not a destructive drug among them

Do not court death by your erring way of life, 

nor draw to yourselves destruction by the works of your hands.  

Because God did not make death, 

nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.  

For he fashioned all things that they might have being, 

and the creatures of the world are wholesome; 

There is not a destructive drug among them.  Wisdom 1:12 - 14a

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a book from 2020 by Christopher Beha that a friend recommended, and I enjoyed it, if that be the right phrase; at least, I was glad to have read it.  The title implies that things do not go well for at least some of its principal characters, but more impressive is how badly things go for all of them largely because of, yes, their own actions.

The title is explained in the book as being something like a statistic in baseball, a way of keeping track of a range of actions like a balk by a pitcher, because, of course, baseball has a statistic for everything.   But it is the title that came to my mind now not in the context of baseball, but in our daily lives especially in these days we now inhabit and endure.

This is a particularly sinister season in our society when so much that is common and good frays, unravels, or is dynamited by individuals and groups with goals that are neither.  At home and abroad, we see the folly or even malice of the presumption that of its own, society can and will be civil.

Look abroad, look at home, look around and you will see plenty of evil afoot and ascendant.  Unfortunately, that is the easy part – to see evil in other people’s actions, and in other places.  The hard part, but necessary, is to look for where it has taken up residence in our own lives and actions.

If politics or persons distress us, the first order of business is not to change them but rather to evaluate ourselves, our own actions, and our own words.  Our principal contribution to the health and success of our society is our own personal fidelity to truth and goodness, and our own labor for one another’s good.

The work of charity in thought and word is enough to keep us busy day and night, within our families and our neighborhoods.  To encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thes 5:11), as Saint Paul admonishes the early members of Christ’s body the Church, is not only an idiosyncrasy among Christians, but also the task of Christians in a society and a world not ordered according to the knowledge and love of God.  That’s right, it is a task, it is work: the work, and our work.  

If we put ourselves to this work, it will take our time and effort, and we will not have room in our day to accuse, detract, or defame people.   Yes, all that tearing-down of one another takes time and vital energy from us.  Time we spend reading or listening to the latest offense or outrage, time we willingly spend laying blame everywhere but on ourselves, costs us and everyone who loves us.

Much of our misery, and the misery that we observe in the people around us, is the result of our own actions and words.  Any and every sin in reality is a self-destructive act, a path chosen by the self for the purposes and goals of the self that are disorded, and result in the harm of that same self.  Almost but not all self-destructive acts cause harm to others as well.  We can avoid them if we believe the word of the One Who Loves Us, who points us in direction of building one another up because it will build up a society that will resist evil and defend what is good.  

Do you want this year to go well for our parish, our school, our county and our country?  Encourage one another and build one another up, and avoid every other use of your time and effort as if it were inscribed on The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.

Monsignor Smith

Jesse made me do it

Not a surprise that he was gone, really; more of a suspicion confirmed with a glance at the all-knowing machine.  Nonetheless there was surprise that I had heard nothing of it, five years later.  

The most ordinary of circumstances, Father Novajosky and I were talking over dinner at the kitchen island of books we had read long ago and reread later, authors we returned to after having been introduced to them in high school.  J. D. Salinger came up, somehow, as by some tortured route we went there from “Field of Dreams”, the movie, and its associated books and authors.  If a body meet a body coming through the rye…ah, Holden Caulfield.

We read Catcher in the Rye, of course, but also Franny and Zooey, I think, and maybe some stories too.  I still have the books.  We did other normal English-class things as well, like diagramming sentences; it was normal then, anyway.  I could always escape the test for that by diagramming correctly on the first try the paragraph-length sentence written on the board.  Writing on the chalkboard was normal then, too.  

‘Tis not deep as a well, nor wide as a church door, but – ‘twill serve.  I am worm’s meat!  He had me read Mercutio as we worked through Romeo and Juliet.  When we had to recite a poem from memory, I chose Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty: Glory be to God for dappled things…

Southern literature was an emphasis in that Alabama classroom.  Amarantha, Amarantha, how beautiful with shoes! I can still hear him declaim in his strong accent.  It was he who famously introduced us to Flannery O’Connor without mentioning (I swear!) that she was Catholic.  A Good Man is Hard to Find for ninth graders is hard enough, but Wise Blood in tenth grade?  Hair-raising and possibly unwise, as it turned me off Flannery for a long time – or what seemed like a long time, since it was all of seven years before I tiptoed back into her writings while exploring short fiction by modern Catholic authors.   

That started me reading her other stories, and her letters, then over time, urged on by new enthusiasm for her amongst culture-conscious Catholics, yet more stories, her prayer journal, her other short novels.  Admiration and amazement grew, but the hair-raising never went away.  Still, a deep aversion to Wise Blood kept me from going back to it until just last year, when I re-read it and then, one night with Father Santandreu, watched the John Huston film of the same name.  Oh my.  Nobody needs redemption who has a good car!  Now, I wear it rather like a badge of honor that I read it as a fifteen-year-old; perhaps it’s a red badge of courage, that left a scar. Thanks to him.

He was my high-school English teacher, four years’ worth.  Two summers, before junior and senior year, he offered the coming year’s course to a group of us who met one day each week at a local library, to free up a period for other pursuits during the academic year.  Senior year, that pursuit would be “English 13,” the only English course I had with any other teacher, as four of us met with the principal in her office to learn The Modern Novel at the rate of one book each week.  Thereby hangs a story, too, of course, but for another time.   

Last saw him almost twenty years after graduation, in 2001, at the funeral of a friend close to both me and him, who died young and in the worst way.  When I entered, a Catholic priest at an Alabama protestant funeral, a strange beast indeed, he greeted me from among a group of students from those high school days and had to say his name when I was slow to recognize him; perhaps the missing mustache threw me.  I was embarrassed to need the help, but truly delighted to see him.  That was a hard moment, however, and not a time to catch up.  We never did get a chance.  He wasn’t at our next reunion, in 2012.

He spent his youth in, and as an adult later returned to, Morris, Alabama, a place so rural, so remote and redneck that we kids couldn’t comprehend it then in the late years of the Carter administration, there in the blossoming suburbs of the big city of Birmingham.  I would say right confidently that nobody round these parts now days could picture or imagine.

But he could teach, and teach he did, all these and many things besides.  I am grateful; God rest ye, Jesse Booker.

Monsignor Smith

Cultural consistency

Whoa… time to rein in the horses of celebration!  Nine days of solemnities in a row, Easter and its Octave plus the Annunciation on Monday, more if you start with the Vigil on Holy Saturday, which of course we did around here.  Not only at Mass with Gloria and Sequence, and the Liturgy of the Hours too, but also throughout the tasks and respites of the day.  

My festive lunch with priest buddies on Easter Monday, and splicing the mainbrace with friends that evening, some glorious meals in the rectory and out as well, all with dessert and extra delights we might ordinarily eschew; all this, and the beginning of baseball.  I confess it’s been hard to slow the wagon, taking a funsize bar from the jar on Carol’s desk each time I pass, and pretty decent dinners here in the Holy House even on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Perhaps no dessert this time…or maybe just a little less.

These feasts are our culture, as much as our fasts, and both are rooted in our worship of the incarnate God, with the Church and in the Church.  Culture’s root is cultus, or cult, as in the worship that gives structure to our days.  Our feasting is not merely an extension of our liturgy but part of the same fabric.  It is not simply good to have a culture; it is essential, that is, life-giving; of our essence, to have the culture. To step away from the particular (and occasionally peculiar) givens of Catholic culture invites in an anti-culture that does not give life but rather deforms and disfigures it.

Culture warrior is a pejorative pasted primarily by ideologues of secularism on us who have the culture, the worship-based life and understanding of who we are and what we are for that the fullness of faith has given us.   We fight because we must fight, not against their silly constructions and poisonous destructions, but to embrace and live the mystery revealed to us and in us.  It is always a fight to live in the light of the living God, but as you might suspect, on the side “of the angels” there is help to be had in that fight.

One of the attributes of the Holy Spirit poured into us, good measure, shaken together, and overflowing into our laps is robur ad pugnam, that is, strength for the fight.  This help from God long predates the foolish and feckless assertions of the so-called science-based regime that is merely the modern manifestation of age-old materialistic hubris at the service of raw will-to-power.  The living God knows better than we the inclination we mortals have toward enslaving ourselves, and others along the way, to our aspirations of lordship over creation.  He drops sacramental worship into the world like a lifeline for us to grasp and wind around our flailing arms lest we drown in a sea of self-serving like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  

The sacramentality of our salvation is not limited to but rather begins with the Sacraments of which we have seven.  That is, God uses things we mortals can see and touch to make present realities we would otherwise miss.  Because of the beauty of Creation, and the beauties of our own creations, we know that life, human life, is beautiful even when that beauty is hard to discern.  The human body as we have received it is not some adjustable, external costume for us to don, disguise, and doff at will, but rather the place where grace and glory erupt and endure.  We know what wombs and wounds are for, and we rejoice to recognize that they are indispensable to God for our redemption.

We, like God, use tangible things, things we receive, treasure, and save; things we invent, create, and enjoy to show and share our love with one another.  God is good; Christ is risen in the flesh, and we have in our bodies a share in life eternal.  Maybe we should give the horses their head for a while longer on this road we travel.

Monsignor Smith

 

Making it happen

April showers are welcome for what they promise by way of future flowers, and those of us who rejoice in the fragrant fruit of the Paschal Mystery know well enough that we must first pass through the perfect storm, that is, all the work that makes Holy Week and Easter possible.  You can’t have one without the other, as a song used to remind us about some other intertwined mystery.  

The rectory staff hammered away with increasing enthusiasm as the Holy Days approached, providentially welcoming Carol Gangnath back after her hiatus.  Susan Sumner, who graciously stepped in to help during her absence, was here through Wednesday of Holy Week and there could not have been a better time to have both of them overlapping together.

The transformation of our sanctuary was almost as dramatic as the resurrection itself, though made possible by many hands rather than the digitus Dei.  Melissa Franklin, Sharon Haley, Liz Beegle, Julie Wilson, all the Daos, Margaret McDermott, and Jasmine Kuzner were our fern, frond, and flower wranglers for both gardens, round the altar of repose and in the main church.  The latter smelled awfully good when I entered at six this morning.

Preoccupied as I am about liturgical excellence, I confess I was positively relaxed much of the time this year, knowing I could count on John Henderson’s careful touch at the musical helm, with all of our singers and choirs (especially the youth choir – are they awesome or what?) providing beauty in abundance.  Likewise all our altar servers were prompt, attentive, enthusiastic, and skilled, with two veteran hands leading them: Daniel Dao and Isaac Daniel, both of whom know not only what to do, but how and why.  Cathedrals look upon our crew with envy.  Our lectors were superb.  Let me also acknowledge that Father Novajosky happily took up some of the trickier roles and rendered them flawlessly.

Fearlessly going where brave souls feared to tread, rookie Toni Henries-Ross took responsibility for organizing and supervising the splendid hospitality on the lawn, aided discreetly by the veteran organizer and queen of the egg hunt, Jasmine Kuzner.  It is a wonderful time to be together, and we need to offer folks a reason to slow down and enjoy it together with us.

It was great to confer the Sacraments of Initiation upon seven souls at our Vigil, Jorge Gaston León; Fitz, Kiernan, & Maura Bader; Kyle Curley; and Addison & Penelope Kerdock.  Thoughtfully prepared with their families by DRE Jasmine Kuzner, the six young folks clearly delighted in the grace of the Communion.  Jorge, whose road was a smidge longer, was no less delighted.  Let’s not forget that the Vigil began with the excellent fire-work of a new crew of Scouts, led this year by the Barclays.  

Let me point out that I am under no delusion that I labored alone.   My fellow priests put their shoulder to the wheel of shriving, and spent hours in the confessional caring for penitents making first confessions, first-in-a-long-time confessions, and confessions of every sort in between.  

Rejoicing now in the Octave and making time for tasks I had put aside during the preceding weeks, and maybe a bit of baseball, it is time to look to the Things of Spring – First Holy Communion, Munchkinball, Gala and Graduation.  Before you know it, we will be processing through the neighborhood with the Blessed Sacrament.  But before we get into all that, let’s be glad for the April showers, and rest a spell, joyfully, in the knowledge that, still today, Christ is risen.

Monsignor Smith