GLORY (Mind and Heart Raised Up)

 

Sunday evening sitting on Seamus McDonagh’s bench down at Rock-a-Nore. June first. A strong westerly wind presses cold against the back of my head, the sound of it merging with the waves washing radiant white on the shore.

The roar of wind and sea is all I can hear. And the occasional sound of twittering birds. Seagulls are strangely silent as they swoop and soar at high speed out into the horizon.

I lean back, looking up at the white wispy clouds and further into the blue of the sky. Then close my eyes, with mind and heart raised up to heaven. The glory of it.

The word GLORY has been with me all day and I estimate that I have used it at least sixty times today in prayer. It occurs more than six hundred times in the Bible, and it refers to the radiant manifestation of the majesty of God. We are touched by it; we enter into it in Jesus who shares His divine Glory with us.

This is what we are called to when we pray.

Our entry into glory is facilitated by two important movements of prayer that are presented to us on the Feast of the Ascension and on this seventh Sunday of Easter.

In Matthew’s account of the Ascension some of the apostles fall down on their knees and in the Acts of the Apostles they are found looking up into heaven. Both of these elements are shown to us by St. Stephen who “filled with the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God’s right hand.” And before falling asleep he fell on his knees. In the priestly prayer in the John’s Gospel chapter 17, “Jesus raised his eyes to heaven.” As He prays, so do we.

We pray every day in the Divine Office, “come in let us bow and bend low, let us kneel before the God who made us” (Psalm 95) and this action of bowing and kneeling opens the soul in a very profound way to the experience of God’s glory. Even when we are no longer physically able to kneel, the spirit of it is within us.

The act of looking upwards, lifting our eyes, gazing like Jesus and Stephen into heaven opens us in the same way. We learned it in the Catechism at a very young age that “prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God.” We are invited to it in the preface of the Mass, “lift up your hearts”, an invitation that we accept when we respond, “we lift them up to the Lord.”

And we need this raising up because for much of our life we are bowed down in a burdened way or we spend a lot of time looking down at our phones, or as we get older and uncertain of our steps, we keep our eyes focused on the ground. So taking moments to look up, be lifted up, is an important aspect of the blessedness to which we are called.

In the Book of Revelation, John not only gazes into heaven but he also hears the voice of Jesus, and I must confess that I feel burdened, even frightened by much of what I read there. But it is the Word of God, and I must receive it, respect it.

On this Sunday in Revelation, Jesus declares Himself to be the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. By this He indicates that He is complete, that all completeness is to be found in Him and when He prays for the unity of His followers, that unity must somehow flow from the completeness of Christ Himself, a completeness that we are called to share in.

It is He who restores all creation to complete unity, restores us to unity with Himself and each other, reversing what took place in the Fall in the Garden of Eden. It is the work of the devil to divide, and we so easily allow ourselves to be drawn into division, whereas Jesus unites, draws us into one. As He lives in the Father and the Father lives in Him, so we live in Him and He in us.

“Now the bond that creates this unity is glory. That the Holy Spirit is called glory no one can deny if he thinks carefully about the Lord’s words: The glory you gave to me, I have given to them. In fact, he gave this glory to his disciples when he said to them: Receive the Holy Spirit. Although he had always possessed it, even before the world existed, he himself received this glory when he put on human nature. Then, when his human nature had been glorified by the Spirit, the glory of the Spirit was passed on to all his kin, beginning with his disciples. This is why he said: The glory you gave to me, I have given to them, so that they may be one as we are one. With me in them and you in me, I want them to be perfectly one.”

(From a homily on the Song of Songs by Saint Gregory of Nyssa)