Reflection for January 8, 2012

A Winter’s Tale

What’s behind the title of Shakespeare’s play A Winter’s Tale? Unless I missed it, it says nothing about winter as a season. I’ve also heard it’s called A Winter’s Tale because winter was a favorite season for telling stories, what with being cooped up by the fireside for weeks on end. But I’m sure there are experts out there who would agree with me that it is called A Winter’s Tale because it starts out with dark, chilling events, the kind that makes our liturgy refer to winter as symbolic of how darkness (in the moral sense) always tries to quench the Light of the World, the infant Christ – even as Herod tries to do when he massacres the infants of Bethlehem or as tyrants down through time try to do – initiating such dark times (be they holocausts or cold wars) that have punctuated the century into which I was born.

Look how the play starts out. Suddenly congenial people like the King of Sicily (Leontes) and the King of Bohemia, friends since boyhood, have a falling out. The King of Bohemia (after a longer than 9 month stay with Leontes and his pregnant wife Hermione) is about to go home – when Leontes begins to brood. He lets his imagination suspect that Hermione’s child, recently born, is the product of an affair between her and the departing King of Bohemia. Things then get darker. Immediately he plans to assassinate his “rival” and execute his wife (remember, Henry VIII and his unfortunate wives were still a relatively current event).

Well, the King of Bohemia escapes back to his homeland – Hermione falls into a swoon and is declared dead; her newborn infant is spirited away to a foreign coast and left to die . . . all sorts of bad things flow out of one man’s sick imagination. The play is indeed rightly called A Winter’s Tale because it issues from a wintry, cold hearted, dark mindset – the characteristics of winter.

But what happens? After winter comes spring! The infant daughter who was left to perish on a foreign shore (hence her name is Perdita, meaning lost) is rescued from death by a shepherd! After a passage of 15 years she meets the crown prince of Bohemia, Florizel (note the allusion to flowers in his name). They fall in love and return to Sicily where Leontes has long since repented of his evil thoughts and deeds. They are welcomed by Leontes who is then reconciled with the King of Bohemia, a wedding is planned – and the play climaxes when Hermione is discovered to be alive after all. A friend has housed her in secret over all these years. She pretends she has commissioned a statue as a memorial of her – and now invites all the players to view the statue. The veil is drawn and Hermione comes to life before them (never having been dead) – much to the joy of everyone – even as the revival of springtime and flowers serves us as an Easter reminder of God’s wedding with Israel, with Mother Earth, with Mary, with Mother Church (as celebrated in our biblical Song of Songs).

So many parallels to our liturgical use of the seasons (passing from winter to springtime, from the King Herods of history to the risen Christ) – hidden within this play for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear! It says, all our long winter’s tale of history, of wars, corruption, death, greed, hatred must give way to a rebirth of light under the influence of the infant Christ at the Easter moment of his resurrection from the dead.

Reflection for December 18, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection for December 11, 2011

Bethlehem Round the Bend

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

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

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

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

Reflection for December 4, 2011

Continuity

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection for November 20th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection for November 13th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection for November 6th, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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