Resurrecting Chicago

I am not sure what’s real anymore. Reality shows on TV are scripted.  Fake news is real news and vice-versa.  Alexa helps me with my grocery shopping and talks to me but I can’t date her. My Instagram account is the chief way I communicate with my friends.  If my cell-phone battery runs down, my reality disappears, although it is still in the cloud.

If my bank took a catastrophic hit today,  it would wipe out my bank accounts, presuming that the money in those accounts is actually there.  Even if I save paper dollars, I can’t trade the cash at a federal bank for silver or gold. It’s only the paper that has value, and that fluctuates.  Look at Argentina which this year is flirting with 15,000% inflation.

Are the vivid resurrection stories in the New Testament real or not?  Sure, they’re real stories but did what they claim as the miracle of Easter Sunday morning really happen or not?  Is the “Good News” really “fake news?’  The Roman soldiers were told to tell everyone that the disciples of Jesus came during the night and stole his body. That was the news propagated by the local authorities.  Meanwhile, Christians began proclaiming the gospel of he resurrection of the Messiah. What’s true here?

Jesus came to give testimony to the truth.  “What is truth?,” Pilate asks.  And, we ask, too. Jesus had already said that we would know believers by their fruit: “By their fruit you shall know them.”   The Spirit of truth reveals itself in these facets: Love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, patience, goodness, faithfulness, and self control (Gal 5:22-23 [NIV]).

Christian history speaks quietly and truthfully in the lives of Mother Teresa, St. Francis of Assisi, Edith Stein, and in every witness for Christ in every age.  Their lives were rich in the Spirit and we have eaten of their fruit. The Roman soldiers who told the news of the theft of the body of Jesus are all forgotten now.  They left no harvest.

Enter most Catholic churches on any Sunday and you won’t see much aknowledgment of the real presence of the Lord there.  The old testament Jews were obsessed with the sacredness of the Temple and the ark within it because God was there, present. Without seeing Him, they believed.  They raised their prayers to the ONE. In II Samuel we read that as David was moving the ark in procession to a new local, one of the princes was struck dead when he touched the ark simply to steady it as the oxen were pulling it over a bumpy road. You don’t touch God, or his throne.  Look upon the face of God and you will be struck dead.

It seems to me that this sense of the sacred doesn’t only apply to blessed things and spaces. People are sacred, too, and trees are holy, springs are sacred.  The spirit of God moves and lives in everything that exists.  But in our post-Christian world, we think we have the universe pretty much figured out and no one has found any evidence of God’s presence out there. No presence, no reverence.

It’s pretty clear that like the Torah lost to the Jewish community for so long after the Babylonian Captivity, the Holy Eucharist. the sense of the real presence God in our churches, has receded to lip-service.

A friend of mine was explaining to a practicing Muslim that we Catholics believe that Allah is really, truly and substantially present in our churches in the unlikely forms of bread and wine.  When the Muslim heard this, he said “If I believed like you say you do, I would prostrate myself on the floor of your church in submission to the Holy One.”

The loss of the sense of the sacredness of things is dwarfed by the loss of the sense of the sacredness of the person.  We have demystified the sacrament of the Eucharist and have lost a sense of the real presence of Jesus Christ and, perhaps, our reverence for one another.