Holding On to Hand It On

Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20)
but that doesn't mean we don't enjoy our local attachments, too.

If you were sent with your family to live in a foreign country, what would you do as mother and father, heads of the household, to maintain the fabric and culture of your family?

I lived in Italy for long periods over nine years, so even though I was in a community of US citizens large (the seminary) or small (Cardinal Baum’s household), I know how it can go to pick up some local practices while carefully nurturing habits from home.  At the NAC we were well-known among the Romans for our Giorno di Ringraziamento (Thanksgiving) feast and our Quattro Luglio (Fourth of July) cookout.  When we came home to the US, the other guys made fun of us for our Italian affectations - yet they readily ate our pasta dishes.

So what of the local culture would you pick up, and what of your own culture would you nurture and maintain?   A lot would depend on just how foreign the culture is.

I thought of this on New Year’s Morning as I sat at my desk and saw cars filling the lot for the 11:00 Mass for the Holy Day.  Mary the Mother of God is a day that puts the Mass-goer at odds with the local culture, as New Year festivities before, during, and after the revelry consume most people’s day.   It was especially obvious that morning, when almost no other cars were on the road, nobody out and about even as midday approached, except the faithful assembling for Mass.  And the faithful did come, in numbers that surprised me.  All three of the Masses had good crowds, though predictably the 8:30’s was not large.

As is often the case when there is a big gap between what we are doing here at the parish and what most people around us are doing, it was a delightful time for everybody to be together.  People were cheerful and happy to be together, participating in the prayers and music, mixing and visiting afterward with the ease and comfort of familiarity and trust.  Meanwhile, 99.9 percent of the local population had no idea of what we were doing, or why.

Moments like that highlight how much like living in a foreign country are our lives as Catholics right here in twenty-first century Silver Spring Maryland USA.  One of my favorite early Christian texts is the Letter to Diognetus from around the year 200 AD, which makes the similarity clear:

And yet there is something extraordinary about their (Christians’) lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.  

Isn’t it funny that the author’s first choices to illustrate the difference (in 200 AD!) are marriage, sex, and not exterminating children?  Some things never change!  But that’s hardly the only thing that distinguishes us.  His whole thrust is that Catholics choose what of their own culture they cling to, and what of the local culture they accept and engage in.

It is not unhealthy for mothers and fathers to take stock of the local culture and make a similar evaluation.  How much of it should our family take part in, and what that is common here and now (“everybody else is doing it!”) should our family exclude?  And like every healthy migrant family, we should take particular care and make every effort to nurture and maintain the practices that strengthen and keep our family’s precious heritage, faith and eternal life in Christ.  

In such circumstances, it does not have to be a day when the bulk of the populace is either binge-watching or binge-drinking to make it a good day to take the family to Mass together, then share a meal with others who do the same thing – whether we knew them before, or only met them today.  The domestic church, the family, is the smallest unit of Christ’s Body the Church, so to identify the family’s home and to choose the family’s activities to be places where Christ is the foundation of the event is how best to maintain the fabric and culture of your family while we are passing through this foreign land.

Monsignor Smith

Images of the Invisible

This week brings less a letter than a photo essay.  Pictures or images are suitable this weekend, as we celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord – the “showing forth” of the one true God, the Word become flesh, the invisible God become visible, the image of the invisible God.  

The Epiphany of our Lord is multifaceted, though most of us think only of the Three Wise Men, the Kings, the Magi from the East, who follow the signs in which they are experts that point the way to the new-born King, and the come to adore and offer gifts.  But the other two aspects are just as significant, revealing the Godhead of Jesus to a wider and less specialized audience.  The second is Jesus’ miracle of changing water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana, demonstrating His command over nature and substance, as well as His concern for people’s joy; and the third is His Baptism, in which the heavens opened, the Spirit descended like a dove, and all present heard the voice of the Father say, behold my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased!  

For all of us in the rectory, it has become a favorite tradition to assemble the Parishioner Tree, where we hang the Christmas cards that arrive from throughout the parish.  We started because it seemed such a shame merely to look once then put aside these marvelous images of the love that makes up the smallest units of the Church, the family, also known as the domestic Church.  This way, we all enjoy seeing them for several weeks, every time we pass through the front office.  The tree is right by the counter at the front door, so anyone who comes to request a Mass intention can enjoy it; last weekend, one substitute letter-carrier was quite delighted.  It will stay up for a few more days, so stop by now to check it out for yourself.  

The cards are a help to identify faces and names of newer parishioners, and sometimes just to figure out who goes with whom – oh, he is her dad!  We learn about travel to exciting places, children who have moved on from the family home, and maybe even have kids of their own.  We have cards from “distinguished alumni” of the parish who still send cards after they have moved away, even as far away as North Carolina and Pennsylvania.  There’s nothing like a photo of a lanky teenager who was seven years old last you saw him, and the baby who was born after they moved away who is now eight years old, to mark the passage of time.

Let these photos help motivate you.  The threefold Epiphany multiplies to many, many more smaller epiphanies in these manifestations of God’s presence in the Church.  The images reveal the presence of divine love abiding in the flesh and blood of our families united by the Holy Eucharist.  Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever!

Monsignor Smith

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This is  NOT the end.

This summer, when I went on my Grand Tour of Ohio, my car’s odometer clicked over 100,000 miles as I drove west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  Well, because the odometer is electronic there was no ‘click’, but the six-digit number appeared for the first time and my nine-plus year-old car became a centenarian of sorts.  I took pictures.

That was already five months ago, in those lovely days of summer that unspool at a more leisurely pace and are filled with sweetness.  With the autumn, the days come at us faster and faster until in December it seems we stand before a demented pitching machine flinging its projectiles with a mindless fixation on beaning us.  

During that same frenzy of demands and diminished days, many of our brothers and sisters did the work of preparing for the great feast that comes ‘in the bleak midwinter.’  Much of the work was unseen, though its results are feasts for the eyes and our ears.  Please reflect for a moment on your favorite aspect of these days of Christmas glory, the music, the flowers, the liturgies, the tiny details that manifest hospitality and humanity in this heart of our communion.  Then try to find somebody who made it happen and say thank you.

I hope you enjoyed the beautiful Nativity scenes that we have – all three of them.  Assembling and staging those is one of the preparations that takes a lot of unseen work but has an outsize reward in enjoyment.  Five years back, when we got new figures for both creches, inside the church and outside, some the old figures were still usable, so we hit up Andy Greenleaf (again!) to build a new stable for a display at the back driveway, for all our Woodmoor neighbors.   By this fall, those figures had disintegrated further and were no longer usable.

Just before we realized this problem, we had received a memorial gift from Loretta Wells and Regina Smith in honor of their parents, longtime parishioners George and Catherine Gadbois.  Their gift mostly covered the cost of a new set of Nativity figures for the back-gate stable.  So with the marvel of modern air transport, the (Italian) Holy Family made it to our (Silver Spring) Bethlehem stable.  Talk about just-in-time delivery!  As you enjoy the beautiful reminder of our Savior’s birth, offer a prayer for the Gadbois family.

Through Advent and Christmas this year, the subject of my letters has been time, how God’s eruption into time and history has changed both, and how our time is marked and measured in the rhythms and rituals of our worship.   This week we have another moment of time measurement, the turning of the calendar year. 

The New Year holiday has never excited me, nor have its conventional commemorations, midnight parties and various large objects being dropped before the hazy gaze of frozen crowds.  The Communist governments, first in Russia then elsewhere as their iron grip took hold, make it the principal festival of the year, supplanting and suppressing Christmas.   Those governments have successively failed but nobody lets go easily of a festival, so atheists everywhere have their moment.

Let them have their fun, regardless of whether they advert to the fact that the turning numbers they celebrate mark the Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord, as we count from the birth of Christ.  And the calendar in universal use was promulgated by the Holy See and is named for the successor of Saint Peter who presided over it, Pope Gregory XIII.  

We faithful keep the Octave Day of Christmas recalling the Holy Mother of the Divine Son and His naming and circumcision according to the practice of the Jews from whom comes salvation.  That is enough for me and rather than watch the clock tick, I go to bed early. 

In the cold clear light of another winter day, the so-called ’new’ year is never a big deal, though we will populate its pages with notations of events and accomplishments as well as losses that will define it in our memories.   I prefer to refer to it as the Year of Grace, acknowledging our dependence for every detail on the same Divine Providence that gave us so great and so tiny a Savior.  

In that way, the opening of a new calendar is rather like the click of the odometer in our car, marking how far we have come, but giving no indication how far we have yet to go.

Monsignor Smith

Today

As I drove through the neighborhood recently just after dark, I marveled at the displays of Christmas lights on the homes and in the yards.  Some were elaborate and extensive, even exaggerated, others more restrained.  Some, perhaps, were half-hearted and still others small and simple, but there was no question that festivity was afoot.  

For some reason it reminded me of the Christmas that was not so: the grim Christmas of 1973 dimmed by the energy crisis imposed by the Arab oil embargo, when the government urged all Americans to forego Christmas lights among other things to conserve electricity suddenly scarce and expensive.  It was dark and depressing for us kids and probably everybody else, too.  The lights were a long time in coming back, and I am delighted that they did. 

Fifty years ago Christmas was different, but Christmas was still Christmas then, and so it is today.  The birth of Christ, God become man, defines and describes the day that transforms our lives and all lives, despite constant change in circumstance.

Pope Saint Leo the Great laid open this mystery when He rejoiced with his Roman flock in 450 AD.  Things were different then, indeed, but one thing was the same.  He preached: For to-day the Maker of the world was born of a Virgin's womb, and He, who made all natures, became Son of her, whom He created. To-day the Word of GOD appeared clothed in flesh, and That which had never been visible to human eyes began to be tangible to our hands as well. To-day the shepherds learnt from angels' voices that the Saviour was born in the substance of our flesh and soul; and to-day the form of the Gospel message was pre-arranged by the leaders of the LORD'S flocks, so that we too may say with the army of the heavenly host: "Glory in the highest to GOD, and on earth peace to men of good will."  (Sermon XXVI, On the Feast of the Nativity, VI)

Christ’s birth today is different from all other events that happened ‘on this day in history.’  I wrote at Christmas ten years ago: one hundred years ago, the nations of Europe were at one another’s throats, five months into the First World War.  Hundreds of thousands had already died of the millions who would eventually fall.  But that Christmas, troops on opposite sides of No Man’s Land, soldiers who had been murdering one another, emerged from their trenches and greeted one another with carols and cheer, to shake hands, laugh, talk, and even play sports together.  It was The Christmas Truce of 1914, an example of the “sigh of relief” that Cardinal Ratzinger mentioned.  

The day and the truce passed, and the war in all its savagery ground on. The subsequent Christmas, far less charity was to be found; and Christmases after that, none at all.  I fear that relentlessness set the tone for the century since.  

However, the same grace, mercy, and peace that prompted that divine interruption of human misery is as alive and potent as He ever was.  

The day that was chosen and changed by God is the day the changes us, though God dwells among us now every day. Ox and ass and angel and shepherds rejoiced to recognize the marvel before their eyes, and you and I renew our own joy when this day comes to us with its cargo of the Christ Child.  

After all our waiting and all our preparation, the day is fleeting, as is every day.  But today, Christmas day, is unlike any other day.  Awareness of this difference gives the day a savor that draws our attention and changes our experience.  This savor’s source is the presence and work of God, Who inhabits our time and our life with His life and his care, revealing Himself first as an infant requiring care.  

The astonishing vulnerability of Almighty God is an invitation difficult to resist.  He Who will conquer all our enemies first shows such sweetness when He shares our weakness that He draws us close, for He will also share our wounds.   This great bridging of the immeasurable gap happens in a moment, and the moment brings delight. 

We celebrate the moment now, not some far away date in history.  As the great and ancient antiphon of the Nativity pours out for all to hear,

Hodie Christus natus est:
Hodie Salvator apparuit:
Hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
Laetantur Archangeli,
Hodie exsultant justi, dicentes:
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Alleluia.

Click to hear the chant

Today Christ is born:
Today the Savior appeared:
Today on Earth the Angels sing,
Archangels rejoice,
Today the righteous rejoice, saying:
Glory to God in the highest.
Alleluia.

Today we rejoice; today Christ is born.  Today God is before our eyes and on our lips in praise that echoes the angels above.  With Father Swink and Father Wiktor, all of us here in the Holy House of Soubirous, and all the generous souls who labor in this parish to bring you grace, I assure you of my prayers and warmest personal wishes for a rich, deep, joyful and beautiful Christmas, today.

Monsignor Smith

Until

 

Are we there yet?

It is the classic question of any kid who travels and anyone who traveled as a kid.  Eagerness and anticipation, longing and desperation, all combine into the perfect expression of the unbearability of the present moment.  We find a richer expression of the same sentiment in Psalm 13: 

How long, O Lord? Wilt thou forget me for ever?
    How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?
² How long must I bear pain in my soul,
    and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³ Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
    lighten my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
⁴ lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed over him”;
    lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵ But I have trusted in thy steadfast love;
    my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.
⁶ I will sing to the Lord,
    because he has dealt bountifully with me.

How long, O Lord? is the prayer equivalent of, Are we there yet? The present circumstances are unbearable, and like restless children in the back seat, we pester the driver.  Will that change anything besides the driver’s disposition? Will our waiting end sooner, or simply be punctuated by a rebuke?

But the Psalmist moves beyond his petulance and arrives at consolation.  How?  He recalls the past, what the Lord has already done for him.  This makes the present bearable and fills it with meaning.  We can bear waiting for things to get better now when we remember the goodness we received in the past.

Advent teaches us how to wait.  Waiting with confidence is such a part of our faith that we dedicate a season to it every year.  Advent is more-or-less four weeks of focused waiting for the great good that is the coming of the Lord at Christmas.  Our days are filled with remembering the good God has given in the past, the benefits that came to those who waited, and how He provides the best to those who wait in confidence for Him. 

To see what we need to see, look to the children, who wait in restless anticipation.  We mark the passing of the weeks along the way to show how far we have come, and how far remains yet to go.  The Advent wreath with its four colored candles is the kid’s odometer of Advent.  Though we grownups might not fight to light the candles or blow them out, we also enjoy its beauty in tracking the time.

Advent teaches us that waiting is good.  Kids’ Advent calendars dispense a treat for each day that passes toward the goal, reminding them that there is goodness even in the waiting, the waiting itself has it good points.   In fact, those good things cease when we arrive at the destination.  In case there be any doubt about our adult patience, there are grownup Advent calendars too, dispensing grownup treats.

We claim to be so much more mature about it than they are, and perhaps we are less frenzied in our anticipation of the good things of our Christmas celebrations.  But are we that much calmer and more confident when we wait for what we need from the Lord?  My guess is: no.  

Advent teaches us what we are waiting for – and for Whom we are waiting.  We are ever restless, dissatisfied with the present moment and eager to pester anyone we think should be making it better for us.  How many people resort to petulance when circumstances are not what they want, when genuine difficulties define the time?   How many people blame God, accuse Him of not acting, not caring, and being deaf to their just demands?  These souls are more miserable than backseat drivers.  Even we who know the living God can be miserable.  Come!  O come.  How long the night?  How long, O Lord?  

The worship of the Church rescues us from this misery by walking us each year through the darkness to the light, much as Psalm 13 described.  To calm our unease, Advent moves toward its consummation with reminders of all the invisible, unknown works by God in preparation for His great manifestation in the Nativity of Jesus Christ.  In the great antiphon for four days before Christmas, we open our liturgical ‘Advent calendar’ and receive this gift:  O Dawn of the East, Brightness of the Light Eternal, and Sun of Justice, come and enlighten them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.  

We ourselves do not control the sun that gives us light and life.  But we do have a light in the darkness: knowledge of the works of God who comes to save us.  We must wait for Him, though; for Him to come, for Him to act.  We have to remind one another that He is coming, coming to help us, coming to give us all we need.  All is dark, save the light of four candles.  The candles are beautiful, but – are we there yet?

Monsignor Smith

 

 

 

 

Buy time back

The Time We Have

Before the ubiquity of smartphones or even pocket watches, before most towns had a single clock in a tower or steeple, in the days when the church might ring the hour but more likely only the Angelus and Mass, people kept time by prayer.  Medieval and pre-modern books of cookery use units of measure that strike us as something else entirely: two walnut-sized gobs of butter; and stir with vigor for four Aves.  Cups and teaspoons, minutes and seconds were abstract or unknown, but everybody knew a walnut and the Hail Mary.  

Marking amounts and distances by prayer was practical and intelligible.  If someone’s house was just over a rosary’s walk away, anyone could understand how far.  It seems that more people than not prayed then as they walked or worked, not to replace the ticking clock but rather finding in prayer’s rhythms the measure of their days.

When I was a young priest, I read The Way of the Pilgrim, a Russian book from the nineteenth century that describes the journey of a soul seeking to fulfill the injunction of Saint Paul to pray without ceasing (1 Thes 5:17).  His recurring prayer is known as the Jesus Prayer:  Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.  This prayer was short enough that not only could I memorize it but also it came to my lips readily and often in the weeks after I finished the book.  I hardly managed to pray without ceasing, though, and after a while I very nearly ceased praying it. 

When it comes to prayer, there is so little time.  We all say this, and we all know this, though there is no more nor less time now than any “then.”  There simply is so much more that takes our time.  Our labor-saving devices have turned on us and become time-consuming devices that demand not physical effort but attention.  But we ourselves are the thieves:  how often when we find ourselves waiting even for a few moments do we reflexively open some window on a screen?   Once the devouring is done, there is little time left to give attention where it is most merited: friends, family, beauty – and God.

Our appetite for entertainment has called forth a deluge of demanding distraction, leaving us wondering whether silence even exists anymore.   These diversions are not innocent, but rather designed to take from us our attention and intention and bestow it on a paying customer who will turn it to his own purpose.  It is easy to forget that on the internet, you (we) are what is for sale, and our life and freedom are taken from us in digital units of time and attention.  

As often as we tell ourselves we should look less at our screens or spend less time on the infotainment that gnaws away our human freedom, we are helpless simply to do it less.  To reduce what we do of one thing, we need to do more of something else; we must increase our gracious works to be able to reduce profane pastimes.   

Meanwhile, I am no longer a young priest, and as any older person will freely explain, there is less time, not more.  So perhaps I am more careful with mine.  Watering the flowers and plants in pots around the rectory every day through the summer, I noticed that I no longer simply counted as the water flowed, but instead offered prayers of predictable lengths.  The geraniums take two acts of contrition; the begonias, three Sub tuum presidium.  Similarly, on my walks I know how far a rosary is, and how much farther another set of mysteries.  

This is not profound contemplation, nor is it earnest attentiveness to the will and mind of God.  But these simple, memorized prayers fill a need that we all have to open ourselves to the Holy, Mighty, and Immortal One.  Filling, marking, or at least elaborating our task-time with prayer accomplishes something that no tune nor podcast can, and that is, it redeems the time – literally buying it back from the demands of the world for the things of heaven and eternity.  They rescue us from the soul-sucking destruction of the screens and its repeating replay before our mind’s eye.

Once we have developed this habit, we can begin to tithe our time – offering the proper percentage to God of this most precious gift He Himself has given us.   Part of every day should be for Him; part of every hour.  Without looking at your watch or smartphone, you will know what time it is: time for prayer.

Monsignor Smith

Holy the Day

God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

When I was in high school in Birmingham, Alabama, I was aware that I was a Catholic, and that made me different from all but one other person in my class.  But the nuts and bolts of religious difference emerged only over time, as with mostly Baptist and Methodist friends I went about the daily business of being a teenager.  At my Baptist friend’s church, I encountered the ‘lock-in,’ passing the whole night in youth activities in the church complex.  I received a quizzical look when I made some reference to people who would be “showing up for early Mass.”  Alright, I was clueless about many things.

One thing that left me gaping with astonishment was when my Baptist friends all admitted that not only did they not go to church on Christmas, their churches did not even have services then.  They went to church on Sunday only, had poinsettias and other decorations in the church and sang Christmas songs all through December, then moved on after the day itself.  That this schedule was echoed at home would explain the desiccated and denuded Christmas trees dragged to the end of driveways by the evening of the 25^th.

The first act of God’s creation resulted in the first day.  And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:3-5).   Rooted in that same creation is the week of seven days, and the sabbath of divine rest.  The Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it, (Exodus 20:11b) which resulted in the obligation to keep it holy.

If that were where it all ended, it would be simple enough.  But God did not stop then, but rather he announced his intention to make holy another day: On that day, … his dwelling will be glorious (Isaiah11:10)  This refrain recurs during Advent.  Our lives unfold in days and weeks, and God’s action in our lives happens on specific days and makes those days holy.  

We keep Christmas because the nativity of the Lord changed the day’s significance in the lives of all mankind, just as on a more personal or local scale we remember the birthdays of people important to us.  Because God took flesh and dwelt among us, His life and work also unfolded in weeks and days, and we keep the significance of those days as our lives unfold by the same measure and the same marking.  

His saving passion, death, resurrection, and ascension all occurred on specific days with their own date and relation one to another that allows us to keep their measure every year.  This Paschal mystery brings about a new creation.  The sabbath of the seventh day was fulfilled when God rested again, this time in the tomb, then is supplanted by the glorious Lord’s Day, the eighth day, when Christ rose from that sleep of death and in His glorified flesh makes all things new.  This is the day of the week we now keep.

Some sects have not got this message and reject the practice of Christians who have kept the Lord’s Day from the very beginning, so too do other sects cling to the insistence of keeping only Sunday.  One way the inventors of protestantism attracted powerful adherents was by abolishing the many holy days in the Catholic calendar, which meant kings and lords could require their subjects to work on all those days that had been given over to resting and feasting.  When Ebenezer Scrooge denied Bob Cratchit a holiday at Christmas, he wasn’t demonstrating any particular character flaw besides being a staunch Calvinist, an affliction that only in the mid-nineteenth century began to lose its 300-year grip on England. 

July 4^th, November 11^th, December 7^th, and September 11^th all have lasting significance in our nation because of what occurred on those dates, and it is a sorry citizen who does not keep them.  Universal and perduring significance has been imputed to the days of Our Lord’s actions in our behalf, and it is we who are sorry if we fail to observe those days with right intention and solemnity.  

The sacred liturgy of the Church orders our worship in awareness of and gratitude for these divine actions that changed our lives on specific, identifiable days.  Our lives as children of the one God, living and true, unfold to the recurring resonances of these days.  Even as the season of Advent awakens our yearning to see God made visible, certain days within Advent remind us of the invisible work He does to make possible that manifestation. 

The feasts and fasts of the Church are rooted in creation and redemption, days that root us in this great and holy reality.  If we fail to cling to this gift that both accompanies and delivers our Catholic faith, we will remain clueless about many things.

Monsignor Smith