Transformed

May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and perception of what us revealed, to bring you to full knowledge of him.

Ephesians 1:17

My father, my grandfather and my Uncle Keith all died in 1976. When we gather as family (inevitably funerals) we usually speak as if all three have just left the room. It's as if the past 44 years were just yesterday. And yet each of us speaks of them as intimately close and present as we tell our stories, laugh and cry. But we speak from real experience - and that is despite the stories growing bigger with every retelling - and we articulate in gesture and word the celebration in our hearts for the gift of their lives to us.

Theologians need often to remind us that when we speak about God, we use language and the arts to express what we understand or seek to understand. In language and the arts we use simile, metaphor and analogy. So when we  consider the Ascension, it is so much than a story about Jesus going 'up into heaven' and even way more than Jesus sending his disciples to the four corners of the world.

I have spent years wondering about the transformation we undergo in various stages of our life. We remain the same person, but there is something essentially new or changed about ourselves. While millions of words have been written by theologians, bloggers and thinkers, I often find that their words just don't quite hit the mark with me.

One of the marvels of Eucharist is the story of grain of wheat that is planted in the ground, then with water, nutrients and sun, the wheat grain embryo breaks open and out, sending its radicle to establish a root, while the plumule germinates into a stem, leaves, the ears. These ears are harvested. Some are stored for the next season's sowing. Some are sent to be milled and then used for the making of bread. Each grain produces almost 20,000 particles of flour. This is transformation.

The word itself is constructed from trans (Latin for across or beyond) and forma (Latin for form or mould). It has distinct scientific and mathematical understandings but is usually understood as change in composition or structure, change in outward form or appearance or a change in character or condition. When we celebrate Eucharist those milled grains are once again transformed from unleavened bread to become the very Body of Christ (which we call transubstantiation). In our consuming of the Body of Christ we become 'in communion' with Christ himself, in fellowship with all believers.

Jesus' ascension follows two other critical transformations - his transfiguration and his resurrection. Each transformation asserts the power of God working in Jesus and through him. The ascension most clearly acclaims that Christ leads us to our place in God - and as Benedict XVI confirms it takes place in our everyday lives. How that transformation takes place is no more a mystery than the grain that sprouts leaves and roots, that grows to produce many more grains.

Peter Douglas

 

The Meaning of the Ascension

POPE BENEDICT XVI

What is the meaning of Christ's "ascension into heaven"?

It expresses our belief that in Christ human nature, the humanity in which we all share, has entered into the inner life of God in a new and hitherto unheard of way.  It means that man has found an everlasting place in God.

Heaven is not a place beyond the stars, but something much greater, something that requires far more audacity to assert: Heaven means that man now has a place in God.  The basis for this assertion is the interpenetration of humanity and divinity in the crucified and exalted man Jesus.  Christ, the man who is in God and eternally one with God, is at the same time God's abiding openness to all human beings.

Thus Jesus himself is what we call "heaven"; heaven is not a place but a person, the person of him in whom God and man are forever and inseparably one.  And we go to heaven and enter into heaven to the extent that we go to Jesus Christ and enter into him.  In this sense, "ascension into heaven" can be something that takes place in our everyday lives…

For the disciples, the "ascension" was not what we usually misinterpret it as being: the temporary absence of Christ from the world.  It meant rather his new, definitive, and irrevocable presence by participation in God's royal power... God has a place for man!… In God there is a place for us!…"Be consoled, flesh and blood, for in Christ you have taken possession of heaven and of God's kingdom!" (Tertullian).

Plans

Come and hear, all who fear God.

I will tell what he did for my soul:

Blessed be God who did not reject my prayer

nor withhold his love from me.

Psalm 66:16, 20

Sometime stuff happens and our plans go out the window. Sometimes lots of stuff happens and it would seem as if everyone's plans and lives collapse into a mess. That has been COVID-19. The loss of life has not been comparable to the outbreak of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, but the information overload and underload, the confusion, the changes, the turnarounds, the posturing, the intervention by police, the deniers, working and learning at home, who can shop where and when, the endless briefings and proclamations would be comparable to any catastrophic event of the past since 1914. Wars, political, economic and social upheaval have long ruined lives, but there is always an underlying resilience to the human spirit that enables communities, towns, cities, states and countries to rebuild, to start again.

We are given a sense of purpose and hope that springs from that resilience and drive. Being purposeful about our lives is what differentiates us from other animals – our capacity to choose our futures and to plan to make them real. Of course there are strictures on how much and for how long we can plan ahead and so we cater for the necessary adjustments and flexibility that are required. If there is a dimension missing - it is about the most significant relationship we have from the minute of our conception, to our last breath and thence into eternity itself – with our God. In a life well lived, regardless of the plan, this relationship provides links between each of those moments of significance, of holiness, perhaps even sacraments (with a small ‘s’) – those ritual, grace-filled and grace-fueled moments that are memorialized in photographs, bonds, celebrations and shared grief. John the Evangelist assures us (John 14:18): I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. We are not left to our devices without his presence in and through our relationships.

God has does have a plan for each of us. As we walk though our lives, his plan becomes ever more clearer. We can look back over our shoulders and see his companionship as we seek to find and explore who and what we are called to be. I can assure you that having reached the ledge on the edge of retirement, I can see my growth as a person. The stumbles are even more clear from this height. Even clearer is that God's plan has always carried me when my own plans have failed.

Although God’s grace is given freely, God does ask something of us in return: If you love me, you will keep my commandments (John 14:15), that is, love God and love your neighbour. If this is the way I have lived my life, then I can be assured that the choices I set my sights on will be blessed, successful and a hymn of praise to the God who loves us.

Peter Douglas

Poems for a Pandemic

from an article of the same title in America of 12 May 2020

Horseshoe Bat

by Dan McIsaac

This hell-bent thing, Cain’s clawed familiar,
like another plague out of Exodus
carries a baleful load of virus
in its trussed body for sale or barter.

Drawn to the rafters on scissoring wings,
from safe haven, the darkling is clubbed and seized,
a wary collector staying clear
of the flailing brute’s stalactite fangs.

Is there any horror in this skittish thing
except in its unclean capture and killing?
Velveteen fur and clownish muzzle,
webbed wings like a ruptured umbrella,

no hell-flame struck from those matchstick limbs,
these orchid ears heard no infernal drums,
and its teeth caught only beetles and flies
in the pandemonium of the night sky.

Financing the Burials
by Lisa Ampleman

During Holy Week
a city councilman
calls for a relief fund
so his working-class
constituents can afford
to cremate or bury
their dead, the city
currently providing
only its standard $900
and even that only
for legal residents.
He speaks
for those without
a Joseph of
Arimathea
able to step in,
claim the body,
keep their loved one
out of the potter’s
field—a phrase
that began with actual
fields from which
potters removed
all the useful
clay, appropriate for
deeper trenches,
“a burial place for
strangers”—
New York’s longtime
burial for the poor
being an island in
Long Island Sound,
once a prison camp,
now a bird sanctuary.
These 1,700 dead
and counting
(from his Queens
district alone)
might not be wrapped
with fine linens or placed
in a rock-hewn tomb,
but he works
to provide them
their own place.
Bodega clerks, food-
delivery drivers,
caretakers for
the sick: he hopes
to treat justly
in death those who,
he says, are keeping
the city alive.

From This Distance
by Cameron Alexander Lawrence

The shadows on the wall, our close companions,
begin as light—a trespass through trees and glass

before transfiguring the carpeted hall:
in the painting of an open window, the curtains

blow forever toward a sea, unseen over hills,
far from our domestic urgency,

where the southern morning breaks in,
echoing on the surfaces, the sway of pine and sweet gum

—everything we shut out,
even now, with the wind-speckled lake and the reeds
            ecstatic as holy rollers,
even as the hospitals and morgues fill and fill,

I’m caught in my longing to be with you
somewhere else, lost in the surge of ten million

beating hearts beneath the tall towers,
uncountable strangers going about their lives,

their warmth separate from ours and not.

Quarantine
By Sonja Livingston

My father-in-law is coming to the end.
My husband drives over and stands beneath his bedroom window.

He tells his father about bluebirds in the park, how the cats
are doing, says he remembers when he was seven
and they went sledding on the hill in Acton.
My husband stands beneath the window
head tilted 45 degrees, taking in sky and pane and glass.

When he was a boy he thought his father was Superman.
Now his father has something to say but the words fall apart
before they leave his mouth.

It’s late March. Most of the snow has melted.
My husband stands under the window listening to the last
of his father’s voice, golden crocuses coming up at his feet

Many rooms

Jesus said to his disciples:

'Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father's house; if there were not, I should have told you. I am now going to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too.'

John 14:1ff

In my sometimes-eventful childhood and youth, Catholic culture was very strong and very real. There were Catholic socials, Catholic tennis, Catholic schools, YCS, YCW, Newman Society, and when I first arrived in Australia in 1974, there were Catholic Clubs, Catholic Bowls Clubs and a plethora of others. We tilted our caps when passing Catholic churches, prayed for souls in purgatory, went to confession with our repetitive lists of offences and responded in our version of Latin. My friends were Catholic, my uncles and aunts and cousins were all Catholic. In my childish mind (and of the Church at the time) God only needed to provide one room. One for us Catholics!

In two generations my Catholic family has virtually disappeared. My family now hosts and is comprised of atheists, agnostics, universalists, Pentecostalists (of many varieties), Anglicans, Muslims, traditional (indigenous) and a great many who still continue their journey of (religious) discovery. The remaining Catholics among us are on that continuum from having been baptised as infants to being regular churchgoers.

Mixed marriages sent our great grandparents and grandparents into paroxysms of doom about the salvation of their children's offspring. And yet, as we have done so many times in human history, we have forgotten God's overwhelming, lavish love for us. It is not syncretistic to understand and know that this God so clearly revealed to Abraham and his descendants and so clearly imaged in person of Jesus opens his arms to all humanity and indeed to all creation.

It would be simplistic to say that the fullness of life we have been invited to participate in is exclusive. Every sheep is not identical, and yet each may enter through the shepherd's gate.

The secret to that fullness of life is not the happiness we might imagine - where life is comfortable, surrounded by family and friends and a community to which I belong: the Beatitudes and parables challenge us out of our comfort zones, turning us upside down. And we look to Francis who has persistently reminded us that we are not licensed 'inspectors of other people's lives', that we should not judge others (cf Luke 6:36f) and in September of last year when preaching in Albano (Italy) said: “Dear brother, dear sister, if like Zacchaeus you are looking for meaning in your life but not finding it, if you are throwing it away with ‘surrogates for love’ like wealth, career, pleasure or some form of dependence, let yourself be seen by Jesus.... Only with Jesus will you discover that you always have been loved. You will feel touched inside by the invincible tenderness of God who moves and inspires your heart.”

The God who loves us trusts us to turn to him - in good time. We may waver, but we will not be forgotten. And all else failing, he will look for you - whichever room you may be in.

Peter Douglas

REFLECTION TIME EMBRACED OR PASSING BY?

by Fr Kevin Bates SM

This time of enforced isolation for us and our families has met with a range of responses. So many have embraced the opportunity to enjoy regular family meals and time with their children. Many have delighted in what they have called “the privilege” of spending time with family which would otherwise have not occurred. For them it’s been a great blessing.

For some, home schooling has been a welcome task and for others a serious challenge. In each case, creative time-tabling, patience and attentiveness have become areas of growth.

Neighbourhoods have become real and a sense of community has flourished for many. Time has been used creatively and generously in so many ways.

Much spring cleaning has occurred even though it’s only autumn! Gardens have been dug over and re-planted. We’ve found so many ways to busy ourselves in order to avoid slipping into time without meaning, and that has its risks!

Not everyone has engaged with this time so energetically. For some, days without normal structures and rhythms have left people with a kind of Groundhog experience in which time simply passes without direction or shape. In this mode there is not much to be passionate about and the experience of loneliness and lack of motivation can get into one’s bones and eat away at one’s sense of well-being.

Time passes and we simply observe. We become passive in the face of each passing day without being able to invest it with meaning or purpose. We turn in on ourselves and find that there’s not much there to engage us either.

Even in the most shapeless time, meaning and life can be found if we care to look, or seek the help we need to break free of our lonely, disengaged space.

The following piece from a recent novel reminds us that meaning can be drawn from seemingly mundane and pedestrian experiences:

“There was something in the silence of the old house, the low rooms filled with steady autumn sunlight and the still order of the workshop, that loosened the dark knots inside me. Day after day went by until the place wasn’t new or strange to me anymore; then week after week…I learnt things by heart, the crinkling reflections on my ceiling, the gappy seams in the patchwork quilt on my bed, the different creak of each tread under my foot when I came downstairs. Then there was the workshop., the gleam of the tiles around the stove, the saffron-and-earth scent of tea….. The hours passed slowly, full of small solid details; at home, back in the busyness of farm life, I’d never had the time to sit and stare, or pay attention to the way a tool looked, or how well it was made, before I used it. Here the clock in the hall dredged up seconds like stones and dropped them again into the pool of the day, letting each ripple widen before the next one fell.” (The Binding, Bridget Collins, pp 29-30).

Jesus’ wish that we find life to the full applies in any situation we encounter. Both our busy-ness and our boredom can hide us from the meaning of each passage of time, time that will never be repeated, time that is given now for us to embrace, explore and find nourishment.

Motivating ourselves to slow down on the one hand and to liven up on the other is easier said than done. Our own gift of mindfulness may well need to be nudged by the care of someone who loves us enough to call us out of our busy-ness or our torpor.

May this challenging time as it unfolds become a grace that sustains us into the future when the present restrictions no longer apply. May what we learn now give shape and meaning to what we like to call “normal life” when it returns.

May that life to the full of which Jesus speaks be the light which calls us on.

Father Kevin