Says WHO?

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”  That’s Confucius. 

I found these lines in an opinion article this week and was delighted to know that Confucius and I have at least this one thing in common.  Now, Confucius was clearly a pretty smart guy, and is famous for being an observant guy, and is especially known for being able to say things well.  But while that is the point where my knowledge of him comes to an end, it also is precisely the point which so fascinates me.  How is it possible that you and I can recognize and nod at an insight from a thinker who lived 2500 years ago in a society and language so different from our own?  

What brings a thought from the mind of Confucius into my mind across that vast gulf of distance and difference?   Words do it.  These words do not function discreetly as individual shipping containers, but within the system of language they make possible this most marvelous of human activities, communication.   Words can do this between two people in physical proximity and spoken conversation with one another, they can do it across time, by being written or recorded, and across distance, by being carried or transmitted, and even across different languages by being translated by one or more people who know both languages and can identify the different words that convey the same meaning. 

You do not have to be a sage like Confucius to have an idea or notice a phenomenon worth the attention and consideration of another person.  That idea, or that observation, can be instantly introduced to another person by the expression of words.  Cookies! or, Fire! are both very succinct ways to put a thought in somebody else’s mind and elicit an appropriate response.  Isn’t that amazing?

A word is not the thing itself (we could always simply wave a plate of cookies or point at the smoke or even flames) but it somehow conveys the understanding of the reality just as well, and maybe even more effectively.  Employ the right word, and the thought moves from your mind into the consideration of your conversational partner.  

Now when the thought in your mind is more complicated than a tasty treat or a mortal threat, more complicated words, and more of them, are called for, but they do the same work.  The word is not itself a cookie, but the word evokes the complex (and wonderful) reality that is a cookie.  

Interestingly enough, not only can a word convey an idea or observation from one person to another, but also a word helps us understand and work with ideas within our own minds.  To name a thing is to give it a handle by which we can lay hold of it, and a complex phenomenon with a simple name (oh, let’s say, nostalgia, or maybe harmony) is then itself a tool we can use to build more complex concepts or decipher difficult problems.  Before we marshal words to convey anything to another person, we use them to shape, organize, and understand our own thoughts.

This process of naming is essential to and characteristic of human beings.  We do it so naturally that we can take it for granted and fail to marvel at what we are doing.  But because the process can fall into the background in this way, it is possible to lose sight of the importance of integrity and coherence to the personal and social function of language.  

What if I say Cookies! and you think of some electronic tracking marker on the internet?  And what if I say Fire! and you think I mean the building is burning -- but I simply wanted to scare you into departing?   There can be confusion, but there can also be intentional misuse of words.  Besides different words that sound alike or words that have multiple meanings, think of how exaggeration, omission, and elision can contort the function of language.  Think of irony, mislabeling, and even outright lies.  The whole enterprise of communication is undermined, possibly even intentionally.

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”  And if the affairs being carried on are essential to human thriving, then woe is us. 

Monsignor Smith

What's the good word?

A wordless message

Let’s be honest.  We all want to connect and communicate with other people.  Maybe not all other people, but at least selected other people, whether we select them to be a friend or a mate, we want them to select us to be an employee, or the selection is organic as parents and children.  

To be honest, we cannot connect with other people unless we can communicate, and our principal means of communication is words.  Sure, simply existing in the flesh communicates something, being visible and audible and tangible.   Gestures and actions communicate effectively, as well.  But most of the work of interaction is done using words. 

Words can be both spoken and written, heard and read.  Words can travel farther and faster than our full fleshy selves, both across a table and across the country.  Words can be saved up until someone has time to hear or see them in a sound recording or in a notebook.  More than simply handy, words are essential to communication.

Words can fail us, not simply when we lack the right words, but when the words provided are unintelligible to the intended recipient because of garbled transmission or bad handwriting.  Most vexing is when the speaker and the listener do not share the same words, that is, they speak and understand in different languages.  Translating, though possible, is a tricky business, something always being lost in it – as the saying goes. 

When words fail, what we have is a failure to communicate.  Where there is the desire or even the need to communicate, the failure of words is an obstacle that can prevent or destroy a relationship.  

But an honest evaluation would lead most of us to admit that we do not think much nor long about most of the words involved in our communication.  The words we send out when we speak or write, and the many, many more words sent toward us by others, flow at such a rapid rate that we rarely pause to consider what would be precisely the right word to speak, or to wonder which of several possible meanings we should take with a word that we hear or read.  The words that we speak and hear are almost always unexamined.

Do all the words we speak mean the same thing to us as they do to the people we intend to receive them?   Do all the words we hear mean the same thing to us as they do to person who sends them our way?  We like to think they do; imagine how unsettling it would be to have to assume that they did not!  Is it possible to choose and use words in such a way that our meaning is obscured or confused?  Is it possible to hear words in a way that gives them a meaning completely alien from the meaning intended by the speaker?  It clearly is possible, and we all know it, but we do not let it hamper us.  

We know this divergence that undermines communication is possible, but we keep on speaking and listening as if we have some grounds for confidence that this divergence is not going to happen to us, not in this conversation, and that our interlocutor has the same confidence.  That’s a lot to take for granted while not weighing the words that fly back and forth at an astounding rate in almost all our communication.  

Though I have been considering the content of my message for several days now, I am typing the specific words relatively quickly without hovering over this or that word choice.  The indicator at the bottom of the screen tells me I surpassed six hundred words.  The quantity is not itself my goal, though it does emphasize how many of these marvelous little language units are required to accomplish a modest task.  

Clearly, I am confident that the words I type today will be read or received by you, dear reader, in a manner that will move the meaning I have in my mind to an understanding you have in your mind.  The tool of this transfer of thought and knowledge is language, the assembly and deployment of words.  Until we examine not only what a word means but even what a word is, we have to ask ourselves: can we be honest? 

Monsignor Smith

Not Hemingway

Labor Day weekend seems so peaceful and pleasant,
 then you look more closely and hey...
what's that coming around the bend?  
The Irresistible Force is headed for our Immovable Feasts.

Easter is the classic example of a movable feast.   It falls every year on a Sunday determined by astronomical considerations.   This past Easter was rather late, April 20.   Next Easter will fall in the normal range, April 5.  That means Ash Wednesday (a movable fast?) will be relatively normal too, on February 18, 2026.  Christmas, on the other hand, is always on December 25, and the annual question is what day of the week will that be?  This year, the answer is Thursday.

Easter and Christmas are holy days of the highest rank and take precedence whenever they fall.  Not all holy days that fall on the same date every year have the same weight as Christmas.  Just this past weekend, the remarkably important Feast of Saint Bartholomew was rudely suppressed (that’s the official term for it) by the twenty-first Sunday in ordinary time, whose very name indicates how easy it would have been to live without it – but I may be somewhat biased in that judgment.  So, everybody who is not a member of a church dedicated to Saint Bartholomew must wait until next August to celebrate the Guileless Apostle.

This year, however, we learn that rather like the animals on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some feasts are more feasty than others.  These feasts will outrank and even suppress a Sunday in ordinary time when they fall on the same date.   For the first time since 2014, four specific immovable feasts this year fall on and supplant Sundays.  

We already celebrated on Sunday June 29 the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, an enormously important feast of the universal Church.  It came so soon after the end of all the movable feasts associated with Easter – Pentecost Sunday, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi Sunday – that it did not seem out of the ordinary (time).   But in just a few weeks, things will get noticeably strange.

On Sunday, September 14, instead of the twenty-fourth Sunday in ordinary time, we will celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is an ancient commemoration of the discovery in Jerusalem and translation to Rome of the True Cross of Our Lord’s Passion by the Empress Helena.  Its proper prayers are ancient and powerful; I especially like the preface.  

Six weeks later on November 2, instead of the thirty-first Sunday in ordinary time, the Commemoration of All Souls will have us pray for our dear departed at all the Sunday Masses.  The eleven o’clock Mass that Sunday will be our annual Requiem Mass for the souls of our parish who have died over the past year.  Our choirs will provide the marvelous music of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, and we will invite the families who mourn them to return for the Mass.  

The very next week, November ninth, we will celebrate the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome (and you thought it was Saint Peter in the Vatican, didn’t you?) conferred on the successor to Peter by the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century.  

You who are extrapolating from these dates have figured out that All Saints’ Day, November first, is on a Saturday, which means that the obligation to attend Mass that day has been lifted by our gracious bishops.  It also means Halloween will be on Friday; does that make for more mayhem, or just more candy?  We shall see.  

It also means that November 16, the thirty-third Sunday in ordinary time, will be the only green Sunday between Halloween and mid-January, because after that comes Christ the King, then Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, etc.  Then we will have at least a month just to pull ourselves together before Lent starts.

Last year, one of my priest friends in the diocese across the river was so pleased with the dynamics of the days around Christmas that he wanted the Church to declare it will be on a Wednesday every year.  I must admit, it was a pretty sweet arrangement.  But Christmas is likely to stay on the twenty-fifth, since sometimes the holy day is best enjoyed when it is an immovable feast.  

Monsignor Smith

Be difficult, sure, but not doubting

No longer the constant topic of conversation, the personality and priorities of the new Pope, Leo XIV, remain a matter of great curiosity.  It is suggested that one of the reasons he has spent time in the Papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo is to focus on and develop his practical and theological initiatives for governing the Church.  He is rumored to be composing “his first encyclical,” and identifying “his curia.”  All this remains to be seen, but that does not mean that we have not already had glimpses of what he considers important.

On July 31 he announced his intention that Saint John Henry Newman be declared a Doctor of the Church.  This has not sprung from the fertile recesses of his mind and personal pieties, but rather has been a hope and desire of many parties within the Church for some years, and is an idea that has received serious examination.  Only 37 other saints have received this designation and distinction.   

An Englishman of the nineteenth century (1801-1890), Cardinal Newman was a prominent Anglican cleric, thinker, preacher, and writer before his entrance into full communion with the Catholic Church, an act shocking in that time that lost him several friends and many supporters.  He was ordained Priest and founded the Birmingham Oratory.  In 1878, Pope Leo XII created him a cardinal though he had never been a bishop and granted him the unusual permission to remain in England at his Oratory.  

One of his sayings that I have often shared in the confessional with penitents who fear that they have doubted God, or the Faith, is that One thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.  That helpful assertion comes from Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, the book he published to explain his conversion and rebut accusations and calumnies from his detractors.  I found the whole paragraph from the fifth chapter of that book, and I think it is even more helpful in context.

I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as anyone; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

We know that our new Holy Father chose his regnal name in reference to his predecessor by one century.   Clearly Number Fourteen shares Number Thirteen’s estimation of John Henry Newman as one who has much to offer the Church.  We can explore the wealth of wisdom and insight this English saint has to offer while we await the manifestation of what our Anglophone Pope intends to emphasize in his leadership of that same Church.  It could even give us something fruitful to talk about. 

Monsignor Smith

Steady

This photo is also from 2006.

This week, a “blast from the past.”  Just for kicks, I went looking in my files for the first bulletin column I had saved there.  I found this from July 2006.  It seems not to have aged too badly, and probably still applies now as much as it did then.  So enjoy it this weekend, and see if you find any anachronisms.   Summer is a time for reflection after all, and what better object of our reflection than to discern what has changed, and what has stayed the same?

What a great neighborhood!  Everybody knows everybody and keeps track of one another’s families.  People leave, but they come back, and bring with them whatever they gained by their adventures.  Families, friends, community; it is a remarkable place to live.

But Jesus was not able to perform any mighty deed there.

What, you thought I was talking about Four Corners?  No, no – Nazareth.  They all knew one another and looked out for one another’s kids.  “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary,
 and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? 
And are not his sisters here with us?”  But somehow, that neighborhood pulled itself together and pushed Jesus away when He came back and started preaching the Kingdom of God.  
And they took offense at him.  Somehow, in their tight-knit little community, there was not room for repentance and the call to conversion.   Maybe they thought they were doing just fine the way they were.

Well, you know, THIS is a great neighborhood, too, and I am glad to be back here.  It is a genuine community in a metropolitan area where so many people are satisfied to live as strangers; trust me, after my eight months at 5th and H NW.  And yes, that does mean that people here are definitely doing something right, and truly have something to be proud of.  

But the challenge for us here at Saint Bernadette, whether we call Indian Spring, Woodmoor, Burnt Mills, or whichever, our neighborhood, is to be the good ground on which the seed of the Word falls, and bears fruit thirty-, sixty-, or a hundredfold.  We need to make sure that the prophet who calls people back to God finds not a rebellious house, but ready hearts.  We cannot let our familiarity with one another – even our familiarity with Jesus – make us so comfortable that we turn away when He calls us to conversion.

My brothers and sister, we do live in a great place, among wonderful people.  I, for one, am grateful to be here.  But we have miles to go to the City of God, so let us always make room for Jesus – and his challenges to us – in our neighborhood.  He will perform many mighty deeds here!

God bless you and Our Lady watch over you,

Monsignor Smith

 

Can but won't

I can’t complain.

Rarely have I heard that statement that I didn’t think immediately to myself, Oh yes, you can.  I have heard you do it, innumerable times!  How quickly people give themselves nowhere near enough credit when it comes to the ability to complain.  

Priests can complain.  It’s part of our training, it seems.  Seminarians are EPIC complainers.  Rather like most people in an academic setting, the stakes are so small that the fighting is fierce.  Add to that the life-formation dimension of seminary, and the complaints accrue higher-payload warheads along with terminal guidance.  Ordination blunts the impulse or reduces the opportunities, but the finely hewn ability to complain remains.

Soldiers, similarly, are known for their ability to craft and deliver complaints; the skills develop even more highly when the soldiers are in action or on campaign.  Do you think this may be a phenomenon common to men in uniform?  Perhaps complaining is nurtured by being under someone else’s command, having certain – or all - aspects of one’s day and one’s life be outside one’s own control.  

The other circumstance that may contribute to gold-medal-winning complaining chops among seminarians and soldiers is the tempting availability of an audience.  Both groups of guys are surrounded by other guys in the same circumstances, enduring the same hardships, and eager to assign responsibility for the same miseries.  The complaints are then intended for an unhelpful but sympathetic audience.  Sympathy is perhaps better than nothing.

Recently I ran across an old cartoon of three devils behind an office door in hell, with the damned souls visible outside the door glass, suffering in silhouette.  The staff devils were guffawing with merriment as they read notes pulled from a conspicuously labeled “suggestion box.”  That would be an unhelpful and unsympathetic audience. 

Sometimes, we complain to achieve more than sympathy:  justice for our righteous cause, redress for some wrong done to us.  Whether we contact customer service of some firm, an ombudsman of some enormous organization, or some elected official’s staffer, we hope our complaint find a sympathetic and responsive ear.  All too often that hope is disappointed.

Convinced of the justice of our cause and the righteousness of our complaint, we can be moved to take our complaints even higher.  Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint.  (Psalm 64:1) The Psalmist lets us know that our impulse to complain is hardly a modern phenomenon, and our desire to be heard by the Almighty Redresser of Wrongs is as strong now as ever.  We can pronounce judgment on whether the Divine Ear is sympathetic or responsive much more critically than we judge the justice of our cause or the righteousness of our complaint.  Wait and see; wait and see.

Complaining brings judgment upon not only the complaint, however, but also the complainer.  Herein lies the peril.  Perhaps this invitation to scrutiny is overlooked too often, especially when the complainer address his complaint to God.   That kind of scrutiny, who can stand?  

Prudence and self-preservation dictate that I keep my complaint to myself.  The lassitude of summer brings an equanimity unavailable the rest of the year.   Despite all the failures of powers and potentates, authorities and agents to live up to my expectations in matters large and small, reticence settles over me like a humid afternoon.  How is the summer going, you ask?

I can’t complain.

Monsignor Smith

On finding delight

These all look to thee,
to give them their food in due season.
When thou givest to them,
they gather it up;
when thou openest thy hand,
they are filled with good things. Psalm 104: 27 - 28

It is the lean time of the year.  Not for the produce of the land, no; we are in the fat of that sweet season.   No, it is lean around the rectory.  Our summer student, Father Philip Tran, has finished his compressed course load at Catholic University for this year and whooshed away in his electric-mobile to return after some exploration to Beaumont, or more precisely, Winnie, Texas.  

Father Marcin Wiktor is also not here, though he did fool some people who spotted his car behind the rectory.  He drove back from Mississippi a few weeks ago and then promptly flew to Poland to visit his family.   He will be back shortly before his classes resume at CUA, later in August.

That means it’s down to just me and Father Swink.  As you know, he is a man of action, whereas I tend more toward contemplation.  Because most of the action has reached the end of its progress, such as his popular study of the First Letter of Saint Peter, he is fidgety.  After the last session I had to chase his lingering devotees off the parking lot!  Now he has no projects ready to hand; he is a bit at loose ends.  

Thus stymied here, he will be away for some of the coming weeks, seeking enrichment and enhancement of the spiritual and theological sort, only to bring it home and spend it on you when the regularly scheduled frenzy resumes.  It will be especially quiet around the holy House of Soubirous, at least until the Holy Day on the fifteenth.  Shortly after that the teachers will slip into the school while I look the other way, pretending all of August is a summer month even as the drumbeat grows louder.

Because of this personnel situation, if you can call it that, we will reduce our weekday Masses to one per day until the fourteenth of August.   The weekend Mass schedule will be the same as ever, though you might encounter some surprise visitors in the celebrant’s chair at those Masses.  You may even recognize them from previous visits.

But I who do not share Father Swink’s desire (and capacity!) for constant activity will enjoy the sweet fruit of summer, not only the actual fruit of peaches and plums and such, but also that calm that settles around here when almost everyone is somewhere else.  It will be too brief, but it is the most wonderful month of the year and I mean to enjoy it.

Both the sun overhead and the rich crop in the field feature this week in the lections for Sunday Mass.  The challenge for us is not to lose sight of what is truly precious, not to be distracted by false goods or lesser goods from what is truly good and life-giving.  That, I happily assert, is where contemplation comes in, and I invite you to join me in a reflective moment that requires nothing that will break a sweat.  We do not even have to perform the evaluation all alone.  It is never a bad time to ask the Lord, what is it that should delight me today?  

And in the answer to that question, there is nothing lean about this time of year.  

Monsignor Smith