Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Happy Feast of the Ascension!

Today, the Church celebrates a great Mystery: our Lord Jesus, the One who came from heaven to share our humanity that we might share his divinity; the One whom death could not undo; the One in whose infinite divinity death exhausted itself; the One who destroyed death and broke hell’s fast-barred gates of brass by his dying and rising again; that One returns to the heavenly courts in order to fill all things with is presence, in order to bring our humanity—our human bodies and souls—into the heart of the Real to seat us, in and through his own resurrected human body, on heaven’s high throne. A great Mystery indeed!

He will not leave us comfortless, but will send the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us into all truth, into the paths of his love; and he will be present to us, in all the fullness of his being, in the Eucharist, as well as in the Church, the new creation coming-to-be from the flood of blood and water that poured from his side on the cross. Indeed, and as we read in the office gospel today, he has promised to be with us always, even to the end of the age.

I think that, very often, we read that promise as a metaphorical or notional thing. Despite believing in the Eucharistic presence, despite believing in the Mystery of the Church in which heaven and earth are joined in one mystic sweet communion, despite believing that God keeps God’s promises, our approach to this particular promise of the Presence that we read at the conclusion of Matthew’s Gospel feels somehow poetic or provisional or aspirational.

Beloved Friend, I want to tell you: it is not merely poetic, nor provisional, nor aspirational. The promised presence of Jesus Christ is very real. The modes of his presence to us—Eucharist, Church—are not symbolic in the way that we so often misinterpret symbols these days: as less-than things that stand-in for or represent a fundamentally absent reality. Time was that a symbol was understood as a means of presence-making, as a threshold of presence, as a doorway to Realities otherwise un-noticed or unseen. But even to understand the Presence as symbolic in this more ancient way doesn’t do justice to the promise.

And let’s be clear: Eucharist and Church, those inter-dependent, mutually creating and recreating realities, do not exhaust the ways in which Christ shows up in our lives to be present with us (though sometimes our conception of what Eucharist and Church are is a bit limited to begin with). They are, indeed, promised ways (this is my Body…, when two or three are gathered…), but Christ has a way of showing up in any aspect of our lives. Do you imagine it’s possible to love someone, really love them, without the Love from which all real love flows being present? Do you imagine that in the silence of your meditations, that the Holy Silence in and from which the Word was first spoken is not present? Do you imagine that in your prayers, when you pray, for instance, the Lord’s Prayer, using the words that God Godself spoke and taught us, that God is somehow not really present? Do you imagine that your neighbor, who was made in the image of God, does not really bear that image to you every time you see them? Do you imagine that the skin of the world is too thick to see the rivers of the Spirit spidering in, through, and under all things? Do you imagine that the beating Heart of the Real is very far from you and not, as some mystics say, closer to you than your jugular vein?

O dear Friend, God’s promise to be with us is real and true. That we so often do not notice that presence or are so often too preoccupied to see or experience it, that we forget the promise and become bogged down in petty passions and distractions does not mean that the Presence is not truly abiding with us. Indeed, it is in those moments of feeling estranged from the promise that we’re being called to pray, to re-discover ourselves rooted in the abiding presence of Jesus Christ. And who knows? Perhaps, as was the case for Ezekiel, we’ll discover the grey rain curtain of this world parted for a moment and behold from time to time (in one way or another, in vision, in the Spirit, in a reality of consolation which defies images or language) the Holy One, in our own human flesh and blood, robed in living flames of love, seated on the throne of glory: humanity present to God, God present to humanity, in Jesus Christ, at the center of all things.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+