VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The temptation to cling to the past – to hold on to what was, including something sacred -- can keep believers from truly embracing the hope offered by the risen Christ, said the preacher of the papal household.
The human desire to preserve memories of meaningful spiritual moments "is beautiful and even important," said Capuchin Father Roberto Pasolini, the papal preacher. "But it can also be an illness of the heart: loving life as it was, instead of seeking the life that rises again, preventing God from reopening the boundaries of our heart and our eyes."
Offering his final Lenten meditation to cardinals and senior officials of the Roman Curia April 11, Father Pasolini meditated on Jesus' words to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection -- "Stop holding on to me" -- describing it as the last and perhaps most difficult conversion that Christians are called to undergo.
Mary Magdalene "is already turned toward Jesus but does not recognize him," he said. "Only when Jesus calls her by name does she turn again. It's as if there's a second conversion -- the one we so often struggle to make."
This second conversion "is a movement we cannot accomplish by our own strength, but it happens when God manages to call us again to hope and to life, precisely us, by name," Father Pasolini said.
Mary Magdalene's instinct, he added, was to preserve what she had regained. "This is the last temptation we must face to access the joy of the Ascension," he said, "to take the risen Lord and confine him."
"That is, to draw the power of the Holy Spirit back into fixing our earthly lives, rather than letting it lead us into something totally new," he explained.
Father Pasolini turned to the Acts of the Apostles, recalling the disciples' gaze as Jesus ascends and two angels ask them: "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking at the sky?" While the preacher encouraged a contemplative gaze toward heaven, he warned against the religious temptation of idealism.
"Lifting our gaze upward is always the fascination of aspiring to some ideal world," he said, "projecting our life upward instead of continuing to walk the horizontal path that awaits us."
After the Ascension, the "immense responsibility" left to the church is to become the presence of Christ in history through lives shaped by the Gospel, Father Pasolini said. "The Lord leaves the stage of history to leave us, men and women, who are still very frightened, with the task of becoming fully human."
The preacher highlighted Jesus' words before ascending: "Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature." This, Father Pasolini said, is not only a geographical mission, but also an anthropological one.
"To bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth means also to bring it to the depths of humanity, going ever deeper," he said. Especially where human ways of thinking "struggle to understand or classify -- there, we are called to bring the light of hope."
"The apparent absence of God from the stage of history is, in reality, a great invitation addressed to us," Father Pasolini said. "To live and to love as witnesses, and to become what we were always meant to be: men and women who, passing through the narrow door of Christ's love, become facilitators of a new humanity."
