April 2011 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

Christ Has Risen!

Easter becomes more significant as the sands of time slip by and so many treasured friends, irreplaceable, pass away. The confrontation with their on-going presence: are they really at that heavenly banquet, awaiting with divine like patience our arrival, the cloud of witnesses, the communion of saints. The heart and soul of our faith, the Incarnation, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus are as John McNamee puts it, a stretch, a leap of faith.

How perceive the overcoming of the great equalizer, the grea t spoiler, the shadow hanging over all of us, death? James Alison, a brilliant English theologian has a unique vocabulary to celebrate the resurrection, to overcome what he calls the great lie; recover the eschatological imagination. He celebrates the effervescent vivacity of God. For Alison as for the disciples, we need to begin to understand “the mind that was in Christ”. The disciples were dumb struck when Jesus spoke of his death and resurrection, totally beyond their comprehension. Alison suggests we need to revitalize our crippled imagination. We begin to be possessed by the “same imaginative perception of the deathlessness of God that had been at work in Jesus – This is, in fact, a huge change which occurred in their case, (the disciples) as it may in ours, very slowly, since it is the whole of human cultural perception which is being altered.”

It sounds a bit simplistic so much a fantasy, to fasten our faith to a revitalized imagination. James Tissot, a French artist (1836-1902) had a mystical conversion experience at age 48, and traveled to Palestine for several years recreating the Gospel scenes in over 300 watercolors. The kindness of some good friends affords me the luxury of looking at these prints. To envision Jesus in the hills of Pale stine speaking of the beatitudes to an audience of poor fishermen and farmers, illiterate; the drama of their rapt, inquisitive faces in Tissot’s, paintings, speaks to the extraordinary call to their imagination to internalize this new story. Can you imagine their hearing, love your enemies, give away your cloak and tunic as well to him who asks. Alison speaks of Jesus subverting from within the old story, a new creation.

He suggests we have different sorts of paternity applying to God as Father. Our endless wars, rampant executions affirm a world seemingly gone mad, one paternity. Christ offers another. “The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think that they are offering a service to God, and this they will do because they have not known the Father nor me.” (John 16-2,3). The “have not known the Father” has frightening implications for how we practice “religion.” “There we have the two different sorts of paternity set out with absolute clarity, the paternity which kills and persecutes in order to serve god and the paternity which is shown in the self-giving in the midst of violence as a witness to the complete vivaciousness of the God who knows not death.” (Raising Abel, J. Alison)

This process of a lively imagination becomes more real as incarnated in fellow human beings. Mother Teresa insisting the “untouchables” should be caressed as they lie dying. Etty Hillesum, young Jewish Dutch woman ministering in the concentration camps of WWII with exuberant love and hope for humanity, Oscar Romero lifting up the Salvadoran people. Robert Ellsberg’s Lives of the Saints gives a daily diet of

our extraordinary capacity for compassion, not just those old saints, but some pedestrian fellow travelers. There is extraordinary stuff going on weekly at the St. Francis Inn and House of Grace Catholic Worker in Kensington and Project HOME and on and on.

There is an ebb and flow to the wisdom of the church. My memory of the late fifties and pre Vatican II sixties of Easter is an endless procession to confession, three and a half hours non-stop every Saturday. One would hope a healthy penitential sense was about, but I think of it more as a touch of the old Gnostic heresy, matter, i.e. the body is evil. With such a constant need for absolution, we didn’t find ourselves very loved. I digress, but St. Therese, the Little Flower, spent hours writing to young priests to dispel this paralyzing sense of unworthiness. So I find Alison’s unbridled sense of hope most welcome. Jesus came not for the just but sinners, prostitutes, lepers, outcasts, the downtrodden, us. The very ones America is about abandoning.

Robert Kennedy, the Jesuit Zen Master, assures us the resurrection has begun, the Spirit dwells within us and we have no existence except as connected to all creation. Living in the present moment we find God within ourselves. I might add, for some of us, God is often absent, not present, but that goes with the territory. Listen to Kennedy: “No matter how long and how often we search outside ourselves we will find no Buddha, no matter in which direction we look for the way outside ourselves, we will never find a direction that can be called our way. We are the Buddha (God dwells in us) and the roadless road within ourselves is the way. If we know who we are, everyplace and every direction is our way. Can we Christians not hear in this Zen gift Christ’s words: I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6)? Can this Zen gift of no God outside ourselves help us to really understand that we are Christ himself? St. Augustine tells us that in the end there will be only one Christ loving himself. And when he was bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine would hold up the Eucharist at liturgies and exhort his Christian followers to come and “receive what you are” ; not what you could be or will be, but what you are.” (Zen Gifts to Christians, p.100).

Joe Bradley

Joe is a member of CPF