The Paschal Mystery and
the UP Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice
Fr. Catalino G. Arevalo SJ
Note: This article was published at the Business Mirror.
On 20 December 2005, the “community of the U. P. chapel” celebrated the golden anniversary of its blessing by solemn liturgical rites. This chapel of the Holy Sacrifice was the realization of the dream of the Jesuit Fr. John Patrick Delaney and the original Catholic community of the University of the Philippines (UP) after UP moved to its Diliman site in January 1949.
On 20 December 1955 the very first Mass was also offered in the chapel, with Archbishop Rufino Santos as celebrant.
The story of how the chapel was conceived; how four young men who were to become National Artists took part in its design and construction; the really moving and memorable history of the Delaney dream and its step by step fulfillment, of his death less than a month after the chapel’s blessing, – all this deserves a book that has not yet been written, but we cannot even touch upon it here.
In an article written by Mrs. Narita M. Gonzalez on this “flying saucer of a church” in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (11 December 1995), she wrote: … “… from the high dome ceiling hangs the crucifix of Christ Crucified and Christ Resurrected. … The placement of the crucifix, up above the plain marble altar standing on the sourcebed of the river of life, is to Father Delaney, the Eucharistic scene in its entirety.”
The UP Chapel was given the name “Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice” of the Mass. For Father Delaney in a true sense “the Mass is, in our lives as Christians, everything”. Those of us who heard him speak of the Mass, in almost everything he taught, began to understand that the Mass and what it means is the point of focus for all our christian living. (Did not Vatican II call the Mass “the source and summit” of our Christian worship and life? The present Holy Father, Pope Benedict XV, teaches pretty much the same thing. Read, for instance, his valuable little book, published not long before his election as Pope, God is Near.)
The two-sided Crucifix at U. P. Napoleon “Billy” Abueva, now the renowned National Artist (for sculpture) carved the two-sided crucifix “in his Area 17 studio” in 1955. Mr Abueva told me himself that he just followed faithfully Fr Delaney’s instructions. It was the closest he could come to representing the mystery of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic sacrifice – the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus “renewed on the altar in the heart of the community.” In one of his Chapel Chismis notes Fr Delaney wrote:
The Mass is predominantly THE ACTION, the renewal of the greatest events of all history, the renewal of the whole life of Christ, especially the Last Supper, Calvary, Resurrection and Ascension. Our ACTION in the Mass – the triple gift: we to God, Christ to God, Christ to us.” (17 July 1955).
Or, in a variant way: “We to Christ, Christ to God, Christ to us.” We bring all of our lives to Christ. Christ takes up all that we bring to him into his own gift, especially the Last Supper, his passion, Calvary, his death, his resurrection and ascension. This his gift is given to his Father, and in turn Christ gives us all of himself to us and sends his Spirit into our lives.
Cross and glory are one only mystery. This is what Fr Delaney taught and tried to portray with the Abueva crucifix. We would later begin to call these great events, the ‘Christ hour’ – the Paschal Mystery. In the Second Vatican Council and the years following it, we would re-discover the understanding and the language of the Paschal Mystery. Cross and Resurrection inseparably belong together: it is the Resurrection which completes the reality and meaning of the Cross: Christ’s dying on the Cross which itself is the way to the Resurrection. The Cross “flows into” the glory of the Resurrection; the Resurrection in its turn fills up the innermost reality of the Cross. Jesus’ death was his “total opening of his own human self to the life and oneness with the Father.” The glory given him by the Father in turn fills out the reality of Jesus’ dying with the power of that Resurrection-to-come. In and through Christ, his dying for us has been transformed into our own entering into the life and glory of the Trinity. And not just the final “dying” which is the end of our physical life, but all the various ways of “dying” which we encounter throughout our lives. All of them can be filled with “the power of the Resurrection”, if we live them out “in Christ, with Christ, through Christ”.
This is the same truth we find in the biblical redemption teaching of John and Paul. In our lifetime it was the masterwork of the Scriptural theologian, Francis Xavier Durrwell, CSSR, who brought this understanding back into Catholic theology. (We in the Philippines have not quite truly assimilated the theology of the paschal mystery into our spirituality, into our deeper understanding of Holy Week and Easter.)
Father Delaney did not have – much of the theology of his time did not have also – what Vatican II and post-Vatican II theology would articulate on the Paschal Mystery. But he had its basic vision implicit already in his teaching on the Mass. In this way too he was ahead of his time.
The River of Life. At least once I heard Fr Delaney touch on the theme of the “waters of life.” In the very year of his death (1956), Pope Pius XII would issue his “renewed theology of the Heart of Jesus” in the encyclical Haurietis Aquas. “You will draw waters from the founts of salvation”, from the pierced side of Christ. The great biblical image of the Heart of Jesus would be the pierced side on the Cross (John 19, 37). From that broken side would flow blood and water. Blood, symbol of his human life given for us. Water, symbol of the Spirit poured out upon us from Christ crucified – and risen. (John 7, 37-39) Water, symbol of life given us by baptism; blood, symbol of human lifeblood – taken up the life of the Spirit – which Christ shares with us in the Eucharist, to make of us “blood brothers” in his Body, in the Church’s life as Body of Christ in time.
So Father Delaney asked future National Artist Arturo Luz to design the “floor mural” on the marble floor of the sanctuary and the entire chapel surrounding it. The waters of life, in the river of life flowing from the altar. The waters of life bursting forth from the pieced side of Jesus on the Cross, water filled with the life of the Spirit given us by the Risen Lord. From the two-sided crucifix, from the altar, from the sanctuary, – principally through Word and Eucharist – the waters of Christ Jesus’ own life would flow into our lives. Fr Delaney was so insistent, in his teaching on the Mass, that the Mass comes to its fullness in communion for us. “The complete Mass should really include communion, where we are fully made one Christ, where we take the gift of Jesus fully into our hearts and lives.”
We have tried to spell out what Mrs. Narita Gonzalez, who herself heard these things from Fr. Delaney’s unforgettable lectures and sermons on the Mass, wrote, many years later, on the Delaney vision behind the artwork in his dream chapel. “The two-sided crucifix and the marble floor with the river of life design: in these symbols for Fr John Delaney the meaning of the Eucharist was quite complete.” In a way it would take us many years to grasp better what Fr Delaney was himself struggling to understand and express with the concepts and words of his time.
The Stations of the Cross. The master painter Vicente Manansala, who would later be named National Artist also, executed the priceless murals of the Stations of the Cross which grace the panels (the “walls”) around the circular chapel. They are, as Mrs. Gonzalez says, surely “a national treasure.” They are the 14 traditional stations. The Pope John Paul II scriptural stations were not yet then in use. But the UP set ends nonetheless with the fifteenth station, the Resurrection of Jesus. Again, the deep understanding that passion and death and the resurrection are theologically wholly inextricably bound together “as one and only mystery – the Paschal Mystery”.
In 1955 many did not understand or appreciate what Fr Delaney was telling us by asking Manansala to add that “final station” – Christ in Easter glory, Christ going to his Father, so that he might pour out his crucified-and-risen life, his paschal glory, into our world and its history, into our lives.
The new Abueva Crucifix. Fifty years after he carved the two-sided crucifix in the chapel of the Holy Sacrifice, Mr Abueva completed a new and striking one now on the wall of Our Lady of Pentecost church at Loyola Heights, near the Ateneo University. In this new image, he tries to join the two sides of his earlier crucifix into one. It is the crucified Jesus, with pierced hands, feet and side.
But this crucified Christ is breaking out of the linen bands that wrap him up for his burial. A striking note: the nails are seen as “being lifted”, half pulled out from the wood, as Jesus rises. Perhaps some will be reminded of the briefest possible resurrection scene in Mel Gibson’s movie on The Passion of the Christ. Jesus who has died is now breaking forth from death to the new existence and life – the life of the Father, the life of glory which he himself now shares with us in the Spirit.
In a way, this is Mr Abueva’s new rendering of his earlier Delaney UP crucifix, carved fifty years ago. That was a first attempt to tell us of the Paschal Mystery, of the one single and invisible mystery which is the Cross-and-Easter. Now a second version tries again to present to us the Paschal Mystery, not by giving us its two sides as two, but trying to reveal to us its integral inner unity.
You who read this are urged to contemplate both Abueva crucifixes, reflect and pray in their presence. Maybe your prayer, with the Holy Spirit teaching you, will bring to a truer and deeper understanding of the mystery at the center of Christian faith and life – the Paschal Mystery. And then maybe you can bring that understanding more authentically into your life as a Christian in our time.
Footnote: The four National Artists (NA) who took part in the design and outfitting of the U. P. Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice were:
1. Architect Leandro “Lindy” Locsin, later NA for architecture, who was the architect for the entire chapel, the first circular church for Christian worship ever built in the Philippines.
2. Visual artist Arturo Luz who designed the “floor mural” for the entire chapel marble floor sacristy and main body of the church.
3. Sculptor Napoleon “Billy” Abueva, who made the crucifix with its two sides, carved in wood, and more recently the design on the marble altar in the sanctuary.
4. Painter NA Vicente Manansala, who painted the Via Crucis which surrounds the chapel from inside. Some UP community members believe Mr. Ang Kiukok, also later to be named NA, worked with Manansala on the Stations. If this is true, then five future National Artists’ work is enshrined in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice.
Incidentally, Fr John P. Delaney, if still among us today would have marked his 100th birthday in the first week of March this year 2007
