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Gulf Pine Catholic
•
July 18, 2014
The Office of Readings for the solemnity of the
Ascension offers a lovely excerpt from one of St.
Augustine’s sermons
“de Ascensione Domini,”
in
which the learned Bishop of Hippo takes as his text
Colossians 3:1-2: “If then you have been raised with
Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is
seated, at the right hand of God. Set your minds on
things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
A familiar enough text, right? But then Augustine,
as is his wont, gives it a striking twist: “For just as he
remained with us even after his Ascension, so we, too,
are already in heaven with him, even though what is
promised us has not yet been fulfilled in our bodies….
While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on
earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity,
his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he
is on earth, by divinity; but in him, we can be there by
love.”
There are something on the order of 70 million
Catholics in the United States. How many of us think
of ourselves as being “already in heaven” with the
Lord? And if we really believed that – if we really
believed that the most important part of our being was
united to Christ and thus incorporated into the life of
the Holy Trinity – how would we comport ourselves
here on earth?
We‘d be on fire with a sense of mission.
There are many reasons to deplore the change in
liturgical nomenclature for the weeks after the Easter
Season, from Sundays “after
Pentecost” to Sundays “in Ordinary
Time.”As has been noted previously
in this space (perhaps to be point of
reader-tedium!), there is nothing
“ordinary” about time after the
Resurrection and Ascension. For, as
that Colossians text suggests and
Augustine makes explicit, human
“time” has now been drawn into the
divine life through the mystery of
Christ’s return to the Father and his
being seated “at the right hand of
the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3)
as Lord of history. History, in that
sense, is “inside” the Godhead.
And there is nothing ordinary about that.
Sundays “after Pentecost,” by contrast, reminded
the Church that the first outpouring of the Holy Spirit,
celebrated on the 50th day after Easter, continues in the
Church throughout history, so that the Church can
continually bear witness to “that which was from the
beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen
with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched
with our hands” (1 John 1.1) – the Risen Lord, who
offers us, in our friendship with him, a participation
here-and-now in the life of God himself.
The Pentecost Season (if you’ll permit a lapse into
a relevant bit of liturgical antiquarianism) lasts from
Pentecost itself through midday of the Saturday before
the First Sunday of Advent. It is the longest of the
Church’s seasons; it is the season of hope (hence the
green vestments); it is a season for lengthening the
stride of the spiritual life, in a steady rhythm of
pilgrimage toward the Kingdom where our hearts
already rest because they rest in the Lord. But it is also,
and above all, the season of mission. Because Pentecost
is not simply about celebrating the gift of the Spirit to
the Church; as the second chapter of the Acts of the
Apostles illustrates, Pentecost is about giving that gift
away.
The Pentecost Season is when those who truly
believe that “we are already in heaven with him” offer
others the possibility of living like that. The offer is
made in many ways: in acts of compassion and charity;
in acts of explicit witness to Christ; in explaining why
the Church believes what it does. If, as St. John Paul II
and Pope Francis propose, the quality of our discipleship
is measured by our commitment to giving others the
gift we have been given, the lengthy weeks of the
Pentecost Season are divinely ordered to that gift-
giving.
About which, there is nothing “ordinary.”
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington,
D.C.
The
Catholic
Difference
Weigel
Mission time
John Green’s novel
The Fault in
Our Stars
has proven to be wildly
popular among young adults in the
English speaking world, and the
recently released film adaptation
of the book has garnered both im-
pressive reviews and a massive au-
dience. A one-time divinity school
student and Christian minister,
Green is not reluctant to explore the
“big” questions, though he doesn’t
claim to provide anything like de-
finitive answers. In this, he both
reflects and helps to shape the inchoate, eclectic spiri-
tuality that holds sway in the teen and 20-something set
today. After watching the film however, I began to won-
der whether his Christian sensibility doesn’t assert itself
perhaps even more clearly and strongly than he realizes.
The story is narrated by Hazel Grace Lancaster, a
teenager suffering from a debilitating and most likely
terminal form of cancer. At her mother’s prompting,
Hazel attends a support group for young cancer patients
that takes place at the local Episcopal Church. The
group is presided over by a well-meaning but nerdy
youth minister who commences each meeting by rolling
out a tapestry of Jesus displaying his Sacred Heart. “We
are gathering, literally, in the heart of Jesus,” he eagerly
tells the skeptical and desultory gaggle of teens. At one
of these sessions, Hazel rises to share her utterly bleak,
even nihilistic philosophy of life: “There will come a
time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come
a time when there are no human beings remaining to
remember that anyone ever existed or that our species
ever did anything. [...] There was time before organisms
experienced consciousness, and there will be time after.
And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you,
I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what
everyone else does.” The only response that the hapless
leader can muster to that outburst is, “good advice for
everyone.” It would be hard to imagine a more damning
commentary on the state of much of so-called Christian
ministry today!
At one of these meetings, Hazel meets a handsome,
charming cancer-survivor named Augustus Waters, and
the two fall almost immediately in love. Though they
both consider the support group fairly lame, there is no
denying that they were brought together over the heart
of Christ. Kind, encouraging, funny, and utterly devot-
ed, Augustus (Gus) draws Hazel out of herself and lures
her into a more active engagement with life. They both
love a novel called
An Imperial Affliction
, written by a
reclusive author named Peter Van Houten. After estab-
lishing e-mail contact with Van Houten, they arrange,
through a kind of “Make-A-Wish” foundation, to fly to
Amsterdam to commune with their literary hero. Just
before the encounter, Gus and Hazel engage in some se-
rious conversation about God and the afterlife. Gus says
that he believes in God and in some sort of life after
death; otherwise, he argues, “What is the point?” Still
clinging to her bleak materialism, Hazel retorts, “What
if there is no point?”
The next day, the young couple, filled with enthu-
siasm, comes to Van Houten’s home only to find that
their hero is a depressed alcoholic who has no interest
in talking to them. When they press him for answers
about mysteries in his novel, he comments on the mean-
inglessness of life, effectively mirroring Hazel’s nihil-
ism back to her. Just after this awful conversation, the
two teenagers make their way to the Anne Frank house,
where Hazel manages, despite her cumbersome oxygen
tank and her weakened lungs, to climb to the attic where
Anne Frank hid from the Nazis. In that room, evocative
of both horrific, meaningless violence and real spiritual
hope, Hazel and Gus passionately kiss for the first time.
It is as though their love, which began in the heart of
Jesus, asserted itself strongly even in the face of dark-
ness.
But we are not allowed to dwell on this hopeful mo-
ment, for Gus reveals, just before they return home, that
his cancer has reasserted itself and that his condition
is terminal. Not long after they return, Gus dies, at the
age of eighteen, and Hazel sinks into profound sadness:
“Each minute,” she says, “is worse than the previous
one.” At the funeral, even as Christian prayers are ut-
tered, Hazel just goes through the motions, pretending
to find comfort, precisely for the sake of her family and
The Fault in Our Stars and the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Word on
Fire
Fr. Barron
See father barron, page 8
