Author: CCW

“Because I go to the Father”

There is at once a fearful and a sad emptiness to our world and day which the YouTube Fanfest in Toronto, perhaps, illustrates. Jenna Marbles has issued her 200^th YouTube video. Her YouTube Channel has over 15 million subscribers. Her latest and perhaps last YouTube is a kind of good-by. It captures wonderfully the narcissism and the nihilism of contemporary culture. It begins with her “want[ing] to share some thoughts” with us. But what are those thoughts? A series of rather trite clichés; trite but true which is the nature of clichés, I suppose. “Because to me, I’m just Jenna. That’s all I am,” she says. But there are questions. What are they? Our questions to her, she thinks. “What are you going to do next? Where is this all leading? What about your future?” To which she replies with disarming honesty and sincerity, “The truth is, I don’t know.”

There are the pressures about having plans and goals. But as she says, “what if your goals are vague? Like mine.” What are they? “To be happy. To laugh every day. To experience life. To find love and loss. To just feel what it feels like to be a human being. To feel alive.” All rather commonplace, a tad sentimental and, perhaps, a wee bit poignant but no doubt undeniable. We are likely all suckers for them. Yet, as she says, “where do you go with goals like that?”

“People associate being lost as something bad. Fear is bad. Confusion is bad. But it’s not,” she claims, “It’s life. Because the way I see it, no one knows what they’re doing. Ever.” True enough, I suppose. Our confusions can be the beginning of learning and living; so too, with fear, especially, “the fear of the Lord” which “is the beginning of wisdom” from the biblical perspective. But if people think they know what they are doing, they’re lying, she says. “No one knows what life has in store. You can take some steps towards what you want. But you can’t control where the cards fall.” True enough, too, I suppose. So then what? With respect to drive and desire and ambition, “people focus on how to get somewhere they’re not right now,” she observes only to ask, “what’s wrong with the step you’re on?” while falling on her face. And then, like the sentiment of a Hallmark card, she advises. “Look around you. Don’t miss what you have today. Your friends. Your family. People you love.” Okay. All rather sweet and cute. But then what? The sad recognition that her time in the limelight may be coming to an end. “The novelty of me has worn off” she says, rationalizing that “we get tired of people every day.” “And that’s okay,” she says, trying to put a brave face on it but wrestling with the transitory nature of fame and glory. Sic transit gloria mundi, she might have said more profoundly. So it’s not all Jenna any more. So passes the glory of the world. Those that live by the image, must die by the image.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Ye believe in God, believe also in me”

The readings for The Feast of St. Philip and St. James complement the themes of Eastertide. The fundamental orientation of the Son to the Father is ever so strongly and rather provocatively expressed in the gospel reading, “no man cometh unto the Father but by me,” Jesus says, pointing out to Philip, too, that “he that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.” And yet, Jesus says, “believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very work’s sake.”

The things which Jesus does are the works which manifest the truth and the life and the way of God. And how are we to participate in that? Through prayer. “If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” All prayer is about nothing less and nothing more than asking the Father in the name of the Son by the power of the Spirit. All prayer gathers us into the fundamental orientation of the Son, “because I go unto my Father.” Here again, and providentially, we have the recurring Easter refrain, “because I go to the Father.” Everything is rooted and grounded in the life of God, the holy and blessed Trinity.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Peace be unto you”

Peace and forgiveness flow out from the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. They are the first-fruits of his resurrection in us. Jesus appears behind closed doors where the disciples are huddled in fear. He proclaims peace and forgiveness. He institutes the means by which his peace and his forgiveness continue with us – through the Holy Spirit breathed out upon the disciples who will be the apostles of his church. They are sent forth to bestow the peace and the forgiveness of God to a fearful and an uncertain world. “Whosoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whosoever sins ye retain, they are retained”.

What an awesome charge! And, yet, how little understood. Sometimes known as “the power of the keys,” the proclamation of God’s forgiveness through the ordained ministry to his penitent people effects what it signifies. If we truly confess our sins and truly seek God’s forgiveness, then we receive the grace of forgiveness objectively proclaimed in the words of absolution pronounced by the priest and signified in the sign of the cross. We are forgiven. That is the grace which extends from the Upper Room “the same day at evening,” the day of the resurrection of Christ to us even today. It is as if we are there, in an arrested moment of time and space, the eternal now. Something happens in the liturgy. At every service, Christ appears, as it were, behind closed doors to speak peace and forgiveness to us all.

(more…)

Print this entry

“Because I go to the Father”

There is confusion before and after. “Because I go to the Father,” Jesus says, but what does he mean, the disciples wonder? And many, many have wondered and continue to wonder ever since. Yet, it is the recurring refrain of the Easter Season that appears time and time again, especially in the last three Sundays of Eastertide.

The refrain goes to the heart of the Christian mystery, to who Jesus is and who he is for us. “Because I go to the Father”, your sorrow – our sorrow – shall be turned into joy. “Because I go to the Father,” the Holy Spirit will come upon you “to guide you into all truth” and “to bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you”.

The phrase “because I go to the Father” speaks to the essential identity of the Son with the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. This lies at the very heart of the Christian religion, to the mystery of our communion with God, to our life in Christ. The phrase “because I go to the Father” speaks to the divine intimacy into which Christ would bring us and place us. He would place us in his love for the Father in the Holy Spirit.

These are resurrection words. They speak to us of the hope of the Gospel. They are resurrection words into which all that belongs to sorrow and suffering have been taken and out of which all that belongs to joy and peace come forth. The resurrection, after all, is new birth, new life. Its radical meaning is life to God with God and in God, “because I go to the Father”. Where would we be without prepositions?

His words speak to us about the pilgrimage of salvation: the way he goes for us and that way in us. The psalmist puts it this way:

Blessed are they whose strength is in thee/ in whose heart are the pilgrim ways; Who going through the Vale of Misery use it for a well;/ yea, the early rain covereth it with blessings.

(more…)

Print this entry