What Winston did

Forced forgetting

 …in the side wall, (there was) a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating…for the disposal of waste paper.  Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building…. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.   When one knew that any document was due for destruction, …it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

          Winston Smith, the nebbishy protagonist of George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984, worked in the Ministry of Truth revising past texts to conform to current assertions of the governing party.  This great book, which gave us the two-way telescreen for surveillance, the Two-Minutes Hate, and Big Brother, describes almost in caricature the workings of an ideological totalitarian state.  When I first read the book, the year 1984 was still in the future, and one could think there was still time for the predictions to come true.  Just over forty years later, many of them have.  

            As if it were not enough always having on our persons our so-called smartphones, we bring Alexa and her sisters into our homes and expect to be listened to by them all.  Hey, Siri!  The Daily Outrage presents a villain to receive universal opprobrium, often delivering into the firestorm someone who until that day had been popular, or respected, or anonymous.  The identity of Big Brother is something of a mystery, but the effects of his supervision are acknowledged in the mundane, almost subconscious steps taken to avoid his disapproval.  

            Similarly, the memory hole has become a fixture – but where?  This great forgetting-contraption that devours reports, records, and reflections must be somewhere, must it not?   Someone must stoke the furnace, maintain the fans, and decide what goes into the slot? 

            Orwell’s model for his future society was Stalin’s Russia.   He had seen or possibly only heard of basic practices there, exemplified by but hardly limited to the airbrushing out of photographs of Trotsky, who had started a hero but become an enemy of the revolution.  That required changing the past to support the assertions of the present.  

            I re-read 1984 about eight years ago and was astonished at its prescience.  Orwell gets so much right about the technology of surveillance and oppression, and especially the manipulation of language.   Some other tools and techniques of suppression he misses; for those you must read Brave New World, a similar dystopian vision by his contemporary Aldous Huxley.  We can talk about those some other time.  But if you think you can guess what brought the memory hole to my mind this month, you are almost certainly wrong.

            Not where I started, but the awareness at which I have arrived is that the memory hole is a phenomenon that appears at most levels of human society, including the personal.  We are all inclined to leave out of our own histories the aspects and actions that do not conform to the image we want to project, and not only when we are applying for a job or courting a mate.  We are inclined literally to forget what we ourselves have done that does not belong to the image of ourselves that we prefer, or even need. 

            Maybe I am saying that there is a little memory hole in each of us.  Neither is this what got me started on the subject, however.   I think it is an insight into why the “memory hole project” can be and has been so successful in its several iterations in our own period of history to the great detriment of many, even all.  If we acknowledge its appeal and search to find how we ourselves have applied it, perhaps that will help us identify the tactic when it is used against us by someone else, whether on an intimate or a more expansive scale.  It may well be philosophically impossible to prove a negative, but we can be aware of the negating power of the memory hole.  Awareness of this present danger is the first step toward escaping it.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Open road

Open road is the impossible dream of the Beltway-bound, commuter-crowded and creeping along under the worst of all possible conditions.  But open road is what lies ahead as we turn that page and resume our forward motion now that the delightful pause of Christmas festivity yields to the normal progression of tasks and responsibilities.  We put the decorations away and get back to business.  Energies are spent and accounts depleted, so not everybody may be ready to run.   But still, the new year beckons!  Any road worth traveling has markers, so here are a few you will want to note.  

The Church has an Epiphany tradition of announcing the Moveable Feasts of the coming year.  We did not sing the chanted proclamation at Mass, but you still will want to mark your calendars.  Ash Wednesday will be 18 February, and Easter Sunday 5 April, which is solidly in the “normal” date range.   The Ascension of the Lord will be on Thursday, 14 May, but we will ignore that until the following Sunday, the 17^th. Pentecost Sunday will be 24 May (which will be Memorial Day weekend this year) and Corpus Christi with its procession two weeks later Sunday 7 June.   The last Sunday of this year will be Christ the King on 22 November, then after Thanksgiving on 26 November we will start the cycle all over again on 29 November with the First Sunday in Advent.

More local markers will include Wednesday, 26 February, one week into Lent, when Bishop Roy Campbell will come here confer Confirmation on our young people.  First Holy Communion will be on Saturday 2 May, the First Saturday of that busy month just as Our Lord indicated to the nuns.  

Not all the dates we need to know are liturgical.  Trying to find a date to get together with a friend, I first had to find out when falls Super Bowl Sunday this year (February 8, if you like me did not already know) because I know I have somewhere to be that evening.  The first of this year’s federal holidays are 19 January and 16 February, which give us three-day weekends and the Monday special Mass schedule.  These are also annual events whose dates change from year to year.

Laying out the map for what lies ahead, I would be remiss if I did not mention what is still large and bright in the rear-view mirror.  Let me thank everybody who worked so hard to make our celebrations over the past weeks so marvelous.  Our music in particular was wide in variety and consistent in excellence. Everybody loves Christmas music for good reason, and the musical talents and efforts of our parish did it more than justice.  

“The big push” to decorate the church on Christmas Eve was handled with near professional efficiency and better than professional results.  As our manger scenes come down this weekend with the Baptism of the Lord, it is good to remember how many hands it takes to build (and remove) those “stables!”   And as ever, our altar servers showed that they can do world-class work blindfolded, or at least in the dark of Midnight Mass.  Our sacristans and ushers took care of an awful lot of work between Masses that made each successive congregation feel like they were the first on scene to see the new-born King.  And even if the announcements at Mass gave you the impression that the rectory offices were nearly always closed, let me assure you that all the staff worked extra hard to prepare everything we needed and process everything you gave. 

So let me thank them for you, but if you have a chance, feel free to say a word yourselves.  These are all people we know and see often who make things so beautiful for all the people we would be glad to see a little more often.  The Nativity of our Lord brings plenty of God’s children “home,” if only for a visit.  It is reassuring to know we are in good company on the open road.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Innumerable

In the search for patterns, it is easy to default to dividing life by the years.  2025 was a tough one, for example.  Or, when I was younger, I was convinced the odds were better than the evens:  seventeen was more delightful age than eighteen.  But what can anyone, much less a teenager, predict from that?

This is the season when turning the calendar gets more attention than usual, definitely more than it merits, but a different pattern also emerged.  Rather than impose divisions on my time, it provided a glimpse of the continuity of the whole.

When I decorate my room, I put up a little artificial (gasp!) tree.  It is strung with multicolored (gasp!) lights that hearken to the big colored GE screw-in bulbs on the family tree when I was growing up.  On it are decorations I pull from a box my mom started for me about fifty years ago when I began accumulating my own ornaments as gifts. Odd ones my grandmother gave me (an owl the color and texture of a pencil eraser embedded with small mirrors), silly ones my aunt gave me (peg figures of chefs because even then I liked to cook), collectible ones my mom gave me (ceramic Snoopy on a sled), and the one my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Taylor gave me in 1974 (a hand-painted plaster of Paris snowman).  Over the intervening years, I have received straw ornaments from Germany from my sister; ceramic bells and little birds from Mom; and several others from buddies that are most tactfully displayed in my private space.  There are also innumerable train ornaments, including the locomotives Jupiter and No. 119 that met at the Golden Spike in Promontory Utah.  It’s all capped with a corn-husk angel I picked up at Tumacacori Arizona on an excursion there from my sister’s place in Tucson with her and her husband and my mom and dad.  It’s new – only fourteen years old.

Decorating the tree does not take long, but it carries me through more than fifty years of people and relationships and Christmas.   

There’s another tree one floor directly below my little one, in the front office.  This one is real (thanks CYO!) and also has multicolored lights.  It has been up for weeks – since the day after Immaculate Conception – but is only half decorated even now.  This is the Parishioner Tree, and the ornaments are still arriving daily in the mail.  It is where we hang the family-picture Christmas cards we receive.  Not only our current population smiles at us in their photo finery; past parishioners still update our remembered images of them with this year’s greetings.  For example, a couple whom I prepared for marriage but left the area shortly afterward sent a picture with their five kids.  Past and present, together it’s a festive throng we can pause to enjoy any time we pass through the office.  New parishioners, it is not too late to bring your cards for the tree!  

This tree takes the whole month-long Christmas season to decorate and assembles in one place evidence of twenty years as Pastor of Saint Bernadette.  

The New Year celebrates the turning of a paper page and the click of a counter.   This structure imposed upon our time is as necessary and even helpful as it is artificial.  It divides and distinguishes days, months, and years.  Christmas, however, and the recurring elements of its celebration, be they food or flowers or songs, reveal the context and continuity within our individual lives and with the lives that have touched ours.  Central among them is the life of the child Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, who is not a memory but a presence and power Who unites who we are with who we were and who we will be, each of our days and months and years into the ongoing history of the salvation of the world.  

One of my newspapers carries a columnist whose humor I appreciate and whose latest book is entitled, Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.  I concur with his prohibition because I know luck has nothing to do with it.  Grace, on the other hand, defines every day and binds the parts into the glorious whole.  What we mark at the New Year is the finitude and failures of time.  What we touch at Christmas delights us, for we hold in our hands the very elements of eternity.  

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

The Inhabitant

Et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.  

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1: 14)

This marvelous declaration, this concise formulation summarizes the wonder at the root of our celebration of the nativity of the Son of God.  From His conception to His birth, Our Lord dwelt within the confines of his mother’s womb; among us, yes, though also not yet among us.  His emergence from that sweet shelter, His manifestation to the wondering eyes of shepherd, mute beast, and starsearching king, is entrance into the air we breathe and arrival into the life we live on this splendid earth our creator made and into the marred world of man’s making.  

Hidden in this phrase so familiar even in Latin is the English verb that describes the great action of God: to inhabit.  et habitavit in nobis.  Behold, He comes, not just to visit, but to dwell; not simply to insert Himself but also to make His own all that is ours, unto our very flesh.  He is not just passing through; He abides.  

The Living God does not just slip on a suit to disguise His splendor, he steps into a life He will make His own.  He will hunger and thirst, sleep and dream, yearn and relinquish.  He will enter friendships and see them lost; He will know mirth and grief.  He will gain strength and competence; He will be made helpless and die.  His birth is an entering into everything that we are and do, instantly making everything we are and do into something that God Himself is and does.  He inhabits not simply our home or our world; He inhabits who we are.   He is come to stay. 

What He will do in our life and with our life transpires over a lifetime and is accomplished on a Friday afternoon.   After three days’ time in the darkest place we spend our time, He transforms what He has made his own and with it all that is ours.  

His goal all along, why He chose to inhabit us (et habitavit in nobis) was that we be made able to inhabit Him.  His moving in to us is the making possible of our moving in to Him.  And He, the coeternal Son of the everlasting Father, dwells forever in the perfect mutual intimacy of the Triune God, Love indivisible and perfect.  The very Being that is our source is also our goal, a destination we can reach only in Him who participates in that Being.   “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” (Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

It would be easy to think that this means that Christ came to change us into somebody else.   But the opposite is true: He came so that we could be who we truly are.  He came from somewhere else as something else so that everything else that God enjoyed could be ours as well.  All else is ours in Christ, who inhabits us and makes ours what we did not possess.  The logical question is, what else?

By inhabiting us, Christ returns to us all that is meant to be ours from our very beginning, the creation of Man.  By inhabiting us, Christ returns us to intimacy with God and with one another in mutual charity.  By inhabiting us, Christ reveals and removes all obstacles to that intimacy, the obstacles that are inherent (original sin) and that are our own regrettable actions (actual sins).  By inhabiting us, God makes possible what we could never achieve of ourselves, and that is being ourselves, our true uninhibited, unburdened identities in right relationship with God and neighbor.  Now that is something else!

To look on that helpless infant we lay in our family manger scene is to see God inhabiting all that we are and inviting us to inhabit all that He is.  He became tiny so that we could be made great.  He is the Divine Inhabitant.  Let Him in, so that He take you up.

We who dwell here so close to the tabernacle, literally the tent or dwelling place of the Lord Jesus Christ, invite you to delight in welcoming Him who comes to inhabit our lives.  Fr. Swink, Fr. Wiktor, and all the fearless and faithful helpers here at the heart of the parish offer our prayers and warmest wishes for you, that your Christmastide be filled with joy, and the tiny and divine inhabitant be at home in you, and yours.  Merry Christmas.  

Monsignor Smith                                   

whose will they be?

Sometimes older things are cooler things,
especially when they show that
what stays the same is the important things.

 Fool! … The things you have prepared, whose will they be? (Luke 12:20) Our Lord warns against laying up treasure that moth or rust can destroy, but perhaps sadder still is treasure nobody wants.

It is a much-remarked phenomenon of our day that the “younger generation” has no interest in the heirlooms and careful acquisitions of their elders.  I have no idea whether this means Gen X, Y, Z, or…what next?  Alpha?  But the assertion is that these “young” people eschew furniture and dishes and art and artifacts that are precious to their parents, who have now come to the time of letting go, also called downsizing, and are eager to be shed of their precious but burdensome array.

The image of the new generation is one of digitally active, virtually connected, acquisitionally averse postmoderns who incline toward renting or app-sharing not only their homes and transport but also everything else that serves their purposes however long or briefly including the clothes on their backs.  The emphasis for expenditure is on experiences rather than objects.  

This leaves great ranks of suburban homes and urban apartments stuffed to the crown moldings with goods and goodies in the unique and eclectic tastes of their accumulators.  The china!  The dining room set!  That carpet!  The collection of objets in ceramic or crystal or carved with a chainsaw!  A few quick calls will reveal that you can sell some for pennies on the dollar, and the rest you cannot give away.  Suddenly it is clear why there are trucks with signs like “college hunks hauling junk.”

Is this mark of the new generation (sic) a symptom more universal disdain?   Does a loss of interest in the carefully accumulated spiritual and intellectual achievements of their elders accompany the aversion to the material accomplishments and accumulations of their forebears?  While the antique stores and eBay vendors present rank upon rank of marvelous objects that have served well their part in life and society, who is gathering up the ideas and understanding that made possible that life and that society?  

The easy instantaneous access to facts, information, and data has obviated the burden of recollection and even learning.  The digitizing of everything has made analysis and evaluation the result of electronic process, not habit of mind. And the perniciously named and facilely advanced “artificial intelligence” has by its artifice elevated algorithmically applied evaluation to replace thought.  The overwhelming advantage of speed and accuracy hides the complete absence of insight or originality.  Truth will be crushed by the manipulation of facts, and goodness and beauty suffocated. 

Of all that your parents and grandparents treasured, what has already been mislaid or abandoned like so many sentimental tchotchkes?  What that you assume to be precious has the next generation already discarded as useless and burdensome?

The birth at Bethlehem of the Son of God to the Virgin of Nazareth, Mary, occurred in obscurity of time and place, yet rather than passing unnoticed, was recognized and received by many who were eager and alert to great things to come from God.  Different from acquisitiveness, receptivity is an indispensable part of learning, a necessary disposition on the way to knowledge, understanding, and belief.  When the Son of man comes, will He find faith on earth?  (Luke 18:8)  I guess the answer depends on whether you can find somebody willing to accept it, whether you remember from whom you got it, and where you put it.  

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Unique and universal

Here's lookin' at you, kid.

It can make me feel self-conscious, in a way that is not good.  It seems I am always saying the same thing, over and over.  And I don’t mean “The Lord be with you”, or “In the name of the Father, and of the Son…”.   I mean when I talk.  When I preach, when I write, when I answer questions; all the things I say that I am responsible for crafting, all of it seems to be the same.

As we launch into Year A (Saint Matthew’s Gospel) of the Sunday lectionary cycle, I look to speak to these Scriptures for the seventh time since I arrived here as Pastor.  You’ve heard it all before!   The parables, the psalms, the glitches in grammar and the grandeur of the whole.  Do you come hoping for something new, something different?  My self-consciousness makes me want not to repeat, not to recycle a homily or a phrase or an image I have given you already.  But really, who remembers what I said in 2013?  I will tell you who does: I do!  And I hate to repeat myself; it seems so – unoriginal!

When I was in seminary there was a spiritual director, a Jesuit from Massachusetts, who asserted to us aspiring preachers that “You only have one homily.”  No matter how many times you preach, under what circumstances and on what scriptures, what examples you give or what stories you tell, you really only preach one thing.  He did not mean that we preach only and always the mystery of salvation in Christ, though that is something we should do.  He was telling us that every minister of the Gospel has a “thing” which he hammers over and over throughout his ministry.   The concept was both amusing and frightening.

What Fr. D. was trying to tell us, I think, was that we each have our vision of the mystery of salvation in Christ, constrained by our human limitedness rather than by any shortfall in the truth.  Like the three blind men encountering the elephant, we all come at it in a particular way, lacking the faculty to grasp the whole.  One may emphasize the trunk while another can only talk about the leg.  Both are, in truth, conveying elephantine reality.  

We are accustomed to seek what is new and different.  The so-called “news” is presented as something we never encountered before and did not expect.   But after the initial frisson of excitement that novelty elicits, we lapse into ennui.  Current events and pointed opinions presented as “news” gets us only so far.  

What should excite us as well as console us, not to mention shape and direct our every action and aspiration, is that God loves us and wants us to be happy.   He loves us so much, in fact, that he took human flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory; the glory of a father’s only begotten son.  And that glory is laid out in spectacular fashion in his suffering like us, with us, and for us.  We have heard it all before, but it is the only news that is genuinely good.

I have only so much creativity.  I read books, I read articles, I listen to music and immerse myself in art; I go for hikes to ‘bathe’ in the forest.  Every day brings something.  I pay attention – some would suggest too much attention – to distinction and difference and nuance.  So much variety!  My “takeaway”, the result, my conclusions are over and over again the same: how many thousands upon thousands of ways we people can get things wrong, and how unique and universal is the one thing that is right.  

As is the case in the elements of our ritual, where repetition and familiarity are both good and necessary for the experience and the expression, even the aspects of our worship that are the least programmatic, the least scripted – the parts I have to devise and provide – even these have an underlying sameness, rooted in the consistency of my limitations and the constancy of the universal truth of God in Christ.

Saint John Paul II said that Jesus Christ is the answer to every human question.  I have yet to find the exception.   That would mean that saying the same thing over and over, in different words and stories and situations, is actually the best remedy for being self-conscious.

Monsignor Smith

 

Squanderous

strewing the floor with our treasures,
littering His place with our concerns.

Practicality.  Efficiency.  Usefulness.  

These are all attributes that most people value highly.  In our day and our society, they make a product more valuable, and often contribute to our decisions to how we spend our days.   We choose to do what is practical in the most efficient manner possible, so that our results are useful to ourselves and others.   Sometimes, we use these criteria because we feel we have no choice – some things we would like to do have to be dropped from our schedule, or our budget, because they are not practical, wouldn’t be an efficient use of our resources, and no useful product or result would be obtained.

It is hard to think of a time of year when we are more likely to make hard decisions using these criteria than right now, what our modern society has come to call The Holidays.  There is so much that we hope to do, want to do, have to do, that we just cannot do it all.  Some things simply must be done; and some things must be allowed to slide -- they don’t make the cut.  Even the parties we choose to attend have to withstand the test of practicality, efficiency, and usefulness.  

I understand.  Really, I do.  My inner German, my training as a professional analyst, my dread of waste; all make me a sucker for such decision-making processes.  However, please allow me to take the opportunity to beg you: Do not to fall for this!

The counter-example I offer you is: snuggle time with your child.  This clearly does not fall on the winning side of the practicality/efficiency/usefulness contest.  Yet, somehow, it carries its own imperative, and bears its inarguable rewards.  Whether the child chatters aimlessly the whole time, asks a Big Question (Daddy, why do people die?), or just falls asleep, it has an immeasurable value.  I don’t think I have to explain to you or verify how this complete waste of time confirms and strengthens the identities and relationship of both participants.

The Sacred Liturgy of the Church similarly fails completely when put to the test for practicality/efficiency/usefulness.  Absolutely nothing is accomplished, and in fact much is lost.  Heck, at a good one, some of our best things get burnt up!  Whether you spend the time reeling off seemingly unconnected preoccupations to God, ask Him a Big Question, or simply settle into a restful peace, this time “squandered” bears great fruit in ordering your life rightly according to your identity and relationship with God and everyone else.

There is nothing practical or productive about worship.  Many words are said, but very little new information is conveyed.  The “Good News” isn’t that new, really.  Much is done, but little is accomplished.  And there are long periods of just ...being there.  Gack!  How unbearably inefficient and ...useless!  What’s worse, it requires pouring out before God our precious time and vital essence, strewing the floor with our treasures, littering His place with our concerns.  That simply doesn’t rate much in a busy society, especially in its busiest month, December.  

But right now is precisely when our worship teaches us that we will never know who we are and who He is, unless we put aside all our tasks and priorities for silence, stillness, and waiting.  It’s an audacious request, but He never fails to deliver on His promise.  

Remember that if you are trying to decide if you can “afford” to attend Mass.  The formerly fashionable concept of “quality time” never really filled the bill with toddlers, or with God.  He offers us holy time, life-giving time, if only we embrace its inefficiency, impracticality, and uselessness.

Monsignor Smith