Friday, April 6, 2012

The Sacred Triduum and the Theology of the Body

The Sacred Triduum
The Father’s Plan for Living the Theology of the Body

“This stuff is great. I only wish I could live it out in a clear and complete way.” This is a very common reaction to the Theology of the Body.  Many folks say that it sounds nice to their ears and maybe even moves their hearts, but many ask, “so how can I live this out in a practical way in my daily life?”

There are really some great responses to this need in the Church: books, pamphlets, workbooks, even coloring books, music, and poetry. There are many courses that give clear and day-to-day examples that are close to the hearts its students. However, understanding is not enough. We must gain carnal knowledge of this doctrine by actually practicing it in it in our very bodies. Pope John Paul’s intention is that we would enter into a personal relationship and dialogue with the living Jesus Christ in our very bodies.

This dialogue is ultimately about the gift that Jesus Christ has given to us of his own body, manifesting the Father’s love by his most sacred passion, death, and resurrection. It is here that we listen to the voice of Jesus, not a voice that is spoken or heard with the ears, but with the body.

We are sinners. The place we experience disquiet, disturbance, and uneasiness of our own sinfulness is in our very flesh, in the depths of our hearts. Yet, we experience what happens to these same bodies when we permit our flesh to drink deeply of the gift of Jesus’ body and blood, soul and divinity. By gazing upon Jesus condemned, mocked, judged, hated, scourged, beaten, bruised, cursed, defiled, and crucified, and realizing that he did this all for us, for love of us, suddenly our wounded hearts finds rest, peace, noble serenity, and a satisfaction that cannot be experienced anywhere else. We experience redemption in our bodies from experiencing the gift of Jesus’ body to us.

This is not something we experience somewhere in our interior life during scattered glimpses of personal prayer or only from those sparks of personal inspiration that fall from the fire of the Holy Spirit passing through the humdrum of our lives. It is something that is experienced in Nomine Ecclesiae, in the name of the Church, by the means of the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist. “As often as the sacrifice of the cross by which ‘Christ, our Pasch is sacrificed’ (1 Cor 5:7) is celebrated on the altar, the work of our redemption is carried out” (Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Second Vatican Council, 3). The Sacred Liturgy is not just a reenactment of something that happened before. It is actually that we enter into the sacrifice of Christ and make it present in our lives.

Yet our loving Father knows that it is not enough for us to have this experience for the few minutes that happens in the Eucharistic prayer. Redemption grows in us like a plant groaning upward toward the rays of the sun. Thus he has given us an entire season where we focus on the passion of our Lord. This is the holy season of lent, which comes to a climax when we experience the liturgical entry of Jesus’ glorious into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, on which day the Church proclaims the Passion of the Lord. We hear on this day our own voices cry out as the Jews of old, “crucify him!” We hear Jesus our beloved high priest, in persona Christi, through the person of the priest, say to us personally, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” We feel the weight of each scourge, the sound of the pounding of the nails, and the terrible groan of Jesus, a cry that pierces the depths of our hearts because it has first pierced the great heart of our Father from whom we experience the mighty and terrible tender KIndness that flows from his infinite majesty.

The passion of the Lord that we live out in Holy Week, especially in the Sacred Triduum, is Christ’s great appeal to the human heart that he gives to historical man.  Jesus speaks to us as one who knows exactly what we are going through because he experienced our weaknesses in his afflictions, our sins in his stripes, our misery in his pain. It is this doorway that we must pass through to reach the primordial plan of the Father that is only restored through Jesus’ redemption. It is through this lens that we can see Christ’s appeal to original man in the beginning. It is only after this fact that we can hear Jesus’ appeal to eschatological man in resurrection.

Jesus points out the personal path of each person by orienting us where we came from, where we are now, and where we need to go. The crucifixion of Jesus is the intersecting point of all three of these because unless we acknowledge our sinfulness (i.e. where we are now) we won’t even be able to take the first step toward where we need to go and forget about knowing our origins.

So many people stay stuck in themselves for years and even decades because they fail to address their weaknesses in Christ. They fail to allow the cross to be fruitful because they won’t acknowledge their woundedness not permitting Christ to address where their hearts really are. The frustration that follows is relating to themselves where God created them to be while not being able to accept themselves for who they are now. The result is kind of like tiptoeing around a wound for years like a pink elephant in the living room.

If we fulling embrace the grace of the Sacred Triduum, the greatest fruit of it will be a very real humility, which is nothing other than frank honesty about our own woundedness. This is the essential pre-condition for redemption and living out successfully the theology of the body in our own bodies.

May our faithful celebration of the sacred liturgy of the Sacred Triduum bring us to the fullness of the redemption of our bodies. May the glorious Virgin Mary, queen and instructress of the Cross guide and illumine us on our way.