01-05-2007 - Traces, n. 5 INSIDE america Reason and the Empty Tomb It is in the link between Jesus and our experience of this world that the power and “authority” of the Gospel is perceived and Christianity is grasped as an event, as something that happens in this world where senseless tragedies occur; it is something that is truer than these tragedies By Lorenzo Albacete I heard first about the tragedy at Virginia Tech from a friend of a student there who belongs to the Movement, inviting me to pray the Angelus with them and other members of a small School of Community on campus. It was right after Easter Week and I had just come back from our Movement retreat for priests in which we had reflected on the impact that the Resurrection of Jesus had on the way we looked at reality. I remember thinking, “Well, here is a test of what we said at the retreat!” How do we respond to the challenge to our faith in the Resurrection posed by what even the Pope recognized as a “senseless” tragedy? We had begun our retreat by reflecting on how proclaiming and celebrating liturgically as priests the Resurrection should correspond to our experience–or else remain a pure formalism without the power to change anything. Indeed, during the extensive television coverage of the tragedy, representatives of the religious world were frequently asked for messages of consolation and strength for those immediately affected by the events as well as for the student body that was described as being in a confused state of shock. The Christians responded with all the right words and gestures of concern, insisting on God’s love, on hope based on the teachings, life, and Resurrection of Jesus, on the power of faith, etc. Still, something was lacking. The tragedy seemed far more real than the consolations of faith. I realized that what was missing was precisely what we had discussed during the retreat. The words proclaiming the Gospel were the right ones, the doctrine was correct, the gestures of concern were the proper ones, but they seemed to describe a totally otherworldly view of reality that allowed us to escape the ambiguity and pain of what was happening in this world. Indeed, Jesus was proclaimed the Conqueror of sin and death, but the “place” of His victory was in our minds, in our ability to reject the implications of what was happening in this world. Christians called the source of this ability “Jesus,” but others could easily substitute something else for His name. Once, a non-Christian, impressed by the way we dealt with life’s challenges, asked me, “You turn to Jesus, but I am not a Christian, so who is my Jesus?” In short, the “Jesus” offered as an answer to the deep questions provoked by this “senseless tragedy” was not an on-going, concrete, historical presence in this world, changing the reality of this world, revealing Himself to be the truth of this world such as it is. What was missing was the proclamation of Jesus as the only one able to correspond to the full truth of our experience of this world. As we had seen during our retreat, it is in this link between Jesus and our experience of this world that the power and “authority” of the Gospel is perceived and Christianity is grasped as an event, as something that happens in this world where senseless tragedies occur; it is something that is truer than these tragedies. The key to recognizing the presence of the Risen Christ and His victory is to look for its evidence in this world, in our experience of this world. Truly, “the path to truth is an experience.” In order to experience the victory of the Risen Christ in this world, however, it is necessary to grasp the full range of our human needs, especially those “needs of the heart for the Infinite” that make us human. This requires us to “broaden” the range of our reasoning, going against the dominant restriction of reason to the realm of the measurable that relegates to the purely subjective realm what cannot be verified by the methods of the positive sciences. This is precisely the teaching of Pope Benedict XVI in his speech at the University in Regensburg. Without traveling this path, it is simply impossible to grasp the real, historical, concrete presence of the Risen Christ in this world, thus reducing the Gospel to an inspiring discourse. This broadening of reason is the path to the empty tomb.