“We also ascend, because we are in him by grace”: St. Augustine on the Ascension

Here is the patristic text from the Office of Readings of the Roman Rite for the Feast of the Ascension.

Today our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into heaven; let our hearts ascend with him. Listen to the words of the Apostle: If you have risen with Christ, set your hearts on the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; seek the things that are above, not the things that are on earth. 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.

Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear. He showed this when he cried out from above: Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? and when he said: I was hungry and you gave me food. Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him?

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.

He did not leave heaven when he came down to us; nor did he withdraw from us when he went up again into heaven. The fact that he was in heaven even while he was on earth is borne out by his own statement: No one has ever ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven. These words are explained by our oneness with Christ, for he is our head and we are his body. No one ascended into heaven except Christ because we also are Christ: he is the Son of Man by his union with us, and we by our union with him are sons of God.

So the Apostle says: Just as the human body, which has many members, is a unity, because all the different members make one body, so is it also with Christ. He too has many members, but one body. Out of compassion for us he descended from heaven, and although he ascended alone, we also ascend, because we are in him by grace. Thus, no one but Christ descended and no one but Christ ascended; not because there is no distinction between the head and the body, but because the body as a unity cannot be separated from the head.

St. Augustine, Sermon on the Ascension of the Lord

Bonhoeffer’s Contradictions and Mine

For the last few days I’ve been thinking about what I believe to be the central paradox in the life of the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: he was a pacifist who took part in not one but several plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The plans failed, and he was executed just three weeks before the Allies closed in on Berlin.

I don’t know much about Bonhoeffer. I haven’t read enough of his writings to amount to an education. But I am intrigued by this sharp contradiction in his life. This is largely, I think, because I became a pacifist in the course of my own study of Scripture—the Sermon on the Mount in particular, although I’d set out with the opposite conclusion in sight—, and I’m simultaneously well aware that I arrived at this position as a twentysomething graduate student who’s never experienced any violence or oppression in his lifetime. Whenever the subject of my pacifism comes up (and I used to wear it a bit more proudly), someone inevitably asks, “So you mean to tell me that if someone were to try to kill you, you would not resist him?” Well, there are endless ways to nuance that scenario and I’m wearied by all the possibilities, but I can only hope that, when the time comes, God will help me stick to what I believe his Word has taught me.

Most people are suspicious about the integrity of pacifists, and rightfully so, I think. After all, there is little proof that we really mean what we say until we ourselves stare violence in the eyes. In the meantime, we seem to go about telling people not to fight wars or harm the unjust aggressor—and we usually do this quite comfortably with journal articles, newspaper columns, blogs, posters and the rudest of all non-dialogical media: bumper stickers. Is it any surprise that pacifists as a whole have little to no credibility in an age when countless men, women and children are oppressed and killed needlessly?

St. Isaac of Nineveh on Silence and Inner Experience

Loosely related to my previous post.

Love ignorance of speech together with the knowledge of experience from within more than spouting forth a Gihon of teaching with keenness of mind and an accumulation of hearsay and writing.

On Ascetical Life 4.42

Remembering Sei Yee, with Questions about Experiencing God

One of my aunts is dying. I received a phone call two nights ago from my sister in Malaysia, in which she informed me that the doctor had sent “Sei Yee” (that is, “Fourth Aunt”) home so that she could spend her last days there. The cancer has spread to her kidneys, and there is nothing the physicians can do at this point.

Sei Yee was baptized into the Catholic Church last Wednesday. Shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, she began her journey toward Christ. It was a big day for her when she decided to send the statue of the goddess of mercy (Kuan Yin) and the ancestral tablets in her home to a local Buddhist temple. The statue and the ancestral tablets had been in the house for as long as she’d lived there with her unmarried sisters and my grandma. After my grandma died several years ago, her sisters converted to Christianity, leaving her the only Buddhist in the house. She faithfully attended to the offerings and incense at the family shrine every day. When Sei Yee became ill with cancer, she began praying the chaplet of Divine Mercy with her sisters in the afternoons and receiving instruction in the faith from a catechist from the nearby Catholic parish. One day, she said to her sisters, “You know, maybe it’s time to send the statue and the tablets to a temple.” This is what Buddhists in Malaysia do when, either because of conversion to another faith or some other reason, they no longer intend to worship the household deities or venerate the forefathers and foremothers according to the Chinese customs. It’s a colossal step, the full significance of which cannot be grasped by an outsider.

To Those Who Keep the Julian Pascha

Bearing life and more fruitful than paradise, brighter than any royal chamber: Thy tomb, O Christ, is the fountain of our resurrection!

Paschal greetings to all Orthodox readers and other Eastern Christians who keep the Julian calendar. I thought about you all as I recited these words of the Paschal Hours this morning.