Mersey Leven Catholic Parish
To be a vibrant Catholic Community
unified in its commitment
to growing disciples for Christ
Postal Address: PO Box 362
Parish Office: 90 Stewart Street
(Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10am - 3pm)
Office Phone: 6424 8383 Fax: 6423 5160
Secretary: Annie Davies / Anne Fisher
Pastoral Council Chair: Jenny Garnsey
Parish Mass times for the Month: mlcpmasstimes.blogspot.com.au
Weekly Homily Podcast: mikedelaney.podomatic.com
Our Parish Sacramental Life
Baptism: Parents are asked to contact the Parish Office to make arrangements for attending a Baptismal Preparation Session and booking a Baptism date.
Reconciliation, Confirmation and Eucharist: Are received following a Family–centred, Parish-based, School-supported Preparation Program.
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults: prepares adults for reception into the Catholic community.
Marriage: arrangements are made by contacting one of our priests - couples attend a Pre-marriage Program
Anointing of the Sick: please contact one of our priests
Reconciliation: Ulverstone - Fridays (10am - 10:30am)
Devonport - Saturday (5:15pm – 5:45pm)
Care and Concern: If you are aware of anyone who is sick or in need of assistance in the Parish please visit them. Then, if they are willing and give permission, could you please pass on their names to the Parish Office. We have a group of parishioners who are part of the Care and Concern Group who are willing and able to provide some backup and support to them. Unfortunately, because of privacy issues, the Parish Office is not able to give out details unless prior permission has been given.
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Archdiocesan Website: www.hobart.catholic.org.au for news, information and details of other Parishes.
Parish Prayer
Heavenly Father,
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
to the Gospel and build an amazing parish.
Amen.
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Weekday Masses 25th - 28th April, 2017
Tuesday 9:00am Penguin - Anzac Day
9:00am Devonport - Anzac Day
Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe
Thursday: 12noon
Devonport
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin
6:00pm Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am Sheffield L.W.C.
5:00pm Latrobe
Ministry Rosters 29th & 30th April, 2017
Ulverstone:
Penguin:
Latrobe:
Port Sorell:
Readings this Week – Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy)
First Reading: Acts 2:42-47
Second Reading: 1 Peter 1:3-9
Gospel: John 20:19-31
PREGO REFLECTION
As I prepare to read this Gospel, I ask Jesus to come and breathe his spirit
upon me.
It may help my prayer to imagine being one of the disciples in the room
with closed doors.
What are my fears?
Do I relate to Thomas’s need for
certainty?
How would Jesus help me to have more faith?
Jesus understands how hard it is for human minds to comprehend the
mystery of resurrection.
Even when our hearts are closed with fear and
doubt, he stands alongside us bringing us peace.
I imagine Jesus standing alongside me now, talking to me, sharing words
of encouragement and a deep understanding of my needs and desires.
What do I say to Jesus?
I may want to use Thomas’s acclamation as I
bring my prayer to a close.
Readings next week – Third Sunday of
Easter
ANZAC DAY:
They
shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Eternal
rest grant to them O Lord and may perpetual light shine upon them.
Please
note: Anzac Day Mass Times - Tuesday 25th April, 2017
Your prayers
are asked for the sick: Elaine Milic, George
Archer, David Welch & …,
Let us pray for those who have died recently: John Munro, Susan Reilly, Ila Breen, Glen
Graham, Christine Illingworth, Darcy
Atkinson, Daphne
Saarman, Antonio
Sciamanna.
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 19th - 25th
April
Weekly
Ramblings
Next Sunday, 29th April, we will be starting a program of
presentations at each Mass time building on work being done by the Parish
Pastoral Council as a follow-up to my Vision Statement which was presented to
the Parish last November. This 1st session will follow the 9am Mass at
Ulverstone next Sunday and will last for about 30 minutes – so I am inviting
all Parishioners attending that Mass to please stay behind for that 30 minutes
so that you might be aware of what has been happening and where we might go
into the future. A similar session will be held at Latrobe that same evening
(29th) after the 5pm Mass so we are inviting Parishioners there to make that
short time after Mass available as well. Over the following two weekends there
will be presentations at the other Mass Centres so that all parishioners have a
chance to hear the same story.
Also, just a heads up for the next Open House which will be
held at Ulverstone in the Community Room on Friday, 5th May from 6.30pm. As
always at these events all you have to do is come – food and drink are
provided. ALL WELCOME
Please take care on the roads and in your homes,
ST MARY’S CHURCH PENGUIN:
KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS: monthly meeting scheduled
for Sunday 30th April has been cancelled.
THE SISTERS
OF ST JOSEPH
PIETY SHOP
DEVONPORT:
FLOWERS – OLOL CHURCH:
Thank you to the wonderful
volunteers who help out with the weekly flower roster at OLOL Church (the flowers
always look amazing!) We desperately need more volunteers to help
out with this roster. If you are able to assist please ring the Parish
Office on 6424:8383.
FOOTY
TICKETS: Round 4 (14th April) footy margin 3 points –
winners; Betty Foster, Charlies Angels, John Webb.
BINGO - Thursday Nights - OLOL
Hall, Devonport. Eyes down 7.30pm!
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
THE JOURNEY CATHOLIC RADIO PROGRAM – AIRS 23 April
2017
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF MISUNDERSTANDING
This article is by Fr Ron RolheiserOMI. The orignal article can be found here
The heart has its reasons, says Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history.
Recently I signed a card for a friend, a devout Baptist, who was raised to have a suspicion of Roman Catholics. It’s something he still struggles with; but, don’t we all! History eventually infects our DNA. Who of us is entirely free from suspicion of what’s religiously different from us? And what’s the cure? Personal contact, friendship, and theological dialogue with those of other denominations and other faiths does help open our minds and hearts, but the fruit of centuries of bitter misunderstanding doesn’t disappear so easily, especially when it’s institutionally entrenched and nurtured as a prophetic protection of God and truth. And so in regards to Christians of other denominations there remains in most of us an emotional dis-ease, an inability to see the other fully as one of our own.
And so in signing this card for my separated Christian friend, I wrote: “To a fellow Christian, a brother in the Body of Christ, a good friend, from whom I’m separated by 500 years of misunderstanding.”
Five hundred years of misunderstanding, of separation, of suspicion, of defensiveness, that’s not something that’s easily overcome, especially when at its core there sit issues about God, truth, and religion. Granted, there has been much positive progress made in the past fifty years and many of the original, more-blatant misunderstandings have been overcome. But the effects of the historical break with Christianity and the reaction to it are present today and are still seen everywhere, from high church offices, to debates within the academy of theology, to suspicions inside the popular mind.
Sad how we’ve focused so much on our differences, when at the center, at the heart, we share the same essential faith, the same essential beliefs, the same basic moral codes, the same Scriptures, the same belief in afterlife, and the same fundamental tenet that intimacy with Jesus Christ is the aim of our faith. As well, not insignificantly, today we also share the same prejudices and biases against us, whether these come from fundamentalists within other religions or whether these come from over-zealous, over-secularized, post-Christians within our own society. To someone looking at us from the outside we, all the different Christian denominations, look like a monolith, one faith, one church, a single religion, our differences far overshadowed by our commonality. Sadly we tend not to see ourselves like this from within, where our differences, more often than not based upon a misunderstanding, are seen to dwarf our common discipleship.
Yet, the Epistle to the Ephesians tells us that, as Christians, we share one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all of us. At its most essential level, that’s true of all of us as Christians, despite our denominational differences. We are one at our core.
Granted, there are some real differences among us, mostly though in terms of how we understand certain aspects of the church and certain issues within morality, rather than on how we understand the deeper truths about the nature of God, the divinity of Christ, the gift of God’s Word, the gift of the Eucharist, and the inalienable dignity and destiny of all human beings. Within the hierarchy of truth this essential core is what’s most important, and on this essential core we essentially agree. That’s the real basis of our common discipleship.
Ecclesially, the issues that divide us focus mostly on church authority, on ordination to ministry, on whether to emphasize word or sacrament, on how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, on the number of sacraments, on the place of sacramentals and devotions within discipleship, and on how scripture and tradition interplay with each other. In terms of moral issues, the issues that divide us are also the “red button” issues within our society as a whole: abortion, gay marriage, birth control, and the place of social justice within discipleship. But, even on these, there’s more commonality than difference among the churches.
Moreover, today, the differences on how we understand many of the ecclesial and moral issues that divide us are more temperamental than denominational, that is, they tend to be more a question of one’s theology than of one’s denominational affiliation. Granted, classical denominational theology still plays in, but the divisions today regarding how we see certain ecclesial and moral issues, be that ordination, gay marriage, abortion, or social justice, are less a tension between Roman Catholics and Protestants (and Evangelicals) than they are between those who lean temperamentally and theologically in one direction rather than the other. It’s perhaps too simplistic to draw this up in terms of liberal versus conservative, but this much at least is true, the fault-line on these issues today is becoming less and less denominational.
The earliest Christian Creed had but a single line: Jesus is Lord! All Christians still agree on that and so we remain brothers and sisters, separated only by five hundred years of misunderstanding.
The Cosmic Christ: Week 2
This reflection is taken from the Daily email series by Fr Richard Rohr OFM. You can subscribe to receive the emails here
Dynamic Unity
Paul tried unceasingly to demonstrate “that Jesus was the
Christ” (Acts 9:22). This synthesis is the heart of Paul’s conversion
experience. Paul did not think he was abandoning his Jewish faith, but rather
finding its universal dimension in this “Mystery of Christ,” as he loved to
call it. Remember, Paul never knew Jesus in the flesh and hardly ever quotes
him directly. Paul introduced his cosmic understanding with his common phrase
en Christo; he uses this more than any single phrase in all of his letters. The
words “in Christ” seem to be Paul’s code for the gracious participatory
experience he so urgently wants to share with the world, and it leads him far
beyond exclusionary Judaism or exclusionary Christianity.
Only in our time is a truly dynamic unity between
time-bound, personified Jesus and eternal, universal Christ slowly being
recognized. Until now, this was an alternative and frankly rare orthodoxy among
Christians. With our much larger awareness of the universe and greater honesty
about Scripture, this understanding is timely and even necessary if
Christianity is to have any social or historical meaning larger than another
competing religion.
After the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), Christians said that
Jesus was “consubstantial” with God; after the Council of Chalcedon (451), we
agreed to a philosophical description about how Jesus’s humanity and divinity
could be one. But both “nondualities” remained cold academic theologies
(“beliefs”) because we did not draw out the practical and transformative implications
for history, evolution, and even ourselves. Many congregations quickly mumble
through the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds week after week, disappointed that there
are no warm or human words like “love,” “healing,” or “forgiveness” in the
whole text. It is hard to believe in the creed, even if you do formally accept
it as true.
“As in him, so also in us, and also in the whole universe”
was meant to be our radical conclusion! What most religion treats as separate
(matter and Spirit, humanity and divinity) has never been separate from its
beginnings: Spirit is forever captured in matter, and matter is the place where
Spirit shows itself. It is one sacred world. John Duns Scotus reflected on the
Christ Mystery as the first idea in the mind of God, and then Teilhard de
Chardin commonly described Christ as "the Omega Point of history."
[1] We were supposed to live safely between this Alpha and Omega. All of
history is moving forward with a clear trajectory, with meaning from the
beginning and a clear summary goal. Without such coherent and universal
meaning, we have paddled desperately, and often angrily, in many confusing
directions.
References:
A Bigger Story Line
Christ is the Archetype and Model for the rest of creation
as Scripture clearly teaches (Ephesians 1:3-14; Colossians 1:15-20). Yet
Christians have instead focused on proving that Jesus is “God,” which felt
necessary to put our group out in front and to solidify our own ranks. By
pulling Jesus out of the Trinity and making him a mere “problem solver,”
Christianity has no overarching vision or explanation for what it all means. We
haven’t fully understood how the Christ “holds all things together” (Colossians
1:17). We were more eager to make Jesus the “top” than to make him the “whole,”
and thus we ended up with a religion largely concerned with exclusion.
As a result, Christianity constantly divided into smaller
tribes. “Why do you try to parcel up Christ?” Paul asked (see 1 Corinthians 1:13).
Jesus became an arguable “text” outside of any larger “context.” If the Eternal
Christ is forgotten or ignored, Jesus becomes far too small, a mere local “god”
instead of a universal principle. Many Christians still see the universe as
incoherent, without inherent sacredness, a center, direction, or purpose beyond
personal survival itself. Many Christians focus on “saving their own soul” with
little care for the world as a whole. Massive disbelief is the result. It is
hard to feel privately holy or good when the universe is neither holy nor good.
No wonder science and reason have now taken over as “the
major explainers” of meaning for much of the world. Jesus was indeed a deep and
life-changing encounter for some people, but the official Church often showed
little evidence of his universal love. Christians brought Jesus to the “New
World,” but hardly ever Christ, as we see from our treatment of indigenous
peoples and the earth. Most slave owners and proponents of apartheid fully
identified as “Christians.” Lots of mop-up work is required of Christianity for
the rest of history, after we dragged poor Jesus through our mud.
We failed to offer the world universal meaning, and now we
live in a postmodern and largely post-Christian world that denies any “big story
line” or purpose to existence. Most progressive people deny all truth claims
and metanarratives as mere grabs for power. So instead of universal hope, we
live inside of cosmic cynicism and we retreat into small identity politics.
This is a major crisis and loss of inherent dignity to the whole human project.
All the extravagances, technologies, and entertainments will never be able to
fill such a foundational hole in the human psyche. In other words, the
world—even most of the Christian world—has yet to hear the Gospel!
Reference:
Christ in Evolution
Ilia Delio, a Franciscan sister and scientist, describes the
positive foundation we have in the cosmic Christ:
Lacking an understanding of the Good News of the universal
Christ, few have the vision to perceive any coherence between the Source and
the Goal. The Christian message has had less and less significance for thinking
people, for scientists, philosophers, social workers, and those trying to find
a purpose for the universe. Christianity became merely another moralistic
religion (which loved to “win” over other religions and countries), overwhelmingly
aligned with a limited period of history (empire building) and a small piece of
the planet (Europe and eventually the Americas through colonization), rather
than representing the whole of creation and a glorious destiny (Romans
8:18-21).
Without the cosmic notion of Christ, Christians can’t
understand that God is inherent in life itself, that God is the life force of
everything who grows things from the inside. The Indwelling Spirit was our way
of saying that God creates things that create themselves from within! In humans
and animals this is experienced as sexuality, in plants as photosynthesis.
Elements participate in the creative process through electromagnetic fields,
fusion, and bonding. Even celestial bodies experience death and birth. There is
only and always growth. Death is simply a transformative stage.
Not surprisingly, many Christians ended up tragically
fighting evolution along with most human-rights struggles—slavery, women’s
suffrage, desegregation, racism, classism, homophobia, policies regarding
refugees and immigrants, mass incarceration, climate change. We had no
evolutionary notion of Christ who is forever “groaning in one great act of
giving birth” (Romans 8:22). Yet we should have been on the front line of all
of these issues, so our bold proclamation of love and justice could have pulled
humanity forward.
“Indeed God is not far from any one of us. For ‘In God we
live and move and have our very being’” (Acts 17:27-28). If this is true, then
it has to be true everywhere and all the time. Small truth is not big enough to
save a very large universe.
References:
"Christ" Is
Another Word for Everything
When Christians defined Jesus in a small way—as a mere
problem solver for sin—we soon became preoccupied with sin itself, which is a
largely negative foundation. We became blind to much else going on in this
world except sin and its effects, which became preoccupations of most monks and
reformers. One well- known Protestant reformer actually spoke of “total depravity”
to characterize the human situation; another spoke of human nature as “a pile
of manure covered with the snow of Christ.” With such a negative anthropology
and without inherent human dignity, it is very hard for even a good theology to
succeed. Grace can only build on—and perfect—nature; it cannot undo it, says
Catholic theology. We must start where the Bible begins in Genesis 1: “It was
good, it was good . . . it was very good” (Genesis 1:10-31).
Yet many Christian leaders and churches focus on shame and
guilt, atonement and reparation, as if we were children frightened of an
abusive father. Is there no greater meaning to our individual lives and history
than to be chastened, corrected, and “saved” by God? Is there no implanted hope
and goodness to first celebrate? The starting point of religion and life cannot
be a huge problem. If we start with original sin (beginning with Genesis 3
rather than Genesis 1), our worldview is scarcity rather than abundance.
Didn’t Paul tell us “There is only Christ: he is everything
and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11), so that “God may be all in all” (1
Corinthians 15:28)? What cosmic hope and direction we were offered! But our
calculating minds have a very hard time knowing how to live inside of such
abundance. Grace is the consummate threat to all self-hatred.
Christians formally believed that somehow Jesus was “fully
human and fully divine” at the same time. But with dualistic thinking, the best
most of us could do was to see ourselves as only human, and Jesus, for all
practical purposes, as only divine. We thus missed the whole point, which was
to put the two together in him and then dare to discover the same mystery in
ourselves and in all of creation! That is how Jesus “saves” us and shows
himself as the “pioneer and perfector” of our faith (see Hebrews 12:2)—and also
the model, the guarantee, the promise, and the pledge, to use some of Paul’s
many fine metaphors for Jesus.
Christianity, a religion based on the radically inclusive
and compassionate vision of Jesus, has had a very different philosophy and
practice in its actual history. Jesus
was held hostage and misused by culture, nation-building, and prejudice, I am
afraid. He ended up being neither Jesus nor Christ!
Rather than being taught that we can and should follow Jesus
as “partners in his great triumphal procession” (2 Corinthians 2:14), we were
told to be grateful spectators and admirers of what he once did. Instead of a
totally “Inclusive Savior” we made Jesus into an object of exclusive and exclusionary
worship. Then we argued and divided over what kind of worship he preferred.
Jesus never asked for worship, only that we “follow” him (Mark 1:18) as fellow
attractors (“fishers of people”) and partners in “his triumphal procession.”
Reference:
The Union of Human and
Divine
Please do not think me a heretic, but it is formally and
theologically incorrect to say “Jesus is God,” as most Christians glibly do and
then need to “prove.” Jesus is instead a third something—the perfect union of
“very God” with “very man.” For the truly orthodox Christian, the Trinity must
be “God,” and Jesus can only be understood inside that Eternal Embrace. From
within this loving relationship, the Christ came forth to draw us back (through
the enfleshed Jesus) to where we all originally came from (Genesis 1:26, John
14:3). This is quite a different description of salvation—and, dare I say, the
whole point! I wonder if “reincorporation” might not be a better word than
salvation.
We have much less need to “prove” that Jesus is God (which
of itself asks nothing transformative of us). Our deep need is to experience
the same unitive mystery in ourselves and in everything else—“through him, with
him, and in him,” as we say in the Great Amen of the Eucharistic Prayer. The
good news is that we also are part of the eternal divine embrace, now as the
ongoing Body of Christ extended in space and time. We are the second coming of
Christ!
There were clear statements in the New Testament about a
universal meaning to Christ (Colossians 1, Ephesians 1, John 1, 1 John 1, and
Hebrews 1:1–4). The schools of Paul and John were initially overwhelmed by this
message. In the early Christian era, only some Eastern Fathers (such as Origen
of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Maximus the Confessor) noticed that the Christ was
clearly something older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They
mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time;
whereas the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning
of time. In later centuries, the church lost this mystical understanding in
favor of fast-food, dualistic Christianity that was easier for the average
parish believer to comprehend. We pushed Jesus, and we lost Christ.
The early Franciscan School surely fell in love with the
person of Jesus, but through Duns Scotus and Bonaventure it also saw him as a
corporate personality (a type, archetype, or model) representing and directing
the Whole. We know this by the way that early Franciscans saw the Christ
Mystery mirrored in every aspect of creation, from elements, to weather,
planets, animals, attitudes, non-Christians, art, and even to enemies. For example,
Roger Bacon (1214–1292), a Franciscan friar at Oxford, is called “the father of
experimental science.” The natural world was no longer just “natural” for those
influenced by the intuitive genius of Francis of Assisi. Poor Bacon was seen as
not very religious, and his laboratory was relegated to the very outside walls
of Oxford, but Bacon had the courage and passion to love and serve the Eternal
Christ and not just the historical Jesus. There was no gap between sacred and
secular in his view. It was one sacred and all “supernatural” world.
Reference:
Universal Salvation
A universal notion of Christ takes mysticism beyond the mere
individual and private level that has been seen as mysticism’s weakness. If
authentic God experience overcomes the primary false split between yourself and
the divine, then it should also overcome the equally false split between
yourself and the rest of creation.
For some of us, the first split is overcome personally in an
experience of Jesus, but for many others (maybe even most!), union with the
divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure
love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, awe before beauty, or some
kind of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” experience. Why? Because creation itself
is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational “Bible” that
reveals the path to God. The first incarnation of the Christ Mystery started
about 13.8 billion years ago at “The Big Bang.” So some start with Jesus, but
many who began with the Christ Mystery did not have that experience validated
by the Church. They looked secular, humanistic, or like mere “nature mystics.”
But God uses and honors all starting points!
Pre-Christian and pre-Jewish people already had access to
God. This is the ecclesia ab Abel (“the church that existed since Abel”) that
has been spoken of so often by the early church Fathers and in the documents of
Vatican II. From the first righteous victim (Genesis 4:10; Matthew 23:35) until
now, all suffering cries out to God and elicits divine compassion and
community. This is a momentous and universal truth. We are indeed “saved”
inside the Christ Mystery since the beginning of consciousness. Only in
eventual time did this community take the form of “church.”
So we are called to love both Jesus and Christ. You can
begin with either Jesus or Christ, but eventually it is easiest to love both.
Too many Christians have started and stopped with Jesus, never knowing the
universal Christ. Many non-Christians have started with loving the Christ by
another name. I have met Hindus, Muslims, and Jews who live in this hidden
mystery of oneness; and I have met many Roman Catholics and Protestants who are
running away from the Christ Mystery, as either practical materialists or pious
spiritualists.
Tertullian (160–225), who is called “the father of Western
theology,” rightly taught that “the flesh is the hinge of salvation” (Caro salutis
est cardo). [1] The incarnation of flesh and Spirit is Christianity’s most
important contribution to spirituality, and this is the meaning of “The
Christ,” although you do not need to name it as such.
Now “the world, life and death, the present and the future
are all your servants, for you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1
Corinthians 3:22-23). Full salvation is finally universal belonging and
universal connecting. Our Christian word for that is “heaven.” This is why
Jesus can say to a man dying in time, “This day you are with me in paradise”
(Luke 23:43). The Christ is now, here, everywhere, and always.
References:
Choose life: horizons beyond the tomb walls
‘The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair’. But the bursting forth of a new world on Easter morning breaks the walls of this tomb and opens our horizons, writes David Neuhaus SJ: ‘resurrection renews hope’. The original of this article can be found here
The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word ‘horizon’ as ‘the line at the farthest place that you can see, where the sky seems to touch the land or sea’. This Easter, the word ‘horizon’ strikes me as particularly appropriate in order to understand what difference Jesus’s resurrection makes in my life and in our world.
Christ’s victory over death is first noted in the gospel when the women approach the tomb early on Sunday morning. They have come reverentially to anoint Christ’s body, which three days earlier had been hurriedly consigned to a tomb. A heavy stone had been rolled over the mouth of the burial cave, as was common practice, and the Jews, those who were his disciples and those who were his opponents, then observed the Sabbath. In the silence of the Sabbath, a new world, whose seed was conceived in Christ’s crucified body, was mysteriously being formed. This new world would burst forth on the first day of the week, the first day of a new creation. It is into this world that we, disciples of Christ, are invited. It is to this new world that we, disciples of Christ, point with our witness.
As the women approached the tomb, as yet unaware of the new world that awaited them, they asked ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ (Mark 16:3) Still firmly rooted in the world that is passing away, their anxiety, sadness and sense of loneliness are all present in this question. Jesus has left them alone and they live this as an abandonment with a profound sense of grief. Yet all this gives way to bewilderment, confusion and fear as they gaze on the tomb, burst open, and on the heavy stone, pushed aside. Mark’s Gospel concludes the scene with the troubling words, ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (Mark 16:8). It is this that must become wonder, joy and thanksgiving as the women, first witnesses of the resurrection, encounter the Risen Jesus.
What distinguishes the old world from the new one? That is a difficult question to answer as we are still living so much in the old. At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father for his disciples, saying: ‘I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world’ (John 17:15-16). Indeed, our being in the old world that has still not passed away makes our fidelity to the new world, into which we are invited by Jesus, fragile and sometimes faltering. The new often loses its specific character, its contours blur and its distinct character dissolves as our rootedness in the old overshadows the light of the new.
It is the word ‘horizon’ that distinguishes the old world from the new. Whereas the old world is suffocating, dark and often hopeless, provoking anxiety and sadness, the new world is one in which horizons are open, flooded with light and joy, evoking hope. Death is the reality of the old world, a reality where the horizon is blocked; and resurrection is the reality of the new, where the horizon stretches to where heaven and earth touch.
The dead body of Jesus was laid in a tomb, dark, dank and closed in. Jesus really died! He did not pass through death or act dead, but he truly died as a human being dies. His death, burial and descent into the place of the dead constitute an essential element in his birth, death and resurrection. In the Apostles’ Creed, we recite a summary of the Easter Triduum: ‘[He] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead’. Many have struggled to understand what it means for Jesus, after his death on the cross, to have descended into hell. This is a reference to passages in the New Testament that talk of a descent into the kingdom of the dead after the death of Christ. Most explicitly this is referred to in 1 Peter 3:18-19: ‘For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison’. In Hebrew, the place referred to as ‘hell’ and described as a ‘prison’ is called Sheol, the abode of the dead.
Sheol in the Old Testament is described as a dark and suffocating place under the earth. In the terrifying story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who challenged the leadership of Moses, they were swallowed up by the earth that opened its mouth, and ‘closed over them’, bringing them into Sheol (Numbers 16:30–33). Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of imprisonment behind gates (Isaiah 38:10), the Book of Job describes it as a place behind bars (Job 17:16) and the Psalm describes cords and snares that entangle (Psalm 18:5). Elsewhere, Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of darkness, a land where there is no memory (Isaiah 14:9, 26:14) like in the Psalms, which describes it as ‘darkness… the land of forgetfulness’ (Psalm 88:12). Solomon describes a place of inactivity, where there is no work and no thought (Ecclesiastes 9:10). It is a place of silence (Psalm 115:17). Most characteristically, Sheol is a place where there is no praise of God. ‘For in death there is no remembrance of you, in Sheol who can give you praise?’ (Psalm 6:5). ‘For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:18).
Jesus experiences the reality of the tomb and that of Sheol as an essential part of the incarnation through which he enters fully into our human lives. The reality of the tomb is a human reality we fully know in death. However, before we die, we can and often do choose death over life over and over again. We are enslaved to the consequences of our wrong choices. In these choices, the tomb is palpable, a reality of darkness, sin and fear. It is this exit from a place of imprisonment and slavery that the Jewish people celebrate at Passover. Their exit from Egypt is a breaking out of the prison of slavery. The word for Egypt in Hebrew (Mitzrayim) evokes the word for narrow and confining (tzar). It is thus completely coherent that Jesus the Jew chose the Passover as the time to pass from death to life. At Easter, we are invited to renew our commitment to the new world born from the tomb. We are called to burst out of the tomb into life, leaving behind us a tomb that is empty.
The tomb reality is one of walls, the blocking out of light, lack of vision, a place in which there are no horizons. Saint Teresa of Avila described a vision of hell in these words:
Being in such an unwholesome place, so unable to hope for any consolation, I found it impossible either to sit down or to lie down, nor was there any room, even though they put me in this kind of hole made in the wall. Those walls, which were terrifying to see, closed in on themselves and suffocated everything. There was no light, but all was enveloped in the blackest darkness.
Scripture and the saints teach us that Sheol is not just a matter of human destiny. There is a choice involved, between stagnating in a place where all the horizons are shut off with walls or tending towards a place where the horizon is stretching out before us.
The world we often choose to live in resembles Sheol in more than one sense. The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out, the language we mouth to define our ‘us’ against our ‘them’, the resources we spend in order to keep track of who is our ‘us’ and who is our ‘them’, all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces the sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair that accompany us too often. This Sheol, which we call home, is ever more alive as a discourse of phobia resounds in our capitals, building on a sentiment of fear.
The old world is often our world, a world that encourages apathy in the face of the misery produced by our greed. As we shut the door in the face of our brothers and sisters who clamour for our solidarity and assistance, we sink into the tomb. As we watch unmoved as millions flee their homes because of hunger and war, petrifying our hearts with suspicion and refusal, we adopt the constitution of an old world that crucified Jesus. As we comfortably mouth a language that divides the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, we betray a gospel that preaches love and pardon. And so we sink into a hopelessness that proposes the walls we build around ourselves in brick and word, in violence and rejection. Resurrection renews hope. The walls crumble. In a Twitter message on 9 February 2017, Pope Francis proclaimed ‘Hope opens new horizons and enables us to dream of what is not even imaginable’. Hope enables us to quit the old world on Easter morning!
Pope Francis, great apostle of the new world, spoke out loud and clear in favour of the new world in his inaugural homily as pope on 19 March 2013:
Saint Paul speaks of Abraham, who, ‘hoping against hope, believed’ (Rom 4:18). Hoping against hope! Today too, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others. To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope! For believers, for us Christians, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph, the hope that we bring is set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ. It is a hope built on the rock which is God.
A few months later, on his visit to the tomb of Christ, in May 2014, Pope Francis expressed this reality of a new world outside the tomb. The context of his words was the meeting with the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople. His words, however, stretch far beyond that specific context.
We need to believe that, just as the stone before the tomb was cast aside, so too every obstacle to our full communion will also be removed. This will be a grace of resurrection, of which we can have a foretaste even today. Every time we ask forgiveness of one another for our sins against other Christians and every time we find the courage to grant and receive such forgiveness, we experience the resurrection! Every time we put behind us our longstanding prejudices and find the courage to build new fraternal relationships, we confess that Christ is truly risen!
When Jesus bursts out of the tomb, he leads us forth into a new world, a world of open horizons. Isaiah contrasts this new world of life to that of Sheol, as a place of joyful thanksgiving: ‘The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day; parents make known to children your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:19). In bursting out of the tomb, Jesus brings down walls, opens doors and brings the widest horizons into view. As the walls dissolve and the gates are burst open, one can breathe in the air of freedom and walk heads held high, no longer slaves. Thus is accomplished in the promise that God makes at the centre of the Law of Moses:
I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. (Leviticus 26:11-13)
Fr David M. Neuhaus SJ serves as Latin Patriarchal Vicar within the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. He is responsible for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel as well as the Catholic migrant populations. He teaches Holy Scripture at the Latin Patriarchate Seminary and at the Salesian Theological Institute in Jerusalem and also lectures at Yad Ben Zvi.
EASTER: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES
Taken from the blog by Fr Val Farrell. The original blog can be found here
"Now is not the time", as we often say, but suppose "time" is not the currency we're using. Suppose instead of thinking in centuries, generations or even the space between general elections, we were asked instead to put time aside and measure all our thinking against the background of eternity, what then? Would we so much as know where to begin? Funnily enough we would, you know, or at least should.
Easter Sunday rouses us with the answer. Though it is tempting to think that if cameras had been around "when he rose out from the tomb" we would have had first hand proof, all we needed to set our minds at ease and solve all our doubts, in fact such a thought is silly and wrong.
Easter could never have been recorded on camera, even digital, because Easter is not an event at all in the way history records such things. Put away cameras, diaries, clocks and tape recorders for Easter is rooted in none of these things but in something we call eternity.
In eternity none of the usual elements come into play, not time, not space, not place, size or gravity. Not, directions or colour. None of these. In eternity we are freed from dependency on all of these things, freed to be in the sheer presence of God. "Free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last." Alleluia.
Easter invites every human being to cross the threshold from time to eternity. Yes we will have to go on using the things of time for they are the elements that make up life as we know it. But if we are one day to leave all these things aside and make the crossing from time to eternity then we must even now, live with our trust and hope not in time but in eternity. This is the great challenge of Easter; to live lives of FAITH. Not faith as a lame excuse for continuing to believe things reason cannot explain but faith that puts Hope and Trust in a world beyond mere reason.
Jesus showed us: Hanging there on the Cross in the world of time, he cried as we all would, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But then, crossing from time to eternity he declares for himself and for all who journey in faith, Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.
Especially must the Church, while hanging out in the world of time, be courageous enough to set out all its thinking, make all its decisions, not on the basis of this world of time, but of eternity, Resurrection Land.
and calling us to serve as your disciples.
as we use our gifts to serve you.
as we strive to bear witness
Eucharistic Adoration - Devonport: Every Friday 10am - 12noon, concluding with Stations of the Cross and Angelus
Benediction with Adoration Devonport: - first Friday of each month.
Legion of Mary: Wednesdays 11am Sacred Heart Church Community Room, Ulverstone
Prayer Group: Charismatic Renewal – meetings will be held on Monday evenings in the Community Room, Ulverstone at 7pm.
Weekday Masses 25th - 28th April, 2017
Tuesday 9:00am Penguin - Anzac Day
9:00am Devonport - Anzac Day
Wednesday: 9:30am Latrobe
Thursday: 12noon
Devonport
Friday: 9:30am Ulverstone
Next Weekend 29th & 30th April, 2017
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin
Saturday Vigil: 6:00pm Penguin
6:00pm Devonport
Sunday Mass: 8:30am Port Sorell
9:00am Ulverstone
10:30am Devonport
11:00am Sheffield L.W.C.
5:00pm Latrobe
Ministry Rosters 29th & 30th April, 2017
Devonport:
Readers: Vigil: M Kelly, B Paul, R Baker 10:30am
E Petts, K Douglas
Ministers of Communion: Vigil B O’Connor,
R Beaton, K Brown, Beau Windebank, J Heatley,
T Bird.
10.30am: K Hull, L Hollister, F Sly, E Petts, S Riley, S
Arrowsmith
Cleaners 28th
April: F Sly, M
Hansen, R McBain 5th May: M.W.C.
Piety Shop 29th
April: R Baker 30th April: K Hull Flowers: M Knight, B Naiker
Ulverstone:
Reader/s: R Locket Ministers of Communion: M Mott, M Fennell, J Jones, T Leary
Cleaners: B & V
McCall, G Doyle Flowers: M Webb Hospitality:
M Byrne, G Doyle
Penguin:
Greeters: A Landers, P Ravaillion Commentator: Y Downes Readers: Y Downes, M Murray
Ministers of
Communion: T
Clayton, M Hiscutt Liturgy: Sulphur Creek J Setting Up: T Clayton
Care of Church: M Bowles, J Reynolds
Latrobe:
Reader: M Eden Ministers of Communion: P Marlow, M Mackey Procession of Gifts: Parishioner
Port Sorell:
Readers: G Bellchambers, E Holloway Ministers of
Communion: B Lee Clean/Flow/Prepare: B Lee, A Holloway
Readings this Week – Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy)
First Reading: Acts 2:42-47
Second Reading: 1 Peter 1:3-9
Gospel: John 20:19-31
PREGO REFLECTION
As I prepare to read this Gospel, I ask Jesus to come and breathe his spirit
upon me.
It may help my prayer to imagine being one of the disciples in the room with closed doors.
What are my fears?
Do I relate to Thomas’s need for certainty?
How would Jesus help me to have more faith?
Jesus understands how hard it is for human minds to comprehend the mystery of resurrection.
Even when our hearts are closed with fear and doubt, he stands alongside us bringing us peace.
I imagine Jesus standing alongside me now, talking to me, sharing words of encouragement and a deep understanding of my needs and desires.
What do I say to Jesus?
I may want to use Thomas’s acclamation as I bring my prayer to a close.
It may help my prayer to imagine being one of the disciples in the room with closed doors.
What are my fears?
Do I relate to Thomas’s need for certainty?
How would Jesus help me to have more faith?
Jesus understands how hard it is for human minds to comprehend the mystery of resurrection.
Even when our hearts are closed with fear and doubt, he stands alongside us bringing us peace.
I imagine Jesus standing alongside me now, talking to me, sharing words of encouragement and a deep understanding of my needs and desires.
What do I say to Jesus?
I may want to use Thomas’s acclamation as I bring my prayer to a close.
Readings next week – Third Sunday of
Easter
First Reading: Acts 2:14, 22-33;
Second Reading: 1 Peter 1:17-21;
Gospel:
Luke 24:13-35
ANZAC DAY:
Remembering,
giving thanks and praying
They
shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
age
shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
at
the going down of the sun and in the morning
we
will remember them.
Eternal
rest grant to them O Lord and may perpetual light shine upon them.
Please
note: Anzac Day Mass Times - Tuesday 25th April, 2017
9:00am Our Lady
of Lourdes Church, Devonport
9:00am St Mary’s
Church, Penguin
Your prayers
are asked for the sick: Elaine Milic, George
Archer, David Welch & …,
Let us pray for those who have died recently: John Munro, Susan Reilly, Ila Breen, Glen
Graham, Christine Illingworth, Darcy
Atkinson, Daphne
Saarman, Antonio
Sciamanna.
Let us pray
for those whose anniversary occurs about this time: 19th - 25th
April
Molly Dunphy, Stephen Gibbons, Wilma Bacchin, Andrew Smith,
Marie Nichols, Leo Sheehan, John Redl, Lillian Stubbs, Lola O’Halloran, Fr
Terry Southerwood, Joyce Sheehan, Flo Smith, Emily Sherriff, Courtney Bryan, Delia Soden, and Rita McQueen.
May they rest in peace
Weekly
Ramblings
Next week we will be celebrating ANZAC Day with Masses at
Penguin (usual day but different time) and Devonport at 9.00am. Hopefully this will enable as many people as
possible to get to the Mass before going onto the various 11am services
throughout the Parish.
Next Sunday, 29th April, we will be starting a program of
presentations at each Mass time building on work being done by the Parish
Pastoral Council as a follow-up to my Vision Statement which was presented to
the Parish last November. This 1st session will follow the 9am Mass at
Ulverstone next Sunday and will last for about 30 minutes – so I am inviting
all Parishioners attending that Mass to please stay behind for that 30 minutes
so that you might be aware of what has been happening and where we might go
into the future. A similar session will be held at Latrobe that same evening
(29th) after the 5pm Mass so we are inviting Parishioners there to make that
short time after Mass available as well. Over the following two weekends there
will be presentations at the other Mass Centres so that all parishioners have a
chance to hear the same story.
Also, just a heads up for the next Open House which will be
held at Ulverstone in the Community Room on Friday, 5th May from 6.30pm. As
always at these events all you have to do is come – food and drink are
provided. ALL WELCOME
Please take care on the roads and in your homes,
ST MARY’S CHURCH PENGUIN:
Please join fellow parishioners for a soup and sandwich
night after 6pm Vigil Mass at Penguin on Saturday 29th April. We are
asking people to bring some sandwiches and/or a dessert to share. There
will be 3 or 4 different soups to choose from, tea and coffee provided.
It is always a nice way to enjoy the company of fellow parishioners over a
shared meal.
KNIGHTS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS: monthly meeting scheduled
for Sunday 30th April has been cancelled.
THE SISTERS
OF ST JOSEPH
Warmly invite Mersey Leven Parishioners to celebrate with
them the 130th anniversary of the arrival of the first Sisters of St Joseph in
Westbury on 24 May 1887.
You are invited to Holy Trinity Church, Westbury on
Wednesday, 24 May 2017 at 1pm for Prayer and Afternoon Tea. For catering
purposes, please rsvp by 5 May 2017 to josephite.mission@sosj.org.au
or phone 6228:1628
PIETY SHOP
DEVONPORT:
CD’s (Religious) now available $5
each. Baptism gifts, Holy/Congratulations & Anniversary cards also
available.
FLOWERS – OLOL CHURCH:
Thank you to the wonderful
volunteers who help out with the weekly flower roster at OLOL Church (the flowers
always look amazing!) We desperately need more volunteers to help
out with this roster. If you are able to assist please ring the Parish
Office on 6424:8383.
FOOTY
TICKETS: Round 4 (14th April) footy margin 3 points –
winners; Betty Foster, Charlies Angels, John Webb.
BINGO - Thursday Nights - OLOL
Hall, Devonport. Eyes down 7.30pm!
Callers for Thursday 27th
April – Rod Clark & Jon Halley.
NEWS FROM ACROSS THE ARCHDIOCESE:
THE JOURNEY CATHOLIC RADIO PROGRAM – AIRS 23 April
2017
This week on the Journey, Peter Gilmore talks about Living
the Gospel (repeat). We hear from Sam Clear in his segment walking the
Walk about Pain and Suffering in God’s Plan. We have put together some amazing
Christian music artists in our line-up this week to help us create a show that
is all a about faith, hope, love and life. Go to www.jcr.org.au
or www.itunes.jcr.org.au where you can listen anytime and subscribe
to weekly shows by email.
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF MISUNDERSTANDING
This article is by Fr Ron RolheiserOMI. The orignal article can be found here
The heart has its reasons, says Pascal, and sometimes those reasons have a long history.
Recently I signed a card for a friend, a devout Baptist, who was raised to have a suspicion of Roman Catholics. It’s something he still struggles with; but, don’t we all! History eventually infects our DNA. Who of us is entirely free from suspicion of what’s religiously different from us? And what’s the cure? Personal contact, friendship, and theological dialogue with those of other denominations and other faiths does help open our minds and hearts, but the fruit of centuries of bitter misunderstanding doesn’t disappear so easily, especially when it’s institutionally entrenched and nurtured as a prophetic protection of God and truth. And so in regards to Christians of other denominations there remains in most of us an emotional dis-ease, an inability to see the other fully as one of our own.
And so in signing this card for my separated Christian friend, I wrote: “To a fellow Christian, a brother in the Body of Christ, a good friend, from whom I’m separated by 500 years of misunderstanding.”
Five hundred years of misunderstanding, of separation, of suspicion, of defensiveness, that’s not something that’s easily overcome, especially when at its core there sit issues about God, truth, and religion. Granted, there has been much positive progress made in the past fifty years and many of the original, more-blatant misunderstandings have been overcome. But the effects of the historical break with Christianity and the reaction to it are present today and are still seen everywhere, from high church offices, to debates within the academy of theology, to suspicions inside the popular mind.
Sad how we’ve focused so much on our differences, when at the center, at the heart, we share the same essential faith, the same essential beliefs, the same basic moral codes, the same Scriptures, the same belief in afterlife, and the same fundamental tenet that intimacy with Jesus Christ is the aim of our faith. As well, not insignificantly, today we also share the same prejudices and biases against us, whether these come from fundamentalists within other religions or whether these come from over-zealous, over-secularized, post-Christians within our own society. To someone looking at us from the outside we, all the different Christian denominations, look like a monolith, one faith, one church, a single religion, our differences far overshadowed by our commonality. Sadly we tend not to see ourselves like this from within, where our differences, more often than not based upon a misunderstanding, are seen to dwarf our common discipleship.
Yet, the Epistle to the Ephesians tells us that, as Christians, we share one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all of us. At its most essential level, that’s true of all of us as Christians, despite our denominational differences. We are one at our core.
Granted, there are some real differences among us, mostly though in terms of how we understand certain aspects of the church and certain issues within morality, rather than on how we understand the deeper truths about the nature of God, the divinity of Christ, the gift of God’s Word, the gift of the Eucharist, and the inalienable dignity and destiny of all human beings. Within the hierarchy of truth this essential core is what’s most important, and on this essential core we essentially agree. That’s the real basis of our common discipleship.
Ecclesially, the issues that divide us focus mostly on church authority, on ordination to ministry, on whether to emphasize word or sacrament, on how to understand the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, on the number of sacraments, on the place of sacramentals and devotions within discipleship, and on how scripture and tradition interplay with each other. In terms of moral issues, the issues that divide us are also the “red button” issues within our society as a whole: abortion, gay marriage, birth control, and the place of social justice within discipleship. But, even on these, there’s more commonality than difference among the churches.
Moreover, today, the differences on how we understand many of the ecclesial and moral issues that divide us are more temperamental than denominational, that is, they tend to be more a question of one’s theology than of one’s denominational affiliation. Granted, classical denominational theology still plays in, but the divisions today regarding how we see certain ecclesial and moral issues, be that ordination, gay marriage, abortion, or social justice, are less a tension between Roman Catholics and Protestants (and Evangelicals) than they are between those who lean temperamentally and theologically in one direction rather than the other. It’s perhaps too simplistic to draw this up in terms of liberal versus conservative, but this much at least is true, the fault-line on these issues today is becoming less and less denominational.
The earliest Christian Creed had but a single line: Jesus is Lord! All Christians still agree on that and so we remain brothers and sisters, separated only by five hundred years of misunderstanding.
The Cosmic Christ: Week 2
This reflection is taken from the Daily email series by Fr Richard Rohr OFM. You can subscribe to receive the emails here
Dynamic Unity
Paul tried unceasingly to demonstrate “that Jesus was the
Christ” (Acts 9:22). This synthesis is the heart of Paul’s conversion
experience. Paul did not think he was abandoning his Jewish faith, but rather
finding its universal dimension in this “Mystery of Christ,” as he loved to
call it. Remember, Paul never knew Jesus in the flesh and hardly ever quotes
him directly. Paul introduced his cosmic understanding with his common phrase
en Christo; he uses this more than any single phrase in all of his letters. The
words “in Christ” seem to be Paul’s code for the gracious participatory
experience he so urgently wants to share with the world, and it leads him far
beyond exclusionary Judaism or exclusionary Christianity.
Only in our time is a truly dynamic unity between
time-bound, personified Jesus and eternal, universal Christ slowly being
recognized. Until now, this was an alternative and frankly rare orthodoxy among
Christians. With our much larger awareness of the universe and greater honesty
about Scripture, this understanding is timely and even necessary if
Christianity is to have any social or historical meaning larger than another
competing religion.
After the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), Christians said that
Jesus was “consubstantial” with God; after the Council of Chalcedon (451), we
agreed to a philosophical description about how Jesus’s humanity and divinity
could be one. But both “nondualities” remained cold academic theologies
(“beliefs”) because we did not draw out the practical and transformative implications
for history, evolution, and even ourselves. Many congregations quickly mumble
through the Nicene or Apostles’ Creeds week after week, disappointed that there
are no warm or human words like “love,” “healing,” or “forgiveness” in the
whole text. It is hard to believe in the creed, even if you do formally accept
it as true.
“As in him, so also in us, and also in the whole universe”
was meant to be our radical conclusion! What most religion treats as separate
(matter and Spirit, humanity and divinity) has never been separate from its
beginnings: Spirit is forever captured in matter, and matter is the place where
Spirit shows itself. It is one sacred world. John Duns Scotus reflected on the
Christ Mystery as the first idea in the mind of God, and then Teilhard de
Chardin commonly described Christ as "the Omega Point of history."
[1] We were supposed to live safely between this Alpha and Omega. All of
history is moving forward with a clear trajectory, with meaning from the
beginning and a clear summary goal. Without such coherent and universal
meaning, we have paddled desperately, and often angrily, in many confusing
directions.
References:
[1] Teilhard de Chardin, Science and Christ, trans. René
Hague (Harper & Row: 1968), 34-35; and Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon
of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (Harper Perennial: 1976, 23rd ed.), 294.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative
Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 213-215.
A Bigger Story Line
Christ is the Archetype and Model for the rest of creation
as Scripture clearly teaches (Ephesians 1:3-14; Colossians 1:15-20). Yet
Christians have instead focused on proving that Jesus is “God,” which felt
necessary to put our group out in front and to solidify our own ranks. By
pulling Jesus out of the Trinity and making him a mere “problem solver,”
Christianity has no overarching vision or explanation for what it all means. We
haven’t fully understood how the Christ “holds all things together” (Colossians
1:17). We were more eager to make Jesus the “top” than to make him the “whole,”
and thus we ended up with a religion largely concerned with exclusion.
As a result, Christianity constantly divided into smaller
tribes. “Why do you try to parcel up Christ?” Paul asked (see 1 Corinthians 1:13).
Jesus became an arguable “text” outside of any larger “context.” If the Eternal
Christ is forgotten or ignored, Jesus becomes far too small, a mere local “god”
instead of a universal principle. Many Christians still see the universe as
incoherent, without inherent sacredness, a center, direction, or purpose beyond
personal survival itself. Many Christians focus on “saving their own soul” with
little care for the world as a whole. Massive disbelief is the result. It is
hard to feel privately holy or good when the universe is neither holy nor good.
No wonder science and reason have now taken over as “the
major explainers” of meaning for much of the world. Jesus was indeed a deep and
life-changing encounter for some people, but the official Church often showed
little evidence of his universal love. Christians brought Jesus to the “New
World,” but hardly ever Christ, as we see from our treatment of indigenous
peoples and the earth. Most slave owners and proponents of apartheid fully
identified as “Christians.” Lots of mop-up work is required of Christianity for
the rest of history, after we dragged poor Jesus through our mud.
We failed to offer the world universal meaning, and now we
live in a postmodern and largely post-Christian world that denies any “big story
line” or purpose to existence. Most progressive people deny all truth claims
and metanarratives as mere grabs for power. So instead of universal hope, we
live inside of cosmic cynicism and we retreat into small identity politics.
This is a major crisis and loss of inherent dignity to the whole human project.
All the extravagances, technologies, and entertainments will never be able to
fill such a foundational hole in the human psyche. In other words, the
world—even most of the Christian world—has yet to hear the Gospel!
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative
Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 215-216.
Christ in Evolution
Ilia Delio, a Franciscan sister and scientist, describes the
positive foundation we have in the cosmic Christ:
Franciscan theology on the whole . . . emphasized the
incarnation as the love of God made visible in the world. [Bonaventure] did not
consider the incarnation foremost as a remedy for sin but the primacy of love
and the completion of creation. He recapitulated an idea present in the Greek
fathers of the church, namely, Christ is the redeeming and fulfilling center of
the universe. Christ does not save us from creation; rather, Christ is the
reason for creation. . . . Christ is first in God’s intention to love; love is
the reason for creation. [1]
Lacking an understanding of the Good News of the universal
Christ, few have the vision to perceive any coherence between the Source and
the Goal. The Christian message has had less and less significance for thinking
people, for scientists, philosophers, social workers, and those trying to find
a purpose for the universe. Christianity became merely another moralistic
religion (which loved to “win” over other religions and countries), overwhelmingly
aligned with a limited period of history (empire building) and a small piece of
the planet (Europe and eventually the Americas through colonization), rather
than representing the whole of creation and a glorious destiny (Romans
8:18-21).
Without the cosmic notion of Christ, Christians can’t
understand that God is inherent in life itself, that God is the life force of
everything who grows things from the inside. The Indwelling Spirit was our way
of saying that God creates things that create themselves from within! In humans
and animals this is experienced as sexuality, in plants as photosynthesis.
Elements participate in the creative process through electromagnetic fields,
fusion, and bonding. Even celestial bodies experience death and birth. There is
only and always growth. Death is simply a transformative stage.
Not surprisingly, many Christians ended up tragically
fighting evolution along with most human-rights struggles—slavery, women’s
suffrage, desegregation, racism, classism, homophobia, policies regarding
refugees and immigrants, mass incarceration, climate change. We had no
evolutionary notion of Christ who is forever “groaning in one great act of
giving birth” (Romans 8:22). Yet we should have been on the front line of all
of these issues, so our bold proclamation of love and justice could have pulled
humanity forward.
The Christian religion was made-to-order to grease the
wheels of human consciousness toward love, nonviolence, earth care, and
justice. Mature spirituality serves as a conveyor belt for the evolution of
human consciousness. Immature religion stalls us at low levels of
well-disguised egocentricity by fooling us into thinking we are more moral or
holy than we really are.
“Indeed God is not far from any one of us. For ‘In God we
live and move and have our very being’” (Acts 17:27-28). If this is true, then
it has to be true everywhere and all the time. Small truth is not big enough to
save a very large universe.
References:
[1] Ilia Delio, Christ in Evolution (Orbis Books: 2008), 6.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative
Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 217-219.
"Christ" Is
Another Word for Everything
When Christians defined Jesus in a small way—as a mere
problem solver for sin—we soon became preoccupied with sin itself, which is a
largely negative foundation. We became blind to much else going on in this
world except sin and its effects, which became preoccupations of most monks and
reformers. One well- known Protestant reformer actually spoke of “total depravity”
to characterize the human situation; another spoke of human nature as “a pile
of manure covered with the snow of Christ.” With such a negative anthropology
and without inherent human dignity, it is very hard for even a good theology to
succeed. Grace can only build on—and perfect—nature; it cannot undo it, says
Catholic theology. We must start where the Bible begins in Genesis 1: “It was
good, it was good . . . it was very good” (Genesis 1:10-31).
Yet many Christian leaders and churches focus on shame and
guilt, atonement and reparation, as if we were children frightened of an
abusive father. Is there no greater meaning to our individual lives and history
than to be chastened, corrected, and “saved” by God? Is there no implanted hope
and goodness to first celebrate? The starting point of religion and life cannot
be a huge problem. If we start with original sin (beginning with Genesis 3
rather than Genesis 1), our worldview is scarcity rather than abundance.
Didn’t Paul tell us “There is only Christ: he is everything
and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11), so that “God may be all in all” (1
Corinthians 15:28)? What cosmic hope and direction we were offered! But our
calculating minds have a very hard time knowing how to live inside of such
abundance. Grace is the consummate threat to all self-hatred.
Christians formally believed that somehow Jesus was “fully
human and fully divine” at the same time. But with dualistic thinking, the best
most of us could do was to see ourselves as only human, and Jesus, for all
practical purposes, as only divine. We thus missed the whole point, which was
to put the two together in him and then dare to discover the same mystery in
ourselves and in all of creation! That is how Jesus “saves” us and shows
himself as the “pioneer and perfector” of our faith (see Hebrews 12:2)—and also
the model, the guarantee, the promise, and the pledge, to use some of Paul’s
many fine metaphors for Jesus.
Christianity, a religion based on the radically inclusive
and compassionate vision of Jesus, has had a very different philosophy and
practice in its actual history. Jesus
was held hostage and misused by culture, nation-building, and prejudice, I am
afraid. He ended up being neither Jesus nor Christ!
Rather than being taught that we can and should follow Jesus
as “partners in his great triumphal procession” (2 Corinthians 2:14), we were
told to be grateful spectators and admirers of what he once did. Instead of a
totally “Inclusive Savior” we made Jesus into an object of exclusive and exclusionary
worship. Then we argued and divided over what kind of worship he preferred.
Jesus never asked for worship, only that we “follow” him (Mark 1:18) as fellow
attractors (“fishers of people”) and partners in “his triumphal procession.”
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative
Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 219-220.
The Union of Human and
Divine
Please do not think me a heretic, but it is formally and
theologically incorrect to say “Jesus is God,” as most Christians glibly do and
then need to “prove.” Jesus is instead a third something—the perfect union of
“very God” with “very man.” For the truly orthodox Christian, the Trinity must
be “God,” and Jesus can only be understood inside that Eternal Embrace. From
within this loving relationship, the Christ came forth to draw us back (through
the enfleshed Jesus) to where we all originally came from (Genesis 1:26, John
14:3). This is quite a different description of salvation—and, dare I say, the
whole point! I wonder if “reincorporation” might not be a better word than
salvation.
We have much less need to “prove” that Jesus is God (which
of itself asks nothing transformative of us). Our deep need is to experience
the same unitive mystery in ourselves and in everything else—“through him, with
him, and in him,” as we say in the Great Amen of the Eucharistic Prayer. The
good news is that we also are part of the eternal divine embrace, now as the
ongoing Body of Christ extended in space and time. We are the second coming of
Christ!
There were clear statements in the New Testament about a
universal meaning to Christ (Colossians 1, Ephesians 1, John 1, 1 John 1, and
Hebrews 1:1–4). The schools of Paul and John were initially overwhelmed by this
message. In the early Christian era, only some Eastern Fathers (such as Origen
of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Maximus the Confessor) noticed that the Christ was
clearly something older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They
mystically saw that Jesus is the union of human and divine in space and time;
whereas the Christ is the eternal union of matter and Spirit from the beginning
of time. In later centuries, the church lost this mystical understanding in
favor of fast-food, dualistic Christianity that was easier for the average
parish believer to comprehend. We pushed Jesus, and we lost Christ.
The early Franciscan School surely fell in love with the
person of Jesus, but through Duns Scotus and Bonaventure it also saw him as a
corporate personality (a type, archetype, or model) representing and directing
the Whole. We know this by the way that early Franciscans saw the Christ
Mystery mirrored in every aspect of creation, from elements, to weather,
planets, animals, attitudes, non-Christians, art, and even to enemies. For example,
Roger Bacon (1214–1292), a Franciscan friar at Oxford, is called “the father of
experimental science.” The natural world was no longer just “natural” for those
influenced by the intuitive genius of Francis of Assisi. Poor Bacon was seen as
not very religious, and his laboratory was relegated to the very outside walls
of Oxford, but Bacon had the courage and passion to love and serve the Eternal
Christ and not just the historical Jesus. There was no gap between sacred and
secular in his view. It was one sacred and all “supernatural” world.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative
Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 220-222.
Universal Salvation
A universal notion of Christ takes mysticism beyond the mere
individual and private level that has been seen as mysticism’s weakness. If
authentic God experience overcomes the primary false split between yourself and
the divine, then it should also overcome the equally false split between
yourself and the rest of creation.
For some of us, the first split is overcome personally in an
experience of Jesus, but for many others (maybe even most!), union with the
divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure
love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, awe before beauty, or some
kind of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” experience. Why? Because creation itself
is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational “Bible” that
reveals the path to God. The first incarnation of the Christ Mystery started
about 13.8 billion years ago at “The Big Bang.” So some start with Jesus, but
many who began with the Christ Mystery did not have that experience validated
by the Church. They looked secular, humanistic, or like mere “nature mystics.”
But God uses and honors all starting points!
Pre-Christian and pre-Jewish people already had access to
God. This is the ecclesia ab Abel (“the church that existed since Abel”) that
has been spoken of so often by the early church Fathers and in the documents of
Vatican II. From the first righteous victim (Genesis 4:10; Matthew 23:35) until
now, all suffering cries out to God and elicits divine compassion and
community. This is a momentous and universal truth. We are indeed “saved”
inside the Christ Mystery since the beginning of consciousness. Only in
eventual time did this community take the form of “church.”
So we are called to love both Jesus and Christ. You can
begin with either Jesus or Christ, but eventually it is easiest to love both.
Too many Christians have started and stopped with Jesus, never knowing the
universal Christ. Many non-Christians have started with loving the Christ by
another name. I have met Hindus, Muslims, and Jews who live in this hidden
mystery of oneness; and I have met many Roman Catholics and Protestants who are
running away from the Christ Mystery, as either practical materialists or pious
spiritualists.
Tertullian (160–225), who is called “the father of Western
theology,” rightly taught that “the flesh is the hinge of salvation” (Caro salutis
est cardo). [1] The incarnation of flesh and Spirit is Christianity’s most
important contribution to spirituality, and this is the meaning of “The
Christ,” although you do not need to name it as such.
Now “the world, life and death, the present and the future
are all your servants, for you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1
Corinthians 3:22-23). Full salvation is finally universal belonging and
universal connecting. Our Christian word for that is “heaven.” This is why
Jesus can say to a man dying in time, “This day you are with me in paradise”
(Luke 23:43). The Christ is now, here, everywhere, and always.
References:
[1] Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis (Treatise on the
Resurrection), 8, 2.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative
Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 223-226.
Choose life: horizons beyond the tomb walls
‘The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair’. But the bursting forth of a new world on Easter morning breaks the walls of this tomb and opens our horizons, writes David Neuhaus SJ: ‘resurrection renews hope’. The original of this article can be found here
The Cambridge Dictionary defines the word ‘horizon’ as ‘the line at the farthest place that you can see, where the sky seems to touch the land or sea’. This Easter, the word ‘horizon’ strikes me as particularly appropriate in order to understand what difference Jesus’s resurrection makes in my life and in our world.
Christ’s victory over death is first noted in the gospel when the women approach the tomb early on Sunday morning. They have come reverentially to anoint Christ’s body, which three days earlier had been hurriedly consigned to a tomb. A heavy stone had been rolled over the mouth of the burial cave, as was common practice, and the Jews, those who were his disciples and those who were his opponents, then observed the Sabbath. In the silence of the Sabbath, a new world, whose seed was conceived in Christ’s crucified body, was mysteriously being formed. This new world would burst forth on the first day of the week, the first day of a new creation. It is into this world that we, disciples of Christ, are invited. It is to this new world that we, disciples of Christ, point with our witness.
As the women approached the tomb, as yet unaware of the new world that awaited them, they asked ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ (Mark 16:3) Still firmly rooted in the world that is passing away, their anxiety, sadness and sense of loneliness are all present in this question. Jesus has left them alone and they live this as an abandonment with a profound sense of grief. Yet all this gives way to bewilderment, confusion and fear as they gaze on the tomb, burst open, and on the heavy stone, pushed aside. Mark’s Gospel concludes the scene with the troubling words, ‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’ (Mark 16:8). It is this that must become wonder, joy and thanksgiving as the women, first witnesses of the resurrection, encounter the Risen Jesus.
What distinguishes the old world from the new one? That is a difficult question to answer as we are still living so much in the old. At the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father for his disciples, saying: ‘I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world’ (John 17:15-16). Indeed, our being in the old world that has still not passed away makes our fidelity to the new world, into which we are invited by Jesus, fragile and sometimes faltering. The new often loses its specific character, its contours blur and its distinct character dissolves as our rootedness in the old overshadows the light of the new.
It is the word ‘horizon’ that distinguishes the old world from the new. Whereas the old world is suffocating, dark and often hopeless, provoking anxiety and sadness, the new world is one in which horizons are open, flooded with light and joy, evoking hope. Death is the reality of the old world, a reality where the horizon is blocked; and resurrection is the reality of the new, where the horizon stretches to where heaven and earth touch.
The dead body of Jesus was laid in a tomb, dark, dank and closed in. Jesus really died! He did not pass through death or act dead, but he truly died as a human being dies. His death, burial and descent into the place of the dead constitute an essential element in his birth, death and resurrection. In the Apostles’ Creed, we recite a summary of the Easter Triduum: ‘[He] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead’. Many have struggled to understand what it means for Jesus, after his death on the cross, to have descended into hell. This is a reference to passages in the New Testament that talk of a descent into the kingdom of the dead after the death of Christ. Most explicitly this is referred to in 1 Peter 3:18-19: ‘For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison’. In Hebrew, the place referred to as ‘hell’ and described as a ‘prison’ is called Sheol, the abode of the dead.
Sheol in the Old Testament is described as a dark and suffocating place under the earth. In the terrifying story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, who challenged the leadership of Moses, they were swallowed up by the earth that opened its mouth, and ‘closed over them’, bringing them into Sheol (Numbers 16:30–33). Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of imprisonment behind gates (Isaiah 38:10), the Book of Job describes it as a place behind bars (Job 17:16) and the Psalm describes cords and snares that entangle (Psalm 18:5). Elsewhere, Isaiah spoke of Sheol as a place of darkness, a land where there is no memory (Isaiah 14:9, 26:14) like in the Psalms, which describes it as ‘darkness… the land of forgetfulness’ (Psalm 88:12). Solomon describes a place of inactivity, where there is no work and no thought (Ecclesiastes 9:10). It is a place of silence (Psalm 115:17). Most characteristically, Sheol is a place where there is no praise of God. ‘For in death there is no remembrance of you, in Sheol who can give you praise?’ (Psalm 6:5). ‘For Sheol cannot thank you, death cannot praise you; those who go down to the Pit cannot hope for your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:18).
Jesus experiences the reality of the tomb and that of Sheol as an essential part of the incarnation through which he enters fully into our human lives. The reality of the tomb is a human reality we fully know in death. However, before we die, we can and often do choose death over life over and over again. We are enslaved to the consequences of our wrong choices. In these choices, the tomb is palpable, a reality of darkness, sin and fear. It is this exit from a place of imprisonment and slavery that the Jewish people celebrate at Passover. Their exit from Egypt is a breaking out of the prison of slavery. The word for Egypt in Hebrew (Mitzrayim) evokes the word for narrow and confining (tzar). It is thus completely coherent that Jesus the Jew chose the Passover as the time to pass from death to life. At Easter, we are invited to renew our commitment to the new world born from the tomb. We are called to burst out of the tomb into life, leaving behind us a tomb that is empty.
The tomb reality is one of walls, the blocking out of light, lack of vision, a place in which there are no horizons. Saint Teresa of Avila described a vision of hell in these words:
Being in such an unwholesome place, so unable to hope for any consolation, I found it impossible either to sit down or to lie down, nor was there any room, even though they put me in this kind of hole made in the wall. Those walls, which were terrifying to see, closed in on themselves and suffocated everything. There was no light, but all was enveloped in the blackest darkness.
Scripture and the saints teach us that Sheol is not just a matter of human destiny. There is a choice involved, between stagnating in a place where all the horizons are shut off with walls or tending towards a place where the horizon is stretching out before us.
The world we often choose to live in resembles Sheol in more than one sense. The walls we build to protect ourselves and to keep others out, the language we mouth to define our ‘us’ against our ‘them’, the resources we spend in order to keep track of who is our ‘us’ and who is our ‘them’, all contribute to the establishment of a tomb, an abode of the dead, a hell that produces the sentiments of anxiety, suspicion, fear and despair that accompany us too often. This Sheol, which we call home, is ever more alive as a discourse of phobia resounds in our capitals, building on a sentiment of fear.
The old world is often our world, a world that encourages apathy in the face of the misery produced by our greed. As we shut the door in the face of our brothers and sisters who clamour for our solidarity and assistance, we sink into the tomb. As we watch unmoved as millions flee their homes because of hunger and war, petrifying our hearts with suspicion and refusal, we adopt the constitution of an old world that crucified Jesus. As we comfortably mouth a language that divides the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, we betray a gospel that preaches love and pardon. And so we sink into a hopelessness that proposes the walls we build around ourselves in brick and word, in violence and rejection. Resurrection renews hope. The walls crumble. In a Twitter message on 9 February 2017, Pope Francis proclaimed ‘Hope opens new horizons and enables us to dream of what is not even imaginable’. Hope enables us to quit the old world on Easter morning!
Pope Francis, great apostle of the new world, spoke out loud and clear in favour of the new world in his inaugural homily as pope on 19 March 2013:
Saint Paul speaks of Abraham, who, ‘hoping against hope, believed’ (Rom 4:18). Hoping against hope! Today too, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others. To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope! For believers, for us Christians, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph, the hope that we bring is set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ. It is a hope built on the rock which is God.
A few months later, on his visit to the tomb of Christ, in May 2014, Pope Francis expressed this reality of a new world outside the tomb. The context of his words was the meeting with the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople. His words, however, stretch far beyond that specific context.
We need to believe that, just as the stone before the tomb was cast aside, so too every obstacle to our full communion will also be removed. This will be a grace of resurrection, of which we can have a foretaste even today. Every time we ask forgiveness of one another for our sins against other Christians and every time we find the courage to grant and receive such forgiveness, we experience the resurrection! Every time we put behind us our longstanding prejudices and find the courage to build new fraternal relationships, we confess that Christ is truly risen!
When Jesus bursts out of the tomb, he leads us forth into a new world, a world of open horizons. Isaiah contrasts this new world of life to that of Sheol, as a place of joyful thanksgiving: ‘The living, the living, they thank you, as I do this day; parents make known to children your faithfulness’ (Isaiah 38:19). In bursting out of the tomb, Jesus brings down walls, opens doors and brings the widest horizons into view. As the walls dissolve and the gates are burst open, one can breathe in the air of freedom and walk heads held high, no longer slaves. Thus is accomplished in the promise that God makes at the centre of the Law of Moses:
I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be their slaves no more; I have broken the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. (Leviticus 26:11-13)
Fr David M. Neuhaus SJ serves as Latin Patriarchal Vicar within the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. He is responsible for Hebrew-speaking Catholics in Israel as well as the Catholic migrant populations. He teaches Holy Scripture at the Latin Patriarchate Seminary and at the Salesian Theological Institute in Jerusalem and also lectures at Yad Ben Zvi.
EASTER: WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES
Taken from the blog by Fr Val Farrell. The original blog can be found here
"Now is not the time", as we often say, but suppose "time" is not the currency we're using. Suppose instead of thinking in centuries, generations or even the space between general elections, we were asked instead to put time aside and measure all our thinking against the background of eternity, what then? Would we so much as know where to begin? Funnily enough we would, you know, or at least should.
Easter Sunday rouses us with the answer. Though it is tempting to think that if cameras had been around "when he rose out from the tomb" we would have had first hand proof, all we needed to set our minds at ease and solve all our doubts, in fact such a thought is silly and wrong.
Easter could never have been recorded on camera, even digital, because Easter is not an event at all in the way history records such things. Put away cameras, diaries, clocks and tape recorders for Easter is rooted in none of these things but in something we call eternity.
In eternity none of the usual elements come into play, not time, not space, not place, size or gravity. Not, directions or colour. None of these. In eternity we are freed from dependency on all of these things, freed to be in the sheer presence of God. "Free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last." Alleluia.
Easter invites every human being to cross the threshold from time to eternity. Yes we will have to go on using the things of time for they are the elements that make up life as we know it. But if we are one day to leave all these things aside and make the crossing from time to eternity then we must even now, live with our trust and hope not in time but in eternity. This is the great challenge of Easter; to live lives of FAITH. Not faith as a lame excuse for continuing to believe things reason cannot explain but faith that puts Hope and Trust in a world beyond mere reason.
Jesus showed us: Hanging there on the Cross in the world of time, he cried as we all would, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But then, crossing from time to eternity he declares for himself and for all who journey in faith, Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.
Especially must the Church, while hanging out in the world of time, be courageous enough to set out all its thinking, make all its decisions, not on the basis of this world of time, but of eternity, Resurrection Land.
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