Life is Bigger than We Are
The disciples of Jesus (that’s us, folks!!) enter Holy Week this weekend as we celebrate our participation in the Paschal Mystery of the Lord. We share in the cruciform process. All Life (not just human, not just terrestrial) is one of ascent, descent and transformation. Our sharing in the Cosmic, Paschal Process happens constantly, but we usually do not perceive it. From Thursday evening through Sunday evening, in the Easter Triduum (3 days), we proclaim liturgically, “We remember, in gratitude and thanksgiving, that we participate in the Death and the Resurrection of the Lord, 24-7-365.”
We live in a culture that has been described as a “therapeutic, individualistic” culture. The axiom is “I am who I am”. People feel a malaise at times. More and more, many seek a panacea in therapy. Wise people rejoice in the gifts of healing provided by psychotherapy. However, we must remember that we are individuals created in community. Most Catholic psychotherapists themselves urge us to remember that psychotherapists do not offer cure-alls.
In a society stressing the individual at the cost of community, we need to remember that individual therapy is an answer, not the Answer. We need to name the fallacy of “entitlement”, viz., the good life is coming to me. Indeed, how can an individual, young or old, not succumb to the fallacy when we live in a culture of entitlement. Another spinoff of the neurosis of entitlement is the blame game, which is someone or something else is responsible for my sense of inadequacy.
We are part of a community as well, with which we should identify in a healthy fashion. Here, the operative axiom is “We are who we are”. We rejoice in our membership in the Catholic community, in our American citizenship, our ethnic and racial backgrounds, etc. Yet, when such identities become security blankets when we make them as the absolutes of life (as opposed to YHWH, the Father of Jesus, the God of Life, the God of Mystery), we will someday become sadly disappointed and disillusioned.
The Paschal Process focuses our attention to our belief that the operative axiom for all is found in the Transcendent, viz., “the Mystery of God, in which we all live and move and have our being”. Now the operative, all inclusive axiom becomes God’s self-identification, “I am Who am.” This transcendent axiom of YHWH, for followers of Jesus, and for everyone else, (although Christians are the ones called to spread the Word,) subsumes and relativizes other axioms.
Our God is revealed in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His salvific sharing in our life and death. We all experience disillusionment, disappointment, betrayal, accident, sickness and suffering in our lives. The Cross takes a variety of shapes and sizes. Such crosses can become opportunities for growth in faith and strength when we accept them as part of our participation in them as part of the Mystery revealed in the death and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, into Whom we are all baptized.
As we hear Jesus’ dying words this week twice, they reflect in a human dichotomy what Catholics feel in our lives. Jesus thinks about others during His final hours, the servant whose ear Jesus healed in the garden, the women of Jerusalem who were trying to console Jesus on His way to Calvary, His forgiveness of His murderers and His concern for the thief who asked to be remembered when Jesus came into His Kingdom. In Luke on Palm Sunday, Jesus dies with the words of Psalm 31 on His lips, “God, into Your Hands, I commend My Spirit!!” Jesus died the way that He lived; through His Holy Spirit given to us in Baptism and throughout our lives, He energizes us to do the same in with and through Him.
Someone recently aptly described the passion narratives in Mark, Matthew and Luke as a Cooke’s Tour” on “How not to treat other people”. You name the atrocity and Good Friday probably has it. The account has it all the following: betrayal, arrest, injustice, torture, mockery, sadism, sexual abuse, death, abandonment by all but closest. Jesus lived a life like us in all things but sin. We experience in our journey through life at times, disappointment, rejection, abandonment by others, failure and troubles Throughout the two thousand years of the New Testament, the koan of the cross confronts us. Hundreds of years ago, St Catherine of Genoa had a dream in which she asked Jesus, “Why was it necessary for you to die on the cross? Jesus’ response was, “Believe me, Catherine, if there were any other way, I would have jumped at it. Bl John Duns Scotus said God meant the cross as a sign to us of the immensity of God’s Love for us. Blessed Juliana of Norwich said that God allowed the worst thing to happen so that the best thing could happen (human salvation) in the same action. It was St Anthony (yes, that St Anthony who said that the reason why Jesus died on the cross was so that when we looked at the Cross, it would be as if we were looking in a mirror. Entering into Holy Week as we prepare for the Easter Triduum, we ask Jesus for the grace to see the axioms, “I am who I am” and “we are who we are” relativized by the Transcendent Axiom of YHWH, I am Who am, Who is self-revealed in the transforming and liberating Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. 032413AD jfq
