Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Ascension - Thursday, May 13, 2021
Witnesses to Jesus are not spectators. A witness is one who testifies to the living, present reality of the event. Witnesses transcend the traps of a nostalgia that keeps Jesus at a safe distance, welcome a Christ who crosses the boundaries of heaven and earth, and recognize in the great mysteries the living signposts of a cosmos where through the Holy Spirit heaven breaks into and intersects our world in all kinds of ways. A witness is one who is willing and open to perceiving that in-breaking. A witness is more interested in loving their neighbor than gazing into the clouds. The arc of conversion in Christianity is from spectator to witness, from observer to participant, from nostalgia to intersection. This is the journey of our waking up and being present.
Spectator Christianity, like knotweed, pops up randomly and is hard to kill. Lest we rush to plant ourselves firmly in the witness category, the insidiousness of the spectator dynamic affects us all.
Whenever we slide into defining ourselves by how much good we do, how much we know, how separate from the “world” we are, how much better than others we are, how our group is better than their group, we are symbolically “looking up to heaven” – seeking some special status or experience to possess and control. The appeal is the clarity, safety, security, and position that it offers. It works well with a culture of rugged individualism, personal autonomy, and material-driven achievement. In spectator Christianity, God becomes an enlarged version of me, especially my American values. “Spectatorism” even grows and sustains Christian communities, where people with similar desires can gather to seek to have those desires ratified by God.
Thankfully, this distortion is cracking up as we collectively reckon with our history and patterns on race, violence, politics, and the pandemic. The accommodation of spectator Christianity to ways of thinking and acting that are no less than evil is coming to an end. Many wise voices are announcing that we have an opportunity, in our time, to embrace a Christianity of witness at long last. We are ready to move into the risk, the unknown of lives of witnesses, opening our hands and hearts to receive rather than grasp. And so, in this context, we come to the feast of the ascension of Christ with a fresh expectancy. We need not invent the ways of becoming witnesses – they are staring us in the face – they have been here all along. Our path forward is none other than the ancient ways of prayer and presence and community rediscovered as if for the first time. Dominican priest and theologian Herbert McCabe provides a great definition of witness: “Our Easter faith is that we really do encounter Jesus himself; not a message from him, or a doctrine inspired by him, or an ethics of love, or a new idea of human destiny, or a picture of him, but Jesus himself.” It is in Jesus himself that we are found and called as witnesses. Messages, doctrines, ethics, ideas, pictures all point toward him. They do not contain, define, or, God forbid, replace him. Liturgy and sacrament are our contact points with the intersection of heaven and earth. In our celebration, the glory of the event of our past is drawn into our present, not as memorialized history, but as history operative right now.
The ascension of Christ is a witness-making event, as Jesus’ presence passes into the sacraments the Church born at Pentecost. The presence of God in heaven that takes on the human flesh of Christ takes that very flesh back into heaven. Christ is universalized beyond the confines of past and future, matter and spirit. Heaven and earth are joined in the risen body of Jesus. Jesus himself is the place of intersection between heaven and earth. Jesus ascending body and soul to heaven means that a new order has once and for all entered into our world and we are part of that. Spectators may believe in the event, affirm its truth, but not really “see” it, live in the world in which we are participants in the glory of Christ to be revealed in this world, in these very bodies, at the end of the age. The question is not so much “How can I fit the ascension into the world I know to be real?”, but “Do I choose to live in a world where the miraculous is an ordinary intersection of the reality that a man of flesh reigns in heaven and the Spirit of that same man is within and around us?”
When we gather around the altar, the presider will say “Lift up your hearts” and we will answer “we lift them to the Lord”. In such simple, beautiful, powerful, ordinary words, the liturgy is teaching us how to be mystics who witness to the presence of Christ. This lifting is decidedly not “let’s try extra hard to reach up to heaven and arrive where the Lord is”. Rather this is precisely the kind of spiritual language of witness that renounces the spirit of observation and invites our participation in the miracle being offered to us once again in the Holy Eucharist. This lifting means that we offer our deepest selves to God. We open the essence of how and who God made us to be back to the loving presence of the Mystery who made us and holds us in being. We become anew living testaments in our own flesh as we eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ who still bears in his flesh the scars of nail and spear, the Christ who sits in heaven, the Christ who rules on earth. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner was prophetic about our time when he said, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.”
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment