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| Why, it must be Thursday!** |
Christ used stories because we have stories; the Church gives us Christ’s life and all Scripture broken down into stories because stories fit into our lives. Not only are we able to recognize and understand the story of salvation, and the parables of Jesus, because they have reflections in our own stories, but also so that the holy stories become part of our own stories.
Lent lays out the story for us in one long, familiar pattern, where each day and its stories come on a schedule that help us recognize how far along we are on the path, the Great Fast of Forty Days. Ash Wednesday reminds us to beware of doing religious acts for other people to see, right before we smirch our faces. The first Sunday, Christ is in the desert; and the second, He is transfigured. The three-year cycle scrambles the next several Sundays from year to year until we find our feet firmly in the Passion, and while clutching our palms, we know again where we are, and where Christ is. We hope there’s less distance between us than when first we started.
But the weekdays of Lent suffer no variety of programming, bringing the same Scripture to the same day year after year. On Thursday of the first week of Lent, as I read the Gospel of the Rich Man and Lazarus on his doorstep, I was transported to a moment in the late 1980’s, when I heard Fr. Brainerd (remember him?) proclaim and preach it. Jesus’ story that day begins, There was a rich man who dressed in purple and linen; which is exactly how Fr. Brainerd, as the priest must necessarily be, was dressed for that Mass. Yes, I remember; Thursday was the day that after work I went by metro to the Cathedral for Mass.
As I may have told you before, each day of Lent has a place attached too, a church in Rome where the Stational Mass is offered, according to ancient tradition. From my seminary days through my later assignment there, I would trek each Lenten day to the appointed church for the dawn Mass (in English) organized by the North American College seminarians. That’s nine Lents, and some of the churches are inseparable in my mind from the days and their scriptures.
Tuesday of the second week of Lent brings Christ’s Gospel admonition to call no man on earth your Father, a loaded moment for a church full of current and future priests. The church that day is Santa Balbina, one of the least popular, least attractive churches on the rotation. It’s a simple, ancient, heavy church built into the back slope of the Caelian hill, which has risen over the intervening millennium or so, that the interior of the church is more like a basement, and a damp one at that in the Roman winter morning chill. The cracked walls are lit by bare bulbs hanging on wires from the undecorated ceiling; its one glory is a magnificent if anomalous inlaid marble throne against the wall behind the altar. That Gospel reading takes me straight there every year, bringing a chill to the back of my neck, but sparing me the long walk along the Tiber and Circus Maximus.
Monday of the fifth week of Lent is at San Crisogono, one of the original churches in the stational lineup, which means it goes back to the fifth century. You should visit the excavations beneath the current, medieval church when next you are in Rome, but you won’t -- because this isn’t even the most important or beautiful church in its own neighborhood of Trastevere, much less in the city. Anyway, the Old Testament reading that day, the longest first reading in the whole lectionary, is the story from Daniel of Susanna and the two dirty old men. My first year there, my classmate (now-Msgr.) Tom Cook of Winona, Minnesota, declaimed it with such relish and emphasis that every year, it is his voice I hear say: Your fine lie has cost you your HEAD!
Finally, finally, in my last year as a pilgrim in these Lents, I was called as a substitute for a priest who became ill, and was able to be principal celebrant and homilist at Mass for Wednesday in the fifth week of Lent, at the church of San Marcello. One of that church’s most striking features is an enormous fresco of the crucifixion which is on the back wall above the entry doors, which means I got to appreciate it from the ambo and altar. The Gospel for that day is from John 8, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. That very excerpt is carved into marble over the main entrance of Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. Coincidence? You make the call.
Unrehearsed, unresearched, these moments come to me clear as light. Such is the power of liturgy and God’s Holy Word to break through the prison of our present moment and transport us into the Communion that is outside of time yet unabating in our lives.
The story of our salvation, the stories that Jesus told to His disciples and that they have told to us, become entwined with our own stories when we encounter them in moments of grief or joy, in our need or in our distraction, recalling us to the awesome truth that no matter where our feet stand on this earth, our eyes and ears behold the very mysteries of heaven.
Monsignor Smith
**The church interior pictured is that of San Giorgio in Velabro, the Station Church for the second day of Lent, the day after Ash Wednesday. The connections, of course, are more complicated than that.
Just a few weeks before my seminary class arrived in Rome at the end of August, 1993, in a "warning" to Pope John Paul II after his strong condemnation of "the Mafia" (for lack of a better word for Italian organized crime), two powerful bombs were detonated, one of which blew to bits the ancient carved stone portico of this church. San Giorgio was closed for years thereafter as the portico and church were restored, and the Stational Mass was moved to a nearby church, usually the bizarre, octagonal San Teodoro, whose vinyl, high-backed benches resembled nothing so much as school-bus seats. But I digress. At some point the Lenten pilgrims got into San Giorgio again, I THINK before I finished seminary, maybe my fourth year.
No less significantly, this is the church in which Father Ben Petty, son of this parish, delivered his first homily to family and friends on the day after he was ordained deacon in 2018 at St. Peter's in the Vatican, so by his gracious invitation I have also celebrated Mass at this altar.
Notice that the church is off-square, and the walls of the nave not parallel. You can see it clearly using the grid on the church ceiling for comparison.
