In every season he is present
It is late March, and we are moving toward Holy Week. Soon Easter will be here, but always the Church enables me to touch the risen Lord.
Every day I hear his voice in the Scriptures. I was raised to respect the Scriptures, and in the seminary I was trained to search out their meaning, but the liturgy of the Church has made them the word of the living Word, as familiar and as welcome as a beloved friend’s face, deeper than the universe itself.
In the liturgy I learn to read and pray the Scriptures because then I hear them as the Word made flesh, actively shaping his people into his Body.
Each day the risen Christ speaks to me a word that burns away falsehood, teaches me the true names of things, and shows me my own life. In sharing with me his Name — Son, Jesus — he reveals to me my own immortal life, and in speaking his Father’s love so simply to my deepest heart, he frees me from my fear that the center of me is really darkness and death.
Because he speaks, I know that he lives, and because he speaks to me, I know that I live too.
Each day the Church feeds me with the Bread of Life. In the Eucharist the Lord is as simply and as quietly in our midst as he was when he lived in Nazareth, but even more powerfully. He clothes himself in ordinariness to reveal to us our glory. “Here I am,” he says, “with the children that God has given me.”
In every season of the year and of the heart he is present, and his life-giving Spirit touches the bread and wine and fills them with the fire of God.
The first time I received the Eucharist, 29 years ago, I felt that fire and knew that by some enormous mercy I had found my way back to paradise. Now days and weeks go by so quietly that the fire usually looks like plain sunlight and the garden like my daily world.
Yet always this very immersion of glory in plainness reveals to me the secret of my own flesh. My body, which will bear me down into the grave, even now, because the risen Lord shares my being, carries me beyond the visible universe into the everlasting life of God. Even now, as the sunlight becomes the image of the fire of God, my dying flesh becomes a sacrament of his life.
My death. Catherine Doherty taught us to sing “Alleluia” when someone dies. In this as in so much else she teaches us what it is to be the Church —a family reaching beyond time as surely as it crosses cultural frontiers and national boundaries.
In Christ’s death the Father has claimed our life for his own and in Christ’s resurrection has made our death the gateway of life. “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren,” (Jn 3:14). The light of the risen Lord shines in my brothers and sisters, anoints my heart with his love, and makes my own humanity bright with his splendor.
The very bodiliness of the Church —that earthiness that disgusts so many with the sights and smells of human weakness and sin —joins me to the Son of God, whose radiant wounds are my healing.
Through the Church Christ touches all of my senses, both inward and outward. He heals my ears, my eyes, and my flesh. He blesses my lips and loosens my tongue and fills my mouth with praise. He tells me the story of my life, and my memories become the memory of salvation. He shows me his image in the face of his Mother and of all his saints, and my own imagination is made whole.
He reveals my own heart to me, and his Spirit fills my solitude with his presence until it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Gal 2:20). He brings my mind there, to the place of faith, and finally, I begin to see with two eyes. March is going, and Easter is close at hand. The earth leaps into life.
Excerpted from Circling the Sun by Father Robert D. Pelton, The Pastoral Press, 1986, p.82. Out of print.
[The Cosmic Christ painting by ©Daniel Rabideau, Madonna House.]
