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