In the Face of Mayhem

I call it May(hem) because so much happens this month.  I know you have a lot going on, some of it because you want to get it done before the summer so you can enjoy some vacation, some of it because of the requirements of the season itself, with sports and the academic year coming to a close.  Some of the things are scheduled now just because it is such a beautiful time of year to do things, like weddings and other events.  It is much the same for me.

But I want to ask you to put something on your calendar for the end of this busy month.  It will help you accomplish absolutely nothing on your list of things to do, but your very willingness to stop doing things is what will make it possible for God to do great things for you.

On Thursday evening, May 30th, at 7:30, we will offer here a Solemn High Mass in the Extraordinary Form for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi. 

The feast, which Americans have observed on the nearest Sunday since the time of Pope Leo XIII, is originally on a Thursday.  I didn’t even know that until I went to seminary in Rome, where they still celebrate it on that day.  The day of the week hearkens to the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper that first Holy Thursday.  We will have our regular Masses for the feast on Sunday June second, but this Thursday evening will be special.

The choir Chantry will sing polyphonic Mass commons  (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) by Josquin Des Prez, the finest composer of the early renaissance.   His Missa Pange Lingua is based throughout on the tune that you probably know best from the classic Eucharistic hymn Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.   The propers (antiphons and such) are from the Gradualia by the English renaissance composer William Byrd. 

This is astonishingly beautiful music, and to have it sung by such a choir in the context of a Mass is a rare enough thing; to have it in our own church is an opportunity not to be missed.

Thanks to the efforts of Father McDonell, our philosopher, the homily will be offered by Msgr. John F. Wippel, who is the Theodore Basselin Professor of Philosophy at Catholic University of America.  He will have some precious insights to share on the reality of the Holy Eucharist!  Then, there will be a Eucharistic procession after the Mass.

Since this Mass will be in the Extraordinary Form, everything except the homily will be in Latin, but do not let that frighten you away.  You will still be able to participate, just not in the same manner you do in the Ordinary Form of the Mass.   We will have handouts to help you follow the words, many of which you know because you know the Mass so well.  But if you raise your eyes -- and your ears, and your hearts -- you will also be free to follow the beautiful sounds and actions, and to encounter the truth and beauty of our Eucharistic worship.  It is a different way of participating at Mass, and one that I find both illuminating and enriching of our understanding of the Ordinary Form that we celebrate each day in English. 

So, in the midst of all the mayhem, put aside time, not for getting something else done, but for wasting time on God.  Squander a few precious hours in the sounds and sights of divine worship; waste a few hours wandering aimlessly in the presence of the Divine Glory. 

Your list of things to do and places to go will be just as long when you get home.  But when you leave this Mass, you will have heard, seen, and touched Heaven itself, beholding the very face of God.  Jesus did not give us Himself in the Eucharist for the sake of efficiency, but for its own sake, the sake of our Communion with Him.  It is the love of God become flesh for us, and by this power alone will we enjoy order and glory in the face of May(hem).

Monsignor Smith

Who is first?

Which came first? is an ancient line in an ancient riddle.   This weekend, first things come to mind.  It is the most beautiful weekend of the year, as the seasons announce life coming back to the earth, and our children present themselves to receive for the first time the Author of Life Himself.  It is the time of First Holy Communion.

This is a great and glorious instant in the lives of our first communicants and their families, but that very first-ness brings both excitement and promise – promise of more, promise of second and third and beyond.  There is a lot of first-ness to be found in our relationship with Jesus.

The first thing the Church did, back before she even knew herself to be the Church, back when she became the Church, in fact how she became the Church, was to celebrate the Eucharist.  The disciples who had encountered the risen Lord on the first day of the week, then again eight days later, continued to worship God on this new day in a new way.  Not with Sabbath-worship on the seventh day, but with thanksgiving to God, and the breaking of the bread, on the first day.

The Sacred Scriptures describe this first action of grace and therefore themselves clearly come later.  Communion with Jesus is the root and foundation of the Church, first when He passed through locked doors to say and give “Peace to you,” then as the Apostles anointed with the Spirit took bread and did this in memory of Him, saying, “This is my body.”

It is clear that to be the Church, to live the life of grace, we need that communion – our bodies united with this glorious body.  It has to come first, before anything we do can be “what Jesus would do.”  Before the doing, before the imitating, there must be something else, first.

This firstness is not, of course, something that the Church could make or take, but that Christ himself must and did give.  The firstness of the giving is essential to the communion, for it cannot be earned or bought or won.  Communion is necessarily something that is received, and the first foot forward is that of Him who gives.  Look at the faces of the children who come forward.  They bring nothing but their receptivity to what they will be given, to Him Who gives.   They return having received, their eyes alight with the gift to Whom they give their own flesh.

The first giving of flesh we celebrate as well this month, as we mark or devotion to our mother Mary, who gave her flesh to Him who became flesh to dwell among us.  This first giving is the first first communion, as God Himself, the Eternal Word, took flesh, and dwelt in the tabernacle, the Tower of Ivory that is His most pure mother.  For the unique response to the giving God is also to give, which makes room for that great first giving.  No one has done it better, but we all strive to imitate what she did, to give our flesh to be one with His flesh, to renew what she did first.

It is my hope that giving these first Communions to these receptive and rejoicing communicants is to kindle not nostalgia for what was and will be no more, but delight and desire for what we are to be, and do.   Not only I, but parents, and grandparents, neighbors, friends, and cousins, all watch and see and smile, and know for a moment the momentousness of this meeting, the union of heaven and earth in an innocent soul.

It is my hope that this also be their desire, and mine: to enjoy that same moment, not the firstness, but the communion.  That desire itself is a gift, given freely and without prejudice, given to all who would receive, who would take the gift by giving themselves, giving their flesh to Him whose flesh gives life; to know, to enjoy, to experience this same second that comes second, flowing forth from the gift of God, who came first.

Monsignor Smith

Patience and its rewards

Spring never comes soon enough for me, or most people I know.  After that brief bit of confusion – when we had three days of summer – now we have days of sun that are not hot, days of rain that are not cold, all the other things that make flowers bloom, and leave us wondering whether we will need a jacket before we come home.  We can laugh about our impatience now that spring has arrived. 

If there is one thing I hear most often lamented in the confessional, it is the lack of patience.  That takes many forms, of course, but we all recognize it as a failure to love, a failure that frustrates us.   And so it struck me recently when our Holy Father Pope Francis identified the Divine Mercy with patience:

God’s patience has to call forth in us the courage to return to him, however many mistakes and sins there may be in our life.  Jesus tells Thomas to put his hand in the wounds of his hands and his feet, and in his side.  We too can enter into the wounds of Jesus; we can actually touch him.  This happens every time that we receive the sacraments with faith.  …  This is important: the courage to trust in Jesus’ mercy, to trust in his patience, to seek refuge always in the wounds of his love.  Saint Bernard even states: "So what if my conscience gnaws at me for my many sins?  ‘Where sin has abounded, there grace has abounded all the more’ (Rom 5:20)" (ibid.).  Maybe someone among us here is thinking: my sin is so great, I am as far from God as the younger son in the parable, my unbelief is like that of Thomas; I don’t have the courage to go back, to believe that God can welcome me and that he is waiting for me, of all people.  But God is indeed waiting for you; he asks of you only the courage to go to him. … For God, we are not numbers, we are important, indeed we are the most important thing to him; even if we are sinners, we are what is closest to his heart.

In my own life, I have so often seen God’s merciful countenance, his patience; I have also seen so many people find the courage to enter the wounds of Jesus by saying to him:  Lord, I am here, accept my poverty, hide my sin in your wounds, wash it away with your blood.  And I have always seen that God did just this – he accepted them, consoled them, cleansed them, loved them.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us be enveloped by the mercy of God; let us trust in his patience, which always gives us more time.  Let us find the courage to return to his house, to dwell in his loving wounds, allowing ourselves be loved by him and to encounter his mercy in the sacraments. We will feel his wonderful tenderness, we will feel his embrace, and we too will become more capable of mercy, patience, forgiveness and love.

It will not make the spring come any more quickly, but to experience the mercy of God is the best lesson we can have in patience.  Believe it; He is waiting for you, but not tapping his foot or counting the minutes, only yearning for the moment when he can pour into you His patient mercy and delight that you have come.  And to rejoice in the patience of God is the best way for us to grow in it ourselves.

Monsignor Smith

This week a poem

Realism

We are not so badly off if we can

Admire Dutch painting.  For that means

We shrug off what we have been told

For a hundred, two hundred years.  Though we lost

Much of our previous confidence.  Now we agree

That those trees outside the window, which probably exist,

Only pretend to greenness and treeness

And that the language loses when it tries to cope

With clusters of molecules.  And yet this here:

A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon,

Walnuts, a loaf of bread -- last, and so strongly

It is hard not to believe their lastingness.

And thus abstract art is brought to shame,

Even if we do not deserve any other.

Therefore I enter into those landscapes

Under a cloudy sky from which a ray

Shoots out, and in the middle of dark plains

A spot in the brightness glows.  Or the shore

With huts, boats, and, on yellowish ice,

Tiny figures skating.  All this

Is here eternally, just because once it was.

Splendor (certainly incomprehensible)

Touches a cracked wall, a refuse heap,

The floor of an inn, jerkins of the rustics,

A broom, and two fish bleeding on a board.

Rejoice!  Give thanks!  I raised my voice

To join them in their choral singing,

Amid their ruffles, collets, and silk skirts,

one of them already, who vanished long ago.

And our song soared up like smoke from a censer.

- Czeslaw Milosz,

translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass

Love, Monsignor Smith

Surprise!

Father McDonell is off for an overnight in New York this week, to connect with a pair of friends of his from Michigan.  The couple is engaged; he has business in the Big Apple, she is coming to enjoy the city.  Fr. McDonell has arranged it with him, and will surprise her.  Be careful about that, I cautioned him.   He assures me that he has successfully surprised her in this way before, and it was both very surprising, and very positive. 

I can’t help but think that this is great: a happy surprise, in a big city far from home, no less.  It makes me wonder: what has surprised you lately?  Does anything surprise you anymore?

In our day of galloping technology, all things are possible, most things are available, and nothing is inconceivable.  The quandary for science fiction authors and filmmakers is to invent something fictional that hasn’t already been achieved or at least foreshadowed in reality.  Which is why so many books and movies and TV shows now settle for merely startling people, with some form of suddenness or brutality, rather than actually presenting something that will surprise.  They just do not have that arrow in their quiver.

Our expectations for pretty much everything have been so comprehensively expanded that the only remaining possibility is not to have our expectations exceeded, but to have them disappointed.   Such disappointment probably reveals more about our expectations than it does about reality or possibility, but reluctance to admit that is just as common as disappointment itself.

Heaven knows the majority of human behavior fails to surprise.  In fact, it’s a common lament, especially when approaching the daily news, that “Nothing can surprise me any more.”  This sort of world-weariness slides toward resignation, if not outright pessimism.  I think this comes from viewing human behavior in a “macro” way – you know, “in the main,” or “in general.”  That almost never fails to disappoint.  Technology and toys provide no respite. 

I submit that the one place where we can still be surprised is more on the “micro” side of human behavior – a single act by a single soul.  The simplest act by a child can open our hearts to a flood of delight – and surprise.  A single sacrificial act of genuine love can upend the predictability of the great mass of human behavior and bring liberation from the oppression of expectations, whether the world’s or our own, and from the soul-crushing reign of pessimism.

That is why I think Fr. McDonell’s little jaunt this week will bring a beam of delight and deliverance to one person in this world of predictabilities.  Good for him, good for his friends, and good for us all.

Does nothing surprise you anymore?  If you feel the burden of predictability or pessimism in your day, please know that it does not have to be that way.  Even if you cannot count on one of your friends or family members to make a trip, give a gift, or say a word that will break the pattern, your liberty is at hand.

Far from being a routine of repetition and regurgitation, the one place you can look for to something truly new is your relationship with the risen Jesus.  The Apostles knew Him better than anyone, saw what he did, and heard what he explained and promised, and still, when He rose from the dead, the peace He brought was a surprise of the most beautiful kind. 

Turn to Him with everything that is inescapable in your life.  Go over His words – again.  Contemplate his actions – again.  Pour out your soul to Him – again.  Ask forgiveness for your petty and petulant sins – again.  Receive Him at the altar – again and again. 

Jesus will surprise you.

Monsignor Smith