Reflection for July 24, 2011

You don’t mess with Mother Nature

Our parish matriarch, Lillian Garrison Sanders, died this week, having reached close to 100 years of age. I call her our matriarch because, if for nothing else, a grandmother of 14, the great grandmother of 23 and the great, great grandmother of 3 and a woman remembered by her family as the “glue” that keeps them together deserves the title of matriarch. But to be a matriarch means a lot more than being the fountainhead of so many descendants. It has to do with being a dominant woman, self-possessed and of long experience who feels subordinate to no one but God alone and even then there may arise some differences of opinion! As I reflect back, there was something about Lillian akin to my probably faulty memory of a Land o’ Lakes butter commercial of many years ago in which a goddess, appalled at the thought of anyone using oleo-margarine, says amid thunder and lightning, “You don’t mess with Mother Nature.”

Or better still, I like to locate her within the grand tradition of the matriarchs of the Bible. For instance, with Eve to begin with. I can’t help but feel that Lillian, if she were with Adam in the Garden of Eden, would have bridled, like Eve, at God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I can hear her saying to Adam, “Why not? Who’s he to tell us what to eat and not to eat? Here! It’s quite tasty. Give it a try.” Of course she got them thrown out of the Garden of Eden for disobedience but they did leave with their eyes wide open and the whole of sacred history unfolded from that “happy fault”.

And then there was Rebecca, the patriarch Isaac’s wife. The rules of a masculine dominated society in those days required that the firstborn son be heir to the father’s wealth and in this case to God’s promise of a blessed destiny. And what happens? Rebecca gives birth to twins; Esau emerging first and then Jacob. So by law it’s Esau who inherits the destiny of God’s chosen one. But Esau grows up a hippie, shaggy, tattooed, the head of a motorcycle gang - hardly worthy of his privileged status. So what does the matriarch Rebecca do? When it’s time for old Jacob to ritually pass on God’s blessing to his oldest son, Rebecca dresses up Jacob, the gentler, civilized son, in rough skins, makes him kneel before blind Jacob and thus usurp Esau’s primacy. Jacob of course is scared, hesitant, fears being discovered and cursed instead of blessed. But Rebecca, in the tradition of our biblical matriarchs, says, “Snap out of it. If there is any fall out, I’ll take the impact. As for you, just get on with it.” Regardless of the established rules of the game, a self-possessed, insightful, dominant woman diverts the history of the world in a way that led to Christ. We could go on to talk of Judith and Esther who successfully took matters into their own hands, fully confident that they were agents of God’s doing.

In that context I see a lot that resembles Lillian. Notes given me by her son recall how in the early days of St. Leo’s parish, Lillian “instructed the new priest on how to do things”! I myself remember her often, as she “presided” at Mass from her usual perch in the front pew, talking back to Monsignor O’Hare as he ad libbed from the altar. On one occasion she was invited to speak on some anniversary and instead of doing so from the lectern, placed her cane on the altar and did so from there, even turning to exchange remarks with the visiting bishop. The notes also remember her as “the unofficial funeral director of St. Leo’s, telling people when to stand and when to kneel.”

An obituary, of course, should focus, I suppose, on the biographical data of the deceased. But in Lillian’s case I think it important to place her among the stalwart women of our tradition – to bring out the true stature of her presence among us.

Reflection for July 17, 2011

And the Beat Goes On

(1991)

Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated with premature burials, with characters who felt some need to bury people alive. For instance, there’s the story entitled “The Cask of Amontillado” in which, for some past slight, Montresor invites Fortunato to descend to his cellar to sample a special wine. There Montresor chains his guest to the back wall of an alcove and slowly seals up the opening with masonry. “I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. In pace requiescat. ” Then there’s the character Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” who prematurely entombs his twin sister in a basement vault, only to hear the vault’s iron door clang open; to hear her footsteps on the stairs; to behold her standing enshrouded upon the threshold of his study!

And then there’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Of all the movies and plays I’ve seen in my lifetime, my high school’s dramatization of that Poe tale remains memorable to me - particularly its special effects. You know the story. The main character couldn’t stand the presence of an old man who shared his house. “One of his eyes,” he complains, “resembled that of a vulture - a pale blue eye. Whenever it fell on me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees I made up my mind to rid myself of the eye forever.” So he did away with the old fellow, took up the floorboards, deposited the corpse and “replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye . . . could have detected anything wrong.” No sooner had he finished the task than three policemen knocked at his door responding to a neighbor’s report of a scream during the night. “I bade them search - search well,” he says, for he was quite confident no trace of the deed would be found. Except that, while he conversed with the police, a low, dull, quick sound began to pulsate throughout the room.

This is where our special effects crew riveted the audience’s attention. From a low, barely perceptible thump, thump, thump, thump to an ever-louder THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP the buried heart crescendoed throughout the theatre - while the main character became increasingly mad! “O God! what could I do? I foamed - I raved - I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise continually increased. I felt that I must scream!”

Beyond mere entertainment, Poe had a far deeper intent in telling such stories. Some think he was anticipating modern materialism’s effort over the past two hundred years to bury both God and the human heart - to evaluate everything in terms of “profitability” and to repress such things as conscience and sentiment as romantic nonsense - to bury them well beneath the floor boards of our psyche so as not to impede “progress”. But note how in most of these stories the beat goes on! The buried person revives, even as God and the human heart will revive, no matter how much a cynical society would stifle their influence.

In such stories Poe stands well within our Gospel tradition, which pivots upon another premature burial - the attempt of a totalitarian Empire to entomb Christ, only to be foiled by his resurrection on the third day. And what was Christ’s resurrection but overture to our own resurrection every time Christ summons us (as he summoned Lazarus from his tomb) to emerge from all that would suffocate our bigness of mind and heart. Could it be that, consciously or unconsciously, all those Poe stories were ultimately influenced by passages from our biblical heritage like: “You were buried with him in baptism, . . . you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God who raised Christ from the dead.”

Reflection for July 10, 2011

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . . . Part 2

Since we are still within the octave of July 4^th, Independence Day, I’d like to stretch the thoughts offered last Sunday about the dilemma facing the founding fathers in early July 1776. Last week we mentioned the logic followed by John Dickinson for NOT signing the declaration – cogent reasons for remaining within the British Empire. His reasons did not prevail because his fellow members of Congress had already been influenced by another list of reasons, quite logical, laid out by Tom Paine in the same year. I won’t go into all of them; just offer a taste:

1. It was absurd for an island like Britain to rule a continent like America.

2. America was no longer British; its population was already composed of people from all over Europe.

3. Remaining a part of Britain would only drag America into unnecessary European wars . . . and so on.

What I’m saying is that the members of Congress were faced with the logic of Dickinson (don’t sign) and the logic of Paine (sign). But was logic enough to do the trick? Does mere reasoning get us anywhere? Look at Hamlet: to be or not to be! Both options lead us to a fork in the road where we might be stuck – either/or; should I or shouldn’t I. After all the founding fathers were children of what we call the Age of Reason. One was not to be moved by fantasies, gambles, emotions, old myths. As far as the Bible being a motivator, the Age of Reason had dismantled that for over a century. A rational person couldn’t be motivated by such a book of fairy tales. I mean Thomas Jefferson produced a version of the Gospels that left out all the miracles, virgin birth, walking on water . . . He felt the only useful stuff in the ancient book was the Sermon of the Mount, the ethical, quasi-rational content.

And yet I think the reason the founding fathers got past any indecision, the fork in the road proffered to them by Dickinson on the one hand and Paine on the other, was a glimmer, a vestige, a trace of our civilization’s biblical heritage. They felt (and did not just think) that in declaring independence they were riding upon the wave of what they blandly called “providence” – they clung to the idea of a Creator, as in: We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our biblical heritage insists that history has a destination and, still sensing that, these men felt the declaration of independence to be a step toward that destiny, the improvement, the salvation (if you will) of the world.

But what I ask is: How much more profoundly would they have been moved to overcome that rational fork in the road, if they had not only been moved by a bland notion of “providence” but had let their imaginations be exposed to the graphic drama, the poetry of Scripture as in God’s call to Abraham to leave his father’s house to go to the land he would show him; God’s call to Moses to confront an earlier King George III to demand liberty, then cross a sea and wilderness en route to a Promised Land; Jesus’ constant invitation to “Come, follow me”; his challenge made to Peter to walk on water – contrary to all common sense, all logic?

In the long run, it is not reason, logic alone that moves our will to act. It is our drama, stories, especially our longstanding biblical story that appeals to the whole of our mind and imagination, our whole being, to cross one horizon after another – with faith, hope and even love. The Bible teaches us that history, collective and individual, has a meaning, that we are en route to a maturity that encompasses freedom and justice and even grace. In that context July 4^th indeed becomes something to sing about.

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!