Incredulous with Joy
“[The Disciples] were bewildered and incredulous with joy...”
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous Transverbation of St. Theresa stands in its aedicule in the Cornaro Chapel in Rome; widely considered among the masterpieces of High Roman Baroque. It is a depiction of religious ecstasy: Theresa is collapsed, supine, as she is pierced through by the arrows of divine desire wielded by the angel. Here are depicted the high possibilities of divinized yearning: of a transformative enrapturement in the divine love so profound that it is not only transcribed into bodily experience, but into stone, a figural testimony to the possibility of transcendental experiences we have hardly dared to imagine.
But if we take the resurrection appearances of Jesus as normative templates for authentic Christian ecstasy, we begin to find the sculpture a bit misleading. Jesus’s Easter appearances to his disciples are profound, intimate, and transformative, but he does not usher them into private spaces of sublime, esoteric transverberation. Rather, he comes to them corporately, in community, in twos and threes. He visits them along the road, along the seashore, in that inner room where they are huddled together; not in at the climax of a spiritual retreat, or the heights of meditative intensity, but in their uncertainty and doubt, as they lock themselves off from the world “for fear of the Jews.”
It is a good thing if Bernini awakens and deeps in us a sense of the impossible possibility of ever deepening rapturous encounters with the God who is there, and makes himself known to us and present to us through is Son, Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. But we should take care to remember the source and the character of this experience. It is not something we achieve or can create, but something that God does, in and to his Church, for the sake of the world.
It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it.
— The Prophet Micah (Micah 4:1)
Third Sunday of Easter
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Almighty God, you gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly living: Give us grace thankfully to receive his inestimable benefits, and daily to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Scriptures
Alleluia, Oportebat Pati Christum /Alleluia, It was Necessary for Christ to Suffer
This haunting chant from the Old Roman Gradual is appointed as the Second Alleluia for the Third Sunday of Easter, drawing its textual inspiration from Lk 24:26 and 46 to proclaim, “It was necessary for Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead, and so to enter into his glory.” What a strange Alleluia! Its bittersweet strains are echoed in the rich and muted melismas, which, in the darker forth mode, communicate a bewildered and sorrow-filled joy, well-appropriate to an Easter celebrated in a world where the victory of the Resurrection is not yet fully manifested: indeed, the chant itself feels almost incomplete …
