Ascension of the Lord (Year A) June 5 (Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:17-23; Matthew 28:16-20)

Angelic figures floating on clouds and playing harps — that is the image of heaven portrayed in many cartoons, stories and works of art. In an ancient worldview it makes perfect sense — God is “up there” in the sky from where He dispatches thunderbolts, rain, sun, plagues and so on. But this view came unravelled with the arrival of modern science and the growth of human knowledge. One of the first Soviet cosmonauts remarked smugly to a believer that he hadn’t seen any God during his trip into space.

But our encounter with the transcendent, God, is not spatial or temporal. It is relational, and relationship begins on Earth through our relationships with one another, with the created world and with the deepest part of our own soul. Jesus is about to reveal this to the assembled disciples. First of all, they want a quick fix: are you going to throw the Romans out and re-establish the Kingdom of Israel now? But He rather brusquely dismisses their concerns, in effect, it is none of their business but God’s, and God has other plans. Their mission is to sit tight and wait for the bestowal of power from on high — the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year A) May 29 (Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; Psalm 66; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21)

What happens when the Holy Spirit descends on a community? The passage from Acts is very explicit: evil is expelled, people are healed and joy and hope take the place of despair and negativity.

The spread of the faith to Samaria is a concrete example of the universal mission of the Spirit as described in the Pentecost account. There was certainly no love lost between Samaritans and Jews, just as the relationships between various Christian churches today are characterized by negative stereotypes and attitudes. But they responded eagerly not only to Philip’s proclamation but to the dramatic manifestations of the Spirit’s power. Although the community in Jerusalem was delighted with the news of their acceptance of the Good News, there is the curious observation that they had not yet received the Spirit, having been baptized only in the name of the Lord Jesus. In the early decades of the Christian movement the gift of the Spirit was separate from baptism and was conferred by the laying on of hands — on everyone, not just office holders. As the Samaritans eagerly embraced the Good News the apostles called down the Spirit on them and they received its gifts. Great things happen when the Holy Spirit is permitted to be more than a theological term or concept. Allowed to do its work, the Spirit can enliven and enlighten individuals, churches and communities. But if it is regarded with fear and suspicion or kept tightly controlled it is emptied of the power that it bears. More joy, life and spiritual energy would certainly not hurt any religious body.

Why should we sanctify Christ as Lord? Isn’t He sacred or holy enough? But the biblical meaning of “holy” or “to sanctify” is to set something aside and keep it pure and uncontaminated. It is not permitted to become diluted or ambiguous. Sanctification of the Lord in our hearts helps to ensure that faith is kept alive and well regardless of what may come our way. The author of the letter insists that this inner sanctification will also give us a joyful hope that will be noticeable to others. When they ask for the cause of our hope and joy we can tell them of our faith in Jesus — that is the only sort of “preaching” that is convincing in a rather sceptical and cynical world, for all search for reasons to hope. The letter also assures us of the privilege of suffering for our faith but warns of the danger of spiritualizing our own sins and errors. People and institutions cannot wrap themselves in the cloak of religious language of crucifixion and suffering when it is due to their own mistakes, infidelities and shortcomings. In those instances only the language of repentance will do.

How can we know God? How can we communicate with God? How do we know truth? In his usual convoluted manner, the author of the fourth Gospel sums up the answer to these questions with one word: love. Love is what impels the believer to walk in God’s ways, and God’s ways are love — in fact, God is love. Through this bond of love one can receive the spirit of truth, which is a stand-in for Jesus Himself. And this Spirit continues to teach and reveal God to the believer personally. But it is clear that all of this depends on love — if there is no love, there is no revelation or guiding spirit. People tend to look everywhere for God except where God can be found — deep within the individual heart and soul. John’s Jesus invites His faithful followers to enjoy the same relationship that He has with the Father. Through the bonds of love they will abide in Him and by so doing they will experience the interior presence of both Jesus and the Father. In effect, they will be people through whom the divinity shines.

In our own time many experience the absence or disappearance of God and feel a great sense of insecurity and emptiness. John offers a solution: the one who abides in Jesus can never claim to be alone nor can they say that God is distant or absent. God dwells within them in a rich, life-giving and transforming way and they can truly say that they know God.

There are more ways than one in which our belief system can be unbalanced so as to do harm to God and to the Church.

What makes for a healthy, balanced, orthodox faith? The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines orthodoxy as “right belief as contrasted to heresy.” That’s accurate enough, but we tend to think of this in a very one-sided way.

For most people, heresy is conceived of as going too far, as crossing a dogmatic boundary, as stretching Christian truth further than it may be stretched. Orthodoxy, then, means staying within safe perimeters.

This is true in so far as it goes, but it is a one-sided and reductionist understanding of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy has a double function: It tells you how far you may go, but it also tells you how far you must go. And it’s the latter part that is often neglected.

Heresies are dangerous, but the danger is two-sided: Faith beliefs that do not respect proper dogmatic boundaries invariably lead to bad religion and to bad moral practice. Real harm occurs. Dogmatic boundaries are important. But, equally important, we don’t do God, faith, religion and the Church a favour when our beliefs are narrow, bigoted, legalistic or intolerant. Atheism is invariably a parasite that feeds off bad theism. Anti-religion is often simply a reaction to bad religion and thus narrowness and intolerance are perhaps more of an enemy to religion than is any transgressed dogmatic boundary.

God, religion and the churches are, I suspect, more hurt by being associated with the narrowness and intolerance of some believers than they are by any theoretical dogmatic heresy. Right truth, proper faith and true fidelity to Jesus Christ demand too that our hearts are open and wide enough to radiate the universal love and compassion that Jesus incarnated. Purity of dogma alone doesn’t make us disciples of Jesus.

Suffice it to say that Jesus is clear about this. Anyone who reads the Gospels and misses Jesus’ repeated warnings about legalism, narrowness and intolerance is reading selectively. Granted, Jesus does warn too about staying within the bounds of proper belief (monotheism and all that this implies) and proper morals (the commandments, love of our enemies, forgiveness), but He stresses too that we can miss the real demands of discipleship by not going far enough in letting ourselves be stretched by His teachings.

True orthodoxy asks us to hold a great tension, between real boundaries beyond which you may not go and real borders and frontiers to which you must go. You may not go too far, but you must also go far enough. And this can be a lonely road. If you carry this tension faithfully, without giving in to either side, you will no doubt find yourself with few allies on either side, that is, too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals.

To risk just one example: You see this kind of pained, but more fully Catholic, orthodoxy in a person like Raymond Brown, the renowned biblical scholar, a loyal Roman Catholic thinker who found himself attacked, for opposite reasons, from both sides of the ideological spectrum. He upset liberals because he stopped before they thought that he should and he upset conservatives because he suggested that proper truth and dogma often stretch us beyond some former comfort zones.

And this tension is an innate, healthy disquiet, something we are meant to live daily in our lives rather than something we can resolve once and for all. Indeed the deep root of this tension lies right within the human soul itself: The human soul, as Thomas Aquinas classically put it, has two principles and two functions: The soul is the principle of life, energy and fire inside of us, even as it is equally the principle of integration, unity and glue. The soul keeps us energized and on fire, even as it keeps us from dissipating and falling apart. A healthy soul therefore keeps us within healthy boundaries, to prevent us from disintegrating, even as it keeps us on fire, lest we petrify and become too hardened to fully enter life.

In that sense, the soul itself is a healthy principle of orthodoxy inside us. It keeps us within real limits even as it pushes us towards new frontiers.

We live always in the face of two opposing dangers: disintegration and petrification. To stay healthy we need to know our limits and we also need to know how far we have to stretch ourselves. The conservative instinct warns us about the former. The liberal instinct warns us about the latter. Both instincts are healthy because both dangers are real.

The German poet, Goethe, once wrote: The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers. This is true in our personal lives and it’s true in Christian orthodoxy. There is danger in bad dogma but there is equal danger in not radiating, with sufficient compassion and understanding, God’s universal will for the salvation of all peoples.

(Fr. Rolheiser can be reached at his web site www.ronrolheiser.com.)

Fr. Henri Nouwen was perhaps the most popular spiritual writer of the late 20th century and his popularity endures today. More than seven million of his books have been sold world-wide and they have been translated into 30 languages. Fifteen years after his death, all but one of his books remain in print.

Many things account for his popularity, beyond the depth and learning he brought to his writings. He was very instrumental in helping dispel the suspicion that had long existed in Protestant and Evangelical circles towards spirituality, which was identified in the popular mind as something more exclusively Roman Catholic and as something on the fringes of ordinary life. Both his teaching and his writing helped make spirituality something mainstream within Roman Catholicism, within Christianity in general, and within secular society itself. For example, American Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has stated that his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, is the book that has had the largest impact on her life.

He wrote as a psychologist and a priest, but his writings also flowed from who he was as a man. And he was a complex man, torn always between the saint inside of him who had given his life to God and the man inside of him who, chronically obsessed with human love and its earthy yearnings, wanted to take his life back. He was fond of quoting Soren Kierkegaard who said that a saint is someone who can “will the one thing,” even as he admitted how much he struggled to do that. He did will to be a saint, but he willed other things as well: “I want to be a saint,” he once wrote, “but I also want to experience all the sensations that sinners experience.” He confessed in his writings how much restlessness this brought into his life and how sometimes he was incapable of being fully in control of his own life.

In the end, he was a saint, but always one in progress. He never fit the pious profile of a saint, even as he was always recognized as a man from God bringing us more than ordinary grace and insight. And the fact that he never hid his weaknesses from his readers helped account for his stunning popularity.

His readers identified with him because he shared so honestly his struggles. He related his weaknesses to his struggles in prayer and, in that, many readers found themselves looking into a mirror. Like many others, when I first read Nouwen, I had a sense of being introduced to myself.

And he worked at his craft, with diligence and deliberation. Nouwen would write and rewrite his books, sometimes five times over, in an effort to make them simpler. What he sought was a language of the heart. Originally trained as a psychologist, his early writings exhibit some of the language of the classroom. However, as he developed as a writer and a mentor of the soul, he began more and more to purge his writings of technical and academic terms and strove to become radically simple, without being simplistic; to carry deep sentiment, without being sentimental; to be self-revealing, without being exhibitionist; to be deeply personal, yet profoundly universal; and to be sensitive to human weakness, even as he strove to challenge to what’s more sublime.

Few writers, religious or secular, have influenced me as deeply as Nouwen. I know better than to try to imitate him, recognizing that what is imitative is never creative and what is creative is never imitative.

Where I do try to emulate him is in his simplicity, in his rewriting things over and over in order try to make them simpler, without being simplistic. Like him, I believe there’s a language of the heart (that each generation has to create anew) that bypasses the divide between academics and the street and which has the power to speak directly to everyone, regardless of background and training. Jesus managed it. Nouwen sought to speak and write with that kind of directness. He didn’t do it perfectly, nobody does, but he did do it more effectively than most. He recognized too that this is a craft that must be worked at, akin to learning language.  

I dedicated my book The Holy Longing to him with this tribute: “He was our generation’s Kierkegaard. He helped us to pray while not knowing how to pray, to rest while feeling restless, to be at peace while tempted, to feel safe while still anxious, to be surrounded by light while still in darkness and to love while still in doubt.”

If you are occasionally tortured by your own complexity, even as your deepest desire is to “will the one thing,” perhaps you can find a mentor and a patron saint in Henri Nouwen. He calls us beyond ourselves, even as he respects how complex and difficult that journey is. He shows us how to move towards God, even as we are still torn by our own earthly attachments.

(Fr. Rolheiser can be reached at his web site www.ronrolheiser.com.)

Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year A) May 15 (Acts 2:14, 36-41; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:20-25; John 10:1-10)

Some of the crowd had been laughing and jeering at Peter and his companions, who seemed to be babbling and very emotional and excited about something. The conclusion of elements in the crowd: they had been in to the wine and were drunk.

Peter quickly disabuses them of this misconception. He explains (in the omitted verses) that this is the pouring out of the Spirit prophesied in Joel and that it signals the arrival of the end days. Things are going to be very different now because all believers were being empowered by the Spirit rather than a chosen few. Peter also relates the story of Jesus — the deeds of power and compassion, the wonders and signs, and His status as the one sent by God. He hurls a barbed accusation at his fellow Jews by recounting the betrayal and execution of Jesus. God reversed their judgment and affirmed the status and teachings of Jesus by raising Him from the dead. Peter drives home the point that Jesus is now enthroned as Lord and Messiah. As the import of his words sink in there is only stunned silence — then the inevitable question: what can we do now? But the gift that Jesus brings is for everyone and the invitation to be baptized is accepted by many that very day.

One day I was in one of those giant supermarkets. The produce department opened out before me like a football field; within it, a vast bin overflowed with tomatoes. I started picking through them, then realized this activity was a waste of time, as they were all identical, all perfect. Each sphere had a thick, tough pink skin, without dent, spot or mark, all the same size; I knew they’d be relatively tasteless.  

My mind flashed to earlier days, to shelves lined with rows of deep red, thin-skinned tomatoes. These did require selection because some would be bruised or split, sizes varied from tiny to huge, and each was a juicy tasty treat of which its contemporary counterpart offers but a faint memory.

These tomato changes, it occurred to me, are like what’s happening to us: we’re expected to look, smell and feel the same as one another, to have tough skins that never bruise or break, and to be easily gathered, stored and marketed in large quantities. We’ve been standardized; normalized; uniformized.

Uniformizing, toughening people up and making them tasteless aren’t hallmarks of Christianity. At least they oughtn’t to be.

Third Sunday of Easter (Year A) May 8 (Acts 2:14, 22-28; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35)

Many people fear the light and run from the presence of God that calls for change. Strangely, religious people are not an exception and at times the worst offenders. Every new glimmer of hope and light has been opposed, resisted and feared from the beginning of time until today. People continue to persecute and kill those who challenge humanity to move beyond fear and blindness.

The truth is rarely pleasant and change is difficult. In the case of Jesus, human sin — fear, rigidity, jealousy and suspicion — did their best to destroy Jesus and everything He stood for. All of this was despite authenticating signs and wonders; in fact, these probably increased the level of fear. Peter does not pull any punches in his speech to the crowd. But something that is of God cannot be silenced or killed for truth has a power all of its own. By raising Jesus from the dead God vindicated all that Jesus said and did. Death cannot hold Him — not now or ever again.

Things do not change very much. We still are not noticeably open to people who challenge our perceptions, prejudices and ways of thinking nor do we treat them with much kindness or respect. It is far easier to condemn the ideas of others than to engage in dialogue. After all, there is the terrible possibility that they may be right! We dare not read a passage like the one above with any sense of smugness or superiority. We must always ask the honest question: would we have behaved any differently?

Some look at history and see nothing but a chaotic mass of events without direction or meaning. The author of 1 Peter sees something else: from the very beginning of time Christ was destined to redeem humanity. There has never been a moment in the history of the world in which God was not at work in some way on our behalf. But our author asks: in view of the blood and effort that has redeemed us can we justify a lacklustre or half-hearted response? We should exercise careful and grateful stewardship of the life that we have been granted.

Often we can amass a pile of facts but lack understanding and the ability to see the big picture. In a teasing cat-and-mouse game on the road to Emmaus with the two disciples, an incognito Jesus questions them about the things that have happened in Jerusalem. The broken-hearted and disappointed disciples had witnessed the words and deeds of Jesus but they had unfortunately also been present for His judicial murder. Their bitter story ends with the account of the empty tomb related to them by the women and the fact that the empty tomb had been verified. But in spite of all this there was an absence of understanding and faith on their part. Debates about the existence of God or the truth of Christianity have a rather dismal success rate — they appeal to “facts” and “proofs” but deeper layers of the mind and heart need to be engaged.

The disciples were struggling with suffering — and they have a lot of good company. It is the oldest philosophical and religious question in the world. An even greater difficulty is faced in trying to reconcile suffering with God or God’s representatives. How could God’s anointed one suffer? The passion and death of Jesus was the stumbling block for the first generation of Christians. A rather exasperated Jesus carefully unravels the hidden mystery of redemption in the Scriptures. His suffering is not a fluke or accident but is part of the divine plan — the same one mentioned in the second reading. It is only at the moment of the breaking and distribution of the bread that their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus — who promptly vanished from their sight.

This gives us an insight into how the early Christians read, interpreted and appropriated the Hebrew Bible — it was the key to understanding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. But it was also in the breaking of the bread — the communal meal and prayer — that they encountered Jesus and experienced His guiding presence. Authentic Christian community is more than socializing. It is a place of acceptance, mutuality and trust and where we encounter the Lord in Scripture, prayer and one another.

Second Sunday of Easter (Year A) May 1 (Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 118; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31)

What fuels the negative forces at work in our world? Human competition, greed, fear and selfishness do the job quite well without blaming Satan or some other sinister force for our troubles. It doesn’t really matter if we are competing for oil, trade, power, military strength, economic advantage or even God. When we are convinced that there is not enough for everyone and that we feel threatened or fearful the “fun” begins — the game of trying to do others out of what we want for ourselves.

This deadly game usually ends in blood and tears. Luke’s depiction of the ideal Christian community challenges this dreary inevitability and offers us a luminous path out of the darkness. This first generation of disciples began to renounce the cause of so much human misery — the notion of personal wealth and property especially at the expense of others. This practice of the radical common life was not common — the Dead Sea Scroll community was a noted exception. But the first Christians were convinced that this was the pattern of the new age that was being born in their time. It was the pattern of a community in which the need for competition or jealousy would be lessened and no one would be humiliated or denied the basics of life.

Each year on Good Friday the Passion of Jesus Christ according to John is read aloud in our churches. John’s Gospel, as we know, was written later than the other Gospels, perhaps some 70 years after Jesus died, and those years gave John plenty of time to reflect upon Jesus’ death and highlight a number of aspects that are not as evident in the other Gospels. What are those special aspects?

The bulk of John’s account focuses on Jesus’ trial and the eventual judgment that He be put to death. But it is ingeniously written. John writes up the trial of Jesus in such a way that, while Jesus is the one being tried, everyone else is on trial except Jesus. Pilate is on trial, the Jewish authorities are on trial, Jesus’ apostles and disciples are on trial, the crowds watching are on trial, and we who are hearing the story. Jesus, alone, is not on trial, even as His trial is judging everyone else. Hence when Pilate asks Jesus: What is truth? Jesus’ silence puts Pilate on trial by throwing Pilate back on his own silence, the truth of himself. It’s the same for the rest of us.