As the Easter Octave comes to an end, it is with a kind of reflexive surprise that I realise that this is actually what Christianity is supposed to be like all the time. I am supposed to be suffused with the joy of the Resurrection each day because it is not just an event that happened long ago. It is what constitutes my whole identity as a Christian and as a priest.
This “day which the Lord has made” (Psalm 118:24) is the first day of the new creation into which Christ has drawn us by baptising us into the life of his Resurrection and making the dynamic of his Paschal Mystery real in us through its representation under sacramental signs. This is the new life hidden with him in God which St Paul speaks of in his Epistle to the Colossians. The radicality and newness of it can easily be obscured.
Indeed, I can protect myself from the concomitantly radical demand for conversion by reducing faith to a lifestyle accessory which allows me to bask in the glow of remembrance annually and then carry on as before. But unless I am prepared to accept the implications of this offer of new life in Christ, faith in the Resurrection can remain a thing of the imagination, like a sort of spiritual points card which, in return for my being loyal to Him when I choose, God contracts to reward my efforts and give me perks not available to others.
I have been trying to analyse what brought about this awareness and deeper conviction of the newness of life proclaimed by this feast. I think the most obvious cause is that I have been able to live these days of the Triduum and Easter Octave within the purlieu of monastic communities. Now, there is surrounding this a whole romance of beautiful cloisters and deep-toned bells and home-grown vegetables.
But lovely as these are, they are not an end but a means. To be with people who seek to live in the presence of God all the time, who have chosen a life hidden with Christ in God and have grounded themselves in exactly that: this is what allows me to imbibe a rare peace and joy. These Christ-centred communities both provide it and alert me to the logic of why it should feel so invigorating.
This grounding one’s whole life in him, the preferring nothing to the love of Christ, is actually of liturgical, not sociological, making. Communities comprising extremely diverse personalities (and gifts and hang-ups) forget themselves, their work and everything else seven times each day to proclaim and celebrate Christ’s Resurrection, and this is what gives them their identity. Paradoxically, the culture of their way of life is so highly disciplined precisely so that when it comes to the liturgy, their Opus Dei, it is able to focus on what Christ does for us, not what we are doing for him.
The liturgy is always a proclamation of Christ’s risen presence as he opens the Scriptures, as he did to the disciples going to Emmaus, and re-presents his Paschal Mystery under sacramental signs so that the Gospel proclamation of the Resurrection is actualised in us as the life of grace. It seems to me that much modern liturgy falls into the trap of focusing excessively on the assembly and proclamations about what it is and on its agency. The horizontally focused approach does not begin to do justice to the theology of what is actually happening.
Perhaps this was always a danger inherent in the priest turning his back on the direction of the rising sun – an orientation which was itself a proclamation of faith in the Resurrection and its cosmic significance – in order to face the people. The proclamation of Christ’s Resurrection turns us towards a new dawn beyond the confines of what any human society can create. We are to follow the risen Christ to heaven. It is the action of Christ proclaimed and fulfilled which constitutes us as an assembly. This truth risks being obscured by an excessive focus on the assembly itself as the subject of the liturgical proclamation and action. “He must increase, I must decrease” (John 3:30) seems to me a good measure for determining what constitutes good liturgy.
The Easter priority is to become whom we celebrate, not just celebrate what we have become, for the latter can only be realised eternally.
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