On acceleration

Did you know that fifty-eight years ago, the Second Vatican Council was not quite three-quarters complete?  John F. Kennedy had been dead for only nine months and few Americans had even heard of Vietnam, much less any armed conflict there.  World War II had ended only nineteen years earlier, and many of those boys who had gone ashore at Normandy or fought in the frozen Ardennes, and survived, were not yet forty years old.  

If you were to look back to fifty-eight years before fifty-eight years ago, it would be 1906, Teddy Roosevelt would be president and Pius X, Pope.  Automobiles and airplanes were in the future, all Europe was at peace and international commerce was nearing an all-time high level that would not be seen again until the 1990s.

Fifty-eight years is more than three-quarters of the time that this parish has been around, but less than one-quarter of the time this country has been around.  It is pushing three percent of the time that has passed since the passion, death, and resurrection or our Lord, which should seem tiny but instead staggers with its burden of significance.   

Two years shy of three score, by the reckoning Lincoln used, thus not long enough for a nation to mature, it is nonetheless long enough for a human soul to do so, and longer still than the forty-six years it took to build the Second Temple in Jerusalem.  A lot can happen in fifty-eight years, a lot can change.

Fifty eight years sees two full generations and then some, that is, it’s plenty long enough to become a grandparent, even in our postponement culture; and perhaps a great-grandparent in more “normal” places and times.  Could it ever see fifty-eight generations of iPhones?  Perish the thought!

It’s one more than the fifty-seven varieties for which Heinz was famous, but three over the double-nickel that was imposed on our interstate highways to save gas one of those earlier times the government made that a goal.  That now seems impossibly slow when crossing the country, but it remains a miracle when it happens on the Beltway: speed is deceptive.  The needle can give the same reading, but the odometer click over faster and faster with every new digit.  Time flies, whether or not you’re having fun.

Monsignor Smith

Dwindling

Last week while out tramping about in the woods on an unseasonably gentle day, I came upon this sight.  You’ve heard, I’m sure, of the first robin of spring?   Well, this would be the first fallen leaf of autumn, and a more different harbinger it could hardly be.  This week the teachers come back to our school to prepare, and then a week later the students return, including my housemates, our student priests.   That brings an excitement, even a newness, all its own, and many will welcome it all. 

But I invite you now, pause, observe, reflect, enjoy.   Gather your peaches while ye may, both literally and metaphorically.   Winter is coming, so don’t rush.  Blessed August to you all.

Monsignor Smith

 

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away —

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy —

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon —

The Dusk drew earlier in —

The Morning foreign shone —

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone —

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful. 

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830–1886)

At the end of the day

What makes a day holy?  We throw around the term holiday with something like abandon, without thinking of its origin.  Federal holidays are paid days off; Are you going on holiday? is a synonym for vacation, and even Happy holidays is preferred as a secular greeting to avoid saying Christmas, which is too, you know, religious.  But holiday is rooted etymologically and culturally in holy day. 

Keep holy the Lord’s day is one of the original commandments, the original how-to from God on how to order our lives rightly toward Him and one another.  That day was the seventh day, the sabbath, which was made holy by the Lord’s resting after the six days’ work of creation.  So holiday does have some original relationship to vacation, after all.  But, how to keep it?  “Keeping” a day holy means, oddly enough, offering it back to God by setting it apart from other days and all the things one would ordinarily do on them, and filling it instead with worship.  

At the root is the realization that a day’s holiness comes from its being marked or set apart by God or His divine action.   Things that we ourselves mark as having transcendent significance to us as a nation or even a family are more rightly considered sacred, such as Independence Hall, a civil war battlefield, or a multi-generational family vacation cottage.  But holy is given to us, achieved by divine action.  

That’s how the Lord’s Day changed – God did it.  The day of rest, the sabbath, was the original holy day out of seven days, until the Lord Himself rested again on that day -- in the tomb (Something strange is happening; the King is asleep.  – third century homily for Holy Saturday).  That was only the preparation to the NEXT day, which would thenceforth and forever be marked by His resurrection.  This now is the Lord’s Day of the new and eternal covenant, the eighth day of the old week and the first day of the new week.  Called “the Lord’s Day” in many languages (e.g., Domenica, in Italian), our retention in English of the quaintly pagan Sunday obscures its significance but provides no excuse to those who try to claim ignorance.

The resurrection is the ne plus ultra of divine actions that mark a day as holy, but it would be foolish to think it the only one.  The incarnation of God as man in His mother’s womb, upon her blessed consent, made holy March 25^th and is celebrated liturgically as The Annunciation.  The Ascension of the Lord into heaven forty days after His resurrection, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles ten days later on Pentecost, and the Assumption of the Mother of God body and soul into heaven are all days forever marked as holy by the works of God in our midst.  

These days, our calendars are marked with so many holidays that it is easy to lose track of when and why any given one is there, though you can be fairly certain it wasn’t anything God did, and there will be sales.  

It can make one laugh to remember that one of the reasons that the overthrow of the Catholic order of things by the so-called “reformers” was welcomed by rulers and owners, was that it wiped off the calendar all of the holy days that the peasants and other such workers could take as holidays, that is, not go to work.   Ebenezer Scrooge was really just a good Calvinist like all the observant Anglicans for three hundred years before him.  Christmas?  That makes no difference in your workweek, Cratchet!

But even after a day loses its significance to man, it retains its significance in the sight of God.  That is, it can cease to be held sacred (and kept as such) by much and even all of the population, but still it remains holy.   Maybe that is what Scrooge is supposed to have learned.   God bless us every one, indeed.

Monsignor Smith

A Perfect Peach

Not a painting, but not a problem, either.

Too many peaches.

There is no such thing, you may say; or this is a good problem to have.  But I have too many peaches.  I made my first foray to the orchard last week and erred toward the large in choosing my poke of peaches, to make sure I had enough for the pies I had in mind.  The pies have since come and gone.  But the peaches?   Still they remain.

I invited Ron to take home a few, and Jackie and Norma have had at least one daily with lunch.  I’ve found them perfect to put on cereal in the morning.  And still they remain.

When I was at the market, I marveled at the large boxes of “seconds” – fruits and vegetables that weren’t quite pretty enough, but merited eating nonetheless, and at a bargain price if you bought the big lot.  A bushel of pattypan squash, anyone?  Even if I had gazpacho on my mind, those boxes held too many tomatoes.

August is the most wonderful time of the year, as you have heard me exult before, and this is among the reasons.  For the goodness of the earth, as the song says; and what was impossible to find out of season, suddenly superabounds so as to be problematical.  Too many peaches!  What to do with them?

Excess is God's trademark in his creation.  So observed Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity, before he was Cardinal, not to mention Pope Benedict XVI.  This concept was introduced to me most memorably by my seminary neighbor, (now Fr.) Peter Idler of Camden (NJ), when he enthused to me over how many acorns a single oak produces, just to make possible a future oak.  How much moreso, he observed, is God’s grace superabundant for our salvation?  So here we are with too many peaches.

Peaches, unlike acorns, are perishable; short-lived in their usefulness and almost ephemeral in their perfection.  This places on us an imperative both morally and practically not to let them go to waste; hence the panic of too many peaches.

Speaking of too many to manage, there is an old saying about feathers being shaken from a pillow on a rooftop.  Likened to words of gossip, or calumny even, how can anyone ever re-gather them?  Too many feathers!  

But if the bad cannot be returned to confinement and control, how much less so the good, and above that, God’s own abundant good?  If indeed, as our holy Pope Emeritus observed when he was a frisky young scholar and priest, Excess is God's trademark in his creation, then how can the good fruits of God’s grace be gathered up, placed in a poke, and liquidated as seconds?

If God reveals something of Himself in every oak that lets fall a superexcess of acorns each year, among innumerable and magnificent oaks both ancient and young, how much greater the excess of His providence for our thriving? 

This is the marvelous, mathematically improbable muchness in which God gives life to you, to me, to the world.  The life He gives is eternal, a concept also mathematically difficult but personally welcome because unlike peaches, you cannot have too much of it.  This sweet fruit will remain.

You have not chosen me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.  (John 15:16)

What God has given to you, and to me, does not exceed what is healthy or beneficial.  The good fruit borne in our lives will not rot in a bushel basket.  Every gift given, every grace received expands but does not exhaust the abundance.  This week’s too many peaches has already dwindled to four, soon to be devoured.  The fruit that God has appointed to you?   The seed of future glory, it remains.  

Monsignor Smith