One and all

 

Laying out the calendar for the month to come, the one on which we schedule the priests to celebrate the Mass, I was called up short searching for saints.  Usually, I like to highlight a day or two for its feast; last month I noted JPII on the 22^nd, Simon and Jude on the 28^th, and a big favorite, Our Lady of Victory, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, on the 7^th.   But for November, I came up blank. 

Not that there lacks great liturgical days to mark, starting right out the chute with All Saint and All Souls batting first and second.  Christ the King Himself arrives three weeks later, then the next week, the First Sunday of (gasp) Advent.  (Yes, already).  There are civic days of substance to be kept as well, Veterans Day on the eleventh, and the national solemnity of Thanksgiving, parts one and deux, on the 26^th and 27^th.  I would be inclined to note Saint Martin, but the Veterans take all the space allowed for text on the 11^th.  Who else IS there in November?

In desperation, I inscribed the 33^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Yawn. Truly that is desperate, even with the drumbeat of year’s end growing loud.  I finally had to look at a calendar and decided to include St. Leo the Great on the tenth, and the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica (I am reaching I admit) on the ninth.   Then I recalled Saint Andrew, Apostle and neighborly patron, who breaks the purple pattern first thing Monday after First Advent.  Now the calendar looks more populated.  

The civil and seasonal celebrations are noteworthy and not to be underestimated.  I enjoy Thanksgiving as a genuine holiday that I can enjoy because it does not bring me also a load of liturgical responsibilities.  I take Veterans Day seriously and even stir in some of its original Armistice Day; though I am not a veteran, indeed because I am not a veteran, I am especially inclined to offer respect and gratitude to veterans.  Christ the King is a day of greatness, and First Advent begins what may be the most delightful liturgical time of the year; it is beyond me why anybody would trade its rich, multi-layered artistry of anticipation for the bell-ringing red and green rampage of generic, manic “happy holidays.”    

Still, I wanted for the month some personality or, more precisely, personalitIES.  I am glad I checked; Leo was man of the millennium in many ways, and his homilies still ring clear and true.  Andrew, clearly no slouch, got his brother the interview for the job of all jobs.  And do not neglect Martin, who has more churches and towns named after him in France than anybody else because he really was just that awesome.  It really does help to have names and faces to present the holiness to which we often refer as if it were an abstractable affect like happiness, or golden liquid that comes by the jug.

Think about your life’s sections or spans divided however you choose.  You will mark the times by any number of things – what you were doing, where you were living, the weather, the wardrobe, or (God help you) the politics. But inextricably mixed in with those other identifying factors you will also name the people who were with you.  Your mom and dad, your brothers and sisters, your best friend in fifth grade, your teacher, your coach, your big date, your wingman, your roommate, the first person to hire you, the only person to fire you, your son and your daughter, the one who said yes.  People with names and faces indelible in your mental lifescape, these are defining realities that give sense to everything else that you were thinking and doing and avoiding and accomplishing.  

This is why I was searching for saints’ names to populate the days of November.  In this month when heat and light dissipate, signs of life literally drop to the ground, and darkness defines the day as well as the night, great is the craving for company to be kept. 

So begins this month with the two “All” days, of saints and souls, because the roster falls short just as the need grows strong.  These “all” are not faceless throngs, nameless multitudes, but rather souls we know and love and need, names that come readily to our lips.  Faces and names, relationships that reveal us to ourselves, these are the people whose faces we seek and whose names we repeat in both memory and prayer, for whom and from who we crave more.  More time, even unto eternity; more together, even unto intimacy with neither grudge nor reticence remaining.  

Souls alike, and souls together, bound by happenstance or by love, our desire but a shadow of God’s desire but still strong, we remember what He has done in them and through them and make daily our petition that they with us be all saints.  

Monsignor Smith

Bright darkness, or dark lights

Many single candles, lit.  
Pray for France!

‘Tis better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness, as we all know.  It could be a motto as I adjust the timers in the sacristy to ensure that the floodlights on the church are lit from evening dusk to the dawn’s early light.  In this season of rapidly diminishing daylight, I change the setting every few weeks.  This very morning there was barely any light in the sky when I returned after the early morning Mass and gauged whether it was bright enough to hang the rectory flag.  It is tough not to curse these days when the darkness gains so much ground. 

But cursing I avoid, and lighting I undertake.   Normally in full ‘Dad mode’ around here, locking doors and turning off lights while monitoring the thermostats for any excess or shortfall, this time of year I begin instead to turn lights on, a low-wattage lamp here or strategic down-light there, for the sake of safety and to make our home more inviting.  

Last month it was a triumph of light in the City of Lights as Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France drew an outpouring of enthusiasm and devotion unexpected in that country so long given over to secularity, what the French proudly treasure as laïcité.  Huge crowds displayed not only enthusiasm for and interest in the person of the Pope, but also piety, prayer, and believe it or not penance, in Paris of all places.  Catholic commentators accustomed to finding their cynicism rewarded were gushing with delight and surprise.  

There were different reactions among the French commenting classes.  Some were aghast at the resurgence of ancient practices they though outmoded and abandoned; lines for confession on the sidewalks drew especial horror.  Perhaps pockets of such superstition persisted, they thought, in the darkness of France profonde;  but in the capital of continental sophistication it was unimagined.  

This month, a very different sort of darkness has since emerged and stormed the streets and cities of France, and a very different type of light.  The burning of shops and cars and city buildings marks the path of riotous mobs wrapped in black.  The plausibility of calling these protests by students was quickly eliminated by the nature, size, and organization of the forces bent on destruction.  This is something far more sinister.

It has been suggested that this disruption is ironic in its juxtaposition to the pious outpouring in the same places mere weeks earlier.  But few have acknowledged the real possibility that the rage was provoked by the public prayer and piety.  The beauty and peace accompanying the unexpectedly large Catholic crowds suggested a vitality that would be a threat to idealogues bent on disorder and destruction, requiring a response.

It is foolish to think that faith can be contained and carried on as only private practice, with each pursuing privately his personal preferences and publicly practicing accepted and expected civic virtues in mutual respect and acceptance.  Our friends in France are learning how short the lifespan afforded that tenuous practice.  Churches there have been set afire with increasing frequency over the past decade.  Where the true light is not nurtured, the darkness will assert itself and even claim dominion.  

Rituals evoking this back-and-forth battle are woven into our culture even now.  Being otherwise fully prepared for Halloween and the doorbell onslaught of hungry goblins, I confess that I no longer prepare a jack-o-lantern.  I don’t even know if a candle is still customary in the pumpkin to provide the glow to eyes and grin; perhaps it too has yielded to LED technology.   But even if it is not an actual single candle, this quaint practice retains some of that spirit of refusal to yield to the darkness, and rather bring fun to drive out fear.  

Light in the darkness can bring so much good that even a little is worth contributing to the effort.  But as cities we think civilized endure nights with that eerie and alarming glow around the corner or on the horizon, what are we to make of the fires the agents of darkness are kindling?

Monsignor Smith

Worth another look

Three years ago, I wrote about our founding Pastor, Monsignor William F. “Pete” Stricker.   This past week was the fiftieth anniversary of his death.  As we look to All Souls Day in a few weeks and prepare our lists or the altar for Masses offered for our beloved dead every day next month, I thought I would put somebody in front of you who should be on your list.  

What is the “MSR?”  Yes, that is a question I get occasionally, usually from new parishioners who are looking for the announced Community Sunday donuts and treats.   The Monsignor Stricker Room is our multi-purpose meeting room in the undercroft (that is, basement) of the church.  It is named for the founding pastor of our parish, whose visage presides over the proceedings in that room, or the mayhem, from a creditable oil portrait on the south wall.  

That portrait may be all you know of Monsignor Stricker.  You might expect that to be all I know of him, too, since I was in fifth grade in Alabama when he retired.  But no, I know rather a lot more.  When I first arrived here, the memories of Msgr. Stricker were still vivid and common, and I heard them all.  

The generation of parishioners who had benefitted from his shepherd’s care were always ready with an anecdote or observation about him. He wore white socks because of a dye allergy, and didn’t drive, so he would walk up to Woodmoor Center and invariably “find” (mooch?) a ride home.  He sang with the choir if he was not celebrating the Mass, and his love of good music laid the foundation for what we enjoy now.   Speaking of foundations, he oversaw the construction of the rectory and the church.

Every homily he ever preached is retained in perfect typescript in a heavy steel file cabinet in the rectory basement. Selected homilies were gathered into a little paperback, (Verbum Sapienti, that is “a word to the wise”) where I have delighted to read them.  He also published a book, still available in the second-hand market, called Keeping Christmas, An Edwardian-Age Memoir, about his youth in the German section of Baltimore.   

Cardinal Baum, for whom I worked for almost five years, remembered that early in his time as Archbishop of Washington, he had to ask Msgr. Stricker for his retirement.  Girded as he was for resistance from the famous curmudgeon, he was shocked when Monsignor gently agreed.  When Monsignor’s friends turned out for his funeral just a year later, Cardinal Baum inquired from where his nickname “Pete” had come.  They explained that in seminary in Rome in the 1920’s, young Stricker had been the captain or head of their camerata, the subgroup in which seminarians pursued all recreational activities.  He was our leader, our “Peter,” explained his classmate, who by then was Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.  

His presence was so strong that not only parishioners remember him.  Neighbors and shop owners at the corner, kids who were friends of kids in the school, all knew and admired (in a vaguely intimidated way) the indomitable pastor of Saint Bernadette.  He was a large man with a powerful voice and a well-tuned intellect; he did not keep people guessing what he thought about things.   I have met non-Catholics who lived in the area and moved away fifty years ago who remembered him, and his name.

Monsignor Stricker retired as Pastor in 1975, to be succeeded by Msgr. David Foley.  He died the next year, on October 14, 1976.  With the help of the prayers of a grateful parish, may his soul and the souls of all the faith departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace. 

Monsignor Smith

Where in the universe

 

In the tender compassion of our God

the dawn from on high shall break upon us,

to shine on those who dwell in darkness
and the shadow of death.  (Luke 1:78-79)

It is Columbus Day Weekend, three days off with a lot of nice autumn weather scheduled.  There will be sales.  Ballgames.  Trips.  You know – the usual holiday weekend stuff.

Why is it a holiday?  Ask a school kid; I do not know how many can even tell you anymore that, “In fourteen ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Aside from a widespread confusion about the difference between Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, I doubt there is any federal holiday to which less thought and appreciation is given than Columbus Day.  I admit that I myself do not think about it very much, and am embarrassed by my own inattention.

Sure, I know about the Castillian King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who financed the proposal of the Italian (Genoese) navigator with his theories of reaching “the Indies” by sailing west, instead of east around the Horn of Africa.  He pulled together three ships, which I hope everybody still knows were named the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, the largest of which was not as long as the average house in the neighborhood here.  And he landed on San Salvador, one beach that no one in this parish is likely to visit over the weekend. 

Does anyone say that he “discovered America” anymore?  That is so unfashionable.  Since the Americas, as these continents later came to be called, were inhabited, some question whether they wanted discovering.  His own awareness of just what he had discovered was a little slow in coming, and he was loath to admit publicly that he had failed to reach the Indies.

However aware of their own existence the native tribes of the islands he first visited were, I would submit that they too discovered something in being discovered.  By learning of the existence of other peoples from other places with other cultures and technologies, they learned something about who and where they themselves were.  Similar is how only in encountering and relating to others, from our infancy on, do we come into an understanding of our own identities.

Imperialism and colonialism are big buzzwords for what Columbus’s voyage represented and introduced to these lands.  I am not certain that anyone whose tribe fell victim to the Aztecs or the Incas would say that these concepts were particularly new, though.  Greed and the abuse of other human beings are remarkable only in how consistently they are present in every human culture and polity.  Recognized for what it is, it can be identified as original sin.

Which brings us to the one genuinely new thing that Columbus brought with him to these splendid continents when he came.  Not a thing, in truth, but a person, and a person who is both the response and the remedy to original sin and its universality among men of every race and land.

The good news of Jesus Christ, His presence in the Church, and His working in the Sacraments, first arrived with Columbus where heretofore none had known Him.  The evil spirits and petty gods to whom the native peoples enslaved themselves will never be completely driven from this land or any other, but thanks be to God, and with a little help from His Holy Mother at Tepeyac, these continents are marked for freedom.  No human being need fall victim to their depredations, for the Holy Savior – San Salvador – has manifested here the Divine Mercy.  That is something worth celebrating, not only one Monday, but every Sunday.

Monsignor Smith

Keepers

One Thursday afternoon in August when I arrived for our evening together, Mom handed me a little packet of papers with a simple explanation: I found these in your dad’s desk and thought you might be interested.  Over the past year she has persevered in sorting through everything in the apartment and finding what he saved that could now be discarded.  

Dad saved almost everything, at least as far as documents are concerned.  Window stickers and bills of sale for all the cars he bought, back to the early 1960’s.  Wow, the Dodge cost WHAT?   Interesting, but not really worth keeping now.

The packet mom gave me had several photos, including one I had taken in about 1975 of Dad at the wheel of his red Fiat Spider.  Now you know where I got my fascination with cars.  That is a keeper.  

There were all my report cards – from college.  Schools used to mail those to the parents of the undergrads, back in the day – can you imagine the gall?  I knew it happened but did not know that each semester’s grade sheet included a hand-written note.  I was shocked to see that all my freshman grades were accompanied by remarks from the president of the university!   After that, it was a dean who would add an observation.  Who knew these people were watching me?

In the mix was a baptismal certificate, judging by the date obtained as I began preparation for Confirmation, as well as a copy of the church bulletin from the day of my baptism that listed all five who were baptized.  From the certificate, I learned something I had not known, that the priest who baptized me was Father John Crawford.  Give me a minute here while I add his name to my All Souls list; done.  I also learned that the date I had in mind for my baptism wrong; I was off by four days.  September 20 makes far more sense since that was a Sunday back in 1964; I was twenty-three days old.  

Also listed were my godparents, John and Ceci Eichenlaub.  Uncle John is mom’s older brother, and Aunt Ceci (neé Spinola) is my only Italian relative.  After nine years living in Rome I now say that I am Italian by adoption; she does not object.  They lived nearby, busy with their three boys.  We were the ones who moved away after a few years to the distant and unknown South.

Aunt Ceci and Uncle John came to visit us there, once.  They came to my college graduation in Virginia, which was a great effort for them and great delight for me, and years later to my priestly ordination in Washington.  Despite their lack of enthusiasm for travel, they came once to Rome during my second assignment there and I was able to show Aunt Ceci the home of her parents and grandparents.  That was immense fun.

I always enjoyed visiting with them.  Occasionally we would overlap at the Eichenlaub cottage on Lake Erie, a happy place for them all their lives.  More often I visited them at their home, stopping any time I rode the Turnpike east or west.  Aunt Ceci would ply me and Uncle John with food in great quantity and variety while he regaled me with his latest discoveries about the history of our family, a result of the genealogical research that he took up in earnest after retirement.   One time he and I got in the car and visited several cemeteries to find the graves of diverse generations and branches of our family, including his own parents, only one of whom lived long enough for me to meet him, and he only a few short years thereafter.  He knew I would like that.  

Uncle John died quietly this past weekend, two months shy of his ninetieth birthday, after diminishing through a long series of issues and illnesses.  I’ll be slipping away midafternoon Sunday to drive up to Pittsburgh for the funeral.  I just wrote his name on my All Souls list, too, which is more than a paper for me to leave tucked inside my desk.

Monsignor Smith

Choices in the Garden

Green light, red light

There is something about an apple.  More than most other fruits, it has significance beyond its simple self.  

Witness the famous computer company, whose logo identifies the fruit but emphasizes the bite that has been taken.  Ah, the forbidden fruit – right here in your hands.  All the time, demanding your attention.  Directing your day.  Tracking your location.  Listening to your conversation.  Predicting your decisions.  Selling your attention.   Well, maybe there was more truth than intended in their advertising back in the day when they chose that logo.  

Unlike many other fruits, apples are durable.  They do not bruise as easily nor rot as readily, they travel well, and can be kept for longer periods of times and under less controlled circumstances.  Like potatoes and root vegetables, they can be stored in the cellar to provide sustenance through the winter.  

Annually it is part of my autumn routine to visit orchards and buy large quantities of apples.   Right about now, I should be heading west to get a half bushel of eating apples and a half bushel of pie apples from among the earlier varieties to be harvested.  Then, after Veteran’s Day, I drive a bit further and buy a full bushel of my favorite eating apples, plus some more pie apples, that are among the latest varieties to be harvested.  Last year this bushel lasted into March, despite how much Fr. Swink enjoys devouring one on frequent occasion.  

But this year I am not sure what I will do, because there is no apple harvest. None. It was destroyed in late April by a hard frost.  All along the eastern edge of the Appalachian range, some of the finest apple orchards in the country are coming up empty.  

As some people welcome the end of summer and the cooler temperatures of autumn that arrived this week as if commanded by the calendar, it is easy to forget what a long, cold winter and late, cold spring we had this year.  I feared at the time that the stone fruits would suffer, as they often and easily do, and sure enough, peaches plums and cherries were obliterated while we waited in vain for the weather to warm.  But that is more common, unfortunately, as stone fruit trees blossom early and are vulnerable.  

But apples!  MY apples!  What has happened here?  I have already resorted to buying apples from the grocery store, shipped in from God knows where.  I guess they are fine – see the durability of apples, referenced above – but they are not local and they are brutally expensive, especially compared to the price per bushel at the orchard.  What sadness.

Still I connive to find a better option, some other supplier of apple varietals in the bulk and at the price I prefer.  Whether such connivance bear fruit, I do not know.   But the sad fact is that this entire catastrophe was thrust upon us months ago while we were paying attention to other things, pursuing other goals, and yearning for other rewards.  Only now is inflicted the privation that was prepared then.  Cherries were missing in June and peaches in August, but the sting of apples’ absence hits in October and November.  

There is nothing that we can do to change it.   Some friend of mine with whom I shared my lament suggested that there must be something that can be done in the orchard during the freeze to protect the apples, like they do in Florida with the orange crop, spraying them with water that encases the fruit in protective ice.  But we cannot go back to late April and change things, nor does such a method exist anyway.  The organic reality is irreversible and irretrievable.

Like the bite out of that fruit on the logo in everyone’s pocket, there is no going back, no un-doing what long since has been done.  The genie stands surly outside the bottle, preparing new destruction.  Only after time has passed are consequences revealed, most shockingly when the decisions and the actions were our own.  Regrettable results make us rue the day, crying for a do-over that remains out of reach.  

There is something about an apple.  More than most other fruits, it has significance beyond its simple self.  Before and after the bite, it reminds us of sin. 

Monsignor Smith

Deflect artifice

It was the lead story on the paper’s web page today, again.  A ranking bishop in the conference formulated policy imperatives regarding it, again.  And our Archbishop finally told us last week who the keynote speaker at our fall priest’s convocation this November would be: the United States priest expert in it.  

Try as I might, I simply cannot get excited about it.  It was the subject of our new Holy Father’s first encyclical letter.  I confess I made one good try at reading that and did not get very far.   In all the infotainment outlets, the new buzz about it involves words like annihilation – of the human race, that is.  As the meme goes, that escalated quickly.

I would not presume to speak for anybody other than myself, but I think about it as technology, and not even as “a” technology, but rather as a technological development, possibly even an incremental one: the next step along the developmental path.  Yes, even incremental developments have personal and social impact.   

Think of the step from the ability to produce practical, reliable flying machines to safe, regular, accessible passenger air travel.  Sure it makes a difference.  It has made a difference in my life and our world.  Some of its impact has been negative even if we except episodes like 9/11.  Most of its impact has been positive. As a technological project, it is still a work in progress.  Will it expand to space?  Will it be abandoned to reduce use of petroleum products?  Will become ever more affordable, or prohibitively expensive?  Will it ever be perfectly safe?  Will it ever be comfortable?

Our technology for processing data and simulating material reality is growing by leaps and bounds.  The human capacity for artifice and susceptibility to it seem to progress hand in hand.  We suspend disbelief to be entertained, whether by our own elementary school children presenting themselves as George and Martha Washington or Tom Holland swinging through urban canyons on webs that shoot from his cuffs.  Ha ha that was fun.  The entertainment ended, disbelief is once again taken up and is perhaps our best tool.  Virtual reality disappears when the goggles come off and your real work remains still undone.  And artificial intelligence is not and never will be.  Intelligence, that is.  

The best disposition to maintain in the face of the self-aggrandizing and self-exaggerating computation and simulation of information technology now claiming for itself the name of intelligence is, I think, to nurture authentic intelligence.  Read a book, write a letter, paint a picture, and memorize a poem – then compose one yourself.  Sing a lullaby – or the post-Communion hymn in church!  Teach a child to bake cookies or mow the lawn.  Grow a garden, every year.  Play a game or compete in a sport.  Build a bed or a shed.  Get better at something you are already good at.  Be a mom, or a dad, or a friend.  Pay attention to the person in front of you and try to figure out what he will do next.  There is technology in all of that, and real intelligence as well.  

There was a panic a few centuries back about the invention and proliferation of the crossbow.  Yes, it did have an impact and some of that was negative, but then there was Agincourt.  Human genius will always outperform mere technology.  

The more intelligence you nurture in your life, the less susceptible you will be to the siren song of the artificial kind, and the more able you will be to use it and prudently.  Prudence; ah, now there is something we priests could stand to build a convocation around.

Monsignor Smith

 

Safe not sound

Speaking of things that you don’t see coming, one of the worst is when something that you use every day without any problem suddenly functions not at all.  No symptoms of a coming breakdown, no catastrophic impact causing damage, just – bam.  A door daily walked through become a steel wall.

Precisely that is what happened Tuesday when the safe in our sacristy ceased to function.   More accurately, I suppose it was the lock that ceased to function, or rather, ceased to do anything BUT lock.  The dial spins, the combination can be entered, but the tumblers do not tumble into place and the gentle click of the latch opening is never achieved.  

This all happened Tuesday as we were preparing for the afternoon Mass.   Unexpectedly we were cut off from many of the things that we use for Mass: chalice and ciborium, server’s paten and, startlingly, the key to the tabernacle.   Fortunately we could retrieve substitutes of the first three items from the chapel sacristy, and Mass proceeded without incident.  But it was imperative to be careful about the host count because without access to the tabernacle, there is no way to retrieve additional hosts if needed for waiting communicants, nor to repose superfluous hosts after distributing.  Massgoers were a bit unsettled by my obvious “head count” at offertory.

In my experience here, there has never been a problem with the safe.  That reaches back fully twenty years, and possibly twenty-eight.  Only one half of the sticker remained from the locksmith who had last worked on the safe.  Fortunately, we were able to identify him from only the first word of his company name.  The locksmith who returned our call quickly clarified that his dad would have been the last one to visit us, as he had taken over the work ‘only’ twenty-three years ago.

Even as I write, he is in our sacristy tapping and rapping at the unyielding steel door.  Our walk-in safe is the envy of most priests who see it, with room inside for everything from chalices and ciboria to relics, big ol’ monstrances, the spare tabernacle, and cases of altar wine.  Keeping them locked away is vital for different reasons for different items, as some of them are ancient and irreplaceable, simply precious because of their materials, or in all cases except the wine, sacred.  These objects have been consecrated to the worship of God and have held Him Whom we adore.  

Practically speaking, it is a reminder of how thing-centric is our worship, as our God condescends to dwell among us.  From the first moment he needed swaddling clothes and a manger, then eventually dinner and a diaper, the Word become Flesh does not disdain our material encumbrance.  Since the Three Magi arrived and proffered their gifts, the things that point to His identity and are put to His purposes have been costly in their own right.  We give him our best, ideally, so we must take care of things to take care of Him.  For some of these things, we need a safe.

Unfortunately, they are a little TOO safe just now, equally unreachable for purposes divine or dastardly.  Still the reminder is welcome of how vital is the operation of a valiant and venerable (78-year-old!) piece of equipment, and how routinely we become accustomed to flawless function, until one day it doesn’t.

Monsignor Smith

Clear and blue

Out of the clear blue sky.  It’s an expression that means without warning or preliminary indication, something happens that there is no way to anticipate or expect.   

It was a beautiful morning just past eight o’clock when I arrived at my post in the Archbishop’s office.  The volunteer drew my attention to a strange report from New York City and we looked to the television.  There was the shining city with its two towers, one of them inexplicably billowing black smoke from a gaping hole in its side.  Then while I watched a passenger jetliner crossed the screen and punctured the other tower.  Debris flew and more smoke rose against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. 

I crossed the hall to alert the Archbishop, a New Yorker by birth and constitution.  His attention fixed on the events now filling every screen, he was pained and paralyzed for the only time in our long acquaintance.   After the first tower fell, I suggested he take the noon Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine, one of the very few of my suggestions he ever adopted.  

I do not remember when we learned of the attack on the Pentagon, or the plane downed in Pennsylvania.  By the time we all went together to the Basilica we knew that a single horrible attack had landed four devastating blows, and there was no reason to think there might not be more.  

You know how I am about anniversaries, so you will not be surprised that I have had my eye on the approach of this one.  Last week I had a long conversation with the priest friend who was with me and the Archbishop throughout that day, recalling as well our trip together two weeks before to that same city for a baptism and a wedding in the Archbishop’s family.  He introduced us to people and places important in his life, including some that would not survive the attack.   This week I had dinner with former parishioners, still friends, one of whom had been in the Pentagon when the plane hit.  Talking about what we recall of that day and what we did, our understanding at the time and what we know now, how we felt then and what feelings we nurture still, helped prepare me to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary fully and well. 

Two subjective experiences remain clear from that day of objective horrors.   The first is that as the Archbishop read us the homily he had prepared, every fiber of my being wanted to object, but I had already spent my single shot of usefulness in giving advice.  One word still sticks in my craw even these years later: he called what had happened a tragedy.  That is misleading, even wrong.  It was an attack.  It was a crime. It was in every sense literal and actual an atrocity.  Its consequences would indeed be tragic, and they are still playing out today.  It was however no tragedy, but rather a freely chosen evil act.

The other experience I recall with full clarity is that while we went about the rest of that upended day, I made calls to let family know I was okay, and to check on the parish and some friends.  While the Archbishop donated blood at Providence Hospital, I waited pacing outside the doors in front of television crews desperate for something to transmit.  I realized with clarity that somewhere else far away, in many places in fact, there was rejoicing at the same scenes that brought us horror.  Even before I saw the video confirmation, I mentally pictured the dancing in the streets that in fact was juxtaposed with our cities’ boulevards and ballparks, schoolyards and streets filled with demonstrations of grief.  

These are only a few of the concrete recollections that accompany me whenever something calls to my mind the murderous terror attacks of September 11, 2001.  As the quarter-century marker arrives, I bring all this to mind to discover what good God and man have brought from that day of evil, and what other changes for good or ill I can identify.

The cheerful optimism that dominated our vision and expectations of human behavior twenty-five years ago has been schooled by evidence and events sufficient to make us wary of certain types of promises and appreciative of genuine differences among people and cultures.  More has changed than simply airport protocols.  We share not only the skies but also our cities and our streets with people whose categories for good and evil, human and inhuman are not only different from but opposed to ours.  Whatever actions and events erupt from the friction that follows may well shock and dismay us, but it will not come from Out of the clear blue sky.  

Monsignor Smith

Did we know what we had

Appalachian beauty

Way back on Independence Day, in my homily I emphasized two aspects of our republic that were manifestations of the truth revealed in Christian doctrine; one of them was the immeasurable value and impact of a single human life.  The lofty example that day was none other than George Washington, the sine qua non of the American experiment, the unique and indispensable man. 

That life is a historical reality I have long contemplated and admired, studied and discussed.  Washington’s broad shoulders bear such scrutiny and his profile fits well into that frame.  Suddenly this week I was caught off guard by a very different profile whose very familiarity disguised its significance, but nonetheless another demonstration of the marvel of incarnation.

After a few days of searching, I cannot find memory of a day or time when I did not know who Dolly Parton was.  Her public life coincided almost exactly with my entire life up to this week when her death startled me and many with me.  I am not quite sure how she crept into my consciousness; maybe radio playlists ranged more broadly in those days. 

We weren’t country music people, my family or my friends, but we were in the footprint, and Hee Haw was near-weekly viewing.  As a kid I knew Porter Wagoner, whose program first brought her national attention, but whose trajectory tended quickly downward as her star broke away and took off.  Variety shows were a television staple then, as well, and the variety of entertainers featured was broad.  Everything distinctive about her fixed her image in the minds of even people who didn’t pay much attention to her genre of music, often as a humorous character.  Even among schoolkids, she was famous, she was funny, she livened up the punchline for any joke.   Then she started doing movies, where she wasn’t only funny – she was good.  

Only much more recently, having known so long who she was, did I find out what she was.  A life-long faithful wife (sixty years) of a reticent man.  An entrepreneur of near boundless energy and skill, turning Dollywood from a regional joke into a destination and example.  Not only a conduit but an engine of development and enrichment for the people of her impoverished mountain home.  She didn’t just make them proud, as was her stated goal; she made their lives better, too.  And she did things for people; not only her people, but more people than we can identify or count.  In everything, in the least likely place imaginable, a life of celebrity, she was a person of extraordinary generosity and grace.

Maybe fifteen years ago I heard Jolene playing and was startled by what an awesome song it was, and how deeply printed it was on my memory from four decades previously.  Not merely a singer, but also an authentic and relentlessly productive songwriter, throughout her long career she gave us so much that was not merely admirable and enjoyable as music and entertainment, but also experiences that were recognizable and true.  All of them drew us in to what they expressed without one nasty, vengeful, threatening, or even harsh word or sentiment.  More extraordinary generosity and grace; this comes into focus only after the fact.  

Obituaries mention her impoverished childhood, her large family and their Pentecostal church providing the foundation for her musical development.   Not in anything I heard her say was she ever explicitly evangelical, and yet.  Her disposition and her every action were clearly rooted in a familiarity with Christ,  and a knowledge of His life, and from that an understanding of her own.  There along with the rhinestones and big hair and slightly bawdy humor in which she mainly made fun of herself, she revealed a deep and developed conviction of what her life was for, and how precious to her was likewise your life, mine, and ours.  

This reality, recognized or not, is the root of the sentiment now sweeping the nation: thank God for Dolly Parton.  Her life and its impact are yet another example of universal and incarnate truth, as it is to be found only in America.

Monsignor Smith

All the light you can see without

Awesome shot of last week's solar eclipse
from Mallorca, Spain, by my brother-in-law Urs Schoop.  
Used without permission.

Just because the lights are off does not mean it is dark. 

We have just traversed the stretch of weeks on either side of the solstice that offers the most marvelous skies and morning light already at half past five when I walk over to the church for early Mass.  Inside still it is dimmer, but the illumination is underway and the stained-glass glows, the colors of the windows entering the dance with the colors of the sky as the gentle and golden light fills the contours and corners of the holy place from every direction and none over the next spectacular half-hour.

The routine of the others who come to the church first thing is to find and flick the switch that ignites a bulb or three, the blaze of which paradoxically casts the church back into harsh shadows and darkness.  I groan.

Just as some people swear they cannot hear unless the voice be amplified through a loudspeaker, there will always be people who are convinced it is dark unless the electric lights, and all of them, are switched on.  In so doing, they often demand their own disadvantage.

When I was a Boy Scout, we once had a night-hiking exercise in which we found our way along unfamiliar paths by designated markers as we went.  It did not take long for my group to discover that our flashlights were not helpful; instead, they blinded us to everything except what was in the bright small disc of their beams.  Practicing ‘light discipline’ and keeping all the lights in the group switched off allowed us to see revealed the sky itself with moon and stars, and the gentle illumination they provided to the piney woods through which we picked our way.  Once eyes grew accustomed to the light present in the darkness, there were both greater awareness and fewer surprises as we made our way toward the goal.    

As it has long seemed obvious to me that with less amplification, there is more that I can hear, so it is that up to a certain point with less artificial light there is far more to see.  How could light-discipline be applied fruitfully to our days to enhance our sight in other ways as well, to help us see what would otherwise go unnoticed, and perceive what under normal circumstances is invisible?  If stilling the noise around us is the first step to hearing the voice of God, what artificial light sources must we switch off to see what He is showing us?    

The adage about lighting a single candle still applies when there is complete darkness.  Just this week as the approaching equinox began to exert its restrictions on our daylight, holding back the sun more and more each morning, I have reluctantly resorted to switching on the bare minimum of lights myself when I open the church, for the sky stays mute and unyielding in its inked solidity.  I regret this violence, but the church would otherwise be too dark, and while that is something I can othertimes enjoy, it is impractical for the folks with work to be done and prayers to be said before the morning sacrifice is offered.  Only just before go-time at 6:30, through the sacristy windows that give out to the field, the rising sun sets fire to the treeline along Saint Lawrence, no small spectacle itself.   That, too, comes noticeably later each morning.  The slope of day’s decline grows steeper as the season’s change comes nearer.  

As summer dwindles and its sweetness yields to autumn and its decay, night claims more and more from our days.  Remember, though, before you reach for the switch earlier and earlier each evening: just because the lights are off does not mean it is dark. 

Monsignor Smith

So much foam

 

Can you imagine what she would say?

They didn’t talk like that back then.

It is one of the aspects of any production that can turn me away most quickly: anachronistic dialogue.  That is, one of the characters says something that a person would not have said at the time and place being depicted.  Whether a movie or other video production, stage play, or book, if one of the characters speaks in a way that is not consistent with the setting of the drama, for me, the whole thing collapses.

Ironically, it is our own time that stands out in the arc of history as the anomaly.  There are many things that characterize speech both public and private in our time that would never have occurred at any other time in recorded history. 

Neither during the Civil War nor the Revolution, nor in medieval times nor in Roman times, would anybody have spoken about his own feelings at all, much less as much as our modern depictions would lead one to believe. The constant gushing about affections and disaffections, hopes and dreads, and disappointments real and imagined, not to mention the endless romantic soliloquys that pass for plot drivers and denouements, simply would never have been uttered in any but our own self-obsessed time.  They say such things make for good cinema, but even that I question heartily.

Almost every other society that has managed to survive for any time on the face of the earth has valued some degree of form and formality in its discourse.   We have projected our insistence on constant and unrelenting casual familiarity onto situations and civilizations that would have found such a thing repellant.

And when, I have to ask, did everybody become such a potty-mouth?   Soldiers in the trenches didn’t use language so vile as one customarily hears from four twenty-somethings sitting together at a baseball game.  To project such shameful behavior onto other people in other times only amplifies the manifest disrespect.

Almost thirty years ago, well into the era of films that depicted everyone at all times as if they were simply twentieth-century southern Californians in different period costumes, there was a movie that was different.  I saw it because it was about the Civil War era, not because it had Spider-man (Tobey Maguire) in it.  Ride with the Devil depicted life during that time of conflict and irreconcilable differences that were political as well as personal, but in western Missouri far from the battle fronts and capitols.  It was shocking that all the characters, even the ones depicted as young adults, spoke like denizens of the nineteenth century, which made their actions more intelligible because they clearly thought like denizens of the nineteenth century.  It was shocking and refreshing all at once.

Speech not only reflects and transmits thought, but also makes thought possible.  We consider our age enlightened and point to astonishing technology as proof, but the speech one hears most often suggests that our concepts and considerations and our ability to apply them have deteriorated, because our language certainly has.  

Dialogue that is post-modern in form and content renders all the characters engaged in it as puerile, selfish, and ignorant.  This may be intended as a judgment on our forebears’ shortcomings, but in effect it delivers a devastating assessment of our own.  They didn’t talk like we do back then.

Monsignor Smith

Up to snuff

Too far gone?

What’s new?  people used to ask before the more personal and probing How are you? became the norm.  The response used to be the news, before ‘the news’ became something else entirely, less informative and anything but new.

Many summers past I have sung the praises of August for its languor and its leisure.  Still I rejoice in this most wonderful month of the year, but languor is in short supply.  It seems that new stuff is the order and object of the days.  

In the school, LED lighting takes the place of fluorescent tubes that most of us associate with classrooms.  It will be a great improvement that none of the kids will notice, being preoccupied with seeing and learning.  There is new paint too, though we did most of that last year; and flooring, startling because I thought we already did that.   Maybe sixteen years of wear makes carpeting old?

If that be then case then twenty years made the carpet in the rectory offices beyond old and almost disgusting, or so the staff insisted.  So new carpet has arrived here as well, under bookshelves, desks, and file cabinets no less, all heavy and hard to move.  Some new paint is coming too.  Once the smell fades the change will be hard to spot, save that things will no longer look old.

You all saw the new deck, which is both great improvement and no big change.  The improvement is that it will not collapse under us as we come and go or linger round the table; the sameness is everything else – same size and shape, same features (no elevator, fountain, or self-cleaning function), save the improvement that the materials will last much longer before this new deck becomes old enough to require replacement.

Things fall apart, but first they get old.  First repair, then replacement are the requirements of having the care of things.   Think for a moment about your kitchen appliances, which seem to age out much faster now than twenty-five years ago.  How exciting can a new dishwasher or refrigerator be, except that it actually fulfill its function where its predecessor ceased to do so?   Once the memory of the tattered and decrepit past has faded, the new and functional elicits no more joy than yet another hot day in August.  Where is the fun and excitement of newness in all this? 

Stairs that do not make you fear disaster, lights that do not hum and flicker attract no wonder or awe nor move hearts to gratitude, but rather by the absence of grave shortcomings elicit a contentment that all is as it should be.  The absence of applause and excitement is not disappointing in these circumstances.  Everything renewed is simply doing what it is supposed to do, being what it is supposed to be.  

And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." (Revelation 21: 5)  The God who did so marvelously create us did still more marvelously REcreate us, through Christ our Lord.  That adds no features, nor electronics, nor Bluetooth; no fresh new color or radical redesign.  Simply by the mercy of God, we are made not different creatures, but fully and perfectly ourselves, doing what we are supposed to do, being what we are supposed to be.  

August this year is filled with the necessary tasks to achieve the near-invisible improvement of refreshment and restoration.  Some few will notice, but fewer still will want to be informed when, resuming our routines at the end of summer, they make the inquiry, What’s new?

Monsignor Smith

Handwriting

Not a screen in sight.
This parlor cries out that it was made for writing notes.  
Who am I to ignore that?

This weekly letter lacks a manuscript made with my hands that involves ink and paper and handwriting purposely put together to reveal thoughts become a new thing.  I confess I type on a keyboard connected only by ether to a screen on which said thoughts take shape in light and dark but without substance.  This accomplishes a great deal in efficiency and legibility but leaves tangibility and durability wanting.  Bright shiny and ephemeral is rather less that I would hope to have to offer you, but there it is.  

You are good to bear with this underachievement, having been conditioned to it by almost all the communications offered to participants in modern life.  Every institution that sends me bills is constantly banging away at me to “go paperless” if I have not been forced already to submit to that disappointing regime by the terms of our original contract.  I assume your lot is the same.  

Being freshly returned from a trip abroad, I have taken advantage of the speed and convenience of direct digital communications to share information and images, often as quickly as I experienced them myself.  Each day I conveyed a passel of pictures and explanatory notes of What I Did TODAY For My Summer Vacation with a small group of volunteers who asked for such harassment.  The digital version of ooohs and aahs followed quickly by return mail, that is, text message.  

However satisfying this semblance of direct connection, I wanted more and better, so I sent three hand-written cards by post.   They required five, seven, and ten days, respectively, to arrive in the hands of their intended recipients, which seems an awfully long time compared to the agonizing seconds we wait for a return text message, but once the time had elapsed, these people actually held something in their hands that had come from mine.  

Some years ago, my younger sister took up once again the lost practice of sending postcards from her travels, most often to our parents but also occasionally to others of us whom she likes.  Her handwriting (printing actually) is charming and legible, and she has a knack for a cheery and informative message in a line or two.  How much more engaging it is to find that on the refrigerator door and examine it than to look at phone or screen held out to see.  Not a facsimile but a genuine thing to hold and turn.

At various and unexpected times over the past decade mom or dad handed me a stack of cards that I myself had sent them, a good example being the ones I wrote near daily during my first ever trip abroad, the eight weeks’ adventure that was my spring semester in Germany junior year - that would be 1985 for you history buffs.  Postcards of cathedrals, castles, and train museums with a line or two about fellow students, host families, and culinary adventures were almost all my parents had to go by to guess that I was alive and thriving.  It seems so little compared to the flood of conversation for today’s connected generation, but forty years later they endure to provide me with evidence and experiences I had long ago laid aside.  Try THAT with a text chain!

Because of these recent reminders of the superiority of material messaging, I am trying to make more of these missives, however brief, to draw together physical and personal realties for my far-flung friends and family who are like me awash in electronic stimulation and information.  Here is a thing for you, it says; I made it.

Quickly and quietly this letter has coalesced wysiwyg before me, and with a flick and a wish it will go to Carol at the reception desk, who will send it along with similar speed but no more weight to the publishers of the bulletin, who will then make it appear on paper. Hundreds of copies will then be boxed and delivered (UPS) to our doorstep, and artfully arranged by the doors of the church for all and sundry to take as they arrive and leave for Mass.  It will be posted online as well, ethereal and ephemeral but accessible, including on the “blog” that is my Pastor’s Corner of the parish web site, where it will be joined by a photograph of some or little pertinence and be viewed by people near and far some of whom I am convinced are what they call “bots.”   But there are regular bulletin readers who prefer the paper to have and to hold.  I only wish I could offer a manuscript.

Monsignor Smith

Preoccupation with temperature

 

Better than a cartoon

It’s hotter than hell out there!

Well actually no, it is not.  Then again, maybe it is.  Heat?  Flames?  I am not sure.  Some suggest an abiding, inescapable cold.  But hell will be infinitely worse, whether in temperature or some other form of misery.  It is an apt comparison, nonetheless.  

Funny, isn’t it, how many people get scandalized at the use of the H–E-double–hockey-sticks word?  The convention against saying “hell” casually, in polite company or in in front of children, is reasonable, but only in a comparable sense to our obligation not to swear or take the Lord’s name in vain.  

Similarly, we must not invoke damnation in vain – that is, casually, for dramatic effect, or as an oath.  But damnation not only is a very real possibility, but something which I have set my life to helping people avoid, and it would be a fatal hindrance if I were to fail to mention it in the most effective language possible.  So why do folks expect such vocabulary never to pass the tender lips of a priest, as if it would be in everyone’s interests to maintain everyone’s comfort?

Unfortunately, it is precisely to our own comfort that our interests are too often turned; mine are, anyway.  Yet even I bridle at the common expectation that I refrain from mentioning hell.  So while I don’t pepper my speech much less my homilies with hell and damn, it is vital that I draw your attention to their very real possibility for all of us.  

The cartoonist’s image of hell, with its flames, pitchforks, and always-descending escalators, may be reasonably dismissed by modern, educated folk.  But it would be foolish and dangerous to dismiss the reality of an unending, inescapable pain and grief that those images attempt to present.  My favorite reflection on hell is The Great Divorce, by C. S. Lewis.  This slender novel is an absolute delight (not what one might expect) and I devoured it in two hours.  Read it; it will rock your world.  More to the point, it will focus your attention outside of your world and my world, this world, and onto the real questions of how you will be spending eternity.  Though in honesty, I must admit that the great cartoonist Gary Larson had some pretty good insights, too.

Damn is even less useful a verb most of the time, since if God is its subject, it is too easy to escape with the logic that “a loving God would not do that to me for (insert offense here).”  Of course He wouldn’t do that to you!  He would save you by the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of His Son.  But you and I can do it to ourselves, or more accurately, can demand it for ourselves.  Our every decision and every action can be either a liberating step toward salvation revealed in Christ, or it can be a damning step toward, well, hell.  

We have constructed an air-conditioned cocoon for ourselves that we allow to lull us into thinking that we have mastered not only nature, but also, even more implausibly, our own eternal course.  Hurricanes, tornadoes, and the shortcomings of Pepco regularly shatter our Potemkin comfort.  Even that is temporary, and we easily return to our complacency.  How dare we?

Meanwhile, it is blistering, withering, suffocating, and altogether unbearable outside, but most decidedly not hotter than hell.  God is giving us this day, and this moment in it, as an opportunity to repent and be delivered from all that misery by His gracious mercy!

All of a sudden, it’s not so bad outside.

Monsignor Smith