What I had seen as elegant and understated, they saw as effectively communicating a message of restrained grief; not the exuberant celebration of joyful transformed lives that Dia de los Muertos proclaims. So, with my “permission” the ladies set to making it a proper altar.
The Spirit is also the principle of freedom in the Church. He/She is God’s left hand, just as the Son is the right hand, the Logos, the principle of reason and order. The two are inseparable. But we ought not to forget that without the breath of the Spirit, the Word cannot be given voice.
I love the response of the angel in Acts – “why are you standing around looking up into heaven?” In another place they are told go to the city and wait for power from on high. Between his apparent disappearance and the coming of the power of the Holy Spirit, between Ascension and Pentecost, we have what John Westerhoff calls a time of impotence.
When Christians reflect on our relationship to “Jesus,” it isn’t really the historical Jesus we’re talking about, or even, completely, the Jesus we meet in the gospels. It is, more mysteriously, the Risen Christ, who belongs at once to our flesh-and-blood experience and to the transcendent mystery of God.
“Getting to heaven” has become cultural shorthand for Christian salvation. But Christian salvation is fundamentally not about getting to heaven.
They pushed fluids … gave round after round of epinephran and took turns doing chest compressions for over two hours. They would get a pulse for a moment or two, just long enough to decide to keep going, before her heart would slow to a stop again. It was the longest I ever saw the medical team in the pediatric intensive care unit attempt resuscitation.
It’s Jesus alive and with us that makes us Christian. The ‘how’ of the mystery of resurrection matters because it points toward Jesus and also makes us talk as well as we can, as much as we understand about bodies and selves, the incarnational demand of finding words to preach Jesus’ ‘resurrection from the dead’ and the promise of our own resurrection.
The fact is that until the Kingdom comes, the mortality rate is 100%. Thomas and those around him would have understood that death, and the finality of death, were facts. They would have understood the wishful thinking, the desire that the facts were different, that was and is part of grief. That wouldn’t have changed what they knew about the fact of death.
The resurrection as it actually happened is God’s savage rebuke of all human tendency to cover up pain, all cosmetic smoothing over, all letting bygones be bygones, all conspiracies of silence, and phony cover-ups masquerading as reconciliation. “He showed them his hand and his side.”
It is at the tomb itself–at the place where we went to confront the reality of that death–that a whole new journey really begins. And when it does, the course of all life is re-directed, and the world itself is reborn.