Clear and blue

Out of the clear blue sky.  It’s an expression that means without warning or preliminary indication, something happens that there is no way to anticipate or expect.   

It was a beautiful morning just past eight o’clock when I arrived at my post in the Archbishop’s office.  The volunteer drew my attention to a strange report from New York City and we looked to the television.  There was the shining city with its two towers, one of them inexplicably billowing black smoke from a gaping hole in its side.  Then while I watched a passenger jetliner crossed the screen and punctured the other tower.  Debris flew and more smoke rose against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. 

I crossed the hall to alert the Archbishop, a New Yorker by birth and constitution.  His attention fixed on the events now filling every screen, he was pained and paralyzed for the only time in our long acquaintance.   After the first tower fell, I suggested he take the noon Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine, one of the very few of my suggestions he ever adopted.  

I do not remember when we learned of the attack on the Pentagon, or the plane downed in Pennsylvania.  By the time we all went together to the Basilica we knew that a single horrible attack had landed four devastating blows, and there was no reason to think there might not be more.  

You know how I am about anniversaries, so you will not be surprised that I have had my eye on the approach of this one.  Last week I had a long conversation with the priest friend who was with me and the Archbishop throughout that day, recalling as well our trip together two weeks before to that same city for a baptism and a wedding in the Archbishop’s family.  He introduced us to people and places important in his life, including some that would not survive the attack.   This week I had dinner with former parishioners, still friends, one of whom had been in the Pentagon when the plane hit.  Talking about what we recall of that day and what we did, our understanding at the time and what we know now, how we felt then and what feelings we nurture still, helped prepare me to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary fully and well. 

Two subjective experiences remain clear from that day of objective horrors.   The first is that as the Archbishop read us the homily he had prepared, every fiber of my being wanted to object, but I had already spent my single shot of usefulness in giving advice.  One word still sticks in my craw even these years later: he called what had happened a tragedy.  That is misleading, even wrong.  It was an attack.  It was a crime. It was in every sense literal and actual an atrocity.  Its consequences would indeed be tragic, and they are still playing out today.  It was however no tragedy, but rather a freely chosen evil act.

The other experience I recall with full clarity is that while we went about the rest of that upended day, I made calls to let family know I was okay, and to check on the parish and some friends.  While the Archbishop donated blood at Providence Hospital, I waited pacing outside the doors in front of television crews desperate for something to transmit.  I realized with clarity that somewhere else far away, in many places in fact, there was rejoicing at the same scenes that brought us horror.  Even before I saw the video confirmation, I mentally pictured the dancing in the streets that in fact was juxtaposed with our cities’ boulevards and ballparks, schoolyards and streets filled with demonstrations of grief.  

These are only a few of the concrete recollections that accompany me whenever something calls to my mind the murderous terror attacks of September 11, 2001.  As the quarter-century marker arrives, I bring all this to mind to discover what good God and man have brought from that day of evil, and what other changes for good or ill I can identify.

The cheerful optimism that dominated our vision and expectations of human behavior twenty-five years ago has been schooled by evidence and events sufficient to make us wary of certain types of promises and appreciative of genuine differences among people and cultures.  More has changed than simply airport protocols.  We share not only the skies but also our cities and our streets with people whose categories for good and evil, human and inhuman are not only different from but opposed to ours.  Whatever actions and events erupt from the friction that follows may well shock and dismay us, but it will not come from Out of the clear blue sky.  

Monsignor Smith

Did we know what we had

Appalachian beauty

Way back on Independence Day, in my homily I emphasized two aspects of our republic that were manifestations of the truth revealed in Christian doctrine; one of them was the immeasurable value and impact of a single human life.  The lofty example that day was none other than George Washington, the sine qua non of the American experiment, the unique and indispensable man. 

That life is a historical reality I have long contemplated and admired, studied and discussed.  Washington’s broad shoulders bear such scrutiny and his profile fits well into that frame.  Suddenly this week I was caught off guard by a very different profile whose very familiarity disguised its significance, but nonetheless another demonstration of the marvel of incarnation.

After a few days of searching, I cannot find memory of a day or time when I did not know who Dolly Parton was.  Her public life coincided almost exactly with my entire life up to this week when her death startled me and many with me.  I am not quite sure how she crept into my consciousness; maybe radio playlists ranged more broadly in those days. 

We weren’t country music people, my family or my friends, but we were in the footprint, and Hee Haw was near-weekly viewing.  As a kid I knew Porter Wagoner, whose program first brought her national attention, but whose trajectory tended quickly downward as her star broke away and took off.  Variety shows were a television staple then, as well, and the variety of entertainers featured was broad.  Everything distinctive about her fixed her image in the minds of even people who didn’t pay much attention to her genre of music, often as a humorous character.  Even among schoolkids, she was famous, she was funny, she livened up the punchline for any joke.   Then she started doing movies, where she wasn’t only funny – she was good.  

Only much more recently, having known so long who she was, did I find out what she was.  A life-long faithful wife (sixty years) of a reticent man.  An entrepreneur of near boundless energy and skill, turning Dollywood from a regional joke into a destination and example.  Not only a conduit but an engine of development and enrichment for the people of her impoverished mountain home.  She didn’t just make them proud, as was her stated goal; she made their lives better, too.  And she did things for people; not only her people, but more people than we can identify or count.  In everything, in the least likely place imaginable, a life of celebrity, she was a person of extraordinary generosity and grace.

Maybe fifteen years ago I heard Jolene playing and was startled by what an awesome song it was, and how deeply printed it was on my memory from four decades previously.  Not merely a singer, but also an authentic and relentlessly productive songwriter, throughout her long career she gave us so much that was not merely admirable and enjoyable as music and entertainment, but also experiences that were recognizable and true.  All of them drew us in to what they expressed without one nasty, vengeful, threatening, or even harsh word or sentiment.  More extraordinary generosity and grace; this comes into focus only after the fact.  

Obituaries mention her impoverished childhood, her large family and their Pentecostal church providing the foundation for her musical development.   Not in anything I heard her say was she ever explicitly evangelical, and yet.  Her disposition and her every action were clearly rooted in a familiarity with Christ,  and a knowledge of His life, and from that an understanding of her own.  There along with the rhinestones and big hair and slightly bawdy humor in which she mainly made fun of herself, she revealed a deep and developed conviction of what her life was for, and how precious to her was likewise your life, mine, and ours.  

This reality, recognized or not, is the root of the sentiment now sweeping the nation: thank God for Dolly Parton.  Her life and its impact are yet another example of universal and incarnate truth, as it is to be found only in America.

Monsignor Smith

All the light you can see without

Awesome shot of last week's solar eclipse
from Mallorca, Spain, by my brother-in-law Urs Schoop.  
Used without permission.

Just because the lights are off does not mean it is dark. 

We have just traversed the stretch of weeks on either side of the solstice that offers the most marvelous skies and morning light already at half past five when I walk over to the church for early Mass.  Inside still it is dimmer, but the illumination is underway and the stained-glass glows, the colors of the windows entering the dance with the colors of the sky as the gentle and golden light fills the contours and corners of the holy place from every direction and none over the next spectacular half-hour.

The routine of the others who come to the church first thing is to find and flick the switch that ignites a bulb or three, the blaze of which paradoxically casts the church back into harsh shadows and darkness.  I groan.

Just as some people swear they cannot hear unless the voice be amplified through a loudspeaker, there will always be people who are convinced it is dark unless the electric lights, and all of them, are switched on.  In so doing, they often demand their own disadvantage.

When I was a Boy Scout, we once had a night-hiking exercise in which we found our way along unfamiliar paths by designated markers as we went.  It did not take long for my group to discover that our flashlights were not helpful; instead, they blinded us to everything except what was in the bright small disc of their beams.  Practicing ‘light discipline’ and keeping all the lights in the group switched off allowed us to see revealed the sky itself with moon and stars, and the gentle illumination they provided to the piney woods through which we picked our way.  Once eyes grew accustomed to the light present in the darkness, there were both greater awareness and fewer surprises as we made our way toward the goal.    

As it has long seemed obvious to me that with less amplification, there is more that I can hear, so it is that up to a certain point with less artificial light there is far more to see.  How could light-discipline be applied fruitfully to our days to enhance our sight in other ways as well, to help us see what would otherwise go unnoticed, and perceive what under normal circumstances is invisible?  If stilling the noise around us is the first step to hearing the voice of God, what artificial light sources must we switch off to see what He is showing us?    

The adage about lighting a single candle still applies when there is complete darkness.  Just this week as the approaching equinox began to exert its restrictions on our daylight, holding back the sun more and more each morning, I have reluctantly resorted to switching on the bare minimum of lights myself when I open the church, for the sky stays mute and unyielding in its inked solidity.  I regret this violence, but the church would otherwise be too dark, and while that is something I can othertimes enjoy, it is impractical for the folks with work to be done and prayers to be said before the morning sacrifice is offered.  Only just before go-time at 6:30, through the sacristy windows that give out to the field, the rising sun sets fire to the treeline along Saint Lawrence, no small spectacle itself.   That, too, comes noticeably later each morning.  The slope of day’s decline grows steeper as the season’s change comes nearer.  

As summer dwindles and its sweetness yields to autumn and its decay, night claims more and more from our days.  Remember, though, before you reach for the switch earlier and earlier each evening: just because the lights are off does not mean it is dark. 

Monsignor Smith

So much foam

 

Can you imagine what she would say?

They didn’t talk like that back then.

It is one of the aspects of any production that can turn me away most quickly: anachronistic dialogue.  That is, one of the characters says something that a person would not have said at the time and place being depicted.  Whether a movie or other video production, stage play, or book, if one of the characters speaks in a way that is not consistent with the setting of the drama, for me, the whole thing collapses.

Ironically, it is our own time that stands out in the arc of history as the anomaly.  There are many things that characterize speech both public and private in our time that would never have occurred at any other time in recorded history. 

Neither during the Civil War nor the Revolution, nor in medieval times nor in Roman times, would anybody have spoken about his own feelings at all, much less as much as our modern depictions would lead one to believe. The constant gushing about affections and disaffections, hopes and dreads, and disappointments real and imagined, not to mention the endless romantic soliloquys that pass for plot drivers and denouements, simply would never have been uttered in any but our own self-obsessed time.  They say such things make for good cinema, but even that I question heartily.

Almost every other society that has managed to survive for any time on the face of the earth has valued some degree of form and formality in its discourse.   We have projected our insistence on constant and unrelenting casual familiarity onto situations and civilizations that would have found such a thing repellant.

And when, I have to ask, did everybody become such a potty-mouth?   Soldiers in the trenches didn’t use language so vile as one customarily hears from four twenty-somethings sitting together at a baseball game.  To project such shameful behavior onto other people in other times only amplifies the manifest disrespect.

Almost thirty years ago, well into the era of films that depicted everyone at all times as if they were simply twentieth-century southern Californians in different period costumes, there was a movie that was different.  I saw it because it was about the Civil War era, not because it had Spider-man (Tobey Maguire) in it.  Ride with the Devil depicted life during that time of conflict and irreconcilable differences that were political as well as personal, but in western Missouri far from the battle fronts and capitols.  It was shocking that all the characters, even the ones depicted as young adults, spoke like denizens of the nineteenth century, which made their actions more intelligible because they clearly thought like denizens of the nineteenth century.  It was shocking and refreshing all at once.

Speech not only reflects and transmits thought, but also makes thought possible.  We consider our age enlightened and point to astonishing technology as proof, but the speech one hears most often suggests that our concepts and considerations and our ability to apply them have deteriorated, because our language certainly has.  

Dialogue that is post-modern in form and content renders all the characters engaged in it as puerile, selfish, and ignorant.  This may be intended as a judgment on our forebears’ shortcomings, but in effect it delivers a devastating assessment of our own.  They didn’t talk like we do back then.

Monsignor Smith

Up to snuff

Too far gone?

What’s new?  people used to ask before the more personal and probing How are you? became the norm.  The response used to be the news, before ‘the news’ became something else entirely, less informative and anything but new.

Many summers past I have sung the praises of August for its languor and its leisure.  Still I rejoice in this most wonderful month of the year, but languor is in short supply.  It seems that new stuff is the order and object of the days.  

In the school, LED lighting takes the place of fluorescent tubes that most of us associate with classrooms.  It will be a great improvement that none of the kids will notice, being preoccupied with seeing and learning.  There is new paint too, though we did most of that last year; and flooring, startling because I thought we already did that.   Maybe sixteen years of wear makes carpeting old?

If that be then case then twenty years made the carpet in the rectory offices beyond old and almost disgusting, or so the staff insisted.  So new carpet has arrived here as well, under bookshelves, desks, and file cabinets no less, all heavy and hard to move.  Some new paint is coming too.  Once the smell fades the change will be hard to spot, save that things will no longer look old.

You all saw the new deck, which is both great improvement and no big change.  The improvement is that it will not collapse under us as we come and go or linger round the table; the sameness is everything else – same size and shape, same features (no elevator, fountain, or self-cleaning function), save the improvement that the materials will last much longer before this new deck becomes old enough to require replacement.

Things fall apart, but first they get old.  First repair, then replacement are the requirements of having the care of things.   Think for a moment about your kitchen appliances, which seem to age out much faster now than twenty-five years ago.  How exciting can a new dishwasher or refrigerator be, except that it actually fulfill its function where its predecessor ceased to do so?   Once the memory of the tattered and decrepit past has faded, the new and functional elicits no more joy than yet another hot day in August.  Where is the fun and excitement of newness in all this? 

Stairs that do not make you fear disaster, lights that do not hum and flicker attract no wonder or awe nor move hearts to gratitude, but rather by the absence of grave shortcomings elicit a contentment that all is as it should be.  The absence of applause and excitement is not disappointing in these circumstances.  Everything renewed is simply doing what it is supposed to do, being what it is supposed to be.  

And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." (Revelation 21: 5)  The God who did so marvelously create us did still more marvelously REcreate us, through Christ our Lord.  That adds no features, nor electronics, nor Bluetooth; no fresh new color or radical redesign.  Simply by the mercy of God, we are made not different creatures, but fully and perfectly ourselves, doing what we are supposed to do, being what we are supposed to be.  

August this year is filled with the necessary tasks to achieve the near-invisible improvement of refreshment and restoration.  Some few will notice, but fewer still will want to be informed when, resuming our routines at the end of summer, they make the inquiry, What’s new?

Monsignor Smith

Handwriting

Not a screen in sight.
This parlor cries out that it was made for writing notes.  
Who am I to ignore that?

This weekly letter lacks a manuscript made with my hands that involves ink and paper and handwriting purposely put together to reveal thoughts become a new thing.  I confess I type on a keyboard connected only by ether to a screen on which said thoughts take shape in light and dark but without substance.  This accomplishes a great deal in efficiency and legibility but leaves tangibility and durability wanting.  Bright shiny and ephemeral is rather less that I would hope to have to offer you, but there it is.  

You are good to bear with this underachievement, having been conditioned to it by almost all the communications offered to participants in modern life.  Every institution that sends me bills is constantly banging away at me to “go paperless” if I have not been forced already to submit to that disappointing regime by the terms of our original contract.  I assume your lot is the same.  

Being freshly returned from a trip abroad, I have taken advantage of the speed and convenience of direct digital communications to share information and images, often as quickly as I experienced them myself.  Each day I conveyed a passel of pictures and explanatory notes of What I Did TODAY For My Summer Vacation with a small group of volunteers who asked for such harassment.  The digital version of ooohs and aahs followed quickly by return mail, that is, text message.  

However satisfying this semblance of direct connection, I wanted more and better, so I sent three hand-written cards by post.   They required five, seven, and ten days, respectively, to arrive in the hands of their intended recipients, which seems an awfully long time compared to the agonizing seconds we wait for a return text message, but once the time had elapsed, these people actually held something in their hands that had come from mine.  

Some years ago, my younger sister took up once again the lost practice of sending postcards from her travels, most often to our parents but also occasionally to others of us whom she likes.  Her handwriting (printing actually) is charming and legible, and she has a knack for a cheery and informative message in a line or two.  How much more engaging it is to find that on the refrigerator door and examine it than to look at phone or screen held out to see.  Not a facsimile but a genuine thing to hold and turn.

At various and unexpected times over the past decade mom or dad handed me a stack of cards that I myself had sent them, a good example being the ones I wrote near daily during my first ever trip abroad, the eight weeks’ adventure that was my spring semester in Germany junior year - that would be 1985 for you history buffs.  Postcards of cathedrals, castles, and train museums with a line or two about fellow students, host families, and culinary adventures were almost all my parents had to go by to guess that I was alive and thriving.  It seems so little compared to the flood of conversation for today’s connected generation, but forty years later they endure to provide me with evidence and experiences I had long ago laid aside.  Try THAT with a text chain!

Because of these recent reminders of the superiority of material messaging, I am trying to make more of these missives, however brief, to draw together physical and personal realties for my far-flung friends and family who are like me awash in electronic stimulation and information.  Here is a thing for you, it says; I made it.

Quickly and quietly this letter has coalesced wysiwyg before me, and with a flick and a wish it will go to Carol at the reception desk, who will send it along with similar speed but no more weight to the publishers of the bulletin, who will then make it appear on paper. Hundreds of copies will then be boxed and delivered (UPS) to our doorstep, and artfully arranged by the doors of the church for all and sundry to take as they arrive and leave for Mass.  It will be posted online as well, ethereal and ephemeral but accessible, including on the “blog” that is my Pastor’s Corner of the parish web site, where it will be joined by a photograph of some or little pertinence and be viewed by people near and far some of whom I am convinced are what they call “bots.”   But there are regular bulletin readers who prefer the paper to have and to hold.  I only wish I could offer a manuscript.

Monsignor Smith

Preoccupation with temperature

 

Better than a cartoon

It’s hotter than hell out there!

Well actually no, it is not.  Then again, maybe it is.  Heat?  Flames?  I am not sure.  Some suggest an abiding, inescapable cold.  But hell will be infinitely worse, whether in temperature or some other form of misery.  It is an apt comparison, nonetheless.  

Funny, isn’t it, how many people get scandalized at the use of the H–E-double–hockey-sticks word?  The convention against saying “hell” casually, in polite company or in in front of children, is reasonable, but only in a comparable sense to our obligation not to swear or take the Lord’s name in vain.  

Similarly, we must not invoke damnation in vain – that is, casually, for dramatic effect, or as an oath.  But damnation not only is a very real possibility, but something which I have set my life to helping people avoid, and it would be a fatal hindrance if I were to fail to mention it in the most effective language possible.  So why do folks expect such vocabulary never to pass the tender lips of a priest, as if it would be in everyone’s interests to maintain everyone’s comfort?

Unfortunately, it is precisely to our own comfort that our interests are too often turned; mine are, anyway.  Yet even I bridle at the common expectation that I refrain from mentioning hell.  So while I don’t pepper my speech much less my homilies with hell and damn, it is vital that I draw your attention to their very real possibility for all of us.  

The cartoonist’s image of hell, with its flames, pitchforks, and always-descending escalators, may be reasonably dismissed by modern, educated folk.  But it would be foolish and dangerous to dismiss the reality of an unending, inescapable pain and grief that those images attempt to present.  My favorite reflection on hell is The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis.  This slender novel is an absolute delight (not what one might expect) and I devoured it in two hours.  Read it; it will rock your world.  More to the point, it will focus your attention outside of your world and my world, this world, and onto the real questions of how you will be spending eternity.  Though in honesty, I must admit that the great cartoonist Gary Larson had some pretty good insights, too.

Damn is even less useful a verb most of the time, since if God is its subject, it is too easy to escape with the logic that “a loving God would not do that to me for (insert offense here).”  Of course He wouldn’t do that to you!  He would save you by the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of His Son.  But you and I can do it to ourselves, or more accurately, can demand it for ourselves.  Our every decision and every action can be either a liberating step toward salvation revealed in Christ, or it can be a damning step toward, well, hell.  

We have constructed an air-conditioned cocoon for ourselves that we allow to lull us into thinking that we have mastered not only nature, but also, even more implausibly, our own eternal course.  Hurricanes, tornadoes, and the shortcomings of Pepco regularly shatter our Potemkin comfort.  Even that is temporary, and we easily return to our complacency.  How dare we?

Meanwhile, it is blistering, withering, suffocating, and altogether unbearable outside, but most decidedly not hotter than hell.  God is giving us this day, and this moment in it, as an opportunity to repent and be delivered from all that misery by His gracious mercy!

All of a sudden, it’s not so bad outside.

Monsignor Smith