Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with resurrection

He Is Not Here! Homily for the Easter Vigil

On the seventh day of creation, God rested.

From a theological and philosophical standpoint, this is quite a statement: philosophers would say that God’s Being is interchangeable with His acting. There is no separation between the two, and for God to rest seems like a contradiction, in one sense. Jesus Himself said that His Father is always at work. But we see two meanings of it in tonight’s liturgy.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened. Enter into my rest.

The first is that it is on the seventh day of the week, that Christ, the Son of God—Who is God—rests in the tomb. And we see even more profoundly that this is the cost to God of creation. God’s willingness—His “permissive will”—to open a space for other creatures of reason and will to act, to be free—this is a great risk that God takes, inviting us to act freely, to act reasonably (one hopes). And the cost of this is shown exactly by Christ’s death. This is the price of giving us freedom.

God is not giving up on us, though: in Christ’s Resurrection, which we celebrate tonight, we see an “eighth day” opening up, a new creation. And we are “recapitulating” this action of God.

The liturgy is the manifest action of Jesus Christ in the world. In the document Sacrosanctum Concilium [par. 7], the first document issued by the fathers of Vatican II, it says that the liturgy is the action of Christ, the High Priest. So what are we doing, then?

Well, we the baptized are members of His Body In acting out the liturgy, we are making visible what Christ is doing. When we participate in the liturgy, by our actions and by our attentiveness, we are conformed, body, mind, and spirit, to Christ Himself, Who is acting through us, impressing the form of His own life upon our own, giving us a new life. In celebrating the mystery of His Passion, Death, descent into hell and Resurrection, we ourselves undergo this same experience, in a mysterious way. As Saint Paul says in tonight’s epistle: “if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection.”

These are lovely words of comfort and consolation in the midst of, and at the end of, an annus horribilis.

So, how much do we feel—experience—the effects of our resurrection?

Now before you think that I’m trying to give you a guilt trip, implying that we all need to try harder to feel good about our resurrection in Christ, let me assure that I mean no such thing. I’m not here to increase your burdens—I promise you!

For starters, we should never try to engineer our own salvation by works.  And that includes working up happy feelings to prove to ourselves that we are saved. Rather, our salvation mysteriously takes place in the realm of faith, and this may or may not be accompanied by corresponding feelings.

I want to emphasize this particularly because I suspect that many of us have experienced at least a year of ambiguous feelings at best. I imagine that most of us, on the earthly plane, have been feeling helpless, anxious, frustrated, even depressed. And if we associate how we feel with the objectivity of our salvation in Jesus Christ, we probably will end up feeling hopeless besides, judging ourselves unworthy of God’s attention, just at the moment we need God’s solicitude more than ever.

Christ healing the paralytic. Haven’t we all had the experience of feeling paralyzed in the last year?

Most of us have never had quite the opportunity to share in Christ’s death before this year, when we’ve experienced a cascade of sufferings, many of them unforeseen and unpredictable.  The sufferings associated with a pandemic, with quarantines, loss of contact with loved ones, loss of pastimes, travel, and cultural events that lighten our lives, have in turn made the normal sufferings that much harder to bear: the deaths of loved ones, illness, broken relationships, financial hardships, difficulties at work, and so on.

Now with that background, let me return to my central question:

How am I experiencing Resurrection in Christ?

We have been led into the darkened church by the inextinguishable light of Jesus Christ, our brother and our head. We have heard of the empty tomb, and Paul has confirmed what the young man in white told the women inside that empty tomb: He is alive: death is not the end. What will this mean for us when we go forth from this celebration tonight, the celebration of our own resurrection and illumination in faith?

Assuredly, we all have some immediate grasp of what it means to live. I don’t mean merely to be alive and not dead. Rather I mean the experiences of great joy, hope, great encounters with beauty and goodness and love

The best we can say about the life that God gives us after our resurrection is that it in some way fulfills all the best promises that these previous experiences betoken. But we don’t really know what this new life is like until we experience it. There is something incomprehensible—at least at first—about living a resurrected life. Because this is an eternal life, God’s own infinite life, there will always be something about it that is unfamiliar.

We’ll never exhaust the mystery of God. If we feel out of our depth, that might be a good sign—that we are open to God revealing to us a new way to think, to feel, and experience the world.

All praise to Christ our Light!

In the meantime, we continue to live in an in-between state, remaining in the flesh even as we strive to live according to the Spirit. This means that much of the Christian interior life depends on interpretation—we can interpret in one of two ways: the flesh or the Spirit. We can interpret every single event of our lives in these ways, events like we’ve been experiencing.

Two chapters after tonight epistle, Saint Paul tells us that we can set our minds on the flesh or on the Spirit. And that the effect of setting our minds on the Spirit is life and peace.

In this same eighth chapter of Romans, Saint Paul tells us something that should be very comforting. We are heirs with Christ, provided that we suffer with Him. Suffering is not meaningless if it done with Christ. This means that our suffering is not proof of God’s abandonment—far from it.

As the Easter candle went before us into the dark Church tonight, Christ has gone before us into the hell of suffering. He’s gone into the darkness of each of our hearts, and brought His light there. so that when we go into our hearts, and we feel all this difficulty, when we arrive there ourselves, He is there to accompany us, to comfort us, and…to show us the way out.

Christ leading Adam and Eve out of hell, and, in them, all of their children–including you.

Perhaps in years past, when life seemed to be going reasonably well compared to the last few years, we could confuse the good feelings about Easter, natural feelings, not bad in themselves, but still somewhat human and limited, with what a resurrected life of faith feels like. But this year, many of us have had a taste of what death feels like, and consequently, I would think that our experience of the resurrection can undergo two transformations as well.

First of all, it might not feel like previous feelings associated with Easter because we have been more closely conformed to Christ’s Passion. But if this is true, it is also true that we can be more confident this year that Christ has been walking with us through that shadow of death that has been threatening us.

What Pope Benedict XVI said about Christ’s death can be applied both to our deaths and to our suffering:

“Death, the illogical, the unspiritual and senseless…becomes [in Christ’s death] an active spiritual event. Death, the end of communication, becomes an act of communion of Jesus with everyone, and in him, of everyone with everyone.”

We all share the experience of suffering and death.

If we can discover in our recent suffering our communion with Christ’s suffering, we can discover our communion with each and every person who is our neighbor. We can be ambassadors of compassion. And, through suffering in communion with Christ, we can discover our communion with God, which is to say, mysteriously but truly, with our eternal life.  If we can re-enter those places of darkness and find in them waiting for us the lumen Christi, the light of Christ alive and life-giving.

How blessed we are to be together this night, the night of nights, when death was broken and God’s love was poured in our hearts. For the sake of the rest of the church, especially for those not able to be in an assembly tonight, let us welcome God’s love anew. And let us ask the Holy Spirit for to renew our minds, to help us think differently, with the mind of Christ, that we may know how to identify the signs of the resurrection in our lives, to become more and familiar with this inbreaking new life, and to live out of it.

[To listen to a podcast of this homily, click here.]

The “Crisis” of Candlemas

The month of February, despite its brevity, is full of critical liturgical celebrations. I use the word “critical” in a precise sense: “of, relating to, or being a turning point…” according to Webster’s. These turning points were somewhat more transparent in the old calendar, before the invention of “Ordinary Time.”

Giotto’s rendering of the Presentation

I invite you to consider the feast of the Presentation (or, as it is often traditionally called, “Candlemas”), which we just celebrated this past Tuesday. This celebration falls forty days after Christmas and is rich in symbolic associations. It is the Incarnate Word’s first visit to the temple—his temple. In the hymn at Lauds on February 2, we sang,

“Parentes Christum deferent,
in templo templum offerunt.”

”His parents carry the Christ;
in the temple, they offer the [true] Temple.

Aside from the obvious paradox in this poetic line, there is a quiet allusion to Christ’s Passion. Christ is brought to the temple as an offering, to be redeemed on the same mount where Abraham had nearly sacrificed Isaac to God. Not only that, but in referring to Christ as the Temple, the hymnist surely is reminding us of a different exchange. The new Temple of Christ’s Body is inaugurated and revealed through His death and resurrection [cf. John 2: 19-22].

The Magnificat antiphon at Vespers this evening (taken from the Benedictine lectionary for the office of Vigils) once again uses the word temple, but in yet a different sense. Here is the text in full, from 1 Corinthians 3: 16-17:

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.

According to the traditional four senses of Scripture, Herod’s temple is the “literal” temple, and Christ’s body is the temple in the “allegorical” or Christological sense. In this quotation, Saint Paul shows us the “tropological” or moral sense. “You are the temple of God! And the Holy Spirit dwells in you!” Thus, the procession on Candlemas, accompanying Christ to the temple, is, in a sense, a procession inward, to the temple that we are. We carry lighted candles, the illumination of the Holy Spirit, into our hearts where Christ wishes to abide.

Candlemas at the Monastery, February 2, 2020

Again, the beauty of this theological reality is accompanied by a serious challenge for us: that we strive to be more and more faithful to our baptismal vows. After all, in our baptisms, we died to ourselves, and we were conformed to Christ’s own Passion, that we might also be conformed to His Resurrection. If we are, with Christ, the temple of God, then we are also an offering to God. Let us, then, today, rededicate ourselves, to “present [our] bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God [Romans 12: 1].” In making this effort, we will undoubtedly discover various resistances to this spiritual renewal, and this in turn will help us to craft a realistic and effective ascetical plan for Lent, only eleven days away.

The world needs spiritual pioneers more than ever. Let us accept God’s invitation and join the saints’ procession to the final temple (the “anagogical” temple), the Church Triumphant in heaven.

Homily for Easter Sunday, 2020

My great-grandmother was born in 1890, and she just missed living in three centuries, dying in 1997. I have fond childhood memories of walking a few blocks south from my grandparents’ house along the Wisconsin River to visit her. She always asked about our education, what did we like to study in school?       Occasionally, she would tell us stories from her childhood. From my perspective now, I wish I had asked her more about what it was like to grow up at the turn of the twentieth century. One of her most-told stories involved her being lost in a snowstorm and the horses knowing the way home. When she was a child, there was no church where her family lived. As the story goes, the German settlers there wanted a church very badly, but in those days, with no telephone and limited transportation options, it was difficult to get an audience with the bishop to secure proper permission. So they went ahead and built the church, then sent a note to the bishop saying that the church was ready to be consecrated.  The bishop was not at all pleased that this project had gone forward without his knowledge, and as he rode the train into town, he was rehearsing the rebuke he would give these impertinent townsfolk.

But when he stepped out, he was greeted by all the townspeople standing on wooden planks laid over the cranberry marshes. They were singing and playing musical instruments. The children were dressed up in their first communion dresses and suits. They were there to greet the risen Christ present in their bishop.

He was so moved by their faith and warm welcome that instead of scolding them, he went with them to the church and consecrated it.

Not only was there a lack of church buildings in those days, there were also very few priests. My great-grandmother only got to Mass several times a year, and, one imagines, Easter Masses were themselves rare occurrences. Among the many questions I wish I had thought to ask her is, “How did you celebrate Easter when you couldn’t go to Mass?”

It must have called for creativity among the simple faithful, as did their sly  plan for even getting a church in the first place. I’ve been in contact with many Catholics this past week. I’ve seen all kinds of creative responses to our stay-at-home orders. This has gotten me thinking about the many odd ways that Christians have had to observe Easter throughout the Church’s history. Someone who is a friend of our community, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, tells the story of the Christian prisoners secretly saying to one another, “Christ is risen.” “He is risen indeed!” to remind each other that it was Easter Sunday.

One of the strangest stories is that of our Holy Father Saint Benedict. When he was still a very young man, he secluded himself in a cave in a mountainous area about fifty miles west of Rome. His biographer, Saint Gregory the Great, tells us that a nearby priest was just sitting down to a sumptuous Easter dinner, no doubt fatigued from his own liturgical duties, when our Lord visited him in a vision. Jesus told him to bring some of the food to his servant Benedict. Our Lord didn’t tell him where Benedict was, so this anonymous priest had to climb around the mountains of Subiaco to find his cave. When he found young Benedict, he greeted him, saying, “Come, let us eat, for today is Easter!” Benedict didn’t realize that it was Easter, and he thought that the priest was using a figure of speech. So he responded, “I know that it is Easter because you have graced me with your presence.” So Saint Benedict sees the risen Christ in this otherwise unknown priest who brings him food, and he has achieved this kind of mystical vision without the benefit of attending the liturgy with any regularity in the preceding years.

I don’t recommend Benedict as a pattern, any more than I would recommend that we celebrate Easter every year the way we are today. But it is another indication that our faith in the resurrection, and the joy that is ours in this faith, can remain in us and even grow stronger when we encounter obstacles.

Perhaps the strangest Easter was the very first. The Apostles were practicing their own stay-at home strategy, fearfully hiding. The women of the group dared to go out to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus, but the body is gone. The result is a mixture of confusion, fear, sadness, indignation, and, some glimmer of belief.  It is quite remarkable that the gospel of this morning’s Mass is one of the few in the Church’s liturgical year in which Jesus makes no appearance whatsoever. Even after Jesus does appear to the disciples, they continue to experience fear, disbelief and confusion. It is not until Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit that the full meaning and effect of the Resurrection is felt. Traditionally, the first forty days after Easter were a time when Jesus continued to visit and teach his disciples the mysteries of the faith, which were fully inaugurated in the church’s liturgical life beginning with the Ascension of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps we are being called this year to stay in the upper room with the Apostles and Mary, listening to the teachings of the risen Lord, to stay in the city waiting to receive the power of God from on high, to renew our hearts with saving doctrine, and then to implore God our Father to set our hearts ablaze with the fire of the Holy Spirit’s love. The risen Christ is among us, and we can learn to recognize him as Benedict recognized Him in the priest who brought him food, and as the townspeople did in their bishop. We can learn to recognize Christ in all we meet, in all those who are sick and caring for the sick. And perhaps this year our Easter celebration can break out from a single day, from which we would typically return to life as normal, and be a living reality at all times. Our creative celebration of the resurrection can become a habit of mind and action in which our faith becomes more and more alive in all that we do, and in all that we say, taking every thought captive for Christ, to whom be glory, honor, and praise forever. Amen.

Homily for the Easter Vigil

[The following is Father Brendan’s homily for Holy Saturday.]

Do you remember where you were or what you were doing on St. Valentine’s Day, February 14 1990?  I would be surprised if you did.  I don’t.  It may be a strange question to ask, but it’s related to an event that took place August 20, 1988.

Voyager 1

That was the day NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft.  Its mission was to study Jupiter, Saturn and the moons of these two planets. Thirteen years later, Voyager was 4 billion miles from Earth and on the verge of leaving our solar system.  It would be the first manmade object to go into interstellar space.

That was when the astronomer Carl Sagan, who had a part in planning the project, asked NASA to turn Voyager’s cameras around and snap a goodbye photo of planet earth way in the distance.

The photo became famous as “The pale blue dot”. Caught in the center of a single beam of light from the sun, Earth appears as a tiny blue orb in a vast, dark void.  Just a speck in the immense cosmic ocean.  Somewhere on that speck, the third rock from the sun, you and I were going about our daily lives.  The photo of our planet turning around a medium sized star, in a nondescript neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy, brings to mind the words of Psalm 8:

“what is man that you are mindful of him,

the son of man that you care for him?

You made him a little less than a god,

and crowned him with glory and honor”.

 

We seldom think of it, but there is a cosmic dimension to Easter.  A dimension hinted at in the first reading from Genesis and again in the Easter Gospel.  In the beginning was the first Creation.  The resurrection of Christ was the beginning of the new creation.

First creation, new creation.  Why did God create the world in the first place?  Carl Sagan had no answer.  He told us that every week, for 13 weeks from September to December on PBS.  The program, “Cosmos” was the most widely watch tv series of its time winning two Emmy Awards.

I watched it faithfully back then. It provoked wonder and melancholy in equal amounts. Sagan explored the architecture of space and time, dark matter and dark energy, how galaxies form, why stars implode, how everything began, and how it’s all going to end.

But he also told us that the physical cosmos was all that existed: it was just the result of a series of chance occurrences.  It has no meaning or purpose.  We were all destined for extinction.  In all its mystery and vastness, he said, there was no hint that help could come from elsewhere to save us.

Fortunately, there are other are other answers to the question “why creation?”.  One of those is found in the writings of the early Church Father St. Irenaeus of Lyon.

Irenaeus reassures us that the Cosmos is not a meaningless, statistical accident.  He taught that Christ is a savior by his very nature.  The world and human beings in it were created to give him something to save.  What’s the good of being a lifeguard if there’s a beach and water, but no swimmers.

What we celebrate in Easter is the revelation of a hidden plan for the salvation of the fallen human race.  Irenaeus invented a term for this plan:  he called it the “divine economy of salvation”.

This economy is first revealed in Genesis, progressively unveiled in the Law and the Prophets, and reaches full disclosure in the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  His return from the dead as a glorified human body tells us that God has directly entered his creation to rescue us from our fallen nature.

Easter is not merely a date on the calendar, it is the beginning of a new way of understanding of the world and how we should be living in it.  Not as those who have no hope, no purpose or goal to their existence.

Voyager 1 is zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour in deep space 14 billion miles from earth.  It has an appointment with Alpha Centuri, our nearest neighbor, 90,00 years from now.

When it took the photo of earth 20 years ago those without faith saw a pale blue dot in a meaningless void.  The vastness of it all made human life look trivial.  For those with eyes awake to the meaning of Easter, the world is charged with the glory of God.

On this night, the Divine Liturgy reminds us that baptism sacramentally inducted us into Christ’s saving death and resurrection.  We now bear the full weight of Christ’s risen glory.  And on the day of his return we will shine like the stars in the cosmos.