David W. Fagerberg, Univ of Notre Dame April 16, 2011
Full, Active and Conscious Participation in Christs Death
I am not being flippant or, what would be worse, sarcastic, when I pluck up a phrase that normally occupies the land of rubrics and apply it to the crucifixion. To speak of full, active, and conscious participation usually brings up pastoral disputes in the liturgical range wars over hymnal selection and extraordinary ministers of communion. But my intent in juxtaposing it to Christs death is to remind us that any reform of the liturgy does not have as its purpose to bring us closer to some historical era, but to Christ. Too often when we think about liturgy we think only about its tip I mean something like the tip of an iceberg. The tip of the liturgical iceberg is the part we can see: it is the public, liturgical ceremony done in ritualized form. But it is connected to a massive reality below the waterline. Of course liturgy has a visible ceremonial face, but it is not merely this. To fully comprehend the ritual liturgy we must appreciate the saving economy that it epiphanizes. Thus Pius XIIs definition of liturgy: The sacred liturgy is, consequently, the public worship which our Redeemer as Head of the Church renders to the Father, as well as the worship which the community of the faithful renders to its Founder, and through Him to the heavenly Father. It is, in short, the worship rendered by the Mystical Body of Christ in the entirety of its Head and members. (Mediator Dei 20)
The liturgy is our inclusion, made possible by the Holy Spirit, in a relationship between the Son and the Father. (i) The Son worships the Father; (ii) the Church worships the Son, her founder; (iii) and through the Son, together with the Son, the Church worships the Father. All this occurs by the power of the Holy Spirit who is ushering creation into a redeemed, eschatological, spiritual existence. 2
Now, at the center of that timeline between the protological alpha and the eschatological omega, stands the paschal mystery. Everything leads up to it, and everything flows out of it. And when Mother Church said, in the second Vatican council, that she earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations, she was not speaking about our right to ritual. She was speaking about our right to spiritual life. (I suppose this to also apply to the new translation coming ahead. Like a new pair of shoes, the translation will pinch for a few weeks while we break it in, but the purpose of every liturgical text is to enable us to walk up to the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem.) This kind of participation is the Christians right and duty by reason of their baptism, and confirms their identity as a chosen race, and royal priesthood, holy nation, and a redeemed people. The reason to restore and promote the sacred liturgy is so that the faithful may derive from it the true Christian spirit. All this is from Sacrosanctum Concilum 14. What is the true Christian spirit that we are to derive from the liturgy? The one found in Christ, the one which is found in Christs hypostatic union. This is where a human will was finally fully conformed to the will of God something intended for the first Adam, but not accomplished. The first Adam did not have equality with God, but grasped at it; the second Adam did have equality with God but did not grasp at it, but emptied himself into only one desire: to obey the Father, to love the Father, to be near the Father. George MacDonald, the Scottish preacher who had such an influence on C. S. Lewis because Lewis said he could smell holiness in his writings, puts it this way: His whole thought, his whole delight, was in the thought, in the will, in the being of his Father. The joy of the Lords life, that which made it life to him, was the Father; of him he was always thinking, to him he was always turning. I suppose most men have some thought of pleasure or satisfaction or strength to which they turn when action pauses, life becomes for a moment still, and the wheel sleeps on its own swiftness: with Jesus it needed no pause of action, no rush of renewed consciousness, to send him home; his 3
thought was ever and always his Father. To its home in the heart of the father his heart ever turned. That was his treasure-house, the jewel of his mind, the mystery of his gladness, claiming all degrees and shades of delight, from peace and calmest content to ecstasy. His life was hid in God.
This attitude was present throughout the life of Jesus, such as we are privileged to glimpse it in the Gospels. Jesus one will is to do the will of the one who sent him. And, Why call me good? he asks, No one is good but God alone. (Mark 10:8, Luke 18:10). And when the hour was coming when each of his disciples would be scattered to his own home, the hour we will be remembering with shame in a few days, he says he will not be alone because the Father is with me. (John 16:32). Insofar as the cross is the Fathers will for his Son because it is required for our redemption, Jesus brings himself to embrace the cross. The most frequently mentioned type of Christ by patristic theologians was Moses, of course: prophet, priest and king all rolled into one. But the second most frequently mentioned was Isaac. He willingly submitted to Abrahams raised knife hand (though Jewish interpretation supposed Abraham was old and frail, and Isaac was young and strong and could have escaped). By whose sacrifice was it, they asked? The Sacrifice of Abraham or the Sacrifice of Isaac? If you are focused on the victim, it is the sacrifice of Isaac; if you are focused on the wounded love, it is the sacrifice of Abraham. And whose sacrifice is it on the cross? No less the Fathers than the Sons. Now that raises a challenge for us. We are anxious to get to the resurrection, to Easter, like children are anxious to get to their chocolate eggs on Easter morning. We would be happy to embrace the prophet, the teacher of love on the shores of Galilee, the idea we have of a Messiah, the miracle worker and parable spinner, but we cannot speed past this fact: that if we are to fully, consciously and actively participate in the life of Christ, then we must embrace what he embraced. And he embraced the cross, from love, out of obedience. 4
Paul Claudels reflections on the crucifixion are gathered from his various writings by his goddaughter, Agnes du Sarment, in a meditation on the Apostles Creed entitled I Believe in God. Jesus said, I come not to be served but to serve. And Claudel replies, well, if it is true that you came to serve, I daresay you got what you were after! Then he criticizes a casual attitude toward liturgy. It is painful to know that you are here at our disposal and that we can think of no better use for you than to help pass that tedious half hour before dinner on Sunday. On the cross the fall is undone. Things work now in reverse in order to reverse our backward life. Claudel writes, Long ago Adam hid himself from God among the trees of paradise; now it is Gods turn to hide. He created the world, and the world denies him a sip of water. A god is about to die before our eyes On the very brink of this act by which all things exist he found no way to defend himself from the shaft of love. The earth trembles and gates, the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom, the graves vomit up their dead. There is a universal shuddering of the whole creation around the cross. On all sides things break asunder and yawn open.
The first creation which we have stained had to be split open so that the seed of new life can find its way to the surface. And to plant such a seed in ourselves, we too must be split open. The hammer blows on the nails in his hands, must become chisel blows cracking our closed souls open. It feels impossible. Claudel concludes, I feel that I have undertaken something beyond my strength. These wings of wood, how can I adjust them to sit on my shoulders? The eternal son did not need to die, for he was born without the original curse and was in constant communion with his Father, who is the source of life. Nevertheless he died in order to crack open the door through which we may squeeze into eternal life. Louis Bouyer is blunt about the matter. Christ died for us, not in order to dispense us from dying, but rather to make us capable of dying efficaciously. (xiv) Our dying must be full, we must actively embrace it, and we must do so consciously. 5
Rightly understood, [Bouyer continues] the imitation of Christ is the very essence of the Christian life. We must have in us the mind that Christ had; we must be crucified and buried and rise with him. This, of course, does not mean that we fallen human beings are to copy clumsily the God-man. The whole matter is a mystery signifying that we are to be grafted upon him so that the same life which was in him and which he has come to give us may develop in us as in him and produce in us the same fruits of sanctity and love that it produced in him. (xv)
Astonishing! Jesus is the Lord, Adonai, the Kyrios, the corporeal dwelling place of divinity but this is not all. Just as men had borne the likeness of the terrestrial Adam, so they were now called to resemble the heavenly Adam. Baptized in him, they would put him on. (xv) We dig our toe in the sand in humility, either false or real, and confess that we do not think we can resemble Christ. We are content to downgrade the mystical faith to a religious morality in which we just try to keep enough of the ten commandments to squeeze past judgment. But the divine economy did not plan on stopping short. The Holy Spirits chisel will not stop its blows until we are perfect, as our father in heaven is perfect. That is the closing verse of the marching orders to evangelical perfection, the Beatitudes, in Matthew 5. Blessed Columba Marmion writes, "What in fact is a Christian? 'Another Christ,' all antiquity replies."
And what is the life the Christian lives? "A list of observances? In nowise. It is the life of Christ within us, and all that Christ has appointed to maintain this life in us; it is the Divine life overflowing from the bosom of the Father into Christ Jesus and, through Him, into our soul." "God not only wills that we should be saved, but that we should become saints."
"God is not content and never will be content with a natural morality or religion; He wills us to act as children of a divine race."
The liturgical mysteries, then, are not events in the biography of the Nazarene, buried under the dust of time, taken out to ogle on days of obligation. In the Triduum we do not look at the past, but at our future, and what it will presently cost. Our participation in the paschal mystery is full, conscious, and active because, Marmion says, Christ attaches a grace to each of His mysteries in 6
order "to help us to reproduce within ourselves His divine features in order to make us like unto Him." This death is hard for creatures like ourselves, so we must practice it. We must train for our biological death by daily dying. Such an athletic training was called askesis by the ancient world, and the Church fathers spoke of an asceticism in the Christian life. If asceticism was perfected in the sands of the desert, it is born in the waters of the baptismal font. Every Christian is to be an ascetic, though not every Christian is an ascetic of the monastic variety. Asceticism is a battle against the passions, the vices, and this battle every Christian vows at his or her baptism. Remember that sacramentum meant the military oath a soldier took; then liturgical asceticism is the fulfillment of our baptismal sacrament. Liturgical asceticism is the cost of being made more Christoform. A person is a block of marble within which lies an image of the image of God (the Son), and each strike of mallet and chisel by the Holy Spirit frees that image from stone-cold vices in order to create out of women and men a liturgical son who shares the Son's filial relationship with God the Father. If liturgy means sharing the life of Christ (being washed in his resurrection, eating his body), and if askesis means discipline (in the sense of forming), then liturgical asceticism is the discipline required to become an icon of Christ and make his image visible in our faces. I am suggesting that this liturgical asceticism is how the mystery celebrated liturgically becomes the mystery loved and lived. The mystery of the liturgy clings to us as we leave the church, like the scent of incense clinging to our clothes, that we may practice the paschal mystery fully and consciously and actively in the recesses of our heart. For the place where we confront our old Adam in order to put him to death is not on a hillside outside Jerusalem, but within the depths of our hearts. In our hearts the struggle between the vices and virtues go on. 7
The ascetical theologians spoke at length about the difficulty of putting our passions to death. The Greek philosophers thought of man as having three faculties: the concupiscible, the irascible, and the intellective. In other words, human beings have an appetite, they can be moved in spirit, and they can reason. When these faculties are working properly, they function in the image of God. But when they move incorrectly, they produce the passions. So when Evagrius systematically orders his list of passions, he does it around these three faculties. Gluttony, lust, and avarice are distortions of our concupiscible faculty; sadness, anger, acedia are distortions of our irascible faculty; and the last two passions afflict our right reason: vainglory, pride. So long as I see the world through the cataracts of sin, I see the world falsely. If I look at my neighbors wife lustfully, or at my neighbor enviously, or at the goods of the earth avariciously, I am seeing the cosmos in distortion. There is therefore an ascetical struggle that trains for death by dying to the passions. Maximus observes that Almsgiving heals the irascible part of the soul; fasting extinguishes the concupiscible part ... So we see fasting, almsgiving and prayer as the Lenten aerobic exercises leading us up to Good Friday, year after year. It takes a sharp sword to make the fine cut that would separate our passions from our heart, without stopping our heart beating. Such a sword God wields. Claudel says God came to pierce each soul; it was His way of opening a passage for Himself. External circumstances, the practical life in which we are engaged, only allow us to live on the crust, to use the most superficial part, not necessarily the worst but the least authentic part of ourselves. Only profound emotion, the weight and painful pressure of harsh and turbulent events, reach down to the gushing salutary vein in the depths of us. Someone has fought his way through to us. Someone is urging us to say outright the real name, our own real name.
With all this talk about piercing and pressuring and crucifying, what would cause us to actively pursue it? It is the deepest mystery at the heart of asceticism. At this depth, faith works by its own logic, and it frequently turns our expectations upside down. We get exactly what we 8
want, exactly the way we want it, says Charles Williams about judgment. And Claudel says we rush to the resurrection from our grave because we desire judgment. A strange thought. Our first reaction is to skulk along the back wall of the room and avoid the gaze of God, but Claudel says that deep down we desire it. Our conscience has found what it longed for above all else: a Judge ... There are so many things heaped up inside us all ready and only waiting to become an answer for the question to be put. A question, a challenge, a presence.
On the day of the Last Judgment, it is not only the Judge who will descend from heaven, the whole world will rush forth to meet him.
George MacDonald picks up a passage from the book of Revelations to explain this paradox. The 17 th verse of chapter 2 in the Book of Revelation says To him that overcomes will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knows save he that receives it." What is this name? It is not one of the ordinary names we go by in this world. A name of the ordinary kind in this world, has nothing essential in it. It is but a label by which one man and a scrap of his external history may be known from another man and a scrap of his history. The only names which have significance are those which the popular judgment or prejudice or humor bestows, either for ridicule or honour, upon a few out of the many.
We have names of these kind in abundance from our tribe and our kin and our employment. But MacDonald says deep down we want our true name. The true name is one which expresses the character, the nature, the being, the meaning of the person who hears it. It is the man's own symbol his soul's picture, in a word the sign which belongs to him and to no one else.
How do we get such a name? The answer is obvious. We know the answer in fact, unconsciously, but conversion means becoming fully conscious of this knowledge. Conversion means coming to an active desire for this name. MacDonald asks three questions about it: 9
(1) Who can give a man this, his own name? God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is, or even, seeing what he is, could express in a name-word the sum and harmony of what he sees.
(2) To whom is this name given? To him that overcometh.
(3) When is it given? When he has overcome.
Now the mystery of grace & free will arises. Does God then not know what a man is going to become? As surely as he sees the oak which he put there lying in the heart of the acorn. Why then does he wait till the man has become by overcoming ere he settles what his name shall be? He does not wait; he knows his name from the first. But as - although repentance comes because God pardons yet the man becomes aware of the pardon only in the repentance; so it is only when the man has become his name that God gives him the stone with the name upon it
God foresees that from the first, because he made it so; but the tree of the soul, before its blossom comes, cannot understand what blossom it is to bear, and could not know what the word meant Such a name cannot be given until the man is the name. To tell the name is to seal the success to say "In thee I am well pleased."
The bare wood of the cross is fixed with greenery between Holy Thursday and the Easter Vigil, as the bare tree of our soul comes to bear its blossoms at judgment day. We must kiss the cross on the way to receive our white stone. We must desire that judgment, that purgation, that purification fully, consciously and actively. When the good mare Hwin meets Aslan for the first time, she trots up to the lion, shaking all over. Please, youre so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. Id sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.
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What Would it Mean to Believe in the Resurrection?
I believe all kinds of things: I believe that in fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue; I believe E = mc 2 (though I dont understand it); I believe warm weather will finally come to South Bend; I believed my Garmin yesterday as it brought me to this doorstep; and so forth. But surely different kinds of truths call for different kinds of belief. The object requires something of the subject. Something different is required of me to believe the weatherman when he tells me tomorrow it will be sunny, than is required of me when I believe my wife when she tells me that she loves me. Different degrees of commitment by the believing subject are required, and the difference is created by the object of knowledge. This is what I have in mind when I ask: what would it mean to believe in the resurrection? My teacher, Paul Holmer, investigated the subjective quality of knowing (which is not the same as subjectivism). As a philosopher, he considered the cost of knowing some things. He wanted to ask how we are capacitated to know truth, and I share two of his summary remarks with you. First, You cannot peddle truth or happiness: what a thought cost in the first instance, it will cost in the second. In other words, what it cost Augustine to understand grace, it will cost you to understand grace. He can point the way, but he cannot travel the road for you. In one kind of knowledge, scientists stand on the shoulders of previous scientists as they pile up knowledge, but theres another kind of knowledge wisdom, I would say which cannot just be piled up. Each person must take it and apply it to himself individually. The second remark by Holmer was What we know depends upon the kind of person we have made ourselves to be. There are things a coarse and egocentric person cannot know; there are things a gluttonous and avaricious person cannot know (speaking of liturgical asceticism again, as we did this morning). 11
Now, what kind of person must we be in order to believe in the resurrection? Id like to suggest three names for the subjective condition for believing in this objective truth. I think Im describing one state, but naming it works better using three names instead of one. (1) First, the subjective state required to believe in the resurrection may be called faith. I am thinking both of the beginning touch of faith, and its greater extension in our lives. I mean it in the sense of metanoia conversion, repentance. We take on a new mind (a meta nous). There are some things for which, to see them, a new mind is required, which capacitates us for this belief. A profound modification of the human being is needed. We do receive new minds from time to time, and with a little effort you can think of examples. That philosopher who opened up for you a whole new way of seeing things, or that theologian who made the penny drop. A man might boringly till a field to plant the most boring crop of turnips ever put in the ground, but one day he falls in love, marries, has children, and begins planting his garden to feed his family, and the old action becomes different. Teleology is connected with meaning. Cultivating this teleological orientation requires a sort of integrity of us, which Holmer says is a kind of attentiveness. "If someone says, he writes: 'My trouble is I've never known what I wanted,' the issue is not the hiddenness and internal privacy of wants, but very probably that one has never wanted steadily and long. The problem is not that my 'wants' are unknowable, even to me; the problem is that I have not trained my wants, like I have not trained my eye on the target. Failing this, there is no "I."
Who I am involves what I have loved long and hard. Holmer continues, "If one's subjectivity is made up only of episodic and trivial desires, stimulated by accident and circumstance, then one is not a person at all. No self gets a chance to develop." This is what it means to have integrity. Integritas means soundness, from integer, which means whole, complete. Integrity means being a person who wants, instead of being a collection of wants. There is someone inside. My name is 12
being written on the white stone. If we wanted steadily and long, if we wanted worthwhile things, if we judged between the trivial and the consequential, if we focused our attention so as to order the welter of sensations we receive, then we would have a kind of consistency or texture to our lives. Do we really want the resurrection? In his famous sermon The Weight of Glory, Lewis says It would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half- hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Resurrection hope lifts us from our love of mud pies. And we need beauty, imagination, glory, and similar qualities to awaken us to this greater dimension. The liturgical celebration of the Paschal mystery of Easter in a week should do exactly this. We have been told that this material world is all there is, but Christianity believes that this world has a sacramental scent. Again, in C. S. Lewiss words Everything in this world is but a reminder of a far-off country. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.
What if we really did believe that a human being is made for resurrection and eternal life? Would we not treat the human being differently, whether at the end of life, or in the womb as the person is just beginning to pass into actuality. A human beings whole existence is constantly on the crest of a wave from potentiality to actuality. If we really did believe we have eternity after todays life wouldnt that affect how we behave today? It would imply taking the measure of 13
this world against the horizon of eternity, the way we must sometimes take the measure of the days events against the horizon of our whole life. In his book Man At Play Hugo Rahner describes the affect of standing at the exact midpoint between heaven and earth. He who plays after this fashion is the grave-merry man he is a man with an easy gaiety of spirit, one might almost say a man of spiritual elegance, a man who feels himself to be living in invincible security; but he is also a man of tragedy, a man of laughter and tears, a man, indeed, of gentle irony, for he sees through the tragically ridiculous masks of the game of life and has taken the measure of the cramping boundaries of our earthly existence. (27)
In other words, only such a man can accept and lovingly embrace the world which includes himself as Gods handiwork, and, at the same time, toss it aside as a child would toss a toy of which it had wearied, in order then to soar upward into the blessed seriousness which is God alone.
This seems to me a description of an elegant person of faith. (2) The second name for the subjective condition for believing the resurrection is love. Confirmation of this come from a surprising source the philosopher Wittgenstein. Born into a Jewish family, and living in relative agnosticism for part of his life, he thought his way into religious questions, and in Culture and Value he writes: What inclines even me to believe in Christs Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation.
But if I am to be really saved, what I need is certainty not wisdom, dreams or speculation and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence.
Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection.
Wittgenstein has linked together faith and love. They co-inhere. Faith consists of aligning our heart with Gods heart, and his heart is full of love. We are being made fit to receive the joy held in store for us. 14
Human beings are made for Eternal Life, which is different from everlasting life. It does not mean going on, and on, and on. Eternal life is full, active and conscious participation in the life of the Eternal One. As such, it can already begin. Benedict XVI writes in his second volume on Jesus, Eternal life is not as the modern reader might immediately assume life after death, in contrast to this present life, which is transient and not eternal. Eternal life is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death. (81) But this means that we can already begin our eternal life. We can start the process already. The Desert Fathers spoke of a first resurrection of the soul, that happens when we have overcome the passions and aligned our will to love God above all things; a second resurrection of the body is to follow. If things work right, we go to our death already resurrected! Then everything would be different: our experience of time and history and matter would be different; we would desire differently and perhaps different things; our work, our play, our vocation, would all look different. Most people know that when they are deeply in love their toes are touching bedrock as they otherwise float along through life. (And I dont just mean romantic love; think of parents sacrificing for their children by being deeply in love with them.) The happiness that comes from loving, is different from any other sort of happiness. It is a foretaste of resurrected life. This love lifts us out of things temporal and points us, like an arrow, at eternity. Chesterton writes, for Catholics it is a fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude.
(3) I have tried to suggest that the love and faith must co-inhere. There is a third. Hope is the third name of the subjective state I am trying to describe. Jean Danielou writes about the impact hope would have on us in his little book Prayer: Mission of the Church. 15
The most difficult theological virtue is hope. In spite of the promises of Christ, how many Christians there are who havent the slightest certainty that they will one day enter into possession of the beatific vision and the overflowing joy of God! How many Christians there are who live without the conviction that they are moving toward this joy! And these people thus show little disposition to generosity because lacking certainty about what is to come, one would rather, as they say, get the most out of this life.
I suggest his words contain the truce between liturgy and social justice, between the tabernacle and the soup kitchen, between the mystics and the Matthew 25 Christians. Our liturgical celebration of the mystery of the resurrection floods the light of hope into our hearts, and produces generosity in us because it permits a sort of reckless abandon in the way we live on this earth. If this is all there is, we might conclude eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. If we are only a flickering bit of consciousness that will be snuffed out tomorrow, we might only focus upon the little pleasure we can squeeze out of today. (How simple life must be for a hedonist!) I understand there are some Christians who are so heavenly minded theyre of no earthly good, but Danielous very point is that this is the hope for beatitude gone awry. It is the light of the resurrection that allows us to take the proper measure of this world, and therefore respond with the proper action. It allows us to see our brief 80 years in proper perspective. The saint with a soul soaring upward into heaven does not forget the world; to the contrary, he or she is in the most radically free position to transform the world. Chesterton describes this by saying we must be enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it. Having hope in the world to come does not cut us off from the world we live in now. Rather, it permits us to love the world radically, without practical calculation of cost analysis. Hope gives courage. Hope gives fortitude. In his little classic, Portal of the Mystery of Hope, Charles Peguy imagines faith, hope and love as three sisters. 16
Faith and love are older; hope is the youngest and smallest of the three.
The little hope moves forward in between her two older sisters and one scarcely notices her. On the path to salvation, on the earthly path, on the rocky path of salvation, on the interminable road, on the road in between her two older sisters, the little hope Pushes on. And no one pays attention, the Christian people don't pay attention, except to the two older sisters.
[But] It's she, the little one, who carries them all. Because Faith sees only what is. But she, she sees what will be. Charity loves only what is. But she, she loves what will be.
Hope can see what will be, and so empowers both faith and charity. To become certain of the resurrection would require more than a movement of the mind, therefore, it rather requires a movement of the heart. Pascal points out that path to belief: Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. To know the certainty of resurrection, the heart must open to God. And, in turn, the sure hope of the resurrection will persuade us of Gods love. Faith, hope, love co-inhere almost like a conceptual pernchoresis. Does faith dare hope to what lengths divine love will go? When Satan burgled Eden, he took the most valuable possession and imprisoned it in a stronghold he thought was secure. The evil one thought he could hide anthropos from God by shame and accusation and death. He took Adam to a place he thought was out of Gods reach. But he was mistaken. Ephrem the Syrian sings in his Hymns on Paradise Adam was heedless as guardian of Paradise, for the crafty thief stealthily entered; 17
leaving aside the fruit -- which most men would covet-- he stole instead the Gardens inhabitant! Adams Lord came out to seek him; He entered Sheol and found him there, then led and brought him out to set him once more in Paradise. 85
When the man and the woman hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden, the Lord God called, saying, Where are you? (Genesis 3:9). The cry, Adam, Eve, where are you? sounded in the garden that first time. Then angels went to the corners of the universe shouting the question, not only because they were bid by their Lord to do so, but also because they missed the humans voices in the celestial choir. The king sent inquisitors with the question through the long corridors of history--Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah--but neither could they find Adam and Eve. Finally, the Lord put on flesh, so that he could die, so that he could look in the last, last place. And there, in Sheol, he found them: deaf, mute, ashamed, dead. And the Lord brought out the man and woman and led them once more to paradise. This dogma is written in icon, too. This is what we celebrate in the three days facing us the culmination of humanitys salvation history, and the declaration of our beatitude. We celebrate the Paschal accomplishment of our reorientation from death to life, from darkness to light, from Satan to God. We are directed to the time when we will slough off our garments of skin and to be arrayed in glory. I had a comical thought about this one spring day (warmer than today) when I was reminded how anxiously I waited as a child to get rid of my winter coat. I wrote about it in my column in Gilbert Magazine. One day I am sealed in my ponderous, bulky coat, and the next I am free of it. Like Superman ripping apart his Clark Kent shirt and tie on the way to the telephone booth, I 18
zip apart my jacket and throw it into the house behind me. Spring has come. I am loose again. It provoked in me the odd thought of wondering what it would be like if other animals in God's Kingdom followed suit (no pun intended). Spring comes, and the turtle yawns, stretches, then feels for the zipper under his chin and after one smooth pull steps out of his shell. Or perhaps he reaches up behind his neck and pulls his shell over his head like a T-shirt. Unencumbered, he dashes through the grass as speedily as a turtle is able to dash. Spring comes, and the snake slithers out of his pants, carelessly leaving them behind in the grass, like a boy strewing his clothes on the bedroom floor. Spring comes, and the horses kick off their heavy hoofs to run barefoot in the grass, like kids are glad to kick off their galoshes. Spring comes, and the children on the playground doff their snow pants to find they can climb more nimbly; and maybe inside the bulky, lumbering gait of a bear is a lithe and agile creature waiting to step out of its winter woolies. Clothing and re-clothing is a Christian image of the resurrection, described so well by Paul Claudel's meditations on Resurrection from the Dead. "This flick of the nail which will split our pod from top to bottom Our material body yellows and withers until the seed of immortality is ready." It was not made to last forever in its present form. "This body which we have inherited through a series of intersecting accidents is now rightfully ours through grace," but one day it will be glorified. "The soul therefore surrenders her old tunic to the elements while waiting to be reclothed in that new and innocent garment which He has promised." Our heavenly garments will be white, like light. We will be light. "This is the stuff of our baptismal gown. This is the cloth which heaven supplies to the wardrobe of the Holy Father. This is the linen closet where 19
we would like to plunge our arms and draw forth those noble fabrics with which we would clothe ourselves in folds of glory!" The resurrection to come will be the Great Spring, when we will slough off our mortality. It will be the Final Spring, when we will find spiritual agility hidden underneath our garments of clay. To realize that we were made for eternity radically reorientates our priorities. It makes us see each moment through the lens of an impending resurrection. Here is Gregory of Nyssa: If you realize this you will not allow your eye to rest on anything of this world. Indeed, you will no longer marvel even at the heavens. For how can you admire the heavens, my [child], when you see that you are more permanent than they? For the heavens pass away, but you will abide for all eternity with Him who is forever.
The theological virtues of faith, hope and love make us into people who share Eternal Life with the Eternal One, and our vocation is to be witnesses (martyria, martyrs of the resurrection) in the valley of death that waits for its transfiguration and completion. Resurrection life is trampling down death by death (as Orthodox hymnody sings at Easter), and being capacitated to contain the glory of God. Lewis said that some completed people already dot the landscape. Every now and then one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours; stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do but they need you less. They will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. 34
To believe in the resurrection would mean to live something like that. Each of the saints reveal another facet of what resurrection life looks like, which is why we like to keep their company. Though space, time and matter will evanesce, we are capable of being made into a three-sided liturgical loom on which eternal life is woven, one day to be gently lifted off by the master 20
weaver, without dropping a stitch, and fitted into his own radiant garment. The sepulcher becomes a birth canal.