(PRACTICING) CATHOLIC - RECOGNIZE GOD IN YOUR ORDINARY MOMENTS

By Colleen Jurkiewicz Dorman

When Words Fail

I love words (obviously; I’m a writer).

But sometimes, words are like teeny, tiny cages. They enclose and confine and restrict our understanding of supernatural realities that are, by their nature, bigger than language.

We do the best we have, with the words that we have, to express who God is. We use terms like “Father” and “Son” because they are the most accurate. But often, without really noticing, we give the words too much weight, and we find ourselves thinking of Jesus as a human son and the Creator as a human father, with all the implications those particular words carry for different people.

That’s why I love hearing Christ speak to God the Father in the Gospels. These one-sided conversations (at least from our viewpoint) pull back the curtain just a little on the breathtaking intimacy that exists between the two. Our misunderstandings of their relationship — framed by our own human experience of fathers and sons, of time and place, of creation and death — are shattered.

“Now glorify me, Father, with you,” Jesus says, “with the glory that I had with you before the world began.”

Before the world began.

In our collective imagination, too often we imagine Jesus as being connected — tethered, really — to a certain time and place: the Incarnation, and all that came after. But let’s not get confused: the Incarnation means that the Son became flesh, and dwelt among us. The Incarnation does not mean that the Son became.

The Son was. From the very beginning, He was. Begotten, not made. Consubstantial.

We say these words every week in the Creed. But saying them isn’t enough. We have to take them into the silence of our hearts and hold them there. We have to invite the Spirit to move among them. Rearrange them. Liberate them. Unleash them.

Only then will we understand what words fail to explain.

THE ASCENSION OF THE LORD

Where did he go? Many times when we think of those who have died, we imagine escape from this world to a purely spiritual place. Jesus' Ascension can leave us in a place of confusion. What happens to Jesus? And why does this matter to us?

The Ascension has been confirmed in the Creed for two millennia. In Jesus' Ascension, we're invited to consider our own ultimate end. Regardless of death's reality now, we believe in the resurrection of the body and the reunification of body and soul. One day, earth and heaven will meet perfectly and without end. We anticipate this "new heaven and a new earth" at every Mass and throughout the beauty, truth, and love of the Church and her members. Today, celebrate a foreshadowing of the fullness we all await!