I've read. I haven't read another book since, having finished it in January. I don't know that there's another book worth reading, quite frankly. Nothing that I've picked up since has held my attention. This is not hyperbole, nor overstatement. The bottom line fact of the matter is that I've never been so shaken or so profoundly upended by anything else I've read, seen, or heard.

I want very much to talk about it. Several times I've began to write about the book and the issues and ideas it explores but abandoned the attempt. Today I have resolved to try finally to put my impressions to words.

Until recently I thought I had a pretty clear understanding of Christianity in general and my own Catholicism in particular. Yet now, all that seems incredibly wrong. Not that I am no longer Catholic nor because I lack faith in religion or the Church, but because Neuhaus simply laid down arguments so compelling they leave my spirit in wonder. I'm almost ashamed of the childishness which passed for thought in me all these 65 years.

Neuhaus emphasizes the last words of Christ while on the Cross and what they might - almost what they must, but we have to be careful about putting our meaning into Our Lord's words, as even he concedes - and why they're so important. He urges the reader to spend some time on Good Friday at the foot of the Cross with Jesus, and not to rush to Easter so quickly, especially so that we consider His words as He was nailed to a tree.

Christ had to die, you know. That's something we tend to ignore, or at least brush past. The imagery is too disturbing. But He had to die to make right all the wrongs in the world. We can't do it, we humans. At our poor level of understanding we can't fully comprehend evil and as such can't fix things. "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," Jesus begs on our behalf as He hangs there dying. Someone who knows completely what must be done has to do the job of atonement - at-one-ment, Neuhaus says - because things must be made right. It's simple justice.

But I do not do the book justice. So many things Neuhaus says are simply gems of theology which never occurred to me before. Some are more compelling in the human sense. To give an example, we generally see the Cross as very tall and intimidating. Yet Neuhaus asserts that it was about seven foot high; His Mother Mary and St. John the Apostle were almost at eye level with Him at the foot of the Cross. When Jesus says, "Woman, behold thy son...Son, behold thy mother," He was speaking directly to them in every sense.

Neuhaus comes dangerously close to supporting universalism, the idea that everyone will eventually be saved. I would never have given universalism the time of day before reading this book. I am still skeptical about it. But Neuhaus never says that universalism must be true, only pointing out that God works in whatever way God wants to work, and that we should be careful about assigning imperatives to Him. As such, and despite my philosophic doubts (I think it is fair to ask why we're put through any trials at all if we're to end up in the same place, though I do think that there may be a proper response to that), I am open to the idea that we may live in the hope that all find Heaven. That's a thought I would never have entertained not that long ago.

At times I had to stop reading because I was too teary-eyed to continue. We tend to think of evil as murder and theft and all those things covered by the Ten Commandments, but that isn't the whole of it. The young child who dies of leukemia - that's an evil. It must be made right. We can't take on the depth of that evil. Yet God can, by making it possible for that child to be reborn in the Great Glory of Heaven. Christ had to die because someone had to bear the stain of all evil. All evil.

And He gave himself up so willingly. Why didn't He call legions of angels to save Him from human clutches? Because it wouldn't have served justice. It would not save that child from illness, nor make up for it. It would have only brought glory to the god-man. But what good is there really in a god saving himself? Such a being would be above the world, not in it, and thus looking out for himself, not us. The Christian God insists He's here for us.

What may have hit me hardest reading Death on a Friday Afternoon was a quote Neuhaus used late in the book. It was from a hymn I sang in high school choir, the words of which always have stuck with me:

Those dear tokens of His Passion,

Still His dazzling body bear!

Cause of endless exaltation,

to His ransomed worshippers!

With what rapture, with, what rapture!

Gaze we on those glorious scars!

I can still sing it, though that would definitely not serve justice nor your ears. But the tune has stayed with me for fifty years now. It has run through my mind countlessly over those five decades. Those wounds, those scars of Christ, are the price of evil. And Christ paid it, making possible for each one of us the attainment of a greater good. 

I still fail to say how deeply this book has shook me. But I think I get it now, the big, final It, the real Truth, even as doubts linger. I am in awe, I am humbled; I find a strange, exciting calm in me about what the future brings. I feel I have discovered a great truth which is nearly beyond imagination, nearly unfathomable. 

I don't know what to think. And yet I find a clarity of thought I never imagined possible.

Holy Assurance

Today's Gospel ends with perhaps the most famous and significant promise of Christ: "Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age", St. Mark tells us. Jesus then ascends into Heaven before the confused Apostles.

If there is a greater assurance that God loves us I can't imagine it. He's always here, He will always look out for us. We forget that when all is well and, myself included, wonder where He really is in times of trouble. We're only human. When we're happy and content it seems as though that's the way it ought to be. When difficulties arise, we question everything. 

There's no need to question. We don't understand - we can't, at least not fully, understand - anything of the world. But He is with us. It'll be all right in the end. 

Good Friday 2016

Today is perhaps the day of greatest irony on our calendar. It is Good Friday, the day we Christians remember the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It doesn't seem that it should be called good. On the surface, the celebration (perhaps veneration is a better word) of someone's death, particularly a rather gruesome one, seems odd to say the least. Yet that is an interpretation based solely on earthly terms. When you consider that the great Divinity was involved, it casts an entirely different light on the situation.

God sent His only Son to be humiliated, to suffer and die horribly, for us. And He did it, his Son. Willingly. Such humility. Such a great act which cannot be seen except as fantastic. How could a sacrifice of that magnitude be seen in other than a positive light?

We cannot rightly see it any other way. Remember what Aquinas teaches: Christ is either lunatic, liar, or Lord. He Himself gives us no option but to answer the question in that frame. He claimed He could forgive others' sins: sins committed (on the surface) against other people by other people. That itself is effrontery or lunacy or even diabolical if He is not part of the Godhead. If He cannot actually do that, if He does not really have that power, then He lies or is insane. If He lies or is insane, then we cannot trust anything else He may say or teach or do. It's that simple.

Yet if we choose the example which faith recommends, if we see Him as Lord of all based on His actions in life and death as well as through the testimony of his trusted companions, then we see the need for praise and holy fear which His death illustrates to us. We understand what that death means: that the God of all humanity will not forsake humanity to her own selfish desires. He will give us an out, if you will, by living the greatest love of all: to give one's life for one's friends.

When the greatest One does that, what choice do we have but to call it Good?

Mary's Last Recorded Words

In the readings at Catholic Mass today, we find the story of the wedding at Cana. It is there where Christ performed his first miracle: turning water into wine. Yet what is sometimes overshadowed by that event are the last recorded words of the Virgin Mary: "Do whatever He tells you."

It is difficult to image these words and their timing as inadvertent. Christ is at the beginning of His public ministry; they must be seen as a foreshadowing of things to come. "Do whatever He tells you."

A simple yet marvelous statement. If we were to honor it, we would do great things for the world.

Improper use of Religious Icons

It seems, at a glance, to be much ado about nothing. There is a poster circulating which encourages Latinos to participate in the upcoming 2010 Census by pointing out that Christ was born was born while his parents were participating in the Roman census of the time. The point is to be unafraid (because of language barriers and the like) and to get yourself counted.

The Census is of course important; probably too important anymore, seeing as it has essentially become a pawn in the game of political power. As so much government cash depends on population, and, more critically, the distribution of House seats at the federal level and legislative seats in the several States being decided by its results, the every ten year count affects everybody.

It's kind of shame, really, that politics have become so important that a simple count of the citizenry creates such gamesmanship. Government shouldn't be so influential as to make the census such a fuss. But money and power come of it; especially the power of who gets what, so it's important that as many as possible in a given area belly up to the bar.

The admittedly inadvertent comparison of modern America with Imperial Rome is a sticking (perhaps) point to those of us on the right, but that is surely minor. As to the use of the religious imagery, the truly sad thing is that it is being used essentially to ensure that cash and influence are distributed, shall we say properly, to the various regions and groups within our borders. I had though Christ tossed the money changers out of the temple, but perhaps He's had a change of heart. Maybe the socialists have gotten to Him after all.

It reeks of a liberal attempt to be sure that they and their minions get their way at the ballot box and the coffers of the public treasury. Whoever came up with this idea should have been more respectful of the religious feeling of Christians generally rather than the few who see government as a religion.

Today's Gospel Reading

"Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood."

-The Gospel of Mark, Chapter 12, vs. 43-44

It is easy for any of us to give of our excess. But to give out of our own need is difficult indeed. Yet it seems to be precisely the sort of thing which Christ asks of us: give until, or even if, it hurts.

C. S. Lewis once said that that is the true measure of our charitable giving: if it doesn't affect us, we aren't giving enough.

So that's what He wants: he wants all of us, all that we have. So long as we hold back anything, we are not fully within Him. And how can we hold back when the One who walked among us held back nothing?