I keep thinking of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, what he said once, that, “The wicked walk round in circles.”[1]
I keep thinking that’s probably the best way to think of us now—wicked, walking in circles—all of us; not just them—whoever them is for you—but us too. Like they say about dogs and vomit, we keep going back for more.[2] By now it’s the repetition of the thing that makes it so maddening for so many. There’s a reason Dante depicted hell as a descending pit of circles—round and round and round the damned go; over and over, the wickedness is repeated. I’ve said all this before; I’ve written about it all before; you’ve heard from me before. I’ve become tedious even to myself. “The wicked walk round in circles.” I’ve said all this before; you’ve heard it before. In this sick world of war and violence and the daily degrading mass destruction of life: school children in Uvalde were shot, many of them killed, this week, two teachers as well—a tragedy shoving Buffalo out of the way. I thought ten years ago Sandy Hook would have changed us as a society, but the wicked walk in circles. And so here we are, and here I must try to preach the gospel.
But I’ve learned how difficult it is to preach, to say anything meaningful at all. Sure, I can say many nice, pious things; I know how to be eloquent. And I am thankful that I can share with you how much God loves each of you—all of you—because, goodness gracious, he does indeed love you all so much. But it’s when I have to speak hard truths that your hearts harden; and that’s also when I (I’ll be honest) sometimes lose courage, wanting just the silence of prayer and reading, my poetry, by myself in the quiet, alone. If I speak about abortion, for instance, some are really pleased to hear what they want to hear; others, though, hate it and hate me, a little, for being political or for mindlessly towing the party line or for not being bold enough (however you happen to define bold). The same is true when I talk about economic justice, individual and systemic racism, migrant justice, violence of any kind, guns; God help us all if I brought you what the Gospel says about sex and sexual responsibility. So many of you want me to say exactly what you want me to say; otherwise I’m out of line, so many of you think; I don’t know what I’m talking about, so many of you think; I’m just done with Catholicism—it’s so hypocritical, so wrong—some think.
And, of course, I’m knee-deep in it too, this hardheaded foolishness. Don’t mistake me here for some bitter, ignored dad or for some know-it-all; my heart hardens too; I’m ignorant too. I sometimes don’t want to hear truth just like you don’t want to hear it. I’ve got my bias just like you do. And, I don’t know all it’ll take to heal us, but I know it’ll take something different. I just know we live in a society that celebrates meaninglessness, that forms children in meaninglessness, spiritually and psychologically—whether it’s our own well-to-do beautifully materialist meaninglessness or the kind found elsewhere, the sort less privileged, less expensive. We live in a society that ridicules holiness and virtue, that disbelieves purity; we live in a society that disregards the preciousness of life at all stages; we drink the imaginary violence of entertainment like water, conditioning our youngest children to thirst for it. We create others, and we learn how to hate them; we create religions without tolerance, political ideologies without tolerance, and no one anymore can take the joke. And all our zeal, it has not made us any more moral, but less so. We live in a virtue-signaling world where actual virtues have become mere sentimental values, merely to be performed but easily ignorable—you know—when you need to do what you need to do no matter if it flies in the face of word of God or the will of God; it doesn’t matter when it’s about you, because it doesn’t really mean anything, we believe deep down. That’s the world we live in, a world in which an unsurprisingly mentally unwell child, without even a fully-developed brain, can buy an AR-15 as easily as cough medicine and do wickedness with it, pushing us all—as the devil laughs—round that circle, that wicked circle. “The wicked walk round in circles.” That’s us, my friends. And I don’t know what to do; I don’t know what else to say. Really, these days all I can think of is Jesus—the eternal judge Jesus Christ whom each of us is destined to meet—and who will at some point have the final word about all this; when he will speak, and we will not be so clever and confident as we are now. When he’ll end it, this madness, either with us or in spite us.
Brothers and sisters, today we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus Christ. Died and risen, the Lord now sits at the right hand of the Father; from thence he will come to judge the quick and the dead and the world by fire. But not just yet. Now our task is to be Christians, to be the sort of people who know Jesus Christ—who know what his death and resurrection and ascension mean. Our task is to be the sorts of Catholics who know how the faith shapes life, to be the sorts of Catholics whose lives are actually shaped by faith—to know what the faith means and to live what it means.
And what it means, as Augustine simply said, is that “we must ascend with him.”[3] If the wicked walk in circles, we must struggle to ascend. Knowing we’re Christians, that we have been “raised with Christ,” we must, as Paul said, “seek what is above.”[4] We must ascend above our own divisions, above our own ideological cults; we must ascend above what we’ve thought and said before, rising above our own comfortable talking points. If you’re a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, wonderful—me too. But help the rest of this think through this; maybe you and me need to think that the way we think about this isn’t working. Because it isn’t. Or, if you’re a staunch liberal, a relentless progressive, vigilant against all forms of oppression and corruption, speaking truth to power so much no one else can get a word in edgewise, wonderful—me too. But help the rest of us think through how creating a society with no coherent account of virtue, no coherent morality, built upon no metaphysics whatsoever save the will-to-power pride of the individual—help us understand how that doesn’t hollow out the souls of our children, our souls too; how it doesn’t destroy meaning, making us all isolated, depressed consumers addicted to Amazon, whose consciences are shaped by advertising and the Instagram accounts of countless shallow celebrities who more and more seem to have a whole lot of nothing. Can I rise above that? Can you rise above that? Can we rise above it, all of it? The wicked walk in circles, but we must ascend. It is our only hope. None of the evil you see in our society is mystifying; let’s not blame any demons, but ourselves. I’ve said this before: the worst judgment I can make of the world today is that it all makes sense. It’s the upshot of our collective willful ignorance, and we’re all ignorant.
But maybe that’s why it’s good we Christians have come together to remember the Ascension of Jesus. Maybe it’s good that in our pain, we’re reminded of Christ’s victory and our destiny. For as dark as it gets, there is still hope. Don’t ever lose hope. But we must start looking up—quick. We must ascend. Maybe not for those little children—Christ has them now—but maybe for us, for our children, we must ascend. Will we ascend? God, I hope so. Amen.
[1] Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God 7.19
[2] Proverbs 26:11
[3] Augustine, Sermon 261.1
[4] Colossians 3:1
© 2022 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
