“IF THEN YOU were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not what is on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3, 1-4). Such was the magnificent reading Easter morning. This year, Easter brought with it an extra burst of life and hope in the wake of the horror of the mass suicide in Southern California, news of which began trickling in on the Wednesday of Holy Week and reached a crescendo of coverage that, at press time, had barely peaked.
The Easter morning words of St. Paul gained added poignancy as they were read against the backdrop of what most profoundly was a perversion of belief in the Easter mystery. Marshall Herff Applewhite promised his followers a kind of resurrection; he, too, counseled Heaven's Gate members “to think of what is above,” to fight this-worldly temptations (in what now turns out to be a bizarre twist in the cult leader's failure to come to terms with his homosexuality, an obsession that led to Applewhite's castration and that of several other men in his group).
Applewhite, on one of several videos, calmly set forth the logic of having to leave all worldly distractions, friends, family and eventually even the body behind. His was the voice of reason. And many clearly intelligent individuals, like the pair that appeared on CBS's 60 Minutes— one of whom thought nothing of basically abandoning his two-year-old daughter—found the man convincing.
Television news soon got access to the macabre footage taken by authorities as they explored the rooms were the bodies were found, purple shrouds and all, lifeless alabaster-white hands visible in some cases. The Sheriff's deputies'grim task contrasted with the experience of Mary of Magdala, who, John recounts, “came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb.” Soon after, she was able to tell the disciples: “I have seen the Lord” (Jn 20, 1;18).
David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, argued in The New York Times that society's gradual marginalization of and “crusade against” traditional religion is the main culprit. Americans, he said, “have never been more confused about good and evil, righteousness and wickedness, God and man.” Like so many of us, Applewhite's disciples felt a spiritual longing and, according to Gelernter, “their souls needed religion but their minds were stocked only with Hollywood junk.” Hence, their ready belief in the imminent arrival of an alien spacecraft dispatched to fetch them.
It is no doubt true that traditional religion has in many respects been virtually outlawed in contemporary society by the courts, the media and other social elites, if you will. But some of the blame must certainly be shouldered by Christian, Jewish and other religious leaders for not doing more to broadcast the riches of their traditions. Much if not most of their energy is spent on maintaining a defensive posture vis-a-vis the evils of the world instead of, pardon the expression, a more proactive approach to responding to people's hunger for meaning.
Christianity for one can bank on a storehouse of mysticism that, properly deployed, would leave the average New Age practitioner and crackpot cultist in the dust. Our heaven is for real. The trick is how to get the word out beyond the flatness, facile optimism or mere moralizing that marks so many of the homilies and other Church-sponsored occasions the average person is exposed to.
Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c. 140-200 AD), spoke of heaven as a place of “communion with the holy angels, and union with spiritual beings.” For Augustine, heaven means that “we shall have eternal leisure to see that He is God. … There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end.” Those with a penchant for science would enjoy Cardinal Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), for whom heaven lay at the heart of a cosmos animated by “the science of salvation.” “Jesus, in his grandness,” the cardinal said, “is the immobile sun which makes all things move.”
This is but a smattering of the enormous riches the Church has to offer. It is a shame to let such great potential go unused. Because in the end there is no doubt that the Christian message in its fullness is a cure for all that ails us and that brought some to follow Applewhite into the abyss. But there is hope for them, and their families, too. “What we proclaim in this Easter season is ‘an empty tomb,’” said Bishop Anthony Pilla of Cleveland, president of the bishops'conference. “We proclaim that Christ Jesus cannot be found among the stench and decay of death. He has crushed that under foot and can only be found gloriously and victoriously alive. Can we see this?”
— JK