Field and Flower

Ordinary days

In the vocabulary of our day, so much emphasis is placed on “community,” we could easily be distracted from the deeper, richer reality of “communion.”  That would be for us who enjoy communion both a loss and a disservice.

In these days of summer when our workaday tasks are relieved by school break and the call of vacation, so has our worship schedule been lightened by the completion of the Easter cycle, whose program of movable feasts ended with the cordial duet of Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary on the late dates of 27-28 June this year.  July seems to be almost a ‘walk in the park’ with its groves of saints’ days spotting the green lawn of ordinary days in Ordinary Time.  In these lives heavy with fruit and flower, we find the companionship and consolation of our communion.

The landmark apostles of Thomas and James (3 & 25 July, respectively) stand out in their celebrity, but that should not lead us to overlook Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions (9 July), more than two hundred souls who about the time of the foundation of our nation gave their lives in witness to the truth of the Good News in China.  Two hundred fifty years later, we mark the semiquincentennium of our freedom, while they mark a quarter-millennium of martyrdom that continues this day as the rest of the Church looks away.  

Sharbel Mahkluf (24 July) was a beacon of monastic sanctity in Lebanon at the time of our Civil War; now he stands witness for us to the millennial Maronite tradition of Christian life that is in danger of expulsion and possibly extinction in that nation war-torn and terrorized by sects who hate the faith.  

A classic example of what we expect a saint to be, Bonaventure (15 July), was a thirteenth-century Italian follower of Saint Francis who wore a brown habit and wrote in Latin.  More intimately, we recognize him as the patron of our neighbors in their friary at the corner of Colesville and Lorain, who frequently join us for Mass or simply pad about our streets in their grey habits.

Not so long ago nor far away, Kateri Tekakwitha (14 July) was known as the Lily of the Mohawks, redolent with the fragrance of sanctity in her time and for ours a reminder that the faith found fertile ground among the denizens of this land when first the Gospel reached these shores.  Her charity for the very ones who mistreated her both confused and attracted the souls who did not yet know Christ.

These saints who might seem foreign or worse yet, unknown to us, reveal in their light-filled lives not only their own radiant identities achieved in Christ, but also who our brothers and sisters are across the expanses of the age and the globe we inhabit.  We easily see the differences that distinguish them from us, but it would be a mistake to stop there and fail to seek and recognize what we share in the grace and the cross that is union with our Savior.  

Unlike the virtual connections so much celebrated in our time, our authentic communities of common cause, common interest, and common home are essential to our lives and are worthy of our care and attention.  But much more worthy and much more life-giving is what we share with these people we should work to know better, emulate more zealously, and ask for help more earnestly, that is: communion.

Monsignor Smith

Holding, still

You never see it coming: the day that is different. 

Summer days unspool with a predictable laze and haze and all the familiar markers of the season.  Worshippers are fewer but filled with good humor and summer’s ease.  We had corn on the cob for dinner last night, the first time this year.  Cherry pies were two weeks ago; apricot galette two weeks before that.  The sweet cherries in the grocery stores are good and their prices, are too.  There are rumors of peaches, but I don’t believe them.   And I don’t even consider tomatoes for another few weeks.  

It is not only food, of course.  After the morning’s exertions through midday, Sunday afternoons and evenings about the parish are peaceful all year, but a lovely languor settles in with summer that reinforces my routine.  I suppose it might be a good night to meet a friend for dinner, but I usually don’t.  I would rather be here.  The stern glare of the afternoon suddenly is spent and the lush green hush of the summer evening settles softly.  The boys almost always are elsewhere and only the cicadas make their clamor.  

The church is so quiet and cool when I lock up, it is perfect for prayer.  It must be honest prayer, because it made me laugh at my self-indulgence and the assumptions that lead me through an evening expecting Sunday to be like Sunday always is.

Every day, every season has its samenesses that mark our times and guide our dispositions.  The long evenings of July, the sudden darkfall of a February afternoon.  Even the madcap activity of a month like May is expected and reassuringly familiar, perhaps somewhat or even mostly because we know it must yield to the vacation exhaustion demands, and then right on schedule, everybody vacates.  

But this familiar backdrop can highlight the unique event.  Driving the customary route home this afternoon from my customary walk, a turn and a merge reminded me of the time I encountered a friend there, and he introduced me to somebody for the first time – somebody who is still around now, six years later.  

How normal was the morning there was that text message conveying news of something that would change everything; it would be months before anyone knew what the new normal would be.  Then there was the afternoon when the pot on the stove, the text on the screen were as predictable as humidity in summer, but returning that phone call and agreeing yes, something just was not right, led to another call, led to the car, led to discovery.  Sweet Jesus help us.  

We hear stories of normal lives expecting another normal day who receive disaster instead – a flood, a tornado, fire coming up the hill.  Everything lost, precious ones lost, sameness never to be recovered.

Sometimes the change comes first as a whisper.  Only later, wondering how we got here, we look back and recall the first clue, that simple call, that small sound that made us look into what might be different.  Sometimes the new thing seems insignificant, but then it ripens into eventual delight.  Sometimes the change comes as an eruption, a disruption, an unavoidable inescapable event.   Sometimes, not often one hopes, it comes as a cataclysm, a life-changing force that changes something for everyone and everything for some.

The rhythm and order of our days, the samenesses that we cherish and nurture, the predictabilities we welcome when they come and we relinquish sadly when they pass, all of these serve not only as background or context to provide the scene to some opening or initiation, some rupture or rending, but the recurring regularities reassure us of the remaining reality on which we stand, we have stood, and we will stand, even when change come as it must, and so often rudely does.  The One who never changes, in whom all being has its being, is present and attentive in the cool and quiet of His dwelling place, and always perfect for prayer.

You never see it coming: every day is different.   The gift is to see what remains the same.

Monsignor Smith

Still on the road

My car has over 111,000 miles on it.  It passed ten years old at the end of April, from the day I took delivery, unless you count from the day it rolled off the assembly line, which was earlier – Holy Thursday that year, in fact.  A happy coincidence for a priest’s car.  It was perfect, as cars are when new, and it was good at its car-job.  Now, it is no longer perfect.  There are some mechanical issues and some electrical issues and there are some bodywork scars from rather more than average wear-and-tear.  But it is still quite good at its car-job, and I am happy with it.  

It cannot be replaced, alas, not with a new model just like it.  No longer is a manual transmission available to those of us who enjoy more involvement with the operation of the vehicle.  Plus, all the new models have no gauges – they have screens that resemble gauges.  I don’t know about you, but I am weary of electronic substitutes and semblances of things that are good and useful.  I like things to be things.  A car is a thing made up of many things that all have purpose toward the functioning of the car.  Our material reality depends on things to do the things we need to do, and staying in touch with that thingyness is a reminder of our reality and our limitations.  This isn’t Star Trek, we don’t have a teleporter, and the things we count on to move us about have the benefits and the limitations of material reality.  Inertia is real, and good brakes a necessity.  

Carefully maintained though it is, my car is wearing out, and certain of its things are not functioning as they should.  I must be a little more careful in my sequences and my techniques to coax from it the performance I enjoy and expect.  By no means unreliable, and certainly not dangerous, my car reveals more often its limitations and places on me more of the responsibility for success.  But I claim to enjoy more involvement with the operation of the vehicle and cannot make this a complaint.

Every time I climb into my car and start the engine, I expect it to do everything it has always done.  This may not be rational, especially since I clearly pay attention to all of its limitations.  But it is necessary, or else I would not be able to do the things I need to do.  I maintain the awareness that I have to make certain adjustments, and then I try to be grateful every time I get away with it, arrive on time, and return intact.

This is a process we all manage with our cars in their various states of reliability and repair.   But is it not also what we do with all the other things we count on daily for their function?  We give no thought at all to our refrigerator until the milk is warm or the ice cream runny; we barely listen to the air conditioner unless repeated prodding of the thermostat fail to achieve our desired comfort.  Let them but fail at their purpose and there is no question more burning in our day than whether they need repair or replacement and how fast we can get it done.

Is this not also true of the material aspect of ourselves?  We give little thought to our eyes or our feet, our hearts or hands, until some failure leave us flailing to do what we always did easily before.  That they are material, and that we ourselves are material to be maintained and managed is a startling revelation.  Then we become accustomed to the added cumber of eyeglasses or orthopedic inserts, or heaven forfend, a stent.  But our corporeal materiality is as fragile and frangible as any other.

Sometimes people joke about the wear and tear of life that it isn’t the years, it’s the miles.  I think it is both, like cars that need to track their running time and not only their mileage, such as police cars and taxicabs.  The informed eye keeps tabs on the fluids and learns how to massage the best performance possible out of the old beast even if some of the systems are squishy and some of the connections loose.  Adjustments are made to technique as well as expectations of performance, so that the driver can keep the impression that he is in charge even as he yields to the increasing demands of the vehicle.  

These are the realities of the effects of time and use on every material reality, even our most vital ones.   We assume at one level of thought that they will continue to run forever, while understanding in a less conscious way that is not an option.   We also know it cannot be replaced with a new model just like it.  

Monsignor Smith

What constitutes us

 The concept of “American exceptionalism” has almost as many definitions as there are commentators on it.  I have long been fascinated by the term, whether its first best use was by Alexis de Tocqueville or Josef Stalin, both of whom are candidates for credit.  Some would assert that the only exceptional aspect of our country is that it is ours, which is thus the same thing that makes any country exceptional.  While I could not endorse any particular theory, it seems sufficiently commonsense to acknowledge that there is something authentically exceptional about our nation.

My first candidate for the ground of exceptionality would be our form of government, the Constitution, and that this form of government is the first and defining characteristic of the country. Ethnicity, culture, and geography all contributed to our nation’s earliest self-understanding and establishment, but did not even then, much less do they now, define what makes the United States of America, the United States of America. 

Lest anyone think that the USA was simply the first of a historical generation of nations to be born of revolution and coalesce by constitution, one need examine the suggested “other examples.”  The French staged a revolution with the express intention of emulating what they saw in our society, but “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” quickly descended into tyranny and bloodshed by committee.  We are all aware of how the Russian and other so-called “revolutions” played out, pursued as they were in the names of ideologies that led to domination by ideologues. Many Latin American nations claim their own “George Washingtons” who nonetheless failed to manifest not only his executive virtues, but also and especially his virtuous relinquishing of executive power.  Anybody familiar with the European Union’s huge phonebook-size assemblage of regulations knows it is a “Constitution” in name alone.

I think what lies at the root of the current mocking of American exceptionalism is a rejection of the possibility that anything can be an exception.  There is a desire to subordinate the character of USA to a rule, and by that rule to take away any privilege or responsibility that would belong to a truly exceptional nation.  

Both privilege and responsibility are eliminated by the tyranny of false equality, which refuses to admit not only any exception, but also the possibility of authentic difference.  The reality of difference is manifest in the differences between and among human beings and all the creatures of the earth. Good and evil, true and false, reality and fiction, beauty and disorder are truly and clearly different.  The only way to deny or suppress these differences is to erect a false equality through authority and power.  That authority and power is necessarily in opposition to the author of all these differences, our Creator. 

My willingness to accept that the United States is exceptional among nations is rooted in my belief that among human beings there are lives that are exceptional.  That belief is founded on my acquaintance with the perfectly exceptional man who is God, Jesus Christ.  His immaculately conceived mother, the Virgin Mary, is not only an exception to the rule of original sin, but also a model of and invitation to acceptance of the privilege and responsibility that comes with freedom from the rule, with being an exception.

The inherent difference among human lives is reflected in the differences of the societies they erect.  The true differences between good and evil, true and false, between God and everything else, undergird a world where every human soul is called to be exceptional in a way that he or she is uniquely capable of being.  This is the foundational freedom that can be suppressed but not eliminated, as it inheres in our very souls.  Better than anywhere else or in any other time, this is the freedom that has until now been both provided and protected in our exceptional nation’s exceptional Constitution.

God bless America, and God bless you.

Monsignor Smith