Spirituality of the Readings
Stay for a While
At schools—such as Saint Louis University—the students and their networks of life fly away at the end of each year. Of course this goes double for the extended quarantine that all the world has been experiencing. Students, famously, have had to find ways to cope with lives apart from each other.
The presider at a recent mass admitted with a beautiful poignancy how much he missed them.
I can remember the same thing from my own pre–pandemic college days. If I was late in travelling home, I experienced empty halls and rooms, and broad, undisturbed yards of grass. Yes, we were all glad to have the year done with, but at the same time, why were the buildings deserted, and where was the buzzing life of intermingling students?
This might serve as a pointer to the kind of hollowness the disciples must have felt, and especially the women who had loved Jesus so much. Of course, the passion had been the worst part, as we said last week. What could ever fill that cavernous emptiness?
And, what sort of lives were Jesus’ followers to find after the very center of their lives had been taken away?
But, you say, there was the resurrection.
Correct.
But we saw last week how confusing this was to the disciples. “I will not believe this unless I put my hands on him,” said doubting Thomas. And Jesus' new presence did not last so very long, did it? There was this event called the Ascension that emptied the school yards, so to speak, and halls all over again. It was joyous, yes, but why did he have to go away for good?
One way to look at it is to say that Jesus had graduated from life into LIFE. Having tunneled through the narrow passageway of death—as you and I will do one day—he had given everything he was and everything he possessed to the Father out of sheer love. Instead of there being nothing left, there was now humanity transformed, a divine human person who had opened up all the way. He was marked with the totality of love and was on his way back to the dynamic, swirling, Trinitarian circle of love from which his humanity had issued in the first place. He lingered after the Resurrection only in order to tell us about it, to comfort us, to ease the loss.
Ok, but quite difficult to understand.
“Stay in Jerusalem until my Spirit comes to fill your heart,” Jesus said to his followers
(First Reading from Ascension). They were to be filled “with all humility and gentleness, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit” (Second Reading).
The immense act of modest love that was the resurrection would be poured into us and it would be called the Holy Spirit. Jesus would continue to be alive within the world after all, but in a different form, in our bodies and those of our neighbors. Loss and absence were to be turned into real presence.
In the Eucharistic Prayer and Communion, we take his body and blood into our body and blood. The Spirit helps us accept his whole life, death, and resurrection as they settle into us and into others around us.
This real presence now abides forever in our midst, urging us, gently nudging us to say, yes.
So, school is not out.
John Foley, SJ
**From Saint Louis University