When the time comes

When the lights are off in the Apostolic Palace,
it means nobody is at home (anymore).

Everybody knew it was coming, but nobody knew when.  Twenty years ago this week, the health of the Holy Father, which had been failing for years, had reached a point that made clear his death would be coming soon.  Crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square to pray and keep vigil.  

For years, John Paul II had neither hidden nor denied his difficulties and his decline.  Parkinson’s Disease was only part of the diminishment of his strength and ability, yet he continued to appear when he could, to speak, to offer Mass as best he was able.  Several stays in the hospital of popes, the Gemelli Clinic, had ended with his return to his home in the Vatican that spring of 2005.

Since the second day of 2002, I had been assisting Cardinal William Baum and living with him in his apartment atop the building opposite Saint Peter’s Basilica.  The health of the Holy Father had even then already deteriorated to a point of concern.  I can give you no proof, but I had a premonition, a conviction that he would die on Divine Mercy Sunday, the day he had named and linked to that devotion that, like him, came out of Poland.   For three years, each Monday of the Second Week of Easter, I would awaken and listen anxiously for the clock of Saint Peter’s to chime the first hour at seven o’clock, with its distinctive, gong-like clang.  For three years, I had sighed in relief and shaken my head at my own anxiety when it became clear that the Holy Father was with us still and a normal morning was beginning.

All this comes back not only because of the twenty-year mark, which I pointed out a few months ago, but also because of the condition of our Holy Father Francis over these past six weeks.  For many of those days, his death seemed imminent; yet now he too has returned home to the Vatican.  It is not unreasonable nor uncharitable to note that he is not well, and that his time with us is dwindling.

It is so easy to see the Church as much like a commercial corporation or even a nation with a government of whom the Pope is chief executive.  In that model, efficiency and effectiveness are not only goals but necessities and obligations.  However, when the Holy Father becomes ill and nears death, we see how the Church is like a family.   When Dad becomes disabled or diminished, we do not push him aside and bring in a new dad; no, we rally to his care and support, for this too is an important exercise of familial love and mutual responsibility.   Eliciting that is an important exercise of his fatherhood.  For those of us not in a place to offer personal and physical care, we offer prayer.  

In February 2005, Cardinal Baum had returned from Rome to Washington with a bad case of the shingles, and he only left the house for doctor visits until finally on Easter Sunday, he was feeling well enough to participate in Mass at the Basilica.  So later in that week, I went to visit my family. 

When the news reached me that Pope John Paul II had died, I was sitting in my parents’ kitchen in Alabama.  Where I was that Saturday, April second, it was afternoon.  However, in Rome it was evening, after First Vespers for the Second Sunday of Easter, which means liturgically, Divine Mercy Sunday had begun.  

I was quickly on the phone with Cardinal Baum, and our travel agent.  The next morning, I offered Mass at the parish in which I had grown up and became emotional when speaking of our departed Holy Father.  Sunday afternoon I flew back to Washington, and as I drove back to the Cardinal’s house, I saw flags at half-staff on United States federal buildings and foreign embassies.  The world had begun to mourn her loss.  

Monday we left for Rome, and the same Cardinal who had been almost an invalid for months found vigor not only for the trip, but for what awaited after the long flight.  When the Chair of Peter becomes vacant, the College of Cardinals governs the Church.  So as befits a head of state, our car into Rome Tuesday morning was accompanied by motorcycle outriders with lights and sirens.  We went straight to the Vatican.  For when the moment of transition comes, the Church knows what to do.

Monsignor Smith

Unburnt List

An icon of the Virgin Mother, the Burning Bush

You can’t unsee it is a marvelous expression that describes so perfectly the vivid figures by which the invisible God manifests himself.   This week, because of the calendar and the lectionary cycle, one of these images shows how powerfully God revealed His intentions long before He enacted them.

Our Old Testament reading from Exodus on this Third Sunday of Lent is the familiar description of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush.   As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed.  So Moses decided, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.” (Exodus 3: 2a-3) In the conversation that follows, God calls Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt and reveals His identity in the most mysterious of ways: I am Who Am.  

That the bush was fully on fire, with heat and light and roar, and that the bush was not consumed by this fire was as astonishing to Moses as such a thing would be to anyone who fled the recent Los Angeles wildfires.  This does not happen; this is not how fire works.  But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not performing a party trick just to get Moses’ complete attention.  He was prefiguring the astonishing way in which he would rescue His people from slavery to sin and death.  

This year it so happens that two days after this Sunday of the Unburnt Bush falls the Annunciation, the most significant moment in human history, when the angel of the Lord appeared to the Virgin Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Spirit.  Upon her gracious consent, Be it done unto me according to thy word, The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  Since the at least the late fourth century the Church has recognized the connection between the unburnt bush and the Virgin Mother of God.  As Saint Gregory of Nyssa states, The light of divinity . . . did not consume the burning bush, even as the flower of her virginity was not withered by giving birth.  The unburnt bush is a figure for the ever-Virgin Mary.  

Felicitously I found online an article about this written by a former parishioner here, Fr. Alan Piper, O.P.   Rejoicing in his connection to us, I will quote him at length:  The burning bush signifies also the result of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, namely, the Incarnation of the Son of God.  Just as the fire did not consume the bush, so the divinity of Jesus did not destroy his humanity.  We beneficiaries of the ancient Nicene formulation “true God and true man” may not appreciate how easy it is to be mistaken about the relationship of Christ’s humanity to his divinity.  Among the early Christians, some mistakenly thought it beneath the divine dignity to be united to matter, and so they concluded that Jesus could not have been truly human, but only apparently so.  Others thought (again, incorrectly) that Jesus did not possess a human mind or will, since the divine ones would seem to render them redundant.  Others worried that the human nature of Christ threatened to diminish his divinity, so they divided him into two persons, such that the Blessed Virgin could be said to be the mother of Christ, but not the mother of God.  Ever since, when the Church calls Mary the mother of God, she means to imply that full divinity and full humanity are united in the one person of Christ.

Each of these errors tends to suggest that human nature and the divine nature are somehow at odds.  It is as if God could defile himself by coming too close to humanity, or that humanity could be crushed by the weight of divine glory.  But the burning bush, the Blessed Virgin, and the Incarnation teach us that divinization does not entail dehumanization.  The Creator so transcends his creation that between God and creatures there is no comparison, no contest.  And humanity itself is open to transcendence, such that in knowing God the human being is brought to human perfection.

God will not destroy our humanity.  He doesn’t want to take away our identity. On the contrary, he wants to show us who we truly are and to free us from tiresome self-misconceptions.  This is part of the point of penance.  Why should we make peace with tendencies to self-destruction? Why should we say, “In the end, the flesh is all I am,” when God is waiting to conform us to his Son?  The divine fire may cause us pain, but it also causes joy–a joy that will endure–because it makes us burn with the love of God.

There is a marvelous mosaic that juxtaposes these two events for the altar of the First Joyful Mystery in the rosary chapels of our own Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  I am frustrated to admit that I do not have a photograph of it but am confident that now that this marvelous manifestation of God’s self-revelation is firmly before your mind’s eye, you cannot unsee it.

Monsignor Smith

Face it

Saint Scholastica, abbess and (blood) sister of Saint Benedict

Lord, show us your face, and we shall be saved.  (Psalm 80, v 20).

The Lord has shown us his face and completed the work of our salvation, and when that work is achieved in us, we will behold Him face to face.  We know what the face of God looks like, but you notice that “face to face” necessarily involves more than one face, more than one person.   How important our own faces are to the economy of salvation!

This week I saw an article online about a group of religious women in California I had never heard of before.   The accompanying photographs showed them fully habited, in long white tunic and black veil and with what I believe is called a wimple under the veil and about their heads and hair, so that only their faces and hands were uncovered.   Resembling as it did any number of ancient depictions of Christian women religious such as Saint Bridget or Saint Catherine of Siena, the habit emphasized the importance of their faces in a way that got my attention.

For millennia, souls who undertake to follow Christ more closely and conform their lives to Him in their embrace of the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience) have very often assumed distinctive clothing.  That garb has rarely, if ever, included face covering.  

When Christian modesty and humility are fully embraced, the face is fully revealed, and perhaps even accentuated.   How important our faces are to our relationships with one another and with God!

Our recent experience with widespread and even mandatory covering of faces revealed or at least reminded us of the importance of face-to-face contact among human beings in order for us to be human.   Children from birth discern their own existence and experiences through the faces first of their mothers, then of other family members who respond to their presence with visible delight.  A mother’s love shines on her newborn child in and through her face.  A child learns both to smile and to love by beholding both the smile and the love in the faces open before his eyes. For years thereafter, the developing child is attentive to and even dependent on the faces of people with whom he interacts.

Medical masks in their proper setting can be reassuring even as they handicap the communication that must be undertaken in those settings.  While a masquerade can be a ball and such masks play a role in a comedy of mistaken identity, masks in American culture were long the mark of bandits or burglars and others about nefarious business.  A covered face encountered where unexpected is an obscured identity and intention, a cause for confusion, and possibly concern or caution.  

In looking about the world as we see it through the images that come to us through our most familiar technology, it is easy to identify the cultures that are rooted in Christianity not only by the visibility of the faces of people, but also by the emphasis upon their importance.  The less individuality and personality are held in esteem, the more frequently faces are covered or hidden.

Salvation itself, heaven as we call it, involves both seeing and being seen, knowing as we are known.  For this our faces are as indispensable as the face we behold.  Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)

Monsignor Smith

Behold the Man

Head of Christ (1506)

by Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina

The strange thing is that we know what Jesus looked like.  Across two thousand years, from a time before photography, of a man with no known portrait from life in any medium, whose physical characteristics are not described in any of the authoritative texts from which most people get most of their information of him, there is a widespread and almost universal consensus on the particulars of Jesus’ physical appearance.

How remarkable is that?  For starters is how remarkable it is that God have any physical appearance in the first place, but that is what happened when The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  From that instant, God had a unique and recognizable physicality that resembled but was distinct and different from every human being ever before or since.  

Also remarkable is that we know and recognize that physical appearance with confidence even now, so far away in both time and distance.  There are so many physical characteristics that do not belong to him that we can reject out of hand: curly hair like Saint Peter had, for example, or great height like an NBA starter.  Such things we wave away as preposterous.  

Without photograph or portrait, how have we achieved this confidence?  We have clues from items whose provenance is less conventional and less convicting; the Veil of Veronica venerated at Saint Peter’s in the Vatican; the Holy Face of Manopello; the Shroud of Turin.   All concur about the essentials; all are equally optional and unnecessary to the life of faith and love of the Lord in His Holy Church.   Make of them what you will.   Even less necessary are the various visions granted to holy people across the ages, however much they tend to agree as well.  Saint Faustina shows us the vision of His mercy, not His hair.

What for me has long been a source of wonder is that however Jesus did look, He does still look, but not entirely. What do I mean by that?  Consider that after Jesus’ resurrection, He appeared to a number of people, all of whom had known Him well before his crucifixion.  Sometimes they did not recognize Him, like Mary weeping in the garden, or the disciples on the road to Emmaus.  And then they did recognize Him – though Mary recognized His voice, mainly.  Others knew Him immediately by sight, as the apostles in the upper room, though they couldn’t say how he got in past the locked door.  What is the same, what is different?   I think the characteristics of the Risen Body have almost everything in common with the body nailed to the cross and laid in the tomb, only somehow they’re better.  I’ll have to think more about that.

Yet we do know a lot about how Jesus looked and looks.  His dark, long hair parted in the middle, that beard that somehow parts into two, as well.  His eyes open, dark, and lively.  A surprisingly small mouth for someone whose speaking is so transformative.  No shortage of nose.  The halo, however painted on, is almost always unnecessary in every rendering for the past two thousand years.  We know.

Jesus is God made visible, not a projection or imagining.  So if any artist change his appearance too much in one way or another to resemble some group or even an individual, it doesn’t take a professional to spot the false steps.  We know.

Jesus has everything essential to us in common with us, except for sin.  That means He looks very much like all of us but not exactly like any of us, just as you or I resemble our forebears and our children but only up to the point of distinction that is individuality.  Not because of any technology or talent, but because He wants it, His is a form, a figure, and a face we know, recognize, and love.  We all know what Jesus looks like.  So look.  At Him.  

Monsignor Smith

Goodbye to all that

Carne vale!
(Meat farewell)
= carnivale!

One thing everybody here should be doing this weekend is having fun.  Celebrating Mardi Gras is fun where people are Catholic, because Mardi Gras is authentic where people keep Lent.  That’s right; in order to enjoy Mardi Gras, one must also observe Lent.  Mardi Gras finds its joy in anticipating the fasting, prayer, and almsgiving of Lenten penance.  We do penance because of our sins, our lack of righteousness, our poverty of goodness.  We need the mercy of God in Christ.  Especially when it comes late as it does this year, we realize we need Lent.  Anticipating that, we take a sip of Mardi Gras.  

The other thing you should be doing this weekend is planning your Lenten penance.  Don’t settle for the cartoon notion of Lent: “This year I am giving up (insert one: a) chocolate; b) dessert; c) beer; d) other food product).”  Remember: Lent is not a diet.  Lent should leave us leaner, but that’s a side effect, not the goal.  Devise your discipline according to these three principles, and you will have many reasons to be grateful.

Seek the silence. Our days are filled with so much noise, and not just audio but also visual, mental, and social.  All of it, all of it, misshapes our relationships and understanding.  This Lent, turn it off:  the radio in the car, the ear-buds while you exercise, the television in the home, the web-browser on the screen.  Sure, make specific exceptions for yourself: except when I need to check the traffic and weather together on the eights; except for watching March Madness; except for ordering Mom’s birthday present online. Break the habit of consuming audio and visual sludge!  Get rid of the constant noise, the default distraction of hypnotizing visuals, the aimless poking about the web for useless information and harmful stimulation.  Be still and know that I am God.  (Psalm 46:10)   

Seek the other.  Do not reduce Lent to your personal goal, where you yourself are the principal beneficiary of your new self-control (in your waistline, your budget, or your productivity).  Offer something to someone else.  “Giving alms” is indispensable to a good Lent; that includes but is not limited to giving money and other gifts to the poor. It also means giving time to the lonely, attention to the ignored, and love to the one we have so much trouble loving.  Remember, too, what a gift it is to ask someone to help you.  Life is not solitary; neither is our struggle against sin. Your Lent should be not private, but personal – and therefore interpersonal.  Seek also the One who desires your company in prayer.  Let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and favor, and to find help in time of need. (Heb 4:16)

Seek the cross.  Jesus Christ is never more fully revealed as God than in His death on the cross.  If you would share that divinity, that holiness, share too his cross.   Put aside something that you cannot picture yourself living without.  Give a gift you think you cannot afford.  Take up a promise, burden, or responsibility you think you cannot carry.  Then look at your crucifix, each day.  The real sacrifice of the cross is available for you at every Mass, so add one more Mass to your week, i.e., every Wednesday near your office, or every Thursday after you drop off the kids.  Behold how the Cross of Christ stands revealed as the Tree of Life! 

If there is some pain or privation in your life not by your own fault or your own choosing, then Lent gives you something to do with it.  Your illness, your embarrassment or failure; your pain, your mistreatment by a false friend; your devaluation at work.  Embrace it as your Lenten cross, what you and Jesus are doing together this Lent.

So, yes, eat less.   Wear your ashes until they rub away.  Eat fewer sweets and fewer treats.  Go to Stations of the Cross on meatless Fridays and write bigger checks to help folks who need.  Give your full attention to somebody who never gets it. Talk less and pray more.  That is the start.  Take it higher.  Raise the stakes, and Our Lord will not fail to raise the grace.

Take it seriously, and Lent will be one of the best times of your whole year.  And it will make your Mardi Gras that much better, too.  

Monsignor Smith

 

What a drag.

Things can be bleak in February

We have no grounds to be surprised.   God warned us about kings and rulers, and anybody else with earthly authority.  It’s all laid out in the Book of Samuel.

So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking a king from him. He said, "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your menservants and maidservants, and the best of your cattle and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. (1 Samuel 8:1-18)   And that’s not the worst of it, because that is just what kings demand rightly; it can and does get much worse when they take even more.

We have been warned, yet for some reason, we are taken aback when we learn of rulers and authorities using their office and responsibility to obtain personal gain, or to channel public funds to private interests that do not serve the people well, or at all.  Shocked as we are, we carry on by telling ourselves that they are outliers, not the norm, and our government, our leaders generally can be trusted.

But there comes to mind a word I learned long ago, probably when I was studying the history of the Soviet Union and its associated regimes: kleptocrat. It’s a combination of Greek particles that could be rendered a thief who is in chargeor one who governs by stealing.  Even worse is a kleptocracy, which is a whole governing class characterized by thievery, that is, taking for themselves what belongs to the people or nation or group they govern.

When a culture of kleptocracy lays hold of a society, it is difficult to shake free.  So many foreign places that Americans visit come with the warning that officials at every level expect bribes to do what one would expect of them because of their offices.  We may go along with it if we must for the sake of our vacation, but we shake our heads at the prospect of living like that.  We assume better of American officials, not least because we see how such a culture of thievery degrades the life of the society and impoverishes the people.  As long as we are prosperous and productive in our own country, we assume we are mostly free of the economic and social drag of kleptocrats.  But we are mistaken.

In the day of Samuel the Prophet, civil governance and religious governance were the same, and religious power just as likely to corrupt.  When Samuel warned the Jews about insisting on a king, and what they would get if they did, it was because his own sons were venal priests, and nobody wanted them to be judges, that is rulers, of Israel.   

When Samuel became old, he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his first-born son was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah; they were judges in Beer-sheba. Yet his sons did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after gain; they took bribes and perverted justice. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, "Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint for us a king to govern us like all the nations."

The criminality of his own sons disappointed but could not have surprised Samuel, and not simply because he knew well the logical result of hereditary authority and power.  No, Samuel had come into his own position as religious and civil leader of Israel when the sons of his own predecessor, Eli the priest at Shiloh, proved to be rotten:

Now the sons of Eli were worthless men; they had no regard for the LORD.  Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the LORD; for the men treated the offering of the LORD with contempt.  ... And this which shall befall your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, shall be the sign to you:  both of them shall die on the same day.  And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind; and I will build him a sure house, and he shall go in and out before my anointed forever. (1 Samuel 2:12, 17, 34-35)

The drag of kleptocracy is heavy wherever there is power, authority, and money, be they civil or religious.  Christ the King and Universal High Priest is our unique rescuer, with whom there is only the surprise of perfection and delight.

Monsignor Smith

 

What can make one believe

Not Obi-wan.

We don’t call it make-believe for nothing.   Whether its root be that you make as if you believe something to be true, or by your actions you make other people believe what you have invented, it is the pastime of children and the profession of actors in the theatre and the cinema.  When the audience contributes the suspension of disbelief, any number of improbable or impossible propositions can be enjoyed as entertainment.

Alec Guinness was one of the great classically trained British actors of the twentieth century, celebrated for his work on stage and screen.  Like many of his peers in the acting aristocracy, he undertook roles in American films because they paid better than the loftier pursuits of Shakespeare and such.  He brought both dignity and skill to his roles, leaving his mark in the minds of all who saw his work.  Thus he is indelibly associated with the character Obi-Wan Kenobi from the original Star Wars films.

One of his memorable lines from that first film seems to have found legs recently as I have heard people saying, These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.  He utters it gently but convincingly, and because the force can be effective with the weak-minded, the bad guys not only accept but repeat the falsehood he has told them.  

It could be argued that Alec Guinness could make one believe anything he uttered with masterful and articulate conviction, and that is indeed how he made his living.  But somehow I have an album of his reading of a number of Christian texts – medieval and modern poems, spiritual writings, and letters from saints.  I was listening to it as I drove around for errands the other day, and he delivers these words with richness and force. 

During his career, Alec Guinness became a Catholic, and spoke movingly of his faith.   One of the experiences that contributed to his conversion occurred when he was playing the role of a priest in a film, an example of make-believe helping to make him believe something that is, in fact, true. 

My album offers no citations for the Christian passages Guinness reads, but one of them impressed me enough that I engaged the infernal machine to find it.  Let me share it with you now, an excerpt from A Remaining Christmas, a 1928 essay by Hilaire Belloc.  I wish you could hear Guinness deliver it with the clarity and conviction of a man who can convince a storm trooper, These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.  It would help you recognize the truth that you are looking for and believe it -- which is very different from make-believe.

Monsignor Smith

Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things.  Moreover, there is this great quality in the unchanging practice of Holy Seasons, that it makes explicable, tolerable, and normal what is otherwise a shocking and intolerable and even in the fullest sense, abnormal thing.  I mean, the mortality of immortal men.

Not only death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, are challenged, chained, and put in their place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability.  The threats of despair, remorse, necessary expiation, weariness almost beyond bearing, dull repetition of things apparently fruitless, unnecessary and without meaning, estrangement, the misunderstanding of mind by mind, forgetfulness which is a false alarm, grief, and repentance, which are true ones, but of a sad company, young men perished in battle before their parents had lost vigour in age, the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety, honour harassed, all the bitterness of living—become part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude.  For they are all connected in the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were, the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.