These last nine days of our 50-day Paschal Season have a special, mystifying, doctrinally-rich character that can’t be overlooked by the serious believer.  Our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ rose from the dead 40 days ago on Easter Sunday, He made various appearances to His disciples in His risen body, He performed miracles, and then, on the 40th day, He ascended back to His native Heaven, taking our weak human nature with Him in its glorified form ¹. He – fully God and fully man – is now seated – in His human body – at the right hand of the Father. Throughout the Gospels, we hear Him tell His disciples that He eventually needs to return to the Father so that They (the Father and the Son) ² can send the Holy Spirit upon us (Jn 15:26; Jn 16:28; and elsewhere).  He anticipates their sorrow at His impending lack of physical presence but comforts them with the promise that His physical absence is actually good for them since it enables Him to be more present to them than He is able to be in His natural form (Jn 14:16-20; Jn 16:5-7).  Paradoxically, Christ physically returns to Heaven in order to be more physically present on Earth.

After the Ascension, we hear that the disciples, gathered around Mary, obediently await in Jerusalem and pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:3-5, 14), Who eventually shows up nine days later on the Jewish feast of Pentecost, the 50^th day after Passover.  The Third Person of the Blessed Trinity appears over them as tongues of fire, empowering them to preach in such a way that all of their listeners hear them in their own respective language (Acts 2:1-6) ³. These nine days of intense prayer would come to set the pattern of prayer known as a “novena,” which now exist throughout Catholic piety ⁴. As an aside, this is why I am generally opposed to the transference of the Feast of the Ascension to the Sunday after Ascension Thursday since, among other things, it makes the original novena no longer a novena ⁵.

Enter Justin Bieber.

A few days ago, during this nine-day waiting period between the Ascension and Pentecost, I heard Justin Bieber’s song “Ghost” for the first time.  It apparently came out over a year ago so I’m not sure how I hadn’t heard it before, but we’ll chalk it up to my exemplary priestly detachment from the world ⁶. Putting’s its catchy beat aside, I found myself really struck by the lyrics, especially in light of what I was in the midst of liturgically re-living, awaiting the gift of the Holy Spirit while attempting to connect with the feelings of sorrow and uncertainty that the disciples must have felt after the Ascension.  Now, in case it needs to be said, I do not think that the Biebs had any of this in mind when he penned this hymn, but who knows.  Interestingly enough, however, it turns out that there has been no small debate online about its meaning.  The so-called “Jelena” theorists argue that it’s obviously about his breakup with Selena Gomez, although Justin himself eventually revealed that it was about loss in general, especially in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the beautiful things about art, however, is that there can be many interpretations, even ones that are totally unintended by the artist or even antithetical to what the artist intended.  So, without further ado, I’d like to offer yet another interpretation of this song from a Catholic liturgical perspective.  Of course, not all of the lyrics fit with this interpretation, and so I won’t go line by line, but here’s what jumped out to me.

“If I can’t be close to you / I’ll settle for the ghost of you.”  This is the beginning of the refrain, and immediately made me think of the role of the Holy Spirit – traditionally referred to in English as the “Holy Ghost.”  Sharing the same single divinity of God the Father and God the Son, one of “jobs” of God the Holy Spirit is to continue to make present God the Son (Jesus Christ), throughout all times and all spaces ⁷.  This is why all liturgical worship is “to” the Father, “through” the Son, “in” the Holy Spirit.   So, without getting too deep into Trinitarian theology and potentially falling into heresy ⁸, it is somewhat safe to say that the “ghost” of Christ is Christ Himself ⁹. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, and Christ is God.  This being the case, how often do we fall into the trap of thinking that Christ’s sacramental presence is somehow less-than?  How often do we think that we have to “settle” for His sacramental presence as if it’s not as good as being physically close to Christ?  We may find ourselves daydreaming to be as close to Christ as was St. John the Apostle when he literally laid his head on Christ’s chest at the last supper (Jn 13:23).  How often do we fall into the trap of thinking that Christ was somehow more present then than He is now?  As the Second Vatican Council reminded us, Christ is present to us in various “modes”:  in the Scriptures proclaimed, in the congregation assembled, in the person of the priest, etc., but His highest mode of presence is when He is really present in the Eucharist, hence the term “Real Presence.”  And this leads to the next lyric that popped out to me…

“If you can’t be next to me / your memory is ecstasy.”  At His last supper – which took place in the context of a Jewish Passover Seder meal – Christ prayed the traditional Haggadah prayers over the unleavened bread and grape wine, but then He added something new:  “this is My body” and “this is the cup of My blood.”  Immediately thereafter, He commanded His twelve apostles to “do this in memory of Me,” at once establishing both the Eucharist and the ministerial priesthood (Mt 26:26-29; Mk 14:22-25; Lk 22:19-20; 1 Cor 11:23-25).  That is, those twelve apostles were thus commanded and thereby empowered to do what Christ had just done Himself.  To this day, we see the phrase “In Remembrance of Me” smattered about ecclesiastical art – Catholic and Protestant alike – although it has come to mean different things since the Protestant reformation.  Speaking broadly, Protestants believe that the Mass (which they have since renamed “Holy Communion” or “The Lord’s Supper”) is simply a remembrance of what Christ did, whereas Catholics believe that, at the Mass, we not only remember what Christ did but, through the power of the Holy Spirt invoked by the ministerial priesthood, we actually re-live it.  For Catholics, when we hear the priest say “this is My body,” we are not simply reading from the Bible and hearing what Christ said at the Last Supper, we are made present to the Last Supper itself, hearing Christ Himself speak those words for the very first time.  I often like to point out that the Mass is not simply a “representation” of what happened at the last supper but rather a “re-presentation.”  And it’s not just what happened at the last supper; in the Mass, we are made present to the entire paschal mystery:  the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ.  As you can tell, a lot hinges on what is meant by “remembering” Christ and doing things in His “memory.”  When we look at the original Greek, the word that Christ used for “remembrance” is “anamnesis” (1 Cor 11:24) ¹⁰, which carries with it something much stronger than just remembering.  In Catholic sacramentology, anamnesis is a type of sacred remembering that actually makes present that which is being remembered.  It is a type of entering into the thing being remembered such that we are present when it originally happened ¹¹. Now, back to the Biebs, when he says “your memory is ecstasy,” something entirely deeper is understood when we apply that to Christ’s paschal mystery.  His “memory” is indeed ecstasy because it’s not just a memory of Him that we draw to mind, but rather He Himself Who draws near to us by our sacred remembering.  Not only that, but He has promised to be made present to us as often as we “do this in memory of Me,” truly placing Himself at our beck and call.  Can we lean on His chest and have Him “next to me” as St. John the Apostle did at the Last Supper?  No, but we can have Him just as present to us and experience the same ecstasy.

Those are the main two lyrics that popped out to me during my own sacramental re-living of the first novena, but arguably there are even more lyrics that could be interpreted along Christian lines:

“I miss you more than life.”  We hear our boy Justin repeat this phrase over and over again, clearly capturing the emotion of loss.  As I noted in the beginning, however, Christ knew that His disciples would feel a sense of loss when He finally left them at the Ascension, and that’s precisely why He went out of His way to tell them not to be sorry.  Nevertheless, even if we were to grant that the disciples intellectually understood what Christ had told them about His return via the sacraments, we can still appreciate the emotion of loss that they would have inevitably felt.  Mature Christians, however, don’t just acknowledge their feelings – as important as that first step is – they must then be able and willing to subject those feelings to their intellect and ask the difficult question of whether or not those are logical feelings.  In this case, there is no reason to get caught up in the emotion of loss, however strong it may be, knowing that Christ comes to us every day in multiple ways.

“Young blood thinks there’s always tomorrow.”  While the young are arguably more likely than the old to think that they’ll have more time, I’ve had to counsel plenty of older people to not assume that they’ll have more time to do various things that they have been meaning to get around to or have been putting off (e.g., forgiving someone, asking someone for forgiveness, asking Someone for forgiveness, telling someone they love them, etc.).  Sacred Scripture warns us clearly not to make such a foolish assumption (James 4:13-15; Proverbs 27:1).

“I’d leave it all behind if I could follow.”  But you can follow!  Following Christ is not just for a select few – it’s for all Christians!  Yes, we are all called to follow Him in different ways, but no one is not called to follow Him, as if following Him were an offer given to only some.  Here’s the catch, however…in order to follow Him, you must first be willing to leave it all behind.  Jesus Christ tells us quite pointedly, “Whoever comes to Me and does not hate ¹² father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be My disciple.  Whoever does not carry the cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple.” (Lk 14:26-27).

So that’s a Catholic Christian reading of “Ghost” by Justin Bieber.  Again, I doubt that Justin Bieber intended any of this, but who knows and who cares.  May we recognize that tomorrow is not guaranteed to us, that we are all called to follow Christ despite the cost, and that He Himself accompanies us on that journey through liturgical anamnesis.