Long ago, unexpected eclipses raised terrifying questions: Would streams freeze, crops fail, herds die? Were the heavens disapproving of the dynasty? Was the cosmic order dissolving?
Nowadays, widespread post-Christendom God-forsakenness prompts us to feel that our cherished freedom is threatened — rather than empowered -- by recognition of intrinsic truth and goodness. Our sense that all is “very good” (Genesis 1:31) is suffering a “total eclipse of the heart.” Depression and addictions are metastasizing.
Vatican II taught, “The future of humanity is in the hands of those who are capable of providing the generations to come with reasons for life and optimism” (Gaudium et Spes 31). Pope John Paul II gave focus, saying, “first of all show the inviting splendor of that truth which is Jesus Christ himself” (Veritatis Splendor 83). The eclipse in mind, we can ponder Jesus in the cosmic big picture.
Jesus began proclaiming God’s kingdom and inviting conversion by teaching, healing, exorcising, forgiving sins, and other signs. He journeyed with 12 apostles to make them “fishers of men” (Mark 1:17). During the Passover meal the night before he died, Jesus passed the bread and chalice to them saying “take this ... eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you” (cf., Matthew 26:26), and then, “drink from ... the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” He was, in advance, defining his death as redemptively sacrificial! He commissioned his apostles to “do this in memory of me” (cf., Luke 22:19). Crucified on Golgotha, Jesus intoned Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mark 15:34), and died praying “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).
At a first modern glance, Jesus, like millions of martyred Jews and conscientious Gentiles, seems merely an impotent deluded dreamer, as if his wishes could make his death mean something special, as if his commission of 12 ordinary Jews regarding a ritual meal and a foreseen crucifixion could make history!
But on the third day, that death-defining, apostle-commissioning, God-adoring dead Jesus was resurrected. He sent the Holy Spirit to gather a Church (1 Corinthians 12) in faith, hope, and agape love (Romans 5:5) around those apostles to share in his sacrificial Eucharistic hallowing the Name of the Creator of this cosmos, definitively redeemed as this “very good” cosmos. His Last Supper words consecrating his death were not swallowed up as futile gestures. His resurrection showed that his passion and death had encompassed death.
His words did effectively define his death as the way God, breath-takingly revealed as love (1 John 4:7-16), is redemptively present with the multitude of otherwise suffering mortal God-forsaken human beings. His “do this in memory of me” continues making history as Catholic priests make his “once for all” (Hebrews 7:27, 10:10) cosmos-defining sacrificial adoration of God really present in every Mass (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1362-1381).
St. Paul noted “that all creation groans and is in agony even until now” (Romans 8:22). He exulted, “the world itself will be freed from its slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). Hope for glorious freedom has spread since Pentecost and the apostles’ beginning of evangelization, for Jews and Gentiles.
The Mass and the Sacrament of Confession have supported the Church’s members as they suffer the pains of withdrawing from sin, as they convert every aspect of their lives (religion, family, use of strength, sexuality, work and consumption, civic communications) to grow in and manifest Jesus’ Eucharistic adoration of God, as they journey with him, step by freely chosen step, in faithful, hopeful agape love.
Christendom achieved notable humane goods among rude Dark Age Gentile European tribes (Romans 11:17-24, Ephesians 2:11-22) when leaders believed in the Eucharistic Christ as king. The person-by-person, step-by-step manner in which Christ’s adoration of the Father is inculturated implies that sinful habits (even if not freely consented to) remain in each inculturation.
Undiscovered or unconverted complicity of believers in their culture’s resistances to agape love scandalizes and eclipses Christ for some people (cf., Matthew 11:6). Even before his death, some people turned away from the Eucharistic Christ and his apostles (John 6:60).
Pope John Paul II exhorted Catholics to repent of antisemitism, offenses against Church unity, coercion to promote truth and morals, and complicity in social injustices. He regarded “purification of memory” from scandalous habits as necessary for a New Evangelization needed for the scandalized and disheartened.
Such New Evangelization relies on alertness to social challenges rerum novarum, of new things (Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est 26-27) and “forms of conditioning” that obstruct free character-formative choices for “true growth” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium 171) to welcome each person and each community into faithful, hopeful, agape love, the love consummated in the Eucharist of Jesus.
Each person and community is welcomed with discernment of the particular step then needed to encourage the emergence of their unique identity into the “glorious freedom of the children of God,” redeemed for the General Resurrection’s extrapolation into heavenly eternal rejoicing. The Church, the Bride of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7, 21:2), longs for the irreplaceable contribution of each person and each community in her symphonic God-rejoicing: Gentiles from European, American, Arctic, and African tribes, and from Islam and the great Asian civilizations. If there are any extra-terrestrials, they too will find through any Catholic priest’s “take this ... eat of it, for this is my body,” the one really present “to bring all things in the heavens and on earth into one” (Ephesians 1:10).
It is Jesus who accomplishes all this by his Eucharistic God-adoring undergoing of all the death-spewing demeaning God-forsaking tendencies in our cosmos and in ourselves. His resurrected Eucharistic body and blood of sacrificial adoration nourishes what ultimately lasts: faith, hope, and agape love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
When “the full number of Gentiles enter in ... then all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25). The Church’s “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” will be enriched, in God’s good time, with the Hebrew “Kadesh, Kadesh, Kadesh,” together in the Church’s two-in-one-flesh union with Christ in his Eucharistic adoration of the Father, “so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The ingrafted Gentiles will rejoice with “all Israel” finally residing peacefully and justly in the Promised Land (cf., Acts 1:6-8), recollecting, dancing, and praising God in that “New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:9-10), that city which has “no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23). What wonders to work for, to sacrifice for, to invest one’s life in, to anticipate in prayer.
Marveling at the eclipse and its metaphors in history -- nourished by the Eucharistic Jesus who at the crux of the cosmos, the Golgotha cross, is the glory of humanity, and of our solar system, and of the Milky Way galaxy, and of the whole cosmos --, Catholic eclipse pilgrims can experience the eclipse as praise of God.
The eclipse over, we can return to parish and home life, and to “eucharistic” real presence with the elderly, with folks met on a Vincent de Paul or Catholic Charities visit, with the frightened and often abandoned young women in a crisis pregnancy clinic, with desperate immigrants, with fellow parishioners and neighbors who have different politics, or with family members we haven’t visited for far too long. We can confess our sins in the merciful Sacrament of Confession. We can encourage parish youth in priestly and consecrated vocations. But now, prepared for the eclipse and its metaphors in the big picture of human history, we can exult:
Great American total solar eclipses in AD 2017 and 2024, BLESS THE LORD.
Faithful Choirs of Heavenly Angels, BLESS THE LORD.
Big Bang and all cosmic forces, galaxies, nebula, stars, novas, planets, and moons, our own sun and moon (Daniel 3:62), BLESS THE LORD.
Those “holy innocents” who suffer dispossession of their lives (Matthew 2:16), marital capability (Matthew 19:12), or right minds (Mark 5:1-20), BLESS THE LORD.
Men and women, girls and boys, suffering for conscience, BLESS THE LORD.
All joys and griefs of marriage and single adulthood, BLESS THE LORD.
Those baptized into union with the Eucharistic God-adoring Jesus, BLESS THE LORD.
Young Christians pondering their vocations, BLESS THE LORD.
Deacons, priests, bishops, and popes pastoring the Church through stormy seas rerum novarum, BLESS THE LORD.
Blessed Ever Virgin Mary, Daughter of Abraham, Daughter of Zion immaculately conceived full of grace, Virgin Mother Honored by Muslims throughout the world, Mother of Evangelization, Star of the New Evangelization, Motherly Loosener, Untier, and Undoer of Knots, Mother of God, when our scandals eclipse your Son, BLESS THE LORD, AND PRAY FOR US SINNERS, NOW AND AT THE HOUR OF OUR DEATH.
Merciful Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, loving Creator of our freedom in goodness, HOLY, HOLY, HOLY: BE BLESSED AND ADORED FOREVER. AMEN!
Mark Frisby holds a master's degree in theology and a doctorate in philosophy from DePaul University in Chicago.
