Holdovers

Things are opening up all over.

What is it that you have put off?  The last two years have curtailed plans for everyone, narrowed options and possibilities, and left important deeds undone, events postponed.  Is it travel, whether to some exotic locale, or some unreachable dear one?  We hear that many people put off doctor visits, surgeries, and health care.  It seems most folks have at least a few things they have been constrained to push back farther than they wanted.

The evidence is showing up hereabouts in the parish as people get back to doing things.  First off is Baptisms; there has been a definite bump in those, and some of the babies are a little bit older, as people waited until they were comfortable coming to church, or families and friends were able to travel.  I’m not certain that there is anything that could be called a Covid baby-boomlet, but I know that there are plenty of new participants to our reputation as being “Saint B, where the B stands for Baby.”  Either way, the Baptism queue is well populated.

There is no such postponement phenomenon with Confirmation.  Because of when we usually have our parish Confirmation ceremony, in the second week of Lent, we were the only parish in the Archdiocese of Washington to have a full, regular parish Confirmation Mass in 2020.  We were also the first, though not the only, in 2021; our timing got us into a good ‘window’ between pandemic surges, and our Covid-tide Confirmation protocols and praxis set the template for other parishes.  As you may have heard, our 2022 class was confirmed just last week by Bishop Dorsonville.

More astonishingly, we are having a surge in weddings.  I have heard that wedding-postponement is a universal phenomenon of the pandemic, and folks waited until they could get all their friends and family together for the social aspect.   I am not sure that is what is at work here, because we had about the same number of weddings the past two years that we usually have in any given year, which is not very many.  But my goodness, do we have a lot of them this year!   It does not seem that many of these couples were waiting for the pandemic to pass just so they could have their large social event, either – so maybe these are pandemic romances coming to full blossom?  Nonetheless, there is a genuine surge.

Like so many of the best and most beautiful things in life, one realizes how precious something is when one loses it temporarily, or learns how another person longs for what we enjoy.  Not only were faithful Catholics separated from the life of the sacraments and the worship of the Church, but so too were others who had never enjoyed but come to desire that great and holy gift of God.   Something you may not have considered is that we really were unable to have proper RCIA classes (“Catholic lessons”) for the past two years.  This year, we have a crew of folks who are chomping at the bit to enter the life of the sacraments.  It should be an excellent and exciting aspect of our Easter Vigil this year, so try to come to that great and glorious (and, yes, long) Mass that will conclude our (finally!) fully-restored Triduum this year.  And as you consider that, please pray for them in this crucial and blessed time of their lives. 

Which should bring us to reflect on what it is that we have postponed or put off that now we can reasonably undertake.  There may be many things, or just a few; but if one of the things postponed is confession, there is no better time than the present to make it happen. 

Monsignor Smith

Behind and before

Life will not be constrained -- plant life, or human life.

As anniversaries go, this one does not seem to be popularly observed.  But this past week marked the completion of two full years since the hammer came down and everything, everything was closed, cancelled, or prohibited to try to stop the spread of the new and frightening virus, Covid-19.  Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve?”

That long-ago Thursday brought the announcement from Governor Hogan; then Friday came the directives from the Archdiocese, and Saturday morning, 14 March 2020, was the last permitted public Mass here.  I remember how moved I was by the presence and attitude of the people here that day, in more than double the usual number, savoring a moment of intimacy and grief as at a farewell for an innocent dear one departing for prison.  It was astonishing that nobody cried, though many were on the verge.

That Friday was a scheduled day of for the students and professional-improvement day for the teachers.  They used it to prepare, and Monday morning our school began its euphemistically named distance-learning operations.  It would be weeks, or more, before the county started theirs.  Originally expected to be only for a few weeks, it stretched to the end of the school year, which culminated in parking-lot graduation ceremonies.  That September, with heroic efforts by dozens of our people who know how necessary it is for children, we opened our school for in-person instruction.  Well into our second school year of this, our students show all the radiant signs of having received what so many of their peers were denied.  Our teachers and staff are weary but justifiably proud.

It would be more than three months before we were allowed back into the church for public Masses, and then with some of the harshest limitations and conditions in the state and the nation.  By then we had all become accustomed to doing what we were told, checking the local mandates and requirements, observing new pieties that had nothing to do with our heavenly Father.  Step by baby step, with the eyedropper of governmental mercy squeezing out incremental permissions along the long hard road, we returned to unimpeded worship.  We could not imagine that this strangled form of society with its peculiar proscriptions would perdure for another twenty months, and counting.  Even as we accommodated the new normal, we knew it was not normal.

After two full years, it seems, finally, that more and more people are entering into a sort of détente with the endemic situation, and more people are reestablishing practices and habits long set aside, but now recognized as essential, habits that include being with other people.  Among them is the weekly, and daily, practice of the faith.  It was exciting to see all the people who came to Mass on Ash Wednesday.

One of the many efforts we made to encourage people to feel safe at Mass was expanding our Mass schedule to allow people to spread out and avoid crowds.   Now it is time to come together, and Sunday Mass is where God indicates we should be with  Him and with the brethren, with the assembly, the community.  We NEED this to be human; to enjoy and reveal how we are made to be like God Himself.  

For that reason, the 4:30 Sunday Mass that we instituted to offer more options during the pandemic will not resume after Easter.  Not only because six Sunday Masses is quite the load for us priests and all the people who help make Sunday Mass happen; not only because six Masses is rather more than a parish with only one assigned priest should undertake.  But also and primarily because one of the chief goods of Sunday Mass is to bring people together, not spread them out.  Come, be together before the Lord; keep alive the bonds of faith that bind us not only to God, but to one another.  It is time to close the distance, no longer to maintain it.  

The austerities of Lent have awakened in us a hunger for all that truly gives us life.  Spring is coming, and it feels good to be alive.  We look out and realize nobody is shelling our city and bombing our hospitals.  Maybe we have less to fear than we once thought.  Maybe we have more to lose than we had realized.  May this be the last anniversary we observe this way.

Monsignor Smith

Look at what this is costing

By the time you see this photo, these prices will have changed.

What does it take to make people change their behavior?

As an economics major in college, I learned a lot about what can change human behavior.  When the cost of something goes down, more people will do it; when the cost goes up, fewer.   The popularity of some products or activities is very much dependent on cost (elastic), and there are also products or behaviors that are nearly, but not entirely, immune to cost (inelastic).  In an example of the latter, smokers gotta smoke almost regardless of the cost of tobacco; in an example of the former, the sudden easy and cheap availability of vaping products drew a whole wave of young people to that bizarre but somehow attractive practice.  

After several years of near stability, the price of gasoline increased significantly over the past year and then shot up further after Russia invaded Ukraine.  The consumption of gasoline by most people is relatively inelastic (drivers gotta drive), so people find more of their spending now going toward filling the tank.  However, in the case of many people, this increasing expenditure can be sustained only for so long; sooner or later, something has to change.  Even on a consumption curve as inelastic as gasoline’s, there will come a time when people reduce their consumption in the face of higher prices.   Driving behavior will change.

Cost is not the same thing as price, as even economists know; types of ‘cost’ can include emotional, psychological, interpersonal, or any of the other categories of our existence that cannot be measured in money.  An unbearable increase in any of these costs can lead us to change our behavior. 

Maybe I am less vulnerable to cost-based pressure to change my driving behavior because I already drive a 30-mpg compact car, which sits in the carport five or more days each week because I walk to work.  Yet I am astonished at Lent’s ability to change my behavior.  And I get the impression that I am not alone in this.

What is it about Lent that can change our behavior?

We are only one week in to this Lent, but it isn’t my first rodeo, so I have my suspicions.  I think our most inelastic behaviors – eating and drinking, gossiping and complaining, praying and almsgiving – are affected not by a change in cost, but a change in our awareness of that cost.   Lent turns our eyes first to our own need for deliverance from our sins, then raises those same eyes to the cross, to see the cost of our redemption. 

We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you; for by your holy cross, you have redeemed the world, we say together fourteen times during every pilgrimage around the Stations of the Cross.  Each genuflection is an anticipation of that moment on Good Friday when we bend the knee before kissing the crucifix, confronted in vivid color by the personal price paid for us and our salvation by the sinless Son of God, out of His fathomless love for us and with clear-eyed awareness of every casual, careless, or cruel sin you and I would commit in the course of our days.  That cost runs red down His arms and over his feet, dropping down onto our desperate heads and outstretched hands.  His loss of blood leaves Him drained of life and color, but leaves us purified of sin, and death.   Looking up, we behold the price of that Most Precious and life-giving drink for which we thirst.   

To enjoy the sweet fruit of the Cross of Christ, we have to come close to the tree.  To lay claim to the mercy that makes our life possible we have to turn away, for a moment or for forty days, from all our priorities and preoccupations, and confront the price of that mercy.  The breathtaking beauty of the sacrifice we see can make us lose interest, for a moment or for forty days, in turning back to those priorities and preoccupations.  We know, deeply and silently, that before Him, we want for nothing.

But what will it take to make us change our behavior?

Monsignor Smith

Into the desert, to be tempted by the devil.

An electronic billboard displays the flag of Ukraine
along Interstate 295 outside Gibbstown, New Jersey, south of Camden.

Simply because it is not true that war never achieves any good, nor that violence never produces anything good, does not mean that even that unicorn of history, a “good war,” is not deeply dangerous to all involved.  

It can be good and necessary to lament the “tragedy” of war, and even fruitful generically to decry “violence,” but such positions are made tenable only by eschewing the difficult moral reasoning that is necessary to discern when waging war is not only permitted, but virtuous; and when violent action is not only allowed, but called for.  

The Catholic Church has a deep and rich tradition of reasoning about such matters, often under the banner of “just war theory.”  Deep and rich also means long and complicated, and in modern times peoples’ appetites for slogans, and attention spans tuned to sound bites, has left much of this treasury unexplored and underutilized.  Such moral oversimplification leaves us vulnerable – to sin.

The breathtaking consensus that has unified most of the world in decrying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past week has accomplished much good, for the Ukrainians as well as for many world citizens shaken from soporific complacency and preoccupation with petty problems and contrived crises.  The attack and the violence are real, and demand attention; manifest is the evil of the reasoning, intent, and goal of the action.  Suddenly, the Ukrainians are engaged in that rarest of things, a good war.  There is no question that they are justified in fighting with all of their resources for their homes and families.  

But the moral danger was brought to me yesterday as I watched a video clip of Ukrainians shooting down one of a number of attacking Russian helicopters.  The man narrating the video was cheering enthusiastically – and of course so was I.

It is a thread that I picked up reading over the years books by authors who had lived through the last “good war” – World War II.  Kurt Vonnegut, especially in his masterwork Slaughterhouse Five, but also, as best I recall, in Cat’s Cradle; and Walker Percy, in both his essays and his fiction, point to the same phenomenon: the good and even gentle man, who by necessity of war not only becomes proficient in doing death and destruction, but also comes to relish it.  

Here I find not only the place of many good and gentle Ukrainians who now find themselves called to prepare for, carry out, and find their satisfaction and even delight in the death and destruction of their fellow men.  Let us not neglect the virtuous Russians whose service is motivated by a laudable love of country and fellow countryman, but whose obedience and discipline are misdirected by lies and brute tyranny; they too can be brought to hatred by the hatred they engender, and come to desire the death of those who desire their death and kill their friends.

The death itself; the displacement, deprivation, and destructions; the wounds, physical, familial, and emotional; the illnesses and absences; all of these results and realities that make us tear up and turn away for grief are in fact the tragic consequences of every war, even the good ones.  The redemption of these evils by their being endured in the service of a greater good, and selflessly for the good of another, does not ever make them good in themselves.  But let us never, ever lose sight of the enormous difference between the loss of a life, and the loss of a soul. 

We began Lent this week, with much groaning and grumbling about what it portends for the coming days.  But part of the genius of Lent is that we know when it will end.  We can handle almost anything, for forty days.  

The war in Ukraine is just getting started.  A worldwide (near-) consensus of who is in the right, and who is in the wrong, does painfully little to bring about its end, or even let us know when that will be.  The next time you catch yourself cheering some success against the “bad guys,” pause and pray for the protection of your soul from sin, and the deliverance of a nation from the clutches of the devil. 

Monsignor Smith