History and heroics

             Speaking of memories, this week snowmageddon has come to mind and come up in conversation.  That winter of 2009-2010 brought a series of major storms starting before Christmas and stretching into February that left all of us reeling and more than a little beat up.  One evocative similarity is how, beginning with Fourth Advent, they all came on weekends except for the final storm, which started on the Feast of the Presentation, a Tuesday that year.  It is funny the things you remember.

In a rare example of forecast accuracy, last weekend’s storm came as promised and on schedule.  This prompted an enormous effort to get to Mass while it was still possible, and the turnout we had here Saturday evening was huge, almost like Christmas.  After the promised frozen fun began to fall overnight, morning Mass attendance was down too.  The 7:30 Mass had THREE hardy souls in the pews.   Then music director John Henderson and several servers made it through the perils, and the eighteen people who over-achieved to reach the 9:00 Mass enjoyed a full-bore Sunday experience.  That number in the pews doubled at the 11:00, when the next batch of undeterred servers even provided incense and John was joined by several choristers.   I do not know about those other folks, but the delight of offering a worthy sacrifice to the Lord on His day was as invigorating as the fresh air outside.  I was gratified by the effort by so many people put into sanctifying Sunday. 

That morning Mass experience left me so revved up I trekked out across the tundra and the Beltway to join some parishioners who hunkered by the fire and rejoiced in a hearty lunch together.  It had been several years since I had walked through nearly knee-deep snow.  It had only been since Corpus Christi in June since I walked in the middle of the street down Colesville Road, which was a better option than the sidewalk.

Best of all was Tuesday when finally, the plows reached Swink Manor where Father Swink had been convalescing and he was able to achieve exit velocity to return home to the Holy House of Soubirous.  He found a warm welcome from me and Fr. Wiktor, the latter having been doing yeoman’s work to fill his shoes on the Mass and confession schedule and being my sole interlocutor at the dinner table especially during these days of frozen isolation.  

I have yet to hear a peep of complaint about schools remaining closed, though my sample does skew toward my altar servers who seem to be enjoying their frozen freedom with gusto.  How long this will last, I cannot guess, and restlessness among the parents to see their charges returned to the rigors of routine is helpless in the face of the governing bureaucratic liability logic that makes the unquestionable, unreviewable decisions about such matters.  Maybe this will spur an uptick in private prayer in an appeal to a higher power. 

            Now we are confronted with the possibility of another winter wonder crashing our party this coming weekend.  I must admit, I would rather move on to the next thing, and if that cannot be spring yet, then maybe we could just try clear and cold.   But if the wet airmass from the Gulf collides with this arctic air over our heads and homes, clearly we will have more of the same.   It may not merit the -pocalypse or -mageddon suffixes, but it is turning into a winter to remember.

Monsignor Smith

Somewhere it is written

           

Letters and numbers disintegrate

                 The forgetting impulse that is both human and universal is made policy and practice in the memory hole described in Orwell’s 1984 and devised and deployed in our own time.  All of us, all men require some evidence, some touchstone to hold back the floods of forgetting that arise in the course of time and adversity.   To obscure or more effective yet to eliminate the evidence is to allow the forgetting to follow its course unhindered, washing away with it all that distinguishes and elevates. 

            Record must be kept to make memory possible, to pass from one mind to another what could but should not be forgotten.  This record must do more than just exist, it must be extolled, examined, and appreciated.  The work of history has two sides, the recording and the recalling.  In simple or local matters, the work of history has for ages before us been simple and local.   Families recall and relate the stories of their forbears, adding to that the remembering and retelling of what they themselves have done and been, the newest chapter in the recounting of a unitary reality, a whole history by no means ended.  On a grander scale, societies have developed entire treasuries of literature, music, and monument to celebrate what need be remembered for the social identity to flourish.

            To relinquish this responsibility to a repository of data and text is to make vulnerable the family and society to forces hostile to the identities they cherish.  In 1984, Orwell forecast this vulnerability.  The development of technology since he wrote it has exacerbated the vulnerability.  The proliferation of media has not made remembering easier, but rather forgetting.  It is a byword to acknowledge that any question of fact is resolved by consulting external media – smartphones – rather than memory or any other authority.  That media can be manipulated much more easily than the archive at the Ministry of Truth.

            Our own willingness to forget, to let somebody or something else do the recording and recalling for us, is to store our treasure in the house of thieves.  To reach for what we placed in their care and receive back something amended, edited, or even disfigured is to be victim of a crime without evidence.  There is no way to demonstrate what has been done; all that was borne away to the flames of the furnace on a current of warm air.  

            This explains one of my preoccupations over recent years, the dissolution of text.  Whereas once we could cry, Show me where that is written! and find acceptable, even compelling proof, now what is written has become so fluid both in form and in meaning that we find ourselves reaching for fog.  Where one word has not been swapped out for another, the meaning of that word has been eroded or transformed, sometimes by use and more often by abuse.  There may be an editor in a cubicle somewhere, but it is more likely that mouths and minds have magnified polemic to scrub away evidence of prior meaning and even understanding. 

            Our society has long relied on text to safeguard memory, history, and reality itself.  Now, even civil, financial, and personal documents of record are virtual, electronic, and ethereal, easy to edit or even eliminate.  

            Our most fundamental identity, as children of the loving God rescued by the sacrifice of His divine son, is preserved in a written account of that same God’s making known of His identity and ours.   This holy writing, the sacred scriptures, has long served as touchstone and authority.  But these texts too, long vulnerable to the necessary perils of translation and editing, are corroding into illegibility before the caustic waves that dissolve text and language.  

Look at the very communities founded in commitment to this text to the exclusion of any other authority; they no longer know what they mean, and no longer know what they believe.  

In the earliest days of our family and our society, the Church, the truest story was not yet written down, but was nonetheless shared, heart speaking to heart.  The eventual writing down was a repository of a reality that preexisted it, a revelation and experience.  It was an aid to recalling, but not a replacement.  To remember this is to reclaim both our own history and our responsibility for it, not to outsource our memory and with it our identity.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

What Winston did

Forced forgetting

 …in the side wall, (there was) a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating…for the disposal of waste paper.  Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building…. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.   When one knew that any document was due for destruction, …it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

          Winston Smith, the nebbishy protagonist of George Orwell’s prescient novel 1984, worked in the Ministry of Truth revising past texts to conform to current assertions of the governing party.  This great book, which gave us the two-way telescreen for surveillance, the Two-Minutes Hate, and Big Brother, describes almost in caricature the workings of an ideological totalitarian state.  When I first read the book, the year 1984 was still in the future, and one could think there was still time for the predictions to come true.  Just over forty years later, many of them have.  

            As if it were not enough always having on our persons our so-called smartphones, we bring Alexa and her sisters into our homes and expect to be listened to by them all.  Hey, Siri!  The Daily Outrage presents a villain to receive universal opprobrium, often delivering into the firestorm someone who until that day had been popular, or respected, or anonymous.  The identity of Big Brother is something of a mystery, but the effects of his supervision are acknowledged in the mundane, almost subconscious steps taken to avoid his disapproval.  

            Similarly, the memory hole has become a fixture – but where?  This great forgetting-contraption that devours reports, records, and reflections must be somewhere, must it not?   Someone must stoke the furnace, maintain the fans, and decide what goes into the slot? 

            Orwell’s model for his future society was Stalin’s Russia.   He had seen or possibly only heard of basic practices there, exemplified by but hardly limited to the airbrushing out of photographs of Trotsky, who had started a hero but become an enemy of the revolution.  That required changing the past to support the assertions of the present.  

            I re-read 1984 about eight years ago and was astonished at its prescience.  Orwell gets so much right about the technology of surveillance and oppression, and especially the manipulation of language.   Some other tools and techniques of suppression he misses; for those you must read Brave New World, a similar dystopian vision by his contemporary Aldous Huxley.  We can talk about those some other time.  But if you think you can guess what brought the memory hole to my mind this month, you are almost certainly wrong.

            Not where I started, but the awareness at which I have arrived is that the memory hole is a phenomenon that appears at most levels of human society, including the personal.  We are all inclined to leave out of our own histories the aspects and actions that do not conform to the image we want to project, and not only when we are applying for a job or courting a mate.  We are inclined literally to forget what we ourselves have done that does not belong to the image of ourselves that we prefer, or even need. 

            Maybe I am saying that there is a little memory hole in each of us.  Neither is this what got me started on the subject, however.   I think it is an insight into why the “memory hole project” can be and has been so successful in its several iterations in our own period of history to the great detriment of many, even all.  If we acknowledge its appeal and search to find how we ourselves have applied it, perhaps that will help us identify the tactic when it is used against us by someone else, whether on an intimate or a more expansive scale.  It may well be philosophically impossible to prove a negative, but we can be aware of the negating power of the memory hole.  Awareness of this present danger is the first step toward escaping it.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Open road

Open road is the impossible dream of the Beltway-bound, commuter-crowded and creeping along under the worst of all possible conditions.  But open road is what lies ahead as we turn that page and resume our forward motion now that the delightful pause of Christmas festivity yields to the normal progression of tasks and responsibilities.  We put the decorations away and get back to business.  Energies are spent and accounts depleted, so not everybody may be ready to run.   But still, the new year beckons!  Any road worth traveling has markers, so here are a few you will want to note.  

The Church has an Epiphany tradition of announcing the Moveable Feasts of the coming year.  We did not sing the chanted proclamation at Mass, but you still will want to mark your calendars.  Ash Wednesday will be 18 February, and Easter Sunday 5 April, which is solidly in the “normal” date range.   The Ascension of the Lord will be on Thursday, 14 May, but we will ignore that until the following Sunday, the 17^th. Pentecost Sunday will be 24 May (which will be Memorial Day weekend this year) and Corpus Christi with its procession two weeks later Sunday 7 June.   The last Sunday of this year will be Christ the King on 22 November, then after Thanksgiving on 26 November we will start the cycle all over again on 29 November with the First Sunday in Advent.

More local markers will include Wednesday, 26 February, one week into Lent, when Bishop Roy Campbell will come here confer Confirmation on our young people.  First Holy Communion will be on Saturday 2 May, the First Saturday of that busy month just as Our Lord indicated to the nuns.  

Not all the dates we need to know are liturgical.  Trying to find a date to get together with a friend, I first had to find out when falls Super Bowl Sunday this year (February 8, if you like me did not already know) because I know I have somewhere to be that evening.  The first of this year’s federal holidays are 19 January and 16 February, which give us three-day weekends and the Monday special Mass schedule.  These are also annual events whose dates change from year to year.

Laying out the map for what lies ahead, I would be remiss if I did not mention what is still large and bright in the rear-view mirror.  Let me thank everybody who worked so hard to make our celebrations over the past weeks so marvelous.  Our music in particular was wide in variety and consistent in excellence. Everybody loves Christmas music for good reason, and the musical talents and efforts of our parish did it more than justice.  

“The big push” to decorate the church on Christmas Eve was handled with near professional efficiency and better than professional results.  As our manger scenes come down this weekend with the Baptism of the Lord, it is good to remember how many hands it takes to build (and remove) those “stables!”   And as ever, our altar servers showed that they can do world-class work blindfolded, or at least in the dark of Midnight Mass.  Our sacristans and ushers took care of an awful lot of work between Masses that made each successive congregation feel like they were the first on scene to see the new-born King.  And even if the announcements at Mass gave you the impression that the rectory offices were nearly always closed, let me assure you that all the staff worked extra hard to prepare everything we needed and process everything you gave. 

So let me thank them for you, but if you have a chance, feel free to say a word yourselves.  These are all people we know and see often who make things so beautiful for all the people we would be glad to see a little more often.  The Nativity of our Lord brings plenty of God’s children “home,” if only for a visit.  It is reassuring to know we are in good company on the open road.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Innumerable

In the search for patterns, it is easy to default to dividing life by the years.  2025 was a tough one, for example.  Or, when I was younger, I was convinced the odds were better than the evens:  seventeen was more delightful age than eighteen.  But what can anyone, much less a teenager, predict from that?

This is the season when turning the calendar gets more attention than usual, definitely more than it merits, but a different pattern also emerged.  Rather than impose divisions on my time, it provided a glimpse of the continuity of the whole.

When I decorate my room, I put up a little artificial (gasp!) tree.  It is strung with multicolored (gasp!) lights that hearken to the big colored GE screw-in bulbs on the family tree when I was growing up.  On it are decorations I pull from a box my mom started for me about fifty years ago when I began accumulating my own ornaments as gifts. Odd ones my grandmother gave me (an owl the color and texture of a pencil eraser embedded with small mirrors), silly ones my aunt gave me (peg figures of chefs because even then I liked to cook), collectible ones my mom gave me (ceramic Snoopy on a sled), and the one my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Taylor gave me in 1974 (a hand-painted plaster of Paris snowman).  Over the intervening years, I have received straw ornaments from Germany from my sister; ceramic bells and little birds from Mom; and several others from buddies that are most tactfully displayed in my private space.  There are also innumerable train ornaments, including the locomotives Jupiter and No. 119 that met at the Golden Spike in Promontory Utah.  It’s all capped with a corn-husk angel I picked up at Tumacacori Arizona on an excursion there from my sister’s place in Tucson with her and her husband and my mom and dad.  It’s new – only fourteen years old.

Decorating the tree does not take long, but it carries me through more than fifty years of people and relationships and Christmas.   

There’s another tree one floor directly below my little one, in the front office.  This one is real (thanks CYO!) and also has multicolored lights.  It has been up for weeks – since the day after Immaculate Conception – but is only half decorated even now.  This is the Parishioner Tree, and the ornaments are still arriving daily in the mail.  It is where we hang the family-picture Christmas cards we receive.  Not only our current population smiles at us in their photo finery; past parishioners still update our remembered images of them with this year’s greetings.  For example, a couple whom I prepared for marriage but left the area shortly afterward sent a picture with their five kids.  Past and present, together it’s a festive throng we can pause to enjoy any time we pass through the office.  New parishioners, it is not too late to bring your cards for the tree!  

This tree takes the whole month-long Christmas season to decorate and assembles in one place evidence of twenty years as Pastor of Saint Bernadette.  

The New Year celebrates the turning of a paper page and the click of a counter.   This structure imposed upon our time is as necessary and even helpful as it is artificial.  It divides and distinguishes days, months, and years.  Christmas, however, and the recurring elements of its celebration, be they food or flowers or songs, reveal the context and continuity within our individual lives and with the lives that have touched ours.  Central among them is the life of the child Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, who is not a memory but a presence and power Who unites who we are with who we were and who we will be, each of our days and months and years into the ongoing history of the salvation of the world.  

One of my newspapers carries a columnist whose humor I appreciate and whose latest book is entitled, Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.  I concur with his prohibition because I know luck has nothing to do with it.  Grace, on the other hand, defines every day and binds the parts into the glorious whole.  What we mark at the New Year is the finitude and failures of time.  What we touch at Christmas delights us, for we hold in our hands the very elements of eternity.  

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

The Inhabitant

Et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.  

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. (John 1: 14)

This marvelous declaration, this concise formulation summarizes the wonder at the root of our celebration of the nativity of the Son of God.  From His conception to His birth, Our Lord dwelt within the confines of his mother’s womb; among us, yes, though also not yet among us.  His emergence from that sweet shelter, His manifestation to the wondering eyes of shepherd, mute beast, and starsearching king, is entrance into the air we breathe and arrival into the life we live on this splendid earth our creator made and into the marred world of man’s making.  

Hidden in this phrase so familiar even in Latin is the English verb that describes the great action of God: to inhabit.  et habitavit in nobis.  Behold, He comes, not just to visit, but to dwell; not simply to insert Himself but also to make His own all that is ours, unto our very flesh.  He is not just passing through; He abides.  

The Living God does not just slip on a suit to disguise His splendor, he steps into a life He will make His own.  He will hunger and thirst, sleep and dream, yearn and relinquish.  He will enter friendships and see them lost; He will know mirth and grief.  He will gain strength and competence; He will be made helpless and die.  His birth is an entering into everything that we are and do, instantly making everything we are and do into something that God Himself is and does.  He inhabits not simply our home or our world; He inhabits who we are.   He is come to stay. 

What He will do in our life and with our life transpires over a lifetime and is accomplished on a Friday afternoon.   After three days’ time in the darkest place we spend our time, He transforms what He has made his own and with it all that is ours.  

His goal all along, why He chose to inhabit us (et habitavit in nobis) was that we be made able to inhabit Him.  His moving in to us is the making possible of our moving in to Him.  And He, the coeternal Son of the everlasting Father, dwells forever in the perfect mutual intimacy of the Triune God, Love indivisible and perfect.  The very Being that is our source is also our goal, a destination we can reach only in Him who participates in that Being.   “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” (Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation)

It would be easy to think that this means that Christ came to change us into somebody else.   But the opposite is true: He came so that we could be who we truly are.  He came from somewhere else as something else so that everything else that God enjoyed could be ours as well.  All else is ours in Christ, who inhabits us and makes ours what we did not possess.  The logical question is, what else?

By inhabiting us, Christ returns to us all that is meant to be ours from our very beginning, the creation of Man.  By inhabiting us, Christ returns us to intimacy with God and with one another in mutual charity.  By inhabiting us, Christ reveals and removes all obstacles to that intimacy, the obstacles that are inherent (original sin) and that are our own regrettable actions (actual sins).  By inhabiting us, God makes possible what we could never achieve of ourselves, and that is being ourselves, our true uninhibited, unburdened identities in right relationship with God and neighbor.  Now that is something else!

To look on that helpless infant we lay in our family manger scene is to see God inhabiting all that we are and inviting us to inhabit all that He is.  He became tiny so that we could be made great.  He is the Divine Inhabitant.  Let Him in, so that He take you up.

We who dwell here so close to the tabernacle, literally the tent or dwelling place of the Lord Jesus Christ, invite you to delight in welcoming Him who comes to inhabit our lives.  Fr. Swink, Fr. Wiktor, and all the fearless and faithful helpers here at the heart of the parish offer our prayers and warmest wishes for you, that your Christmastide be filled with joy, and the tiny and divine inhabitant be at home in you, and yours.  Merry Christmas.  

Monsignor Smith                                   

whose will they be?

Sometimes older things are cooler things,
especially when they show that
what stays the same is the important things.

 Fool! … The things you have prepared, whose will they be? (Luke 12:20) Our Lord warns against laying up treasure that moth or rust can destroy, but perhaps sadder still is treasure nobody wants.

It is a much-remarked phenomenon of our day that the “younger generation” has no interest in the heirlooms and careful acquisitions of their elders.  I have no idea whether this means Gen X, Y, Z, or…what next?  Alpha?  But the assertion is that these “young” people eschew furniture and dishes and art and artifacts that are precious to their parents, who have now come to the time of letting go, also called downsizing, and are eager to be shed of their precious but burdensome array.

The image of the new generation is one of digitally active, virtually connected, acquisitionally averse postmoderns who incline toward renting or app-sharing not only their homes and transport but also everything else that serves their purposes however long or briefly including the clothes on their backs.  The emphasis for expenditure is on experiences rather than objects.  

This leaves great ranks of suburban homes and urban apartments stuffed to the crown moldings with goods and goodies in the unique and eclectic tastes of their accumulators.  The china!  The dining room set!  That carpet!  The collection of objets in ceramic or crystal or carved with a chainsaw!  A few quick calls will reveal that you can sell some for pennies on the dollar, and the rest you cannot give away.  Suddenly it is clear why there are trucks with signs like “college hunks hauling junk.”

Is this mark of the new generation (sic) a symptom more universal disdain?   Does a loss of interest in the carefully accumulated spiritual and intellectual achievements of their elders accompany the aversion to the material accomplishments and accumulations of their forebears?  While the antique stores and eBay vendors present rank upon rank of marvelous objects that have served well their part in life and society, who is gathering up the ideas and understanding that made possible that life and that society?  

The easy instantaneous access to facts, information, and data has obviated the burden of recollection and even learning.  The digitizing of everything has made analysis and evaluation the result of electronic process, not habit of mind. And the perniciously named and facilely advanced “artificial intelligence” has by its artifice elevated algorithmically applied evaluation to replace thought.  The overwhelming advantage of speed and accuracy hides the complete absence of insight or originality.  Truth will be crushed by the manipulation of facts, and goodness and beauty suffocated. 

Of all that your parents and grandparents treasured, what has already been mislaid or abandoned like so many sentimental tchotchkes?  What that you assume to be precious has the next generation already discarded as useless and burdensome?

The birth at Bethlehem of the Son of God to the Virgin of Nazareth, Mary, occurred in obscurity of time and place, yet rather than passing unnoticed, was recognized and received by many who were eager and alert to great things to come from God.  Different from acquisitiveness, receptivity is an indispensable part of learning, a necessary disposition on the way to knowledge, understanding, and belief.  When the Son of man comes, will He find faith on earth?  (Luke 18:8)  I guess the answer depends on whether you can find somebody willing to accept it, whether you remember from whom you got it, and where you put it.  

Monsignor Smith