Reflection for May 6, 2012

“I saw new heavens and a new earth”

            When someone you love dies suddenly, the world seems so empty.  Work, supper, errands, bills, plans - everything seems so irrelevant.  Your mind and heart are elsewhere.  The landscape as you drive to work now looks strange; like the receding panorama you see from the rear platform of a moving train, a panorama rapidly being taken over by the past tense.  It’s a world that you feel you have somehow left behind – of little interest anymore.

            I wouldn’t call it simply a state of depression.  There is something positive or curious about it.  I think you begin to feel distant from your everyday surroundings because the death of the one you love has made you suddenly more conscious of other dimensions you were till then too preoccupied to notice.  It’s like a wake up call. Caught up in this merely three dimensional world; caught up in the daily melodrama of the workplace, in the ever changing, never changing politics of “current events”; performing the several roles of breadwinner or housewife or entrepreneur or bureaucrat or “life of the party”; reciting the lines expected of us - it’s no wonder we assume that this theatre of our own preoccupations is the only world there is.

           

            And then someone like my young son suddenly departs (4/28/93) and you experience grief yes, but also what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes in a poem called “Death Experienced”.  “The world is full of roles we act,” he says:

                        But when you went, a streak of reality

                        broke in upon this stage through that fissure

                        where you left: green of real green,

                        real sunshine, real forest.

                        We go on acting.  Fearful and reciting

                        things difficult to learn and now and then

                        raising gestures; but your existence,

                        withdrawn from us and taken from our play,

                        Can sometimes come over us, like a knowledge

                        of that reality settling in,

                        so that for a while we act life

                        transported, not thinking of applause.

            No - that initial sense of emptiness or distraction we feel when someone we love suddenly departs this life cannot be simply called depression.  It can be the commencement of an awareness of a realm so real, so wonderful, so durable that it leaves us – as it were - standing upon our every day stage immersed in the descending light, colors,  pattern and theology of the rose window of some grand cathedral.

                        I am so grateful to a dear friend for giving me this poem – unwittingly - on the second anniversary of the very hour I received a call that my son was dead.

Reflection for April 29, 2012

You must change your life

            It has been said that poems or paintings or any worthwhile work of art should not be seen simply as objects of pleasure – things to be admired, acquired.  They should not be seen as something passive. Rather, such things should be seen as active, as if they impose on us a moral obligation to change our lives; they reach into our passivity and call us forth to become as beautiful as they are.  Take for example Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Candle Indoors”, which opens with:  Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by. / I muse at how its being puts blissful back / With yellowy moisture mild night's blear-all black.

            Hopkins is charmed by the glow coming out of an evening dwelling – that makes the night somehow hopeful.  But in his second stanza he shifts from admiring that candle indoors to sensing it is imposing upon him a moral obligation to become a luminous person; to trim his own lamp, so that others might draw hope from his own candle indoors even as those evening suburban homes aglow which I passed on my solitary walks when I was 10 years old were saying to me, “You have a moral obligation not to despair over the dysfunction of your own home; you have an obligation to save your soul by becoming yourself a candle indoors whence others may derive a moral obligation to have faith, to make of this otherwise dark world  a home alight with warmth.” 

            Of course, I didn’t think of moral obligations when I was 10 years old.  It takes time to catch the voice, the face, the moral imperative that’s confronting us in every “candle indoors”, in every poem, painting, sonata, or biblical episode we encounter. A good example of the gradual nature of spiritual awakening is the case of Mary Magdalene as she sadly faces life on Easter morning as nothing but an empty tomb. But then she sees two angels in white sitting there, asking, “Why are you weeping?”  Then next, she sees a gardener asking her, “Why are you weeping?”  And only then does the apparent gardener get personal, no longer asking questions but simply and intimately saying, “Mary!”

            That’s the way it is with life.  At 10 years of age I pass by those warmly lit dwellings and they awaken in me only a desire for a home that’s more than a stop on a suburban trolley line.  Then, thanks to Hopkins, I later realize those warm domiciles were signaling to me what I myself   must become – a beacon in a world gone dark.  Those angels, that gardener, those suburban dwellings, Hopkins’ poem, every sonata, or vase of flowers, or the evening star, or church interior, or Eucharist lays a moral obligation on you and me to trust that each of us is the most important person in the world.  And over time we should come to realize that the voice addressing us personally (like Mary) out every sonata or Iris or novel or sanctuary or out of every chalice or face we meet is none other than that of the divine Poet out of whose very being came the whole world as “home”, like a rose arbor cascading with galaxies – intent on making you and me his latest poem.

Reflection for April 22, 2012

Why all the fuss?

In the 1970 film Little Big Man we follow the adventures of a fellow named Jack Crabb (played by Dustin Hoffman) during the Indian Wars of the 1870’s. Crabb, early on, is captured and taken into a Cheyenne tribe led by Old Lodge Skins (played by Chief Dan George), whom he thereafter refers to as “grandfather”. Circumstances then return him to his own people but later on he is reunited with Old Lodge Skins – and when he reenters Old Lodge Skins’s tepee, the Chief, who is blind in his old age, welcomes Jack (or Little Big Man) back, saying, “Greetings, my son. Do you want to eat?” No rising, no outstretched arms, embraces, tears, no fuss (as in our parable of the Prodigal Son) but simply, “Greetings, my son. Do you want to eat?”

Later on, after much harassment by the U. S. Cavalry, Old Lodge Skins in a quiet moment decides it is “a good day to die” and invites Little Big Man to climb with him from their encampment up a mountain to a place he has chosen to lie down and die. After a ritual dance and chant and words of thanksgiving to the Spirit who lives at the center of the universe, the old Chief lies prone on his back, face to the sky. He closes his eyes and waits - with Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) watching. After a while it begins to rain hard and Old Lodge Skins gets up shakily, saying something like, “Sometimes the magic doesn’t work.” Then aided by Little Big Man he begins to return to his encampment saying, “Let’s go back to the tepee and eat.”

Old Lodge Skins believes the universe has a center (as does our biblical and church tradition). His problem with modern white men is: “ . . . they are strange. They do not seem to know where the center of the Earth is.” Knowing that himself, he seems always calm, graceful, not easily excited like modern “civilized” people. And so when he is reunited with Little Big Man he simply says, “Do you want to eat?” And when, after his buildup to his self-appointed meeting with death, nothing happens – there is no fuss, no frustration, no bewilderment, no emotion; simply, “Let’s go back to the tepee and eat.”

Now I know that in today’s Gospel when Jesus, after showing his wounds to his frightened disciples, asks, “Have you anything here to eat?” he is validating the fact that he is no ghost, that he is real enough to eat and digest food. But if we overlay what we know of Old Lodge Skins’s style on today’s reading, may we not also suggest that Jesus was trying to snap his disciples out of their unproductive astonishment, “their incredulous joy” (meaning: what they were seeing was too good to be true)? When amid all their wide-eyed, hands thrown back, mouths agape reaction to his risen presence, he simply calls them back to our everyday world with “Have you anything here to eat?” – may he not be saying, “Why all this fuss? So I have risen from the dead? Why should that surprise you? It’s been foretold in Scripture for centuries, it has been the aspiration of human hearts since the beginning of time. So now it’s happened! So let’s get on with it; tell everybody about it – that death has been conquered and need no long freeze us in our tracks and frighten us into crucifying each other. And by the way, do you have anything here to eat? That looks like a piece of fish over there.”

The effect? The disciples are startled into recovering their sense of hospitality. They no longer stand there idle but begin to grill that piece of fish as prelude to their going of into the wide, wide world encouraging people to stop making such a fuss over this transient thing called death.

Reflection for April 15, 2012

Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them “Peace be with you.”

It’s consoling to know that no matter how firmly we lock our doors, Jesus can still break in upon our privacy, bringing with him the radiance of a divine world we’ve long forgotten. There was a time, of course, when our doors and windows seemed to be wide open, when our senses of sight, hearing, touch, imagination were especially sharp to pick up the traces of God’s Spirit all around us, be it in a rose arbor or blue jay or the sound and scent of a seascape. Or as Wordsworth put it: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, . . . But driven by some radical anxiety, similar to that of the disciples in today’s Gospel, we learned early to bridle our senses, to detect only the ominous instead of the wonderful in our environment. We learned to think survival, to lock our doors, shutter our windows - to dwell within a world of business gray.

Still, even as we grow older, Christ can intrude upon us as he did upon those mournful disciples. Now and again, by way of little signals, he can appear among us to remind us that there’s so much more to reality than our doubting minds will allow - as he did with Anne Porter, who tells of a wartime Sunday morning walk in 1940’s Manhattan with the littlest of her sons. First Avenue was empty and gray. No one was up. The bridges over the East River stood silent like great webs of stillness. Returning home past locked-up shops, she paused to notice one window heaped with old lamps, guitars, radios, dusty furs - And there among them a pawned christening-dress / White as a waterfall. That’s how Christ and the real world he represents can break in upon us - so that suddenly we realize how much we have let death constrict our minds and, if only for a brief moment, find ourselves ready once more to share in Christ’s victory over death, to explore with him once more the brilliant, eternal NOW that lies beyond our muted senses.

Marcel Proust in his masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time writes often of such moments when, for instance, the mere taste of a French pastry dipped in tea would lift his hero, Marcel, out of the boredom of his Parisian social life to taste again the sacramental quality of his childhood village of Combray - where the discovery of a simple hawthorn bush flooded him with affection and the names of the village streets (Rue Saint-Jacques, Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, Rue du Saint-Esprit) made him feel he dwelt in nothing less than a suburb of God’s celestial Jerusalem. And then there was the village church of Saint-Hilaire, whose sculptured facade and stained glass interior made it seem like a gateway into depths light years beyond the shops around it. And its spire! From wherever young Marcel viewed the local landscape, that spire always looked as if it were the very Finger of God tenderly touching the earth.

Indeed, so profoundly did he remember it that, later in life, were he to find himself in a strange quarter of Paris and to ask directions of a passerby to an intended destination and were the passerby to point out some distant spire as the place to turn to reach that address, Marcel would stand motionless, oblivious of his original destination, remembering the spire of his childhood. Only after a seemingly interminable moment would the passerby see him then begin to walk a bit unsteadily, turn the appropriate corner - but as Marcel himself comments, “The goal I now sought was in my heart.”

Moments of epiphany! Moments when Christ and the fullness of life he represents intrude upon our shuttered world! Stay alert! Their frequency may be only dependent upon how often you would like them to happen.

Reflection for March 25, 2012

Reflections on Jenny

I especially remember two things about Jenny. At the literature sessions I conduct in the Spring Lake retirement community’s music room she would always placidly glide into her front row seat five minutes after the hour. Jenny did not seem to live in clock time but in what the mystics might call real time. Somewhere in the course of her life she had acquired the pace of Paradise itself - which is perhaps what made her seem so ethereal to me – airy - afloat as it were - not as much subject to the grip of gravity as we are.

Nor was it only her late arrival that impressed me but the blithe way she paraded in! For Jenny was an individual parade - a pageant of simply one person - as she passed delicately through our lives always wearing a beribboned straw hat and wreathed with diaphanous shawls; clad in pastels of lavender or combinations of pink and purple, iris or rose right down to her ankles - as colorful as a rainbow - more like a child or an angel than an elderly widow. And all of this seemed quite deliberate to me, as if she were determined to live in one season only: Spring - determined to allow Death to have no dominion. As a nurse and spouse of a doctor, she knew human frailty well - had seen the shadow of Death fall upon young and old. And I think somewhere along the way she decided to confront that shadow with lavender and thereby hold it at bay while she gracefully went about her business exploring the Garden of Eden all around her. But Jenny’s pastel spirit was housed within a fragile body. One day my phone rang and a voice said, “Jenny is dying.” It was early evening when I arrived at Warrack Hospital’s intensive care unit. How stunned I was to see her so colorless, her breathing short, her eyes so vacant. And I thought, “So this is what happens to Jenny and someday to me. And what’s the use of all the lavender and lace we contrive to forestall Death.”

But what I didn’t reckon upon as I left her bedside (just moments before her death) was Nature’s imminent intention to strike up the band! To spoil Death’s intent to abort Jenny’s parade! For as I drove down Highway 12 toward Sonoma at sunset a glare in my rear view mirror caught my eye. There and in my side view mirror the whole sky had become an incandescent orange across which there stretched clouds ranging from pink to rose and , yes, to lavender. Then, looking to my left and right and directly through my windshield there were enough wisps of cloud and high mist reflecting the setting sun to make the whole valley before me - in the direction of oncoming night - glow with deeper shades of purple and violet. I mean, the whole sky in every direction was full of the colors of Jenny, as if, even as her soul took flight from that frail body, she had left her whole wardrobe behind, shawls, scarves, ribbons, skirts - scattered here, there and everywhere across the heavens in a final gesture of departure. Or could it be that God himself was laying out by way of all those splendid clouds a whole new, celestial wardrobe for Jenny composed of all the colors of the rainbow out of deference to Jenny’s taste.

I experienced my faith revived. The whole panorama seemed to be a message from Jenny herself saying, “Don’t let appearances get you down. See how gloriously amid my pastels I have survived the ravages of Death.” And I could imagine her already somewhere on the other side of that setting sun, arrived at last in that realm of real time (beyond clock time) of which she already seemed so familiar. Jenny’s son later told me that she died at 8:19 PM, precisely the moment when I beheld that sunset. Of course, then I began to think, if Jenny died at 8:19, could it be that God expected her at 8:14? It would be quite consistent with Jenny’s blithe tendency to arrive anywhere - five minutes late.

Reflection for March 18, 2012

“Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: The God of heaven has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem . . .” First Reading Cycle B

Someone has said we walk through life backwards. We see the past and the immediate present – to some degree – but tomorrow is a different matter. We’re never sure about tomorrow until it happens. Who could guess on September 10^th, 2001 that the Twin Towers would collapse into a pile of rubble on September 11^th? How could I have known in 1950 as I brooded over my studies that a confrere in Rome would have a breakdown which would lead to my taking his place and travelling down a path of studies that would change my life far beyond my imagining?

Back in the 500’s BC a Jewish poet composed Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion / . . . our captors asked us for songs . . . “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” / How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, . . . / May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you. This fellow’s face is toward the past, the homeland he knew, the Temple of Solomon, David and the Hebrew heroes of biblical history. He is confined among the Jewish exiles in Babylon (modern Iraq). Back in 587 BC the Babylonian armies crushed the kingdom of Judah, put an end to the dynasty of David, reduced Solomon’s Temple to rubble, deported the psalmist and his compatriots to a ghetto far away. His face was fixated on the past; his heart was broken.

But then came news reports out of tomorrow – rumors that a new Persian king named Cyrus was swallowing up one kingdom after another right up to the frontiers of Greece – and about to swoop upon the psalmist’s Babylonian captors. An unexpected tomorrow was becoming today. And what’s more, this Cyrus was not a monarch like the ruthless oppressors of the past (the Assyrians and Babylonians with names that were enough to scare anybody: Ashurbanipal, Esarhaddon, Nabopolassar). No, this Cyrus believed in the diversity of peoples. He favored returning the prisoners of former empires to their homelands where they might rebuild their temples, revive their worship, cultivate their land, all at Persian expense! They would not be allowed to become political powers again; but they could have Persian governors of their own ethnicity!

Who could have predicted this – a savior who was not a Hebrew, unfamiliar with Hebrew history, a worshipper of the sun god Marduk – a total alien, the kind condemned by the prophets - used by God to propel the Jewish people into an expanding tomorrow? Judah (as a political entity) would be transformed into Judaism – the former state would become a Church – guided by priests instead of corrupt royal families, focused on a new Temple and on a fresh collection of old religious traditions known as the Bible.

No longer would political boundaries be a problem. Jews could go anywhere in the world (which they did) bearing their Book, making pilgrimages to Jerusalem’s new Temple, held together not by politics but by a creed, their contemplation of true God and true behavior. Initially their defeat by the Babylonians, the destruction of their homeland and almost of their faith was something for this psalmist to lament – but now as he turned away from yesterday, surprised by how God was rearranging his tomorrow, he had reason to step into that future full of expectancy.

God works in strange ways – and as far as we are concerned in even stranger ways when the next stage of human liberation will be achieved by a nobody out of Nazareth who turns out to be the Grace of God made flesh.

Reflection for March 11, 2012

Campfire Girl

Among Eudora Welty’s stories is one called “A Visit of Charity”. It’s about a fourteen year old Campfire Girl named Marian who, dressed in a red coat and white cap and bearing a potted plant, pays a visit to an Old Ladies Home upon a wintry day. The place itself, made of whitewashed brick and reflecting “the winter sunlight like a block of ice” must have added to the chill. The nurse who opened the door was also dressed in white. “I’m a Campfire Girl,” said Marian. “I have to pay a visit to some old lady.” The visit was worth three points (toward a merit badge?), which will prove to have been the only motivation Marian had to visit the place. The nurse asked if she were acquainted with any specific residents. “With any old ladies?” stammered Marian. “No – that is, any of them will do.” The nurse took her down a corridor to one of the rooms and knocked, saying, “There are two in each room.” “Two what?” asked Marian as the nurse pushed her through the open door. Suddenly Marian was alone with two old women.

One was feeble but up and about. She wore “a terrible, square smile . . . on her bony face.” With a claw like hand she plucked off Marian’s hat. “Did you come to be our little girl for awhile?” she asked - and then snatched the potted plant. The other woman was lying flat in bed, irritable. “Stinkweeds,” she said, referring to the plant. And so it went, with the one being cloyingly sweet and the other increasingly cranky over every remark her roommate made. The tension in the room made Marian go rigid.

The irritable bed-ridden women summoned Marian to her side. “Come here!” Marian trembled. (The other woman explained: “She’s mad because it’s her birthday.”) “It’s not my birthday,” screamed the woman in bed, “ . . . no one knows when that is but myself and will you please be quiet . . . or I’ll go straight out of my mind!” Marian “wondered about her . . . for a moment as though there was nothing else in the world to wonder about.” It was the first time she had ever experienced anything like this. Then the old face in the pillow slowly collapsed. “Soft whimpers came out of the small open mouth . . . she sounded like -- a little lamb.” Surprised and embarrassed, Marian turned to the other woman and said, “She’s crying!”

And with that she jumped up, grabbed her cap and, eluding the other lady’s grasp, ran from the room, down the hall, past the nurse and out into the cold air. “Wait for me!” she shouted to a passing bus and jumped on; then sat down and took a bite of an apple she had hidden for herself.

Even back in the early Church some Christians preferred the company of pleasant folk over the apparently shabby ones. I myself once visited a nursing home almost every day where I had an aged relative and I must admit, I sometimes bridled at the thought because of the condition of so many of its residents – and the forecast it gave me of my own inevitable physical and mental deterioration. The New Testament Letter of James tells us to get over that; that a treasure awaits us at the margins of polite society – a treasure Marian almost acquired when she said, “She’s crying.”

And what is that treasure? An awakening of our closed minds, of our muted senses and consequently of our hearts, of a sense of solidarity with people in pain, indeed an awareness of our own pain, the loss of that numbness we characterize as equilibrium. In other words, an awakening of our humanity! Marian didn’t stay long enough to fully experience such an awakening but hopefully one day she’ll return to that Old Ladies Home with something more than a merit badge in mind.

Reflection for March 4, 2012

Despite the Transfiguration they saw no one but Jesus.

Today’s Gospel about the Transfiguration of Jesus offers us an insight into what happens when faith is awakened and later subsides, when what is a profound understanding of our Catholic tradition becomes shallow due to routine, familiarity. Peter, James and John are lifted to a vision of Jesus in all his significance – resplendent with meaning, set against the rich background of the Old Testament in the persons of Moses and Elijah. And then, when they come off that high, what happens? The radiance is gone; they no longer see anyone but Jesus – un-transfigured, the too, too familiar figure of routine piety, a plaster saint.

Beware of spiritual, mental shallowness. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby, which tells of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age - the Lost Generation of the 1920’s - shallow characters abound. There’s the description of parties at Gatsby’s mansion that last from 9 in the morning to well past midnight, hundreds of guests coming and going – who don’t even know Gatsby. It’s a generation adrift from old traditions, excited about easy money, booze, good times – shallow. People become ecstatic over someone they have never met before and then pass on to some other novel experience. Phony.

In one scene Nick, the narrator of the story, walks into the mansion’s grand library, there to find a solitary fellow, a bit loaded, excited about something. Nick inquires and the fellow says, “What do you think?” “About what?” replies Nick. “About that . . . They’re real.” Nick again replies, “The books?” The fellow nods. “Absolutely real – have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and – Here! Lemme show you . . . See! It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter . . . What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But . . . What do you expect?”

I once knew a man who worked in a bookstore in Manhattan who told me wealthy people would come in and ask for four yards of red, six yards of blue . . . meaning yards of books of the same color for decorative reasons. Not to be read but only seen as symbols not sources of wisdom. How many Christians have a similar decorative interest in the Gospels and the deeper regions of our Christian tradition – pages uncut?

Shallowness. A dangerous thing. There is another character in The Great Gatsby named Tom Buchanan – a wealthy jock, star football player in his Harvard days, has a string of polo ponies, bored stiff with his wife and with his girlfriends, nostalgic for his playing days. Dangerous. An empty mind, starved for intellectual exercise, is susceptible to the first book one reads – and in Tom’s case it’s a diatribe about “The Rise of the Colored Empires”. Now at last he has something to think about – a threat to civilization, to his wealth, to occupy his vacant mind. A single issue takes over – he is obsessed with this one book – and moreover now thinks he is smart, possessed of an “intellectual” vantage point from which to judge society as a whole.

Lent is a season when the Church encourages us to deepen our understanding of Scripture, of the Eucharist, of the profound meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, of the relevance of all this to the deepening of our understanding of who and where and why we are in this world. Don’t let the opportunity pass without cutting a few pages of the sacred heritage you hold in your hands.

Reflection for February 19, 2012

September 3, 1943 – The Allies land at Salerno to liberate Italy from its Fascist regime.

September 9, 1943 – I enter the minor seminary of the Franciscan friars at Graymoor, N.Y.

September 30, 1943 – Pope Pius XII promulgates his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu.

February 22, 2012 – The Gospel for this Sunday tells of stretcher-bearers breaking through a roof to lower a paralytic to where Jesus is teaching and healing.

That encyclical of Pius XII is the Magna Carta of Catholic biblical scholarship. After centuries of reading Scripture off the surface of the page the Pope ordered scholars to embrace modern methods of releasing the original sense of the writers which may have been lost over time - the Bible being well close to 3000 years old. So listen to what he has to say: Let the interpreter with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed . . . What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East . . . The interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing . . . the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech, which we use today.

Supported by this encouragement Catholic biblical scholars ever since have raised to consciousness so much of the Bible that was obscure in prior times – with the result that our appreciation of our heritage can come alive with new insights regarding old beliefs.

Not that the early Church was not aware of the depths of Scripture. Why just the other day the official prayer book of the Church cited the 4^th century St. Ephrem: Lord, who can comprehend even one of your words? We lose more of it than we grasp, like those who drink from a living spring . . . Within it he has buried many treasures . . . And so whenever anyone discovers some part of the treasure, he should not think that he has exhausted God’s word . . . So let this spring quench your thirst, and not your (limited) thirst the spring.

Today’s Gospel reading supports such an effort on your part. The four stretcher-bearers couldn’t get close to Jesus with their paralyzed friend. He was surrounded by mere onlookers and then by scribes with only a legalist sense of Scripture. So what did they do? They went up to the roof of the house, dug out the ceiling, and lowered their friend into the direct presence of Jesus – who healed him of both his sins and his paralysis!

Which is what Pope Pius was asking Catholic scholars to do: dig down deeper into Scripture and thereby bring paralyzed people closer to Christ. As for my own inclusion in the dated events of September 1943 – little did I know then that one day I would be sent on to study Scripture in the manner decreed by Pope Pius XII and find my own assisted way down into the depths of that house where Jesus awaits to heal us all. In closing let me ask: when did you last give some serious time to a course on Scripture?

Reflection for February 12, 2012

Comedy is not anarchic; it is a defender of a more human order. William Lynch S.J.

Many years ago, as I sat among 300 other seminarians in the large amphitheatre classroom of the Gregorian University in Rome listening to a lecture by Fr. Tromp on the nature of the Trinity, I caught - out of the corner of my eye - some movement in the balcony which stretched along the front of the hall and over the high dais and lectern where Father Tromp was speaking. Now you have to realize these 300 seminarians came from every nation under the sun. There were Germans in red cassocks (possibly including a fellow now known as Benedict XVI), Frenchmen in blue sashes, Scots in the color of heather, Brazilians in green piping, Africans and Asians, all of whom were wearily trying to follow Fr. Tromp’s monotonous discourse.

But obviously they too saw what I saw, for now all eyes were raised to that balcony where the figure of an American seminarian had sidled along until he stood directly over the unsuspecting Fr. Tromp. This seminarian then produced a cup of soapy water and a bubble pipe and began to do you know what. Just at that moment Fr. Tromp had lifted his head and hand to make a point when down before him there fell a continuous flow of glistening, rainbow hued bubbles. He paused, looked up. Then the whole chamber roared with laughter. That seminarian had brought us all down to earth – having probably been inspired by the Trinity itself to do so, since Fr. Tromp was having a terrible time explaining it to us in the first place.

There were other such incidents – as when in the midst of a lecture on the Church in that same vast amphitheatre a groveling Capuchin friar carrying an armful of books came in late, slamming the door. As he passed right in front of the lecturer, he dropped all the books on the floor and spent all of what seemed forever trying to gather them up – only to drop the armful twice more with much clatter before reaching his seat high in the hall’s back row. We learned later that he was not a Capuchin friar at all but some wag from the English College dressed like a Capuchin - out to break up the monotony of the class.

Breaking the monotony! That’s what humor does, nor do I think we fully realize the redemptive importance of such humor in our lives. Of course, I don’t mean ridicule, for ridicule is not funny but the product of a mean streak characteristic of people too serious for their own good, like Bible-thumpers, ideologues and snide fellows posing as stand up comedians. And why are they inclined to ridicule? Because they’ve got everything figured out. Monotonously “correct” in their assessment of life, they have no compassion for its often hilarious complexity.

In the Gospels for February Jesus insists on going about healing, delivering Good News, “tidings of joy” to people far and wide; to shower a world of Pharisaical religion with rainbow-hued bubbles as did my seminarian friend of long ago. He came to initiate a Divine Comedy, bring joy to the faces of the oppressed. But he ran into resistance from the more sober scribes of this day, even at times from his disciples. And so what was meant to be a Divine Comedy ended in tragedy. A humorless world unamused by the mercy, the magnanimity of Christ would expel him from the amphtheatre of this world.

Except, come Easter, we shall all know who had the last laugh!

Reflection for February 5, 2012

The Blue Mesa

I’ve never been to Mesa Verde (the Green Mesa or Table) in Colorado – but I have recently been to the Blue Mesa (a fictional version of Mesa Verde) in Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House. Like the actual Mesa Verde (which is now a national park) Cather’s Blue Mesa was a prominent feature of the flat landscape of the Southwest. It jutted up, “a pile of purple rock, all broken out with red sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs.” Thus it appeared to a young cowpoke named Tom Outland and his sidekick as they grazed cattle in the region over several months. “The mesa was our only neighbor (he wrote), and the closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was.” Even their cattle were seduced by it – for other cattle had crossed over to it in the past to become permanent strays amid its upper recesses.

He goes on to write: “It was light up there long before it was with us . . . the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim cedars along the rocks would be gold – metallic, like tarnished gold-foil.” As evening approached “the sunset color would begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great black-ink rock against a sky on fire. No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. Black thunder-storms used to roll up from behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning would play round it and jab into it . . . I’ve never heard thunder so loud as it was there. The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though it seemed solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account for the . . . growl and rumble that followed each crash of thunder.” It makes you understand why God drew the ancient Israelites into the Sinai desert to snap them out of their nostalgia for the fleshpots of Egypt.

But that was not all. Tom went climbing into the canyons of the mesa. “I was soon in a warm sweat . . . In stopping to take a breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it . . . through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was like a sculpture . . . pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other . . . narrow windows . . . a round tower.” It was red in color – or like winter oak-leaves. Silent, in immortal repose. The village “sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.”

Soon Tom, his companion and a friend named Father Duchene studied the place – found artifacts spanning perhaps 800 years of habitation, which revealed the inhabitants (according to Fr. Duchene) to have been a provident people. “There is evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter . . . I see them here making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by religious ceremonies . . . entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this stronghold . . .” Indeed, says the priest, as they advanced as human beings they “declined in the arts of war, in brute strength and ferocity.” (Could that be why they disappeared a thousand years ago?) Willa Cather became an Episcopalian in her mature years and was sympathetic to Catholicism – so that I wouldn’t be surprised if for her the novel’s Blue Mesa were a metaphor of the Church in some ideal way – a nest within which a sane, productive, creative humanity might grow – at least in its innermost recesses. Even today – in that sense of a sane, peaceful humanity nurtured upon the grace of God – it seems hidden to many people behind a formidable façade. But to those of us, who share Tom Outland’s curiosity about its innermost recesses, the arduous trek to its grottoed City of God continues to entice us.

Reflection forn for January 29, 2012

It takes a while

Everyone must remember that story about young Francis Bernardone who, while reconsidering his profligate life, paid a visit to a run down chapel outside Assisi in Italy, knelt to pray before a painted crucifix and thought he heard Christ’s voice saying, “Go, Francis, and rebuild my house for it is falling into ruins.” So Francis bought materials and labored to refurbish the chapel. He did not realize the full scope of Christ’s words: that he rebuild the universal Church itself, as a whole; that he revive it from the complacency and politics and mere ritualism into which it had fallen. In other words, the message from the cross had a slow fuse as far as Francis was concerned; it took a while for his response to match the magnitude and depths of its intent.

The Gospel of John especially illustrates this tendency of ours initially to fall short of grasping the wider intent of Christ’s discourse, the Holy Spirit’s influence in our lives. For instance when Jesus says to the Samaritan woman by the well of Jacob: “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Taking him literally she says in effect, “How can you do that, since you have no bucket and this well is deep?” OK, the well might have been deep, but she was shallow – not deep enough into her spiritual life to understand the kind of depth perception, freshness, vitality the presence and words of Jesus could bestow on her. The same misunderstanding was shown by the Pharisees when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” In effect they immediately thought, “There’s no bakery around for miles; where will he get sufficient literal bread for this crowd!”

Even the saved in Matthew’s parable of the last judgment struggle when Jesus says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me.” They reply, “When was that? When did we see you hungry, thirsty, an alien . . .?” They couldn’t see past the faces of the poor they served to detect the face of Christ in each of them - and the presence of Christ in their own behavior.

In his poem about the journeys of St. Brendan John Savant writes of one monk showing dismay over the whales swimming just beneath the surface of the sea: . . . the young monk cries / “Whales!” And then fearfully, / “Many whales – one / a wee fathom under!” // And Brendan: “Why do / you fear? It’s shadows / that guide us, our dreams / that drive us, more / than ordinary light.” As Christians, of course, we trust that it is more than shadows, dreams – but the intervention of God as an undercurrent in our lives, bringing us with each revelation closer to him.

I have spoken in the past of an incident in my teen years when I was in high school. It happened during a music appreciation class – in which we bored freshmen had to listen to classical music instead of Glenn Miller. Then one day the brother played Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The melody woke me up, I snapped out of it, listened, felt carried away – I had crossed a horizon into a world of heartfelt experience. But you know what? The experience of something special, hidden in that music, only burst into bloom a few days ago when, during a discussion with some retired ministers, that high school experience came back to me with the message I didn’t quite get 70 years ago. It dawned on me that what the moment was saying to me, what Schubert was saying to me, what the Holy Spirit was saying to me was: I myself am an Unfinished Symphony; everyone of us is an Unfinished Symphony! A divine composition that shall never end! One could say with regard to that freshman moment in my life that Jesus got through to me - after all - with living water – having no need for a bucket.

Reflection for January 22, 2012

Verifiable

Often when I meet with people to discuss Scripture the question arises: did this really happen. Take for instance last Sunday’s account of Samuel’s being awakened by a voice calling to him – so he goes to the priest Eli (his mentor), wakes him up and asks what he wants. Eli – probably disgruntled over being awakened – says he didn’t call him and that Samuel should go back to sleep. This happens three times before Samuel realizes God is calling him directly – and pays attention. Then there is the Gospel of last week in which the first disciples begin one by one to respond to Jesus’ invitation to come and see where he lives – and pretty soon we have a little procession of followers trailing behind this unusual Pied Piper.

Then there is today’s first reading about Jonah – being sent to Nineveh (a ruthless city) to demand repentance – and the Gospel reading about Jesus calling Simon and Andrew and then James and John to leave their fishing nets to join Jesus in “fishing for men”.

So it’s back again to the question that comes up: did these events really happen or are they fables. Well, I trust the integrity of the ancient writers – they are writing about things that radically changed their lives, recording moments that added up to great significance for them and others. To fabricate would only be to fool themselves as much as others. Of course such events are told with embellishment or a succinctness that captures the essence of what happened. But many people, because the Scripture is so ancient, wonder how you can verify these episodes.

Well one way of verifying them, trusting that they really happened is to study the course of your own life. All these events are verifiable in my own life; they have happened and continue to happen to me (and you?). The voice of God has intervened in indirect ways in my life since my childhood – even as it woke up Samuel in the night. Often I did not quite hear it right, went running to someone else for answers to the questions it raised and was just as often told by “people in the know” like Eli to go back to sleep. But sooner or later that “sacramental” voice really woke me up – in this classroom or in some startling or even ordinary experience. The same goes for the Gospel account in which Jesus invites his first disciples to “come and see” where he lives, how he lives, why he lives – and in the supplementary account in which he disentangles his disciples from their nets. The same beckoning, seductive voice caught my attention (and yours?) at several stages of my life, each adding up to a deeper knowledge of who Jesus is and what he’s about. That same beckoning voice disentangled me (and you?) from distorted notions of what’s right and wrong, from a sick sense of low self worth, from biases that I thought were virtuous – and so on.

Of course biblical scholars do hold the Jonah story (with his being swallowed by a whale) to be an inspired piece of fiction with a moral. But I can say, and so can you if you think about, that that whole story has happened to me. How often have I run away from God’s command to do something heroic, how often have I allowed myself to be swallowed up by fear, by self-preservation only to find my condition stifling? And how often have I with the help of God been thrown up out of the belly of that “whale” to follow God’s way as I was first commanded? So you see – every event – even the more imaginative ones – in Scripture is verifiable – both back then in many cases and certainly now, as I myself experience every moment of that ancient biblical drama.

Reflection for January 15, 2012

Not always so prompt but - persistent

The Church has been compared to many things: a Mother, a City built upon a hill, a Sheepfold. The early Fathers of the Church sometimes compared it to the ship of ancient Ulysses, which wandered sometimes too close to hazardous rocks and whirlpools or whose crew let itself be seduced by siren songs of wealth and power or lolled away its time ultra-piously among the lotus-eaters – or (bedeviled by single-eyed Cyclopean giants) let itself become obsessed with “single issues” and thus apt to apply simplistic solutions to complex problems. Yet, whatever the winds that have assailed it, Christ has somehow always appeared out of the night walking on the waters to set us once again on course toward home.

It’s true that in these Gospels of January we hear tell of the first apostles responding immediately to the call of Christ – not hesitating for a moment. We hear they abandoned their nets, the many ties that entangled them, and followed him. But there are other episodes in the Gospels where, when Jesus summons people to follow him, they drag their feet, think of ingenious excuses to delay their response. In other words they are slow about it. And insofar as that also could be said about the Church as a whole down through history, it makes me think of another (and not entirely negative) metaphor applicable to the Church, namely: the turtle!

John Steinbeck must have studied a turtle quite thoroughly to come up with his wonderful description of one crossing a road in The Grapes of Wrath. The scene is a concrete highway in Oklahoma; a summer day. “And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass. His hind legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along.” Steinbeck notes how “his fierce, humorous eyes . . . stared straight ahead.” The turtle then came upon a steep embankment, which he investigated with head held high and then clawed and pushed his way up. Then came a new obstacle: the four-inch high shoulder of the road itself. Laboriously the turtle shoved itself up against this barrier until its shell stood at an angle whence its front legs could not touch the ground. But its hind legs kept pushing and pushing until the shell was high enough to plop over flat on the roadbed.

Now all seemed easy as, with all its legs working, the creature waggled from side to side - until one car just missed it, causing the turtle to withdraw its head, legs and tail tightly within its shell. But no sooner did it venture forth again than a truck grazed it, spinning it like a coin right off the road, where it landed on its back - all its feet waving in the air, “reaching for something to pull it over.” Somehow it righted itself and continued on until Tom Joad found it and wrapped it in his coat as a gift for his little brother. But in the end the turtle worked its way out of the coat, hid for a while within its shell to avoid the pestering of a cat, and was last seen walking “southwest as it had been from the first.”

The Church! Considered a slow moving phenomenon by many, but obstinately aimed at a destination of which this world seems so ignorant, carrying a heavy shell of tradition within which it retreats occasionally when under pressure but whence it emerges again under its compulsion to keep advancing toward its rendezvous with the Source of its being. The Church! Running into roadblocks, tossed about by the violence of controversy - but driven by the Holy Spirit to waggle on, bearing ever so awkwardly the burden of the Gospel. The Church! Namely, you and me, ridiculously slow to catch on yet likely to cross the finish line before Bugs Bunny - by sheer tenacity if not by speed.