The 20th century philosopher Hannah Arendt, who as a woman of Jewish extraction fled Europe as the depraved Nazi ideology spread, opined in her book on human willing that the past was something inherently problematic, a zone of formerly contingent necessity now beyond the reach of our intentions and interventions. The will sometimes–perhaps oftentimes–wants to change the past, but becomes frustratingly fixated in its inability to do so. “What is done, is done” may be a platitude to the mind, but to our freedom it can easily present as a painful perplexity, especially when tragedy, trauma, or terrible moral failure lie in our past.

For Sigmund Freud, who died just as the Second World War was poised to begin, the future could be just as dangerous a place for the human psyche, with the pull of unavoidable death disturbing the inner world with convulsions of rage and despair, the darkly impulsive thanatos which is the destructive counterpart to the creative eros.

With both past and future in some real sense eluding our efficacy and casting a troubling shadow into our present–the only real arena for our activity–we can become consciously or unconsciously hemmed in, imprisoned in our guilt-ridden impermanence. A mixture of anger and apathy can thus easily begin to coat the heart, a hard and cold protective carapace against pointless cruelty and crushing meaninglessness. As an epitaph found with some frequency on Roman grave markers from the 1st Century put it: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.”

It is the light of the Risen Christ that permanently pierces this existential darkness; and the most radical, revolutionary report to ever resound in the words of this world remains what we heard read on Easter: “He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said” (Matthew 28:6). Though we interpret the “here” most readily in a spatial way, there is also the implication that the person of Jesus is not to be found in our categorical certainty about the finality of death and the immutable meaning of the past. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, what was “passed and beyond recall has been recalled”, even though outside the purview of human power. Jesus has gone, goes, and will continue to go where we can’t: in the Paschal Mystery His limitless love reaches what we cannot touch, transforming, reintegrating, and nullifying as needed. Even dark and desperate things won’t ultimately escape his wounded but healing hands, which can turn sins themselves “white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18). Thus the Resurrection reconfigures and reveals the real meaning of events, whether those which have already taken place, those which are now happening, or those which will happen in the future, synchronizing and synthesizing them with the free, sovereign love of God disclosed definitively in Jesus.

Yet this creatively redemptive realigning remains largely veiled to us; and what was written of those disciples who directly witnessed the Ascension, the ending note of the endlessly reverberating Paschal Mystery, applies just as much to disciples today: “they worshiped, but they doubted.” (Matthew 28:17) To accept and participate in the Resurrection, the Truth that truly sets us free, requires reassurance that Christ remains present and personally in control, regardless of what ruin may lie behind us or loom before us. So we must never cease to ponder and put into effect his final exhortation to proclaim the Good News, with constantly growing confidence in his words that “all power in heaven and on earth has been given to me . . . And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Amen.  

–Reflection by Brother Andrew