A face in the crowd

Ecce Homo ("Behold the man")
 by Valentin de Boulogne

For all our prized intellect and will, for all our cherished individuality and freedom, we human beings do occasionally reveal that at least partially we are herd animals.  No, nobody enjoys flying coach or ‘cattle class’ and the feeling of being treated as less than human.  But it is hard to go even a day without video from nearby or some faraway country showing a broad public space filled with thousands or even tens of thousands of people, massed and moving and often shouting as one single beast.  

Sports rivalries and packed stadiums are at the light end of the mob spectrum that runs thence toward dark and dangerous.  Even in a lighthearted assembly, people can get worked up with victory or defeat and do something en masse that none of them would ever do solo.  When the mood does turn dark, the words and the deeds can become truly terrifying and even, in a peculiar way, inhuman.  

This madness of crowds can appear spontaneously or after careful connivance and manipulation, and while it is exhilarating for the participants to be swept up into ‘something bigger than themselves,’ it is properly terrifying for any bystanders who manage to maintain some personal and emotional distance from the frenzy.  What begets that fear is not only the danger that the roiling crowd presents, but also the evident change that has overtaken its members who mere moments earlier were so recognizably and fully themselves.  A tremor of a different sort of fear can shake the participants when the mob disperses, and its members remember themselves and wonder with revulsion what came over them.

Rather than warning you  to excuse yourself from such an assembly before it become a riot, I invite you to enter the mob as its bloodlust rises.  Only one specific mob, I should clarify; the one that gathers round the praetorium and roars for the blood of the innocent man Jesus.

In this our annual experiment in crowd psychology we try on, like a garment, the madness that all too easily fits us tailor-made, woven as it is of fear and self-preservation, colored by indignation at the mere suggestion that we be sinful, and cut to the false consensus of mutual congratulation.  All these vices inhibit our intellect and our will and constrain our freedom; together they fabricate the false fraternity of hypocrites.  We are not proud of them nor even comfortable with them, but we are afraid to find ourselves naked without them. 

The One who has none of these vices nor any other stands alone before us stripped, beaten, and bleeding in His mute pity for us, which only fuels our rage.  Yes, rage.  How dare anyone suggest we be the guilty ones.

It is the Passion of the Lord, not merely read but inhabited by us who are the Body of Christ.  We do this to ourselves on purpose, in a controlled environment and with a strong lifeline round us all to pull us out of the abyss.  Recognizing after the fact our role in the events of this day, a tremor of a different sort of fear shakes us when we come to ourselves and wonder with revulsion at how we could ever have been a part of such an action. 

The One being manhandled to His death by the savage crowd directs to their highest purpose both intellect and will, placing individuality at the service of the multitude to whom He is bound by His human nature, and perfecting freedom in obedience.  While we rush on helpless to save ourselves from ourselves, He anchors the lifeline that draws us up from the abyss, retrieves and restores us to our own humanity, and delivers us from the madness of the crowd.

Monsignor Smith

Limited visibility

The rich accounts grow, treasure abundant in words and meaning.  We have so much on which to feed in these downhill days of Lent, it seems a brash conceit to add more text or lines.  To explain, to explain!  Vain pursuit.  

Rather this week, an image in words.  It is time for us to train our eyes to see all that unfolds in the Scriptures and the prayers and the gestures that change in these days of waiting for the great change. Spend a while with Hillaire Belloc’s The Prophet Lost in the Hills of Evening to sharpen your vision in low light.

Blessed Lent.

Monsignor Smith

 

Strong God which made the topmost stars

      To circulate and keep their course,

Remember me; whom all the bars

      Of sense and dreadful fate enforce.

 

Above me in your heights and tall,

      Impassable the summits freeze,

Below the haunted waters call

      Impassable beyond the trees.

 

I hunger and I have no bread.

      My gourd is empty of the wine.

Surely the footsteps of the dead 

      Are shuffling softly close to mine!

 

It darkens. I have lost the ford.

      There is a change on all things made.

The rocks have evil faces, Lord,

      And I am awfully afraid.

 

Remember me: the Voids of Hell

      Expand enormous all around.

Strong friend of souls, Emmanuel,

      Redeem me from accursed ground.

 

The long descent of wasted days,

      To these at last have led me down;

Remember that I filled with praise

The meaningless and doubtful ways

      That lead to an eternal town.

 

I challenged and I kept the Faith,

      The bleeding path alone I trod;

It darkens.  Stand about my wraith,

      And harbor me – almighty God.

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