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

What constitutes us

 The concept of “American exceptionalism” has almost as many definitions as there are commentators on it.  I have long been fascinated by the term, whether its first best use was by Alexis de Tocqueville or Josef Stalin, both of whom are candidates for credit.  Some would assert that the only exceptional aspect of our country is that it is ours, which is thus the same thing that makes any country exceptional.  While I could not endorse any particular theory, it seems sufficiently commonsense to acknowledge that there is something authentically exceptional about our nation.

My first candidate for the ground of exceptionality would be our form of government, the Constitution, and that this form of government is the first and defining characteristic of the country. Ethnicity, culture, and geography all contributed to our nation’s earliest self-understanding and establishment, but did not even then, much less do they now, define what makes the United States of America, the United States of America. 

Lest anyone think that the USA was simply the first of a historical generation of nations to be born of revolution and coalesce by constitution, one need examine the suggested “other examples.”  The French staged a revolution with the express intention of emulating what they saw in our society, but “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” quickly descended into tyranny and bloodshed by committee.  We are all aware of how the Russian and other so-called “revolutions” played out, pursued as they were in the names of ideologies that led to domination by ideologues. Many Latin American nations claim their own “George Washingtons” who nonetheless failed to manifest not only his executive virtues, but also and especially his virtuous relinquishing of executive power.  Anybody familiar with the European Union’s huge phonebook-size assemblage of regulations knows it is a “Constitution” in name alone.

I think what lies at the root of the current mocking of American exceptionalism is a rejection of the possibility that anything can be an exception.  There is a desire to subordinate the character of USA to a rule, and by that rule to take away any privilege or responsibility that would belong to a truly exceptional nation.  

Both privilege and responsibility are eliminated by the tyranny of false equality, which refuses to admit not only any exception, but also the possibility of authentic difference.  The reality of difference is manifest in the differences between and among human beings and all the creatures of the earth. Good and evil, true and false, reality and fiction, beauty and disorder are truly and clearly different.  The only way to deny or suppress these differences is to erect a false equality through authority and power.  That authority and power is necessarily in opposition to the author of all these differences, our Creator. 

My willingness to accept that the United States is exceptional among nations is rooted in my belief that among human beings there are lives that are exceptional.  That belief is founded on my acquaintance with the perfectly exceptional man who is God, Jesus Christ.  His immaculately conceived mother, the Virgin Mary, is not only an exception to the rule of original sin, but also a model of and invitation to acceptance of the privilege and responsibility that comes with freedom from the rule, with being an exception.

The inherent difference among human lives is reflected in the differences of the societies they erect.  The true differences between good and evil, true and false, between God and everything else, undergird a world where every human soul is called to be exceptional in a way that he or she is uniquely capable of being.  This is the foundational freedom that can be suppressed but not eliminated, as it inheres in our very souls.  Better than anywhere else or in any other time, this is the freedom that has until now been both provided and protected in our exceptional nation’s exceptional Constitution.

God bless America, and God bless you.

Monsignor Smith

Testimony

Under the soaring cupola of the basilica, under the elaborate bronze baldacchino, under the papal altar, under the marble box from the fourth century, one finds this odd little niche marked with graffiti "Peter is within" and holding small cluster of bones of a sturdy first-century man that were wrapped in precious cloth when reburied there.   Could be anything, right?

Sober, charitable, and careful Christians willing to write reflectively and publish under their own names will assert without embarrassment that Saint Peter never went to Rome.   This astonishes me.

Mind you, I have lived among Bible-believing Christians all my life who believe what is in the Bible and only what is in the Bible.  I have found their faith edifying and convincingly manifest in their lives and in their prayer.  But to encounter some who apply that standard to deny that Peter was head of the church in Rome is not only startling but gravely disappointing. 

To pull up the Scriptural indications of Saint Peter’s presence in Rome would only play into the expectation that every Christian truth be asserted biblically.  This fallacy deprives those who hold it of much that Christ bestows and even more that faith requires.  The Church is confident in the truth of her sacred scriptures and jealous of their integrity, but at the same time grateful that their texts do not exhaust the content of the Faith. 

One of the interesting things about Peter is that his authority, his indispensability for the unity and identity of the Church, is clearly not dependent on any of the things that usually confer authority.  His intelligence, strength, administrative or leadership skills, and most importantly, his record of fidelity to the Lord are all very clearly notwhat won for him the role he was given.  Similarly, no accomplishment of his own achieved any superiority over any of the many other disciples, much less over the other apostles.  He was not elected or chosen for this role by those fellow apostles or any other population of the church.  Peter was chosen, called, formed, and named by the Lord Jesus Himself.  Peter’s weakness and betrayal were not anomalies but rather integral to his call, not obstacles but rather the occasion of his unique relationship to the Lord. Not his accomplishments but rather his redemption by Christ’s merciful forgiveness is the explicit model for every soul he was charged to feed and tend as his sheep.

The same Lord Jesus Himself set him as the one without whom the Apostles would not be united, the indispensable personification of the oneness Christ desired for the many who would be His body.   Surprisingly, it was Saint James who was in charge of what seemed at the time to be the primary or even primatial church, that of Jerusalem.  Saint Peter headed the church in Antioch, a later and smaller foundation in a city of great cultural and commercial significance, but hardly a city with claim to universal prestige either religious or secular.  

When Peter went to Rome, he brought his authority with him, and the fledgling communion there received and recognized him.  Capital of the Empire though she was, Rome did not confer her secular primacy on Peter’s ecclesial standing.  Likewise, the community of Christians there did not claim or demonstrate any corporate influence or authority over the other churches of the day prior to Peter’s arrival.  No, Peter was not the mark and standard of unity for the Church because of Rome; Rome became the center of the Church’s unity because of Peter.

The Church of Rome was transformed and rose to prominence because of Peter’s presence and model of martyrdom.  His successors – Linus, Cletus, Clement, etc. – exercised Peter’s authority and followed in his footsteps.  Every life, every act in the Church of Rome from earliest days testifies to this presence and activity of Peter.  “The very stones cry out” that Peter lived and died in Rome.  

His mortal remains, returned after some movement to the place of their first interment, mark the spot where a great basilica would be built to accommodate the multitudes who would come to venerate them.  Neither the broad valley below nor the lofty hilltop above would be the building site, but an improbably steep slope that otherwise would have discouraged anyone from building anything on that part of the Vatican Hill.  

Peter’s resting place is mere meters from where he died in a public spectacle, rebutting his earlier reluctance to follow his Master into death, and refusing to resemble him in crucifixion right-side-up, but revealing the hope of the resurrection.  The hundreds and even thousands of similar witnesses who followed him proved stronger than the civil power of the empire and became the expression of the authentic glory that to this day radiates from Rome.

Though it is not written anywhere in the Bible, millions of people turned their attention just last month to the reality that unfolded before them and revealed that still today, Peter is in Rome.

Monsignor Smith

to the best of his ability

This famous passage from the First Apology of St. Justin Martyr reflects the way the Eucharist was celebrated in Rome about 150 AD, only about 55 years after the last New Testament books. It makes clear several important things:

1) the Eucharist was interpreted in a very realistic way in the early church

2) it was the principal, weekly worship celebration of the Christian Church

3) it took place on Sunday, not on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath

4) the meaning of the Eucharist and manner of its celebration was handed down by the apostles.

Monsignor Smith

No one may share the Eucharist with us unless he believes that what we teach is true, unless he is washed in the regenerating waters of baptism for the remission of his sins, and unless he lives in accordance with the principles given us by Christ.

We do not consume the eucharistic bread and wine as if it were ordinary food and drink, for we have been taught that as Jesus Christ our Savior became a man of flesh and blood by the power of the Word of God, so also the food that our flesh and blood assimilates for its nourishment becomes the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus by the power of his own words contained in the prayer of thanksgiving.

The apostles, in their recollections, which are called gospels, handed down to us what Jesus commanded them to do. They tell us that he took bread, gave thanks and said: Do this in memory of me. This is my body. In the same way he took the cup, he gave thanks and said: This is my blood. The Lord gave this command to them alone. Ever since then we have constantly reminded one another of these things. The rich among us help the poor and we are always united. For all that we receive we praise the Creator of the universe through his Son Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit.

On Sunday we have a common assembly of all our members, whether they live in the city or the outlying districts. The recollections of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as there is time. When the reader has finished, the president of the assembly speaks to us; he urges everyone to imitate the examples of virtue we have heard in the readings. Then we all stand up together and pray.

On the conclusion of our prayer, bread and wine and water are brought forward. The president offers prayers and gives thanks to the best of his ability, and the people give assent by saying, “Amen”. The eucharist is distributed, everyone present communicates, and the deacons take it to those who are absent.

The wealthy, if they wish, may make a contribution, and they themselves decide the amount. The collection is placed in the custody of the president, who uses it to help the orphans and widows and all who for any reason are in distress, whether because they are sick, in prison, or away from home. In a word, he takes care of all who are in need.

We hold our common assembly on Sunday because it is the first day of the week, the day on which God put darkness and chaos to flight and created the world, and because on that same day our savior Jesus Christ rose from the dead. For he was crucified on Friday and on Sunday he appeared to his to his apostles and disciples and taught them the things that we have passed on for your consideration.