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!