Reflection for July 5, 2009

The Way We Live Now

Just two weeks ago I chose with some trepidation a novel by Anthony Trollope called The Way We Live Now for use in a class at Springlake Village. I say with trepidation because it’s a fat novel of 425,000 words, published way back in 1875 – and I worried whether it could retain the interest of the class over a period of several weeks. I knew that critics consider it to be Trollope’s greatest novel – but even so. And then what should happen but a class member came up to me the other day with a copy of Newsweek, which loudly proclaimed The Way We Live Now as its top choice for current reading! That same day the news of Bernard Madoff’s 150 year sentence for fraud was announced and then I knew why Newsweek chose the book: the Madoff ripoff and the recent collapse of overambitious, even greedy financial ventures make the Trollope story relevant.

It’s about the kind of speculation that was going on in America and Britain in the late 19^th century. The old fashioned way of living off the produce of the land and manufactures was giving way to the temptation of making money off of money, i.e. to trust your money to some promising enterprise (the more fantastic the better) and then triple it without raising a finger. Take the risk, which isn’t such a risk when your investment is in the hands of seemingly competent managers, people in the know.

The metaphor of the card game occurs a lot in the novel – played by idle young aristocrats until early in the morning. Of course you start out betting cash but as players lose, their cash runs out and so they sign IOUs. Pretty soon, for want of ready cash, the IOUs become the currency of the game. For instance, Sir Felix has a streak of luck that leaves him with a handful of IOUs. Since he himself is out of cash, whenever he loses, he pays off the winner with the IOUs he has from Tom, Dick and Harry, which leaves the winner dependent not on Felix but on Tom, Dick and Harry to pay up. This gets entirely out of hand. IOUs become so worn and old that they never get paid. They are pledges of no value at all, mere paper the way so many purchased shares in today’s marketplace have become mere paper – the pledges of companies gone bankrupt – or of a Mr. Madoff who spent people’s investments on himself.

Indeed there is just such a fraud described in the novel. A company is formed whose aim is to build a railroad from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz in Mexico (we’re talking the 1870’s). Who would want to take such a train? Yet the project is promoted and gullible investors offer millions of pounds – which end up in the hands of a company that is primarily interested not in the railroad but in the printing of more and more shares. As one of the promoters says to a more scrupulous friend: the object of their enterprise was not really to build a railway to Vera Cruz “but to float a company.” Whether the railway should ever be constructed, “it was clearly his idea that fortunes were to be made out of the concern before a spadeful of earth had been moved.”

I’m kind of glad I went into a Franciscan monastery when I was a mere child. It left me ignorant of “the way we live now”. Which reminds me of penniless Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Stephen used to grub loans from more successful people like George Russell, whose pen name was AE. When Russell asks Stephen to pay up, Stephen meditates: must I pay it back? when? do I have to pay it back? not really, because my body has undergone so much molecular change that I’m not the same Stephen I was when I borrowed it. But then, no. Stephen has a conscience, something we seem to have lost, considering “the way we live now”. And so Stephen concludes: “A.E.I.O.U.”

Reflection for June 28, 2009

Sleeping Beauty

Today’s Gospel episode about a young girl whom Jesus raises from a deep sleep brings to mind all those Sleeping Beauty stories that have become a part of our culture, for instance the one we rarely hear about in the Book of Tobit. That’s one not so much about a girl gone comatose but about one - named Sarah - who was victimized by a jealous demon named Asmodeus. This demon had already strangled seven successive husbands who dared approach her on their wedding night, so that what began as a tragic predicament was fast becoming a joke. After a seventh night of frustration, Sarah’s maids could hardly repress their mirth over her plight.

But every such story has a prince. In Sarah’s case it was her distant cousin Tobias with the angel Raphael. Raphael encouraged Tobias to wed Sarah and advised him on how to deal with the demon. So upon their wedding night (even while Tobias’s diffident father-in-law was digging an eighth grave in the backyard) Tobias placed the heart and liver of a fish on some burning embers. Hardly an aphrodisiac, the smell drove Asmodeus all the way to Egypt, never to return. Sarah was at last free to experience fulfillment.

Now this story, like all stories, has its deeper meaning. The heart and the liver were considered to be the seat of intellect and feeling in ancient times. Possession by Asmodeus could symbolize Sarah’s repression of her own intellect and emotions, making her toxic to be with. But Raphael’s “heart and liver magic” does the trick: it revives her timid intellect and emotions to release her creative capacity.

As such, Sarah could be a symbol for all women down through the ages, who, because of male dominion, grew up abused and disenfranchised - all the while longing for release, longing to BE in the fullest sense of the word. Perhaps it’s that hope that underlies all such Sleeping Beauty stories: Snow White; Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who fell asleep in that field of poppies; Briar Rose who fell into a deep sleep of 100 years, hedged in by an impenetrable tangle of thorns. And then, again, there’s today’s New Testament account about Jairus’ nubile daughter, seemingly dead to the world, surrounded by professional mourners who impeded all access to her until Jesus came along. Of course these stories may also symbolize the repression of the feminine in men as well - insofar as the feminine has long been a metaphor for heart, sensitivity, intuition, things men are often too shy to express.

However you take it, the stories always have a happy ending. They predict that God by way of some emissary or influence will (despite all frantic patriarchal resistance) eventually release the oppressed and repressed feminine in our world to make its unique contribution toward a better, more candid, playful yet profoundly serious society and Church. The late Dorothy Parker already provides evidence of this happening in the polite yet caustic poem she once addressed to the condescending men folk in her life:

In youth, it was a way I had / To do my best to please, /

And change, with every passing lad, / To suit his theories. //

But now I know the things I know, / And do the things I do; /

And if you do not like me so, / To hell, my love, with you!

Reflection for June 21, 2009

E Tenebris (out of darkness)

When I was four years old my family visited my grandmother at a convalescent home. Like other visitors, my parents set up a picnic on the lawn of the institution. I remember then wandering off to the edge of a small pond and – how it happened I can’t remember – I soon found myself deep below the surface of the pond, it being not as shallow as I thought. I still recall looking up toward what seemed the far off, sunlit surface of the water, convinced that I would never see my brand new world again. Except that somehow I did rise to the surface and was lifted out – to make my way through life more carefully thereafter.

This experience of near drowning is a favorite metaphor of Old Testament writers. It captures that feeling of dire need which overwhelms us in so many ways – more often perhaps in times of mental depression, sorrow. Listen to one of the passages to be found in the psalms:

Psalm 69: Save us, O God, for the waters threaten my life; I am sunk in the abysmal swamp where there is no foothold; I have reached the watery depths, the flood overwhelms me . . . Rescue me out of the mire; may I not sink. Let not the flood overwhelm me nor the abyss swallow me up.

Of course even as the disciples in today’s Gospel have to wake up a sleeping Jesus, the Old Testament writers express the same dismay at God’s often seeming indifference to their plight:

Psalm 44: Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Why do you hide your face? Arise, help us!

Nevertheless, they do trust that God will answer – for they see in God someone whom even the wind and the sea obey:

Psalm 89: O Lord, God of hosts, who is like you? You rule over the surging of the sea; you still the swelling of the waves. You have crushed the sea monster with a mortal blow!

Indeed, it could be the disciples’ familiarity with these Old Testament passages that compelled them to appeal to Jesus to save them, sensing in him a power akin to that of God. Nor were they disappointed, for he awoke and quieted the storm – even as he does, whenever the Church is buffeted by head winds and high seas (although he seems to take his own sweet time about it!).

This Gospel story is much like the one in which, instead of rising from a cushion in the boat, he comes to his terrified disciples walking on the water. But in both he is present in a way we ourselves can experience – thanks to the metaphor – when we sink into despair, -- though none of us, I assume, have had to go through what Oscar Wilde went through in the later stages of his life. Yet even he found hope in these stormy episodes of the Bible – as expressed in his poem E Tenebris:

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand, / For I am drowning in a stormier sea / Than Simon on the lake of Galilee: . . . / My heart is in some famine-murdered land / Whence all good things have perished utterly, / And well I know my soul in Hell must lie / If I this night before God’s throne should stand.

(Here he worries whether Christ sleeps, is indifferent to him – but then concludes)

Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night / The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame, / The wounded hands, the weary human face.

Reflection for June 14, 2009

Festival of the Body and Blood of Christ

(once known as Corpus Christi)

My childhood memories of Corpus Christi, or perhaps I should say of the Corpus Christi procession that followed the Mass, remain vivid. In St. Ludwig’s quite German parish it stayed within the confines of the church building. All of the parochial school children were involved, processing up and down the aisles in front of the acolytes and the men carrying a golden canopy over the priest, who in splendid robes carried the Body of Christ aloft in a silver monstrance. There were flower girls scattering rose petals; there was fragrant smoke spiraling up out of the censers. And, of course, there was music: Ecce Panis Angelorum; Panis Angelicus; Tantum Ergo Sacramentum.

It was only later during my sojourn in a less inhibited Italian parish that I was surprised to see this show burst right out of the church into the alleys and avenues of South Philadelphia to fill the very gutters with rose petals. Remember now that Corpus Christi was celebrated in those days on a Thursday so that all this liturgical pomp and circumstance (candles, incense, acolytes, cloth of gold, children and pious adults with folded hands, music) intruded upon what was a workday with all its workaday traffic!

But since the neighborhood was 99.9% Italian, the parade wasn’t seen as an intrusion. Customers and dealers along the outdoor market stalls made the sign of the cross as the priest passed by. People in the procession waved or called to neighbors as they stood in their storefronts or looked down from the second story windows of row houses. Of course the scent of incense had to compete with smell of fish and carbon monoxide - but otherwise, the Body of Christ, borne upon this river of faith, dominated those secular streets for a couple of hours before returning to its tabernacle within the portals of a church called King of Peace. (In ancient times, I understand, the priest carrying the Host would stop to bless an old tree here, a bridge there, a mill here, a public building there, intent upon magically changing the City of Man into a City of God!)

I’m not sure such processions take place anymore, what with everyone moving to the widespread, less intimate space of the suburbs and a new theological emphasis on the Body of Christ as a sacrament to be rather consumed than contemplated upon a pedestal. But I think the symbolism of those old processions is worth remembering, especially in this secular age when the only parades we see are either commercial spectacles with floats enthroning Miss Bisquik or some Nike celebrity or military juggernauts where rocket launchers usurp the place of Christ’s Body and marching boots expel every echo of the Panis Angelicus.

But maybe I’m premature in assuming that such Corpus Christi processions have disappeared, because doesn’t such a procession commence after every Sunday Mass we attend? Having fed upon the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ at Communion time, don’t we all still flow forth from our sanctuaries every week to inundate our neighborhoods, workplaces and schools with Christ’s presence in our hearts - to make an otherwise secular world sacred again? Aren’t we all collectively the Body of Christ made mobile well beyond the confines of his tabernacle? Why then not make it a custom to take a handful of rose petals every morning to scatter furtively here and there at work, school and marketplace as befits our grand procession through this world – as subtle reminders of the fact that life is not some long day’s journey into night but a pilgrimage whose destination is everlasting joy.

Reflection for June 7, 2009

Trinity Sunday

We arrive today at Trinity Sunday as the climax to the Easter season. By following the flight of Christ on Ascension Thursday we too have arrived at the top floor of the universe and today the Liturgy would raise us a notch higher – as if our elevator had an extra button that can take us through the roof of the universe into the very nature of God. Now it’s not easy to deal with the nature of God intellectually. But the Liturgy’s approach to the Trinity is not intellectual but graphic and experiential. So let’s look at the three readings selected for this Sunday.

The first reading has us recall the day when Moses assembled the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Horeb (Sinai) and how the mountain “blazed to the very sky with fire and was covered with a dense, dark cloud – and how God spoke out the fire and all they could hear was a voice but saw no shape.” The reason for this shapeless appearance of God was to convince the Israelites never to reduce God to the shape of anything we know, to the shape of a man or woman or animal or bird; not to identify God with the sun or moon or the stars – to bring him under the control of our biases. In other words remember God as total Otherness, transcendent beyond anything you know.

And why? Because his Otherness, his transcendence will empower you to transcend whatever else in this world claims “ultimacy”, claims to be the “last word” – whether it be a king or nationality or race or philosophy or wealth or sex or yourself! It’s easy to fall into idolatry; people thrive on celebrities whose 15 minutes of fame reveal the shallowness of their claim to Otherness - for if you observe them closely you find they are a dime a dozen. Israel by responding to that voice without a shape was to become a nation not subject to mirages, to false horizons to restrict its spiritual destiny – and the same goes for you. God alone is absolutely Otherness in relation to whatever you see and on Mt. Horeb he calls on you to share his Otherness so that you may become so much Other than you think you are; so much Other than how the systems of this world would classify you.

And now let’s go to the Gospel reading for Trinity Sunday which serves as a mirror to the first reading. I mean in the Gospel we also have a mountain with disciples gathered around it and here again we have a voice speaking. But it is not speaking out of fire and smoke (out of an inaccessible Otherness) but out of the risen Jesus. Whereas God in the Old Testament reading has no shape, here he condescends to take on a shape, a human nature like ours. He presents us with a face, the face of Jesus.

And what does this voice say? “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. . Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” God’s Otherness (incarnate in Christ) is reaching out to embrace others, telling his disciples to baptize all nations – to guide them through their own exoduses from whatever enslaves them to meet the Otherness of God in Jesus. And the impact of that? That they and we may all take on through communion with Christ the Otherness of God – become each of us God’s manifold face to the world – and his healing touch.

The Holy Spirit (the third person of the Trinity) comes into play in the second reading where it says in so many words: “It is the Spirit, the Breath of God that can infiltrate our lives and thus make us so much Other than we are; sharers of God’s Otherness – so much so that we may dare address God as Abba – papa – with all the boldness of a son or daughter – dare allow ourselves to walk – wide eyed - into the very heart of the Trinity – as members of the Triune Family of God.

Reflection for May 31

“On our dryness pour thy dew” (Pentecost Sequence)

The Holy Spirit arrives among us in a variety of ways. For starters, its presence is described in Genesis 1:1 as a mighty wind sweeping across a formless abyss, summoning light, sky, land and life into being. Or again, in the Book of Exodus it issues from the bosom of God as a strong east wind, piling up the waters of the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to emerge from Egypt and begin their journey toward the Promised Land. And then there’s today’s description of the Spirit’s descent upon the apostles, sounding like a strong driving wind and manifest in tongues of fire, symbolic the Spirit’s intent to set the whole world on fire with love. On the other hand, the Spirit may come in gentler ways as it came upon Mrs. Larkin as narrated by Eudora Welty in her brief story “A Curtain of Green”.

Every day one summer it rained a little. But on this particular day the daily ration of rain had not come. As late as five o’clock the sun was still ablaze. Women of this Mississippi town sat by their windows fanning themselves. Only Mrs. Larkin remained active, working her garden despite the warmth. Ever since her husband accidentally died the year before, she’d enter her garden every morning and work away aimlessly. She would plant carelessly, without regard to harmony of color. “And if she thought of beauty at all, . . . she certainly did not strive for it. . . . It was impossible to enjoy looking at such a place. To the neighbors gazing down from their upstairs windows it had the appearance of a jungle.” Mrs. Larkin didn’t care. Nothing had any meaning for her now. True, at times she felt something flutter within her breast like some bird struggling to fly free but then lapsed into deep depression. Then under the sun all she could do was keep “chopping in blunt, rapid, tireless strokes. Her eyes were dull as if from long . . . bewilderment. . . People said she never spoke.”

How well that describes many us who, bewildered by disappointment or death, become skeptical of any deeper meaning to things. And what’s left for us to do but keep busy: hoe that garden, punch that clock, turn that channel. It’s enough to drive anyone mad! And angry is what Mrs. Larkin became on that arid afternoon. It was the whistling and smile of her helper Jamey, “the colored boy who worked in the neighborhood”, that got to her. What right had he to smile? What right had he to contemplate some “flickering and beautiful vision” when she beheld only emptiness? She took tight hold of her hoe and approached Jamey as he bent over his work. She raised the hoe in silent anger to strike out at this dark angel and his music, his dream, and this ridiculous universe. But then Eudora writes: “In that moment, the rain came. The first drop touched her upraised arm. Small, close sounds and coolness touched her. Sighing, Mrs. Larkin lowered the hoe. . . . She stood still where she was, close to Jamey, and listened to the rain falling. It was so gentle. It was so full - the sound of the end of waiting. In the light from the rain, different from sunlight, everything appeared to gleam unreflecting from within itself. . . . The green of the small zinnia shoots was very pure, almost burning. One by one, as the rain reached them, all the individual little plants shone out, and then the branching vines. The pear tree gave a soft rushing noise, like the wings of a bird alighting. . . . A wind of deep wet fragrance beat against her. Then as if it had swelled and broken over a levee, tenderness tore and spun through her sagging body. It has come, she thought senselessly, . . . against that which was inexhaustible, there was no defense.”

Mrs. Larkin fainted. Jamey ran and crouched beside her. In a beseeching voice he called her name, “Miss Lark’! Miss Lark’!” until she stirred. And so the story ends. But who can doubt that beneath that gentle rain, symbolic, too, of how God’s Spirit works within our lives, whatever it was she had felt flutter within her breast was finally set free?

Reflection for May 24, 2009

Before Abraham came to be, I AM.

Alice was upset with her kitten, which had unraveled her spool of yarn. “There it was, spread all over the hearth-rug, all knots and tangles, with the kitten running after its own tail in the middle.” That was a good description of the world Lewis Carroll lived in when he wrote about Alice in his 1871 tale Through the Looking Glass, because by the mid 1800’s Western civilization was no longer the well wound up culture it had been. Inventions, industrial growth, new scientific knowledge seemed to toy with its once simpler view of things. Darwin in 1859 had published his theory of evolution about the span of natural history stretching eons beyond the stretch of biblical time – in our case to some slug in the shallows of a continent now long gone. Again, by the 1850’s locomotion had reached speeds of almost 35 miles per hour and speech was being wired from London to Liverpool as if speakers were face to face. “What next!” one might ask. The world we had so wrapped up into a tight spool was unraveling too fast to be reeled in.

Alice, as she fell asleep in the story seemed to pass through her mirror into a parlor the reverse of her own. Left became right and words like Jabberwocky ran from right to left. Clocks smiled and chess pieces spoke and the world outside looked like a gigantic chessboard of crisscrossed streams and hedges – a maze even as the future to Lewis Carroll seemed a maze. And that’s what lay before Alice, bizarre discoveries (actually less bizarre than the actual changes about to come like flight, autos, rapid firing weapons, radio, H Bombs, television, deeper layers of pre-history and cosmic space, cell phones, computers). Include new philosophies to compete with truths and norms once held in common – and you know Alice faced a wild ride.

Just traveling hand in hand with the Red Queen of the chessboard landscape was quite a thrill. Alice could hardly hang on. “Faster! Faster!” cried the Queen. Yet the faster they went, the more the trees and other things remained stationary. “Faster! Faster!” cried the Queen and Alice pleaded, “Are we nearly there?” The Queen replied, “Nearly there? Why we passed it ten minutes ago. Faster!” When they finally stopped Alice noticed they were under the same tree where they began. Alice said that in her world you generally get somewhere else when you run so fast. The Queen said, “Here it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” (Making a living in modern times seems like that!)

Lord knows, since the 1850’s our civilization has speeded up, from little fabric biplanes to jets to rockets, from carriages to NASCAR vehicles, from 35 miles an hour to 200. Then there’s the speed of communication, trips to the moon. Lewis Carroll was clairvoyant. But he also seemed to foresee that no matter how fast, far and wide technology may take us, no matter how widely our minds may expand under the influence of other civilizations and of deep probes into molecular worlds or outer space – will we really have gotten anywhere? The same spite, fears, polarizations, wars prevail; the same need to start all over again. What a parable that is – Alice’s journey into the inverted future of the looking glass.

Was Carroll trying to tell us that progress could unravel not only our civilization but also our faith? It can for those whose faith is weak. But I’m sure Carroll (who was a deacon of the Anglican Church) dealt with his own scary dream by remembering the last words of Jesus in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of time.” There’s the foundation that sets us up to find in change not disarray but the challenge of the Holy Spirit to grow ever wiser and creative partners of our Creator God.