From America Magazine:
Posted at: Monday, June 06, 2011
Author: John W. Martens
"One of the great beauties of the Church is the liturgical calendar and the eternal rhythms to which one becomes attuned. One of the realities of writing with the Church’s calendar is that soon you have written on almost every feast day. It is a wonderful thing to turn one’s mind to writing about the Ascension of the Lord, but should one have something new to say about the Ascension every year, or can you rely on, if not exactly the eternal rhythms of the calendar, the tried and true cut and paste from last year’s musing on the Ascension, or perhaps the year prior to that? This is a combination of posts from the last three years, dating back to Ascension 2008, which I offer today because they reflect the eternal significance of the Ascension and, in some cases, current and recent concerns.
The Ascension is not a time to be gazing skyward or backward. St. Augustine gets to the ground of this reality in The City of God Book XVIII, Chapter 53, when he says of the Parousia, citing Acts 1:6f, “it is usual to ask at this point, ‘When will this happen?’ But this question is entirely inappropriate. For had it been of profit to us to know the answer to it, who better to tell us than the Master, God himself, when the disciples asked him? For they were not silent on this matter when they were with Him; on the contrary, they asked Him directly, saying, ‘Lord, wilt thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ But He said, ‘It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has put in His own power.’” Augustine goes on to say, “in vain, therefore, do we strive to compute and define the number of years that remain in this world”; it might be an intriguing past-time, but pulls us away from the many tasks of the Church at hand.
On the other hand, Augustine returns to this passage in Book XX, Chapter 30, on the last page of his massive tome, as he considers the reality of Christ’s return – without calculating dates! – as “prefiguring the eternal rest not only of the Spirit, but of the body also.” Augustine speaks specifically of our bodily reality, but it is true also of Jesus, “who will return in the same way.” This bodily reality of Jesus, which the disciples gaze at in the Ascension narrative at the beginning of Acts, prefigures the bodily return of Jesus.
There is a very real and continuing physicality of Jesus Christ. The ascension is the celebration of Jesus’ enthronement as Lord, but also a sign of his continuing existence in the flesh, albeit the resurrected body. It has also been, in many ways, a marginalized teaching of the Church, perhaps because of its very physicality which can tend to embarrass modern or postmodern sensibilities. Where is the Risen Lord? Luke reports that “as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven” (1:9-11). Ephesians states that God has seated Christ “at his right hand in the heavens, far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come” (1:20-21). The cosmology reported in these two New Testament writings is so very foreign to us, as Jesus seems to “float” into his home in the sky. On the other hand, the bodily existence of Jesus is real and so we cannot simply revert to the body-soul split of the ancient Greeks and even many modern thinkers.
How do we retain the core of our faith, the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord, while embedded in an ancient cosmology which we no longer share? It was Douglas Farrow’s book, Ascension and Ecclesia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), which made clear to me how significant the doctrine of the ascension was, not only within the New Testament, but to the Church today. While we may reject the ancient cosmologies which describe Jesus flying into the ether, if we reject the particularity of Jesus we lose not only his bodiliness, but our own and are prone to fall into the trap of Gnosticism. The ascension is essential for the Church. Farrow writes, “to take seriously the fact that Christ has ascended to the Father is not to say he is everywhere, or nowhere, or somewhere else, but that he is with us in this twofold way: He is there, in first-century Palestine, and there again, at the parousia. Because he is with the Father, he is before us and after us; only so is he with us. He is with us precisely as a question put to our very existence, so that we too must decide with Pilate – and under essentially the same circumstances – ‘What shall I do with Jesus, who is called the Christ?’” (Ascension and Ecclesia, 225).
We must focus on the particularity of the Risen Lord. This seems such a significant point to me, that we serve and await not a cosmic or universalized principle, but the Risen Lord, who is present to us in the Scriptures, the Church and the Eucharist. Our task as Christians seems that much more grounded in light of the Ascension. T.F. Torrance in Royal Priesthood writes, “to demythologize the ascension (which means of course that it must first of all be mythologised) is to dehumanize Christ, and to dehumanize Christ is to make the Gospel of no relevance to humanity, but to turn it into an inhospitable and inhuman abstraction” (cited in Ascension and Ecclesia, 265). Jesus is not an abstraction; he has ascended to the Lord, as Ephesians 1:17-23 stresses. Our task is here on earth, again as a passage from Ephesians, 4:12, notes: “for building up the body of Christ.” We work “with all humility and gentleness” (Ephes. 4:2), according to the gifts we have been given. We are a part of the body of Christ here on earth because he is, indeed, our heavenly Lord. But we await the return of Jesus and we know that he will return, the one who shared in our humanity in every way but sin, and who models for us the life in the glory of the resurrected body."
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=1&entry_id=4281
Ascension 2011
Helping Catholic Students Remain Catholic in a Setting of Nietzsche and Beer Pong
Helping Catholic Students Remain Catholic in a Setting of Nietzsche and Beer Pong
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: May 20, 2011
NEW HAVEN — When she graduated four years ago as the valedictorian of a Catholic high school in Chicago, Marysa Leya received a present from her biology teacher. It was a hand-painted crucifix, intended for her college dorm room, with a note from him on the back urging her: “Be sure to stay as grounded and awesome as you are now.”Before leaving the Midwest for Yale University here, Ms. Leya also got some parting advice from her grandmother. “Don’t lose your faith,” Ms. Leya, 22, recalls being told, “out there on that liberal East Coast.”
In their divergent ways, Ms. Leya’s teacher and grandmother were expressing the conventional wisdom about religious young people heading off to college. Exposed to Nietzsche, Hitchens, co-ed dorms and beer pong, such students are almost expected to stray. Just as surely, the standard thinking goes, their adult lives of marriage and parenthood will bring them back to observance.
Things didn’t work out quite that way for Ms. Leya. In her four years at Yale, which culminate in commencement this weekend, she never missed a Sunday Mass and joined in weekly discussions of scripture. As a typical underachieving Yalie, she also drew cartoons for the student newspaper, captained the club tennis team, participated in a Polish cultural society and, oh by the way, earned her way into Northwestern’s medical school with a 3.78 grade point average as a biology major.
For all that, perhaps because of all that, Ms. Leya has also become part of a nationwide pilot program designed to keep actively Catholic college students just as actively Catholic after the last mortarboard has tumbled to earth. The program, Esteem, has operated from the contrarian premise that a college graduate who is suddenly reduced to being the young stranger in a new parish may well grow distant or even alienated from Catholicism.
“I can’t imagine shirking my faith,” Ms. Leya said in an interview this week at St. Thomas More, the Catholic chapel and center at Yale, “but how do you keep it important around all the chaos of med school? How do I become a meaningful member of a new parish? How do I allow the kind of experiences I’ve had here to continue?”
For Ms. Leya, like about 70 other students on six campuses, Esteem has provided intensive education in the Catholic practice, especially the role of laity, and a handpicked mentor who combines professional success with religious devotion. In Ms. Leya’s case, he is Dr. Leo M. Cooney Jr., a professor of geriatric medicine in Yale’s medical school, and, as important, a veteran of his own spiritual walkabout.
“We wanted people who were living out a life of faith that might have struggles,” said Kathleen A. Byrnes, a chaplain at St. Thomas More who is on Esteem’s executive team. “Not someone with all the answers.”
Esteem began, in fact, with a question. Every fall, the chaplains at St. Thomas More would welcome back alumni for the religious ritual known as the Harvard-Yale game. Invariably, those recent graduates delivered similar reports of Catholic life after Yale: stultifying parishes, aging congregations, irrelevant homilies, all resulting in a drift away. So what could be done?
A series of meetings by three people in 2004 — Geoffrey T. Boisi, a Wall Street executive active in philanthropy; Kerry Robinson, the development director at St. Thomas More; and the Rev. Robert L. Beloin, the church’s pastor — led to the initial notion of Esteem. A $25,000 grant from the church paid for a planning conference and development of a business plan.
Then, with a donation of $102,000 from an unidentified corporation, Esteem set up its pilot program for the 2010-11 academic year. Under the aegis of a national organization of Catholic executives, the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, Esteem recruited students and mentors on campuses that included elite private schools (Stanford, Yale), public universities (Michigan State, Ohio State, U.C.L.A.) and one Catholic institution (Sacred Heart in Fairfield, Conn.).
Yet what all the planning comes down to, in a certain sense, is the hour each week when Ms. Leya and Dr. Cooney get together, and the chemistry that Esteem’s founders hope will emerge between them.
Dr. Cooney’s own trajectory, decades before Esteem was devised, ratifies its viewpoint. The third of 11 children in an Irish-American family, the product of Catholic education from kindergarten through college, he had many assumptions jolted when he started medical school at Yale.
To be immersed in biological science was, for him, to be confronted with an alternative system for the world than divine creation and oversight. His ultimate specialty, working with elderly patients nearing death, shook his belief in an afterlife. And such doubt seemed to him the disqualifier of faith.
Only in the last dozen years, since being introduced to St. Thomas More by a student, has he resumed regular observance, becoming more deeply involved than ever. What drew him back more than anything, he said, was Father Beloin’s message “that doubting is encouraged, that it’s part of the journey.”
Still, when Ms. Byrnes approached him about being a mentor to Ms. Leya, he asked, “What can I do?” Teaching medical students how to conduct muscle exams? That he could do. Modeling faith in action? That was getting into sin-of-pride territory.
Still, in his self-effacing way, Dr. Cooney shared what he could with Ms. Leya. He told her about the rough transition from college, with its built-in community, to the medical education’s regimen of long hours, less socializing, maybe a different hospital in a different city for your residency, then internship, then fellowship.
They talked, in a pragmatic way, about the parishes near Northwestern’s medical campus in Chicago, and the university’s Catholic center. More philosophically, Dr. Cooney reminded his protégée to find time amid the pressure to stop and reflect, to keep looking for a base, to see Catholicism as a means to an end: connection to a community.