Resurrection & real presence:

...A church, founded on resurrection faith and nourished by real presence, can only be an adversarial witness to this one-dimensional myopia of modernity...

...No resurrection there, only a ghostly apparition...

...The very identity of the Christian is to be in relation to Christ: "christened," that is, "anointed" through Christ with God's Holy Spirit...

...He is risen...

...The music and words sing out the wonder of creation and redemption, the alpha and omega of our origin and destiny: coming forth from love and called to love's wedding feast...

...So Paul told the Corinthians...

...I know, of course (and have myself rehearsed) all the laments concerning tasteless liturgy, unhappy homilies, unmemorable music...

...The brilliance of Bach's trumpets but underscores the tradition's conviction: "Christ, raised from the dead, will never die again...

...Perhaps no more moving contemporary witness can be found than that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Letters and Papers from Prison...

...For our participation in the body and blood of Christ has this effect: it makes us become what we receive...

...The Resurrection of Christ thus marks a new beginning whose repercussions touch not only humanity, but the entire created universe, now groaning and longing for the appearance and ministration of sons and daughters after God's own heart (Rom...

...Heart pounding, ears ringing with Magdala's message, they came running, running...

...8:29...

...And the goal intended by Christ's redemptive love is the gathering of the whole body, the "many" of the new covenant in his blood...

...These, the primordial witnesses and recipients of the new life in the Spirit, are inseparably particular individuals and representatives of the community: humanity regenerated...

...What baptism constitutes, the life of discipleship realizes-not without cost...

...For among the most sublime of his cantatas, the one which, in a sense, sums up all the rest, is the "Credo" of his B Minor Mass: a "Credo" which is surely a cantata of love...

...Toward its end, the celestials address mortals thus: Oh, to have so little, nothing except feasts of love...

...Liturgical celebration does not substitute for what the Spirit may be doing elsewhere...

...In the Creed, we glorify God who establishes us in truth by the gift of the Holy Spirit...

...All body forth intimations of the Lord's transformed body, even as they conspire to effect the transformed embodiment of believers...

...Between the old and the new there is both continuity and discontinuity, identity in difference...

...Indeed, to be "in Christ" is, primarily, to live in communion: related to self and other through Christ, becoming member of one body...

...we must always live close to the presence of God, for that is newness of life...

...On those occasions when the program of truth-telling seems actually to have been translated into practice, and appeal is made to persuasion rather than coercion (as in the case of President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia), one thrills to the promise the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, offers ever anew...

...The new life in the living Christ is relational existence...

...The singular sense of union between the Risen Christ and his disciples of every age provides the key to the distinctive Patristic scriptural interpretation and pastoral practice...

...Early on the first day of the week, the sun having barely risen, Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved came running to the tomb...

...Is it any coincidence that commentary on the Song of Songs, as consummate and privileged evocation of the universe of love, soon ceases in a West avid for the subjugation of supposedly spiritless nature and peoples...

...For the mystery, which Scripture illuminates, is, finally, the "whole Christ...

...How can real presence not be foundationally inclusive...

...The Christian life, the life of discipleship, is life in Christ, not metaphorically, but really...

...This "Mother of Vigils," this unique "Mass of the Resurrection," is the measure and point of reference for every liturgical celebration, however modest...

...and, precisely by so doing, granting to all freedom and scope to grow into Christ, the alpha and omega of maturation in the Spirit...

...Here is enacted the admirabile commercium...

...he is not here...

...And the hinge of the whole is the Resurrection of Christ: "et resurrexit tertia die...

...and its continued relevance today...

...Body, most certainly, but not merely resuscitated body: body transformed in the Spirit of God, imbued with God's power and glory...

...It is the recognition-confession which Christian experience and discipleship will reiterate through the centuries...

...Presence so real as to be palpable: yet so discreet as to demand discernment...

...If Paul, in Romans 8, proclaims ecstatically the presence of love from which nothing can sunder-"neither death nor life, neither powers nor potentates, neither zenith nor abyss"-he makes patent that this presence is rendered real and irrevocable in the death and Resurrection of Christ...

...6:9...

...Resurrection faith stretches heart and mind to the breaking point, as they stagger under the unbearable lightness of being...

...It is nothing less than the building up of Christ's body, the realization of that one perfected person, who is Christ come to completion (Eph...

...Its manner is a bold, if compassionate speaking of the truth (Eph...

...15:45), is himself the firstborn of a multitude of brothers and sisters (Rom...

...not merely because it formed a living link with the whole body of Christ, but because she prayed the Creed as, in its essence, a "love song...

...For the Christian the unique access to God is through Jesus Christ, God's Beloved and our Lord, who lives and reigns now...

...For the Easter Vigil shows that all creation is implicated in the coming to birth of Christians, by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, in the womb of the church...

...If Christ be not raised, preaching and faith alike are useless, empty, and vain...

...8:19...

...Maria...

...death no longer holds dominion over him" (Rom...

...Body indeed: but motile and pyrogenic, penetrating closed spaces and the confines of hearts...

...How can the new temple in the Spirit, which is the risen body of Christ, not embrace all the nations in its ampleness...

...the disciples ponder at the close of Luke's narrative of the Risen One's appearance on the road to Emmaus...

...But the cloth that had covered the face of the Beloved was not found with the rest...

...There is simply no Christian faith without the density of real presence...

...The privileged place of encounter and exchange between the Risen Christ and Christians remains the eucharistic celebration...

...For the only way to resurrection is the way of the cross...

...Christ, the new Adam become life-giving Spirit (1 Cor...

...So intimate is this union with the living Lord that the church's mystical tradition-from Origen through Bernard of Clairvaux to John of the Cross-found commentary upon the biblical Song of Songs to be the least inadequate way of expressing the unique love binding Beloved to those he enlivens...

...he is not here" (Mark 16:6...

...RESURRECTION & REAL PRESENCE TO BE IN CHRIST IS TO LIVE IN COMMUNION Recently, I encountered a woman, a nun, who had spent the better part of a year living an almost solitary existence, a "desert" year given over to prayer and communion with God...

...This the New Testament and the Patristic age fully appreciated...

...A recent issue of the New Yorker (February 26) featured a remarkable poem by Czeslaw Milosz entitled, "Creating the World...

...soledad sonora" (as John of the Cross exclaims with eloquent stammer...

...Nothing is omitted: fasting and feasting, silence and music, darkness and light, water, oil, bread, and wine...

...That is why the full panoply of the Easter Vigil is required merely to initiate us into the real presence of the Risen Lord, in the midst of the community which he constitutes and continues to found by the outpouring of his Spirit...

...The real presence of Christ is, therefore, principle and sustaining power of the realization of humanity's vocation to divine filiation and universal reconciliation...

...not imitatively, but participatively...

...Remarkable, in the first chapter of Ephesians, is the author's insistent prayer for a sense of wisdom and discernment, a real apprehension (in Newman's terms) of the power of God revealed in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead...

...but both ever together-as Rudolf Otto speaks of the Holy as ever evoking both dread and desire...

...Had not Johann Sebastian Bach shown as much long ago...

...Then, the one whom Jesus loved, in a final burst of desire, outstripped the other and reached the tomb first...

...The trumpets herald the dark luminosity of resurrection, recapitulating both seen and unseen, visibilium et invisibilium...

...And faith finally relies not upon rational demonstration but upon spiritual discernment...

...But against all infringement of the mystery the angel stands adamant: "He is risen...

...In the Creed, we thank God, who, out of utmost compassion, sends the dearly Beloved to dwell in our midst...

...But their being, if not their immediate effect, is ultimately insubstantial...

...A provocative resuscitation, perhaps, but no true resurrection...

...Is it any wonder that we frequently retreat before the mystery, reducing it to more manageable perspectives...

...Rabboni": the ecstatic recognition, rejoicing at having been found, which is followed at once by the imperative, "Do not cling to me...go and tell" (cf...

...The leaven of our old malice is thrown away, and a new creature drinks deep and feeds upon the Lord himself...

...It enables us, with our whole being, to bear him, in whom and with whom we have died and been buried and risen again...

...Whatever we confess of God in the Creed is not dry propositions, but divine praises...

...This personal, embodied presence of the Risen Christ defines the newness of the new covenant, binding eyewitnesses and those to whom they testify into one body of love, at-oned in a common Eucharist: "Praised be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in great mercy has begotten us anew into a living hope by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead...

...And love, taking all in at a glance, believed in the sun that never sets.t a glance, believed in the sun that never sets...

...Once intimated, the point was self-evident...

...The living Christ is the presence of God in human flesh, temple in whom all God's creatures can nest, bridegroom who is unique beloved of each...

...Pope Saint Leo the Great but recapitulates, in this regard, the common conviction of the undivided tradition of East and West: Beloved, it cannot be doubted that the Son of God assumed human nature so intimately that there is one single Christ in the one who was first-born of all creation, and also in all his saints...

...You have not seen Christ, yet you love him, and believing in him now, even without seeing, your joy overflows, a joy beyond all telling" (1 Pet...

...Traces there may be in "proclamation" and "people" and even, however implausible this may appear, in "institution...

...As Sebastian Moore has written: "It's he that we are experiencing, but extraordinarily, in a way that takes us beyond ourselves, into a new world...

...They press us onward: Pouring forth a thousand graces, he passed these groves with haste...

...The linen cloths, binding the dead, lay discarded, useless now...

...Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory...

...One need not naively deny that an untransformed world still falls under the illusory sway of principalities and powers...

...4:12-13...

...Can faith in resurrection and real presence entail any less...

...Or, some ecclesiastical functionaries insist, "He is risen into the institutional church"-displaying, by the very contention, a rather petrified imagination...

...The power in question, the power who is Holy Spirit, is-and this is crucial-persuasive, not coercive...

...revelation serves transformation...

...And yet, for all the legitimate concern about the opus operands (what we do as presiders, ministers, people), the primacy lies with the opus operatum (what God has done and is doing through the Risen Christ...

...Still, for all the splendid allusion and evocation, the issue remains, ultimately, one of faith...

...but provides its norm and substantiation in Christ...

...Body, assuredly: but in the full Hebraic sense of relational identity, no longer limited or thwarted, but diaphanous to Spirit...

...dinning solitude-musica callada...

...Yet it is also clear that this relation to Christ is not individualistic in any exclusive sense...

...Though Christ's victory renders them ultimately impotent, they still make empty show of majesty and mastery...

...Some might even say: its transubstantiation...

...Without Christ's Resurrection the universe of love is but wishful myth, well-meant illusion...

...It lay carefully folded in its own place apart...

...The Creed, as hymn of love, hinges on the Resurrection...

...the Spirit who effects the communion of saints, by being the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life...

...And the making of the whole Christ is, at once, the unmerited gift of God and the urgent responsibility of believers...

...Here, if anywhere, we encounter real presence...

...We proclaim God who creates, out of goodness all that is seen and unseen...

...But these, in themselves, are but footprints left by the Beloved in his passage, as John of the Cross knew and suffered...

...On this hinge swings wide the stone set before the tomb, opening an abyss before which the women stand and tremble...

...and then nothing is impossible for all things are possible with God...

...And the purpose of that power is set forth, in chapter 4, with a depth we still scarcely fathom...

...Were not our hearts burning within us...

...Not conflict, but profound harmony, issues from the confession of Christ as unique Beloved of each and as head of the entire body of believers who draw their life from him...

...How feeble your defense against the abyss...

...and there is no reason to retract his assessment today...

...All these themes are but multiple variations on the one cantus firmus which is God's love: indeed, the one incomprehensible mystery of the triune God who is love...

...John 20:16-17...

...For the appearances of the Risen One provide sacramental glimpses into a world unseen, from which come healing, grace, and peace...

...As John of the Cross insists, only the dark night of faith can be prelude to Easter dawn...

...and fixing them with a glance, transforming them in his image, he clothed them with beauty...

...Without doubt both...

...For in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ we confront new creation, transformed existence...

...Spiritual body," body transformed in Spirit, becomes an incomprehensible symbol in a Cartesian world, regulated by "clear and distinct ideas" that serve the purposes of power and control...

...Now, in counterpoint to this depiction of the human condition, a fugal variation upon a Johannine theme...

...In the Fourth Gospel's magnificent portrait of Jesus' hour of glory as his exaltation upon the cross, the consummation of the good news is the pouring forth of the life-giving water and blood from the pierced side of Christ upon his mother and beloved disciple...

...A contemporary student of the New Testament writes: "The resurrection experience that gave birth to the Christian movement was the experience of the continuing presence of a personal, transcendent, and transforming power within the community" (Luke Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament, Fortress...

...1:3-8...

...All the meditation of the centuries-long tradition is but lectio divina et continua upon Paul's wonder-filled rhetoric in First Corinthians: What is sown a perishable thing is raised imperishable...

...A recent review in Commonweal [February 23] on the search for "dark matter" in the universe by Chet Raymo reminded us that "the entire visible universe is but a drop in the cosmic sea...

...That is why we daily celebrate the Lord's pasch with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth...

...Joyful affirmation or terrifying revelation...

...4:15...

...Paradoxical physicality: like "silent music...

...Here, if anywhere, is celebrated real presence at its highest pitch...

...the only authentic mode of discipleship is the one that retraces the journey of the Lord-or, better, relives it, by living it in Christ...

...Bach's "Credo" structures a cosmos and proclaims it a work of love...

...And the poem's last stanza, summing up mortals' life on earth, reads: And the sun rises and the sun sets, And the sun rises and the sun sets While they go on running, running...

...Can we dismiss, as only Orthodox exaggeration, what Alexander Schmemann urges: "The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the Risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber...

...A power now at work in believers...

...The key to everything is the 'in Christ.' All that we rightly expect from God and pray for is to be found in Jesus Christ...

...But, since it has long been my peculiar habit to meditate with the Bible in one hand and the New Yorker in the other, let me close this meditation in like fashion...

...And so, certain scholars contend, "He is risen into the kerygma"-betraying thereby their inordinate appetite for ideas...

...Sown an animate body, raised a spiritual body (15: 42-44...

...For the vision of the Risen One is, as Paul exemplifies, ardent with expectation, opening a new horizon of hope for all creation...

...Speaking of her prayer, she surprised me by saying that a staple of her prayer life was the Creed...

...The head cannot be separated from the members, nor can the members from the head...

...Or, others of more lib-erationist bent cry, "He is risen as the people"-manifesting their often havoc-wreaking innocence...

...Here vision impels to mission...

...Only the advent of modernity, articulated with devastating genius by Descartes, saw the propagation of an atomistic individualism which loosed the relational bonds between persons, even as it fragmented matter and spirit into separate and competing spheres...

...Once I thought about it, it made perfect sense...

...This corporate destiny is confessed with unsurpassed boldness in the Epistle to the Ephesians, whether by Paul himself or a disciple who had appropriated and extended Paul's mystical vision...

...The rest is in the living...

...the Beloved who, for the sake of our salvation and well-being, offers himself in life and in death and is raised to new life...

...That would merely exchange one tomb for another...

...In his letter of August 21,1944, Bonhoeffer achieves a realization which the disciple must ever appreciate anew, in each new circumstance of his or her life...