Reflection for December 18, 2011

The shorthand image is that of the Annunciation, or a “terrible beauty” . . . breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. (George Steiner in Real Presences)

Back in the early 1950’s another seminarian and I were sent from Rome to the Catholic canton of Fribourg in Switzerland to learn French. During our weeks there I was once invited by a local family to spend a weekend at a mountain chalet near the village of Plaffeien – in the kind of world we find described in the story Heidi: “open to every ray of the sunlight and with a wide view of the valley below.”

Now this chalet was not the picturesque kind you find in travel folders. It was a rough wooden building partitioned into a limited space for the family and, under the same roof, a barn for their goats, cows and chickens. I can still remember as I tried to sleep in the hayloft above the animals at night how I could hear the shuffling of hooves, the lowing of some cow, the smell of their hides – as if the straw I slept on was not enough to keep me awake.

There is an opinion that it was just such a building in which Jesus was born. In olden times (even as today in Switzerland) herdsmen housed their animals along with their feeding troughs (mangers) not in exterior sheds but inside the house, a mere wall separating them from the human quarters. This may be why one English version of Luke’s account says Mary “laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them to lodge in the house.”

Is there any room in your soul for Christ to be born – or do you partition him and his mother off into some remote part of your being, far from the things you customarily dwell upon? Apparently the owner of the “chalet” where Christ sought entry was not ready or capable of taking him in – and so walled him off as if he were something less than human. We do that to a lot of people in our society (with whom the Christ of Christmas can identify). How much do you allow Christ to be a welcome guest within your living quarters, to illuminate the windows of your house for all to see?

In speaking of the lectionary readings for this Advent we dwelt upon the image of the Annunciation – suggesting that angels approach the quarters within which we confine ourselves (our cautionary abode) announcing Christ’s desire to “enter under our roof”. We mentioned the account about Joseph and how he was reluctant to receive him as he was conceived in Mary – but how he finally agreed and thus made of carpentry an immortal trade! We also mentioned Gabriel’s entry into Mary’s dwelling, asking her to take Christ within her womb. She too was astonished by the request but gave Christ the space to acquire a heartbeat within her and thanks to her within each of us.

How often does Gabriel come to you; how often does Christ seek shelter in this chaotic world within you as his means of reversing all that chaos? Most of the time he will come gently, quietly as at Christmas, most of the time in a thought, an insight. But he is not beyond coming violently, to sweep us off our feet. I mean he mentioned his having that option – as when in Mark’s Gospel he described himself as a housebreaker, as someone determined to break into every “strong man’s” house to tie him up (by way of miracle and word) and ransack all his goods. That’s how much he loves us – that if he can’t enter gently with the angel Gabriel as his herald, he may bowl you over, break down your door with the intensity, the relentlessness of his grace, his graciousness.

Reflection for December 11, 2011

Bethlehem Round the Bend

It was with much anxiety that the adolescent Marcel (in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time) boarded a train in Paris and set off on his first journey to the seaside resort of Balbec. He was a boy who depended on a familiar environment and predictable routine to feel secure and this excursion to a strange location threatened to trigger one of his asthma attacks. Nevertheless Marcel spent a peaceful night in his compartment and awoke to see the sunrise through the square of his window. Slowly the train came to a temporary stop at a little station between two mountains and Marcel caught sight of a tall girl emerging from a house and climbing a path bathed by the slanting rays of the sun. She was approaching the station carrying a jar of milk. “In her valley from which the rest of the world was hidden by these heights, she must never see anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She passed down the line of windows, offering coffee and milk to a few awakened passengers. Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky.”

Marcel goes on to recall, “I felt in seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and happiness.” Normally his routine way of life would have insulated him from noticing anything or anyone beautiful – but here at a remote train stop situated in a strange landscape his insulation had given way. He was open to the impact of this apparition. He was ready to get off the train of habit and spend the rest of his life with this lovely apparition. He signaled her to bring him some coffee. “She did not see me; I called to her . . . . She retraced her steps. I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a sun . . . dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating gaze, but doors were being closed and the train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn.”

I can’t help but think of Marcel’s train as an image descriptive of my life and perhaps yours. Doesn’t life for all of us become in some way a narrow corridor of habit – set upon wheels that convey us rapidly through time, equipped, yes, with windows through which we can catch a glimpse of the passing years, a passing landscape – of other people and an occasional sunrise? Otherwise our consciousness is confined – like that of the captives in Isaiah’s first reading and the Levites of today’s Gospel - to the familiar enclosure wherein we are lulled to sleep by the clickety clack of those wheels that relentlessly carry us through one day after another.

Until, thank God, we slow down enough to arrive at a station called Christmas, where we have at least a chance to stick our heads out the window and see the Virgin Mary, “flushed with the glow of morning”, offering us, if not a pitcher of milk, then a nourishment even more profound: her newborn son, destined to become one day our eucharistic bread and wine! But do we allow ourselves to savor this season of spiritual sunrise? Do we stay long enough in Bethlehem to allow Christmas to do for us what Marcel’s experience of that milkmaid did for him? How does he describe it? “It gave a tonality to all I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe, . . . from which to emerge now would be, as it were, to die to myself.” - - Time to sit up now! The narrow coach of habit that so confines your limbs and vision and mind and soul is coming round the bend. Bethlehem lies just ahead, offering you the vision of a real Sunrise and of a lovely lady dressed in blue and the experience – if only for a moment - of a world permeated with the poetry of God’s Word made flesh.

Reflection for December 4, 2011

Continuity

It was – I must say – funny to hear ourselves mixing reflexes with will power last Sunday as some of us responded to familiar expressions of the celebrant like “The Lord be with you” with our habitual response of “And also with you” becoming entangled with the new response “And with your spirit” – creating a audible traffic jam that took the edge off the change, making for laughter instead of aggravation. Laughter is often the Holy Spirit’s way of resolving differences. I’ve lived long enough not to be disturbed by such changes in the Church – so many have come and gone. The Mass is the thing, its continuity; indeed continuity is the thing! As Catholics we value continuity – and if the intent of the language change in our English liturgy has to do with the continuity of essential beliefs – then so be it.

Why last week I happened to catch on TV a Charlie Brown film in which Charlie wins a local spelling bee and from there gets caught up in a series of regional spelling bees until he’s a competitor in a national one – limelight and all. His life has changed; great pressures promising great rewards or public ruin – the consequence of our modern quest for upward mobility. Of course, he misspells the word “beagle” much to Snoopy’s dismay. Charlie feels ruined, brought down to earth. Things will never be the same again. And then back in his own neighborhood he sees Lucy handling a football, teeing it up, apparently oblivious of Charlie’s seeing her. He approaches stealthily and makes a sure fire run at the football, only to have Lucy lift it up as usual. Nothing has changed – he has returned to a continuity that may be stressful but keeps us as viewers always happily expecting Lucy’s guile and Charlie’s gullibility.

I’ve been reading Henry James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady. It’s all about a late 19^th century young woman who wants to break out of the mold into which all such young women were destined to be wed: to be domestic, relatively uneducated, raise kids, serve as their husband’s trophy wife and so on. And she is determined to break out of that mold; she refuses marriage to an aristocrat, to an American industrialist – both real catches. She must expand her mind, experience life to the nth degree. In this quest she marries an American expatriate in Rome who is a connoisseur of art, seemingly wise, a likely source of insights that could broaden her mind. He turns out to be a tyrant, expecting her to abide by his likes and dislikes; he only married her for her money.

Desolate, Isabel (for that was her name) finds comfort in Rome itself, takes drives among the relics of antiquity, the old churches, St. John Lateran, ancient ruins. “She had long before taken this old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her own happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe . . . She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion . . . This is what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship of endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers . . . the firmest of worshipers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation.”

Now this is said by a writer of Protestant background and of a story character of similar background who find in ancient and Catholic Rome’s long accumulation of human experience a grounding that does not resist new experiences but enters into them as remembered as much as new. That’s called “continuity” – a Catholic value.

Reflection for November 20th, 2011

There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility. Wallace Stevens 1942

In the days before television the trends of current events were presented to the public at the movie theater in a 20 to 30 minute documentary called The March of Time. The title must have been taken from that old saying, “Time marches on.” And so it does until whatever events were shown in that documentary have long since been swallowed up by time – indeed, even Time Magazine is getting slimmer and slimmer and may one day disappear like the people and events narrated in its contents.

You will hear Time’s relentless pace tolled out every day on our obituary pages – as in John Donne’s famous line: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And this relentlessness, this seeming inevitability of change, nothing holding firm, tends to get people down – so much so that in his Sonnet 65 Shakespeare can speak of Time as a kind of raging force which neither brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor . . . sea can withstand. And if that be the case, he asks, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower? / . . . how shall summer’s honey breath hold out / against the wrackful siege of battering days, / When rocks impregnable are not so stout / Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

And yet thanks to our Christian heritage, we defy Time’s rage even as St. Paul defies it in today’s second reading where he says of the risen Christ: For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. As Christians we believe that time need no longer be synonymous with death but experienced as a crescendo, as an overture to our living forever – somehow! And as such, each day becomes – no longer a roadblock – but a gateway to wider horizons. Time is redeemed. Indeed, if we are true Christians, really moved from the depths of our Scripture, we should confront the so-called rage of Time with a rage of our own. Or as the poet Wallace Stevens has written, we must confront the violence of meaningless Time with our own violence from within – which he defines as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality”. Translate “imagination” as creative faith, hope and love.

And so to Shakespeare’s complaint how with this rage of time can beauty hold a plea Stevens looks to art, poetry, and I might add the beauty of today’s Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Specifically Stevens refers us to the rage evident in the watercolors of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose flowers “make no pretence to fragility. They shout, explode all over the picture space and generally oppose the rage of the world with such a rage of form and color as no flower in nature or pigment has done since Van Gogh.” (Look up Epstein’s flower images on Google.com.)

As Christians we are often encouraged to be gentle, sweet, calm, pious amid the storms of life. But maybe rage should be the better expression of what we believe (as it was in subtle ways in the writings of Flannery O’Connor). Like Christ (whom we honor as so much more noble than monarchs of old, whose noble rage was shown when he chased the money changers from the Temple) we ourselves should live nobly, defiantly in the face of all that would reduce us to timid souls, cringing within an ominous universe. We should affirm life and beauty, stand up to all that has made of Time a dead end against which beauty cannot hold a plea, being so fragile. But what was Christ raised upon the cross but someone fragile – and yet he rose again as someone of whom the Book of Revelation says: His eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. Like an Epstein dahlia?

Reflection for November 13th, 2011

“I will open my mouth in parables, I will announce what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.” Matthew 13:35

I never did enjoy John Fowles’ novel: The French Lieutenant’s Woman. You follow the story looking forward to its conclusion and what happens? Fowles offers us a choice of three endings: 1. the hero marries his fiancée and not “the other woman” and the marriage falls flat; 2. the hero drops his fiancée and goes for “the other woman” who then takes off and disappears; 3. the hero finds “the other woman” again but things turn sour, so off he goes to America.

As passive readers we don’t like to have to choose between such alternatives and especially when each leaves one hanging! We expect the author to finish the job. We feel he owes us an ending without our having to work at it. We expect stories to end in a standard pattern - with the good guys winning and the bad guys losing as exemplified in last week’s parable of the ten virgins and this week’s parable of the talents.

Both live up to what we expect of a story. In the one the five wise virgins retain a supply of oil for their lamps and gain access to the wedding feast while the other five, foolish enough to have no reserve, end up outside. In the other, those who increased their talents are promoted while the fellow who buried his ends up gnashing his teeth. Nicely symmetrical, wisdom rewarded, stupidity punished!

But then I wonder! Are we to read these parables passively or does Jesus (and the Church) challenge us to come up with alternative endings to each, even as John Fowles does for his story? I mean, may we not rewrite the parable of the ten virgins so that we, as the wise virgins, share whatever surplus of oil, of luminosity we have with those who for whatever reason have exhausted their fervor, their capacity to brighten the world around them with faith, hope and love? Must those whose souls are empty have doors shut in their faces, never to share in the wedding feast of the Eucharist?

Or to switch to the parable of the talents – must it end with the poor fellow who buried his talent left to wail and grind his teeth in an anguish of crippled self-esteem? I mean, why can’t we change that, to intervene, to say to him, “We know that you are an anxious fellow when it comes to responsibility; that you impose on your master a stern visage even though he has already shown you confidence enough to bestow upon you a worth that’s meant to grow. So snap out of it! Step out of your intimidation; trust that whatever spiritual initiatives you may undertake will widen and deepen your experience of life. So here! We now give you two talents, as evidence of our faith in you and in the Holy Spirit to inspire you. Try again!”

I mean, may we not say that Jesus, having closed these two parables within the standard endings we expect, only did so to challenge us to rewrite their endings in ways that correspond to the behavior he describes in his Sermon on the Mount and to the way he himself behaves with people who are lame, paralyzed, immobilized, foolish, hesitant - mercifully?

Certainly, as far as our own lives are concerned, these parables are presented to us at our liturgies to encourage us to change the ending of our own stories. To encourage us to acquire a surplus of warmth and light to share with others; to be cognizant of the worth God has already bestowed on us and ever ready to multiply that worth by the graciousness we show to others.

Reflection for November 6th, 2011

“It is a good and holy thing to think of the dead rising again.”

“I never saw color as this year; the trees are like lamps, with the light coming from within.” So thought Cleotha Powers - in Paul Horgan’s story “The Peach Stone” - about the passing of peach orchards as she along with her husband began the long drive from their ranch amid the tumbleweed of New Mexico to transport the body of their two year old daughter (contained in a sandpapered wooden box) to the family burial plot in Cleotha’s girlhood town of Weed. The orchards reminded her also of how as a girl she used to catch up the peach petals by the handful, crush them and wrap them in a handkerchief to place in her bosom so that she might smell like peach blossoms – and of how her girlfriends used to say that if you held a peach stone in your hand long enough, it would sprout. But then no one wanted to hold a peach stone that long to find out and so they would laugh about it. But Cleotha believed the saying – and she especially believed it now in her bereavement.

Indeed, ever since she woke up that morning a spell had come over her. She had done all her weeping the night before. And now she never wanted to merely look at anything anymore; she wanted to see, to watch for any signals of something grand and eternal within the ordinary contours of reality – so much so that instead of relaxing for the journey ahead she felt herself leaning forward in the back seat – reaching with her eyes beyond the windshield - singling out things like this unusual beauty of the peach orchard. Or look - that dead tree! But still there’s that little swarm of green leaves on its top branch. And what’s that dazzling light on the road – like a ball of diamond light which danced and quivered so far ahead? Could it be a daytime star, sent to guide them? That it might only be sunlight reflected off the metal of an oil truck made no sense to her because, as I have said, Cleotha was trying to see! She wanted to catch a glimpse of where her daughter, whose inert form lay beside her, had gone.

And hasn’t that been the question that has preoccupied us ever since the dawn of our species? Our appetite for life and love, our insatiable curiosity bridles at the thought of our being ultimately and forever confined within a space of six feet by two. We want to know! And it was this need to know that now possessed Cleotha. Or to put it theologically, she was operating now out of faith and hope – that pair of eyes with which sorrow and love endows us. And so the most consoling thing she finally saw, once she and her relatives and friends knelt by the burial plot halfway up Schoolhouse Hill, was a boy coming down the hill from the school. He was framed in sunlight and she couldn’t help but notice his wonder at the people kneeling mournfully around a grave. So innocent of death, discretely coming down the hill shying away from the mystery and yet large eyed with a hunger to know in ways his schoolhouse will not teach him. And Cleotha found in his respectful curiosity confirmation of her own and all humanity’s need to know, to envision that “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns” that she cried out, “I believe, I believe” and she said it “as if she were holding the peach stone of her eager childhood in her woman’s hand.”

I’ve been holding a peach stone in my closed fist for 18 years now. And I’ve been leaning forward, not just looking but trying to see amid the unfolding wonders of Autumn signals of an even greater glory to come – somewhere beyond the windshield of my mind. And what I’m precisely looking for is the gradually unfolding presence of the son I knew, who I hope has had the patience to wait for me upon whatever path he has been traveling since his death, so that together we may continue what – so many years ago – was just beginning to be fun.

`

Reflection for October 30, 2011

You have but one Father in heaven and one master, the Christ (Gospel Acclamation)

When I was a minor seminarian (the stage of training that covered our high school education and first two years of college in a residential environment) – we were required to spend our afternoons and evenings in “study hall” in silence, preparing for the next day’s classes. (As a result I received good grades in this phase of my training because I HAD to study! If I had been on my own in a loose set up at home, I would have fallen so far behind that – well, one semester prior to my entering the seminary (while I was in first year high school, after three semesters) I received the Distinguished Flying Cross in Latin – i.e. a D an F and a C!

But getting back to my minor seminary days, there came a time, when I became an upper classman, that I was assigned to monitor the study hall – sit up front at a high desk and make sure that people were studying, that no passing of notes or monkey business was going on. I was, therefore, no longer among the peons but placed in charge! What a change in my personality! As soon as I saw or thought I saw any of the underclassmen giggling or whispering from desk to desk – in other words, challenging my “authority” (in other words trying to “make a fool of me”), I shouted out like some top sergeant – frightened even myself – in order to enforce order, to get people back to their books.

I didn’t like what I did; it seemed to have to do mainly with my ego – I wasn’t getting the respect I should get as study hall monitor and I soon abdicated the role – again probably to conceal my vulnerable ego under a low profile. Rising to a position of authority, therefore, has its risks; it can detach one from a sense of solidarity with others with whom you were so recently rubbing shoulders. Today’s readings – if read closely – deal with the importance of our not forgetting our sense of solidarity, of our sibling relationship – even when it is necessary for someone of us to be “in charge”.

The theme of this Sunday is stated in “Have we not all one father? Has not the one God created us?” and “Call no one on earth your father; you have but one Father in heaven,” which Gospel statement is repeated as our Alleluia refrain, if you listen closely. In other words, it is imperative that both those in charge of the community (at all levels down even to study hall monitor) not let the distance of their status elbow out the fact that we are all brothers and sisters of God’s family and should treat each other not as inferiors but as kin, even as peers, personally, as members of a family of faith that’s buffeted enough from the world at large not to need aggravations from within.

That’s a hard thing to maintain, a family tone to our interactions. The scribes and Pharisees whose authority still intimidated many a Jewish Christian in the days of Matthew seemed to have forgotten that sense of family; tended to embarrass God by their “shouting for order in the study hall” (which so often begets a shouting match among their subordinates) - instead of all members of the family valuing, loving one other as siblings under God.

To which the prophet Malachi pleads, “Why then do we break faith with one another, violating the covenant of our fathers” or of our one Father – whose presence is made sacramentally manifest at the head of our one table - in the Christ of the Eucharist?

Reflection for October 23, 2011

Declining the Frisbee

Toward the end of the Gospel of Saint Matthew (which is the Gospel from which our lectionary readings for this year are selected) Jesus is confronted by priests and scribes (experts in the Law of Moses) relative to the major topics of 30 AD – whether there is a resurrection from the dead, whether Jews should pay taxes to Caesar, what is the relative importance of the many commandments of Jewish Law. By the way, according to scholars, the Law was not simply the Ten Commandments but included an additional 613 other commandments, 365 interdictions and 248 other prescriptions – so that the question of priorities was bound to arise.

Many rabbis underscored the equal importance of all the maxims in expressions like: whoever transgresses but one of the commandments breaks his relationship with God just as much as anyone who transgresses all the commandments. Or: the lightest commandment should be held as important as the gravest commandment. Or: if anyone transgresses loving one’s neighbor as oneself, he will soon wind up hating his neighbor even to the point of bloodshed. Not much room for latitude in any of these cases. So something of these extreme interpretations of the Law lay behind the question put to Jesus: “Teacher, which commandment of the Law is greatest?”

But is this question sincere? So often in an argument someone will ask a question, pretending to seek information – no ulterior motive. But just as often, if not more often, someone asks a question already knowing the answer he wants! He does not really seek information but wants to test someone, wants to catch someone in his speech (as might happen at an Inquisition). Jesus seems to have detected this motivation among the authorities that question him in Matthew. It’s as if they launch a Frisbee at him and every time he refuses to catch it and get trapped in a give and take that leads nowhere. No, rather he always lets the Frisbee fly past his ear as he lifts the discussion to a higher plane.

In this case, Jesus doesn’t get lost among the trees of the scribal forest – to select this commandment or that. He simply sums up the whole law in a combined quote from the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is its equivalent: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He concludes: the whole of Scripture (and your life) pivots upon these two commandments – to love.

In effect he seems to say, stop becoming unhealthily scrupulous over things like gleaning wheat on the Sabbath or touching unclean people like a leper or Gentile. Reach down deep into the love that made you and let that flow forth – even as that wonderful river in the Book of Ezekiel flowed forth from the Temple and turned the Salt Sea into something sweet. If you adhere to this principle, the details will take care of themselves.

Spontaneous goodness – such as characterized Jesus – will prevail. Become a virtuoso when it comes to virtue and not forever an amateur.

There follows in Matthew then a whole chapter in which Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of the scribes – in terms like “Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.” Which leads to the question: are you as scrupulous about love and a deeper exploration of your faith as you are about your posture in church?

Reflection for October 16, 2011

Free at last!

I think it was in the autumn of 1941 (when I had entered first year high school) that the popular painter Norman Rockwell came out with his now famous illustrations of the Four Freedoms. We were not at war yet but we were sympathetic to Great Britain in its stand against the totalitarian system of Nazi Germany. Indeed President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had met on an American cruiser in a bay up in Newfoundland in August of that year to frame what has been called the Atlantic Charter – a declaration of Four Freedoms to which the democracies of the West were dedicated.

Now “freedom” was something the United States embraced way back in 1787 when Congress approved what is known as the Bill of Rights. The first two clauses speak of the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, of the press, the right to peaceable assembly and the right to retain arms. But when President Roosevelt first stated the Four Freedoms of 1941 in his State of the Union address he repeated the ideal of freedom of speech and worship (in keeping with the Bill of Rights) but added two more: freedom from want and freedom from fear. The freedom from want no doubt expressed his political philosophy embodied in such programs as Social Security. It meant that nobody should be subject to extreme need anywhere in the world. Freedom from fear meant nobody should have to put up with ruthless dictatorships, for example.

I remember well Norman Rockwell’s paintings – especially the freedom from want illustration showing an extended family on Thanksgiving Day, the aging parents laying down a platter containing a huge turkey upon a table full of other traditional foods and surrounded by the smiling, laughing younger members of the family.

But if we ponder our heritage of all such freedoms it comes across more often as having to do with “my rights” or as “freedom from” something. We don’t want to be oppressed. We want to be valued. Often in the last 70 years if comes across in terms of such songs as “I did it my way” or expressions like “I gotta be me” or in spiritual quests that take one far away “from the madding crowd” – like to India or Antarctica! Freedom seems to mean don’t crowd me; I should be able to do as I d----d please. It seems almost anti-social.

Is this what the Bible, what the Gospel mean by freedom: “Don’t tread on me”? The freedom to which the Gospel calls us is the freedom to love, to care! I mean I look at myself. In what way am I really in bondage? In what way am I kept bound, restrained, enslaved? I want to love, to break loose, to care but how much am I handicapped by the inherited prejudices of my ancestors, the party politics of my environment, my parents’ constant warnings not to trust anyone, the paranoia I pick up reading the news, the threat of failure in school, the presence of competitors who are more savvy than I, the precarious nature of my economic existence, my own sloth . . . I could go on listing the things external and internal that hold me back from doing the thing I really want to do which is ultimately to love, to care, to relate, to be generous, to be courageous, to be my best self, to be Christ.

May that not be the freedom that Martin Luther King longed for when he cried out “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty I’m free at last!”

October 9, 2011

Il Sacro Speco (The Holy Cave)

About forty miles east of Rome you run up against the mountains around Subiaco, the region to which a young St. Benedict retired around 500 A.D. to live in solitude and contemplation. An older hermit showed him a cave high up on the cliff of a canyon and there he remained until, drawn by appeals of others, he emerged to found the present monastery at Subiaco and the Benedictine Order which went on to civilize Europe’s barbarian ancestors. The original cave can still be seen within the walls of the precariously perched priory that was built around it ages ago. It has been incorporated into a series of three chapels dating from before 1100 A.D. There is a large upper chapel from which a stone stairway leads to the chapel built around the cave itself. Each chapel is a jewel. There are arches and slender columns, a marble altar covered with gold, blue and crimson mosaics. But most overwhelming are the frescos dating from as early as 700 A.D. which cover every square foot of wall and ceiling.

Obviously the monks who created these chapels were not content to hear the Gospel. They needed to see it happening all around them. And so they painted the walls and ceilings with splendid impressions of Gospel events. The upper chapel portrays the whole climax of Christ’s life, from his entry into Jerusalem, the kiss of Judas, the flight of the disciples, his crucifixion, the meeting with Mary Magdalene in the garden, his confrontation of doubting Thomas, to his ascension into heaven. There it is in reds, blues, purples, silver and gold. And then there are iconic images of Mary and saints. In the lowest chapel there’s even an image of St. Francis, painted from life when he visited the place in 1223. It’s tucked behind a corner at shoulder level and when you stumble upon it in all your vulnerability, his wide open, gracious eyes look right into your soul.

Well, as if the art weren’t enough, when Jane and I visited this treasure there was a wedding in the upper chapel. In other words, we were lucky enough to experience the place not as a mere museum but as an environment alive with faith and love. It was as though all those frescos were hardly relics of the past but beautifully present participants in the current event, beaming down with eyes strangely alive upon the equally beautiful bride and groom, family and friends - who were also beautifully attired. (Looking at them I understood why Italians rank among the foremost fashion designers in the world!)

Bellezza! Beauty! That’s what summed up for me the whole experience of that place and moment. Beauty. And after all, isn’t that what religion is ultimately about: becoming beautiful, perceiving and creating beauty everywhere, behaving beautifully and not just puritanically? And then I shuddered - for, standing there amid all that beauty dressed as I was in the khaki trousers, sports shirt and hiking boots of your standard American tourist, there came to my mind today’s Gospel about a wedding feast and I expected someone at any moment to approach me like the king in the parable and ask: “My friend, how is it you came in here not properly dressed?”

And I thought, “By golly, I’ve got to acquire a change of wardrobe. Not only literally but spiritually. I’ve got to divest myself of all the sourness and whining and grinding of teeth, the resentments, anxiety, excuses - the things that perpetually mute my beauty. I’ve got to get more joy, faith, love, vision, grace - in a word - more beauty into my life if I am ever to become eligible to enjoy the world of Christ so beautifully reflected here within this Sacro Speco of Subiaco.”

Reflection for October 2, 2011

A vine from Egypt you transplanted; / . . . It put forth its foliage to the Sea, / its shoots as far as the River. Psalm 80.

It’s good to get away. Jane and I decided, before the cold weather sets in, to return to Italy for a couple of weeks this past September. We chose the town of Spello, which is not far from Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis whose feast occurs on October 4^th. Spello is a hillside town, not large, built within an ancient wall, narrow streets, tile roofs, a parish church with a threefold fresco of the Annunciation, Birth of Jesus and the boy Jesus instructing the doctors in the Temple – done by Pinturicchio around 1500 AD. I must say, surveying these magnificent paintings with all their detail, contemporary faces, garments, landscapes, angels, golden haloes, colors, with all the imagination and work that must have gone into them . . . (my apologies to devotees of modern art) but they make Picasso look like a scribbler.

And what I mean by its being good to get away to a place like Spello and surrounding medieval towns like Deruta and Montefalco is – it revives one’s appreciation of the beauty all around us here and now; it rinsed my own vision of the familiarity that beclouds my appreciation of our Sonoma Valley – makes it come alive, fresh again even as the Valley of Umbria seen from our Spello window appeared so fresh, so much a painting, a work of art in itself.

Which ties in with our readings about vineyards for today. Our biblical writers use the metaphor of a vineyard to describe the world as God made it, as God wants it to be, as we should cultivate it. But familiarity, the distractions of politics, of commerce, of gossip, of self-interest – all those things that blind us to the deeper meaning and beauty of creation – turn this vineyard world (and valley) into a blur as we speed down Highway 12 or Arnold Drive – turn it into something that (figuratively speaking) might as well be unpruned, overgrown with thorns and briers, parched, open to trespass by every passerby or “beast of the field” as far as our notice is concerned.

For you see, it is not God (as the biblical readings suggest) who lays our vineyard world waste, but we in so far as we live detached from God, each other, the landscape out of which we were born, of which we are meant to be not just spectators but participants – even as St. Francis saw in the Sun, Wind, Air and Fire brothers; in the Moon, Water and Death sisters, in the Earth itself a Mother – in the whole of the universe around us on and beyond the reach of this globe – a Family of which we are the Care-Takers (the people who should Care!).

Why I reaped the reward of our trip to Spello this very morning when, in walking around the Plaza at dawn, the eastern sky, the silent trees, flowers, the chill in the air, the shops, the lamplights – after having become somewhat strange from seeming outside me for so long - quietly greeted me personally – you might say as a quiet vineyard, an environment no longer laden with sour grapes.

And so may we not make our prayer that of the Psalm for today: Once again, O Lord of hosts, / look down from heaven, and see; / take care of this vine, / and protect what your right hand has planted. // . . . give us new life, . . . / O Lord, God of hosts, restore us; / if your face shine upon us, then we shall be saved.

Reflection for September 4, 2011

God would never make it as a CPA.

At the end of James Joyce’s short story “Grace” a congregation of Dublin gentlemen has gathered in the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street to attend a retreat service led by an imposing preacher named Fr. Purdon. The men were mostly dressed in black, relieved here and there by tweeds. They included mostly commercial people, city clerks, moneylenders, even the owner of three pawnbroker shops – men of business (some with alcohol problems). The text chosen by the preacher was Luke 16:8: For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the Mammon of iniquity.

The preacher went on to say that this text was a text for business and professional men – like his congregation. He said he was there in the pulpit for no terrifying purpose (he wasn’t there to scare them into virtue) but as a man of the world, familiar with money, speaking to his fellow men. And so, even as they believed in tallying and verifying their accounts in every point, so they should rectify their accounts in this and that, balance discrepancies and come out even with God. (A celestial version of the Income Tax?)

That’s a smart way of getting through to commercial fellows; it talks their language. But if accountability is Fr. Purdon’s take on the Gospel, it doesn’t quite measure up to God’s way with us in September’s Gospel readings. There we hear Peter ask, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” And Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.”

He then tells of a king who wrote off a cheating servant’s debt out of compassion only to hear that this same servant squeezed the last drachma out of a person indebted to him. Rigid accounting despite experienced generosity! “All right,” says the king. “If you insist on a strict quid pro quo way of life, you shall henceforth live under the torture of a relentlessly quid pro quo concept of God – a creed without grace, compassion, forgiveness.

Then there’s that other parable in which a landowner hires early birds at $10 dollars an hour. In the course of the day he hires others at noon, three, five . . . When eleven hours are up he pays the early birds their $110 but grants a full day’s pay to the latecomers as well. That’s bad accounting. In a world of exact accounting some get more and others get less – which helps maintain the caste systems of history. But all the parable tries to do is introduce largesse, magnanimity into our world – making it more human, more divine. Of course we say such largesse is excessive, disruptive of an orderly commercial life – except when it’s you and me – when it comes to moral discrepancies – who need, who welcome such graciousness.

So again, would God pass a course in accounting? He’d probably be expelled – as in fact he so often is in our world of relentless, impersonal (yet often ineffective) quid pro quo accounting, a world always preoccupied with debt, ignorant of grace.