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

Field and Flower

Ordinary days

In the vocabulary of our day, so much emphasis is placed on “community,” we could easily be distracted from the deeper, richer reality of “communion.”  That would be for us who enjoy communion both a loss and a disservice.

In these days of summer when our workaday tasks are relieved by school break and the call of vacation, so has our worship schedule been lightened by the completion of the Easter cycle, whose program of movable feasts ended with the cordial duet of Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary on the late dates of 27-28 June this year.  July seems to be almost a ‘walk in the park’ with its groves of saints’ days spotting the green lawn of ordinary days in Ordinary Time.  In these lives heavy with fruit and flower, we find the companionship and consolation of our communion.

The landmark apostles of Thomas and James (3 & 25 July, respectively) stand out in their celebrity, but that should not lead us to overlook Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions (9 July), more than two hundred souls who about the time of the foundation of our nation gave their lives in witness to the truth of the Good News in China.  Two hundred fifty years later, we mark the semiquincentennium of our freedom, while they mark a quarter-millennium of martyrdom that continues this day as the rest of the Church looks away.  

Sharbel Mahkluf (24 July) was a beacon of monastic sanctity in Lebanon at the time of our Civil War; now he stands witness for us to the millennial Maronite tradition of Christian life that is in danger of expulsion and possibly extinction in that nation war-torn and terrorized by sects who hate the faith.  

A classic example of what we expect a saint to be, Bonaventure (15 July), was a thirteenth-century Italian follower of Saint Francis who wore a brown habit and wrote in Latin.  More intimately, we recognize him as the patron of our neighbors in their friary at the corner of Colesville and Lorain, who frequently join us for Mass or simply pad about our streets in their grey habits.

Not so long ago nor far away, Kateri Tekakwitha (14 July) was known as the Lily of the Mohawks, redolent with the fragrance of sanctity in her time and for ours a reminder that the faith found fertile ground among the denizens of this land when first the Gospel reached these shores.  Her charity for the very ones who mistreated her both confused and attracted the souls who did not yet know Christ.

These saints who might seem foreign or worse yet, unknown to us, reveal in their light-filled lives not only their own radiant identities achieved in Christ, but also who our brothers and sisters are across the expanses of the age and the globe we inhabit.  We easily see the differences that distinguish them from us, but it would be a mistake to stop there and fail to seek and recognize what we share in the grace and the cross that is union with our Savior.  

Unlike the virtual connections so much celebrated in our time, our authentic communities of common cause, common interest, and common home are essential to our lives and are worthy of our care and attention.  But much more worthy and much more life-giving is what we share with these people we should work to know better, emulate more zealously, and ask for help more earnestly, that is: communion.

Monsignor Smith

Holding, still

You never see it coming: the day that is different. 

Summer days unspool with a predictable laze and haze and all the familiar markers of the season.  Worshippers are fewer but filled with good humor and summer’s ease.  We had corn on the cob for dinner last night, the first time this year.  Cherry pies were two weeks ago; apricot galette two weeks before that.  The sweet cherries in the grocery stores are good and their prices, are too.  There are rumors of peaches, but I don’t believe them.   And I don’t even consider tomatoes for another few weeks.  

It is not only food, of course.  After the morning’s exertions through midday, Sunday afternoons and evenings about the parish are peaceful all year, but a lovely languor settles in with summer that reinforces my routine.  I suppose it might be a good night to meet a friend for dinner, but I usually don’t.  I would rather be here.  The stern glare of the afternoon suddenly is spent and the lush green hush of the summer evening settles softly.  The boys almost always are elsewhere and only the cicadas make their clamor.  

The church is so quiet and cool when I lock up, it is perfect for prayer.  It must be honest prayer, because it made me laugh at my self-indulgence and the assumptions that lead me through an evening expecting Sunday to be like Sunday always is.

Every day, every season has its samenesses that mark our times and guide our dispositions.  The long evenings of July, the sudden darkfall of a February afternoon.  Even the madcap activity of a month like May is expected and reassuringly familiar, perhaps somewhat or even mostly because we know it must yield to the vacation exhaustion demands, and then right on schedule, everybody vacates.  

But this familiar backdrop can highlight the unique event.  Driving the customary route home this afternoon from my customary walk, a turn and a merge reminded me of the time I encountered a friend there, and he introduced me to somebody for the first time – somebody who is still around now, six years later.  

How normal was the morning there was that text message conveying news of something that would change everything; it would be months before anyone knew what the new normal would be.  Then there was the afternoon when the pot on the stove, the text on the screen were as predictable as humidity in summer, but returning that phone call and agreeing yes, something just was not right, led to another call, led to the car, led to discovery.  Sweet Jesus help us.  

We hear stories of normal lives expecting another normal day who receive disaster instead – a flood, a tornado, fire coming up the hill.  Everything lost, precious ones lost, sameness never to be recovered.

Sometimes the change comes first as a whisper.  Only later, wondering how we got here, we look back and recall the first clue, that simple call, that small sound that made us look into what might be different.  Sometimes the new thing seems insignificant, but then it ripens into eventual delight.  Sometimes the change comes as an eruption, a disruption, an unavoidable inescapable event.   Sometimes, not often one hopes, it comes as a cataclysm, a life-changing force that changes something for everyone and everything for some.

The rhythm and order of our days, the samenesses that we cherish and nurture, the predictabilities we welcome when they come and we relinquish sadly when they pass, all of these serve not only as background or context to provide the scene to some opening or initiation, some rupture or rending, but the recurring regularities reassure us of the remaining reality on which we stand, we have stood, and we will stand, even when change come as it must, and so often rudely does.  The One who never changes, in whom all being has its being, is present and attentive in the cool and quiet of His dwelling place, and always perfect for prayer.

You never see it coming: every day is different.   The gift is to see what remains the same.

Monsignor Smith

Still on the road

My car has over 111,000 miles on it.  It passed ten years old at the end of April, from the day I took delivery, unless you count from the day it rolled off the assembly line, which was earlier – Holy Thursday that year, in fact.  A happy coincidence for a priest’s car.  It was perfect, as cars are when new, and it was good at its car-job.  Now, it is no longer perfect.  There are some mechanical issues and some electrical issues and there are some bodywork scars from rather more than average wear-and-tear.  But it is still quite good at its car-job, and I am happy with it.  

It cannot be replaced, alas, not with a new model just like it.  No longer is a manual transmission available to those of us who enjoy more involvement with the operation of the vehicle.  Plus, all the new models have no gauges – they have screens that resemble gauges.  I don’t know about you, but I am weary of electronic substitutes and semblances of things that are good and useful.  I like things to be things.  A car is a thing made up of many things that all have purpose toward the functioning of the car.  Our material reality depends on things to do the things we need to do, and staying in touch with that thingyness is a reminder of our reality and our limitations.  This isn’t Star Trek, we don’t have a teleporter, and the things we count on to move us about have the benefits and the limitations of material reality.  Inertia is real, and good brakes a necessity.  

Carefully maintained though it is, my car is wearing out, and certain of its things are not functioning as they should.  I must be a little more careful in my sequences and my techniques to coax from it the performance I enjoy and expect.  By no means unreliable, and certainly not dangerous, my car reveals more often its limitations and places on me more of the responsibility for success.  But I claim to enjoy more involvement with the operation of the vehicle and cannot make this a complaint.

Every time I climb into my car and start the engine, I expect it to do everything it has always done.  This may not be rational, especially since I clearly pay attention to all of its limitations.  But it is necessary, or else I would not be able to do the things I need to do.  I maintain the awareness that I have to make certain adjustments, and then I try to be grateful every time I get away with it, arrive on time, and return intact.

This is a process we all manage with our cars in their various states of reliability and repair.   But is it not also what we do with all the other things we count on daily for their function?  We give no thought at all to our refrigerator until the milk is warm or the ice cream runny; we barely listen to the air conditioner unless repeated prodding of the thermostat fail to achieve our desired comfort.  Let them but fail at their purpose and there is no question more burning in our day than whether they need repair or replacement and how fast we can get it done.

Is this not also true of the material aspect of ourselves?  We give little thought to our eyes or our feet, our hearts or hands, until some failure leave us flailing to do what we always did easily before.  That they are material, and that we ourselves are material to be maintained and managed is a startling revelation.  Then we become accustomed to the added cumber of eyeglasses or orthopedic inserts, or heaven forfend, a stent.  But our corporeal materiality is as fragile and frangible as any other.

Sometimes people joke about the wear and tear of life that it isn’t the years, it’s the miles.  I think it is both, like cars that need to track their running time and not only their mileage, such as police cars and taxicabs.  The informed eye keeps tabs on the fluids and learns how to massage the best performance possible out of the old beast even if some of the systems are squishy and some of the connections loose.  Adjustments are made to technique as well as expectations of performance, so that the driver can keep the impression that he is in charge even as he yields to the increasing demands of the vehicle.  

These are the realities of the effects of time and use on every material reality, even our most vital ones.   We assume at one level of thought that they will continue to run forever, while understanding in a less conscious way that is not an option.   We also know it cannot be replaced with a new model just like it.  

Monsignor Smith