Reflection for July 3, 2011

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . .

It being the 4^th of July weekend, I picked up our home volume (VIII) of the History of the United States written by George Bancroft way back in 1863. I wanted to review all the reasons Pennsylvania’s delegate John Dickinson gave for NOT declaring Independence in 1776. By July 2^nd of that year all 13 colonies had allowed their delegates to support the declaration, even though the revolution was not going too well. An American army had been thwarted in Canada and even more threatening, a British fleet had arrived outside New York harbor, landing 32,000 hardened soldiers on Staten Island – and Washington’s army was still a hardly organized militia.

So Dickinson had good reason to be cautious. Indeed, his reluctance to sign made sense:

1. A declaration of independence would not add one soldier or any amount of supply to the small and poorly equipped American army.

2. To win in the field we would need experienced allies, like France and Spain with whom we had hardly begun to negotiate.

3. And why would they gamble on us in our present state of unreadiness, with no real victories to speak of?

4. And do we really want to lose our privileged place in Britain’s

world wide commercial empire?

5. If we break with England we may only unify against us British public opinion, much of which is now sympathetic to our grievances.

6. Indeed a declaration of independence will alienate many of our own countrymen.

7. Is it prudent to declare independence when the various governments of our states differ in so many ways? Don’t we need some uniformity, a constitution before we launch out into the unknown?

8. What about the boundaries of the thirteen states - as we advance west? Won’t there be competition, some expanding and others confined - without some rules of the game after we leave Britain behind? Will we end up at war with one another?

Obviously Dickinson was a man of logic. Impetuosity in the midst of vast uncertainties hardly seemed the right course to take. Like many down through history he used reason to erode the enthusiasm of his peers. He absented himself from signing the declaration. True, he contributed to the revolution in other ways and eventually helped frame the Constitution – but he anticipated he would forfeit the esteem of his countrymen when he wrote, "My conduct . . . , I expect will give the finishing blow to my once too great and . . . now too diminished popularity."

All of which reminds me of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles – when the original disciples of Jesus still were a hesitant bunch, attending services at the Temple, requiring that Gentile converts go through the hoops required to be Jewish first – when almost out of nowhere came St. Paul to snap them out of their tentative selves – to see that the time was ripe, that the Church must be a universal community where neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female distinctions should prevail – for all were one in Christ. Indeed, may we not say that in some way the 4^th of July was triggered by the Gospel movement of long ago?

Reflection for June 26, 2011

Inebriates of Christ

The Book of Daniel opens with a story about four Jewish youths who are supposed to have lived back around 580 B.C. They were exiles, whom the Babylonians transported to Shinar (Iraq) after destroying Jerusalem in 587 B.C. Now these four young men were chosen by the Babylonian king to learn the language of their captors and serve in the king’s palace. It wasn’t uncommon for a conqueror to take young captives and assimilate them into their culture to fill various bureaucratic jobs. The Egyptians did that with young Moses. And I think of our own country’s “Indian Schools” like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Native American boys were required to wear trousers, boots, shirts, ties, jackets and caps and sit row upon row in classrooms whence they were supposed to emerge indistinguishable from their Euro-American counterparts in everything but complexion. Jim Thorpe, the All American athlete, was a Carlisle product. As selected aliens, these Jewish lads were privileged to dine on the very food and wine served at the king’s table. But they abstained from what to them was non-kosher fare. This worried their Babylonian mentor who said, “If you don’t eat, you’ll lose your ruddy complexions and weight and the king will have my head!” “Don’t worry,” said Daniel, one of the four. “Just serve us vegetables and water and we’ll be fine.” And in fact, after ten days, “they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youth who ate the king’s rich food.”

This story was written around 167 B.C. to encourage Jewish youth then living under Greek oppression to emulate ancient Daniel and his friends. On the face of it, it encourages Jewish youth to abide by kosher food laws. But on a deeper level it says, “Don’t become consumers of Greek culture; don’t accept the stuff your conquerors dish out to you. Eat their cuisine and you’ll soon be consuming their ideas, their polytheism, their purely rational philosophy.”

There’s a German saying: “Man ist was er isst.” - a man is what he eats. Consume the junk food served up to you on every channel of television or radio (the commercials; a comic’s cynicism and scapegoating; the “philosophy” inherent in the pop lyrics; the celebrity cult; the paranoia of the news and talk shows; the vindictiveness of politics) and, far from your being the consumer, it is you who will be consumed, swallowed up by a culture that can chew you up and spit you out as it does all the natural resources of the world around you. Assimilate whatever a marketplace of shallow taste and ideas feeds you and ultimately it is you who will be assimilated. Christianity supports the position taken by Daniel: “I will not be assimilated; I will not be enticed to give up my identity, my tradition, my faith in God and the sacredness of nature and the worth and creative potential of every human soul. I will not be used and manipulated; I will not be taken for granted, reduced to a statistic or commodity.”

But won’t we starve if we ignore modern culture’s vast display case? No, because like Daniel, we have an alternative diet to insure our spiritual (and physical) well being. We dine at the table of Christ. Every Sunday we first assimilate his Word, served up to us by our lector and homilist and then partake of a special bread and wine which in a mysterious way contains Christ’s very Being. In the process we who assimilate Christ and his mentality are assimilated by him. We begin to share his vision of reality. We become his Body, his poetic Presence in the world, ruddy, potent, a manifestation of what a free, divinely radiant humanity must be. Emily Dickinson, intoxicated by Nature, boasted: “I taste a liquor never brewed - / From Tankards scooped in Pearl - ”. And so say we, inebriates of Christ.

Reflection for June 19, 2011

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” William Blake

For those parishioners who could not attend the parish education session which reviewed the Sunday lectionary readings for this month of June (or have not as yet picked up a copy of the session’s content) we spoke of a thing called the iconostasis – the image stand.

For those of you not familiar with Eastern Orthodox services, the iconostasis or image-stand is a high partition built between the congregation and the church sanctuary and altar. It’s designed to quasi-block the view of the congregation from the central action of the Eucharist. In other words you have to peek through its central door to see what’s going on, granted that at communion time the priest comes out to the people with the bread and wine.

It seems to resemble the set up of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem where the Holy of Holies (God’s inner sanctum) was hidden behind a veil and the altar of sacrifice itself was isolated from the courtyards of the Temple where men and women and visitors were kept at a reverent distance from the rituals at the altar.

What people do see, as they look at this iconostasis or image-stand or partition, were icons – colorful, beautiful full length paintings – panel by panel – of Mary, the mother of God, Jesus as Creator of the world, the angel Gabriel (of the Annunciation), various saints – all with eyes fixed upon the worshipers. And what eyes - wide, serious, deep, gazing into the eyes of every worshiper!

And why these stares? To communicate to each of us something of each image’s power of perception, to help us see the way Mary sees, Jesus sees, saints and angels see. To help us see all that we cannot see because of a spiritual glaucoma that dims our vision – our eyes and minds being so clouded by the news of the day, pettiness, contentiousness, distractions, prejudices. And so thus, in a way, these icons on the iconostasis do not block our vision of the Eucharist that goes on behind it but invite us toward a deeper appreciation of the breaking of the bread, cleanse us of our obstinacy, our vagueness so that Christ might gain access to our souls and bodies – as the poet William Blake once said: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

In seeing one of these Eastern Orthodox iconostases, we members of the Roman Church might feel a bit deprived, because we don’t have such a lively, colorful structure offering us a spiritual portal into the banquet of God. But as we discovered during that lectionary session, we do have our own iconostasis. It’s built around the lectionary and psalm readings that are recited before we bring forward the bread and wine and sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” as we pass on to the heart of the Eucharist. For don’t these readings “precede” the central part of the Mass? And don’t they give us a glimpse of God’s way of seeing, biblical moments of insight, miracle, words that enlighten us – deepen our powers of perception, if we but heed them? Try as time goes on to see the lectionary readings as standing, like the Greek iconostasis, between you and our communion table magnetically drawing you toward a deeper experience of God’s presence in our midst.

Reflection for June 12, 2011

Frustration

The Vigil Mass for Pentecost Sunday, celebrated on the day before, begins with the Tower of Babel reading from the Book of Genesis. You recall what it’s about: an effort of the human race to build a tower to the sky and “so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.” The story also notes that everyone spoke the same language – so coordination was guaranteed. Bricks and mortar were prepared and work begun. Except that, part way up, the whole effort became a divine comedy. God diversified their language – this fellow speaking let’s say Greek, this one Persian, this one Japanese. The project collapsed into the state of affairs we have today where differences of language (and ways of thinking) often isolate people from one another, polarize them, contributing to misunderstandings, even war. So what’s the message of the Babel story? Efforts on our own to attain some kind of supremacy in this world can often lead to frustration, confusion – to wit: look at all the Empires that collapsed since 1900 – including that once powerful Soviet one.

There is a Greek version of such frustration - called the Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a practical joker, liked to undercut the doings of the gods. So he was condemned to push a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it slip his grasp and roll down again – whence he must push it up again and again forever. The philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) saw in Sisyphus the fate of the human race – condemned to aspire to a kind of divine power and independence only to find itself at the bottom over and over – hopeless but ever aspiring to someday know and control everything. Exhaustion – from generation to generation! Human existence as no comedy at all but forever tragic!

But then we have another story of upward ambition that’s a bit comical perhaps because it is influenced by our Christian belief in a God who does not play games but is ever ready to support our efforts with grace. It’s the famous 1931-32 Academy Award winning short film featuring Laurel and Hardy – called The Music Box. The Music Box is a player piano that Laurel and Hardy have to deliver to a home situated at the top of a high outdoor concrete staircase. No problem. They unload the piano and begin lifting it from step to step – one in front, the other in back. And then commences their Sisyphean adventure. They meet a woman coming down the steps and have to come back down to the pavement; they meet a mother with a baby carriage (as I remember) and have to come back down; they lose their grip and the thing goes banging down into the street below. It’s all so human – the human comedy of Nature not cooperating with our proud minds and plans. The force of gravity not conducive to our reaching whatever top we strive for. They finally get it into the house above the steps – but only after wrecking things working the piano through the doors and windows. And the homeowner gets so mad he goes after the thing with an axe. The effort ends in a shambles. And all the while, as I recall, there was a driveway up to the house Laurel and Hardy could have used!

Could it be that all the frustration we experience in life trying to “reach the top”, be it spiritually or in the affairs of business, politics, some quest for perfection, is a message from God saying: you can’t do it on your own. You need the Holy Spirit – who knows your frustration, shares your labor and as St. Paul says stands ready to “come to the aid of our weakness.” Look at the disciples after Jesus’ Ascension. Fishermen, hardly cosmopolitan, maybe hardly educated. No wonder they were intimidated by the mission Jesus gave them: to preach his good news to the farthest ends of the earth. And then came that wind and those tongues of fire – and they were now ready not to climb mountains but to move them!