Tuesday, May 7, 2024
Lost In Ideology (The Book)
Sunday, May 5, 2024
Expanding the Church's Horizon
One of the distinctive features of the Easter season is the daily reading of the Acts of the Apostles, which takes us back to the earliest Christian communities and their unique experience of the ongoing presence of the Risen Christ in their midst. Reading Acts, we get to experience vicariously the inspiring internal life of those apostolic Christian communities, living their own kingdom as a religious alternative to the empire in which they remained enmeshed.
I felt some of that inspiration during last month’s Paulist Summit on Polarization, ambitiously subtitled Bridging the Divide, Seeking Reconciliation. Participants included Paulists and Paulist Associates, academics, Catholic media figures, and others involved in various initiatives directly or indirectly aspiring to reduce the toxic affective polarization which is poisoning secular society and infecting even our life together as Church. The conference created opportunities for us to learn about how we experience one another and how to navigate through and around our differences, the obstacles which the ways we experience our differences create that hinder opportunities for conversation, and the human and religious resources we can draw upon to attempt those challenging conversations. The weekend was a powerful experience of Christian community, not unlike (it seemed to me) the communal reinforcement and encouragement those early Christians must have experienced in their local Churches.
Primarily, however, Acts recounts the Church’s growth and expansion from a small group huddled together in one room in Jerusalem to larger and increasingly more diverse communities throughout the Mediterranean world. It’s the wonderful story of how, transformed by the Risen Christ’s parting gift of the Holy Spirit into a missionary movement that spread from Jerusalem to Rome, the Church changed from a small Jewish sect into a world-wide Church with a universal mission.
To us, who already know the story, all that seems obvious and inevitable. For the first Christians, however, it must have seemed like one new learning experience after another. Today’s 1st reading [Acts 10: 25-26, 34-35, 44-48]recounts one pivotal point in that process. Peter, as the official leader of the community, had visited the disciples in a town called Joppa (near today’s Tel Aviv). While there, he had a dream of various animals and heard a voice tell him to eat them. When he responded that he had never eaten non-kosher meat, he was told, What God has made clean, you are not to call profane - another example of something the meaning of which may seem obvious to us, but which at the time must have seemed completely perplexing. Meanwhile, as Peter pondered this perplexing dream, emissaries from a Roman centurion, Cornelius, came and asked Peter to accompany them back to Caesarea, which he promptly did. That is where today’s reading picks up the story.
Cornelius was a Roman pagan, an uncircumcised Gentile! Normally, no devout Jew would enter his house, but these were not normal times. Already “prepped” by his perplexing dream, Peter crossed that boundary, and proclaimed the Good News of Jesus to a house full of Gentiles. Suddenly what had happened to the original disciples on Pentecost happened to Cornelius and his household – a “Pentecost for pagans,” as it has been called. So, Peter asked, “Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”
Thus began the momentous change that enabled Christianity to spread throughout the wider world. I say “began,” because, of course, the full implications of something so unexpected took time to sink in. Had Cornelius become a Jew and then acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, he would have been like the other early Christians, who were, of course, also Jews who acknowledged Jesus as the promised Messiah. Cornelius, however, did not become a Jew. He “jumped the line,” so to speak, directly into Christianity. Eventually, the Church would have to debate whether this was proper, and Peter would cite this transformational event as the key to understanding God’s will for his Church – that it be the vehicle for conversion and repentance for all, without exception and without restriction.
It was God who took the initiative in all this – directing Cornelius to invite Peter, prepping Peter with his dream, and then dramatically demonstrating God’s plan to include the Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit. For his part, Peter, as the official leader of the Church, recognized God’s action and accepted its implications, baptizing the first Gentile Christians and incorporating them into the community.
This story speaks volumes about the very nature of the Church – not just the first century Church of the apostles, but the global Church of the twenty-first century, which is, if anything, more diverse than ever before. The Church is not a club, a fraternal association, a social networking group, or even a prayer group, though it may have elements of all those things. As Pope Pius XI put it, almost a century ago: “The Church has no other reason for its existence than to extend over the earth the kingdom of Christ and so to render people sharers of his saving redemption.”
As a practical matter, of course, we experience the Church largely locally, as part of a locally defined parish community that nourishes and supports us in our faith. It brings us together to hear the Good News that makes our lives different from what they would otherwise have been. It brings us together to respond to that Good News with worship and prayer, support for one another, and service to others in the day-in, day-out dying and rising that defines a disciple’s life.
But it doesn’t stop there. In the movie Civil War, there is a strange interlude when the journalists drive through a town that seems to be pointedly ignoring the civil war being fought all around them, weirdly separated from the experiences and concerns of their fellow citizens. The Church does not enjoy that option, but rather has been appointed, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel [John 15:9-17] to go and bear fruit that will remain.
The parish is never just about itself, but in some sense is challenged take in the entire world, today’s world - to expand our horizon, just as the apostolic Church had its horizon expanded, to understand our own local experience of Church as one with that of the young, emerging Church in Africa, the aging Church in Europe, and the even more ancient Churches in India and the Middle East, along with newer Catholic Churches in Asia and elsewhere, to understand how our own middle-aged American Church is being rejuvenated and revitalized by many new immigrants, and in other unexpected ways, to understand our own local experience of Church in the wider terms of God’s great plan for the salvation of the world.
Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, May 5, 2024.
Friday, May 3, 2024
1968 Redivivus?
Campus violence is in the news, all over the news. Of course, most young people of college age are not students at four-year colleges or universities. And most of those who are do not attend elite institutions like Columbia. Even so, the media has focused intensely on this issue. And many of those who think or write about what is happening on our campuses cannot resist recalling 1968.
I was 20 years old in 1968, now widely regarded as the most tumultuous year in modern American history, and I remember it well. That miserable year began with the Tet Offensive at the end of January, then Eugene McCarthy's surprisingly good showing in New Hampshire in March, which provoked RFK's entry into the presidential race and LBJ's unexpected withdrawal. In early April, Martin Luther King was killed, and cities erupted in riots. Then, later in April, Columbia University suddenly experienced a week of campus disorder, which presaged a pattern of campus disorders that would characterize 1969 and 1970 (including as I well remember at my own City College campus one subway stop north of Columbia). In June, RFK was assassinated. Then, in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago was disastrously overshadowed by unprecedented street violence, all of which combined, unsurprisingly, to elect Richard Nixon in November of that year.
In 1968, the U.S. was mired in a losing war in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans were being killed. The LBJ-haters, who disrupted campus life and then brought their hatred of him and the Kennedy-Johnson Administration's war to the convention, undoubtedly had a variety of motivations - among them in at least some cases actual support for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Whatever their motivations, the one clear consequence was the election of Richard Nixon, who gave us another four years of war, Republicans on the Supreme Court, and eventually Watergate. What a proud roster of accomplishment!
And now we appear to be at it again! The U.S. is not actually at war this time, but our ally Israel is. The Biden-haters, who are currently disrupting campus life, again undoubtedly have a variety of motivations - some of them genuine humanitarianism but among them in at least some cases expressions of outright anti-semitism and support for Hamas. Whatever their motivations, the one most plausible political consequence will likely be the election of Donald Trump, which promises at least another four years of "American carnage," and maybe MAGA Forever!
Meanwhile pundits and professors are falling all over themselves to defend free expression and the right of student activists to protest on campus. One wonders if the object of the protesters' hatred were some group other than Jews whether as many pundits and professors would be so libertarian - or whether they might instead revert to the (until recently) obsession at many universities with censoring hate speech and guaranteeing "safe spaces" for students.
Of course, freedom of expression is an important American value, and students should have ample opportunities to participate in peaceful protests which are non-violent and do not disrupt other students' rights to receive an education and participate in campus life. That said, college and university students do not obviously enjoy any particular privileges in this matter, more than the rights to free expression and peaceful protest enjoyed by other, ordinary citizens in other public and private places. This latter point is often lost amid laments about the role of the police. There is, in fact, a reasonable and legitimate argument to be raised regarding the over-militarization of contemporary policing. That said, being a student at an elite institution should not, a priori, exempt one from legitimate policing activity, to which other, ordinary citizens are also subject. It is not "academic freedom" to block access to public spaces, classrooms, and libraries and to threaten Jewish students with the result that they are afraid to access those spaces (thereby losing their "academic freedom").
One side story in this larger saga, which has received much less attention, is what this tragic turn of events reveals about the current state of higher education in the U.S. - especially at elite institutions. As one who spent several formative years at an elite institution of higher education, on the margins of and aspiring to become a part of that academic world, I am increasingly saddened by what seems to have befallen the collective life of the academic community. What would it take for faculty to reclaim their role and recommit their institutions to become again genuinely intellectual communities committed to a more coherent educational purpose?
That is all another issue for another day, however. Likewise, the war in the Middle East is obviously an important issue that deserves political discussion and debate. A terrible atrocity was committed by Hamas. on October 7. Since then, thousands of Gazans - many of them presumably civilians - have died, been injured, made homeless by the subsequent war, while some 132 Israelis remain hostages of Hamas seven months into this conflict. Like the wider war, the underlying Jewish-Arab conflict of which this is a part, the issues seem so intractable. That said, it is incumbent upon the Biden Administration to be as pro-active as possible in facilitating a settlement, however limited and temporary.
Meanwhile, however, I have little doubt that the primary accomplishment of the Biden-hating campus demonstrators - especially if they continue and take their street show to Chicago - will be helping Donald Trump get elected, much as their predecessors in 1968 helped guarantee Richard Nixon's election.
Photo: Columbia University, NY Times.
Friday, April 26, 2024
The 1960s In a New (and Loving) Key
Historian and Pulitzer-Prize winner, Doris Kearns Goodwin has been around and producing great books since I was in grad school. Her latest is a bit different and somewhat special. In An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (Simon and Schuster, 2024) she is still doing history, but within the context and through the unique lens of her marriage to "Camelot" veteran Richard Goodwin, her husband of 42 years. The book takes the form of a recollection of the written memories in archival boxes of her and her husband's personal and political experiences, primarily during the eventful decade of the 1960s, with some reflections on their earlier pre-political lives and the post-political trajectory of their married life together.
Richard "Dick" Goodwin (1931-2018) liked the portrayal of him in the movie Quiz Show: "I'm he moral center of the story. I'm portrayed but a young good-looking guy. And I get to sum it all up with the last line, 'I thought we were going to get television. The truth is, television is going to get us'." (That would prove prescience in many respects.)
Yet, already while interviewing contestants in the late 1950s Quiz Show scandal, Dick Goodwin was already heading toward his life-defining work as an aide and speechwriter first for John F. Kennedy, then for his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and then, after having been so much a part of the start of the Great Society, leaving he White House and becoming an anti-war activist and an aide and speechwriter first for Eugene McCarthy, and then for Robert F. Kennedy (and then McCarthy again).
Most of the book is about Goodwin's work with those four men and his role in helping shape the liberal accomplishments and the eventually catastrophic liberal losses of the 1960s. For those of us who lived through that tumultuous time (and may have our own complicated memories to unpack), Goodwin's recollections recall the aspirations and disappointments with which we are so familiar and with which we are still living today. They also fill in the historical record with interesting personal anecdotes that personalize the story and highlight how that history was very much neither happenstance nor the working out of inexorable historical forces, but the unique intersection of distinctive personalities with the needs of a society in the grip of generational and cultural change.
Even remembering the intense emotions of the era and the negative polarization its politics produced, one cannot fail to be struck by the intensity of Goodwin's involvement first in the New Frontier and then in the politics of producing the Great Society. The latter was rooted in the conviction that "Johnson's domestic agenda spoke directly to our daily lives," but was followed so soon by what his wife would call his "spiteful, personal vendetta against Johnson." Indeed, so much of the story of the 60s as recalled here can be categorized as a sad story of spiteful personal vendettas - most notably RFK and Kennedy loyalists spiteful personal vendetta against LBJ, but also the hostility between the McCarthy and Kennedy wings of the anti-war Democrats. Not only did those personal vendettas damage the people involved and undo the aspirations of the Great Society, but they set the stage for the more negative and destructive political dysfunction of subsequent decades.
Doris Kearns Goodwin met her husband in the 1970s, in the afterglow of the 60s and Goodwin's era of influence. Younger than he, she had participated in the earlier events of the 1960s at what might be called the street level. But her service as a White House Fellow and the friendship she formed with President Johnson became her ticket to academic renown, with her first book Lyndon Johnson's and the American Dream. From there she would go on to write acclaimed books about Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. It is interesting to observe how her academic engagement with those heroic figures and her personal engagement with Johnson helped steer her toward a more balanced perspective on the 60s.
It is the fashion nowadays to compare our problematic present not to the 1960s but to the mid-19th-century run-up to the Civil War. Drawing on her knowledge of Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls how the young Lincoln "was troubled by the mood of the country, a tendency to substitute passion for judgment, to engage in mob action in disregard of laws." Lincoln worried that the "living history" of the revolutionary era "was fading, along with the founding generation itself." For Goodwin, "Lincoln's words took on a powerful resonance," as she realized that "some sixty years after the changes and. upheavals of the Sixties have begun to fade, been half-forgotten or become misunderstood," this project might add their voices "to the task of restoring a "living history' of that decade, allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made, what chances were lost, and what light might be cast on our own fractured time."
One of the particular beauties of this book is how it integrates the personal with the political and the past with the present. It is an account of a married couple in their old age (he in his 80s, she in her 70s) reflecting back on the history they had originally lived separately and in which both played active parts. It is an amazing insight into how we all may remember our past in old age and be nourished even now by those memories, both positive and negative. It reminds us of the vision of history-shaping public service and the animating power of a life lived in public service. And, of course, it is an even moire poignant reminder of the pre-eminence of love in life, of the primary importance of marriage and family, even within a life blessed by opportunities for historically significant political participation.
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Jesus and the Powers
N.T. Wright, a retired Bishop of the Church of England, is an eminent and well-known scripture scholar and theologian. In this latest book, Jesus and the Poers: Christian Political Wirness in a Age of Totalitarian Terror and and Dysfunctional Democracies (2024), he and his co-author, Australian theologian Michael Bird, seek to address in straightforward, non-technical language the perennial question of the Christian commitment to politics and government, a question that has acquired increased salience in a post-Christendom world, in which the once widely acclaimed alternative of liberal democracy has become increasingly problematic. Indeed, for these authors, this presetn decade may "be the most precarious and perilous time in human history since the 1930s."
The authors stress something that many modern progressives insouciantly seem to be increasingly eager to forget, namely that both the Latin West and the Greek East were and have continued to be "shaped by a Christian vision of God's love for the world and the place of Christian virtues in societies where few restraints on evil and exploitation existed." This is an inescapable historical fact, but it is also much more than that. It is of the very nature of Jesus' kingdom, which, while completely unlike the kingdoms of this world, "is still for this world, for the benefit and blessing of this world, for the redemption and rescue of this world."
The theological claim is that "the Creator intends his world to be run through obedient human beings." God, the authors insist, "intends that humans should share in running his world, and should be held accountable." Thus, "because we believe that Jesus is King and his kingly power is operative among us," Christians "cannot retreat to the attic of spiritual affairs, not when there is a gospel to proclaim and ahurting world crying out for healing and hope."
In this post-Christendom context, the author's preference is clearly for a form of liberal democracy, a form of political arrangement which seems to have lost a lot of its former luster and appears increasingly threatened. The authors aregue that "in a world with a human propensity for evil, greed and injustice, liberal democracy stands as the least worst option for human governance." It is, they stress, "neither a necessary not a sufficient conditon for a just society, but it can be an enabling condition for a just society."
In a world in which no political axiom can any longer be taken for granted, the authors offer a valuable religious argument for invigorating liberal democracy. This is especially timely when the ideas that have underpinned liberal democracies find themselves challenged not just by populist authoritarianism but by explicitly religious versions such as messianic imperialism (e.g, Russia) and a revived Catholic integralism.
Saturday, April 20, 2024
Wonders Never Cease
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Orestes Brownson
"Heartily, deeply did I ever reciprocate Dr. Brownson's affection, and the long and eventful years have but strengthened more and more my love for him and my admiration for his genius - convictions and emotions which have drawn from me in these articles my feeble attempt to estimate his providential mission and to introduce my countrymen to the study of his works" [Isaac Hecker, "Dr. Brownson and Catholicity," Catholic World, 46, (1887), p. 235].
Largely forgotten among contemporary American Catholics, but someone whoi deserves to be remembered and appreciated even still, Orestes Brownson was born in 1803 and died on this date in 1876. He had already established himself as a leading American intellectual, a philosopher, and a social theorist, as well as Unitarian clergyman, well before his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1844, after which he became perhaps the most prominent lay Catholic voice in the United States Church. He contributed to the Transcendentalist critique of Unitarian empiricism, articulating an alternative idealist philosophical perspective that would continue to inform his mature thought as a Catholic. Although he would later vote for Lincoln, Brownson began as a Jacksonian Democrat, with genuinely radical social and economic theories Both religiously and politically, Brownson was an important early influence on the young Isaac Hecker (1819-1888). At the end of his life, Hecker remained supportive of Brownson's earlier social and political ideas. "The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and such as was then within he easy reach of State and national authority would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of pubic order." ["Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," Catholic World, 45, (1887), pp. 207-208.]
Concerning Brownson's religious conversion to Catholicism, Hecker in that same article [p. 207] wrote "it was a glory and a triumph for the Catholic Church to obtain the conversion of such a man and to hold that free soul in most contented allegiance till the hour of death."
The youthful and then life-long friendship between Brownson and Hecker was of great significance for both of them in their respective spiritual journeys and, by extension, for the 19th-century American Catholic Church. Brownson met the Hecker Brothers in New York City in 1841 and quickly became a kind of mentor to the young Isaac Hecker, eventually steering him to Brook Farm, the contemporary communal experiment Brownson valued most highly. The younger and less well educated of the two, Hecker at the outset of their friendship was definitely a disciple of Brownson. As Brownson's biographer has highlighted, however, "the disciple had something to teach the master, and Brownson knew it. Reading his correspondence with Hecker during this period gives one the impression that it was Hecker who brought the personal to the fore in Brownson. Brownson was drawn to that which he criticized in Hecker and knew, instinctively, that Hecker possessed something that he did not. Brownson was attracted to the difference.” [Patrick W. Carey, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), p. 138.]
Indeed, Isaac Hecker's first book, Questions of the Soul, written as a Redemptorist missionary priest in 1855, which attempted to demonstrate the positive aspects of Catholicism as the response to the deepest questions and desires of the human soul, seemed to liberate Brownson from his immediate post-conversion commitment to a more polemical approach to apologetics. To quote Carey again: Brownson’s review of Hecker’s book “demonstrated a thoroughly positive assessment of Hecker’s achievement, and an acknowledgment that his own previous polemical style of apologetics was neither effective nor what the times demanded. … Hecker’s book clearly awakened Brownson to the defects in his own previous approach.”
Brownson's writings during that period represented an attempt to craft a genuinely Catholic conception of politics and society, in contrast to the perennial tendency to accommodate to American reality by treating politics as largely autonomous. That concern perdured as a priority for Brownson, who in October 1870 wrote: “Even our Republic goes the way of all the earth, and our Catholic population hardly seem aware of their mission as Catholics. Outside of the Sanctuary they are hardly distinguishable in their social and political action from non-Catholics.”
Ultimately, he understood that mission as being "to Catholicize America, not Americanize Catholicity.” On the other hand, his intense ultramontanism did not turn into integralism. Rather, he understood that European political conservatism was likely a losing cause with which the Church should not be identified. In particular, Brownson recognized that those who supported the absolute continuation of the Papal States against Italian national aspirations, which were inexorably leading to the unification of Italy, were wrongly identifying a particular political goal with the Church’s fundamental interests.
Both Brownson and Hecker had been influenced by the 19th-century German Catholic theologian Johann Adam Moehler (1796-1838) who had emphasized the Church as the continuation of Christ's incarnation in a visible structure. Both believed that neither Calvinism, Unitarianism, nor Transcendentalism could appeal long-term to the more moderate American mentality, although of the two Brownson was more sensitive to the demographic realities of American Protestantism and demonstrated a far greater appreciation of non-New England-based religion (e.g., Evangelicalism and Methodism) than Hecker did.
Although Hecker and Brownson began to diverge somewhat in their views in their later years, they remained friends, and Hecker never ceased to admire Brownson's accomplishments. Hecker considered Brownson's primary work of political theory, The American Republic (1865), to be "the greatest work yet written in America on general politics." ["Dr. Brownson in Boston," Catholic World, 45 (1887), p. 466.]
A decade after Brownson's death, Hecker expressed his support for a movement to erect a monument to Brownson in New York's Central Park, but added: "The best monument to Dr. Brownson's greatness is his works. ... They ought to be in every American library of any character." ["Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty Years Ago," Catholic World, 45, (1887), p. 200.]
Photo: Orestes Brownson, Portrait by G.P.A. Healy, 1863.
A bust of Brownson was in fact commissioned in the 1890s by the Catholic Club of New York for its building on Central Park South. When that building was demolished, Brownson's bust was moved to Riverside Drive and 104th Street. In the 1930s, however, it was overturned by vandals and put in storage. In 1941 Father Robert Gannon, SJ, the President for Fordham University (1936-1949), acquired the bust from the Parks Department for its placement on the Fordham campus in the Bronx, where it remains atop a high granite pedestal. (Brownson was awarded Fordham's first honorary degree in 1856.).
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Witnesses of These Things
We set out to find His friends to tell them.
We went to Jerusalem to tell them;
and with joy we told them, “We have seen the Lord!”
And as we were speaking there, He stood among us, blessed us, said to us,
“Now my peace I leave with you.” We saw Him!
Suddenly our eyes were opened, and we knew He was alive!
Some of the old-timers here may recognize those lines from the second verse of the hymn, In the Breaking of the Bread,* which we used to sing here at Saint Paul’s every Easter season. It recalls some of the highlights from Emmaus to Pentecost, among them the event recounted in today's Gospel, as the Risen Lord revealed himself to his disciples and transformed them into his Church.
Typically, in these gospel stories of the Risen Lord’s appearances to his disciples, there is the sense that, while this is certainly the same Jesus the disciples had followed in life and who had died on the Cross, something about him is now different. Hence, the startlement and terror before the dramatic moment when Jesus is fully recognized.
Jesus’ resurrection was a real event (every bit as real as his crucifixion), but one which no one witnessed first-hand. What was witnessed initially was an empty tomb – a necessary condition for the resurrection to be true, but insufficient evidence in itself. Something more had to happen, and something more did happen – a series of encounters which captured the novelty and uniqueness of the resurrection, encounters with the glorified body of the Risen Christ in which the Risen Lord demonstrated to his disciples that he was the same Jesus who had lived and died (hence the wounds in his hands and his feet), fully alive now in a unexpectedly new and wonderful way.
Unlike hallucinations or mystical experiences, these were authentic encounters with someone who had lived and died but was now beyond the reach of death, embodied in a completely new way.
The events described in today’s Gospel took place on that same eventful Sunday in Jerusalem, to which the two disciples had rushed back from their exciting encounter with the Risen Lord in the breaking of bread. Perhaps this was the same room where some of them had so recently eaten the Last Supper and where an already growing group of them would gather again after the ascension to await the coming of the Holy Spirit. Since apostolic times (long before it ever became a day off from work), Sunday has been the special day, the irreplaceably privileged day, when Christians assemble in churches to encounter Christ, the Risen Lord, present in the sacramental celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist.
To repeat the same news over and over again is one way to bear witness to its importance. To hear the proclamation of the resurrection, over and over, during these Easter Sundays strengthens our faith by the witness of others’ faith. That is why one of the most noticeable features that distinguishes Easter in our Catholic liturgical calendar is the daily reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Through our journey through the book of Acts, we identify ourselves with that first generation of Christians in their experience of the Risen Christ, becoming like them a community which witnesses to the presence and action of the Risen Lord in his Church, a community which expresses its new life in its worship.
And, so, we celebrate Easter not for one day or one week but for seven weeks, during which we relive the experience of those first Christians, transformed forever by the presence and power of the Risen Lord, experienced in the here and now in his word and sacraments. We see how eager they were to share that experience with everyone around them – an eagerness we need to learn from, for each of us is being propelled by the power of the Easter story to trust in its power to transform the world.
Some of you here may also remember how the hymn which I began with concludes.
We ran out into the street to tell them,
everyone that we could meet, to tell them,
“God has raised Him up and we have seen the Lord!”
We took bread as He had done and then we blessed it, broke it, offered it.
In the breaking of the bread, we saw Him!
Suddenly our eyes were opened.
There within our midst was Jesus, and we knew He was alive.
In the breaking of the bread, He is here with us again,
and we know He is alive.
Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 14, 2024.
* Hymn by Michael Ward, © 1989.
Friday, April 12, 2024
Civil War (The Movie)
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Forever Elsewhere
Monday, April 8, 2024
Total Eclipse
Historians have long been fond of eclipses, especially since historical references to ancient eclipses sometimes enable other ancient events to be dated more precisely than would otherwise be possible. One of the earliest known solar eclipses was in 1375 B.C. and was recorded in the ancient city of Ugarit, in what is now Syria. In earlier times, eclipses were often interpreted as signs or omens of some contemporary calamity. They have also been known to alter behavior. Thus, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus wrote that an eclipse that occurred during a battle between the Medes and the Lydians in 585 B.C. caused the two armies to stop fighting and make peace. Wouldn’t it be something if today’s eclipse had that kind of effect on any of the conflicts currently tearing our world apart!
Like the many who are traveling near and far today to experience the awesome wonder of the eclipse, we are all pilgrims seeking the light revealed amid the dark shadows of our day-to-day divisions and conflicts.
In August 2017, together with many other "eclipse pilgrims," I was privileged to view the total eclipse of the sun from our observation point at Saint Joseph the Worker Church in Madisonville, TN, a manageable drive from Knoxville. The photo above was one of many I took that memorable day.
How I wish I could repeat that experience today! Alas, the path of totality is too far west of here to make that feasible. I do hope that as many as possible will be able to avail themselves of the opportunity to see this most amazing natural show (and that the weather will cooperate). May their experience be safe and as inspiring as previous eclipses have been for others. For myself, however, I must content myself with memories and reflections from that last total solar eclipse.
Blow the trumpet at the new moon, said the psalmist (Psalm 81:3). In Tennessee in August 2017t, he Moon blew her own trumpet, as she put on a show of shows, covering up the Sun in an amazing spectacle of light and shadow. Since Knoxville was just outside the path of totality, the four of us drove down to the southernmost parish in our deanery, which was scheduled to be more than two minutes in Totality. From there, we were able to view the eclipse in all its amazing grandeur. Needles to say, we were not alone. We left in mid-morning, hoping to avoid getting snarled in traffic and successfully got to the city of Madisonville around 11:00, which left us plenty of time to get some lunch in a crowded roadside restaurant with some of the other "eclipse pilgrims" who were swelling the town's population on that so memorable day.
Then on to the local church, where we met up with others we knew and others who had come from as far off as Mexico and Queens, NY, to experience this awesome spectacle. Children were playing games. People were cooking food in the parking lot and picnicking on the grass. It was a real party atmosphere. Everyone was friendly and hospitable, inviting others to share their food. After making a proper visit to the church itself upon arrival, I periodically retreated to that air-conditioned building to sit down and cool off while we waited and to reflect upon what we were witnessing.
The first part of the eclipse went on for over an hour. The Moon bit more and more into the Sun, which itself as a result came more and more to resemble a kind of crescent moon! The effect of wearing the special eclipse glasses was startling! Unlike wearing sunglasses, for example, when wearing the special eclipse glasses you could see nothing at all, total darkness - except for the sun, which looked like a small yellow disk, getting progressive smaller as the hour passed. If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might think you were looking at the night sky during one of the partial phases of a harvest moon.
Towards the end of the Moon's apparent conquest of the Sun, you could feel the difference in the atmosphere, as the air got just a little bit cooler and the sky started to get darker. You could see it in the images of the crescent sun reflected in shadow in patterns on the ground. Soon it seemed like an eerie twilight. One could hear the animals reacting accordingly, as if imagining thatd it must suddenly be sunset.
And then it was dark! Two or three stars appeared in the sky, as the sun was completely covered and its hot corona suddenly shone all around the dark disk of the Moon. People cheered. People prayed.
And then it was suddenly light again. No sooner did the Moon's movement reveal a small sliver of the Sun (on the other side this time), then normal light started to return. I suppose the poor animals were completely confused, as well they might be. We, however, who understood what we had seen and experienced could only express our joyful admiration:
Sun and Moon, bless the Lord! (Daniel 3:62).
Friday, April 5, 2024
“It is the Lord!”
Modern pilgrims in Israel quickly sense the contrast between the dry desert of Judea (where Jerusalem is) and the relatively lush, green of Galilee (where today’s Gospel story is set). Renewed annually by winter’s life-giving rains, the land around the large lake the Gospel calls the Sea of Tiberias (more commonly called the Sea of Galilee) is at its greenest in spring. It had been from those familiar shores that Jesus had originally called his disciples to follow him. And now they’d come home – back to what they knew best. They went fishing.
But this was to be no normal fishing expedition!
There’s a little church on the shore that marks the supposed site of this event. In front of the altar is a rock, traditionally venerated as the stone on which the risen Lord served his disciples a breakfast of bread and fish. Just a short walk away is another church, marking the site where Jesus had (not so long before) fed 5000+ people with five loaves and a few fish. Presumably, the disciples would have well remembered that earlier meal. And, surely, we should as well, as we also assemble here at the table lovingly set for us by the risen Lord himself, here in this church, where, as surely as on that distant lakeshore, he feeds us with food we would never have gotten on our own.
Typically, in these gospel stories of the risen Lord’s appearances to his disciples, there is the sense that, while it eventually becomes clear that this is the same Jesus the disciples had followed in life and who had died on the Cross, something about him is now different. Hence, the dramatic moment when Jesus is recognized for certain, as when the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!”
But recognizing the risen Christ is not the end of the story but the beginning of a new life, a new life lived in a community of love. We learn that love by following the risen Lord. So, even before being formally invested with his special mission, Peter leads the way, dressing up for the occasion, jumping into the sea and swimming to Jesus ahead of the others. As his role requires, Peter here is already leading his flock, leading here by example. His example illustrates for the rest of us what it means, first, to recognize the risen Lord and, then, actually to follow him.
Homily for Friday within the Octave of Easter, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, April 5, 2024.