When the time comes

When the lights are off in the Apostolic Palace,
it means nobody is at home (anymore).

Everybody knew it was coming, but nobody knew when.  Twenty years ago this week, the health of the Holy Father, which had been failing for years, had reached a point that made clear his death would be coming soon.  Crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square to pray and keep vigil.  

For years, John Paul II had neither hidden nor denied his difficulties and his decline.  Parkinson’s Disease was only part of the diminishment of his strength and ability, yet he continued to appear when he could, to speak, to offer Mass as best he was able.  Several stays in the hospital of popes, the Gemelli Clinic, had ended with his return to his home in the Vatican that spring of 2005.

Since the second day of 2002, I had been assisting Cardinal William Baum and living with him in his apartment atop the building opposite Saint Peter’s Basilica.  The health of the Holy Father had even then already deteriorated to a point of concern.  I can give you no proof, but I had a premonition, a conviction that he would die on Divine Mercy Sunday, the day he had named and linked to that devotion that, like him, came out of Poland.   For three years, each Monday of the Second Week of Easter, I would awaken and listen anxiously for the clock of Saint Peter’s to chime the first hour at seven o’clock, with its distinctive, gong-like clang.  For three years, I had sighed in relief and shaken my head at my own anxiety when it became clear that the Holy Father was with us still and a normal morning was beginning.

All this comes back not only because of the twenty-year mark, which I pointed out a few months ago, but also because of the condition of our Holy Father Francis over these past six weeks.  For many of those days, his death seemed imminent; yet now he too has returned home to the Vatican.  It is not unreasonable nor uncharitable to note that he is not well, and that his time with us is dwindling.

It is so easy to see the Church as much like a commercial corporation or even a nation with a government of whom the Pope is chief executive.  In that model, efficiency and effectiveness are not only goals but necessities and obligations.  However, when the Holy Father becomes ill and nears death, we see how the Church is like a family.   When Dad becomes disabled or diminished, we do not push him aside and bring in a new dad; no, we rally to his care and support, for this too is an important exercise of familial love and mutual responsibility.   Eliciting that is an important exercise of his fatherhood.  For those of us not in a place to offer personal and physical care, we offer prayer.  

In February 2005, Cardinal Baum had returned from Rome to Washington with a bad case of the shingles, and he only left the house for doctor visits until finally on Easter Sunday, he was feeling well enough to participate in Mass at the Basilica.  So later in that week, I went to visit my family. 

When the news reached me that Pope John Paul II had died, I was sitting in my parents’ kitchen in Alabama.  Where I was that Saturday, April second, it was afternoon.  However, in Rome it was evening, after First Vespers for the Second Sunday of Easter, which means liturgically, Divine Mercy Sunday had begun.  

I was quickly on the phone with Cardinal Baum, and our travel agent.  The next morning, I offered Mass at the parish in which I had grown up and became emotional when speaking of our departed Holy Father.  Sunday afternoon I flew back to Washington, and as I drove back to the Cardinal’s house, I saw flags at half-staff on United States federal buildings and foreign embassies.  The world had begun to mourn her loss.  

Monday we left for Rome, and the same Cardinal who had been almost an invalid for months found vigor not only for the trip, but for what awaited after the long flight.  When the Chair of Peter becomes vacant, the College of Cardinals governs the Church.  So as befits a head of state, our car into Rome Tuesday morning was accompanied by motorcycle outriders with lights and sirens.  We went straight to the Vatican.  For when the moment of transition comes, the Church knows what to do.

Monsignor Smith

Unburnt List

An icon of the Virgin Mother, the Burning Bush

You can’t unsee it is a marvelous expression that describes so perfectly the vivid figures by which the invisible God manifests himself.   This week, because of the calendar and the lectionary cycle, one of these images shows how powerfully God revealed His intentions long before He enacted them.

Our Old Testament reading from Exodus on this Third Sunday of Lent is the familiar description of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush.   As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed.  So Moses decided, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.” (Exodus 3: 2a-3) In the conversation that follows, God calls Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt and reveals His identity in the most mysterious of ways: I am Who Am.  

That the bush was fully on fire, with heat and light and roar, and that the bush was not consumed by this fire was as astonishing to Moses as such a thing would be to anyone who fled the recent Los Angeles wildfires.  This does not happen; this is not how fire works.  But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not performing a party trick just to get Moses’ complete attention.  He was prefiguring the astonishing way in which he would rescue His people from slavery to sin and death.  

This year it so happens that two days after this Sunday of the Unburnt Bush falls the Annunciation, the most significant moment in human history, when the angel of the Lord appeared to the Virgin Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Spirit.  Upon her gracious consent, Be it done unto me according to thy word, The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  Since the at least the late fourth century the Church has recognized the connection between the unburnt bush and the Virgin Mother of God.  As Saint Gregory of Nyssa states, The light of divinity . . . did not consume the burning bush, even as the flower of her virginity was not withered by giving birth.  The unburnt bush is a figure for the ever-Virgin Mary.  

Felicitously I found online an article about this written by a former parishioner here, Fr. Alan Piper, O.P.   Rejoicing in his connection to us, I will quote him at length:  The burning bush signifies also the result of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, namely, the Incarnation of the Son of God.  Just as the fire did not consume the bush, so the divinity of Jesus did not destroy his humanity.  We beneficiaries of the ancient Nicene formulation “true God and true man” may not appreciate how easy it is to be mistaken about the relationship of Christ’s humanity to his divinity.  Among the early Christians, some mistakenly thought it beneath the divine dignity to be united to matter, and so they concluded that Jesus could not have been truly human, but only apparently so.  Others thought (again, incorrectly) that Jesus did not possess a human mind or will, since the divine ones would seem to render them redundant.  Others worried that the human nature of Christ threatened to diminish his divinity, so they divided him into two persons, such that the Blessed Virgin could be said to be the mother of Christ, but not the mother of God.  Ever since, when the Church calls Mary the mother of God, she means to imply that full divinity and full humanity are united in the one person of Christ.

Each of these errors tends to suggest that human nature and the divine nature are somehow at odds.  It is as if God could defile himself by coming too close to humanity, or that humanity could be crushed by the weight of divine glory.  But the burning bush, the Blessed Virgin, and the Incarnation teach us that divinization does not entail dehumanization.  The Creator so transcends his creation that between God and creatures there is no comparison, no contest.  And humanity itself is open to transcendence, such that in knowing God the human being is brought to human perfection.

God will not destroy our humanity.  He doesn’t want to take away our identity. On the contrary, he wants to show us who we truly are and to free us from tiresome self-misconceptions.  This is part of the point of penance.  Why should we make peace with tendencies to self-destruction? Why should we say, “In the end, the flesh is all I am,” when God is waiting to conform us to his Son?  The divine fire may cause us pain, but it also causes joy–a joy that will endure–because it makes us burn with the love of God.

There is a marvelous mosaic that juxtaposes these two events for the altar of the First Joyful Mystery in the rosary chapels of our own Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  I am frustrated to admit that I do not have a photograph of it but am confident that now that this marvelous manifestation of God’s self-revelation is firmly before your mind’s eye, you cannot unsee it.

Monsignor Smith

Face it

Saint Scholastica, abbess and (blood) sister of Saint Benedict

Lord, show us your face, and we shall be saved.  (Psalm 80, v 20).

The Lord has shown us his face and completed the work of our salvation, and when that work is achieved in us, we will behold Him face to face.  We know what the face of God looks like, but you notice that “face to face” necessarily involves more than one face, more than one person.   How important our own faces are to the economy of salvation!

This week I saw an article online about a group of religious women in California I had never heard of before.   The accompanying photographs showed them fully habited, in long white tunic and black veil and with what I believe is called a wimple under the veil and about their heads and hair, so that only their faces and hands were uncovered.   Resembling as it did any number of ancient depictions of Christian women religious such as Saint Bridget or Saint Catherine of Siena, the habit emphasized the importance of their faces in a way that got my attention.

For millennia, souls who undertake to follow Christ more closely and conform their lives to Him in their embrace of the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience) have very often assumed distinctive clothing.  That garb has rarely, if ever, included face covering.  

When Christian modesty and humility are fully embraced, the face is fully revealed, and perhaps even accentuated.   How important our faces are to our relationships with one another and with God!

Our recent experience with widespread and even mandatory covering of faces revealed or at least reminded us of the importance of face-to-face contact among human beings in order for us to be human.   Children from birth discern their own existence and experiences through the faces first of their mothers, then of other family members who respond to their presence with visible delight.  A mother’s love shines on her newborn child in and through her face.  A child learns both to smile and to love by beholding both the smile and the love in the faces open before his eyes. For years thereafter, the developing child is attentive to and even dependent on the faces of people with whom he interacts.

Medical masks in their proper setting can be reassuring even as they handicap the communication that must be undertaken in those settings.  While a masquerade can be a ball and such masks play a role in a comedy of mistaken identity, masks in American culture were long the mark of bandits or burglars and others about nefarious business.  A covered face encountered where unexpected is an obscured identity and intention, a cause for confusion, and possibly concern or caution.  

In looking about the world as we see it through the images that come to us through our most familiar technology, it is easy to identify the cultures that are rooted in Christianity not only by the visibility of the faces of people, but also by the emphasis upon their importance.  The less individuality and personality are held in esteem, the more frequently faces are covered or hidden.

Salvation itself, heaven as we call it, involves both seeing and being seen, knowing as we are known.  For this our faces are as indispensable as the face we behold.  Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)

Monsignor Smith

Behold the Man

Head of Christ (1506)

by Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina

The strange thing is that we know what Jesus looked like.  Across two thousand years, from a time before photography, of a man with no known portrait from life in any medium, whose physical characteristics are not described in any of the authoritative texts from which most people get most of their information of him, there is a widespread and almost universal consensus on the particulars of Jesus’ physical appearance.

How remarkable is that?  For starters is how remarkable it is that God have any physical appearance in the first place, but that is what happened when The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  From that instant, God had a unique and recognizable physicality that resembled but was distinct and different from every human being ever before or since.  

Also remarkable is that we know and recognize that physical appearance with confidence even now, so far away in both time and distance.  There are so many physical characteristics that do not belong to him that we can reject out of hand: curly hair like Saint Peter had, for example, or great height like an NBA starter.  Such things we wave away as preposterous.  

Without photograph or portrait, how have we achieved this confidence?  We have clues from items whose provenance is less conventional and less convicting; the Veil of Veronica venerated at Saint Peter’s in the Vatican; the Holy Face of Manopello; the Shroud of Turin.   All concur about the essentials; all are equally optional and unnecessary to the life of faith and love of the Lord in His Holy Church.   Make of them what you will.   Even less necessary are the various visions granted to holy people across the ages, however much they tend to agree as well.  Saint Faustina shows us the vision of His mercy, not His hair.

What for me has long been a source of wonder is that however Jesus did look, He does still look, but not entirely. What do I mean by that?  Consider that after Jesus’ resurrection, He appeared to a number of people, all of whom had known Him well before his crucifixion.  Sometimes they did not recognize Him, like Mary weeping in the garden, or the disciples on the road to Emmaus.  And then they did recognize Him – though Mary recognized His voice, mainly.  Others knew Him immediately by sight, as the apostles in the upper room, though they couldn’t say how he got in past the locked door.  What is the same, what is different?   I think the characteristics of the Risen Body have almost everything in common with the body nailed to the cross and laid in the tomb, only somehow they’re better.  I’ll have to think more about that.

Yet we do know a lot about how Jesus looked and looks.  His dark, long hair parted in the middle, that beard that somehow parts into two, as well.  His eyes open, dark, and lively.  A surprisingly small mouth for someone whose speaking is so transformative.  No shortage of nose.  The halo, however painted on, is almost always unnecessary in every rendering for the past two thousand years.  We know.

Jesus is God made visible, not a projection or imagining.  So if any artist change his appearance too much in one way or another to resemble some group or even an individual, it doesn’t take a professional to spot the false steps.  We know.

Jesus has everything essential to us in common with us, except for sin.  That means He looks very much like all of us but not exactly like any of us, just as you or I resemble our forebears and our children but only up to the point of distinction that is individuality.  Not because of any technology or talent, but because He wants it, His is a form, a figure, and a face we know, recognize, and love.  We all know what Jesus looks like.  So look.  At Him.  

Monsignor Smith