Time sanctified

October 29, 2015

Looking through my photos on the computer, I came across a picture of me standing with my friend Fr. Christopher Murphy atop Old Rag Mountain.  Is it nine years ago already?  And we looked like THAT? My, my.

It doesn’t feel like that long ago, because I still see Fr. Murphy several times a year, and we are both the same friends we were then, as for decades before that.  But the date is marked on the photo so nine years must have passed.  Some things are so much the same; some, visibly, have changed.

Here at the parish, we know another year has passed because we are doing what we do every year at this time, awaiting the arrival of the truck that will bring our lot’s Christmas trees from Canada.  It seems late, though, because Thanksgiving fell on its last possible date in November.  On the Sunday after that, the day to open our lot, suddenly it is December already.  Same as every year, but different.  

This year the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is five days shorter than it was last year, but Advent is two days longer.  Both civic and liturgical calendars mark the time allotted for different types of preparation for the different aspects of the same event, Christmas.  These are actions and experiences we anticipate and enjoy every year. 

Though a turn of the year marks our planet’s circuit of the sun, time does not run in circles, nor do our lives, nor history.  In every revolution, the recurring point, the same time is different because we are different, and much in our lives and in the world around us is different as well.  Yet for all this time, its passage does not necessarily bring progress in any category, much less every category, as forgetting and remembering, growing in wisdom and strength and diminishment in faculties all occur side by side.  The samenesses and the differences reveal a more organic reality, like the growth of wheat:  First the blade, then the ear, then the grain in the ear.   All is contained within the single living reality, and the differences manifest over time.  

The recurring rites of our seasons, both civic and religious, make time intelligible to us, and give us occasion to survey what has been, and what is now beginning.  As the seasons change and the calendar and clock march along, we change too.  We feel every one of those differences: taller smarter stronger?  Grayer heavier slower?  The differences are revealed not only in our physical and mental capacities, but also in all our human relationships as well as our disposition and relations with the Lord.  We march too, for we cannot pause nor stop, yet we remain the same individuals, the selfsame beings in the divine image.  We feel so much the same, until we are startled to awareness.  Has it been a year already?   Has it been nine years already?  

Unlike the civic feasts, our liturgical life reveals the purpose of time, of our time, by laying it out alongside eternity, the everlasting unchanging love that called us into being.  The mystery of our salvation is open before us every day, and every day we encounter and benefit from the constancy of the Lord.  But over the course of a year, the different aspects of this saving reality unfold before us in the holy liturgy.  We are not merely spectators, but participants, and we experience those elements and those aspects in ourselves as well.  Divine grace nurtures in us the very life we engage and accompany.   

The Church’s worship, our worship, marks time and is marked by time.  The new year for us begins with Advent, and the tones and colors change dramatically, even though the prayers and Scriptures bridge that stark change with a continuing, almost unvarying focus on being watchful and ready for the Lord who comes – again, both the same and different.  The Lord who comes in judgement is the same Lord who comes to dwell among us, though the effect on our attitudes and expectation can and should be greatly different.  It is the same Lord who dies to save us who is the same Lord who rises and returns to the Father’s house to prepare a place for us.  Yet it is the differences that resonate in our lives and make us recognize His life in ours.  

Our worship of the living God rescues us from both futility and hubris.  The futility would be life lived in endlessly recurring circles, and the hubris the false notion of progress toward perfection, every day in every way getting better and better.  Each of our lives is unique and unrepeatable, absolutely different and a marvel in its own right.  Yet we share the same origin and yearn for the same goal: intimate union with our God and with one another.  

Like a birthday party for our children or our parents, marking the same annually recurring day with the same person we have known lifelong reveals how much changes in the same relationship of love.   Marking the same annually recurring day with the outpoured life of the Divine Communion, Father, Son, and Spirit, reveals how His gifts seem to vary to meet our changing needs while He stays ever the same.

Looking at an old photo of anyone we love gives us the opportunity to see what was different then, and to delight to know that the person was the same.  So too is the sacred liturgy our opportunity to look at our own lives next to the life of our constant Lord, and to delight to know what love changes, and what love treasures ever the same. 

Monsignor Smith

Who's in charge here?

So, about your rebellion....

Everything belongs to the King.

This arrangement is not the one to which we are accustomed.  The principle of private property holds that what is mine is mine, yours is yours, and so on unto his, hers, theirs, ours, and pending litigation.  Government property is a different matter.  Our nation holds to this principle, mostly.

But a King is different; the whole Kingdom is his, and everybody else just lives there.  This was the standard arrangement of human governance for millennia, even though now it has passed from practice, mostly.

The arrangement sounds like an enormous benefit for the King, but as any young first-time car owner discovers, with ownership come responsibility, obligations, and costs.  Not least among these is security, that is, protecting what is yours from them who would take it away.  Even a King can ignore these only at his peril.   The more that is owned, the greater the burden.  The King’s burden is enormous, because everything belongs to the King.

For you and me and everyone who is Not The King, this seems an enormous penalty.  The house where we sleep is not ours, and the King can turn us out at any time; the produce from our labors is not our own, and the King can take whatever of its bounty appeals to him.  Even our families and our very lives are not ours, as the King can claim anyone he wishes to serve him.  

Yet there is an upside.  For us who are Not The King, the burdens, responsibilities, and obligations are not ours either.  In fact, our needs and even our happiness fall squarely into the category of responsibilities of the King.  He can ignore any responsibilities he chooses, but recall, it is at his peril.  People deprived of basic needs have ways of arranging for a new King.

Here in the Land of the Free, we sit back and imagine such an existence, if we can take a minute from the duties, labors, and obligations attendant on what we have, what we need, and what we desire.  Yes, we say, we are better off this way; and perhaps it is true.

Being Pastor is in some ways like, and in some ways unlike, being King.  For many practical purposes here at the parish, I am the Property Owner with many powers.  This is a convenient fiction, however, that makes it possible for me to pay bills and oversee who does what, and who is forbidden.  In reality, the Archbishop owns it all.  What he demands, I relinquish.  At the flick of his pen, and possibly just his eyebrow, I can be deprived of both privileges and responsibilities.  

This is because the Church is the earthly manifestation of the Kingdom of God.  Everything she has belongs to the King.  Her earthly governance falls to the Vicar of Christ, the Successor of Peter.  Vicar is like viceroy, or vice-king; he is not himself the King, but is the King’s place-holder, or lieu-tenant.  The King cannot be represented by a committee or a council, but only by an individual.  Talk about burdens and responsibilities!

The burden of all that is, was, and ever shall be falls on the King of the Universe.  He is sovereign of all creation and all time, and you and I just live here.   The bodies in which we live are not ours, and the King can turn us out at any time; the produce from our labors is not our own, and the King can take whatever of its bounty appeals to him.  Even our families and our very lives are not ours, as the King can claim anyone he wishes to serve him.  

For all this, we owe the King our gratitude, and grateful worship.  For the burdens, responsibilities, and obligations are not ours either.  In fact, our needs and even our happiness fall squarely into the category of responsibilities of the King.  He can ignore any responsibilities he chooses, but ignores no need and no needful person, though there be no threat of arranging for a new King.

Despite his awesome power, the King astonishingly insists that all his subjects be free to ignore what we owe to him.  Those subjects who refuse to tender this just portion tell themselves that yes, they are better off this way.  And in truth, those subjects who refuse are more numerous than we can imagine; those who refuse include every subject of the King, including us.

For in our poverty and in our abundance, we all cling to something we believe to be truly our own, and not his; some selected thing we refuse to relinquish for it would deprive us our lives, our very selves.  Oh, we might not cling to everything; we might not refuse everything we owe every day.  And yet.  We are unworthy servants who rarely manage to do what is required of us. 

We have so much; how can this be?  Is the King reckless with his treasures, or heedless of our disobedience?   Neither is true.

Everything indeed belongs to the King. And Jesus Christ, Who is King of the Universe, Who reigns from the Cross, bestows everything on us.

Monsignor Smith

Those who sow in tears

The ancient port city of Carthage, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Tunisia.  Prosperous and strong, it was for centuries a commercial and military rival of Rome.  When threatened with difficulty or defeat, its citizens practiced child sacrifice.  The Romans destroyed Carthage and famously sowed salt in its fields.

It caught me off guard, even though I saw the progress, step by step, that led to this state of affairs.  There were signs locally, but considering where we live, of course there were.  It shocked me how widespread it became, and how quickly it was taken as the new normal.  It is matter of fact now that people freely and openly advocate for abortion. 

It used to be about choice, so they said.  We knew what they meant, they knew what they meant, but it was a lofty euphemism that put a calico dress of all-American freedom on the death’s-head doll that made people coo and chuck it under the chin.  Now, it is the act itself that is advanced and advocated, embraced and asserted, and the dress-up words are discarded.  Their plan is clearly named for what it is, even while they still dissemble.  How savage!  How pagan!  How…inhuman.  

To rally around an act so violent that to see it done elicits instant revulsion in man, woman, and child; and to name it as a good, to demand it, recommend it, assert it as a rightful part of the program of governance and social order by that unequivocal name, is as breathtaking as would be crowds in the street demanding death for any other class of human being.  But you cannot draw the curtains and hide until this mob passes, for they patrol the avenues of information and the boulevards of entertainment.  They speak up at social gatherings and look for anyone who dare dissent, ready to punish.  All, all to promote and demand and assert …abortion.  

In these same past few weeks when people on rostrums and people at microphones, people with yard signs and people with clipboards, were afoot in our country asserting the Most Important Thing to require of our government is abortion, we here at our parish had a little funeral.  It was a gentle funeral with a tiny casket.  You may have heard one of our families lost an infant a few days after her birth.   She came early, yes, but in the ‘window of viability’.  Then she got sick and died, but not before she received divine life by Baptism into Christ.  And so our sadness was lit by hope; confidence that she enjoys already the fullness of everlasting and glorious life for which you and I and everybody who pauses to think about it desire for ourselves.

Other families came and cried, came and prayed, came and helped.  Other children came and did all that children do when at Mass in our church, but even they were sober, for they could read the room, and they had seen the little casket.  This is a great grief, the death of a tiny child.

And outside our doors, beyond our lawn and vibrant trees, the signs waved and the voices boomed and the votes were cast in favor of abortion.  How many have witnessed this horrific ‘remedy’ they are prescribing’?  How many know the great wounds it leaves on the ones who give themselves and their tiny ones into the clutches of this cult of child sacrifice?

For even if a great altar to Moloch that ravenous demon himself depicted a grim stone idol with fiery eyes were to be built in our midst, and lines of helpless and terrified women and men were to fling their tiny progeny onto its blood-soaked stone and consuming flames, in hopes of – what?  Another chance? A better time?  Deliverance from fear or sadness or want?  Even if that vile and terrifying abomination were to stand where every citizen could see, it would not be a more vivid horror than the angry, open, and teeth-clenched advocacy by fashionable, educated, popular and powerful people demanding asserting and imposing abortion.    

Meanwhile our own state, our neighbors and friends, the stiffly smiling Stepford citizens, took the time and took the effort to assure to insist on an abundant and unvexed flow of abortion, as if a limit or restriction would be a privation of life and goodness.  We live in upside-down land!  The election has come and gone like a knot in a line plumbing the depths of the deepest sea, but the clamor is undiminished.  And still the armies of advocates and activists bang their drums for more, like the relentless walking dead in a fiction film, neither mollified by advancement nor deterred by defeat, clamoring always for more victims.  Protests are planned and programs prepared; pyres will be kindled to light bloodthirsty vigils.  

Our nation’s political working-out of embrace versus revulsion of this modern-day slaughter of the innocents is not within our power, but neither is it beyond our reach.  Equanimity demands, and pragmatism insists, that we who know Christ not be single-issue citizens, but we recognize in our midst the open portal of everlasting horror and disgrace (Daniel 12:2).  Unless we reject and refuse all who advocate and advance this grisly grinding of human flesh and lives, we ourselves will not escape the consequences of abortion.

Monsignor Smith

Along the way

Well now that was an exciting week, wasn’t it?  Who knew the turnout would be so huge.  I gave away every one of the 240 candy bars I bought and then some to the mobs of trick-or-treaters who came to my door on Halloween.  What a group!  What a delight.  I want to thank all the middle-school cool kids who admitted you knew me, and all the parents who loaded the van to bring your little ones a little bit out of their ordinary footprint so that I could see them and put Skittles in their bags.

Friday started early with the All Saints Holy Day Masses.  Perhaps not quite as encouraging a throng for that as for the candy, but God was glorified in His Saints and at the end of the day I was wore out like a hall carpet. 

That same day, great news came from Rome that our Holy Father Francis named Msgr. Fredrik Hansen as co-adjutor Bishop of Oslo, his home diocese in Norway.  Why is that Scandinavian event good news for us in Silver Spring?  Well, for the past two years, Msgr. Hansen has helped out here, most noticeably on weekends in August when help is much needed, but also at other times.  I met him in New York just as he was entering the Sulpicians and the faculty at St Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore.He became a friend to me and the other denizens of the Holy House over time, as he came just to visit for Saturday dinner, or help with weekend Masses too.  All of us who know him are thrilled for him and for Oslo, though it might make things hairy here come August.   

In grim news, also over the weekend people handed over to Fr. Wiktor several hosts they found on the ground in front of the church.  We carefully took them and disposed of them reverently and appropriately.  

If you ever wonder why the priest watches you or the person receiving Holy Communion next to you as you receive and consume the host, it is an expression of our care for Our Lord in the Most Holy Sacrament.  No, we do not expect many – or even any! – of you to make off with the host and fling it to the ground; more likely an accident happen that leave Our Lord on the floor rather than under your roof.  But every once in a while somebody does something genuinely bad.  It happened before, several years ago, when every week we would find a Sacred Host in the envelope holder on the back of one of the pews.  Now this. 

Care for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is one of the greatest gifts He gives us priests, from maintaining the security of the tabernacle to catching Him when he falls during Holy Communion.  It is rather as if Our Lady were to hand the Infant King to you, a shepherd, while she stepped away for a moment.  With time and age, I grow more aware of the saving presence and its precarious disposition.  So much that God bestows on us is precarious while it depends on our care!

In the few years we have been using the patens under chins and hands at Holy Communion time, I have been astonished by the accumulation of little tiny bits of the Body of the Lord when the paten returns to the altar for purification.  Once you have seen this, you cannot unsee it, as the saying goes, and my carefulness only increases.  

You too can join your care to the custody of Our Lord, Who makes Himself small so that we may offer Him our attention, care, and love.  Review your practice of receiving the Lord, which may have become a little too routine over the years, not to say slapdash.  Make certain that you are careful and attentive and still, your posture and disposition entirely focused on the great and fragile gift you are receiving.  Move slowly, pay attention, and remove all causes of collision or ejection from your moment of encounter and embrace.  Be grateful and careful.

I know some people think this week was exciting for some other reasons, but none of that is revealed or resolved as I write this.  We have bad news enough in the desecration of the Blessed Sacrament here, in our sacred precincts.  Yet even in this we are not helpless to right the grave wrong, as we can make reparation for the indignity thrust upon our Lord and be reminded of our responsibility to care for Him when He comes to us.

There is good news aplenty, too, for the Church is alive and thriving here in Four Corners with large numbers of children who have parents and teachers who bring them to Mass after they cavort for candy.  The universal Church is thriving and growing in a land from which she had long been excluded, and a successor to the Apostles arrives to his Norwegian flock by way of our distant parish.   The Faith is alive and at work here and now.

And that should put proportion to any other excitement you had this week.  Praise God!

Monsignor Smith

A Sufficiency of Infinity

Gloria Dei homo vivens

It began simply enough, I think, with the question of my disposition toward space travel.  Was I for it?  Would I do it?  I reflected that if offered I would accept a suborbital ride in one of these new craft, or maybe even, if offered, orbit the earth.  But it is not a priority, nor is there any destination requiring travel through space that I care to visit.

Next, as a matter of course, came What about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?  Aliens? Almost, but not quite, What is the church’s position on…?  But rather, it was, do you think there is..?  So, after a pause, knowing I would have to explain, I answered No.  Neither necessity nor probability indicate that any life exist, intelligent or otherwise, in any other form or place.

In God’s providence He has revealed himself to be Being Himself, and all that is came to be and exists though Him.  The material universe, ever expanding and beyond our measure or ken, nonetheless remains limited.  While the near-infinity of possibility leads many to believe that our race, the human race, is unlikely to be unique in what characterizes us to ourselves, that is, intelligence or even self-awareness, the vastness of possibility does not convert to probability.

We have been summoned into being by God’s unforced extension of His own goodness, the generous giving of being that characterizes His own Being.  We know that there is no need for Man to exist, and we know how much less need for any other form of life, save mutual interdependence of species, the need that each form of earthly life have for another.  We therefore discern that there is no need for any other life form in all Creation, however vast the Space. 

The uniqueness of the one God, living and true, Who is Father and Son and Spirit in perfect communion, has loved into being only one living reality in His own image and likeness, which is Man.  The one source and origin of all that is or will be, Himself unbound by limit or finitude, has placed in every human being a reflection of His own infinity, which is our immortal soul.  Reflecting the uniqueness of God is one way to comprehend the uniqueness of Man.  

What parents look for the first time at their newborn child and wonder how to find any other like her, rather than wonder that she exist at all?

The same providence has granted me a place not at the microscope searching ever deeper, nor at the telescope seeking ever farther, but rather at the screen and the altar, beholding the ever-astonishing mysteries of the immortal souls of men and women whose extension both inward and outward is without limit.  Here I find sufficient infinity of both possibility and necessity that the completeness of creation is not contained, but rather re-presented in every immortal reflection of divine eternity and uniqueness.

When I have that as my daily fare, what greater feast could I seek?  Which is a lot more elegant than saying aliens schmaliens, but means more or less the same thing.  One who is denied, or denies himself, knowledge of the self-revealing God, casts himself into a frenzy of fears and suspicions that do him no good nor service.

Not that epochs or ages have passed since the day I was born, nonetheless have I travelled to and even resided in places astonishing in their own right and far beyond the imagining of my mother and father when first they greeted me.  My appetite for travel has shrunk, and my interest in foreign places dwindled, to the point that I will be able to sate them revisiting places I once called home and exploring the expanses of my own home country.  So I would rather drive from North Dakota to Nevada than go to the moon or any farther point.  I would rather take a short flight in a B-17 than a long one in a capsule of any sort, and would much rather have my feet on terra firma than luna firma.  

Perhaps this dwindling restlessness reflects not so much my age as my experience, which is that neither outer space nor alien creature hold any interest compared to the marvel of human life that I explore and experience every day.  Gloria Dei homo vivens, as Saint Irenaeus (ca. 130 – 200 AD) put it.  The glory of God is the man alive.  And who is alive and alert to that is lacking nothing – nor is the universe he inhabits lacking.  

Monsignor Smith