The news about Anthony Bourdain’s early death by suicide hit me hard this morning. His travelogues were sensitive and insightful, particularly about the fragility and beauty of the human experience. Even as he experienced genuine highs in his exploration of the world, he clearly found meaningful connection in more intimate moments simply connecting with new friends on an individual basis. Travel is broadening in the way it opens us up to new cultures but also in the way it puts us into contact with other human beings.

Travel also has its cost. It’s become a bit of a joke that the secret to a happy life is to go travel the world, eat good food, and gather unique experiences. This is what blessed people are supposed to do while the rest of us are stuck in the various hometowns we cannot escape. To the extent to which we consider travel a panacea for our boredom, it will always disappoint. Not that this is what Bourdain thought he was doing, but his life proves that a man can live a beautiful, meaningful existence that is greatly envied and yet peace is still fleeting. For a certain personality (mine) travel is a fraught experience. I love it, but when I return to my every day existence the crushing reality of homesickness settles in like nausea. This, I want to be clear, is after I return home. Everyone’s psychological landscape is unique, but in the distant past I was clinically depressed. I’ve since recovered to a great extent, but I shudder to think how travel would often make my situation worse.

Travel is still worth the effort, but it forces us into a confrontation with the basic fact that this world is not our home. That everywhere we go, we leave behind somewhere else. In our wake is the detritus of old friends, the ghosts of college towns, pictures of beaches that have long since ceased to bear the mark of our footprints.

In his travelogue Remote People, Evelyn Waugh is brutally honest about the psychological cost of travel. He writes about how we tell stories of travel with selective memory, forgetting the pains and inconveniences, but also the one, inescapable, supremely devastating terror of melancholic personalities – boredom. He writes, “The boredom of civilized life is terminable and trivial…I am constantly a martyr to boredom, but never in Europe have I been so desperately and degradingly bored as I was [while traveling]”. He then delicately dissects the concept of human boredom, writing from a hotel in the heart of Africa while waiting for a steamship whose arrival is indeterminate. The point being, no matter where we are or what we are doing, a human being must struggle with the highs and lows of existence. Travel is a beautiful thing, but it isn’t a magic pill to solve the existential sickness that ails us.

Waugh manages to return to London after an absence of several months in Africa and finds himself immediately bored. He ends up in a trendy underground club, surrounded again by the gossip and wit of high class society. He drinks fancy drinks, sees fancy clothes, hears trendy music. Why travel? “Just watch London knock spots off the Dark Continent,” he writes. Where ever we find ourselves, we are in the midst of it.

Life is achingly fragile, and we go forth like a dream. Love each other. Love life, and always remember that even in our lowest moments, we are aching for Home.

I still remember certain books from my formative period vividly. When I was younger I would happily spend hours and hours tucked away in my bedroom reading incredibly thick, dense books that I’m sure I only fractionally understood. The problem is, now that I’m older I no longer have the energy to read books of that caliber. My literary life now is PG Wodehouse novels, Evelyn Waugh travelogues, and watching Brideshead Revisited once a year. I do believe that there’s a certain amount of youthful exuberance that gets us through very difficult books when we’re younger. I’m pretty sure, for instance that I once read Being and Time cover to cover and after that, in youthful impetuosity, immediately started Either/Or. There’s no way in the infinite horizon of dasein that I’d ever make it through those books now. Well, maybe I’d re-read some of the Aesthete’s advice. He seems like a pretty cool guy.

The point is, the formative stage for any human being is precious, so don’t waste it. Here’s my list of the best books to read each year of your life until you get a job and your only cultural input is listening to sports talk radio. Feel free to intensely question my choices.

6 – the ABCs. It’s, like, fundamental. Go ahead and memorize it and sing it if you want. But the important bit is to actually learn to read it.

7- The Little Prince. Read the best book ever written before you get too old to understand it.

8 – Black Stallion. It’s about time for that developmental stage where you get into a major pony obsession. Go with it.

9 – Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Honestly, I still re-read this. It stretches the imagination in delightful ways and is a masterpiece of whimsy and creativity.

10 – The Chronicles of Narnia. Before this age, it’s too scary. After this, it’s too tame.

11 – Ender’s Game. Kids are better than adults. It’s time you learned that.

12 – Little House on the Prairie. You’re about to hit the big time, your teens, and it’s time you learned how to take care of yourself.

13 – Lord of the Rings. Your imagination is primed and ready. If there’s one thing a thirteen year old can do, it’s read an incredibly long, dense trilogy full of insanely intricate details and then obsess about it through role playing and memorizing fictitious languages.

14 – Discworld. It’s a mythological detox from Tolkien. Sometimes books are just for fun and kind of pointless but they’re also really clever and you suspect the author totally squandered his talent and that’s okay.

15 – Hamlet. It’s a rite of passage. You have to get this thing read and you’ll probably hate it, but you’ll thank your English teacher for this later. It’s almost laughable how little I appreciated this at the time and how I fall more in love with it every time I re-read it. Is it possible that Shakespeare is under-rated?

16 – Catcher in the Rye. Finally, someone who understands you. Sure, the guy you relate most to in life is probably a sociopath created in the mind of a reclusive, anti-social hermit. But a little empathy is nice wherever you can find it.

17 – Catch 22. The book you should’ve read last year because it’s way funnier and darker.

18 – Blood Meridian. You’re about to graduate high school and it’s time you understand the world is a violent, biblical place, kid.

19 – Inferno. You’re going to want to store the experience of reading this away so in twenty years when you have your mid-life crisis you have it as a resource. You don’t want to wander the dark wood alone, do you?

20 – Infinite Jest. If you’re in college and have followed this reading list up to this point, you’re just becoming pretentious enough to tackle this. The funny thing is, it isn’t pretentious at all. It’s amazing and human and thoughtful and sad.

21 – On the Road. This is it. This is your moment to get in the car and drive. It doesn’t matter where you go, just be sure you give it zero thought as you slip behind the wheel. DO IT NOW

22 – Brothers Karamazov. When you’re older you won’t have the time or energy. I couldn’t imagine trying to read this now that my brain is fried by work meetings, the internet, and talking to other adults on a daily basis. This book, I seem to recall, is really good, you guys.

23 – The Aeneid. This may be the last book you ever read, so make it a good one. It’s time to find your place in the world and do great things. Spoiler alert, Aeneas never makes it. Life is open-ended and uncertain, but it is most definitely a heroic adventure. Go found your Rome.

How did poetry and theology become so disconnected from one another in the modern age? “If one were to walk away from Domestico’s book under the impression that he is simply arguing for a shared sentiment between modernist theologians and poets, though, one would be mistaken. This shared feeling of crisis between Barth and Eliot is based on a shared theological concept: namely, the notion that this temporal world is under the judgment of eternity, and that any moment of divine presence is always punctiliar and fleeting.”

Ian McEwan tried helping his son write an essay about one of his novels, and landed him a C+. “I confess I did give him a tutorial and told him what he should consider. I didn’t read his essay but it turned out his teacher disagreed fundamentally with what he said.”

An interview given by the last slave ship survivor in the 1930s has recently surfaced. “Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different plantations.”

Guest post by Denise Renner.

For we have not by following artificial fables, made known to you the power, and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ; but we were eyewitnesses of his greatness.” (2 Peter 1:16)

We received an icon of Saint Catherine of Alexandria as a gift a couple years ago. She hung in our son’s bedroom, out of sight and out of mind, until we moved and I placed her in our kitchen. Having her as a constant companion throughout my day made me curious to know more about her. And her story is extraordinary.

As a young Christian girl in Egypt during the 4th century, she confronted the Roman Emperor Maximinus II because of his violent persecution of Christians. Debating and ultimately converting some of his scholars only served to further anger the emperor, who sentenced the insolent and eloquent Catherine to death. But at her touch, the wheel she was condemned to die on was destroyed. She was ultimately beheaded, and her body was transported to Mount Sinai by angels—a Catholic saint if ever there was one.

But then I read the boiler plate: there have been embellishments, and there is a lack of historical documentation; there are even claims that Catherine did not exist, that she is a purely legendary figure based on the pagan philosopher Hypatia.

This bothers me.

Maybe because I grew up reading literature that dealt with the stuff of everyday—suffering, loss, death, tragedy—and spent little time in mythical worlds and the fantasy genre, I find the stuff of real life infinitely more compelling than smidgeons of reality padded and puffed up beyond all recognition with the fantastic. A big part of my conversion was realizing that truth could objectively be found in the Church. After conversion, it was disheartening to discover what felt like an absence of just that.

Things I had previously dismissed—saints, apparitions, relics—were suddenly becoming part of my culture, and part of the heritage we were passing on to our children. I remember the first time I heard the term “pious fake” applied to a relic. I thought, Well, of course. Nothing sounded more Catholic than fake bones and body parts being venerated all over the world by laypeople who did not know the difference, and probably did not even care.

If relics could be both pious and fake, then what of the Communion of Saints? Could a saint be both the stuff of legend and still intercede on our behalf? What of Saint Catherine, who was either a character in a fictional romance or a devout Christian martyr, depending on who you ask and where you looked for information?

Of one thing I am certain: the inner Doubting Thomas has surfaced more since becoming Catholic. There was less to question as a Lutheran, less demanded of the faithful. I accepted Martin Luther, who was one man, terribly and fearfully easy to relate to. Not so in the Church founded by Jesus Christ. I struggle mightily to relate to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, even the most simple version of her life: a young girl martyred for her faith. Even if you lop off the bit about confronting the emperor, her torture and beheading, and the transportation by angels—she is still much more than I was at her age, and more than I am now.

So why gild the lily? Perhaps that is just part of the mystery of the faith and its transmission to future generations. And maybe we all struggle, in our own unique way, with some form of perceived “excess” when we come into the Catholic Church.

There are those who cannot understand the elaborate ceremony, the vestments, the candles, the incense; and those who stumble in the silence, who cannot find a toehold when confronted with the Latin Mass. Some cannot comprehend the Eucharist, the papacy, Marian devotion, or how the Divine Office can be so complicated. For me, there is the shimmering veil of fantasy that seems to envelope the Communion of Saints.

Perhaps, like the vestments and candles and processions, these embellishments and legends are meant to inspire, in the same way we use fairy tales to introduce children to the nature of good and evil, to see Hansel and Gretel succeed in escaping from the witch. And are we not all children of God?

I have spent a considerable amount of time reading fiction. I know the stories are not true when I start to read them, but that does nothing to prevent the characters from lodging in my imagination, from being people I “know” in the sense that I have spent time in their worlds, in their circumstances, and in their mind. Before becoming Catholic, I was able to commune with Saint Augustine through his Confessions, able to know him, and to be influenced by him, all these centuries later.

I would argue that I know Anna Karenina as well, that I have connected with her and a whole host of characters that are fictional, or loosely based on real people; and whether only partly real or totally imagined, each character reveals some truth about human nature and our existential condition, which is not only possible in fiction, but is the purpose of all good literature.

Perhaps the story of Saint Catherine’s life as it has come down to us is simply inspiration for confronting the pagan emperors of today, yet another example in a long list of those who have stood for what is right and true—even if the details are a bit fuzzy. After all, Saint Joan of Arc claimed that Saint Catherine was among the saints who counseled her on her own blazing course through history.

And yet, somehow it remains easier to accept a purely fictional character’s nod to the truth than to fight my knee-jerk resistance to legends of the early saints. I want the Barque of Peter to take on no water, to be neat and tidy. To examine one life, one legend, and find holes leads to questions about what Joan of Arc truly saw, said, or heard and whether this divine and holy communion can be trusted. Tolstoy never suggests that we commune with Anna Karenina, and we have no expectation that her role will transcend that of a good story. But if we believe in Christ’s Church, which can neither deceive nor be deceived, then Saint Catherine is not merely a historical figure, and not merely good fiction, but a sister, a counselor, a confidant, and a companion of God.

We do not live in the same culture as the early saints. Indeed, we now have “proven” saints, whose lives, deaths, and miracles are sanctioned by experts within the Church. Saint Catherine did not leave an ecclesiastical paper trail as proof of her holiness: we only have the tradition.

But if we trust the wisdom Mother Church has amassed, then we must be able to call on Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ora pro nobis, with the joy of the children who delight in the death of the witch and run to the open arms of their father. In truth, these legends provide abundant evidence—not of the saints, but of their foe, for he is one we share, and about whom there is ample proof: the pagan, the evil emperor, the Devil.

I had not given Saint Catherine much thought when I placed her in the kitchen. I would have chosen Mary Magdalene, as a reminder of my sins. But instead I have this ancient martyr and her wheel of torture beside me, accompanied by the soft sound of angel wings carrying her body away. She bothers me because I cannot “know” her, because I have no proof. But in just this way Saint Catherine, and all the saints, point beyond themselves to that unsurpassed mystery of the faith presented to us in the Mass. In truth, no saint, relic, miracle or intercession is as astounding and incomprehensible as that which occurs every day, all around the world—when the silence of the sanctuary is broken by the ringing of the bells and the priest raises the host and declares: “The Body of Christ.”

Denise is a wife, mother and convert who makes her home in the Pacific Northwest.

Guest post by Renée Darline Roden.

When I tell my children about traveling in Europe in my early twenties, I will tell them stories of profound, existential loneliness—the sort of loneliness that reveals God to you.

Most of the world’s religious traditions make space for loneliness in the form of asceticism. Most have included a variation on the ancient practice of seeking God in spaces of loneliness. Holy men and women retreat to the high places, deserts, mountaintops, to geographies where wild wind out-roars the noise of the maddening crowd, and resolves into a quiet palpable to your ears. These single-minded souls seek the holy in the silence of nature far from other people, in the barren space where a heart can slowly decipher the voice of the divine.

Non-monastic orders of religious life, men and women who live their lives ministering in the hearts and homes of ordinary folk, often also mandate this precious time spent apart, in what is called a novitiate year. Before full admittance to religious life, holy hopefuls must undergo a shorter time of monastic trial. This ascetic period tests these novices’ mettle, throwing them into extreme discomfort, agitating their sense of self and their grasp on God.

My friend went to one such novitiate on the side of a mountain in Colorado. Studying to be a priest, my friend was intending to live life on the plains, following his flock into their valleys of darkness, not to dwell on a mountain forever. But he went to the foreign heights of mountain to discover how to listen to the uncanny voice of God. To hear God in the roaring silence of yourself and the mountain wind is to begin to hear God—that which is untamed, that which is radically unlike—in the voice of a neighbor.

My nomad novitiate has been not a mountain, but Europe’s urban landscape. My peripatetic monastery’s bricks are built of the weird asceticism of drinking wine while writing as though my life depended upon it—perhaps, when we are alone, it does—on a crisp spring night in Montmartre’s Place du Tertre. Periods of testing begin with sinking my teeth into a burger patty of juicy Irish beef on a bridge above the Liffey, and end surrounded by couples necking while the rhythm of the city and the river washes over and under my solitary meal and me. Wandering through the Norfolk countryside, in search of a medieval pilgrimage site, I find my novitiate roaming through back roads, seeking connecting bus stops in villages like remote North Stars.

There have been other lives lived in Europe: hiking in Cumbria and Kylemore with friends, falling in love (or something) under Italian sunshine, and laughing nights in London pubs. For some reason, these moments are not those which define Europe to me. When I think of tramping around Europe, I think of all the bizarre, singular moments and movements of loneliness which have been stamped on my heart. Eating crème de marrons crepes while walking through Pigalle. Tracing the steps of thousands of dead souls in Auschwitz on my birthday. Walking from the Bologna airport to its city center in the rain. In these moments, of wandering in solitude, of paying sacred attention to the world around me, in its grungy discomfort, in its dazzling whirl of rain-stained colors, in its heavy scars of horrors and weighty ghosts, in each strange episode of aimlessness the same, mysterious presence—indefinable except in its almost-absence—shimmers just below the epidermis of the empirical. Who are you? I ask the intangible pulse in each step. And why have you led me here?

Perhaps what guides me through the loneliness (why do I persist in traveling alone?) is the hope stronger than desire that the revelation of the divine is just on the other side of the mountain. So thinks the novice, whose faith allows him to endure one more night of loneliness.

In all the searching, the wandering alone through the maze of Rome’s Centro Storico, through the thin paths of English countryside with nothing but a written map and a strong instinct towards home, I search for the God whose whispered voice lies just beyond my footsteps. The promise of divine revelation made by mountain wind tantalizes my soul through its half-epiphanies in the chaotic symphony of the city.

One cold March afternoon, in Rome’s Piazza della Chiesa Nuova, I bit into a steaming Nutella crepe, munching like a smug five-year-old, protected by a strong halo of unassailable ecstasy. In this sort of self-less euphoria of eating rich, good food, watching the traffic speed by on the corso, without the distraction of anything other than my own sensations, I became deeply part of the place. As my ears attuned to the rhythm of the traffic, I counted each breath, taking in the air of the other lungs swirling around me. In silence and sugar-induced stomachache, I could attend to the world with the captivated curiosity of childhood so hard to recover in adulthood. Solitude sharpens the senses. In solitude, we can begin to see what in our hearts and in our environs is untamed and unlike. In this uncanny, we can make out a whisper heralding the divine.

When I tell my children about Europe in my early twenties, I will describe for them the infectious throb of Trastevere’s nightlife surging through my blood. I will tell tales of writing alone in cafés and praying alone in churches. I will paint for them the picture of soaking up June sunlight in Munich’s Englischer Garten. I will paint for them a portrait of the quiet peace of being present which runs deeper than restlessness and can only be found in loneliness.

I will share with them all those strange moments in which I have sought the quiet voice who leads or dogs my steps. Perhaps, they, too, will become seized by the search for the strange deity whose challenge calls in both the following and the guiding: do you trust me?

Renée Darline Roden is a master’s student in theology at the University of Notre Dame by day and a playwright by night. She blogs about the sightings of grace in her life at Sweet Unrest.

Guest post and photos by Brent Livingood.

A little bit ago now, but not nearly long enough, I briefly found myself at the base of a waterfall in Polk County, Tennessee. It was the middle of the week, a Wednesday, I think, and I was at the low end of a long trail on a tall mountain. No one was in the woods but me.

The water thundered over the ridge called Benton Falls slapping the rocks a hundred times before falling back into a susurrant creek. I imagined what it must be like to be the cragged edge enduring the endless water drops. Each drop falling against the exposed strata, one after another, after another. One drop, two, four, eight… Drop after drop until time evaporates. Even rock cannot endure this tortured life.

The creek is my mind that never forgets, each drop a memory splattered against rock – my body, which tallies with all the others, counting up an exaggerated accumulation: all the hurts and pains, the embarrassments and humiliations, the failures and my ruined will. The roar carried between the mountain walls isn’t the sound of water, but the lacerated cry of rock reliving water’s memory again and again.

The history of Christianity is a pageant summoning the greatest sinner, according to Origen’s nemesis Celsus. And we’ve all raised our hands and said, I am. I am. And my hand is raised too, waving with the enthusiasm of an elementary school child who knows the right answer. It is me. It is me. I am the greatest sinner. Shame on me. Shame. On. Me.

I am a disappointment to the ghosts, both here and gone, who hover in my head howling about my drinking, filling in lost stretches of time. I am the greatest sinner, a wretched, lost soul, near the penumbra of hopelessness; sometimes I can no more believe in redemption than I can silence the sound of water’s memory.

And that is my goal, if I have a life goal: to die in quiet – to no longer hear the constant rumble of my mind rehashing long-ago bouts that have been distorted and magnified by the pervasive stream of consciousness.

“But I have calmed and quieted my soul,” writes the psalmist whose description of salvation is a hard-won grace constantly staging an escape. Will I find that laconic repose? Is it possible to live by the falls and be dry? Can I calm and quiet the storm of my mind? Walk on water?

This mind, this creek that only falls, poured down replies; No, no you won’t. You can’t.

I’ve been counseled with many dumb ideas. Surely my favorite is that I shouldn’t be so negative. I should learn to love myself and forgive myself. I should think other thoughts, as though a hostage need only walk away from her captors.

Water can only fall, I want to say, as if those who claim I’m going through a “phase” could possibly understand. It cannot help but fall.

Late in the second century or early in the third, Tertullian, a Christian whose spiritual ardor would later in life fetch him the company of eccentrics and ascetics and, possibly, heretics, said prison was a sanctuary for Christians. In prison, the Christian was “free from causes of offence, from temptations, from unholy reminiscences; you are free from persecution too.” Standing alongside Benton Falls, I take Tertullian to mean that prison is a dry place, empty of thought, amnesia blessed.

There’s that expression, “like water breaking against the rock,” which seems to suggest that the rock is stronger than water. It will endure. It can take the unending assault. But whoever believes this has not watched a rain-filled creek hitting stone. They haven’t heard the cry of the stone. They haven’t noticed the stone’s spooned out curves. The water is winning. The water always falls against the stone. And I think how wise Tertullian was. There is a freedom from unholy reminiscences, a place without persecution. But it isn’t near the river. It isn’t underneath the waterfall. It isn’t in the mind.

Salvation is in a prison without windows, a place where reflection and thought are as forbidden as self-absorption. The unholy reminiscences cannot spoil the soul who flirts with the fatuous slouch; so, I covet his company.

I am fatigued and water is heavy. Take it away. Honor your promise. Wipe the tears from my eyes – these drops that leak and fall from the crevices of my mind.

But this is all wrong. Tertullian wasn’t right. Or better, he wasn’t talking about what I want him to be talking about. The only escape is through the water, not away from it. I must submerge myself, drowned my mind in the water’s cacophony, and remember; “When nothing existed but chaos, you swept across the dark waters.” The water will destroy me, the onslaught of memory and thought – the unholy reminiscences. But this destruction is some sort of reconstruction too. Jesus said to the man hanging next to him that paradise was near, but he also meant that destruction was closer. This gift of water calls to our remembrance the nothing we were so that a tabula rasa awaits – a new start, a clean slate, a mind without experience.

I hiked out of the woods feeling refreshed. Silence will eventually come. And without meaning to, I pulled into the liquor store on the way home.

Brent Livingood is a recovering pastor with dependency issues. As a way of staying healthy, Brent enjoys exploring creation through the lens of faith and creative writing. You can follow his experiences and occasional insights at www.brentlivingood.com.

This is a reprint of my homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension. It seemed fitting to share.

Today is the Solemnity of the Ascension of Our Lord. Having risen from the grave, Christ must now rise to the right hand of his father. St. Augustine says, “Let our hearts ascend with him,” meaning that just as Jesus brought us with him out of the grave and into the sacramental life, so too does he bring us with him to heaven in the Ascension.

Christ is our Head. We are the Body. We are connected still, and where he is we are also. The Ascension is a fellowship and what happens at the altar during the Mass, quite literally, is an ascension. It’s tempting to think that when the bread is consecrated, Our Lord comes down from heaven into the host. That picture is actually backwards. What happens is the Host becomes a gateway to heaven and when we encounter the Real Presence of Jesus, it is because we are drawn up into heaven to his presence.

If you’re a church nerd like me, it’s kind of interesting to think about the metaphysics of transubstantiation, but what does it really mean for our lives to say that we are lifted up to the Lord?

Well, first it means that God is far different than his detractors suppose.

He is not, as some might allege, angry at his creation. He is not out to get us, not looking to reject the unrighteous or declare us inferior. God, for some reason that I cannot fathom, notices us and desires the best for us. It’s kind of a mystery, if you think about it, why God loves us so – but he does – he takes on human flesh, he makes the body sacred, he has a mother and a father, he has friends. God cries, and worries his mother, and feels lonely in the abandonment of Gethsemane. I don’t know, maybe as a kid he had a dirt-bike like I had and built a ramp for it and bloodied his nose. The point is, God is right here in the midst of it with us. Everything you care about, he cares about: your children, your family, your hobbies, your job, what keeps you awake at night, everything.

This is the second reason the Ascension is important. When Jesus ascends to Heaven, he takes us and everything we care about and enthrones us with him.

People all the time want to talk to me about how they’ve rejected God. It’s weird, they see a priest and just cannot wait to inform him that they’ve evaluated and dismissed everything he holds dear. I think they just want to talk and don’t know how to start, but they may as well hand me a note that says in all capital letters, “YOUR LIFE IS A LIE.” The problem is, when these people begin to describe to me the God that they don’t believe in, I’m not actually familiar with that God. Reject God if you want, but you should actually know what you’re rejecting, not just some distant, demanding patriarch, but the spark of divinity that makes every single thing in this world so amazing.

Here’s a secret that non-Church-goers and adherents of a secular, Godless society don’t want you to know. The kind of life they seek and desire in the end turns out to be really, really boring. We saw that just this past week with the big fashion show in New York where all the celebrities wore Church-themed outfits. A lot of Christians were offended when they saw the pictures, and I can certainly see why. It made me angry too, mostly, though, because the clothes were so boring. Without the spark, without the Christian imagination and the sacramental outlook on life that maybe, just around the corner is a love so dangerous and white-hot that it will burn you if you get too close and we only see it by the shadow of its flame. Without that, all those deeply intriguing symbols of faith, the Cross, the Papal miter, images of the blessed Virgin and saints, all of it was emptied of excitement and became bland. If you’re a designer and all you can think to do with the regalia of the Pope to make it exciting and dangerous is to show more body parts, your imagination is dead. Take a simple counter example, the papal robes of John Paul II. They’re fanciful and odd, and not at all a costume. They are the sign of the spiritual power of St. Peter. John Paul wore those clothes when he stared down bloodthirsty communists, when he offered mass for a million people, when he knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, when he blessed the people of Rome as he was dying. The Catholic imagination is far more daring than anything else out there. Take, for instance, the angel costume on one starlet. It was risque and had big wings and seemed dramatic, but compare it with Ezekiel’s description of a real angel, wheels upon wheels of fire, covered head to toe in eyes, hovering in place but seemingly always on the move, so powerful that human words fail to describe it. Nice try Hollywood, but your imagination isn’t nearly as adventurous as that of the Church.

This is the third reason the Ascension is important. Through it God redeems our imagination.

Because God has returned to Heaven and prepares a place for us, we are able to live in hope and to dream. CS Lewis once said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I can see it, but because, by it, I can see everything else.” In other words, when we internalize the heart of religion and begin to see the way that God sees, suddenly the world shifts into focus, and what we see is endlessly fascinating. This is why G.K. Chesterton says that the imagination makes facts into wonders. Secularism, on the other hand, imposes a mechanized view of the world. Everything is functional, everything is practical, everything is physical, and nothing is a mystery. This is not wisdom, it is the impoverishment of the imagination.

Sometimes this functional attitude creeps into the Church. For instance, I might arrive here thinking that the purpose of the Mass is to see what I can get out of it. The function of the mass is to give me self-help type advice, or to give me a certain feeling. In fact, our worship isn’t about what Jesus offers us, although he does indeed offer us infinite riches. Our worship is about encountering the splendor of God, seeing him in all his glory and giving him the adoration that he deserves. For this, we need the imagination. All of the sensible things that Catholicism is so good at, strange but beautiful garments on the priests, singing, visual arts, incense, architecture, this is all instructive. Plato is helpful on this point when he writes about how Socrates learns from a little old lady the value of imaginative, sensible beauty and how through it we ascend to the realm of eternal reality.

Kids are good at this, by the way. Observe how they watch during Mass, the types of questions they’re asking, the way I can invite them to trace the letters in the Gospel book and they’re wide-eyed and eager to do so. These things excite their imagination and are formative in their ability to encounter God.

We adults must also continue to form our imaginations. St. Edith Stein says that we ought to think of ourselves like plants. With a plant, there is organic growth which does not, “come about wholly from within: there are also exterior influences which work together to determine its formation . . . just so, in the soul’s formation, exterior factors as well as interior ones, play a role.”

So now do we see why God takes a human body and ascends to heaven? Here are our three points again: 1) God is with us entirely, 2) we ascend with him, and 3) he is the fulfillment of our imagination. He loves us so much, and he made all of this for us. We aren’t meant to be bored here on earth, we’re meant to be endlessly amazed, and through this world that he is redeeming right along with us we are lifted up as Heaven unfolds before our eyes.