Paschal Mystery: 3rd Monday in Easter, 2012

During this time of Easter-tide, this season of Easter, we celebrate the Paschal Mystery: Christ's death and Resurrection. And isn't the "secret of life" contained in this - is not this the mystery that permeates all life?

In order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit.*

In writing about the Paschal Mystery, Ronald Rolheiser* makes a few distinctions that I also feel are important before exploring the Paschal Mystery further.
First, there are two different kinds of death (terminal and paschal). Terminal death ends life and ends possibilities. A paschal death ends one type of life while opening "the person undergoing it to receive a deeper and richer form of life." Both types of death are real, and I might add that one doesn't have to die physically to experience either or both.
Second, just as there are two types of death, there are two types of life (resuscitated and resurrected). Resuscitated life is when one is returned to one's former life and health (Jesus raising Lazarus in John's gospel is an example). Resurrected life "is not a restoration of one's old life but the reception of a radically new life."
Third, Rolheiser distinguishes between life and spirit. "They are not the same thing and are often given to us at a different time. For example, after the resurrection of Jesus, the disciples are given the new life of Christ, but only some time after, at Pentecost, are they given the spirit for the new life that they are already living. ... We live by both life and spirit and our peace of soul depends upon us having a happy synthesis between the two."

So, the pascal mystery is about a paschal death, about resurrected life, and about the synthesis between life and spirit. Rolheiser presents five movements withing the paschal cycle:

The paschal mystery ... is a process of transformation within which we are given both a new life and new spirit. It begins with suffering and death, moves on to the reception of new life, spends some time grieving the old and adjusting to the new, and finally, only after the old life has been truly let go of, is new spirit given for the life we are already living.
     We see all of this, first, in the great mystery of Jesus' own passover from death to life.
     Theologically, looking at Jesus' teachings and especially at his death and resurrection and what follows from them, we can see that there are five clear, distinct moments within the paschal cycle: Good Friday, Easter Sunday, the forty days leading up to the Ascension, the Ascension, and Pentecost. Each of these is part of a single process, an organic one, and each needs to be understood in relation to the others to make sense of the paschal mystery. Each is part of one process of transformation, of dying and letting go as to receive new life and new spirit.

Rolheiser diagrams the paschal cycle as such:

1. Good Friday: "the loss of life - real death" ("Name your deaths")
2. Easter Sunday: "the reception of new life" ("Claim your births")
3. The Forty Days: "a time for readjustment to the new and for grieving the old" ("Grieve what you have lost and adjust to the new reality")
4. Ascension: "letting go of the old and letting is bless you, the refusal to cling" ("Do not cling to the old, let is ascend and give you its blessing")
5. Pentecost: "the reception of new spirit for the new life that one is already living" ("Accept the spirit of the life that you are in fact living")

This cycle is not something that we undergo just once as our physical life ends, but a process we are called upon to undergo again and again through out life. We start a new job, we find ourselves laid off, we move aboard a boat, we face an illness, we are diagnosed with a disability are all examples of ways in which the paschal mystery can speak to us and call us forth into a resurrected life.

During this season of resurrection - when we watch the buds form on the trees, and new life shoot from the ground - may we, too, find our lives inviting us forth into Resurrection. May we also, as we await the Ascension and Pentecost, refuse to cling to the old, and prepare for the new spirit awaiting us.

Blessed Be

Joel


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* All quotes are from Ronald Rolheiser. The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. Doubleday, 1999. Pages 146 and following. During the rest of this chapter, Rolheiser examines five examples of how the paschal mystery applies to daily life.