Sistine resurrection

...it may be stimulating, fraudulently so, but in a qualitative sense, literally nothing is happening -- except death in some form (and thus it's draining, nerve-racking...

...No wonder...

...And as the theatrical analogy suggests, you can't come to either Bible or liturgy cold...

...All of which takes time, is time's main chance...

...You may of course, even as a child, take delight in the colorful rituals of Passion Week and the Easter Vigil, but there's a sense of these great rememberings that no one can take in until the soul has been plowed open, not closed, by the nightmare of history...

...likewise the "profession of faith" took place in private...

...We muse on time because, among the various time frames we dwell in, it's time for the annual Catholic Educational Association convention, a group dedicated to educing quality time for our children, and this year devoting its congress to the topic of peace...

...For many born-Catholics the Bible is peripheral to the liturgy and the Real Presence that is enacted psychodramatically, by puttingon Christ symbolically, swallowing the substance of the mystery disclosed in Him, through Him...

...There is, of course, more...

...the convert is encouraged to explore a lifetime' s spiritual journey, to discern the movement of the Spirit along irregular paths and chance encounters -- and finally, to tell whether the poetic language of the Bible, its sprawling mix of story, proverbial wisdom, parable, prophetic iconoclasm and vision, fits a life, provides the images and the song the soul longs to utter...

...To put on its figures ritually is like catching a fresh wind -- or a breeze like a still, small voice...

...Is that a simple question, a matter of consulting your calendar or quartz watch...

...That practice tended to reinforce an individualistic and secretive form of piety...

...On the other hand, the centrality of ritual and ritual's capacity to transform the quality of time into a visionary medium is not the luxury item that either activists or academics tend to think it, much less the aesthete's device for appreciating the Bible as literature...

...We stock our imaginations and nervous systems with this'history, and thereby enter a movement of time that would turn our world inside out...

...Such happenings are as prized as they are rare...

...20 April 1984:229...

...That means the baptism of adult converts -- and if we're not mistaken, there's a quiet educational and cultural revolution taking place here...

...This editorial space is often shot through with metaphors of time -time running out, time to act, time against us, for us, precise timing, inept timing, time spent, lost, or ga~.ned -- and when you think of it, the issue is rarely, or only peripherally, one of uniform standard time, time determined by reference to the minor star in the galaxy we call the sun...

...One can also anticipate strains, expectations difficult to fulfill...

...Well, the point of lending an ear to the liturgical year in the midst of all that's fit and unfit to print or tape is just this: that it charges our often shallow calculus With times of intense movement -- Sarah laughing...

...formal reception now occurs at the Commonweal: 228 crowded Easter Vigil...

...The issue is the character, intensity, and, despite the clichr, the quality of time...

...EASTER RITES'- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What time is it...

...And, above all, because it' s Easter time, a time that for all its coordination with seasonal greening time, has had much less success as a national folk festival than Christmas...

...Suffice to say, however, that this new church practice may be bringing into our midst a new kind of Catholic -- who, by another standard, may be the revival of a very old kind...

...The clear gain, however, is the promise of the biblical orientation of these converts, although it may at first strike cradle Catholics as foreign -- even Protestant...

...Above all, we humans are concerned with critical moments, auspicious and inauspicious times, moments of opportunity when there's a chance the whole timbre of time can change, shift from cruel time to welcome time...

...namely, the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults...

...kings dancing or caught in the act...

...Biblical study, familiarity with the actual historical and sociological settings of biblical figures, can help dispel the sentimentalism that often tends to enervate such ritual role-play...

...prayer, spiritual discipline, are the necessary rehearsal and staging...

...On the contrary, ritual enactment offers a key to the high times the Bible testifies to, gives access to the same great current here and now, in our own time, place, and circumstance, that moved Moses, Isaiah, and Jesus...

...That is certainly the way they are conducting this campaign...

...Anything which goes beyond sounding that single note is forbidden...

...There's a vast task here hardly begun in our time: to get the congregation into the action, to give them parts in the performance...

...In a fundamentally prayerful context (can this kind of learning occur otherwise...

...No longer...

...The" instruction" of convertsused to occur privately, by a priest, and normally in a rather bookish fashion...

...But the analogy to theater also suggests something else: that the passive audience, the inert spectators, the "frozen people of God," who ordinarily still warm the bench at the Mass, won't do...

...The normal news, when you reflect on it, is often no-news, a tale of collapse, collision, power-balance stalemate, wasted energy as in the physicist's entropy...

...When Martin Luther King proclaims a dream at the Lincoln Memorial, when Anwar Sadat shakes hands with Menachem Begin, when Argentina elects a humane, civilian president, we recognize "an event" in a sense that the daily horror show of the evening news is not...

...a tongue-tied herdsman metamorphosed into a people's leader...

...wily Jacob wrestling...

...Hence the dramaturgy of Christian ritual: it's the privileged way into the Jewish sense of history and its Christian coda...

...That is to say, these converts are being cultured in something very much like aLatin American "base community," their link to local concerns and to a world-wide, historical people with a determined collective mission to yeast a world...

...Unlike Christmas, Easter (and Pentecost) are adult feasts beyond the range of children...

...an inconsolable Job, the reluctant Jonah, and fishermen, tax sharks, and prostitutes -- at random -- betrayed into being world-shakers...

...It is said that liberal Democrats would form a firing squad by standing in a circle and putting the victim in the middle...

...And leading up to this event, the new programs of "initiation" are conspicuously communal, biblically oriented, and mystagogic...

...To the extent our liturgy reinforces this spectator stance, it is unlikely that ritual will release the Pentecostal fire, that great subsurface historical movement, which we claim~Jesus came to set free...

...It seems that the campaign strategists have alloted each condidate one theme -- "new ideas" for Hart, "experience" for Mondale...

...A real event, on the other hand, energizes the heart and will do so precisely because it represents qualitative movement, a change in tonal planes, a metamorphosis...

...No, it's not...

...One must learn of death and return from the shadow of death, and to some degree take on the race's passion story and know, by "hints and guesses," that God has made it his own...

...Reflections like these lead us to the auspicious moment which many Catholics will witness this year, as they have for the past several, in the midst of their parish Easter Vigil service...

...What the Bible gives us," writes Northrop Frye, "is not so much a cosmology as a vision of upward metamorphosis...