Mysterium Paschale

Reflections on the Resurrection from St Gregory's Abbey on the occasion of my baptism.

Hi friends, it’s been a while. I now plan on concurrently publishing everything I write for magazines on my own blog to keep a coherent record of my writing, and also to pay more attention to publishing standalone pieces on Substack that are too personal or scattered to make it in the editorial word. I really miss writing in a more casual and diaristic sense - so I plan to be on this website a lot more often. That said, this blog is now only nominally about perfume, and is also about my interests in literary/artistic criticism, second-wave feminism, inclusive orthodox theology, and prayer. On the latter subject, I was baptized this Easter at a historic Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian parish, and spent the preceding week on retreat at St Gregory’s Anglican Monastery. This is what I wrote between praying the Liturgy of the Hours and taking naps in the Abbey library. I consider this my baptismal testimony, and an explanation of why I spent the last year and a half intensely studying to convert to Christianity. As always, let me know what you think.

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I have a prayer I made up recently where I kneel before my home altar at night right before I go to bed and say “Lord, I try to be good” over and over and over again until I feel like it has fully lost its meaning. I call this prayer the “Lord, I try to be good prayer,” for obvious reasons. It reminds me a lot of one of my favorite existing prayers, one often attributed to Saint Francis, that begins “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” In many respects, this is what I believe it means to be Christian, no more, no less. The sum total of Christ’s message in the gospels can be broken down to a question asked of our lord by a Pharisee: “‘Which commandment in the law is the greatest?’” It is written: “He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39).”’ It is easy to take this for granted because of how frequently the so called golden rule is touted, but Christ himself states that “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,” so it seems any amount of attention we give to understanding these rules by our own faculties of human reason can never truly be enough.

I’ve come to learn the operative word in the “Lord, I try to be good” prayer is try. As Christians we are both perpetually striving towards goodness, and never quite arriving there. As winter melts to spring, I am reminded of Martin Luther’s sensationalized assessment of human nature and the saving grace of God: like a dunghill covered in pure white snow. Of course snow normally never quite covers unseemly things for long. It has to either be perpetually cold outside, or snowing continuously. Yet while the temperature of the world around us often feels closer to the warm fires of Hell, after His resurrection and in hope of our own, it is indeed snowing at all times. In Archbishop Peter Carnley’s book “The Structure of Resurrection Belief,” he asserts that not only is the Paschal Mystery – the bodily resurrection of Christ and His harrowing of Hell – that which upends man from eternal death, it is also that which assures man of his eternal life. Christ returning from the dead was both now and in the time of the early church, one of the most difficult aspects of the Christian faith. Yet “If Christ has not been raised,” Paul reminds us, “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished (1 Corinthians 15:14-15).” It is not enough to love the teachings of Jesus and believe He was a righteous man or even the son of God. We must proclaim with all our chest that he was put to death for our sake, and on the third day conquered death itself. For faith in the resurrection, even immediately after the historical event in AD 33, was notoriously impossible to prove, and indeed a testing mark of Christian maturity to believe. Carnley writes: “It is not that the impartial historian is able to turn his scientific procedures to the provision of a relatively neutral statement of fact concerning what may be understood to have happened, which the man or woman of faith might then appropriate in his or her experience of faith, repentance and salvation. Rather, the resurrection of Jesus can only be understood in the response of faith itself in which, at the same time, to believer subjectively knows himself to be saved. Assent to the resurrection and experience of salvation are inseparable (97).” In this sense, even if Christ’s bodily resurrection could somehow be proven scientifically, that would be beside the point. It is, as my newfound patron Saint Mary Magdalene found in the story of the first easter egg, simply our word against theirs. The Acts of the Apostles disaffectedly lists a Roman’s report in AD 60 that Paul’s strange conversion argument with his Jewish brethren was “about their own religion and about a certain Jesus, who had died, but whom Paul asserted to be alive. (25:19)” This sense-defying contradiction, that Christ can have both truly died for us and truly be risen, is at the core of the Christian faith, and is no less difficult to accept in your heart of heats than the equally true claim that the omnipotent intangible God of Moses himself has incarnated wholly and bodily in the flesh of a Palestinian man from Galilee named Jesus.

This is not to say one’s standing as a Christian is simply a marker of how immediately one is willing to blindly believe every word of the scriptures wholesale. There is a place for reason in faith, and God does not scorn our rational brains for thinking rationally. I am reminded of the apostle Thomas, who in John’s gospel initially struggles to believe his teacher has exited the tomb into which he watched Him be placed. It is written: “the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’ A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’ Thomas answered him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’ (20:24-29).”

While Christ applauds those who are naturally pre-dispositioned towards saving faith, he reveals himself to Thomas still – proving that while of course the straightest path to the truth is often the easiest, there are countless winding trains of doubt that through the subtle miracles and reminders of God’s presence, endear us towards knowing the Easter Christ like the contours of a staircase in the dark, not seen, but felt. My path has surely been the latter. Having started my conversion to Christianity unsurely attending Roman Catholic mass every few weeks, to becoming a Catechumen in a South Carolinian Eastern Orthodox parish, to departing for Chicago and wandering into a historic Anglo-Catholic Episcopal church, my own journey in faith was at all times nerve-wracking, and at worst enough to make me shut out the possibility of religiosity entirely for periods of time. I now write from the sparse woods of rural Michigan, in a humble Anglican Monastery governed by the rule of St Benedict, having worked around and compromised inclement and distressing issues with various Christian religious communities concerning my sexuality, my Judaism, and my tendency towards obsessive-compulsive masochism and selfish scrupulosity. There are countless ladybugs here, crawling up and around my desk and my bed and the windows like little wayward pilgrims: another Anglican invention – ‘our lady’s bugs’ – robed in regal red. I spend my mornings praying the rosary with divorced men who just lost custody of their daughters and whispering the daily offices with kindly life-professed monastics. Things move agonizingly slow here, and you can practically feel the screeching season shifting into spring. I am brought, of course, to my wrong-eyed idol Flannery O’Connor, and to the father of the epileptic asking with tears in his eyes “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” Near the end of her life O’Connor wrote privately to a confidant:

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you fell you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

I could just as easily turn the “Lord, I try to be good” prayer into a “Lord, I try to believe” prayer and retain its core message and meaning. In many respects, my faith has cost me a great deal, but it has also given me the structure by which I didn’t realize I was already trying to live my life. Of course, all religions will guide you to do good, but none as sacrificially and indiscriminately as Christianity. Indeed the core tenant of "Agape" (from Ancient Greek ἀγάπη, agápē), used in Christ’s commandment “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” is a revered word, used only ten times in the whole of scripture to refer to an unconditional and selfless form of love; the most pure form of the emotion being that which God feels to his Son and Christ felt for us on the cross. Whereas love based in eros responds to the conditions of its object of affection, Karl Barth defines Agape as love that loves its beloved "in utter independence of the question of his attractiveness.” Of course this plays out clearly in Golgotha – surely Jesus did not love and die for the sake of his executioners because of their exceptional character or eminent comeliness. It is one thing to know this in a historical sense, but it is another to extend this grace to our lives today.

If Easter not only concerns itself with Christ’s rising, but our own, and not only demonstrates the fruits of His love, but enables us to love the same way, it also not only has to do with new beginnings, but the nature of our earthly lives. Whereas in advent we look to the coming of our lord and await His second coming, in lent we foretell the death of Christ, and remind ourselves eminently of our own mortal fate. At the end and the bottom of the Paschal liturgy is nothing other than structure of reality itself. It is a bold claim, but a very old one. Modern theologians like Barthes have defined the resurrection as a transcendent non-event outside history, “which in essence lies beyond the scrutiny of historical investigation, [and what] vestiges.. are left behind in history must leave it essentially incomprehensible and mysterious (The Structure of Resurrection Belief, 125).” Indeed, a slippery strain of thought encapsulated in Willi Marxsen’s “The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical and Theological Problem” points out that none of the apostles or primitive Christians claimed to have seen or experienced Christ’s resurrection “as an event, a fact, a happening (24).” Rather, what is seen are the resurrection’s fruits – the risen Christ, appearing to Mary Magdalene and so forth. Many have used this to argue for symbolic interpretations of the Resurrection, that He is alive in Christendom’s collective memory, even that He was simply in transcendent existence pre-cross at events taking place after the crucifixion. This I think is a misguided step too far. That said, I do wonder if leaving out the particulars of how exactly Christ conquered death is meaningful. I think of the moments in which the risen Christ first appears to His friends and students, and how at first, they don’t recognize him. It seems easy from our perspective to understand the lone man in John’s gospel who instructs his disciples to cast their nets to the right side of their boat (21:6) is indeed Jesus. But time and time again, He comes to us in very subtle ways, in anonymous moments that take us utterly by surprise. He does not shock His faithful with an audience to the means by which He has conquered death, but rather, simply shows up afterwards, simply to be with us. It is as if the light of the Transfiguration was enough. That the majesty which shone forth in that single moment was evidence and product of God’s glory which had yet to even be won.

The alien race in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five are said to view time not in a linear line from past to present to future, but as a single, simultaneous reality where all moments exist at once. In a sense, I truly believe this is how Christology works, and how the Resurrection functions. There was never a moment in which the world had not already been redeemed, and yet, the specific moment in which it happened became the tiny lynchpin on which all of time summarily sits. It is no surprise that most of the world literally orients the calendars of their year around the life of Christ. There is in this sense, never a moment in time in which His humanity was not either anticipated or remembered. It is by this logic that He is with us, always. Not necessarily because human colonialism invented a Christian year-keeping system, but because God, who is eternal, took up temporal flesh at one specific moment in time – of course that moment is to constantly radiate out in both past and future directions.

On the edge of the grounds of St Gregory’s in Three Rivers Michigan, roughly thirty miles south of Kalamazoo, there’s a small cemetery housing the graves of several monastics. A stone’s throw away, there’s one grave without a wooden cross, written almost entirely in Hebrew. The Abbot explained to me that it belongs to the father of one of the monks, who had wished to be buried beside his son, but whose son had converted to Christianity and become a Benedictine monk. He awkwardly laughs as he explains the story to me – “it took a lot of meetings with his Rabbi to make this happen” – but happen it did. Before the gravesite I kneel and say the Shema in Hebrew, the one thing I retained from Hebrew School, and wonder the last time a Jew had prayed over his grave. There are stones there, and I add a small one on top of a twofold stack. When I pray the Shema, I cover my eyes with three fingers, as per tradition. It’s a very easy habit to make syncretic. Originally, the three fingers make a Shin, and the hand over one’s eyes outwardly shows the degree to which the truths contained within the prayer are incomprehensible to our faculties of sense in their full magnitude. This is still true when I place my hand over my eyes during the Glory Be doxology, but the trifold gesture takes on a new meaning. This is how I think of my conversion to Christianity at the present moment: not exactly abandoning my Judaism, but expanding upon it. It’s a slippery slope that has justified a great deal of anti-semitic conversion attempts, but for someone already seeking to explore the Christian tradition, it holds true. In this sense, I rely on the vast history of Theology which thinks about the Resurrection as an expansion upon the Passover. The word for Easter in most languages other than English is notably derived from Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover. Patriarch and early Christian Bishop Melito of Sardis gave a homily in the first century AD entited Peri Pascha, or ‘On the Pascha.’ It builds upon the typical form of a Passover Haggadah, narrating delivery from bondage into freedom, and explicates the sacrifice of Christ for our own eternal life. It is the first recorded use of the word mysterium, or mystery, to refer to the Pascha – a beautiful and apt word which would later be used in the eastern church to describe the nature of all sacraments. Melito of Sardis begins:

Understand, therefore, beloved,
how it is new and old,
eternal and temporary,
perishable and imperishable,
mortal and immortal, this mystery of the Pascha:
old as regards the Law,
but new as regards the Word;
provisional with respect to the type,
yet everlasting through grace;
perishable because of the slaughter of the sheep,
imperishable because of the life of the Lord;
mortal because of the burial in earth,
immortal because of the resurrection from the dead.

This to me is the peak of all record Christian thought on the subject of Easter. Simple, contradictory, and poetic, in the way that only things which are incredibly true can ever be. There is nothing left for me to say in response but amen, and alleluia. Lord, I try to be good. Lord, I try to believe. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

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‘Eat your Lipstick’ is a perfume blog by Audrey Robinovitz, @foldyrhands

Audrey Robinovitz is a multidisciplinary artist, altar girl, and self-professed perfume critic. Her work intersects with the continued traditions of fiber and olfactory arts, post-structural feminism, and radical orthodox theology. At this very moment, she is most likely either smelling perfume or taking pictures of flowers.