Ascension Day
2 June 2011
Acts 1.1-11; Lk 24.49-53
Fr. Patrick S. Allen

(at the Church of the Holy Communion)

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Here we are gathered together this evening to keep and celebrate this great of feast of our Lord’s Ascension, when on the fortieth day after his mighty resurrection, the forty-third day after his blessed passion and precious death, Jesus, blessing his disciples, was lifted up, and  a cloud took them from their sight.

Took him from their sight.  And yet this is a feast, a festival, a celebration, which perhaps immediately strikes us as a bit counterintuitive:  his departing results in their rejoicing.  Now, let’s not kid ourselves, we have all found ourselves rejoicing at someone’s, maybe some three-day’s guest’s, departing.  But that shouldn’t apply here.  These were Jesus’ disciples and friends; they loved him, and they wanted his company and companionship.  They mourned his death, and they rejoiced at his resurrection, and so we might expect a return to some level mourning at this departure, however attenuated.

But St. Luke tells us that just the opposite happened:  While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven.  And they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.

So St. Luke is telling us that if we understand our Lord’s Ascension aright, if we can learn to see something of what those disciples saw, the result will be a deep and sustaining joy and an authentic, from-the-heart worship of and genuine gratitude toward God.

The first thing to say is that whatever they saw in Jesus’ Ascension, the disciples did not experience this parting, this leave taking, as an abandonment.  They were not losing Jesus.

He was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight, we are told.  Immediately, we think of fluffy white cumulus drifting across a blue sky, but that is to fail to think and read in the language of Bible – the holy scriptures, the record of God’s redeeming work, in which the cloud of God’s presence led the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage, and the cloud of God’s presence which filled the Tent of Meeting and settled upon Sinai, and the cloud of the Holy Spirit that overshadowed the Blessed Virgin Mary as she gave her full and free “Yes” to God’s Word, and the cloud that descended upon Jesus on Mt. Tabor and in which he was seen gloriously transfigured and shining by the disciples.  This is the cloud, the cloud of God’s presence, into which Jesus ascends and is taken from their sight.

Jesus is not departing “up to” some higher but other floor in the universe, but to his God and Father upon whom the very existence of the universe depends, and in whom we all “live and move and have our being.”  The Ascension is not an abandonment but the beginning of a new and more intimate nearness – his continuing, ubiquitous, always-available presence with us and for us, not to a different and distant point within the universe, but transcending and filling all things.  He is Ascended from one particular place to the heavenly, the divine  places, far above all rule and dominion and power, as St. Paul says in our epistle, so that he now fills all in all – not an abandonment, but a new and available nearness.

Well, that might certainly result in the disciples’ great joy.  But wait, as they say on television, there’s more!  It’s not just that they see their friend and Lord somehow spiritually returned to and mystically united with the Father, but that they see their friend and Lord in his incarnate, fully human, flesh-and-blood, body and soul humanity taken in to the life of God.

The Incarnation did not end at the Ascension but continues forever.  In the Ascension, the disciples, and we, see the very image, “the perfect icon,” of their own full redemption.  In the Ascension, they and we see what humanity is capable of.  Indeed, we see what God has created humanity for: an eternal share in his own divine life.   And so in the Ascension we see revealed the full dignity of every human being.  Every last and least one of us – intended, created, and at the cost of Christ’s own blood, redeemed for this, our true home and our true selves.

In the summer of 1990, having just graduated from college, I spent a couple months travelling in Europe, making stops at all the standard spots, including of course, the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican.  As it happens, it was a curious time to see the Sistine Chapel.  A restoration of the marvelous ceiling, covered by Michelangelo’s frescoes, had just been completed and the chapel re-opened the previous December after four years of careful, minute, painstaking cleaning and rehabilitation.  The ceiling had been restored, but work had not yet begun on the great “Last Judgment” scene behind the altar and the other wall frescoes.

The contrast was startling:  the ceiling above having emerged from beneath four and a half centuries of soot, grime, and water damage, an intensely bright jumble of vivid color and beauty and life.  But the walls, the walls were dead by comparison, covered in grime, reduced almost to a dingy monochrome.  Looking up, we could see the beauty of Michelangelo’s restored creation; we could see the artist’s achieved intention.  But looking around us, though something of the original majesty could still be discerned, it was as if we were merely seeing through a glass, darkly.  The truth of the creation was obscured.

Forty-three days ago, Pilate dragged Jesus onto the pavement before the madding crowd.  There he was on display, a spectacle:  scourged, beaten, bloodied, spat upon.  Ecce homo, Pilate said; “Behold the man!”  And in that man, that mistreated and abused man, we see our own disfigured and wounded humanity, “fast-bound by sin and nature’s night.”  Ecce homo; Behold, the man.  For every diseased, abused, aborted, betrayed one of us, with all the self-inflicted wounds of our own sin, there he is:  for us he has become one of us, a participant in this fallen world with us – Behold, the man.

But that is not humanity’s whole truth.  In the Ascension, God’s grace triumphs over Pilate’s cynicism just as, and because, he has triumphed over our sin.  So, Pilate. So, everyone of us: Ecce homo! Behold the Man! –  the risen and glorified Christ ascending to the Father … and you and me, united to Christ by faith and baptism, one with him in his Body the Church, ascending with him, into the eternal life and fellowship of the Most Holy Trinity, together with the saints in light.

In the Ascension the disciples saw the ultimate truth of our humanity, “wonderfully created yet more wonderfully restored”:  the grime of the fallen ages washed away, the great Artist’s perfect intention gloriously achieved and revealed … not as a work of art, a fresco perhaps, a spectacle to be observed, but an event, as Pope Benedict has said, “in which they themselves [and we ourselves] are included,” in which we, in Christ, are participants.

No wonder they returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God. May this grace of the Ascension also fill our hearts, lift up our heads, and redeem our days, so that we may share in their joy.

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Please pray and rejoice with us as our first “class” of former Anglicans is received into full communion with the Catholic Church!  Mass according to the Anglican Use!  Our Ordinary, Monsignor Jeffrey Steenson presiding!

• Saturday, June 1
• 5.15PM
• St. Mary of the Annunciation Catholic Church (89 Hassell St., Charleston)
• Fete to follow!

At the Cathedral:

Mon., Mar. 25
11:30am Rosary
12:05pm Daily Mass

Tue., Mar. 26
11:00am Chrism Mass

Wed., Mar. 27
11:30am Rosary
12:05pm Daily Mass

Thurs., Mar. 28 Holy Thursday
7:00pm Mass of the Lord’s Supper

Fri., Mar. 29 Good Friday
3:00pm The Lord’s Passion

Sat., Mar. 30 Easter Saturday
8:00pm Easter Vigil Mass

Sun., Mar. 31 Easter Sunday
8:00am Easter Sunday Mass
11:00am Easter Sunday Mass
in the Upper Church
11:00am Easter Sunday Mass
in the Center Hall

At St. Mary’s:

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: 7am, Daily Mass
Good Friday: Noon, Stations of the Cross
Easter Sunday: 8am & 9.30am, Mass

Here is a little piece I wrote a couple years ago for the Church of the Holy Communion newsletter – PSA

Fr. Sanderson and I have been sharing the duty of teaching candidates for the vocational diaconate (sometimes called “permanent” deacons, like our own Deacon Smith, as opposed to “transitional” deacons who will in due course be ordained to the priesthood) in the Diocese of South Carolina, which has been a bit of work but a great pleasure, because we – I think I can speak for Fr. Sanderson here – enjoy both the subject and also the students.  Over the past couple months, I’ve had the pleasure of talking with the students about the church from the end of the western Roman Empire through the medieval period.  And of course a great deal of that history focuses on the successive bishops of Rome, the Popes.  So we have encountered men such as Pope St. Gregory the Great (540-604), a man in whom holiness of life, learning, evangelical zeal, courage, humility, and above all love were combined in such a way that the appellation magnus – “the Great” – hardly does him justice.  From that height we descended all the way to Pope Alexander XVI (1492-1503), a warmonger of whom it was said that he publicly and brazenly reveled in all the deadly sins except for gluttony, for he suffered from chronic indigestion, poor man.

Reacquainting myself with this turbulent history (and how could expect the history of the successors to the See of Peter to be anything but turbulent?) has caused me to be thankful for the particular historical moment in which we find ourselves.  To be sure, there are wars and rumors of wars, the economic forecast  is dark with a chance of black, and there is no need here to list instances of social and artistic debasement in a culture shorn from its religious roots as, all the while, the Church bleeds from self-inflicted wounds.  But, for all that, the fact is we live in a golden age of popes.

Blessed John Paul II is a hero for this or any age, shining the clear and clarifying light of the Gospel on to the dehumanizing ideologies of Nazism, Communism, Secularism, and our own American consumerism (which, every bit as much as Communism, threatens human dignity and freedom by reducing men and women to means to be used rather than goods to be honored).  And he did this not just by his teaching, but in the example of his own life in which he personally, fearlessly, and at great cost embodied that liberating Gospel light.  Both the Gestapo and the KGB had thick files on John Paul.  For his history in the midst of the roiling totalitarian ideologies of the 20th Century, I cannot recommend too highly George Weigel’s two-volume biography:  Witness to Hope and The End and the Beginning.

Less dramatically but just as powerfully, Pope Benedict XVI is placing the stamp of Christ’s love on the Church in our time.  The theologian Bruce Marshall recently had this to say about the Holy Father:

…In his actual exercise of the Petrine ministry he more resembles Gregory the Great than that other ancient saint who is his namesake. Leading a twenty-first-century Church much diminished in power and influence throughout Europe, Pope Benedict XVI manifests a similar trust in the renewing power of the gospel, devoting much of his papacy to a persistent effort of clear, precise, and attractive teaching that seeks to transmit rather than innovate, to inform rather than speculate. As pope, the former professor of theology has been above all a catechist.

In countless public presentations he has spoken in plain terms of the prophets and the apostles, the Fathers, saints, and doctors of the Church, confident that their insight and example will prove pertinent to his twenty-first-century hearers. (During the summer of 2008, I heard him talk for close to half an hour, at a Wednesday audience under the warm Roman sun, of the historical and contemporary significance of Isidore of Seville.) In the many books gathered from these theological talks, in book-length interviews before and after becoming pope, and in his homilies, encyclicals, and apostolic exhortations, Benedict XVI has striven to teach the faith to a generation that, within and without the Church, is confused about it, puzzled by it, and hostile to it—to the generation of barbarians among whom most of us must, to some extent, also number ourselves. (First Things, October 2011)

For an entry into the thought of this papal catechist, one could do no better than to begin with Benedict’s two-volume Jesus of Nazareth [now three volumes].  Or, this being the age of the internet, nearly every word which proceeds from his mouth or pen is readily available via the magic of the web.  The Vatican of course has a website (vatican.va), but I find an easy to use site is the news site Zenit (zenit.org).  I often go there to read the Pope’s homilies, and thus to get a “second opinion” (usually as a corrective to my own).

We live in a golden age – don’t let it pass you by!

Straight from Ordinariate HQ:

Note on the Solemnity of the Chair of St. Peter

In his statement on February 11, 2013, our Ordinary, Msgr. Steenson, reminded us that “members of the Ordinariate are in a particular way the spiritual children of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI,” and Msgr. Steenson exhorts us, despite some feelings of sadness and a sense of shock, to deeper joy and special gratitude to the Holy Father “for giving us this beautiful gift of communion.”

On Friday, February 22, the Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter will celebrate its Solemnity of Title, and the Ordinary commends all Ordinariate communities in North America to express their gratitude to Pope Benedict with the singing of a Solemn Te Deum of Thanksgiving (at the conclusion of Mass or Evensong, or as a separate service). After the Te Deum and its versicles, this special rite of thanksgiving may conclude with the following prayer:

Let us pray.
O God, whose mercies are without number, and the treasure of whose goodness is infinite: we render thanks unto thy most gracious majesty for the gifts which thou hast bestowed upon us (and especially for the pontificate of our Holy Father Benedict XVI, and for the gift of communion with the Chair of Peter); evermore beseeching thy mercy that, as thou dost grant the prayers of them that call upon thee, so thou wouldst not forsake them, but rather dispose their way towards the attainment of thy heavenly reward. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God world without end. Amen.

The Ordinary and the Ordinariate community is aware that the Te Deum is not usually heard during Lent. However, February 22 is the Ordinariate’s Titular Solemnity and should be kept as such according to the Particular Calendar approved by the Holy See. The Te Deum is rightly proclaimed; Friday abstinence may be dispensed; the liturgical color is white; and the Gloria and Creed are said or sung at Mass (the Alleluia is omitted, as throughout the season).

With thankful joy, let us then pray and work that Pope Benedict’s “labors in the vineyard might continue to bring forth a fruitful harvest.”

Today, on the Solemnity of the Chair of St. Peter, the Titular feast for the Ordinariate in North America, we might well ask, just what is the significance and beauty of this solemnity?  Let Pope Benedict explain it to you and then beseech your prayers…

To celebrate the “Chair” of Peter, as we do today, means, therefore, to attribute to it a strong spiritual significance and to recognize in it a privileged sign of the love of God, good and eternal Shepherd, who wants to gather the whole of his Church and guide her along the way of salvation.

Among so many testimonies of the Fathers, I would like to refer to that of St. Jerome, taken from a letter of his to the Bishop of Rome, particularly interesting because he makes explicit reference in fact to the “chair” of Peter, presenting it as the safe harbor of truth and peace. Jerome writes thus: “I decided to consult the chair of Peter, where that faith is found exalted by the lips of an Apostle; I now come to ask for nourishment for my soul there, where once you received the garment of Christ. I follow no leader save Christ, so I enter into communion with your beatitude, that is, with the chair of Peter for this I know is the rock upon which the Church is built! (“Le Lettere,” I, 15,1-2).

Dear Brothers and Sisters, in the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica, as you know, is found the monument to the Chair of the Apostle, a mature work of Bernini, made in the shape of a great bronze throne, supported by the statues of four Doctors of the Church, two from the West, St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, and two from the East, St. John Chrysostom and St. Athanasius.

I invite you to pause before that evocative work, which today it is possible to admire decorated with so many candles, and pray in a particular way for the ministry that God has entrusted to me. Raising one’s gaze to the alabaster glass window that opens precisely above the chair, invoke the Holy Spirit, so that he will always sustain with his light and strength my daily service to the whole Church. For this, as for your devoted attention, I thank you from my heart.

Read the entire mediation here.

Ash Wednesday
2 Cor 5.20b-6.10; Mt 6.1-6,10-21
9 March 2011
Church of the Holy Communion
Fr. Patrick Allen

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In the most recent issue of the New Yorker, author Meghan O’Rourke has a beautifully written and moving essay reflecting on her beloved mother’s dying and death from cancer.  She writes fondly of her childhood and of her mother’s loving indulgence.

And then she writes,

The summer I was eight, I became preoccupied with the thought that I was going to die. My mother noticed that something was wrong, and would pull me onto her lap and ask me if I was O.K., but I had no words to explain my fear; it seemed too enormous to talk about, or even to write down in my journal. One morning, curled up in my sleeping bag on the couch at our cabin, reading an Agatha Christie mystery, I listened as Liam, playing go fish with my mother, turned to her and said, “I don’t want to die. Do you not want to die? What happens to us when we die?”

And my mother put the cards down and said, slowly, “No, I don’t want to die. But I don’t know what happens to us when we die.”

“It’s scary,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” our mother said calmly. “But it’s not going to happen to you for a long time.”

I was both nauseated and riveted: these were the words I had wanted to say, and couldn’t. Perhaps that was because I knew already that any comfort she could offer would be false.

On this day, this Ash Wednesday, we begin the observance of a holy Lent by confronting the reality that young Liam’s mother so naturally wanted to shield him from, the reality that turned young Meghan’s stomach:  Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return.

There is of course a kind of commonsense wisdom in such an annual exercise.  We are largely insulated from death in modern society; it happens away from home and is handled clinically by the professionals to whome we have collectively delegated those tasks (or, perhaps, who have contrived and connived to sell us their services).

And so it may be helpful to engage in this kind of memento mori.  To remind ourselves of what is coming, and so to add a sense of urgency to the days we have, how ever many they may be.  You know what I mean:  Carpe diem, “seize the day!”, as the Roman poet Horace urged, “and put little trust in the future.”  Or, if you prefer your reality therapy in a more prayerful context (I know I do!): Teach me to number my days, O Lord, prays Moses in the 90^th Psalm, that I may apply my heart to wisdom.

If that were all we were up to day, I suppose it might still be a thing worth doing, if maybe a little deprssingly so.  A reminder of death does, or should, lead to a certain and real kind of wisdom.  But if that were all we were up to, we might place the day and this dusty rite at just any convenient place in the calendar.  But obviously that’s not the case.  We do this at the beginning of Lent, precisely to make a good and appropriate start to a holy Lent – this season of penitence, prayer, and fasting.

But Lent itself is not just a 40-day period of instensified psycho-social self-help effort:  “In every day, in every way, for 40 days, I’m getting better and better.”  Well, fat chance.  But again, if that’s all we were offering, we could do it any old time.  But of course we’re not.  We observe this Ash Wednesday, and embark together upon this holy Lent, with a particular horizon in view.  We are going somewhere.  We are moving toward the observance of a particular death, on a particular Friday afternoon – a death which would itself have no importance and would long ago have been forgotten had the man involved had the common decency to remain dead.  But Jesus did not.  He gloriously rose again on the third day.  And that’s where we are going; that is where Lent is designed to take us; that is what Lent teaches us to see and to celebrate: eternal life given to us in the victory of Christ over the grave.

Which puts the impostition of ashes today, here at the outset of Lent, in a new light.  It transforms and deepens the wisdom of our self-imposed reminder of death.

Seize the day, indeed.  Apply our hearts to wisdom, absolutely.  But not because life is short and uncertain, but because eternity is nigh, the Kingdom of God is at hand.

In Christ we have infintely better than the dubious and cold comfort offered – though, bless her,  it was all she had to offer – by Meghan O’Rourke’s mother:  “it’s not going to happen to you for a long time.”

We have better.  In Christ we have the victory.  In Christ, today’s ashes and dust are transformed into fertile soil sown with Resurrection, and this life and every day in it is the arena in which we may live the grace of God in Jesus Christ, the grace which has already taken root in our hearts by faith, and which on the last great day will transform our bodies also,  and the perishable will put on the imperishable, and our mortal nature will put on immortality (1 Cor 15.53).

The thing to do then, in this Lent, in this life and every day in it, is to choose life.  Which is another way of saying to repent.  “To be reconciled to God,” as St. Paul urges us in our epistle lesson, to turn from our sins and cling to Christ, “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The thing to do then, in this Lent, in this life and every day of it, is to “lay up treasure in heaven,” as our Lord urges us, and to place our hearts and hope there, so that today, even with the dust of death on our foreheads, and everyday, we may “prepare with joy for the Paschal feast,” which is the mystery of eternal life in Jesus Christ.

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From Monsignor Steenson:

Statement from the Ordinary of the
Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter
On the Resignation of Pope Benedict XVI

February 11, 2013

We members of the Ordinariate are in a particular way the spiritual children of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.  Throughout his years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and especially as Pope, the reconciliation of Anglicans to the Catholic Church has been one of his principal tasks.  Our hearts are saddened to receive the news that Pope Benedict will step down from the Chair of Peter, but there is a deeper joy knowing that we are the fruit of his vision for Catholic unity.  And we will pray and work diligently to so that his labors in the vineyard might continue to bring forth a fruitful harvest.

When Pope Benedict issued the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus in November 2009, he laid a permanent foundation for the Ordinariate, to be the means to reconcile Anglican groups to the Catholic Church and that this Anglican patrimony might be shared with the Catholic Church.  While the Ordinariate has been a special intention of Pope Benedict, it is now firmly established in the Catholic Church and will continue to serve as an instrument for Christian unity.

It seems likely that the transition, between Pope Benedict’s retirement and his successor’s installation, will be an orderly one that should not greatly impact the work of the Ordinariate.  We should probably expect that the ordinations of our candidates could be delayed slightly, as the Pope must approve these petitions.  But this can be a time for the roots of faith to grow deeper.  The patience of Jesus Christ will strengthen and encourage us!

Perhaps the most important thing that we can say at this time is a heart-felt thank you to Pope Benedict XVI, for giving to us this beautiful gift of communion.  We rededicate ourselves to promote this “culture of communion,” to which Archbishop Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, called us on the occasion of our celebration of the first anniversary of the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter, in Houston on Feb. 2. 

And these words of our Lord seem particularly a propos for today:
“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).

Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson 
Ordinary

Dear friends,

Our community will be using Fr. Scott Hurd’s The Living Gospel to structure our daily devotions this Lent – you should, too!

• from Ave Maria Press
• from Amazon (also Kindle edition)

Daily Devotions for Lent 2013, written by R. Scott Hurd, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, offers simple prayers, a pertinent reflection on the gospel reading for the day, and a specific challenge for ongoing spiritual growth. As a popular homilist, speaker, and blogger, Hurd is immersed in day-to-day pastoral care and leadership. In these gospel reflections he gracefully draws the cares, concerns, and joys of his fellow Catholics into the larger story of the Lenten readings and provides a simple blueprint for prayer, reflection, and renewal. (Here.)