Singing in a sweet, treble voice, “Jesus is God! Jesus is God!” to the Holy Face of Jesus, a toddler pat-patted happily on a canvas that hung above his crib.
Twenty years later, as a young man, that happy song was spent. The Christianity of his childhood seemed to have betrayed him. Scourged by atheism and pierced with many toxic thorns, the life-music seemed to have all bled out from the little chap. Even the soaring possibility of fair love had been crushed; it seemed to have been swallowed by the beast of pornography and negative social media. “It’s a lie! It’s all a lie! I am alone! Life ends in death, and that’s it,” the unhappy man cried out in his pain. Yet, a thread of hope was given him in a flash of shared insight. In studying physics, he read that the great Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein, confessed to being “enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.” Maybe, just maybe, the relativity of our human dimension and the Incarnation of Jesus had a chance to unite. May-it-be, just may-it-be, Jesus lived, though unseen in our dimension!
By the new covenant of Jesus’s coming, people are no longer abandoned and helplessly suspended in a dark place. Truly, in the beauty of holiness, his own splendid beauty, the risen Lord dispels the darkness of our hearts and minds and carries us with him into the welcoming arms of his Abba.
All threads of hope pass through the mystery of Mary, Mother of the Church. Battered, but prevailing, the Church continues buoyant, a life-preserver within existential despair. The Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not merely a fruit of our faith, it is the very foundation of the Church, for the whole world and for all time, including the end of modernism.
“Jesusus is God!” He, our brother and savior, is the only one who was, and is, and eternally will be one with the Father; through him the Holy Spirit is among us today and always. Borrowing the prayerful words of the 19th century priest and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who knew great suffering and Tenebrae of soul, a joyful Alleluia can begin again: “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us!”
With the Alone, we are never alone. By the mystery of the Cross, we are not alone.
Ruth D. Lasserter
Friend of the SDC
Indiana, US
