Come again?

Starting at over eight feet tall,
the heap of plowed snow under my bedroom window
lasted forty-four mornings.

Repetition is the mother of learning.  So they say.  But who needs to repeat things until he learns when we have Google, which I used to make sure I correctly remembered this very maxim?  

Electronic data may stand in place of facts remembered, but learning is far more than simple storage of information.  Learning indicates a knitting together of facts into understanding and ability.  This requires more than simply storage, no matter how “smart” one’s phone may be.

The readings of Sacred Scripture at Mass are long in these days, seeming to stretch longer every week as we move along in Lent toward the Mother of All Scriptural Readings, on Palm Sunday – the Passion of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  You can’t try to tell me you haven’t noticed; every Sunday, the Liturgy of the Word seems to have more and more.  Why do we go through all this?  There is no new information being presented, no new facts.  We have heard all of this before. 

For every time you hear these Scriptures on Sunday, I have already gone over them several times, and sometimes many times more, just in that very week.  Although I am on my tenth or even sometimes fifteenth time preaching a set of these readings, I assure you that it never fails that something new appear to me.  Sometimes a word, phrase, or line seems so alien and unfamiliar that I even check to see if it was there the last time I read it.  Sometimes words so familiar come along that I need not even read them, but nonetheless, in that moment, they reveal something different and completely new.

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.  (Heb 4:12)  Time and time again we return to the words of Scripture so that we might encounter this Word, living and active.  We need to hear over and over again the mighty deeds of God read forth to us, on different days, when we are in different circumstances and dispositions.  The Word of God become flesh, Jesus Christ, reveals Himself to us in the words of Scripture re-read and re-heard in the midst of His Body the Church, united in worship.  There is no new word among the words, but the Word is at work, who makes all things new. (Rev 21:5)

We return again and again to this privileged place where the words are read and re-read in the context of communion.  What already was recognized is not lost, but often enhanced; and what earlier was hidden is now revealed.  We who would know our God need over and over to allow Him to speak to us, that we may hear His words of eternal life.  Repetition is the mother of learning.

And because learning is not only knowing, but also doing, there are other things we repeat, time and again.  Two weeks ago you all participated, again, in our Lenten Food Drive, to help food banks at sister parishes in the heart of DC.  This also you have done before, and this also will you do again.  This Lent, like the Lents before it, we look about to find what we can offer that is needed by a brother or sister or neighbor; the giving of alms is always similar but never the same.

Like learning Scripture, we are never finished addressing the needs of our neighbor.  Failure to repeat is a recipe for ignorance.  Repetition of Scriptures, repetition of charity; all this repetition is the mother of learning: of learning Christ.

Monsignor Smith

What's in the dustbin

Though His glory be obscured,
our God will not abandon the place
where He has chosen to dwell.

Long long ago as a rookie seminarian just finished with first year in Rome, I went to Siena to learn Italian.  Better late than never.   For four weeks I lived with an Italian family, went to class five days a week, and learned how to deal with a heat wave when there is no air conditioning anywhere.  I also came to love Siena.

In one of the third-string churches in town, I found a flyer at the entrance to a side chapel where a strange monstrance was enshrined.  Reading it in my newly-improved Italian, I learned that all unprepared, I had discovered the Eucharistic Miracle of Siena.

It was the day before the Assumption in 1730, and some thieves had stolen a ciborium and the sacrament it contained from the Basilica of San Francesco.  On the feast, the theft was discovered, and celebrations were cut off and replaced by prayers for the recovery of the sacrament.  Some days later, the sacred hosts were found in the bottom of an alms box in another church.  In solemn procession, they were returned to the Basilica.  Fouled with dust, dirt, and cobwebs because of their hiding place, they were unfit for consumption.  But a funny thing happened to those hosts: nothing.  They remained intact and did not deteriorate at all.  Years passed; the bishop put some new, unconsecrated hosts in identical circumstances, and after a short period found them rotten or eaten by worms, whereas the recovered hosts remained fresh.  Decades and even centuries have passed, tests have been performed as technologies were developed, and the sacred hosts remain intact and fresh to this day.

Now, when you hear of a Eucharistic miracle, you likely think of a broken host that bleeds and takes on characteristics of human flesh, like Bolsena-Orvieto, or Santarem.  Those are remarkable and dramatic and continue to hold up under scrutiny and skepticism over the centuries, to our own time.  But the miracle of Siena is moving in a different way, at least for me.

What is remarkable here is that the sacred species did NOT change, not at all.  It continues to resemble the simple bread as which it began, with only two ingredients, wheat flour and water.  The marvel is what does not happen that ordinarily would happen to anything so constituted.

The thieves were clearly after the valuable ciborium, likely silver gilt, and probably managed to get some cash for it from an unscrupulous dealer.  Its holy contents, however, the very body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord, they threw away.  

But the local church, the priests and people of Siena, prayed for the return of the Lord in His sacramental presence, and were rewarded with His safe return. Jesus in His Eucharistic presence is vulnerable; that is why we say He is ‘exposed’ for adoration and require that adorers be watchers for His safety even as He watch over them.  

What God consecrates, He transforms permanently.  What Jesus sanctifies, He does not abandon.  The Sienese knew this and sacrificed their time and prayer on behalf of their suffering Savior, who then rewarded them with a manifestation of His abiding fidelity.  

The Eucharist is unique among the seven sacraments of salvation in that it is the only one that you can place on a table and point toward, the only one that remains when every person leaves the room.  The others occur in individual human beings, body and soul, where the work of His sanctifying grace is transforming.  In some of the sacraments, Baptism and Holy Order, this change is permanent and irreversible.  What God has sanctified at the request of the Church remains transformed; the change abides.

The life that God the Father has poured into you at Baptism, often at the request of your parents and always with the invocation of a sacred minister, remains holy and glorious.  He will not revoke that grace even if the life so changed be left to languish in the dustbin; the glory of the Son in whom He is well pleased abides and will abide.

Similarly, configured to Jesus Christ the High Priest by Holy Order, human lives remain vulnerable to the vicissitudes of sin, their own and that of others.  But even if the men so changed should forget that holiness, still their priesthood abides.  And if the Church herself should cast them away, that sacred and sanctifying reality still abides, ready and waiting to be retrieved from the detritus and cleaned of cobwebs and clinging filth.

God does not forget His sanctified gifts.  When the Church remembers and clamors for their restoration, He rewards that fidelity with an extraordinary manifestation of his own abiding and faithful presence, even and especially when the vessels be fragile.

Maybe a trip to Siena in 2030 to mark the tricentennial of nothing happening to the Eucharistic species that had been so carelessly cast aside would be a suitable pilgrimage and petition for the revelation of God’s fidelity in what man has smirched and squandered, and His own Church has left to rot.  Better late than never.   

Monsignor Smith

Just a kiss

Along with the old La-Z-Boy and
a small refrigerator, this went with me
to my freshman dorm to fortify me for my studies.  
Mom and Dad never missed it (they said).  
OF COURSE I still have it.

 FOR ALL THE WORLD!  FOR ALL THE WORLD!  FOR ALL THE WOORRRLLLD!

The sopranos shrilled with all their might, but in German, which is even stranger: DER GANZEN WEELLLLTT!  I could not help but chuckle.  The music is magnificent; Beethoven’s Symphony #9 in D Minor.  I was enjoying it as I drove up the highway for my day off on (another) wretchedly wintery day, leaving me ravenous for the beauty and energy of the musical marvel.  I had recently been reading about how other composers were paralyzed by awe of this work, some believing that in it, Beethoven had done everything that could be accomplished in the symphonic form.  I could hear in each movement what they found so intimidating, but the fourth movement, the one with the chorus, is clearly ‘next level’.  

But therein lies the the source of my chuckle.  The text so masterfully put to music is a work of the venerated poet Schiller, the “Ode to Joy” (Click for text), which to modern ears is more than a little sweetly precious, even treacly in its sentiment.  The line that caught my attention is from the strophe, You millions, I embrace you.  This kiss is for all the world!  Teehee.  It makes YOU chuckle too, doesn’t it, even without hearing it sung in all earnest full-throated effort by over a hundred adults?

Realizing that my appreciation is increased by my ability to understand most of it and even (sort of) sing along with some, I remembered who taught me German back in college.  Professors B. S. Stephenson (first year and 20^th century literature) and M. K. Follo (romantic lit and semester abroad) are largely responsible for that elevation and that ability.  Both men were learned and enthusiastic about music, too; the former mad for Wagner, the latter trying to get me into Bartok.  Stephenson died just before I started seminary; Follo and I are still in touch. 

I look back with gratitude on my undergraduate encounter with language, art, and music, thought and beauty, and my friendship with these two men is a kernel of the whole.  I learned so much in those short but intense years, and because of what I learned then, I learned so much more over the ensuing four (gulp!) decades.  

Just as the growth in knowledge and understanding did not end at graduation, neither did it begin with freshman year.  My high-school Spanish teacher, Bill Sullivan, loved all languages and language itself.  He also taught me some German, and was a friend.  I remember my dad teaching me from his own school-day storehouse a list of German words for a project when I was in maybe sixth grade.  

Not only that, but the Beethoven’s Ninth that I so treasure even now, the 1959 recording of the Berlin Phil with Ferenc Fricsay conducting and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau the baritone soloist, I originally obtained (swiped?) from my mom and dad.   That was an LP, now what I have is a digital file.  I haven’t found a newer performance I can enjoy as much, but recently decided it is time to start looking again.  

On the scale of knowledge and understanding, below vocation, there is avocation, then perhaps hobby.  Below even those there is a level of awareness that is far from mastery but gives a foundation that is sufficient for delight and gives ground on which to stand and reach for more.  Education need not obtain expertise to merit the effort and the expense.  What I have learned – what I have been taught – about language, art, music, history, literature, and culture was not part of the training for my profession, but was my preparation for life.  It makes my life better.  All the associations, nuances, and relationships that it awakens in my mind and soul make for riches surpassing the dreams of avarice.

This is no boast, but rather an acknowledgment.  What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?  (1 Cor 4:7b)   To be able to appreciate and enjoy a masterwork of the millennium like The Ninth is the fruit of many, many gifts accepted and employed.  

Finding new delight in an old recording on a dreadful February day is a gift. My rejoicing that grizzly morning was not simply that the Ninth exists, but also that I can find so much in a hearing of it that gives me joy and remember the people who made that possible.  To remember with gratitude a song or a singer, a lesson or a teacher, a profound thought or an inside joke and the one who first shared it with you, is to reach out a strong hand and pull a worthy soul away from the consuming maw of the memory hole.

A chuckle on a gruesome February day is a gift in itself; thank God it is just one in a long and wondrous series, to be continued.  FOR ALL THE WOORRRLLLD!

Monsignor Smith

I challenge you to find a better performance

It's a bit much, really, but that's part of the glory.  
AND it helped me learn German!

Rescue me

           

Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the temple, 
but they had hardly forgotten Him.

               The saddest kid on any given day at school dismissal can be found in the same spot, the stretch of sidewalk behind the church where students gather who have searched the parking lot for mother or father or grandma or brother and found nobody there to take them home.  The teachers can assure them, they may vaguely understand the vicissitudes of local traffic, and they may even know well that lateness happens.  But there is in that one child, for as long as the wait endures, the quiver of fear of having been forgotten.  

            Her fears may vanish when the long-sought car rolls up with the late arrivals, or she may have to troop back to the office for those awkward phone calls.  Never yet has a student been abandoned at our school.  Nonetheless, the fear abides.  

            More than once after Sunday Mass I have been approached by a young person whose family departed the campus with one fewer kid than arrived with them.  Usually old enough to take it in good humor, there may even be time to share the story of the time that a brother or sister was left at a gas station or rest stop.   Families in which this has occurred tend to have enough children to stir up a “cloud of unknowing,” disorder sufficient to make it easy to fail to notice one is not returned to the car, or forget  which children are riding with which parent.  In such cases, even small kids are somehow aware that there has been something more like an administrative error, rather than to think they have forgotten.  Although they don’t have to be very old to realize that they now have an episode they can deploy as leverage, possibly for the rest of their lives.

            But that flicker of fear and sadness that naturally appears in the eyes of a student whose anticipated ride home is not where it is expected to be reflects a basic human dread of being forgotten.  It is one of the worst things that can happen to a person and causes great grief when it cannot be chalked up to operator confusion or administrative error.  Anybody and everybody has a natural fear of being forgotten.

            Things happen, mistakes are made, the obvious is overlooked, and memory fails us.  All can contribute to a brief and regrettable episode of forgetting someone.  More alarming, and more damaging, is the possibility of forgetting somebody on purpose, intentionally reducing a soul’s presence in memory, one’s own and that of others. 

            Totalitarian regimes of the last century and this one have mastered the art of eliminating people from the histories of their people and their nation.  Faces eliminated from photographs, names stricken from lists, articles removed from archives, and conversations forbidden make us think of dictators in faraway lands.  But some of these have become commonplace occurrences more locally.   The internet makes it easy to manipulate one’s own online history, as well as that of others.  For some reason the destruction of monuments has come into vogue.  Even cemetery markers are being stolen and smelted for the bronze.  

            Not everybody is a governmental or revolutionary figure who decide that it would be best if some person be forgotten.  Other organizations and associations, individuals and even families can take steps to push some disfavored member toward the memory hole.   

Wrack your brain for a moment.  Look up from your screens and close the “feeds” that you follow these days.  Try to recall your habit of thought ten or twenty years ago, or even longer.  Who was on your mind then, whose name was on your lips?  What person or personality can you recall distantly, as down a dark corridor, of whom you never hear or think anymore?  Is it someone who needs you to rescue him from the quivering sadness of the memory hole?

Monsignor Smith

Is memory damnable?

            

Nero who? the moon wants to know

                You know the minute you see it, whether on a poster or in a movie or in an advertisement for a trip: the Colosseum.  Whether you think gladiators or emperors or Christians versus lions, any glimpse of the remaining portion of this grand edifice conveys Rome itself, ancient and monumental.  

            Erected just after the Apostles were martyred nearby and the Church was seeded in the blood of thousands of witnesses, the Flavian Amphitheater’s worldwide recognition is the accomplishment of its purpose.  Not merely a gift to the Roman public for their diversion, the arena’s first reason for existence is rooted in what it is not: it is NOT the golden palace of the emperor Nero, which stood in all its vulgar excess on that same spot.  

            After the catastrophe of Nero’s reign, the general Vespasian rose to the throne to restore order. He and his two sons after him, Titus, also a successful general, and Domitian, the problem child, are the three Flavian emperors who governed Rome at the end of the first century, and the Colosseum’s original name reflects that it was built as part of their program.

The golden house of Nero was conspicuous and reviled, so it was an easy target for the post-Nero program.  To redecorate it or repurpose it, or even replace it with another palace, more tasteful and with happier associations, was not enough.  Its theatrical elimination was the first step of the transformation of the site to a place of civic utility and civic pride.  Though no evidence of it remained on the grounds of the grand new building, everybody knew what (and who) had been eliminated.

It was in discovering the history of this great public work as part of my Christian archaeology class that I first encountered the concept of damnatio memoriae.  Rather than simply reject the projects and reverse the damages of the rejected tyrant, there was a “whole-government” effort to erase evidence of his existence and be seen to have erased it.  While monuments to him and statues were eliminated, his name was removed from lists and texts carved in stone in a manner that left a scrubbed blank space that revealed that who used to be acclaimed no longer was to be mentioned.  This project was carried out with characteristically Roman efficiency throughout the vast empire.  Nero was expunged except for just enough to remind the knowledgeable how vitiated he now was.

To omit reference or citation of a person from current events or historical accounts is one way to push that person out of mind as well as out of sight.  But to keep just enough evidence of the omission to call to mind its cause is to take the game to another level.  This game is not reserved to potentates or governments, but almost anybody can play.  

Any individual can excise another person’s name from conversation and correspondence.  Objects belonging to the excised individual can be carried to the dumpster or flung from the window with great ceremony or none.  Friends and family can be cowed into fear of accidentally mentioning the offending name when the outburst elicited is sufficiently terrifying.  And as simply as that, a real living person is not forced to be forgotten, but residually recalled as rotten.

The most effective damnatio memoriae is achieved not by eliminating the memory of the cursed one, but rather in bringing about something so good and glorious that it is celebrated for ages unto ages, and the rejected one is recalled and damned anew every time the achievement and its origins are celebrated. Better than negation is appending the negative to a great positive.  You never know in advance if you will succeed, but you will know it when you see it.

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

Demolition derby

         

Bluff Park Elementary School
The central part remains; all else is taken away.

           The intended recipient was my grandmother, but before she was married – it was her maiden name.  I recognized the town in Ohio, but not the street.  A distant cousin had sent me an old postcard some merchant had mailed to my grandmother almost a century ago.  So of course I went immediately to Google maps and found – nothing.  It is not there anymore.  It was worse even than an Elvis Presley song: there was no such number, no such home, not even the street.   

This, unfortunately, makes a clean sweep of my father’s parent’s places.  The houses on Belmont and Noble Streets where I visited them when I was a child yielded to the broad concrete sweep of the multilane Scenic Byway.  Most recently and most lamentably, the impossibly small one-bedroom house with the most marvelous address – 3 Maple Street – was razed to make way for a patch of grass that likely will be more versatile.  

Though my mother’s parents went far longer ago, their places remain.  The North Hills house where mom spent her childhood, and the more urban quadruplex where she spent her high school years with her dad after her mom died, still serve their same residential purposes in those same places.  I’ve seen them, though it has been more than a decade.

Not just indicators on maps, but the architecture that houses our histories is subject to alteration and elimination.  Most of my elementary school was bulldozed about a half dozen years ago; they left the “historic” core building, but the cafetorium and most of the classrooms are gone.  This stuff happens.

Because I spent more than ten percent of my life in Rome, where buildings remain for centuries and sometimes millennia, I find the fungibility of our buildings and places startling.   My mom now lives in an area only recently developed, an entire civilization where no edifice is more than thirty-five years old.  The awareness alternates between wondrous and creepy.

More often than you might think, I find people wandering about the campus here wide-eyed and wondering.  It hasn’t changed at all since I finished school here in ’57! (or ’49 or ’68) they will tell me with delight.  Three-quarters of a century isn’t that terribly long for either a church or a school to ‘hold the fort,’ so to speak, but it is an accomplishment that both interior and exterior remain the same in form as well as function.  Thank God for mid-century masonry.

Here in Four Corners, we Catholics have a strong and steady presence in both population and construction.  For years, I have asserted that Saint Bernadette School would stand long after Blair High School crumbles to dust, and while that may be an accurate assessment of the construction techniques and materials, does it speak to the inhabitation thereof?

In the “Ahaya” River valley where my dad and his folks are from, post-industrial decay and diminution have reduced the number and the condition of many of the buildings of every sort along with the population.  Without people, living, working, learning, building, worshipping, and socializing, the buildings dissolve.  That makes sense.  But might the converse also be true?  Is there any danger to the people if the buildings and places be reduced or eliminated?

Our buildings shape us and inform our being at least as much as we do theirs. To inhabit and maintain the structures most formative of our lives is a responsibility; to lose the architecture that gave us our form to the cult of disposability is a loss of some portion of our humanity.  To lose track of the places where these buildings once stood, and we in them, is to lose the thread of our own story.  

Battlefields and bridges, baptismal fonts and classrooms, houses and playgrounds and yes, even vacant lots are all places where our lives and their preludes came to be.  Find them!  Mark them on your maps, paper or electronic, and better yet, visit them.  Take the kids.  See what has changed as much as you have, and what is the same.  To lose your place to the memory hole is to lose part of your life and your very self. 

As for that postcard to my then-young grandmother that my cousin saved and sent me?  I don’t remember where I put it. 

Monsignor Smith                                   

 

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