The Mystery of Passages

I was thinking about "passages" today and how I collect for my computer files images of passages. These are pictures which are evocative of something mysterious or deep within me (us), what some call archetypes.

 

A passage is of course a journey from one place to another, or from one stage of life to another, or from one time to another. So we might also speak of passages as a journey or a pilgrimage. The Scriptures and the Christian, as well as other, spiritual traditions speak of the "journey of life" and the "spiritual journey." (See my material on the spiritual journey HERE and related categories on my personal page)

The spiritual journey also involves what are called rites of passage. This is passing from one kind of way of life to another, or from one stage of spiritual growth to another. Baptism is a rite of passage. Marriage and ordination are rites of passage. But rites of passage can also be on a smaller scale than birth, death, or big life changes.

 

Here’s an interesting discussion of rites of passages as well as their similarity to the creative and the therapeutic processes:

 

       "The initiatory process, the creative process and the therapeutic process all have a  tremendous amount in common. They are all rites of passage.

 

     "The archetypal structure of a rite of passage (which is used for initiation and for transitions in life) is threefold. The first phase is a separation -- a breaking away from the normal workaday world and entry into ritual space (also known as sacred space or, more technically, liminal space). Once within the ritual container, the second phase is the ordeal -- the confrontation with personal and archetypal materials that need to be integrated for the rite of passage to succeed. Once the ordeal has been successfully navigated, the third phase is the return, where the initiate is blessed and received back into the larger culture, with a changed identity and all the gifts the initiate received during the process.

 

     "This may sound archaic and daunting, until you learn to spot variants of this process. For instance, the creative process follows this same pattern. The artist goes to the studio, wrestles with the creative process, and returns with a new creation. Therapy also follows the same structure -- the client enters the therapeutic realm in relationship with the therapist, confronts and integrates painful material, and emerges with healing and greater inner resources. Likewise, when we go to the movies or read a novel, we enter another reality, are swept along with the struggles of the characters, and we emerge transformed, or at least entertained.

 

     "It is a universal process that we all experience over and over again -- though usually it is done unconsciously. In fact, we go to the arts precisely because they create (or mimic) this pattern."

 

Harry LeBlanc  From "Arts of Passge" (emphasis added)

 

Perhaps this speaks to you or not. But I think of something like coming to Sunday Mass or other liturgies and what it could mean for as a "passage" (dramatically or not). We in some way separate from the everyday world to enter the sacred space of the church. We are not escaping from the world for we bring the world with us wherever we go; however, we do leave our ordinary pursuits for a time to enter the church with others on the Catholic spiritual journey.

The Procession into Mass reminds us that we are making a passage into the House of the Lord

Then, as LeBlanc said, we proceed to "the second phase [which] is the ordeal -- the confrontation with personal and archetypal materials that need to be integrated for the rite of passage to succeed." To put this into spiritual language, we encounter the story of Jesus, his life, especially his Death and Resurrection, and integrate or struggle to incorporate these "mysteries" into our lives. We may have to confront our sins, our failures, our fears, our hopes and dreams, etc. in the course of the Mass. Granted we may be more or less sensitive to this depending on where we are at in our spiritual and life passages. For example, teens (but other ages as well) are sometimes "bored" at Mass until the Mass is a Funeral for a classmate or friend who is killed in an accident. Then the Mass may become all too real in what it confronts us with and promises.

 

Then, ideally, we return back to our ordinary world from Mass having a new sense of purpose, a new outlook, sins forgiven, fears reassured, etc.

 

Some of the images I share from my files here probably express for me an inner desire to wander, to go on a journey, to explore where the unknown road is going. Maybe it’s because I (and I think a lot of people) feel that our life journey seems measured in inches, not miles. Where are we going? Is everything becoming too routine? Is this desire a desire to escape, or is it our soul reminding us to take time and pay attention to the passages we are making right now? To be sure, Jesus walks with us on our journeys. (See Luke 24:13-35 HERE)



The Passage of Israel through the Red Sea going from Slavery to Freedom

is the pattern for the Spiritual Journy for Judaism

and later for the Christian Faith as a type of Baptism

 

An image like this reminds me of a journey upward and it is titled "Ascension"

 







A favorite photo I took at the Franciscan Shrine of LaVerna, Italy.

Here is a passage of descent from the mountain

 



Sometimes our spiritual journey is like passing through a desert

 



I really like the sense of passage captured in images like this. Where is it leading?

 





A classic image of a journey with companions

 



Very evocative to me of both the beauty and mystery

and the invitation to the journey

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How We Journey in Jesus

The Gospel for this Sunday begins "[Jesus] resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem..." (Luke 9:51)

 

This can be taken in three ways. First, he is going to Jerusalem to die, for it is in Jerusalem that he was crucified and buried.

 

Second, it could mean he is going to Jerusalem to rise from the dead.

 

Third, it could mean he is on his way to the heavenly Jerusalem, i.e. to heaven, where he will gather all his saints, his Mother Mary Most Holy, and the Blessed who have died in him. (for more on the Heavenly Jerusalem go HERE)

 

Of course, Jerusalem stands as the destination for all these events. Jesus cannot ascend to heaven until he is raised from the dead; and he cannot rise from the dead unless he first dies.

 

What I am interested in for my life and that of the people I pastor is what the implications are for our following Jesus to Jerusalem. Or to put it more specifically, to know how we are called to die in Christ so as to rise in him and also live forever in the Heavenly Jerusalem.

 

 

To die and rise with Christ is to share his Paschal Mystery. This Paschal, or Passover, Mystery describes to his Death and Resurrection. Dying and rising in Christ is the pattern of our Christian life. It does not simply refer to our physical death or the resurrection of our physical bodies one day. It is first a spiritual (i.e., Holy Spirit filled) dying and rising beginning at our Baptism. We are committed in our Baptism to die spiritually to all sin and self-centeredness and to rise to a new life in Christ, a life of love as God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another. (Hence we are baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit).

 

This is all basic Christianity 101. What this Sunday’s passage about Jesus on a journey does is remind me that I, too, am on a journey. A journey naturally leads to a destination (unless we go astray). Once you get to your destination, you are no longer on a journey, unless you begin another journey.

 

If I am on a journey to die with Christ, then that means I haven’t arrived yet at a perfect state of being "dead to sin, but alive in Christ Jesus." (See Romans 6:11 HERE) If I am on a journey to rise to a new life in Christ and the Holy Spirit, that means I haven’t arrived yet at a perfect state of living the new life of Christ. I certainly am still on a journey where the destination is heaven, and that will happen only when I do physically die and am purified of all sin in Purgatory, if I remain faithful to Christ Jesus.

 

This thought of journey, then, gives me great comfort; it is not, however, an excuse to avoid progressing forward in Christ. If I go astray or even go backward, I am not heading closer to my destination. And actually the journey to dying in Christ actually involves dying to sin and selfishness while I’m on the journey, not till a future date; the same with rising to new life, the rising happens on the journey, not just at the end of the journey. Even heaven can be experienced in moments on earth.

 

I’m sure some of these thoughts will probably be incorporated in my homily this Sunday. The Gospel, by the way, warns against our excuses for delaying the spiritual journey, as we will hear.

 

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Journals and Spirals

I started to keep a journal in the late 1970's. I first began to write in my journal to bring to the surface of my consciousness a whole lot of thoughts and emotions. I remember hearing years later someone quoted as saying: "I write to know what I think."

 

A journal is not a diary, though it may record various events in one’s life. It is more reflection upon one’s life. At first my journal was a way of dealing with needed psychological healing and coming to maturity. At some point my journal became more reflections upon the Faith, thinking through the implications of Catholic Teaching. So I began to write to know what I believe.

 

I have rarely gone back and read any of my past journals. I have almost 30 years of journals! The few times I have looked back in them, say sampling a few years worth of writing, I found out that I was often having the same "new insight" about the same time every year! This led to an insight of mine that our growth is rarely linear, i.e. able to be plotted in a straight line. Linear growth would look like this:

 

 

We all know that if we charted our personal and spiritual growth, the line forward would have to sometimes go backwards because of regressing or digressing. It might look more like this:

 

 

 

But my journal findings would suggest that our growth is also spiral. We know that a spiral goes round and round, but also it expands outward. If one drew a line across a spiral, the spiral keeps coming back to the same point, but further down the line. This diagram illustrates this:

 

 

I think we keep coming back, then, to the same points in our growth, but we’re not caught in an unending loop. That would be pointless. Each swing along the spiral takes us further down the line, and that is progress. Of course, my insight is not original, though I haven’t studied it too much. Goggle "Spiral Learning" and three are many sites about the subject. I Goggle image search and also got this spiral:

 

 

In fact, if you think about spirals they are everywhere. My favorite white rose:

 

A galaxy:

And the Sacred Spiral in The Glory Window of the Chapel at Thanksgiving Square, Dallas. Designed by French artist Gabriel Loire, the window symbolizes the blessing of the Divine descending to earth as well as the ascent of human praise and gratitude to God:

 

But this place with a spiral particularly intrigues me, as it descends into the earth. I believe it descends to a sacred well:

 

This adds dimension to our spiral journey. But the subject of "depth" is for another day.

Returning to the subject of my journals. What am I to do with 30 years of them? At 57 years old, I don’t think I’ll become famous so that my journals might be abridged and published! I haven’t made the time in a long time to even write in them much anymore. But I have a reverence for the insights they record, so I think I’ll keep them and perhaps one day read them again in old age...

 

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The Saints: Our Traveling Companions

This upcoming Sunday’s Gospel is about the Kingdom of God (11^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Mark 4:26-34). I have often said that the Kingdom of God is the Rule of God and "God is love." (1 John 4:8); thus, the Kingdom of God is about the rule of God’s love.

We also pray in the "Our Father": "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." If we were suddenly given a vision of heaven, we would see the Risen and Ascended Jesus, the Son Of God, with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, surrounded by the angels and saints, with Mary the Mother of Christ. As the Catechism teaches us:

"This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity - this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed - is called ‘heaven.’ Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness."  (Catechism#1024)

The saints in heaven enjoy the fullness of God’s love and each loves one another with the fullness of divine love. This is that love, that rule of God’s love, that we pray will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Growing up as a Protestant, the subject of the saints was almost entirely absent from my mind. Of course I was taught about the men and women of God in the Bible who are also saints, but that title of "Saint" was not used in my childhood religious education.

Perhaps the first Catholic saint that I came to know about was St. Francis of Assisi. I was a student at UF. Somehow I came across a small book called The Little Flowers of St. Francis, written in the late 14^th century.

I was totally charmed by these stories about St. Francis and his companions. Little would I know at the time that I would become a Catholic, be ordained a priest, and one day visit Assisi and many other haunts of St. Francis in Italy. I would also become the Pastor of a parish, our parish of Holy Faith, whose name comes from a Franciscan mission in Spanish Florida near present-day Gainesville. (See Parish History)

On my Catholic journey begun so many years ago, I took as my Patron Saint, St. John the Evangelist also associated with the Beloved Disciple in John’s Gospel (See John 13:23). Everyday I ask for St. John’s prayers and that I might become a beloved disciple of the Lord.

I, of course, came to also know and love Mary the Mother of God. At my ordination, whoever prepared the written program thought that my middle initial "M" stood for Michael. It actually stands for Morris, a family name of one of my great grandfathers. So I got named as John Michael Phillips and I decided I had been also given St. Michael the Archangel as an additional Guardian angel. I also came to love St. Benedict; I was taught in my first year of Seminary by the Benedictine monks of St. Meinrad, Indiana and did my further studies after ordination at St. John’s University and Benedictine Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota.

I could mention other saints, as well, that I have read, come to admire, and think of with devotion. Pope Benedict XVI has instructed us about having the saints as intimate friends:

"There are very dear people in the life of each one of us to whom we feel particularly close, some of whom are already in God's embrace, while others still share with us the journey through life: they are our parents, relatives and teachers; they are the people to whom we have done good or from whom we have received good; they are people on whom we know we can count.

"Yet, it is important also to have ‘traveling companions’ on the journey of our Christian life....I am also thinking of the Virgin Mary and the Saints. Everyone must have some Saint with whom he or she is on familiar terms, to feel close to with prayer and intercession but also to emulate. I would therefore like to ask you to become better acquainted with the Saints, starting with those you are called [named] after, by reading their life and their writings. You may rest assured that they will become good guides in order to love the Lord even more and will contribute effective help for your human and Christian development." (Pope Benedict, General Audience 8/25/10)

[For more on "traveling companions" on the Catholic Spiritual Journey read my reflections here]

As Catholics, along with the Orthodox Church, we have a glorious gift and heritage in the many saints we honor. They will pray for us and guide us with safe passage into the Kingdom of God, into the experience of his love!

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