Ordinary and extraordinary.

Let us cross over to the other side

Please let me take this opportunity to thank you all for your kindness to me and my family over the past weeks.   Your concern and your prayers were a prop and gift to us, in a way simultaneously startling and organic.  Ours is a family small in number, but the connection nurtured by grace and sacrament here in the parish extended and embraced our family, effectively multiplying both membership and affection.

Earlier this year, for the twentieth anniversary of the death of Pope Saint John Paul II, I shared with you some of the notes I sent from Rome, where I was privileged to be a close participant in the events around his funeral.  As I was preparing for my own dad’s funeral, I was reminded of something I had written then, and I want to share with you now what I wrote the evening of April 8, 2005.

But these vast dimensions, and all the coverage, all the narrative, all the lights and cameras and action, all of it made it very tempting to overlook something: what happened today, though vast in scale, unprecedented in its participants, unheard of in its impact, was totally ordinary.  It happens all the time.  It is what families do.  It is what Christians do.  It is simply what we do.

This is what we do when we lose a loved one.  We take him to the altar.  We welcome our Lord and God who comes in the Eucharist, right into our midst. Then we all stand up and in one voice present the one we have loved and lost to that same Lord.  Take him home!

And then we bid him goodbye. 

All this is ordinary, in the sense that it is a part of life; necessary, and even good.  But by no means easy.  We lost a father.  Today, it just took a while to say goodbye.  

Ordinary, and extraordinary.  Death is universal, loss of a loved one, universal; loss of a mother or father after a long life, good and even holy, is not universal by any means, and therefore worthy of extraordinary gratitude.  To be surrounded by prayer and faith in the midst of that is extraordinary indeed, and cause for even greater gratitude.   God bless you all.

Monsignor Smith

Be our defense

His is still one of the most popular names for boys, even in this era of innovation in naming children.  But otherwise, Saint Michael seems to have come into hard times over the last half-century.

Everybody knows Saint Michael the Archangel – or at least they should know him.  He wields the flaming sword and drives Lucifer and his rebel angels out of heaven and away from the presene of God because of their refusal to serve.   He appears at various junctures (e.g., the Book of Daniel) to bring the help of the Host of God to the assistance of those who do serve him.  For this prominent and recurring role in salvation history, he is known not only to Christians, but also to Jews.  Even Muslims know who he is.  Because of his unique talents and responsibilities, he is the patron saint of law enforcement and paratroopers, among others.  

I bring him to your attention because this Monday, September 29, is his feast day.  Since the revision of the liturgical calendar in 1970, he has to share his day with Saints Gabriel and Raphael, the other two Archangels, who themselves have distinctive missions and characters, though no longer their own feast days.  This day customarily designated the beginning of the fall academic semester at the ancient universities of Europe, which is why in England it was (and may still be) known as “Michaelmas Term.”  And I can’t get our own school to wait even until after Labor Day to begin the term!  You can see why St. Michael’s Feast would be prominent in people’s minds then – and not so much anymore.

Saint Michael has a great prayer, too, which is enjoying a merited resurgence these days.  It was recited together by the priest and congregation after all Low (spoken, not sung) Masses until the liturgical reforms after the Second Vatican Council, one of the few elements of Sunday worship that was is English, rather than Latin.  Everybody knew it!

I commend the prayer to you all now.  The only folks who have no need of it are the ones who do not confront evil. Who of us can claim that privilege, or live in that bubble?  Learn it and, as the saying goes, use it early and often:  

Prayer to Saint Michael

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle!

Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil.

May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,

and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,

by the power of God, cast into Hell Satan

and all the other evil spirits who prowl about the world

seeking the ruin of souls.  Amen

Offer this prayer when you are afraid or in danger, or when you confront temptation to sin.  Pray it in your desire for salvation, that you be defended against anything or anyone, any sin or any sabotage, that would separate you from the service of the saving God.  

Offer this prayer also for all those who daily choose to serve, often in one uniform or another, who protect you from evil in this world: evil in nature, and evil in the hearts of men; evil abroad, and evil at home.  Offer this prayer for our brothers and sisters in the Christian faith, who confront evil daily in their lives because of their loyalty to Christ.  This is the charge of this great Archangel, who has demonstrated his willingness to fulfill it throughout the ages in response to the needs of those who call upon him.

Saint Michael defends all who are willing and eager to recognize and respond to Him who alone made us and saves us, not as Lucifer did (Non serviam!) in rebellion and rejection, but as God’s own Son did, in obedience: Not my will, Father, but your will be done.  I will serve.  This is the profession we can make to unite ourselves to this great Archangel, and moreover, to Christ Himself.  

“Hard times” are precisely where he is best deployed.  Remember, the first we know of him was when the very courts of heaven were under attack from rebel angels, rumored to have been one quarter of the total.  He is good when the odds are bad!  Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle!  

Monsignor Smith

 

Hangin' around, Nothin' to do but frown

For all my days on this earth there has existed a popular fascination with theories of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy.  From the earliest investigations of credentialed government panels, through blockbuster films by Hollywood aristocracy, through stated priorities of the current presidential administration, the murmur and hum has persisted that some organization foreign or domestic was behind it.  

 Just a few months ago I found a chapter of a valedictory work by a great American novelist given over to his own calculations and convictions on the subject.  That the scenario he spun was credible and compelling speaks more to his greatness as a novelist however old and cranky than it does to what is likely to have occurred.

For all these days I have remained skeptical of these theories.  No one of them has captured the high ground of probability and evidence, and all of them have settled into the homogenous murk of suspicion and excitement in which all conspiracy theories are consigned to dwell.   Never have I understood what keeps these miasmic creations alive.  Never, that is, until today.

For all this last week the tune of a long-ago song by The Carpenters has been in my mind as I have had to explain to people that rainy days and assassinations always get me down.  How to refocus on the tasks of the moment and the goodness of God has eluded me.  Every drop of information, every reaction and discovery have brought new waves of sadness and disappointment.

I did not know the murdered man at all.   I had heard his name but never his voice, nor seen his image, nor even read one solitary statement by him.   These have all been put before me in the minutes and days that followed and compound the shock and grief.  Who does this to such a one?  

The discoveries that followed bring no consolation.  The one who did this to him, how he prepared and did it, why he said he was doing it, how he came to be captured and his picture displayed everywhere.  There, finally, we have not resolution or release, but the obstacle: this nice young man from a nice family looking frightened and sullen but otherwise normal in his suicide-prevention dress.  How could he have done this?

What happened to him? Who talked him into this?  Who turned him into this?  What was being poured into his young brain, what ideology or technology or twisting external influence deprived him of his own self-knowledge and self-love and self-preservation until he woke up from the horrible trance alone and naked in a cell?  Whom was he serving, to whom was he listening?  There must be some system, or some syndicate.  It was them clearly, not any of us.  There has to be a them, because to look at him is to see a human being, to see one of us.  

This is where the conspiracy theories come in.  They are a coping mechanism for which people reach to deal with the great evil that was done by somebody with whom they have too much in common; with whom, in fact, we have everything in common, our very nature.  It is more than familiarity, more than similarity that we see.  We see our very selves.  And we are horrifying.

Our capacity for delusion is accomplice to our capacity for evil.  We are all too willing to relinquish our hard-bought self-knowledge and self-love when there is an opportunity for self-aggrandizement.  For everything we know and understand and treasure about ourselves has been purchased for us by our God at the price of His Son.  When we see what He endured, we look not only at what we are worth, but also what we are capable of doing.  We could any one of us lay down our lives to save another; and we could any one of us nail to a cross the very one who is coming to save us.  

It was the killer’s family that showed me who they are, and thus the other side of who we are.  For his own family realized what he had done, and his own family insisted on what he had to do about it, at great and lasting cost to themselves.  Now his family is riven by simultaneous affection and revulsion, love and horror, compassion and conviction.  In your charity, pray for them all.  In this prayer, you will find the selflessness that is our lifeline, however thin the thread.

After wondering for decades why conspiracy theories about assassinations continue to have the power to arouse passionate advocates, I think I finally understand.  These people are all trying to prove that he couldn’t have done this on his own, which is their way of asserting that I couldn’t have done this on my own.   Though they try for all their days on earth, still they fail. 

Monsignor Smith

Says WHO?

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”  That’s Confucius. 

I found these lines in an opinion article this week and was delighted to know that Confucius and I have at least this one thing in common.  Now, Confucius was clearly a pretty smart guy, and is famous for being an observant guy, and is especially known for being able to say things well.  But while that is the point where my knowledge of him comes to an end, it also is precisely the point which so fascinates me.  How is it possible that you and I can recognize and nod at an insight from a thinker who lived 2500 years ago in a society and language so different from our own?  

What brings a thought from the mind of Confucius into my mind across that vast gulf of distance and difference?   Words do it.  These words do not function discreetly as individual shipping containers, but within the system of language they make possible this most marvelous of human activities, communication.   Words can do this between two people in physical proximity and spoken conversation with one another, they can do it across time, by being written or recorded, and across distance, by being carried or transmitted, and even across different languages by being translated by one or more people who know both languages and can identify the different words that convey the same meaning. 

You do not have to be a sage like Confucius to have an idea or notice a phenomenon worth the attention and consideration of another person.  That idea, or that observation, can be instantly introduced to another person by the expression of words.  Cookies! or, Fire! are both very succinct ways to put a thought in somebody else’s mind and elicit an appropriate response.  Isn’t that amazing?

A word is not the thing itself (we could always simply wave a plate of cookies or point at the smoke or even flames) but it somehow conveys the understanding of the reality just as well, and maybe even more effectively.  Employ the right word, and the thought moves from your mind into the consideration of your conversational partner.  

Now when the thought in your mind is more complicated than a tasty treat or a mortal threat, more complicated words, and more of them, are called for, but they do the same work.  The word is not itself a cookie, but the word evokes the complex (and wonderful) reality that is a cookie.  

Interestingly enough, not only can a word convey an idea or observation from one person to another, but also a word helps us understand and work with ideas within our own minds.  To name a thing is to give it a handle by which we can lay hold of it, and a complex phenomenon with a simple name (oh, let’s say, nostalgia, or maybe harmony) is then itself a tool we can use to build more complex concepts or decipher difficult problems.  Before we marshal words to convey anything to another person, we use them to shape, organize, and understand our own thoughts.

This process of naming is essential to and characteristic of human beings.  We do it so naturally that we can take it for granted and fail to marvel at what we are doing.  But because the process can fall into the background in this way, it is possible to lose sight of the importance of integrity and coherence to the personal and social function of language.  

What if I say Cookies! and you think of some electronic tracking marker on the internet?  And what if I say Fire! and you think I mean the building is burning -- but I simply wanted to scare you into departing?   There can be confusion, but there can also be intentional misuse of words.  Besides different words that sound alike or words that have multiple meanings, think of how exaggeration, omission, and elision can contort the function of language.  Think of irony, mislabeling, and even outright lies.  The whole enterprise of communication is undermined, possibly even intentionally.

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”  And if the affairs being carried on are essential to human thriving, then woe is us. 

Monsignor Smith

What's the good word?

A wordless message

Let’s be honest.  We all want to connect and communicate with other people.  Maybe not all other people, but at least selected other people, whether we select them to be a friend or a mate, we want them to select us to be an employee, or the selection is organic as parents and children.  

To be honest, we cannot connect with other people unless we can communicate, and our principal means of communication is words.  Sure, simply existing in the flesh communicates something, being visible and audible and tangible.   Gestures and actions communicate effectively, as well.  But most of the work of interaction is done using words. 

Words can be both spoken and written, heard and read.  Words can travel farther and faster than our full fleshy selves, both across a table and across the country.  Words can be saved up until someone has time to hear or see them in a sound recording or in a notebook.  More than simply handy, words are essential to communication.

Words can fail us, not simply when we lack the right words, but when the words provided are unintelligible to the intended recipient because of garbled transmission or bad handwriting.  Most vexing is when the speaker and the listener do not share the same words, that is, they speak and understand in different languages.  Translating, though possible, is a tricky business, something always being lost in it – as the saying goes. 

When words fail, what we have is a failure to communicate.  Where there is the desire or even the need to communicate, the failure of words is an obstacle that can prevent or destroy a relationship.  

But an honest evaluation would lead most of us to admit that we do not think much nor long about most of the words involved in our communication.  The words we send out when we speak or write, and the many, many more words sent toward us by others, flow at such a rapid rate that we rarely pause to consider what would be precisely the right word to speak, or to wonder which of several possible meanings we should take with a word that we hear or read.  The words that we speak and hear are almost always unexamined.

Do all the words we speak mean the same thing to us as they do to the people we intend to receive them?   Do all the words we hear mean the same thing to us as they do to person who sends them our way?  We like to think they do; imagine how unsettling it would be to have to assume that they did not!  Is it possible to choose and use words in such a way that our meaning is obscured or confused?  Is it possible to hear words in a way that gives them a meaning completely alien from the meaning intended by the speaker?  It clearly is possible, and we all know it, but we do not let it hamper us.  

We know this divergence that undermines communication is possible, but we keep on speaking and listening as if we have some grounds for confidence that this divergence is not going to happen to us, not in this conversation, and that our interlocutor has the same confidence.  That’s a lot to take for granted while not weighing the words that fly back and forth at an astounding rate in almost all our communication.  

Though I have been considering the content of my message for several days now, I am typing the specific words relatively quickly without hovering over this or that word choice.  The indicator at the bottom of the screen tells me I surpassed six hundred words.  The quantity is not itself my goal, though it does emphasize how many of these marvelous little language units are required to accomplish a modest task.  

Clearly, I am confident that the words I type today will be read or received by you, dear reader, in a manner that will move the meaning I have in my mind to an understanding you have in your mind.  The tool of this transfer of thought and knowledge is language, the assembly and deployment of words.  Until we examine not only what a word means but even what a word is, we have to ask ourselves: can we be honest? 

Monsignor Smith

Not Hemingway

Labor Day weekend seems so peaceful and pleasant,
 then you look more closely and hey...
what's that coming around the bend?  
The Irresistible Force is headed for our Immovable Feasts.

Easter is the classic example of a movable feast.   It falls every year on a Sunday determined by astronomical considerations.   This past Easter was rather late, April 20.   Next Easter will fall in the normal range, April 5.  That means Ash Wednesday (a movable fast?) will be relatively normal too, on February 18, 2026.  Christmas, on the other hand, is always on December 25, and the annual question is what day of the week will that be?  This year, the answer is Thursday.

Easter and Christmas are holy days of the highest rank and take precedence whenever they fall.  Not all holy days that fall on the same date every year have the same weight as Christmas.  Just this past weekend, the remarkably important Feast of Saint Bartholomew was rudely suppressed (that’s the official term for it) by the twenty-first Sunday in ordinary time, whose very name indicates how easy it would have been to live without it – but I may be somewhat biased in that judgment.  So, everybody who is not a member of a church dedicated to Saint Bartholomew must wait until next August to celebrate the Guileless Apostle.

This year, however, we learn that rather like the animals on George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some feasts are more feasty than others.  These feasts will outrank and even suppress a Sunday in ordinary time when they fall on the same date.   For the first time since 2014, four specific immovable feasts this year fall on and supplant Sundays.  

We already celebrated on Sunday June 29 the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, an enormously important feast of the universal Church.  It came so soon after the end of all the movable feasts associated with Easter – Pentecost Sunday, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi Sunday – that it did not seem out of the ordinary (time).   But in just a few weeks, things will get noticeably strange.

On Sunday, September 14, instead of the twenty-fourth Sunday in ordinary time, we will celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is an ancient commemoration of the discovery in Jerusalem and translation to Rome of the True Cross of Our Lord’s Passion by the Empress Helena.  Its proper prayers are ancient and powerful; I especially like the preface.  

Six weeks later on November 2, instead of the thirty-first Sunday in ordinary time, the Commemoration of All Souls will have us pray for our dear departed at all the Sunday Masses.  The eleven o’clock Mass that Sunday will be our annual Requiem Mass for the souls of our parish who have died over the past year.  Our choirs will provide the marvelous music of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, and we will invite the families who mourn them to return for the Mass.  

The very next week, November ninth, we will celebrate the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the cathedral church of the Bishop of Rome (and you thought it was Saint Peter in the Vatican, didn’t you?) conferred on the successor to Peter by the Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century.  

You who are extrapolating from these dates have figured out that All Saints’ Day, November first, is on a Saturday, which means that the obligation to attend Mass that day has been lifted by our gracious bishops.  It also means Halloween will be on Friday; does that make for more mayhem, or just more candy?  We shall see.  

It also means that November 16, the thirty-third Sunday in ordinary time, will be the only green Sunday between Halloween and mid-January, because after that comes Christ the King, then Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, etc.  Then we will have at least a month just to pull ourselves together before Lent starts.

Last year, one of my priest friends in the diocese across the river was so pleased with the dynamics of the days around Christmas that he wanted the Church to declare it will be on a Wednesday every year.  I must admit, it was a pretty sweet arrangement.  But Christmas is likely to stay on the twenty-fifth, since sometimes the holy day is best enjoyed when it is an immovable feast.  

Monsignor Smith

Be difficult, sure, but not doubting

No longer the constant topic of conversation, the personality and priorities of the new Pope, Leo XIV, remain a matter of great curiosity.  It is suggested that one of the reasons he has spent time in the Papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo is to focus on and develop his practical and theological initiatives for governing the Church.  He is rumored to be composing “his first encyclical,” and identifying “his curia.”  All this remains to be seen, but that does not mean that we have not already had glimpses of what he considers important.

On July 31 he announced his intention that Saint John Henry Newman be declared a Doctor of the Church.  This has not sprung from the fertile recesses of his mind and personal pieties, but rather has been a hope and desire of many parties within the Church for some years, and is an idea that has received serious examination.  Only 37 other saints have received this designation and distinction.   

An Englishman of the nineteenth century (1801-1890), Cardinal Newman was a prominent Anglican cleric, thinker, preacher, and writer before his entrance into full communion with the Catholic Church, an act shocking in that time that lost him several friends and many supporters.  He was ordained Priest and founded the Birmingham Oratory.  In 1878, Pope Leo XII created him a cardinal though he had never been a bishop and granted him the unusual permission to remain in England at his Oratory.  

One of his sayings that I have often shared in the confessional with penitents who fear that they have doubted God, or the Faith, is that One thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.  That helpful assertion comes from Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, the book he published to explain his conversion and rebut accusations and calumnies from his detractors.  I found the whole paragraph from the fifth chapter of that book, and I think it is even more helpful in context.

I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as anyone; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

We know that our new Holy Father chose his regnal name in reference to his predecessor by one century.   Clearly Number Fourteen shares Number Thirteen’s estimation of John Henry Newman as one who has much to offer the Church.  We can explore the wealth of wisdom and insight this English saint has to offer while we await the manifestation of what our Anglophone Pope intends to emphasize in his leadership of that same Church.  It could even give us something fruitful to talk about. 

Monsignor Smith