COCHIN, India – One of the prominent female Catholic theologians in India said the Church has lost its identity as “Church of the poor.”

The stone which rolled away from the tomb of Jesus continues to roll away from every sort of grave. Goodness cannot be held, captured or put to death. It evades its pursuers, escapes capture, slips away, hides out, even leaves the churches sometimes, but forever rises, again and again, all over the world. Such is the meaning of the Resurrection.

Ascension of the Lord (Year C) May 8 (Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:17-23; Luke 24:46-53)

What is it like to ascend to the heavens? The sight of astronauts floating effortlessly around a space station or outside on a repair mission has become so commonplace that it doesn’t even elicit much comment. When we read the account of the Ascension in Acts, it seems to pale in comparison to the accomplishments of our own time.

Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year C) May 1 (Acts 15:1-2, 22-29; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23; John 14:23-29)

There are two basic approaches to drawing people to a relationship with God and an experience of divine love and mercy. Some anxiously, and usually angrily, place as many obstacles before others as possible. They set conditions that have to be met before someone can belong to the community or dare to approach God. But there is another approach, and that is to place as few obstacles or conditions before people as possible — in short, do everything in one’s power to bring them home.

The famed Jungian writer Robert Johnson makes this observation about falling in love: “To fall in love is to project the most noble and infinitely valuable part of one’s being onto another human being... We have to say that the divinity we see in others is truly there, but we don’t have a right to see it until we have taken away our own projections... Making this fine distinction is the most delicate and difficult task in life.”

Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year C) April 24 (Acts 14:21b-27; Psalm 145; Revelation 21:1-5a; John 13:1, 31-33a, 34-35)

What sort of word did Paul and Barnabas proclaim to the communities they founded? We can expect that the death and resurrection of Jesus was first on the list — details about His life came later. Most importantly, their proclamation included the warning that Jesus had been appointed judge of the living and the dead.

In the movie based upon Jane Austen’s classic novel Sense and Sensibility, there’s a very poignant scene where one of her young heroines, suffering from acute pneumonia, is lying in bed hovering between life and death. A young man, very much in love with her, is pacing back and forth, highly agitated, frustrated by his helplessness to do anything of use, and literally jumping out of his skin. Unable to contain his agitation any longer, he goes to the girl’s mother and asks what he might do to be helpful. She replies that there’s nothing he can do, the situation is beyond them. Unable to live with that response he says to her: “Give me some task to do, or I shall go mad!”

Fourth Sunday of Easter (Year C) April 17 (Acts 13:14, 43-52; Psalm 100; Revelation 7:9, 14b-17; John 10:27-30)

There are many ways to relate a series of events, poetic, scientific, artistic and journalistic modes among them. When most people hear the word “history” they think of a straight-forward narration of unvarnished “facts.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. There is no such thing as an unbiased or dispassionate narrator — everyone has a point to make, an axe to grind, an agenda to address or an ideology to advance. This should not really surprise anyone, and there is nothing nefarious or sinister about it. 

Fear is the heartbeat of the powerless. So writes Cor de Jonghe. That’s true. We can deal with most everything, except fear.