The Christian Church’s central proclamation is called The Paschal Mystery, in caps to make sure everyone knows it’s of ultimate importance—and, well, crucial to my own wellbeing, now and forevermore.
I remember once asking a church official with a higher title than mine: What really IS the Paschal Mystery anyway? He coughed, cleared his throat, looked down on me and said, “My dear, you should know that one!” Then he walked away, leaving me feeling ashamed and angry.
Why then am I wondering and worrying over this doctrine now? Because I’m 83.
I’m a word person, so I make sure I know, again, that “Paschal” means pascha Passover/ Easter, from Greek pascha, from Hebrew Pesach or Passover. Good, it’s Christian and Jewish, nicely inclusive. My maternal grandfather was Jewish, so I’m all in, saved from all sides. Yes, but, I already learned all this in seminary, drank it into my flesh, practiced it regularly for 34 years as a priest at the altar of the sacrament, and wondered at its power. The Paschal Mystery. The Mystery part of it, I notice, is taken for granted. It’s like a way to field and discourage too many annoying questions like mine. Yet here I am asking it again—not because I doubt it, exactly, but because I doubt it, sort of. Am I saved, and if so, will it hurt much?
What helps my old-age distrust, when words grow tiresome, is graphic art, pictures that tell me more than words, images that call my heart to attention.
In this superb painting, called Creation and painted between 1508 and 1512, by Michelangelo Buonarroti Simoni for the Sistine Chapel, I at first see what I’ve always seen, even in Italy: the old man God, his anatomy delicately draped in a swath of cloth, looking feminine save for the beard, and surrounded by many cherubic faces in the clouds, creating the handsomely sinewed Adam, apparently on earth though not very distant. I’m fascinated. As I stare, my eyes fall on HANDS. I look down at my own hands wrinkled with veins, more blue and evident than they were when I was younger. Just now all I see in this painting is those two hands with perfectly drawn muscles, reaching, stretching, both together each one reaching with all its might, toward the other, their forefingers not quite touching—not quite. I stare and wonder at the depth of this mutual yearning between God and Humankind, between God and me, perhaps all Creation.
In all these small ways I learn again that The Paschal Mystery is not tie-downable (lovely new word). It’s not even strictly Christian, nor magically distant. It is plural. It is perennial—within the enchanting repetitive cycling of life-death-new life—and again—each cycle more beautiful than the last, each spark of life a brief affirmative certainty.
