Monastery of the Holy Cross

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Easter Homily: Beyond the Frontier of Death

As we gather this morning, four astronauts are sailing toward the moon. Right now they are over 200,000 miles away from earth. The Artemis II mission is scheduled to circle around the moon tomorrow and begin the long return home.  NASA has a real-time mission tracker website, where you can look at video feeds from four cameras attached to the solar array wings. There is also a computerized diagram of the flight of the Orion spacecraft that allows you view the path to and from the moon from different angles, seeing the relative positions of earth, moon, and sun.

I thought of this last night at the Easter Vigil when we heard about God, at the beginning of creation bringing forth dry land from chaos and creating the two great lights. I came of age in the wake of the first lunar missions and and when I was around ten years old an uncle of mine gave me Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, a classic of science fiction, which I read and re-read. My father and I watched reruns of the original Star Trek series. I was enchanted by the mysterious music of the opening, with the famous monologue that begins, “Space: the final frontier.”

These were words that would have resonated with Americans, for whom, in the 1960s, the frontier still meant the wild west. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, wrote scripts for Westerns before conceiving Star Trek, and he modeled the show after the great naval exploratory novels of C.S. Forester.

Artemis II countdown

But Roddenberry was also and atheist, and I believe that he spoke too conclusively about space being the final frontier. He was right about something in the human spirit that craves discovery, that is impelled to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” But is space all there is?

When I got older, I fell in love with music, and this, for me, was also a kind of exploration, but of the mind and heart and community rather than of the physical cosmos. The world of art and music seemed to have truly endless possibilities, being unbound by time or space. But as you can see, I pursued neither the life of an astronaut nor of a musician. And that’s because, in the end, the final frontier for all of us is death.

In the words of Hamlet, the afterlife is the “undiscovered country,” though Hamlet, like Roddenberry, surely spoke a bit too hastily. That’s because we do have reports from beyond the grave.

We celebrate that first reconnaissance today, the day that Jesus rose from the dead after descending into hell, preaching to the captives in prison and liberating those who had been held captive to death. Not only has the undiscovered country been scouted out, it has been conquered, and we are free to move in and explore.

The Harrowing of Hell

For those of you who heard my homily on Good Friday, I hope that you mind me excavating a bit more a theme I introduced then. If this new world of the afterlife is now open for colonization as it were, how exactly do we get there? Do we just simply wait until we die? No; again, not in the physical sense. Rather, the entryway is baptism.

We were baptized into Christ’s death, Saint Paul says, so that “as Christ was raised from the dead…we too might walk in newness of life.” Right now, in the present tense, we are invited by God to live no longer by the flesh but by the Holy Spirit. This is the fulfillment of the distinctive human yearning for the beyond, the urge that impels us to venture into space and to plumb the depths of the heart. What we have been searching for all along is Jesus Christ, the Risen Christ, the God of love and infinite creativity.

So where do we go to explore this new country? In today’s second reading, Saint Paul says, “Seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Indeed, the very fact of the empty tomb is an invitation to seek Christ, but to do so spiritually, not physically.

The new world opened up for us by Jesus Christ is the spiritual life. And I don’t mean this in the sense of a boutique “spirituality,” where we choose a spiritual lifestyle that suits us. The spiritual life is the life of the unique Holy Spirit, God’s gift to us in baptism, the Spirit of Truth who will lead us into all truth. A personal “spirituality” limits us to what is comfortable. The Spirit of God makes us true explorers of what is real, what is given by God. And we discover this previously undiscovered country first of all in our own hearts.

Saint Macarius of Egypt said this of the human heart: “The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions, there are poisonous beasts, and all the treasures of evil, there are rough and uneven roads, there are precipices; but there too is God and the angels, life is there, and the Kingdom, there too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of grace. All things lie within that little space.”

Do you see that he is, like Saint Paul, urging us to seek what is above? God and angels, the apostles and heavenly cities and treasures. Yes, we must take up arms against the dragons and lions and poisonous beasts, that is our sins and vices, but victory is absolutely assured if only we cling to the Lord with all the love of our hearts and fight unwearied at His side.

He is risen indeed, and in His unsurpassed love for you, his sisters and brothers, He has invited us where truly no one had gone before, but now where await all the saints and angels at the eternal heavenly banquet.

Saint Monica

One of our principal ministries as monks is intercessory prayer. The requests we receive run the gamut, but there are a few that arrive in our inboxes more frequently than others. One of the most common comes from a parent deeply desiring that child or children who have ceased practicing their Catholic faith would return to the sacraments. This heartbreaking situation is unfortunately but unsurprisingly common in our culture. In addition to praying in my own voice for the persons involved, I commend those fallen away from the Church to the prayers of the great Saint Monica. Her son, Saint Augustine, was spiritually dead, avoiding baptism, in spite of her wishes that he receive the life of Christ. It is significant that the gospel assigned to her feast day today is the story of the widow of Nain [Luke 7: 11-17], whose young son Jesus raised from the dead, after He was moved with compassion at her grief.

He wandered off from his native Africa to Rome, then to Milan, where Providence directed him into the orbit of Saint Ambrose. The sophisticated Ambrose was perhaps the first man Augustine had ever met who was fully his intellectual peer. Ambrose’s homilies explained the Scriptures to young Augustine in a way that made him reconsider in his wavering. But he was still very much stuck in a number of vices. A year or two after his arrival in Milan, he read The Life of Anthony, the story of one of the greatest monks of Egypt, and this pricked his conscience even more. This was the prelude to the famous garden scene where he hears a child singing, “Tolle et lege!”–“Take and read!” The only reading material in reach was Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Upon reading Paul’s stirring call to newness of life, Augustine’s resistance broke, and he agreed to be baptized.

It was a long journey of the mind and heart. Augustine himself credited his mother’s prayers for his eventual embrace of the faith. Saint Monica knows the heartache of parents whose children have wandered off spiritually. May her powerful prayers bring many of them back to the fold.

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After I finished this, I discovered an article with a similar theme…

Monasticism and Magdalene

To the modern mind, Saint Mary Magdalene doesn’t seem like a promising role model for monks. The Church’s mind thinks differently, and it benefits us to pay attention.

Let’s begin with the Offertory chant assigned for today. It reads, “Deus, Deus meus, ad te de luce vigilo [Psalm 62: 2].” “O God, you are my God, for you I keep watch at first light.” If we don’t associate Mary Magdalene with keeping a nighttime vigil, it is perhaps because we don’t read the Scriptures as carefully and synthetically as did our forebears in the faith. An important detail behind today’s gospel meeting between Mary and Jesus is found at the end of John Chapter 19:

“Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried [John 19: 41].”

Jesus is buried in a garden and there appears risen from the dead. The image of a garden brings up all kinds of resonances, including with Eden. When Jesus first sees Mary, he refers to her as “Woman,”–Adam’s first name for Eve–as He did His Blessed Mother at Cana when he earlier spoke of His “Hour” [see John 2: 4]. Jesus is the New Adam, come to reverse the sin of the First Adam.

Another resonance is with the Song of Songs, which happens to provide the First Reading on this feast. In that masterpiece of eros-poetry, filled with garden imagery, the Bridegroom frequently goes missing, forcing the Bride to persevere in pursuing Him. The Bride says:

On my bed at night I sought him
whom my heart loves–
I sought him but I did not find him.
I will rise then and go about the city;
in the streets and crossings I will seek
Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him.

–Song of Songs 3: 1-2

Notice how this reading brings together the Psalm text with which we began, about keeping vigil at night. Mary Magdalene is not content to stay at home when her Lord is in the tomb. Her love impels her to go there in search of Him: “Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark [John 20: 1].” She finds an empty tomb, and not Jesus. Yet while Peter and John head home puzzled by the scene, she “remained outside the tomb [John 20: 11],” persevering, watching to see what happens, keeping vigil.

Saint Gregory the Great, the “Doctor of Desire,” saw himself as a watchman.

Saint Gregory the Great demonstrates his Benedictine sensibilities in a homily on this gospel, which is used for the Second Reading at this morning’s Office of Vigils.

“Though the disciples had left, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found…And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see Him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tells us: Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved [Matthew 24: 13].”

The monastic life is dedicated to the search for God, keeping watch in the night for Christ’s return, contemplating God’s creatures for traces of God’s Word, yearning to see His beauty in all things. Like the Bridegroom, God evades easy capture by the Bride. Those who desire to make God their sole Good will have to step out into the night of naked desire and persevere in seeking Him through the heart’s desire. Many distractions and many doubts flood the mind that would pursue God alone. This is why monks urge each other on with the exhortation, “Persevere!” And in doing so, we are urging one another to imitate Mary Magdalene, whose love ensured that she saw Him Whom her heart loved.

Celebrating Saint Athanasius and Nicaea

Today is the feast of Saint Athanasius, the great champion of the teaching of the First Council of Nicea. He was made bishop of Alexandria shortly after his attendance at the Council, but he spent much of his episcopacy in exile for his opposition to Arius, whose theology enjoyed a favorable reception among the governors of the empire. He was a stalwart supporter of the early monastic movement in Egypt, writing the biography of Saint Anthony the Great. In turn, the monks could be counted upon to support Nicene orthodoxy.

Here is a selection from my homily last Sunday:

This year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicea, the first ecumenical council. This council was convoked by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, and brought together nearly all of the bishops of the Church in the year 325. The principal item on the agenda was the teaching of a priest from the diocese of Alexandria in Egypt, whose name was Arius. Arius taught that Jesus was a man who was adopted by God. This was not an easy argument to make, given that Jesus says things in John’s gospel like, “Glorify me, Father, in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.” John’s gospel also famously begins with the lines, “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”

So as I say, it seems like Arius’s teaching would be a non-starter. And yet, it was quite popular, and the problem raised by Arius continued to plague the Church in different forms for many centuries. In fact, Arianism, the doctrine that Jesus is a man, not consubstantial with the Father, but adopted in some way as God’s Son, is a perennial temptation. This is because our reason, our rationality tends to say that two different things can’t also be the same, right? If I have an apple, I don’t say that it is also an orange; the two concepts are distinct. And so to say that Jesus is man, and also God at the same time, seems to be irrational. And Arius and his followers were simply ironing out problems with revelation by subjecting it to human reason, as it was understood at the time. Jesus can’t be both the uncreated God and a human creature.

What the Council of Nicea challenges us to do is to force our reason beyond its normal limits and to accept that, in fact, Jesus is consubstantial with the Father. In a few moments, we will say this, that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father, in what is often known as the Nicene Creed, the statement of belief produced by the bishops at the First Council of Nicea. The Church honors the great achievement of the Council by reciting these words at the liturgy. But this word “consubstantial” itself was controversial. It’s not a word that appears in Scripture, though Saint Paul hints at the idea frequently in his letters. Jesus not only has a human nature, but He is also by nature God, of the same substance as the Father.

What happens when we allow our reason to be suspended, and to take on faith that Jesus is God and man, is that our understanding of God and creation changes. God actually become more transcendent—or perhaps we would more accurately say that, because of the Incarnation, we now understand what it means to say that God is utterly transcendent.

As a side note, this is why the English translation of the Creed changed fifteen years ago. We used to say that Jesus Christ is “one in being with the Father.” But this seems to imply that the idea of “Being” comes before the idea of God. In fact, God’s transcendence, as we understand it from the mystery of the Incarnation, means that we can’t really speak of the concept of Being outside of God. God Himself is the Existence, the eternal Being, in which we partake.

The fact that Jesus is described as both God and man in the Scriptures forces us to stretch our reasoning abilities to account for what appears at first as a paradox. We can believe this truth even if we don’t fully understand it, even if we still have certain doubts about its proper meaning.

Homily for Easter Sunday

Catholic filmmaker Mel Gibson recently announced that he would begin filming the sequel to his most famous movie, The Passion of the Christ. The new film is set to be released next year, and the current working title is The Resurrection of the Christ, and it apparently will chronicle what happens after Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the women and the apostles.

On the Joe Rogan podcast, Gibson explained, “It’s the story of the Resurrection; It’s a nonlinear story. It took my brother, Randall Wallace, and me about six or seven years to finish the script. We’ve worked with historians. All the apostles died, but nobody dies for a lie; they die for the truth. I wanted to show that. Who rose three days after being killed in public? Certainly not Buddha.”

It is interesting to me that Gibson implies that the Resurrection is unique. And he has historians who are corroborating this conviction that he has. If he were working alongside his fellow filmmakers instead, he might come to a different conclusion. In Hollywood, resurrection seems to happen all the time. In the past thirty years, we’ve been treated to—or subjected to, depending on your cinematic tastes—films entitled Alien Resurrection, Halloween: Resurrection, Mechanic Resurrection (I kid you not), The Mummy: Resurrection, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and perhaps most surprisingly, four separate releases of movies simply called Resurrection. I could go on and on. From this small sampling, it would seem that people are being resurrected all the time. A cynic might suspect that an effort being made to downplay the uniqueness of the specific Resurrection that we are celebrating today.

It should also be noted that several of these movies are in the horror genre, which is to say that the mechanics, aliens and mummies rising from the dead (and to be honest with you, I’m not sure what it means to have a mummy rise from the dead), that these characters returning to life is something that puts them back into this same world that we thought that they had left for good.

So it appears that the notion of resurrection is commonplace today, and is almost certainly not good news. I presume that these resurrected aliens and mechanics and mummies will head back to the grave at some point. What I’m getting is this: we are so accustomed to the idea of resurrection that we might be in danger of domesticating its revolutionary meaning. It might come as a surprise to discover that the people of Jesus’s own day were rather unfamiliar with the concept. In the year 52 A.D., Saint Paul preached one of his most famous sermons in the city of Athens. In it, he announced that God raised Jesus from the dead. How do the sophisticated, philosophical Greeks respond? They scoff at him. “Sure! Come back another day and tell us more about this crazy idea.” Resurrection certainly was unique at that time. Even unthinkable.

Now, from this perspective, I want to point out something very interesting about the gospel from last night’s vigil and this gospel reading this morning. Here it is: Jesus does not appear at all. It’s amazing that, of all the Sundays and feast days of the Church, the only time Jesus doesn’t appear in the gospel reading is a few times in Advent, when He is not yet born, and then on Easter Sunday. What could this apparent absence mean for us?

First of all, it means this: the Resurrection is emphatically not simply a return of Jesus to the old life He had in this world. It’s not a resuscitation. He has somehow passed into the higher realms, and yet maintains contact with us, as if he were, for example, God. He challenges us to seek Him out, to follow Him. This is, in essence what Saint Paul was saying in today’s second reading—”seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”

The absence of a visible Jesus in this morning’s gospel is also a sign of just how new and baffling the actual resurrection was and is. There’s another very telling detail in the stories of the resurrection. The Apostles never seem to have questioned that Jesus life is now an eternal life—they do eventually see Him again in the flesh. But he is strangely changed. He is often completely unrecognizable at first. He’s a stranger on the road, a gardener, a man taking a walk on the sea shore at dawn. He is present, but He is present in a new and transfigured form. This is the opposite of the mundane understanding of resurrection trafficked by our contemporary culture. This isn’t more of the same. It is an elevation of human nature into the realm of the divine.

And, my brothers and sisters, we have been made partakers of this resurrection, even though we are still alive in the flesh. In baptism, we were united mysteriously to Christ in His death and Resurrection. This baptism, the promises of which we are going to renew in just a moment, conforms us to Christ, and it is what makes it possible for us to follow Him toward the hidden heavenly realms. Let’s look at the second reading again. Saint Paul says “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is.” Paul is speaking of the Resurrection that we were given when we were baptized, the light of Christ that now dwells mysteriously in our hearts, if we care to search for it.

Paul continues, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” So not only is Christ invisible to us in the gospels this morning, but our own new life is a hidden one, one that we must seek out to experience it. How do we seek it out: through prayer, through attentive participation at the liturgy, through the efforts we make to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and imprisoned. What we discover then, is that all of Jesus Christ’s teachings were not about making this a better world, but a map, an instruction manual on how to find God, to seek what is above while still in the flesh below. At the center of this is His presence in the Holy Eucharist, where He is visible only to the eyes of faith.

In today’s first reading, Saint Peter says that Jesus was not visible to everyone after the Resurrection. He appeared only to those who ate and drank with Him. Saint Peter is referring to us. We are the ones who now eat and drink with the Lord, and this means that we seek the things that are above not merely for ourselves, but to be able to report back to a world that labors, in so many ways, under the shadow of death: “Christ is risen indeed! He shall wipe away every tear from your eyes, and death shall be no more!”

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 2)

My second paradox is closely related to the first.

When the Son of Man is lifted up, he draws all to Himself [John 12: 32]. In John’s Gospel especially, it is the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross, His “lifting up,” that is the moment of Jesus’s glorification. Herein lies the paradox: how can glory emanate from the face that is hardly recognizable as human because of His wounds, His exhaustion, and the utterly shameful nature of death by Crucifixion?

While this paradox has been commented upon by many theologians, I first remember encountering a form of it in an essay by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in a book entitled On the Way to Jesus Christ. He observes, in the Liturgy of the Hours, two antiphons attached to the same Psalm 45 (44 in the Latin numbering) at Evening Prayer on Monday of Week Two. The Church has always taken this Psalm to refer to the marriage of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride. During the Second Week of Lent, the Church attaches to this Psalm the antiphon, “You are the fairest of the children of men and graciousness is poured upon your lips.” Jesus’s beauty is therefore emphasized, but especially the “inner beauty of his words,” as Cardinal Ratzinger puts it. He is the perfect man.

But this changes during Holy Week, when the antiphon is now a text taken from the prophet Isaiah: “He had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes [Isaiah 53: 2].”

To make sense of this contrast, Ratzinger points out that it cannot be a contradiction, since both antiphons derive from the same Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets. Invoking the English poet John Keats, he points out that the aphorism, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty” forces us to a critical evaluation of what we consider beautiful. We must accept that true beauty must somehow involve “wounds, pain, and even the obscure mystery of death and that this can only be found in accepting pain, not in ignoring it.”

Thus in the suffering Christ we see the beauty of our God accepting our pain in love, transforming it into life. We see a man, driven by a fervent love, freely willing to endure all manner of human violence and hatred in loving obedience to the Father. He loves His own to the very end and goes to any length to rescue us and to show us how lovable we are, even in our frequent unloveliness. That this is a kind of beauty can be inferred by its effects on us: it causes a kind of “compunction,” a breaking open of our hearts, often connected with tears, partly of joy, partly of pain.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s essay is primarily a reflection on Christian aesthetics, a topic to which he often returned in his occasional essays. He recognizes certain premonitions in Plato’s aesthetics (especially in the Phaedrus and Symposium), in the pagan philosopher’s belief that beauty wounds the beholder (which is to say, it causes a kind of compunction) and thus awakens in us a thirst for a deeper truth, something beyond superficial notions of beauty.

I would add that a similar premonition in the Greek pagan world can be found in the poets. As the great Alasdair MacIntyre observed, Homer’s Iliad demonstrates, subtly, how one can win a war by losing it. By this he means that the reader, in the end, tends to sympathize more with the vanquished Hector, even when his “appearance was so marred beyond human semblance [Isaiah 52: 14],” by the disgraceful treatment of his body by Achilles. There seems to be greater glory in the moral goodness and inner nobility of Hector than in the acknowledged excellence of Achilles. Why is this? We could speculate at length, but we see Hector dying for love of his city, versus Achilles fighting as a kind of hireling, a soldier of fortune. In the end, what redeems the character of Achilles, as is the case in all Greek tragedy, is our knowledge of his doomed mortality, not his perfections as a manly warrior.

[I note in passing that in this analysis, I part ways with important aspects of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek culture.]

What the pagans were not fully able to grasp (and indeed was anyone able to do it, except in prophecy by the Holy Spirit?) was that this inverted glory would be fully vindicated by God in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of God’s Son. The final beauty, for which the Christian hopes in the Iliad, is the vision of Hector and Achilles, like Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, reconciled by the death of Christ, and now, as friends, adoring the one, true God of us all. Until this final vision, all earthly beauty is provisional, existing in a tension between the intimation of God’s glory and the realism of human cruelty and suffering.

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 1)

Owing to my interest in sacred music and liturgy in general, I’ve been asked to join a few groups on Facebook. Recently, in one of these, I was quite amused by a long debate that had broken out. On one side was a Catholic liturgist, a very learned man whose writings I greatly esteem. In the opposing corner was an Orthodox believer, about whom I know little. The dispute was about the relative amount of rejoicing and lamenting to be found in the Lenten liturgies of the East and West. The Orthodox writer insisted that Western liturgies focused more on sin and penance, whereas the Byzantine liturgies were brighter, focusing on the joy of God’s salvation, and so on.

There are indeed many joyful texts in the Byzantine liturgies for Lent. But there are also long passages in which the faithful accuse themselves of every imaginable sin, of being the worst of all sinners, hard of heart. There are claims for continually weeping over sin. In this, I tended to side with my acquaintance, the Latin liturgist, who made just this argument.

What amused me, though, was the very idea that penance and the joy of Lent could be separated at all. This apparent paradox is easily understood if we attend to the theology of the liturgy. “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. [Romans 5: 10]” We do not weep for our sins hoping that God will save us if we attain the minimum required amount of contrition. Rather, we are already saved, despite the fact that we couldn’t possibly merit salvation. And it is this realization of God’s patience, His loving pursuit of us in our unloveliness, that gives rise to true penthos, or compunction. It is the response of the faithful on Pentecost. When they realized that they had conspired to put to death God’s Son, “they were cut to the heart [Acts 2: 37].” But did they therefore despair? No! They repented and were baptized, becoming followers of the Apostles.

It is well attested of many saints that, as they grew in holiness and nearness to God, they felt less worthy of friendship with God. The brighter the light in which we find ourselves, the more we see our imperfections. Yet it is God’s very nearness and purity, an experience, at root, of awe and bliss, that gives rise to this insight about ourselves. The closer we come to God in the liturgy and in prayer and in asceticism, the more we see how our sins keep us from fully experiencing the joy of life in Christ. And so we weep for our sins precisely because we are drawing near to God’s selfless, regenerating love. It is what theologian Khaled Anatolios calls “doxological contrition,” and which he holds to be the central meaning of salvation.

As I never tire of mentioning, Saint Benedict, who was extremely realistic about human failings and vices, mentions joy twice in his short chapter on the observance of Lent.

What is being described is the theological virtue of hope. Hope is the great forgotten theological virtue, and so perhaps it is no surprise that this Facebook disagreement went unresolved. For hope to be hope, we must hold in tension the fact that we remain sinners in need of salvation, and that somehow salvation has already been accomplished. In fact, until the eschaton, we are necessarily saved, not with final assurance, but “in hope [Romans 8:24]”: in such a way that we must continually work out our salvation in “fear and trembling [Philippians 2: 12].”

The faith of a child

Many years ago, when I was a young adult and attending a family event at my grandparents’, I had an amusing “discussion” with my four- or five-year-old cousin. He had just discovered the word “why” and was asking me an endless stream of questions. “The sky is blue. Why?” When I gave whatever answer seemed suitable for his age, he repeated what I said, and then added, “Why?” I found the exchange rather enjoyable, at least for awhile. I can’t quite remember, but I expect that the conversation ended at the point that I decided to say, “Just because,”…and that was good enough for him. An adult said so.

Faith is the virtue of allowing God to propose to us ideas and plans of action for which the question, “Why?” is more or less irrelevant, at least for the moment. To a child, what I understand about the color of the sky (electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency causing corresponding events in the cones of my eye and brain) is well beyond his cognitive ability at that age. Imagine how much more God knows—He Who knows everything that ever was or will be—than even the most intelligent human. It is clear that sometimes when we ask God, “Why?” He can only respond, “Just because; trust me!”

“Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” May we have that serene and childlike trust in our heavenly Father that Jesus did.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 12:7

“The Lord appeared to Abram.”

Why does the Lord appear to Abram and not Noah, when we are told that Noah also was just? We will discover that Abram goes beyond justice when he pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah, whereas Noah made no apparent effort to save others besides his family from the Flood. That is to say, in wrath, he remembered mercy [Hab. 3: 2]. Since he accurately conveyed this quality of God, he also was found worthy to be the source of blessings for all the families of the earth.

The Light of Christ in an Earthen Vessel: in Memory of Thomas Levergood, 1962-2021

I met Thomas at a graduate student party at the University of Chicago in 1994. I’ve never forgotten his first two questions to me. He began with, “Aren’t you the cantor at St. Thomas [the Apostle parish]?” When I replied in the affirmative, he immediately followed that up with, “Have you ever thought of being a priest?” I hadn’t…

“Le Barberousse” [Redbeard] as he was fondly known by Hyde Park francophones.

So began an intense three-year period of our friendship, during which we toured around virtually every men’s religious community in the Archdiocese and spoke, often with greater zeal than discernment, about the mystical life, Church history, founding our own monastery, etc. I had never before had such intellectually gratifying discussions about faith. Our great shared passion was mysticism, though as we walked this path together, he tended toward the Carmelite tradition and I toward the Desert Fathers. He and I would end up working at the monastery I eventually joined, helping out with cleaning the guesthouse and maintaining the grounds. It was during this time that he conceived the idea for a “Catholic think tank” at the university. Just before I entered monastic life, I was able to help out at some of the first meetings of what would become the Lumen Christi Institute.

As anyone who knew Thomas can attest, his was a most fecund mind. Some years later, I visited him at Calvert House, at what was serving as his office for Lumen Christi. He told me that some corporate leadership guru had given him advice to engage in “one act of creative destruction at the beginning of each day.” I think that the idea was to avoid procrastination by characterizing a difficult phone call as a challenge rather than as an existential crisis. The advice struck me as slightly absurd on his lips. He needed little encouragement for initiating new projects! The difficulty was always about finding adequate help. Thanks be to God, he managed, through many years of dogged work and with much competent assistance, to build up an impressive group of board members and staff who will carry on his vision.

Lumen Christi came to be so identified with Thomas that it is easy to forget just how multitalented he was. When we met, he was, among other things, contemplating becoming a poet, becoming a priest, and running political campaigns. Lest we forget, he was ostensibly working on a PhD. as a student in the prestigious Committee on Social Thought, that quirkiest program at the quirky university that he and I both loved. Most of his ideas were serious, but his imagination allowed for plenty of oddball humor, too. He once suggested that I compose a country song cycle on the ecumenical councils and even offered a melody for “Good Pope Leo and His Tome.”

Friends of Thomas will also attest that he was a complex person. His impressive resume made it easy to overlook the many obstacles he encountered throughout life. If mysticism had been our shared passion in the early years, I believe that the Incarnation became the firmer foundation for our shared reflections as we grew older. Age has a way of bringing home the limitations of our bodily existence, all the better, one hopes, to hand the reins to Christ.

These memories have been flooding my mind in recent weeks as, during his final illness, Thomas and I were able to spend more time together than we had in many years. My first thought, on hearing that he had died yesterday was that Christ had chosen the Feast of the Transfiguration as the day to call him home. It was a mystery that Thomas greatly revered. This is the day on which we are dazzled by the Uncreated Light somehow–improbably–shining through our lowly human body. What a triumphant hope this breeds in those who know its secret! Our frail human nature is absolutely no obstacle to the purifying and transforming Light of Christ. May God in His mercy send the angels to receive him, that his eyes may be opened anew to the deifying light. Rest in peace.

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