In this Issue:

Can you Catch the Spirit off the Beaten Path?

Bridge-Building, in the spirit of John Paul II

People, Parishes, and Pictures across the Diocese

From the Bishop: Breaking Barriers

St. Stephen's Covington: Faithful ot the Kingdom

For Kentucky's Junior Miss, Allison Asay, faith matters every day

A tainted Easter message

Questionable decision

Peace for Teri Schiavo

Navajoland Bishop Stephen Plummer dies at 60

Reflection: Time-out

X-ercizing: Burgers, forgiveness, and alleluia

Pope John Paull II dies at 84: A message form the Presiding Bishop

Archbishop - Pope's last days a 'lived sermon'

Resources

Diocesan Calendar

Advocate Information

Past Issues

From the Bishop: Breaking the Barriers

Chuck Yeager was the first person to fly an airplane faster than the speed of sound. From our vantage point, 58 years later, it may not seem all that significant. It was, though, highly significant in its day, and I think it is still pretty significant today, if not for its technological accomplishment, then for its spiritual one.

Now Chuck Yeager was not the first person to attempt to break the sound barrier. Others had tried it before. Experimental aircraft had been technologically capable of breaking the sound barrier for some time. Still, theoretically possible or not, no one had ever done it. The reason is that as one flew closer to the speed of sound, the aircraft encountered a wall of wind that caused it to shake violently, feeling as if it were going to fall apart. Until Chuck Yeager came along, all the pilots had done the same thing, the only thing that made sense, which is that they slowed down. When they slowed down, though, the wind overcame them. Those who had tried before had died.

Chuck Yeager did what was unexpected, what did not make sense, what was counterintuitive. When he met the wall of wind that made his airplane feel like it was about to shake apart, instead of slowing down, he sped up. And he broke through the sound barrier. And lo and behold, once he went through the sound barrier, the turbulence outside stopped and the shaking inside ceased.

What makes Chuck Yeager a spiritual hero is his insight to do the counterintuitive, to seek the truth beyond our preconception of it, to face resistance with perseverance. Facing resistance with perseverance is what the spirit of God is all about because absolutely everything worth achieving, at least if it is of God, will necessarily face resistance in a world no more disposed to the godly than ours is.

The ministry of Jesus was constantly pushing at the religious sound barrier. When he dined, he dined in the home of Simon the leper, the most impure of people religiously speaking. When Jesus traveled from Galilee to Jerusalem, he did not take the religiously approved route by going around the region of Samaria, which lies between them. Instead he went right through Samaria, but that is not all. When he went through Samaria, with whom did he spend so much time opening the way of life? A woman, a Samaritan woman. And not just any Samaritan woman. A Samaritan woman with a disreputable past. When Jesus visited Jericho, at whose house did he stay? The house of Zacchaeus, a tax collector, someone despised by all the good, decent, self- respecting folks in town.

Now I don’t know much about what it is to be Jesus, but I have been around the block enough to know that pushing the barriers—religious, political, or cultural—anything that seeks to overcome the divisions among us and the barriers that we have built for ourselves will inevitably meet with resistance. The more one pushes, the more resistance there will be, at least that is, until the barrier finally falls. In Jesus, God has revealed that it is God’s intention to push on all the barriers of our own creation, even if we like to credit God with them instead of admitting that they were made by our own hands and minds and prejudices.

Jesus, though, is the ultimate in overcoming resistance to the will of God, particularly religious resistance. The cross is the ultimate in defeating evil counterintuitively, meeting evil with good, facing turbulence by speeding up, finding life by laying life down. It is hard to understand. It does not make sense. Entirely contrary to expectations, the cross defeats death and leads to resurrection, not at all unlike meeting the wind of wall close to the speed of sound by speeding up instead of slowing down.
It is always so when suffering is undertaken, not for the sake of suffering itself, but for the sake of another, especially for the sake of the kind of people Jesus undertook it for—the lepers, the tax collectors, the poor, the outcasts, the disreputable. And, if we have the courage to admit it, us.
The message of Easter is that we can never let the will of God to reconcile the whole world be defeated by the barriers of our own construction, even when those barriers are religious ones, even when those barriers are deep within our culture, even when those barriers are dearly loved by the powers that be, and most especially when the barriers are constructed by our fear, whatever our fear might be. The resurrection tells us that even our ultimate fear, which is of death, is not something that can overcome our spirits, at least if we do not allow it to.

The message of the resurrection is that our salvation is in meeting resistance not by succumbing to it but by overcoming it, in doing the counterintuitive thing and not slowing down but speeding up, and ultimately of giving up our lives in order to save them, which is the meaning, when you put them together, of the cross and resurrection of Christ.

Agape,

Advocate Online Staff:

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