“Ups and Downs”

Is it just me, or do you also feel the world and everyone in it is in a funk? The economy is in the tank, the church is stumbling toward an unknown future and people are left wondering what it’s all about.

Maybe it’s time for the yo-yo to make a comeback. During the Great Depression, the yo-yo was the greatest craze ever. Even poor people could afford it; and if they couldn’t, they could make one from pieces of scrap wood and a string. And any kid could make it work. It almost worked itself.

But most important for the times, the yo-yo was a cultural icon. As it scurried back up the string, sometimes whistling along the way, it was a promise, a sign, almost a sacramental symbol that what goes down will come up. It made people feel that even if they were on their back today, they would be on their feet tomorrow.

And that is why the yo-yo is also a symbol for the Ascension. If anyone led a yo-yo of a life, it was certainly Jesus. It began when his Father flung him abruptly from the heights of heaven to the depths of the desert. Some days he would be the friend of everyone and the next day he would be scorned by the crowds. Even his family jerked him around.

In the last week of his life, he was the plaything of traitors, enemies, friends, religious leaders, political sycophants and the uncertain cultural climate. His whirlwind, spinning life shuddered to a halt when he died. And if that weren’t bad enough, he slipped farther into the regions of the nether world.

But all of a sudden, with a flick of the wrist, his Father snapped him back into action. Yo-yo Jesus was jolted from the inertia of hell, crashed through the crust of the earth, zoomed toward the outer edges of the universe. Then, to the clapping of the planets and the dancing of the stars, Jesus leapt back into the hand of his Father.

What makes a yo-yo work? Hope. The brute force of gravity drags it down, but the bright spirit of hope scoots it back up again. Otherwise, it would spin in its tracks.

It is true that Jesus, along with the Pharisees, believed in some kind of resurrection. But most of the Jews probably did not. And even for those who did, it was a fuzzy idea imported from another religion. They had no idea of what resurrection entailed. But what they did believe is that it happened at the end of the world when everyone would rise all together. That is probably what Jesus believed. Not much to believe in when dangling from a cross — or a string.

But Jesus had hope. No matter if the gravity of life dragged him into the ground; no matter if the folly of friends dashed his plans to smithereens; no matter if his kingdom-project didn’t seem to get off the ground. No matter, even, if his Father seemed to dangle him between heaven and earth. What mattered was that no matter what happened, he had high hopes that his Father would ultimately come through and make things right. He hung on to the impossible hope that despite all evidence to the contrary, he would eventually end up back in the hand of his Father.

As it goes with Jesus, so it goes with us. We live in hope. Because we are not in charge of the world, or even in charge of ourselves. We dangle between heaven and earth, good and bad, sin and grace, salvation and damnation.

Fr. James Smith is the pastor at St. Matthias Church in Columbus, Ohio, and a long-time contributor of homilies and theological reflections to Celebration.

Why Celebrate the Ascension? 

One early summer evening, shortly after the end of the school term, my Dad rather solemnly — so it seemed to me — took the training wheels off my bike. Then, while he mowed the lawn, my Mom and I slowly walked my two-wheeled test to the school playground at the end of our block. I was going to ride a bike without training wheels!

Of course it was harder to peddle on a field than on asphalt, but Kansas grass isn’t high. And it did make for a softer landing. This was the procedure. Mom would hold the bike upright while I mounted it. Standing alongside me, with a hand on each of the handle bars, she would run alongside the bike as I peddled. “That’s it. Now peddle faster. Okay, I’m going to let go of the handle bars. Keep peddling! Hold the handle bars steady! Keep peddling!”

I would peddle a few feet, sometimes a few more, and then skid to ground. We would begin all over again, and then again. Mom lost five pounds that summer.

If the Ascension means the departure of the Lord Jesus, why celebrate it? Who rejoices over the loss of a loved one? Clearly this is not a day to remember what was lost. We celebrate what was gained.

For the first time, our humanity, the nature assumed by Christ, has been taken into the Godhead. This is a coming of age for the human race, something akin to the removal of training wheels.

Here, the sainted scholars of the Church diverge a bit. It’s not clear whether we were created to enjoy the very life of God, or if this is the gladsome result of the Incarnation. Put another way, we don’t know whether the Incarnation, and the resultant glorification of our humanity, happened because of sin, or despite it. Either way, as it did happen, Christ took on our humanity so that we might share his divinity. Today, in him, our humanity is first raised to that height.

There’s another aspect to the Ascension. Our companionship with Christ passes from the self-evident to the mystical. Apparitions give way to the Church and her sacraments. Christ’s presence among us doesn’t decline; it matures. Think of it this way: this is the day Christ let go of the handle bars. God retreats enough so that the Church might become her own self. God lets go — just as my Mom did those handle bars — so that human faith and courage might have a go. “So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God. But they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs” (Mk 16: 19-20).

This is a day worth celebrating, because, in heaven, in the person of Christ, our humanity was raised into the Godhead, and because, on earth, that same humanity was set free to grab the handle bars and ride the winds, commissioned to be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Rev. Terrance W. Klein

Salvation? From What?

Startling similarities–and startling differences–between that early community gathered to replace Judas, and the Heaven’s Gate cult waiting to waft away behind the Hale-Bopp Comet.Both groups longed for a way of living as an upright, loving community “not of this world,” who had met a charismatic leader offering a richness of spirit they’d never known before. The values of the prevailing culture were fatuous and unfulfilling, so they tried to rise above it, living a common life, sharing money, food, living quarters. Both communities believed that through death would come resurrection and ascension into a “higher level.”Remarkable similarities. But remarkable differences, too.

The people who gathered to replace Judas didn’t gather for mass suicide–for negation of human life, but for profound affirmation of this life, and the penetrating richness of the divine, other-worldly dimension into our present existence. For this continued life, Jesus chose twelve leaders–-the fulfillment of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Now they gathered to fill the leadership, in order to continue. These idealists didn’t gather to “take off” but to “carry on.” They found Heaven’s Gate not in the tail of a comet–or even in the path of the departed Jesus. They found Heaven’s Gate welcoming us into a richer life, right here and now, in their everyday lives.

The major difference between modern cults like Heaven’s Gate in San Diego and the early Church community in Jerusalem is that the modern cultists were out to save themselves, but the first Christians were out to save others. And equally important: they didn’t want to save either themselves or others from the world, but to save the world from itself.

I used to believe “saving souls” meant snagging them as they started falling ultimately and irretrievably into some future hell. Like a wild-eyed cartoon character shouting at the orgy: “Repent! Doom is near!” Now I believe a Christian’s purpose is to keep souls from atrophy here and now, from a lifelong hell of meaningless coping, treading water, mindlessly killing time till time kills us. I feel my Christian mission is to disabuse people, especially young people, of the erroneous belief that, in a just world, life should be all spring break. There’s no just world; just the world we have. And in that world, certain inescapable forces encroach on our freedom, like the need to eat, therefore the need to work. We also need to sleep, which means we doze away one-third of the days we have, which makes the other two thirds of each day all the more precious. And since those realities are, in fact, inescapable, you by God better enjoy them, because you only go round once. And if you truly live only on the weekends and spend the rest of the week merely moaning and enduring, you miss out on five-sevenths more of your one life.

Not salvation from hell, but salvation from joyless drudgery! Jesus says it today, “that they may share my joy completely.” The joy of being a divinely-alive human being!

A psychiatrist once had twin boys, one an incurable pessimist, the other an incurable optimist. So to cure them, one Christmas he filled the pessimist’s room with toys, and the optimist’s room with horse manure. When he went into the optimist’s room, the boy was cringing in fear, pouting, and the father said, “Honey, don’t you realize all these are yours?” And the little boy whimpered, “But, Daddy, if I move, I’ll break them.” When the father went into the optimist’s room, the boy was dancing around, laughing, tossing lumps of manure in the air, singing. The father said, Honey, don’t you realize what this stuff is,” and the boy giggled, “Yes, Daddy! With all this horse stuff, there must be a pony!”

Christians have unshakable hope that behind all the ugliness there is, indeed, a pony. And the pony’s name is Jesus.

Bill O’Malley

He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit (Gospel).

In her book, Survivor, Christina Crawford writes: “Lost is a place, too.”

That’s more than a clever sound-byte. It’s a deep truth that’s often lost in a world within which success, achievement, and good appearance define meaning and value.

What can that phrase teach us? That sometimes it’s good to be without success, without health, without achievements to bolster us, without good appearance, and even without meaning. Being down-and- out, alone, lost, struggling for meaning, and looking bad, is also a valid place to be.

One of the greatest spiritual writers of all time, John of the Cross, would agree with that. If he was your spiritual director and you explained to him that you were going through a dark, painful patch in life and asked him: “What’s wrong with me?” He would likely answer:

“There’s nothing wrong with you; indeed, there’s a lot right with you. You’re where you should be right now: in the desert, letting the merciless sun do its work; in a dark night, undergoing an alchemy of soul; in exile, lamenting on a foreign shore so that you can better understand your homeland; in the garden, sweating the blood that needs to be sweated to live out your commitments; being pruned, undergoing spiritual chemotherapy, to shrink the tumours of emotional and spiritual dead-wood that have built up from wrong-turns taken; in the upper room, unsure of yourself, waiting for pentecost before you can set out again with any confidence; undergoing positive disintegration, having your life ripped apart so that you can rearrange it in a more life-giving way; sitting in the ashes, like Cinderella, because only a certain kind of humiliation will ready your soul for celebration; and undergoing purgatory, right here on earth, so your heart, soul, and body can, through this painful purging, learn to embrace what you love without unhealthily wanting it for yourself.”

He’d also tell you that this can be a good place to be, a biblical and mystical place. That doesn’t make it less painful or humiliating, it just gives you the consolation of knowing that you’re in a valid place, a necessary one, and that everyone before you, Jesus included, spent some time there and everyone, including all those people who seem to be forever on top of the world, will spend some time there too. The desert spares nobody. Dark nights eventually find us all.

Knowing this, of course, doesn’t make it easier to accept feeling lost and on the outside, especially in a world in which being successful is everything. That’s why it’s hard to ever admit, even to our closest friends, that we’re struggling, tasting more ashes than glory. Small wonder that our Christmas letters to our friends each year invariably are a list of all that’s gone well in our lives and never an admittance of struggle or humiliation.

The need to name being lost as a valid place is important for us, both communally and personally.

In many ways, at least in the Western world, that’s exactly where the church is today, namely, in the desert, in a dark night, lost, being pruned, undergoing a purifying alchemy. We’re experiencing public humiliation in the sexual abuse scandal, in our greying and emptying churches, and in the strong anti-clericalism inside our culture. We’re aging, unsure of ourselves, lacking in vocations, and becoming ever more marginalized.

But that’s a place too, a good place to be. From the edges, humbled and insecure, we can again become church.

The same holds true in our personal lives. We have our good seasons, but we have seasons too where we lose relationships, lose health, lose friends, lose spouses, lose children, lose jobs, lose prestige, lose our grip, lose our dreams, lose our meaning, and end up humbled, alone, and lonely on a Friday night. But that’s a place too, a valid and an important one. Inside that place, our souls are being shaped in ways we cannot understand but in ways that will stretch and widen them for a deeper love and happiness in the future.

Good wines are aged in cracked old barrels. That’s what makes them rich and mellow. They can, of course, go sour during the process. That’s the risk. The soul works in the same way and, thus, we might ask whether failure and loneliness, as they shape our souls, need to be re-imagined aesthetically: Are maturity and transformation, growth in beauty, not about more than success, health, having it all, and looking like a million dollars?

Beauty is ultimately more about the size of our hearts, about how much they can empathize, and how about widely and unselfishly they can embrace. To that end, the desert-heat of loneliness is helpful in softening the heart, enough at least to let it be painfully stretched. That happens more easily when we’re lost, feeling like unanimity-minus-one, unsure of ourselves, empty of consolation, aching in frustration, and running a psychic temperature. Not pleasant, but that’s a place too.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser

Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his web site,www.ronrolheiser.com.

Cutting Back

The Gospel has the familiar story about the vine and the branches. We are, of course the branches, and Jesus is the vine. He will always be there and will always bring us all the nourishment we need. Maybe you would like to stop here and contemplate this rich image.

Because just beyond it there is the small matter of being pruned. To prune a plant is to cut branches of it off. Jesus mentions this twice in our Gospel reading: Speaking as the vine, he says that the Father

“takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit,
and every one that does
he prunes, so that it bears more fruit.”

Ouch. If we bring forth no fruit, we “will be thrown out like a branch and wither.” If we bear fruit, we have to be pruned anyway. We lose either way!

The version of Murphy’s law that I know is “if anything can go wrong, it will.” It seems to apply. If only I were a better person, if only I had done the right thing, if only the world were different, if I had been dealt a better hand in the game of life, or, or, or, or. If I weren’t so full of guilt I wouldn’t have to be pruned. It is all my fault.

Or,

look how much fruit I bear! That means I have to be pruned! I must have done something wrong.

Guilt is a major feature of human life. Many people take the crucifixion as a direct result of their own sins. “I caused this, my sins killed Jesus.” This is not completely false, but guilt can get out of control in this paradigm.

So, how to deal with guilt?

First, decide whether you are bearing no fruit at all. None. If that is really and actually true, then get help from someone, because spiritually you are dying. Remember that most of us do bear good fruit—it is just that we don’t remember that we do.

Second, with that matter settled, look at what pruning is. It is a way to make things better, make a better plant, a better tree, a better orchard. If you cut tired old branches from your Philodendron, the plant begins to thrive again, not wither. Pruning is done to encourage new growth and the overall health of the plant or tree. Seen in that way, you and I do need to be trimmed regularly, don’t we?

Here is an example. Maybe unconsciously we have been thinking that we ourselves are the vine, independent of Christ. The reason pruning would help is not punishment, but promotion of the health of the whole person, the whole garden, the whole orchard—the mystical body of Christ.

Trust the steadiness of Jesus’ gardener hand. Trust even while suffering. Drink in your overflowing share of trust at Sunday’s table of the Lord. Let the Word instruct you, let the body and blood of Christ, which was pruned to almost nothing, fill you and shape you.

Then you can say to the Lord with the rest of us, go ahead, trim whatever gets in the way! I am not the vine, I am a branch. My job is not to be perfect, it is to remain in you, Christ, and to let you do good within me and through me.

Fr. John Foley, S. J. is a composer and scholar at Saint Louis University.

Keeping in Contact

In the weeks after Easter, the Church’s lectionary turns our attention in a special way to the Acts of the Apostles, which recount the continuing drama of the early Church in the wake of the resurrection. Usually the lectionary readings for any given day find their center of gravity in the Gospel, but during Eastertide it almost seems as if the Gospel becomes a commentary on Acts, providing background images and interpretive keys to the events unfolding there.

Last week’s reading from Acts, for instance, features St. Peter proclaiming the good news to the people of Jerusalem, while in the distance we hear the echo of the Lord’s voice from John, saying “I am the good shepherd.” In faithfully proclaiming the message of Jesus’ resurrection, Peter is gathering together a new people from the tribes of Israel under the kingship of the promised Messiah, who is both the shepherd of the people and the lamb sacrificed for their salvation. The entire biblical narrative, in fact, could be rendered as one long “gathering” of the human race from the disintegration of sin into the embrace of divine love. Yet it is remarkable that, after the climax of God’s encounter with humanity in the person of Jesus, we find Peter in the foreground and Jesus in the background: it Peter who is now doing the gathering, in the power of the Spirit he has received at Pentecost.

There is a part of me that is absolutely terrified and intimidated by these passages from Acts, especially when they are read in light of Jesus’ words in the Gospel. The rationale for my terror is very neatly encapsulated in the First Letter of St. John: “as He is, so are we in this world” (4:17). The saying has its roots in the very words of Jesus, who said in the Gospel of John, “as the Father has sent me into the world, so I am sending you” (John20:21). If you recall, that is what Jesus says to his followers when he appeared to them after his resurrection, as they were huddled up in fear behind locked doors. That is what he says to them immediately after giving them his peace, and immediately before breathing his Spirit upon them. In my opinion, Christian disciples do not give enough attention to the magnitude of what is being conveyed in these passages. The point is one that should inspire awe, or else invite ridicule: we are to carry on Jesus’ work in the world.

I am very fond of Rowan Williams’ little book, Tokens of Trust, which I have used in my intro Theology classes for the last several years. One of the lines I keep returning to from that book is that “Christianity is a contact before it is a message.” What Williams is saying, I think, is that the Christian faith is fundamentally based on a human encounter: an encounter with a human person who is as human as any of us, and yet who also—mysteriously yet unequivocally—embodies the divine presence in its fullness. Jesus is not only the vehicle of God’s message; there have been many of those already in salvation history, whether angels, lawgivers or prophets. No, Jesus is much more than simply a medium; He is also the message: the eternal Logos which is begotten by the Father before all ages.

The contact God has made with humanity in the Christ event is one that no longer requires an extrinsic reference point beyond itself to verify its authenticity. Christ does not point his disciples to any destination that is not coterminous with Himself, which is why He can say things like “live in me” and “apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus presents himself not only as a model and teacher, but as bread, as living water and as the vine. We are called not only to listen to his words and follow his example, but to somehow share his life, to participate in his very being. Indeed, this participation is what I think is on display in the accounts of the apostles’ adventures in Acts. It is not strong enough to say that there the apostles act as “representatives of Christ,” like my congressman acts on my behalf in Washington. St. Paul’s term “ambassadors of Christ” is a little closer, insofar ambassadors in the ancient world were understood to have taken on the persona of the one they represented, but even still, I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that when we encounter the apostles proclaiming the Gospel in Acts, we are in some way witnessing Christ himself acting amidst the people of that time and place.

When we recount St. Peter boldly addressing the people, or St. Stephen forgiving his murderers with his last breaths, we are witnessing again the work of the “branches” bound to the vine of Christ. Paul will only slightly modify the image in calling the Church a “body” whose head is Christ. In baptism, Christians become part of an organic unity that shares the same life as a person who rose from the dead two thousand years ago, and the same life that ultimately knows no beginning or end. Christ’s life pulses through our veins, and yet it also flows through all the many branches which have been united to him throughout the ages. The “contact” of the Christian faith ultimately centers on the divine life of the incarnate Word, but it equally relies upon an encounter with the branches through which that divine life has been transmitted through each generation. In this sense, all of us owe our faith to a “branch,” and others in turn may depend on us for their own incorporation into the “vine.”

That is why I find the idea of “being sent as He was sent” so terrifying. For whom am I to be the embodiment of Christ as my parents and mentors were to me? Whom am I, through the power of the Spirit, to be “gathering” into the Body by my words and actions?  Even in the case of Paul, whom Christ met directly on the road to Damascus (and as good a candidate for self-sufficiency as any), we hear of the instrumental role played by Ananias and Barnabas, to whom he is entrusted so as to be fully grafted into the concrete community of the Church. We all need other people—real people—if we are to live out the Christian life, since the Christian life is nothing else but the life of Christ himself, which we encounter first and foremost in the lives of those who share his life as “branches on the vine.”

BY: PATRICK CLARK

Hankering after the “Old Faith”

“This is my commandment: love one another.”

The two men who came to visit were immaculately dressed. There was a sweetness about their courtesy, even though you could sense they were stern. They came to present a large book to someone they thought would be sympathetic, someone who respected the pope and was unafraid to write about sin.

“I still believe in the old faith,” one of them said.

“The old faith? What faith?”

“I mean our faith before they started talking about love all the time. There was right and wrong and punishment. There was fear of God and the following of the law. Since Vatican II and the theology of love, everything has been watered down and made easy.”

My heart went out to the men. But it was with sadness. “Well, when do you think the love stuff started? Don’t you think Jesus talked about love?”

One of them said he knew there was a place for love, but in these days it had taken over everything and made a mess of the church. I felt depleted and tense after the meeting was over. It seemed that this good man had missed so much. Yet he was trying to reach for a truth that we all are somehow in touch with.

As for love, the Gospels and Epistles would fragment into a million pieces without it. Our saints would be incomprehensible, our heroes nonexistent. And Jesus would not be. “For God so loved the world that he sent. . .”

The following passage is from the First Letter of John, not the Second Vatican Council: “Love is of God. Everyone who loves is begotten of God and has knowledge of God. The person without love has known nothing of God, for God is love. Love, then, consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us and has sent his Son as an offering for our sins.” How could we imagine a Christianity before love became its center?

The love that this letter describes is not primarily our love of God, but God’s love for us revealed in the offering of the Son for the forgiveness of our sins. It is the same love that Paul celebrates in the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians, the love from which, he writes in Romans, we can never be possibly separated.

Jesus, in the fourth Gospel, calls us to live in that love. How are we to do that? By keeping his commandments. Ah, finally the law, finally right and wrong. And what is his commandment? “Love one another as I have loved you.” There is no escape. Our faith in Jesus is haunted by the mystery of love.

Perhaps this mystery itself is what causes us disquiet. Love, after all, is not easily won, rarely found, and never really earned. It also leads to improbable situations like that of the prodigal son and the lost sheep and to forgiveness for dreadful sinners.

This is, of course, not the narcissistic and self-indulgent state of mind that passes for “love” in contemporary life. Nor is it the great tidal wave of emotion associated with “falling in love.” Rather it is, Paul reminds us, patience and kindness. It lets go of jealousy, conceit, and resentment. It delights in the truth. It trusts. It hopes. It endures. All of these qualities of love are attributes of God’s love for us. What is more, love’s greatest expression—to lay down one’s life for one’s friends—is what the Passion means.

None of this is new. And none of it is easy.

To have or not have rules can be easy. To keep or break commandments can be easy. We can set up our lives in such a manner that we allow no restraint or limit on our egos and desires. We can also legislate our lives so relentlessly that we delude ourselves into thinking that we have actually earned, produced, and now control the love that our scriptures speak of.

But the love revealed in Jesus, simple as it sounds, is terribly arduous. That is why the history of our faith so often reads like a history of our resistance to love.

Give us rules. Give us magic. Give us threats. Give us mighty victories in war or splendid successes in the marketplace to insure our worthiness. Give us Communion counts, converts, and the approval of the nations to guarantee our righteousness. But the mystery of love?

One of Dorothy Day’s favorite passages from world literature occurs in Dostoevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, where the old Father Zossima points out to Madame Hohlokov that her supposed crisis of faith is really a crisis of love: “For love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. . . . But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps a complete science.”

No, love is not as easy as we may think. And its challenge to us is certainly nothing new.

John Kavanaugh, S. J.

Father Kavanaugh is a professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University in St. Louis