Why Does the Ascension Matter?

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This is my annual reminder of why we bother with all this Jesus business.  If you’re not in it for this, I’m not sure what you’re doing.  First ran at the Wine Dark Sea.

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We think of atheists as the people who actively deny the existence of God, but there’s a much more pernicious and widespread atheism among religious people today: Faithy-ism. We talk about God, and do God-themed activities, but we don’t really mean it.  It’s all just a metaphor.  Our spirituality consists of our deeply felt emotions and our mental catalog of Good Things That Happen, wrapped up all pretty in a cellophane bag of inspirational poetry.

It’s a vapid illusion, but an understandable one.  When someone dies, what do we see?  Nothing.  To all appearances, the human soul is snuffed out.  We’re left with a decaying corpse and a collection of memories.  It’s hardly surprising if we conclude that “eternal life” must consist of little more than remembering the beloved family stories, combined with a reverent observation of how the well the oaks grow when their roots hit graveyard compost.

Want to find the world’s most diehard atheists? Pop into a parish and listen to the unscripted bits.  If the songs and sermons are mostly about the works of good Christians, and not so much about the worship of God, you’ve found your spot.

The Ascension is the punch in the shoulder to this religious atheism.

And his companions asked him, Lord, dost thou mean to restore the dominion to Israel here and now?

But he told them, It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. Enough for you, that the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and you will receive strength from him; you are to be my witnesses in Jerusalem and throughout Judaea, in Samaria, yes, and to the ends of the earth.

When he had said this, they saw him lifted up, and a cloud caught him away from their sight. And as they strained their eyes towards heaven, to watch his journey, all at once two men in white garments were standing at their side.

Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here looking heavenwards? He who has been taken from you into heaven, this same Jesus, will come back in the same fashion, just as you have watched him going into heaven.

(Acts 1: 6-11)

Here’s our Lord, fully man and fully God, body and soul united in one resurrected, eternally-enduring piece.  He appears among the disciples for forty days, cooking, eating, admonishing – all the things a person ought to do.  You can touch Him.  You can split a fish sandwich with Him.

And when He ascends into Heaven, He doesn’t just wisp away like the cheshire cat.  He doesn’t slip out the door and into the sunset.  There He goes, up into the sky towards eternity, and there’s no nitrogen-rich corpse left behind.  The body goes with.

That is our eternal destiny.  Why do we recoil against death?  Because we were made for something so much better.  So much cleaner.  So much more comprehensible.

And the clincher to the Ascension – and to the Assumption, and to the taking up of Elijah in the angelic chariot – is that we’ve got a handful of people who are waiting for us somewhere.  We’re not sure where.  But they’re out there.  The place beyond all places is a place.

Even as we sit here at our computers goofing off reading blogs, Our Lord, the Blessed Mother, and some debatable number of other humans are hanging out, body-n-soul, in a Heavenly place.  They’re in a place where they can be touched, with a hand like your hand.  They can breathe on you with breath like your breath.

Jesus isn’t just a warm feeling before we slip into eternal nothing.  Heaven is no abstraction.  It’s real. And we can go there.

Artwork: Benvenuto Tisi [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When You’re a Catholic Who Doesn’t Have It Together

I have this friend whose job is to hold my life together.

I don’t mean that she’s a kind, caring, conscientious person — though she is that, too.  I mean that I pay her by the hour to take care of some non-negotiables in my life that would otherwise fall by the wayside.

I think one of Satan’s more pernicious lies, and it cuts two ways, is other people have their act together.

Well, some of us do, some of us don’t, and on our best days many of us are half-n-half.

How Do You Know When Someone’s Life is Coming Unglued?

There are people who do their best to keep their public face together despite inner collapse, and people who brandish a veener of chaos but secretly have their act together.  In my experience, people who are losing it exhibit a few common signs:

  1. The friendships get erratic.  If someone you had every reason to believe was your friend suddenly loses his temper, quits coming around, gets cagey about commitments, or won’t take your calls, unless you’ve really done something to deserve it, it’s probably not you.  Psychopaths will give you good reasons for why you deserve to be maltreated.  Your friend who is coming unhinged, in contrast, is the person who knows better, doesn’t have an excuse, and is probably too tired or overwhelmed to even explain why.
  2. Simple stuff goes out the window.  “Simple” is relative of course — if your friend never did keep up with the dishes, dishes in the sink are just a sign of situation-normal.  When your friend is losing it, what tends to go are the things that hit either the low-priority-high-pleasure corner of the spectrum or the should-do-usually-do spot.  Doesn’t get a thrill out of changing the oil, but always managed to do it before without any difficulty.  Always loved sending Christmas cards, let it go this year.
  3. Small requests seem monumental.  You’re unlikely to see this one overtly, because it often shows up indirectly.  Your friend probably won’t come out and say, “I was hoping to attend, but if they make everyone find a White Elephant gift I’m just not coming to the Christmas Party this year.”  It sounds so lame.  How hard is that?  Instead, the friend just doesn’t come, or else the friend values the event enough to pull off the cost of admission, but there’s a spike in #1 and #2 behaviors to go with.

I’d like to pause here and say that while these “no longer have it together” behaviors can be associated with depression, a lot of people who don’t have their act together are not depressed.  These are things that you see among people who are the opposite of depressed: People who are working their tails off to hold their life together and do as much as they possibly can, despite the fact that the odds are against them.

Confounding Situations

There are a couple things that can make it hard to really believe your friend is going over the edge.

Your friend still accomplishes quite a lot.  Demanding vocations abound.  If someone’s running a parish, or a business, or a family, there will always be one more thing to do.  As your friend is working like crazy to hold together as much of that vocation as possible, you’ll see results.  You’ll see activity.  You want to know why Father just lost it in his private meeting with you (see #1, above)  about the candle budget, when he didn’t have any problem pasting a smile on his face through the entire two hour long Vacation Bible School songfest?  Because he just endured the songfest, and it used up every ounce of willpower he had.

Your friend doesn’t talk about his problems.  There are people who just love to talk about their problems, and there are people who don’t.  It’s a spectrum, and for a lot of people who are overwhelmed by significant, difficult, persistent life problems, there are some common reasons they aren’t going to bring up those problems in conversation:

  • The situation is confidential, embarrassing, or involves another person whose privacy would be infringed.
  • There are in fact no real solutions to the problem (and yes, they’ve investigated).
  • The problem is the sort best discussed only with those few people who have experience with it.
  • It’s depressing talking about what’s going wrong when you could be enjoying hearing about something good.

It’s easy to spout platitudes about the importance of “sharing one’s burdens” or “talk therapy,” but consider the hubris involved in appointing yourself the one person who must be informed of your friend’s every moment of difficulty.  Consider instead the possibility that your friend loves and values you, but still doesn’t care to talk about the situation right now.

Your friend continues to pursue personal interests, even impressive ones.  A difficult life isn’t necessarily an unhappy life, nor a life devoid of all talent.  There’s a tendency to say, “Gosh, she’s able to take care of that dumb horse of hers, how come she can’t help out with the church picnic like everyone else?  She’s just malingering.”  That dumb horse, as it happens, is the thing that keeps her sane, the one thing she’s going to hang onto until the bitter end, because when your whole life is a train wreck, you want a little refuge of sanity.

In the same manner, an overwhelming life doesn’t mean all your talents suddenly dry up and blow away.  If your friend was always perfectly capable of spitting out a copy of a Dutch Renaissance Master on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, unless his hands fell off, he’s probably still going to be able to do that (and even if his hands fall off, he’ll probably find a work-around and get back at it).  That he does something he finds easy but you find astonishingly difficult doesn’t mean he’s got his act together.  It means he’s still capable of doing some things that are easy for him.

The Two People This Matters To: You and Everybody Else

I write about all this for two reasons.  The first is that it’s easy to think everyone else has their life together, and therefore you’re a crappy person and a failed Christian if you do not.

Can moral failure be the reason your life isn’t working out? Sure.  But it’s also possible that your life is hard regardless.  For most people, moral failure is the bitter rind that surrounds our life, no matter how good or how bad the rest of the fruit is.  It’s the seed you spit out and eat the rest.

Your life can be going to pieces despite no particular uptick in sin, just an uptick in lousy life circumstances.  Don’t confuse the two.  Keep working on the holiness, but don’t measure the holiness by your outward success.

The second reason is that it’s easy to think everyone else has their life together, and therefore they are crappy people and failed Christians if they do not.

Pastoral Perspectives on Apathetic Catholics

There are categories of Christians who get a pass.  If they have some obvious or publicly acknowledged excuse for their inability to meet spec, the whole parish pats itself on the back for winning at the Welcoming and Accepting contest just for letting the miserable slobs in the door.

Meanwhile, there’s this cycle of desperation that causes the rest of the parish to eat its young.  It goes like this:

  1. Parish leaders are falling apart at the seams because they can’t do it all.
  2. Therefore they beg pewsitters to step up and do it all.
  3. Pewsitters were already falling apart at the seams themselves.
  4. Leaders burn out, pewsitters either develop a talent for ignoring pleas or else they give up and go home.

There are other types of dysfunction, but this is one I keep seeing.  Are there people in your parish who would step up and help out if only they understood the need and were invited to help?  Yes there are.  Invite them (and very often they go uninvited because they have some outward reason you think they won’t meet spec, when really they’d love to be wanted and put to work).

But there are other people who seem to have it all together and they simply do not.  They cannot help you, or they cannot help you in the way you are asking of them.

Suffering is Not New

Let’s quit talking about the modern world.  For a hundred years and more, people have been writing about about how the pace of the modern world is the problem.  Well, it is, in the sense that none of us have to live in any other world, so this world’s the one that’s going to give us trouble.

But life isn’t difficult because it is modern, it is difficult because it is life.  Not having your act together is one of the facets of human life since shortly before we got kicked out of the Garden of Eden.   The poor will be with us always, and when we get a turn at experiencing some sort of poverty, that’s just us having our turn at being those poor.  Not having your act together is, technically speaking, a sort of blessing.

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Edvard Munch [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.  I think Gary Larson’s Wiener Dog Art version is a little better, though.

Welcome, Conspirators!

As the Catholic Conspiracy launches, here’s the 101 on this blog and what I’m doing.  You can make a meme out of this if you like, look at the answers and figure out suitable questions for yourself.

A. My name is Jennifer and I like to write.  I have sometimes gone minutes and minutes without thinking of something to write, but it doesn’t happen very often.  Like maybe it happened ten times in my life?  Ever? Okay, minute.  Minute and minute.

B. Why no, there’s not a combox.  There’s a com-group, and it’s on Facebook.  Join in if you like, you need not be Catholic to apply.  I’m not always there, but you can be.  There are people in the group whom you should meet.

C. The reason I am so sporadic in my internet attendance is because I am decrepit.  Sometimes I write about that.

D. My public writing is 99% Catholic non-fiction.  This post has a link to my archives around the Catholic blogging world.  I am still actively writing at Patheos as well.  For links to the books I’ve written and/or and contributed to, look at my publications page.  If you’re looking for the free PDF retreat workbook, look at my downloads page.

E. What will the relaunched Riparians be like?  Ha.  I tell you a mystery.  Riparians at the Gate is the non-anonymous successor to my first foray into blogging.  When I started writing at Patheos, rather than move everything over, I kept this place around for personal updates.

In coming back here and freshening up, one of my goals is to get back to more personal blogging.  Another is to get into Catholic stuff from a different angle than I’ll be doing at Patheos.  My final goal is top secret until I pull it off.  That’s my thought.

F.  People sometimes want to know what the name Riparians at the Gate is about.  I will tell you, because that’s your prize for being here on moving day.

  • It’s a weak pun off of “Barbarians at the Gate.”
  • The word riparian is because of all the -arian things I might be considered, that one is real. Met my husband on a river. Like to relax on a river. Really like rivers.  Fast ones, slow ones, but generally prefer narrower ones to wider ones.  In a pinch, any good creek will do.
  • Unlike some of the other blog names out there, Riparians at the Gate hadn’t been taken yet.

Those are enough reasons for now.  Here’s a nice river video.  It’s not me.  The spouse and I went out and scouted the route on the previous trip, and then I gave my seat to one of my offspring for the recording.

Yes, actually it was scary.  A little terror is good for the soul.

G.  So let’s talk about visceral reactions.  

I got to know Larry D. during our stint doing 3.5 takes, and the photo below is the one I’d use for posts for that. It warms my heart to look at that picture and think about doing a new thing with a pile of Catholic blogging friends who in some cases go pretty far back.

But the photo that totally makes my stomach go happy-wild is this one of our head-conspirator Rebbeca Frech’s daughter Ella getting air at the 2016 WCMX championships.  I think if you haven’t really done any mountain biking or BMX or WCMX or something like that, your body won’t be trained right to really feel the thing when you look at the photo.  But if you have done the thing, then you’ll look at that picture and your stomach will leap with excitement and you’ll be like, “Oh yeah.  That’s what we’re talking about.  Bring it.”

And that’s I think what the Conspiracy is — that moment when you’re really in the air with the Catholic faith, and the question of where or how you’ll land isn’t even on your mind, because hey — air time.

Photo by J. Fitz, all rights reserved.

 

Welcome Knights and Columbiettes!

I had a great weekend with you, thank you for having me!

If you’d like to continue the quest of bringing your family, friends, and community back to the Catholic Church, the book you want is Return by Brandon Vogt.  You can read my endorsement here.

Here’s Brandon’s quick article on Seven Steps to Bring Any Young Person Back to the Church.

This works.  Do this.

Cover art courtesy of https://helpthemreturn.com/game-plan.

About the Ugly Duckling Phase

You  may have noticed that I caused the blog to become terribly ugly, and then I left it that way.  Here’s what’s going on:

  • In anticipation of the new project TBA, I need to get this blog into a layout that will support some of the necessary new features.
  • Therefore, I’ve been toying around with themes-n-things, in order to find a combination of beauty and utility that satisfies both my aesthetic goals and my desire to not have to learn very much.
  • And then I wasn’t feeling well.*  So my blog got stuck with a terrible experimental haircut.

I do apologize.  It’s like one of those dreams where you can’t quite seem to get to class all the way dressed.  But I won’t be naked at the grand opening, I promise.

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*By this we mean that a certain blogger was several weeks into exertion-induced arrhythmias and exhaustion that would not seem to listen any explanations about how no, really, we could just stop with that now, thanks.  The thing that finally worked was all the usual adjustments, plus getting the heck off social media, which it turns out is more active a form of rest than other more laying-around modes of rest.  If you see me on Facebook and my blog is still ugly, remind me to get off FB and go work on the blog if I’m such a little bundle of energy.

Thanks for asking, I don’t know either.

I’ve been meaning to write a health update since last September.  I sat down then to write that everything was still great (yay!) except that gosh, I was really very tired.  Just a cold, though, no worries.

Seven or so colds later (I lost count at six, but there was at least one more), I started to turn a corner around the new year.   I’m definitely better than I was in the fall, but every time I start to be happy with the new normal, the new normal decides maybe I’m getting a bit uppity about this “having energy” thing.

But things are better.  Late February I was at a parish event, enjoying myself and enjoying seeing all the good things happening at church, and I was thinking to myself, “Why haven’t I gotten more involved with this group sooner?”  And then I remember: Oh yeah, it’s only been a month that I could reliably have a conversation without getting a headache.  I really enjoy that change, by the way.

So I’m writing on a day when I’m flopping around miserably, utterly useless, mostly flat on my back.  But I’m hopeful that’s a one-off, and with a little rest I’ll be back to the new preferred-normal.  But we’ll see.  I really have no idea.

And Then I Woke Up

Thursday July 2nd at 6pm the fatigue-haze that’s owned me to varying degrees since the end of January suddenly evaporated.

It is intensely pleasant to be out of it.  If you’ve ever done that thing where you get someplace and forget to take your sunglasses off, and you’re walking around inside and everything’s really dim, and then suddenly you remember and you take off the shades and suddenly everything’s brighter and you don’t need so many lights on, it’s like that.

No explanation whatsoever, anymore than I could figure out what brought it on.  But suddenly it’s like I’m not trying to function underwater anymore.

So I like this.

Something curious: No change physically.  I can still be intensely physically tired — tired like holding my head up is too much energy — or short of breath or enjoying one or a couple of the three different variations on light-headedness, but now I’m doing it without the static.  Ditto on emotions – I can be frustrated by something or daunted or lazy or lacking in virtue, but now, suddenly, my utter irresponsibility is like an unfettered act of free will, rather than me fighting against this physical inertia.

I can remember telling a friend earlier this year, “I just want to wake up.”  That’s what it’s like.  Like I’ve been groggy for six months, and then suddenly the coffee kicked in and I snapped to it.

An analogy that is of no help to anyone but me: It’s like the difference between my left side limbs and my right, for those who recall the nerve injury that coincided with the back/pelvic injury eight years ago.  I don’t *lack* sensation on the right side, it’s just less — it all feels like there’s no sensory loss, but then apply the exact same touch to the same place on the left side, and left side has more flavor. Or: I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with my right hand, but if I compare wiggling fingers on right hand versus left, the right side fingers feel thicker, and it feels like there’s more resistance to movement — like a stiffness, but it’s not a physical stiffness, nothing wrong with the joints, no lack of dexterity or flexibility or anything at all.  (–> None of that is as profound as it was initially, it’s very background now.  I forget it’s a thing.  No practical application, other than to remind myself that if I’m only noticing mild *left* leg calf cramps, it’s possible both legs are experiencing the same thing, but only one side is reporting in.)

Dr’s appointment on Monday, and we need to decide with who / when / how to pursue the on-going thing, in light of the fact that I was pretty much laid out for several months this year, which is not good.  You who pray should pray for that.

Meanwhile, you who prayed and got me to snap out of the thing, thanks.  I’m enjoying this.

Interesting Times

The afternoon of May 23rd I had to reluctantly admit that what I was determined to call “allergies” was really a cold.  If noses run in your family like they do in mine, you can appreciate the difficulty of telling the difference.

It was this mild cold that half the kids had already had, no big deal.  I sneezed a lot, and then it was supposed to be over.

Interesting thing one: Nothing bad happened, and it still managed to own a month of my life and counting. Normally what happens with a cold is that if there aren’t any complications, it annoys you and then you get better.

Instead what I had was no complications, and tangible but glacially-paced recovery.  So I go weeks constantly asking myself, “Surely something terrible has happened because no one is this tired, with this obnoxious of a cough, for this long,” except that no, nothing terrible was happening.  Not a single sign of a secondary infection or anything else. Every day was in fact just a tiny bit healthier than the day before.  A perfectly normal recovery, only carried out in ultra-slow motion.

So that aggravated me, because I was impatient to be back to the fully-functional-esque person I was in earlier April – May.  I’m thinking, looking back, that ultra-slow recovery is the same reason February and March were the disaster that they were; or maybe it was something else.

Interesting thing two: Just as I’m turning the corner I start getting a resurgence of the infamous “I feel like I’m buzzed” thing that was the fascinating side note to my initial (untreated) illness.  Which leads to a fair bit of lying when I see people, because after hiding in the cave with the cold long enough, when you see someone you’re so happy to see fresh humans that when they ask you how you’re doing you say, “Good!” even though what you mean is not, “I’m doing well,” but rather, “It is good to see you.”

And here’s where the interesting cropped up: My allergies really truly went away.  If noses run in your family like they do in mine, not sneezing is an aberration.

Curiously, when I first got dramatically ill in 2014, something that happened is that the allergies completely cleared up and stayed cleared up.

So today I googled “allergies autonomic nervous system” and it turns out this is a thing.  Essentially hayfever (cats, dust, pollen) and my presumed type of IST are opposites.  Not quite as neatly as all that, but something like it, which will presumably be helpful to figure out.

For the moment all that tells me is that should this renewed spell of sickliness pass, I should plan to start sneezing again.  Meanwhile, we’ve got a topic for the visit to re-up the meds this summer, which might entertain or even intrigue.  We’ll see.

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In the meantime, given that 50% of the last six months have been “temporary” disasters, I need to quick get just organized enough to hand off the remainder of my responsible-person obligations.  Prayers in that direction appreciated, both that the intended handing-off will happen efficiently and well, and that I’ll make good decisions about precisely how much I can commit to in the year ahead.

How to Find Me

This is a quick note for people who land here and want to find the treasure-trove of interesting:

All my current writing (Catholic punditry, mostly) is going on at my Patheos blog, “Sticking the Corners”.

Here are the archives of my columns at:

I’m still holding down the 16th of the Month Gospel reflections at CatholicMom.com through the end of 2015, so look for those.  Or read them all in the 2015 devotional collection, which you can find by checking out my publications page.

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I check my e-mail sporadically and don’t open anything that looks like spam, so if you write (see sidebar), make that subject line a good one.  Ditto friend requests on Facebook, if yours is languishing, it’s because I don’t know who you are, and either didn’t have time to check out your profile and determine we have something in common, or I checked out your profile and couldn’t tell you apart from Sir Spam-a-lot.

I am a hermit, I live in a cave, but I like people.  So don’t be shy, just be patient and forthcoming.