What a drag.

Things can be bleak in February

We have no grounds to be surprised.   God warned us about kings and rulers, and anybody else with earthly authority.  It’s all laid out in the Book of Samuel.

So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking a king from him. He said, "These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your menservants and maidservants, and the best of your cattle and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. (1 Samuel 8:1-18)   And that’s not the worst of it, because that is just what kings demand rightly; it can and does get much worse when they take even more.

We have been warned, yet for some reason, we are taken aback when we learn of rulers and authorities using their office and responsibility to obtain personal gain, or to channel public funds to private interests that do not serve the people well, or at all.  Shocked as we are, we carry on by telling ourselves that they are outliers, not the norm, and our government, our leaders generally can be trusted.

But there comes to mind a word I learned long ago, probably when I was studying the history of the Soviet Union and its associated regimes: kleptocrat. It’s a combination of Greek particles that could be rendered a thief who is in chargeor one who governs by stealing.  Even worse is a kleptocracy, which is a whole governing class characterized by thievery, that is, taking for themselves what belongs to the people or nation or group they govern.

When a culture of kleptocracy lays hold of a society, it is difficult to shake free.  So many foreign places that Americans visit come with the warning that officials at every level expect bribes to do what one would expect of them because of their offices.  We may go along with it if we must for the sake of our vacation, but we shake our heads at the prospect of living like that.  We assume better of American officials, not least because we see how such a culture of thievery degrades the life of the society and impoverishes the people.  As long as we are prosperous and productive in our own country, we assume we are mostly free of the economic and social drag of kleptocrats.  But we are mistaken.

In the day of Samuel the Prophet, civil governance and religious governance were the same, and religious power just as likely to corrupt.  When Samuel warned the Jews about insisting on a king, and what they would get if they did, it was because his own sons were venal priests, and nobody wanted them to be judges, that is rulers, of Israel.   

When Samuel became old, he made his sons judges over Israel. The name of his first-born son was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah; they were judges in Beer-sheba. Yet his sons did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after gain; they took bribes and perverted justice. Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, "Behold, you are old and your sons do not walk in your ways; now appoint for us a king to govern us like all the nations."

The criminality of his own sons disappointed but could not have surprised Samuel, and not simply because he knew well the logical result of hereditary authority and power.  No, Samuel had come into his own position as religious and civil leader of Israel when the sons of his own predecessor, Eli the priest at Shiloh, proved to be rotten:

Now the sons of Eli were worthless men; they had no regard for the LORD.  Thus the sin of the young men was very great in the sight of the LORD; for the men treated the offering of the LORD with contempt.  ... And this which shall befall your two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, shall be the sign to you:  both of them shall die on the same day.  And I will raise up for myself a faithful priest, who shall do according to what is in my heart and in my mind; and I will build him a sure house, and he shall go in and out before my anointed forever. (1 Samuel 2:12, 17, 34-35)

The drag of kleptocracy is heavy wherever there is power, authority, and money, be they civil or religious.  Christ the King and Universal High Priest is our unique rescuer, with whom there is only the surprise of perfection and delight.

Monsignor Smith

 

What can make one believe

Not Obi-wan.

We don’t call it make-believe for nothing.   Whether its root be that you make as if you believe something to be true, or by your actions you make other people believe what you have invented, it is the pastime of children and the profession of actors in the theatre and the cinema.  When the audience contributes the suspension of disbelief, any number of improbable or impossible propositions can be enjoyed as entertainment.

Alec Guinness was one of the great classically trained British actors of the twentieth century, celebrated for his work on stage and screen.  Like many of his peers in the acting aristocracy, he undertook roles in American films because they paid better than the loftier pursuits of Shakespeare and such.  He brought both dignity and skill to his roles, leaving his mark in the minds of all who saw his work.  Thus he is indelibly associated with the character Obi-Wan Kenobi from the original Star Wars films.

One of his memorable lines from that first film seems to have found legs recently as I have heard people saying, These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.  He utters it gently but convincingly, and because the force can be effective with the weak-minded, the bad guys not only accept but repeat the falsehood he has told them.  

It could be argued that Alec Guinness could make one believe anything he uttered with masterful and articulate conviction, and that is indeed how he made his living.  But somehow I have an album of his reading of a number of Christian texts – medieval and modern poems, spiritual writings, and letters from saints.  I was listening to it as I drove around for errands the other day, and he delivers these words with richness and force. 

During his career, Alec Guinness became a Catholic, and spoke movingly of his faith.   One of the experiences that contributed to his conversion occurred when he was playing the role of a priest in a film, an example of make-believe helping to make him believe something that is, in fact, true. 

My album offers no citations for the Christian passages Guinness reads, but one of them impressed me enough that I engaged the infernal machine to find it.  Let me share it with you now, an excerpt from A Remaining Christmas, a 1928 essay by Hilaire Belloc.  I wish you could hear Guinness deliver it with the clarity and conviction of a man who can convince a storm trooper, These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.  It would help you recognize the truth that you are looking for and believe it -- which is very different from make-believe.

Monsignor Smith

Man has a body as well as a soul, and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things.  Moreover, there is this great quality in the unchanging practice of Holy Seasons, that it makes explicable, tolerable, and normal what is otherwise a shocking and intolerable and even in the fullest sense, abnormal thing.  I mean, the mortality of immortal men.

Not only death (which shakes and rends all that is human in us, creating a monstrous separation and threatening the soul with isolation which destroys), not only death, but that accompaniment of mortality which is a perpetual series of lesser deaths and is called change, are challenged, chained, and put in their place by unaltered and successive acts of seasonable regard for loss and dereliction and mutability.  The threats of despair, remorse, necessary expiation, weariness almost beyond bearing, dull repetition of things apparently fruitless, unnecessary and without meaning, estrangement, the misunderstanding of mind by mind, forgetfulness which is a false alarm, grief, and repentance, which are true ones, but of a sad company, young men perished in battle before their parents had lost vigour in age, the perils of sickness in the body and even in the mind, anxiety, honour harassed, all the bitterness of living—become part of a large business which may lead to Beatitude.  For they are all connected in the memory with holy day after holy day, year by year, binding the generations together; carrying on even in this world, as it were, the life of the dead and giving corporate substance, permanence and stability, without the symbol of which (at least) the vast increasing burden of life might at last conquer us and be no longer borne.

 

Don't miss it

Nothing to see here, folks -
or is there?

It was a very good question, from a very young person.  One of two young daughters who accompanied their mother to the Sodality luncheon on Sunday raised her hand and asked me, “How are you supposed to notice something you are not supposed to notice?”

With great ceremony the indefatigable honcha of our Sodalists, Sharon O’Brien, had just presented me with a donation to cover the cost of one of the two new altar cloths I had ordered.   Everyone in the room agreed it was a worthy donation and a much-needed upgrade.  What (almost) nobody in the room knew was that the new cloth had already been on the altar for six days.  

Everybody who eyeballed it with me after Mr. Dao put it there agreed it looks much better.  But the change evident to the average eye is minimal.  Honestly, beyond the people I told about it, nobody has noticed.  A whole week of daily mass goers, and a whole weekend of Sunday regulars had come and gone with nary a comment.  Sharon was one of those folks who had been to Mass and not noticed.  The same goes for most of the ladies in the room.  I confess to enjoying a mild taunt: You didn’t notice!

To assuage any guilt and make it clear that this was no grave shortcoming neither of the ladies nor of the altar cloth, I observed that the altar cloth is not something that SHOULD draw attention to itself.  It should elevate the dignity of the great altar when it stands silently in the midst of the church, and it should dignify and emphasize the drama of the saving sacrifice of the Eucharist and the splendor of the Body and Blood of the Lord Who rests upon it briefly on His way toward nourishing us.   It is rather like a frame that should reveal the painting, not draw attention to its own splendor.  All of this our new altar cloth accomplishes.

And then our young companion asked her question.  “How are you supposed to notice something you are not supposed to notice?”  The sodalists chortled thinking she had me hoist on me own petard.

But a good question merits a good answer, and my response is that one spots it much the same as one sees the great works of God.   Anything He has done or is doing, you will not notice in itself, unless and until you listen to what He has promised He will do, what He has done in the past, and how He accomplishes His will.   All God’s works point to God, not themselves, just as Christ’s signs and wonders revealed Who He is.  So even now, the works of God in our own lives can be a as a flash or flicker, or result in a substantial change that makes us ask, now when did that happen?

Most of our Sodality ladies have been at this long enough that they have had the experience of recognizing the love of God at work in their lives not as it happens, but only long after time and reflection – oh, THAT’S what He was doing for us!  Similarly, their regular attention at Mass to the proclamation of the Scriptures and the consistent working of the Sacraments, their long hours of prayer for all the intentions that have been entrusted to them, and their listening to the accounts of graces poured into the lives of the people with whom they share their faith; all of this listening has opened their eyes to the marvels God is doing.

Now that you have heard about it, your eyes will be open to our new altar cloth, and to the possibility of spotting the other new one when we put it on our holy altar, as they are visibly different one from another.  You can think to yourself how glad you are that our Sodality helped with this upgrade, then allow your eyes to return to their usual focus on the saving work of the divine Word being wrought on this linen white ground.

At the same time, you have sharpened a skill you may not have known that you have.  If you find yourself asking during some difficulty or dry period in your life, where is God in all this?  What is He doing, what does He want me to have, or to do, or to know?   That is reasonable, but the next step is, as the psalmist tells us, Be still and see that I am God (Ps 46:10 DR).   Listen first, then open your eyes and see the answer to your very good question.

Monsignor Smith