Jesus is no tease

Words fail in writing about the Eucharist, but I can’t help myself. I want the Word above every other word, the Word made flesh, the Word that is before and behind every word and more profound than all the books that have ever been, or will ever be, written to gather dust on dusty shelves. As Eliot demonstrated in The Four Quartets, words are messy tools, but we have to work with what we’ve got.

Jesus is no tease. He gives his all to all. Before the Eucharist, the greatest theologian is as humbled and as beloved as the illiterate peasant. Thus, the Eucharist is more democratic than the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Jesus is pure beauty, truth, goodness and compassion–and absolutely free for the asking. He is particularly kind to the poor, the ugly, the outcast–who in an instant are turned into princes and princesses. Since we are all subject to disease and death, is it not comforting to contemplate the Eucharist at any moment and be transformed?

Imperfect analogies may help. When we gaze upon a famous painting, we are not all art experts, but we are all able to soak up quite a bit of the emotional content. We don’t have to be musicologists to appreciate a Bach fugue or Handel’s Messiah. Experts may see more than we do, but we, in our innocence, may see other things in our awe. When I was a hormonally saturated teenager, I dreamed about being married. Little did I expect that a particular woman from Poland would be my fulfillment.

The Eucharist is always more than we expect. He is redeeming love for sinners. I cannot fix myself up to be beautiful or earn my own salvation. But I can ask Jesus to love me and he will not refuse. Without him I can do nothing. With him all is possible.

Ron Day

Choosing Belief

Doug spoke yesterday of belief as a choice we make daily. His thoughts reminded me of this commencement address the writer David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005. The full address, widely anthologized, has now been printed as a (slim) book of its own. The full text can be found at http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

et verbum caro factum est

   The  Resurrection is the blossoming of the seed  Jesus has always borne within him.  In the Resurrection, that which had lain dormant from the beginning in the vital existence of the Son of Man and God becomes apparent. My existence appears to begin with my birth and ends with death.  Before it lies a darkness so complete that it seems incredible that I ever could have begun to exist at all.  After it, again  a darkness. In Jesus this is not so.  He does not begin with his birth, but  rather "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh,"  and  He knew it in his very bones. "Before Abraham came to be,  I am" he told the Pharisees. (John 8:58)  

An Easter poem

Transport

The rose, for all its behavior,
is smaller than the lifelove it stands for,
only briefly brightening,
and even its odor
only a metaphor.
Or so we suppose
just as we suppose the savior
we employ or see next door
is only some hired man
gardening.

Marie Ponsot

How many crosses have been borne up and down in elevators of our buildings

   Jesus did not invent the cross. He, like every person, found it on his journey. The newness in his message was to plant the seed of love in our bearing of the Cross. The element of love turned the way of the Cross into a way that leads to life. The Cross itself became a message of love: a means of transformation. Our cross is also the Cross of Jesus!
This cross first embraces each of us, and entrusts us with a duty in our personal life, in our families, among our friends and acquaintances - in sum, with whoever else's cross we encounter. I think of the many broken

The Light That Gets Lost

"The Blue of Distance," a chapter in Rebecca Solnit's wonderful book A Field Guide to Getting Lost begins with a description of how color measures the distance light travels to get to us. The warmer colors are closest to our eye. At the farthest end of the spectrum, she writes, lies blue, the color of twilight, of far horizons, of deep water:

The light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole of distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

This chapter sprung to mind when I was meditating on Jesus' words in John 16. "It is better for you that I go." In particular, I remembered a passage later in the chapter where she compares a child's eye-view of the world, close-up and present tense, with an adult's view of life in retrospect. She quotes a writer describing an excursion to the Grand Canyon with his children.While the adults in the party sought vistas and panoramas, the children would 'scour the ground for bones, pine cones, sparkly sandstone... .' Solnit comments:

There is no distance in childhood... . The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, and the complexity of the terrain we traverse... .

With Jesus' departure imminent, the disciples are poised to discover melancholy as they too traverse more complex terrain -- physical, emotional, spiritual -- than they ever imagined. Solnit quotes Simone Weil writing to a friend:

Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.

Jesus' going away "for a little while" deepens our friendship by extending it. He shifts the disciples' (and our) gaze from the near, from close, daily contact, to the far horizon. He reveals that separation carries its own intimacy. "Love," writes Solnit, "is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between." Jesus tells the disciples of that love and gives a name to that particular atmosphere. It is the Comforter.

And, of course, without departure and separation we can never experience the exquisiteness of return and reunion, as Jesus tells his friends, tells us:

But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.

St. Marie Eugenie does John 14

   Today is the feast of St. Marie Eugenie of Jesus. The Assumption examiners are considering the meaning of  John chapter 14 for their lives,  so I thought I might draw  attention to this quote from Marie Eugenie contained in the Chapters of 1878.

   You have the direct teaching of Our Lord. "That the world may know that I love the Father. Arise, let us go from here" (John 14:31)  This means let us go to meet sacrifice so the world will know that I love my Father.  Sacrifice is therefore the sign, the fruit and the characteristic of love.  Why include mortification with charity?  At Easter, must we speak of mortification?  Yes,  because this is a virtue which must be practiced every day in the Christian and religious life.  Christian life has a basis of mortification and what best suits the daughters of the Assumption is the mortification proposed by the feast of the Resurection.
   To live in the divine life, we must mortify ourselves ...true charity cannot exist without a spirit of mortification and sacrifice.