Ascension, St John Paul, & Spring Appeal

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

On behalf of the board for the Eighth Day Institute ("EDI"), grace and peace to you in Christ!

It was the 2010 Nativity Feast that first pulled me in. Then the comradery of the Hall of Men confirmed it to be a place to stay. From there, the Symposium, Inklings Festival, Florovsky-Newman Week, feast after feast and publication after publication has made EDI part of who I am and a constant fount of joy! I served on the Board of Directors for five years (2013-2018) and as Vice President for three (2015-2018). It’s now my joy to come back on the board and serve EDI as the board President—all of it, honestly, because it’s something I love and believe in.

So heaven does have a physical dimension to it. But we also don't want to think of it like we would imagine places in the material cosmos. It's not like Jesus ascends into heaven and then he's going out past the rings of Saturn and out past Andromeda. There's some sense in which he transcends space and time. How this exactly works precisely isn't fully revealed to us.

1. "Pope Benedict XVI’s Letter Marking St. John Paul II’s Birth Centenary":

From the first moment on, John Paul II aroused new enthusiasm for Christ and his Church. His words from the sermon at the inauguration of his pontificate: "Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors for Christ!" This call and tone would characterize his entire pontificate and made him a liberating restorer of the Church.

Read the full letter here.

2. "Pope on the World Stage" by Peter Leithart:

"This marvelous world," he said, is "the theater" for battle. No pope has ever taken to the world stage like John Paul. In the nearly twenty-seven years of his pontificate, he spoke to crowds that sometimes topped a million, while his words and actions were broadcast to millions more across the globe. A poet, he valued the power of a resonant phrase. An actor and playwright, he knew the right gesture at the right moment could shake the earth. Kissing the tarmac at Warsaw Chopin Airport in June 1979; slipping a prayer of penitence into a crack in the Wailing Wall in 2000; visiting and forgiving his assassin, Ali Agca; canonizing numerous twentieth-century martyrs; growing old and frail before the cameras—these were the public expressions of a pastoral flair for drama that manifested itself in innumerable private encounters throughout his long ministry.

Vigorous, fearless, cultured, humble, and warm, John Paul hiked and skied in the mountains of Europe and kayaked on its rivers, spoke fluently in many languages, rebuked and comforted the powerful and the powerless alike. He lived the abundant life he preached; message and messenger merged. His unfeigned delight in "this marvelous world" wasn’t merely the vitality of a magnetic extrovert. John Paul was one of modernity’s great Christian humanists. Scripture, he taught, reveals the goodness of creation prior to our sad history of sin, and redemption promises the elevation of creation and humanity. In letters, homilies, and encyclicals, John Paul repeatedly quoted the Second Vatican Council’s claim that the incarnation demonstrates how much God values us and so "reveals the truth about man" (Gaudium et Spes). "Gospel," he wrote, is "the name for . . . deep amazement at man’s worth and dignity" (Redemptor Hominis). In response to God’s call, man becomes aware of "his transcendent dignity" (Centesimus Annus). This dignity extends to the body. Sex is a "communion of persons" and an act of mutual self-giving, and thus can be a reflex of Triune Love (Theology of the Body). Through manual labor, "man not only transforms nature" but "becomes ‘more a human being’" (Laborens Exercens).

Read this whole wonderful reflection here.

3. "How John Paul II Reminded Us That Liberty and Truth Are Inseparable" by Samuel Gregg:

One theme which permeated [St John Paul II’s] pontificate from its beginning to the end was that of truth.

Many remember Pope John Paul II as playing a crucial role in Eastern Europe’s liberation from Marxist tyranny. But he also insisted that liberty needed to be grounded in and guided by the truth knowable via reason and faith. If freedom and truth become separated—as they most certainly have in many people’s minds in our own time—we not only end up with an unhealthy and dangerous association of liberty with moral relativism. We also open the door to those who claim that the truth is whatever the most powerful or the loudest say it is.

Read the entire reflection here.

4. "A Protestant Appreciation of Pope John Paul II" by Bruce Riley Ashford:

During the Christmas season of 1999, while living in Russia, I read George Weigel’s extraordinary biography of John Paul II, Witness to Hope. It was not the first time I had reflected upon John Paul II, but it was the first time I understood the magnitude of his life. […]

I am not a Catholic. I am a Baptist. Some, therefore, might find my affinity for John Paul II a bit out of place. But while we Baptists have convictions that run contrary to certain aspects of Catholic doctrine, I cannot help but recognize in John Paul II a forward-looking public theologian with a message relevant to our twenty-first-century situation—especially his emphasis on human dignity, his resistance to false ideologies and authoritarian regimes, and his constructive theology of the body.

John Paul’s greatest cause was the defense of human dignity. He reminded us that God created every human life in his image, imbued with incalculable dignity. He fiercely opposed the culture of death and degradation that would scale this dignity based on usefulness, nationality, race, or religion. And he repeatedly rebuked the practice of abortion, the shedding of the blood of unborn humans.

Read the whole piece here.

5. "On John Paul II’s Centenary" by George Weigel (published five days before the centenary):

As the world and the Church mark the centenary of the birth of Pope St. John Paul II on May 18, a kaleidoscope of memories will shape my prayer and reflection that day. John Paul II at his dinner table, insatiably curious and full of humor; John Paul II groaning in prayer before the altar in the chapel of the papal apartment; John Paul II laughing at me from the Popemobile as I trudged along a dusty road outside Camagüey, Cuba, looking for the friends who had left me behind after a papal Mass in January 1998; John Paul II, his face frozen by Parkinson’s disease, speaking silently through his eyes in October 2003, "See what’s become of me . . ."; John Paul II, back in good form two months later, asking about my daughter’s recent wedding and chaffing me about whether I was ready to be a nonno (grandfather); John Paul II lying in state in the Sala Clementina of the Apostolic Palace, his features natural and in repose, wearing the battered cordovan loafers that used to drive the traditional managers of popes crazy.

Read the whole personal reflection here.

We come to you, men of weak faith,

So that you might fortify us with the example of your life

And liberate us from anxiety

About tomorrow and next year. Your twentieth century

Was made famous by the names of powerful tyrants

And by the annihilation of their rapacious states.

You knew it must happen. You taught hope:

For only Christ is the lord and master of history.

The Lord has ascended into heaven that He might send the Comforter into the world. The heavens prepared His throne, and the clouds His mount. Angels marvel to see a Man high above them. The Father receives Him Whom He holds, co-eternal, in His bosom.

The Holy Spirit commands all His Angels: "Lift up your gates, ye princes!" All ye nations, clap your hands: for Christ has gone up to where He was before!

The Cherubim were amazed at Thine Ascension, O Lord, beholding Thee, the God Who dost sit enthroned upon them, ascending upon the clouds; and we glorify Thee, for Thy mercy is good. Glory to Thee!

Beholding Thine Ascension on the holy mountain, O Christ, Thou brightness of the Father’s glory, we hymn the radiant appearance of Thy countenance; we worship Thy sufferings, we honor Thy Resurrection, as we glorify Thy glorious Ascension. Have mercy on us! 

We pause before the glorious Christ of the Ascension to contemplate the presence of the whole Trinity. We know that Christian art, in the so-called Trinitas in cruce, has often depicted the crucified Christ with the Father leaning over him as if in an embrace, while the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers between them (for example, Masaccio in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence). In this way the Cross is a unifying symbol that joins humanity and divinity, death and life, suffering and glory.

In a similar way we can glimpse the presence of the three divine Persons in the Ascension scene. Luke, on the last page of his Gospel, before presenting the Risen One who, as the priest of the New Covenant, blesses his disciples and is lifted up from the earth to be taken into heavenly glory (cf. Lk 24:50-52), recalls his farewell discourse to the Apostles. In it we see above all the saving plan of the Father, who in the Scriptures had foretold the Death and Resurrection of the Son, the source of forgiveness and liberation (cf. Lk 24:45-47).

But in those same words of the Risen One we also glimpse the Holy Spirit, whose presence will be the source of strength and apostolic witness: "I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay in the city, until you are clothed with power from on high" (Lk 24:49). If in John's Gospel the Paraclete is promised by Christ, for Luke the gift of the Spirit is also part of a promise made by the Father himself.

The whole Trinity is therefore present at the moment when the time of the Church begins. This is what Luke emphasizes in the second account of Christ's Ascension, in the Acts of the Apostles. Jesus, in fact, exhorts his disciples "to wait for the promise of the Father", that is, to "be baptized with the Holy Spirit", at Pentecost which is now imminent (cf. Acts 1:4-5).