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

Not for nerds?

I am not making this up: “The Cool Church”.  I found it while out visiting my sister in Tucson.  It’s not far from her house, and apparently it is one of a chain – there is at least one other like it. 

After the heat wave last week, we can all appreciate the appeal of a cool church.  If this one in Arizona stays fresh and comfortable even in the crushing desert heat, they obviously have a more powerful air conditioner than I do, though in my defense, they also have a significantly smaller building.  

While it may be true that inside it is not hot, I doubt it is the intention of folks who named their church.  I have to wonder whether they want to identify their place as the popular church – that is, well liked, especially by all the people who are themselves popular, which is sort of what “cool” meant in high school. Maybe like some innovative gadget or other promising novelty, this church might make some folks marvel that it is “cool” because of some new invention.  They also might want to announce that they are not that bothered by or interested in the things that some other church is, since there is an aspect of the word that means certain easygoing unflappability, a carefree aspect. 

Doubtless, these folks named their church this because they wanted to make it attractive, make it sound popular, new, and probably even “laid back,” or some other word that means that it makes no demands. Aside from the promise of refreshment, I must confess that few of its characteristics have anything to do with the real Church.

What is attractive about the genuine Church, what she teaches and what she does, is attractive because it is true, not vice versa.  In fact, sometimes the truth is not readily appealing, and not popular at all.  The Church is popular in the sense that is of and for people, but her foundation and design are from God; she is a divine institution.  Popularity in the sense of being well liked is hardly a criterion, since from her very beginning Christ’s Church has been made up of unpopular people, the marginal and excluded, the poor, sick, or ugly.

And while the Church incorporates and embraces everything that is truly human, and that includes many innovations over the centuries, the divine element of her nature is eternal and unchanging.  Every human life has a fresh encounter with revelation in Christ Jesus, which is called the Good News because the newness of the experience, not anything recent or invented about the message.  Everything that is essential about salvation through Jesus has been consistently present in the Church for two thousand years now, even though that hardly makes it old news.

‘Laid back’ is a term I have never found any evidence in the Gospels for applying to Jesus or His followers. Jesus was most often calm, indeed, but He was always simultaneously intense.  He had a deep and abiding concern over the life of every person He encountered, and relentlessly set His face toward Jerusalem to save us from our own sin and its consequences.  He sacrificed his own life – not just his own ease, but His life!  How is that “laid back?”  And who can forget the whip of cords?

So, while you know I am very proud of our HVAC in the church and relieved that it held up during the high temperatures of last week, you won’t hear me trying to convince anyone that the church is “cool.”  Nothing finds a place here at Saint Bernadette because of its popular appeal, or because it is new and exciting. Nonetheless, you and I get pretty excited about it, excited enough to take its demands seriously. 

No, the faith of the Church is hard to consider cool.  But whatever you find here in our outpost of the Church, you can be certain that I am not making it up.

Monsignor Smith

Over-under

None for me this time, thank you.

Well now THAT was fun; a festive weekend for the national holiday.   I confess that I underachieved when it comes to most of the big public events.  I did, however, fulfill all righteousness by eating hot dogs and going to a baseball game, riding in a Chevrolet no less.  Hamburgers, ice cream, corn on the cob, and local lager also were on the menu.  Don’t even ask about pie; it was entirely too hot to bake anything and besides, the apples will not be in for months.  The menu was not the only thing that ran the gamut: the weather went from withering heat to gusting downpour and eventually yielded to a cool misty Monday morning-after.    

On the Fourth of July itself, the festive Mass for the nation that we added drew a crowd that was not large, but everyone was glad to be there, offering prayers of gratitude and intercession for our country, leaders, and fellow citizens.  I get the impression a lot of people were away for the weekend; not only were all our Masses underpopulated, but even the Beltway looked like our pews at 8:59 on any given Sunday morning.  Oddly, even the high temperatures did not cause lines to form for the cool, dark confessionals.

I underachieved in some categories for a simple reason: it was a weekend.  A friend was incredulous after the ballgame Friday evening when I told him that cookouts and fireworks were not on the schedule.  My other friend at that table, also a parish priest, sided firmly with me.  Mass and confessions and an extra Mass and more confessions then another Mass…that’s how weekends are for us.  Next time the Fourth falls on a Thursday, then we can relax and enjoy.   

I did make sure Father Tran got the benefit of his Washington sojourn; he viewed the midnight fireworks from a well-placed rooftop in the company of his classmates.  But he also did his part around here; he took the morning Mass on the Fourth and the latest Mass on the fifth to make it work.  When he returns to east Texas he will know where he was in summer school.

Those of you who have not fled the DMV will have noticed that Father Swink is back in the house and on the schedule.  His recovery is continuing according to schedule, but that schedule does not yet indicate “all better,” much less “cavorting like a teenager.”  We are trying to keep his yoke easy and his burden light, so to speak, to make sure that this stage of his convalescence bears good fruit in future health and ability. 

Some of you even got to see Father Wiktor as he spent a few days here between driving back from his diocesan home in Mississippi and flying for a long visit and some academic research in his natal home in Poland.  He will be back here in time for fall term.  

Father Wiktor and I had a quiet dinner together Saturday evening before turning in early to be ready for the work that Sunday morning brings.  I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of distant fireworks, clearly a display for the ages.  I felt a twinge of regret for underachieving in that regard and missing a good party.  I did not awaken, though, in the wee hours when Father Tran came home after his patriotic adventure, and I was well rested and ready to leap into the saddle for confessions, and Mass, and baptisms, which is the festivity where I do my best to avoid any underachieving.

Monsignor Smith

Let it fly

For my seminary classmates, 1994 was the year that we did not set foot in the United States, because those were the rules.  As a result, it was the year that the Fourth of July did not happen.  Well, you know the date came and went, but wherever I was just then – Spain?  France maybe?  -- I was having a good time in a great place, but it was not the same.  On my second assignment to Rome, over four years I became accustomed to being in somebody else’s country for our national day.  It did not have the same sting as that first time in 1994. 

I have had epic Fourths of July.  When young, foolish, and living within walking distance of the National Mall, I enjoyed the concert and fireworks on the capitol lawn.  I have mingled at an elegant party of Important People on a balcony a mere block from the White House.  At my bachelor apartment, I pulled together my local friends with extended family visiting town for a fifth of July wedding in a great convivium that adjourned to the roof in time to see in the distance the fireworks of the Mall.  

The best ever was the Bicentennial in 1976.   The Tall Ships.   The Freedom Train.  The neighborhood parade with bicycles decorated by all the kids.  The Flags of the Revolution project for my whole sixth-grade class.  I got the “Bicentennial Camper” rocker for my Camp Sequoyah patch on my first-ever summer camp with Troop 21.  The Bicentennial-edition everything, even, I think, cars.  

The coming into existence of the United States of America is a never-before-in-human history event, and statistically as well as sociologically likely to be a never-ever-again.  Not being omniscient but also not being ignorant of history and life experiences very different from my own, I am firmly convinced that this existence is a good thing on a scale and at a level of impact unmatched by any other human undertaking.  (Before you extend that “just a minute here” finger at me, let me observe, graciously, that the Church is a divine institution.)  Yet I seek no controversy here; I am willing to let that assertion go by the by, undefended.

I will content myself to assert that the existence of the USA is a very good thing for me, personally, and for mine, however you want to parse that possessive.  This is my country, and this is our country.  It is our home, our patria – our fatherland.  As a matter of piety we owe our country love and devotion.  As a matter of honesty we have so much, even everything for which we must give gratitude.  My heart swells at the National Anthem, to which we indeed owe an obligation of respect, and therefore stand and salute.  Patriotism is the debt we cannot pay down for it enriches us far more than it costs.

Look, I am a Boy Scout.  In fact, I am that Boy Scout who would wear his uniform to our high school’s football games each Friday night to raise the flag at the beginning, and then lower it respectfully afterward.  Twenty-five years later, it seemed natural to take responsibility for the flag that flew in front of my seminary in Baltimore for my solitary year there.  I don’t care who calls me a nerd, it is important.  

One of the Catholic commentators I most greatly admire and enjoy solemnly intoned that, as America turns 250, we could all use some humility, austerity, and personal repentance along with the bombast and celebration.  I cry Foul! Wrong you are sir!  This is precisely what we must avoid.  

The toast at a wedding is not the time to make recriminations.  A rehearsal of grudges has no place at a birthday party.  And a eulogy is so called because one speaks well of the deceased – de mortuis nihil nisi bonum.  This is more than manners; this is the fabric that binds families and nations.   

Ours is not a Catholic nation, but Catholics have thrived here beyond the dreams of their forebears and continue to contribute indispensably to the greatness of our country.   From her storehouse of wisdom, our Holy Mother the Church can contribute a more pointed directive, a more foundational principle that can calm the turbulence and reduce friction in these days when everybody has an opinion and some of them are negative.  Remember, brethren, it is forbidden to fast on a feast.  

I may just join Father Swink in a beer this week – a domestic one at that.  Our cuisine will not be haute, but spirits will be high as we mark this great anniversary and celebrate our truly great nation.  To all my fellow citizens who find themselves abroad on this day, I send a greeting and a prayer; may you come home when you will, rejoicing.  To the rest who are somewhere, anywhere in this enormous land, I shout with Saint Peter on Mount Tabor: ‘Tis good, Lord, to be here!  God bless America, and deliver us from evil.

Monsignor Smith

 

 

Escape hatch

Big rivers have to come from somewhere;
even the mighty Potomac starts small.
It may be Almost Heaven,
but it isn't Paradise.

Known as the Garden of Eden, or even Paradise, the original habitation of Man in the order of God’s creation was perfect in every way.  No pests, no predators, no problems.  No shortages nor sadnesses.  What could possibly go wrong?   

Since the Fall and that whole by-the-sweat-of-your brow-shall you-live consequence, Paradise has been not only a happy memory but also a goal: to restore or re-achieve what every human descendent of that first couple, Adam and Eve, somehow remembers well enough to desire.  

When our forebears set forth upon this continent a great new undertaking, they had reason to recall Paradise, and to imagine its recovery.   The broad and fertile land was not pest- nor predator-free by any means, but it was rich in opportunity for the sweat of one’s brow to achieve the requirements for life.  

Having recently and for the umpteenth time crossed the Millard E. Tydings Bridge over the Susquehanna River and marveled anew at how big is this river that most people would not name if asked for five or even ten big rivers in our nation, I wonder at the courage that it took to undertake to eke out a subsistence from this hugeness, and the vision that resolved to order and erect a society that encompassed it.

Two hundred and fifty years have passed since a small and representative group took responsibility for that enormous project onto their own shoulders. One might think this necessarily another act of hubris, of men taking to themselves what is forbidden to mortals.  But they were all familiar with both that ancient Fall and the Redemption that is its remedy, and wary of grabbing the fatal fruit.  In their modesty, they left for every inhabitant of this nation what Adam and Eve enjoyed in their Garden days: respect for the intellect and will, and the freedom to act upon these in pursuit of what is good.  So began the experiment in ordered liberty that has so benefitted us, and the world.

While daily surrounded by the benefits and blessings that have accrued because of their audacious action, many manage to preoccupy themselves and one another with the opposite, the past failures and the perduring problems.  These have not only survived in our republic, it is asserted, but indeed have grown to define and degrade the entire undertaking.  

How sad, and how wrong.  Paradise long since lost, any pest- and predator-free place would also be devoid of human freedom, and in fact of human beings.  People are not problems, but we do have a knack for causing them by misusing our freedom.  To categorize any one human life as a problem is the temptation that deprives us of what we have in common with that person and our Divine Creator. 

Rebuilding Paradise and re-achieving problem-free living invariably leads to the elimination of more and more actual people.  Shortages and sadnesses are endemic to our human condition.  They can either drive us apart or bind us more closely one to another.  In this nation the burden of responding to them and remedying them falls to us, the people.  The apple still hangs tantalizingly on the branch, and there will always be a voice in every ear suggesting you’ve been robbed and I can help you.  All will fall for it some of the time, and some will fall for it all the time.  Social upheaval ensues.

Perfection, while it lasted, included freedom.  Deprived of perfection, we still crave and protect freedom.  Anything can go wrong, but we are free to respond and rebuild.   Paradise this is not and never will be.  We know our limitations, yet our aspirations are limited only by our willingness to sweat our brows.  We have a republic, if we can keep it.  

Monsignor Smith

Thank you Father Martin!

 

Fun while it lasted.

The gifts bestowed by someone who came before, we are obliged to protect and preserve.   That should not be a controversial assertion, but in our era of innovation novelty often prevails over preservation.  

In the Church, what has been handed down is the most precious of our possessions.  The Faith and the Sacraments, the Church herself; all are the very opposite of innovation and novelty.  Their source and their value are eternal!  This rubs off in more practical affairs in the life of the Church, such as our own rectory where everything old and good is preserved and protected until it can fulfill its role no longer.  Things can get a little shabby in the latter days.  The deck on the back of the rectory is a fine example of this. 

Even though the deck juts out over the parking lot and gets the direct sun in the summertime, it has been a popular place for residents both short- and long-term.  The acquisition at the encouragement of Fr. DeRosa about 2010 of a decent table and chairs, followed by a new retractable awning, made it much more inviting and useful.  We put the grills out there, which means I cook out there.   

Peggy and Lewis Hicks, while they were the floral elves of the rectory surrounds, introduced the bamboo screening that provided the privacy we need to be on the deck and not on display.   The also showed what some flowers and plants can do to spruce up the otherwise bare space, which lesson I took to heart.  The flowers bloom outside the window next to my desk, as well as the kitchen window, and boost morale.  

The staff likes to have lunch out there when I am away; it has nothing to do with being unable to hear to doorbell or the phone, they assure me.  Father Jason Williams of Cincinnati, a student here in the summers of 2019 and 2021, spent about six hours a day out there doing schoolwork.  More recently, Fr. Wiktor and Fr. Tran both enjoy it as a “second desk” for their academic pursuits.  Rectory dinners become more convivial and last long into the cooling evening once we take the trouble to set the table out there.    It has become a major part of our rectory life.

Margaret Gamache, who has been a parishioner here for decades and was one of the first lay teachers in our school, informed me at a recent Finance Council meeting that our deck was installed under Father Bernard Martin, the Third Pastor of Saint Bernadette.  She offered no precise date, but did assert that he enjoyed it, which means he had time to use it.  Fr. Martin was named Pastor in 1987, retired in poor health in 1997, and died mere weeks later.  A working estimate for when the deck was built would be 1991, plus or minus a few years.    

That mean our deck lasted 35 years!  This explains why it was getting a bit rickety.   Anthony Dao, our maintenance factotum, had replaced components as needed over recent years.   The stairs up from the carport were alarmingly unstable.  It was time. 

You will notice the replacement deck going up over coming days, because by the time you read this the old one will be gone.  The big change will be the materials; we will be using modern synthetics for the decking and lattice screens.  This means it will last even longer than if it were wood.  

There is no reason not to plan for a lengthy lifespan for the deck on the rectory.  The church tends to keep what is good for as long as possible, for the good of all who come after us.  

Speaking of the good that we have received, our nation is marking a milestone anniversary this year on Independence Day, which falls on a Saturday.  Even though it is the usually the quietest time of the year hereabouts, I have decided we need to do something to acknowledge this great gift of God and our forebears.  There will be a celebratory Mass on Saturday, July fourth, at 11:00, to render thanks for what we have received and prayers for help to be good and generous stewards.  What we receive and treasure, we are more likely to maintain and keep, so help us God.  Because all the best that we have was given us by the ones who came before us.

Monsignor Smith