Greenland Isn't Green

 

Most people probably already know that Greenland isn't green. But, if he didn't know it already, Vice President Vance presumably knows that now, after his chilly reception in Greenland. It was chilly in the literal sense. (Greenland is a cold place.) It was, perhaps more importantly, chilly in a metaphorical sense, in that the Vances had to scale back their plans because no local Greenlanders could be found who wanted to host them.

Greenland isn't green. Much of it is glacier-covered. It is no accident, then, that the King of Denmark's Coat of Arms includes a polar bear to represent his sovereignty over Greenland.  Recently, since the American threat to Greenland has become something to be reckoned with, Denmark's King revised his coat of arms to give Greenland's polar bear bigger space in a heraldic quadrant all its own. On can compare the older (on the left) and the newer (on the right) versions of the Danish royal coat of arms (above).

Of course, to a grifter, Greenland might appear green in a very different sense. There are natural resources there to be exploited and hence money to be made. And one thing America never seems to lack are Americans ready to exploit natural resources, regardless of the harm to the common good and to our common home. 

Greenland's location in the north Atlantic makes it significant for American and European security. But Greenland (via Denmark) is part of NATO, the north Atlantic's surest source of security, and the U.S. already has a military base on Greenland, guarding the sea lanes and the arctic air. For its part, Denmark has been a very loyal ally of the United States, actively supporting us in peace and war.

There are not a lot of Greenlanders. They are a very small nation, suddenly experiencing the classic bad behavior of great powers pushing their smaller neighbors around (as we have witnessed most extremely in the case of Russia's 2022 invasion of its smaller neighbor Ukraine). It appears that some, maybe many, local Greenlanders would like independence. If I were a Greenlander, I would probably prefer to remain Danish, with Danish and European Union social benefits and NATO's security umbrella. Denmark does, after all, repeatedly rank as one of the happiest countries in the world. But that is ultimately up to the Greenlanders and the Danes to sort out. Whatever Greenland's future, it should be the business of Greenlanders and Danes to determine.

The Last Supper (The Movie)

 

I have not fully followed The Chosen, the first-ever multi-season TV series about the life of Christ. I have watched just a few episodes from the first season. But yesterday I went to the theater to see the latest episode, The Chosen; The Last Supper, Part 1. 

The series itself has gotten great reviews. From what I have heard from others who have followed it more faithfully, for the little I have seen myself, and finally from watching this in-theater episode, it is certainly impressive. The series is beautifully filmed, conveying a real feel for what the world of the New Testament - at that very specific place and time must have been like. It illustrates first-century Jewish life, which we Christians need to appreciate as much as possible. It also illustrates what kind of dramatic affect Jesus had on people's lives, people whose lives which until then had been otherwise ordinary but were suddenly being dramatically challenged to transformation through their experience of and relationship with Jesus.

As I remarked in regard to the current series House of David, one of the problems with dramatizing biblical narratives is that there is a lot of space to fill in with what must inevitably be made-up events, stories, and even characters. In the case of House of David, the downside of this is evident in the effort and amount of fictionalization required required to fill eight episodes with only three chapters of the biblical account. The latest episode seemed totally like a forced attempt to make up enough to fill in the time so as to get in one more episode. I haven't seen enough of The Chosen to be certain that this series avoids that pitfall. What I have seen suggests it is doing a more interesting job of filling in the spaces between actual biblical events.

That said, The Last Supper, Part 1, is really more about the first few days of Holy Week than about the Last Supper itself, which is only shown in intermittent excerpts of Jesus' Last Supper Discourse. The highlights of the evening (e.g., the foot washing, the Eucharist) are presumably being saved for a later episode. Instead of the Last Supper itself, this movie is about the triumphal entry into the city on Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the Temple (which the Gospels suggest occurred right away, but which the movie makes happen a day or two later). Both are well dramatized, and both are preceded and followed by fictionalized events that seem intended obviously to fit in with the bigger events and help interpret them (for example, the Gentiles from the Decapolis perplexed reaction to the Temple commerce and their wonder what Jesus would think of it).

This is the season for biblical dramas - especially passion plays. The Chosen; The Last Supper seems to do a better than average job of filling that niche of seasonal expectation, with something that definitely invites us to put ourselves into the story and imagine personally how Jesus' activities impacted his surroundings and what they are meant to mean for us today.

Abundance (The Book)

 

Ezra Klein is a well known NY Times political columnist and podcaster, originally from California, now based in Brooklyn, and author of Why We're Polarized (2020). Derek Thompson is an Atlantic staff writer and also a podcaster. The two have teamed up to produce Abundance (Simon and Schuster, 2025).

Abundance is dedicated to what its authors consider a simple idea, but which they and we know to be actually a quite controversial one, that "to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need." They oppose this to a 21st-century American "story of chosen scarcities." Thus agenda transcends the 20th-century political dichotomy between "a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it."

As anyone familiar with the way these issues have come to be framed recognizes, this book is a conversation largely within the progressive left. It expresses "the anger any liberal should feel when looking at the states and cities liberals govern." California, for example, "has the worst homelessness problem in the country. It has the worst hosing affordability problem in the country. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts in its cost of living. As a result, it is losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas and Arizona." The authors also highlight the consequent effect ineffective progressive misgovernment in such places has had electorally - in the form of the rise of populist Trumpism.

In their argument for a retrieval of growth politics, the authors take on the misanthropic antigrowth politics that they see as having developed somewhat in tandem with the environmental movement and related quality-of-life concerns in the last 50-60 years.  Back then, the rising anti-growth ideologies sometimes attacked Christianity. Here. the authors rebut that attack. They call degrowth "an anti-materialist philosophy that holds that humanity made its fundamental errors, hundreds of years ago, trading the animism of our ancestors for Christianity's promise of dominion over nature."

The book gos into great detail illustrating the ways in which liberal preoccupations with process have frustrated and stunted the outcomes liberals ought to have been seeking. I live in New York City, a city that once epitomized what America could build. Imagine anyone trying to build the Empire State building in just a year today? Let alone trying to build enough housing for everyone who wants to live here?

But the authors believe that this may be one of those rare periods in our national history, "when the decline of one political order makes space for another." They recall how the New Deal political order arose in the 1930s and then collapsed in the 1970s, to be replaced by the neo-liberal order which has been fracturing under the weight of the Great Recession, the climate crisis, the pandemic, and "our interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability." In such times of transition, "ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable."

So is it time for such a retrieved politics of abundance? The authors see the politics of scarcity  in the currently reigning right-wing populism, which "seeks power by closing doors, halting change, and venerating the businesses and dominance hierarchies of the past. So too is the sense that governments today are weak and corrupt and, therefore, that strongmen are needed to see the world clearly and deliver on democracy's failed promises." Meanwhile, however, Blue America remains stuck in its own scarcity politics. The authors' argument is that, given the right's abandonment of its many successes (e.g., the Texas housing market, Operation Warp Speed) in order to embrace a politics of scarcity, there may now be room for liberals to embrace the politics of abundance that Republicans have abandoned.

This is a very thoughtful and provocative book. It is hard to contest its data. But diagnosing where we have historically gone wrong is always easier than producing the political solution that may be needed. At present, the left lacks political power, without which little can be accomplished. To acquire power - and to use it effectively in our present predicament - require a kind of liberal "strongman," a liberal anti-Trump, an FDR for the 21st century, who can coalesce a new coalition that can be led to embrace not just more of the same, but a new political order, responsive to the new challenges of the present. Whether the current opposition party can rise to that challenge remains yet to be seen.

77

 

Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain. They pass swiftly and we are gone (Psalm 90:10).

Those familiar words from the psalter, recited regularly for a lifetime in the ordinary course of the Divine Office, take on a special salience on one's birthday - especially when one is in his late 70s, on a day like today when I celebrate turning 77.

Frankly, the first feeling I have as I turn 77 is simply gratitude - gratitude at having lived this long, at being still around after so many years and so many experiences and so much that has happened both to me and to the world that no one would have anticipated on this date back in 1948. 

It is good to be alive, in tolerably decent health, much slowed down but nowhere near stopped. It is good to remember the people I have known, the places I have been, the things I have done - and also the opportunities missed and other inevitable regrets. (No honestly examined life is without its regrets.) 

Today, it feels good to reflect on where I have been, not mainly for nostalgia or regret, but for where I am going in whatever time may yet be given me.

 

What's Going On?

 

“Why do bad things happen to good people?” Some of us here are old enough to remember that as the title of a popular 1980s best-seller. Long before then however, as today’s gospel [Luke 13:1-9] suggests, this was a perennial problem and an endlessly asked question.

 

Since even Jesus in today’s Gospel avoided answering the questions directly, neither will I be so presumptuous as to attempt an answer here. Jesus’ refusal to speculate why bad things happen to good people in life – or, for that matter, why good things happen to bad people – appears almost as enigmatic and mysterious as God’s answer to Moses’ somewhat impertinent insistence on asking God’s name [Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15]. God reveals himself not through philosophical and moral speculations about what is going on in the world but by otherwise unforeseen personal initiatives. Maybe I Am merely means that God exists, as opposed to false gods who do not, and was God’s way of telling Moses that some things about God that are just mysterious, as if God were saying, “I am who I am and that’s all you need to know.” Maybe that’s why the real Moses (in contrast to the famous 1950s movie’s Moses) refrained from asking God the obvious question, why it has taken God so long to react to his people’s suffering in Egypt and hear their cry of complaint.

 

On the other hand, God is obviously showing personal interest in his people’s problems. Moses may not have asked, but he may still have wondered why they had to have those problems.  Well may we wonder as well. Likewise, those anonymous some people who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices may well have wondered why good Galilean pilgrims on pilgrimage in Jerusalem had been killed by Roman soldiers. And why, for that matter, had 18 innocent people been accidentally killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them?

 

The last example reminds me of Thornton Wilder’s famous 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which revolves around seeking some connection among the apparently random victims of a bridge’s collapse – in the hope of explaining why they, in particular, died instead of someone else.

 

Of course, no one needs to read a novel to find plenty of comparable examples in real life, which is full of natural disasters and as many multiple tragedies and injustices of human making. All these things inevitably inspire people to wonder. Could it possibly be that we, whose lives have so far been spared, who are lucky to live lives of affluence and abundance, are somehow more worthy or deserving or virtuous than those who haven’t been so lucky? The question itself seems absurd and maybe morally repugnant. The very universality and randomness of so much human suffering would seem to rebut the logic of any explanation, even if our all-too-human desire to impose some order and logic on the apparently arbitrary randomness of so much of what happens causes us to engage in such speculations in the first place.

 

As if to pre-empt any such speculation, Jesus just rejected it out of hand, telling us, in effect, don’t go there.  Focus instead, he seems to be saying, on where we do have agency, particuarly on our universal need for conversion and repentance. By becoming one with us in the burning bush, by becoming one of us in Jesus, God has, so to speak, agreed to meet us where we are at. But where we are at, Jesus warns us, may not be such a good place after all. Hence his parable – simultaneously so comforting and so threatening – of the unproductive fig tree.

 

Now most people would probably agree that the whole point of cultivating a fig tree is to produce figs. A fruit-less fig tree hardly warrants the work involved in cultivating it year after year. If there were ever an obvious application for the slogan “three strikes and you’re out,” this would seem to be it. After all, how likely would it be that, after three fruitless years, yet another year’s effort might make the tree bloom at last? Not much!

Yet the gardener in Jesus’ parable is willing to give it one more try. Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future.

 

To us, impatient people that we are, the thing to do with an unproductive tree would be to stop wasting soil and effort and just cut it down. But God patiently postpones cutting us down. He gives us extra, even lavish attention, cultivating and fertilizing us, revealing himself to us more and more clearly, and more and more fully, through Moses and others, finally sending us his Son as his final and fullest revelation of himself, his final and fullest expression of his patience and mercy, the one piece of really good news in our otherwise dismal history.

 

As this saga of God’s long-lasting mercy toward the human race reveals so dramatically, amid the world’s cacophony of otherwise bad news and in spite of all that is wrong with the world, God has been opening up new perspectives and opportunities and has been incredibly patient to us in spite of everything. The challenge, however, is that, while God’s patience and mercy may be infinite, we are not. The world may be in a mess, but meanwhile we have to avail ourselves of God’s limitless patience and mercy in the inevitably limited time each of us has.

 

Lent is our annual reminder, our annual wake-up call, challenging us to bear fruit in spite of everything else that seems so wrong right now, to put God’s patience and mercy to good use – right here right now.

 

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, March 23, 2025.

A Frighteningly Contemporary Crime Drama

 

Adolescence is a powerfully gripping (and at times somewhat emotionally frightening) four-episode British mini-series recently released on Netflix.

Episode one begins with the shocking arrest of a 13-year old, Jamie Miller, at his seemingly peaceful and ordinary family home early one morning, on suspicion of murder. Jamie claims to be innocent, and continues to protest his innocence through the horrifying experience of arrest and questioning at the local police station. Most of the episode seems set up to make the audience sympathize with the traumatized young Jamie and his terrified family. Not only do we want to believe in Jamie's innocence, but the dramatic expectation built into this kind of crime drama normally leads one to expect - even as the evidence against Jamie accumulates - that at some point the case could collapse and someone else's guilt will be uncovered. Jamie meanwhile desperately wants his father to believe in his innocence, as if that could undo what has happened and, so to speak, fix the situation. Only in the second episode, set three days later at Jamie's school, when the detectives try to gather evidence (and perhaps the murder weapon) from Jamie's unruly schoolmates, do we begin to realize that this is not a typical  "whodunit," and that the drama is less about who committed the crime than about why it happened. Meanwhile, at the school (an "academy," with lots of stairs, where students wear uniforms and generally behave badly), we are  introduced into a really frightening world where teenagers appear to live primarily on-line, a world which adults (police, parents, and teachers) all seem incapable of comprehending. 

Episodes three and four take place respectively seven and thirteen months after the crime. The interesting minor characters (and sub-plots) we have been introduced to in the first two episodes, about which we might expect to see and hear more (like the story of the detective and his son, a student at that school), disappear. The tone changes dramatically from the more typical crime-drama of the first two episodes. Now that we know what happened, we are supposed to focus on the reasons why. Thus, episode three depicts the (now incarcerated) teenager's interview with a psychologist assigned to prepare a report on him for the judge. Their conversation continues and highlights a terrifying world of adolescent on-line and in-person bullying and male sexual obsession, that was earlier alluded to already in the second episode. In the course of episodes two and three, we learn about some of the factors that apparently contributed to Jamie’s crime, such as his extreme lack of self-esteem, his experience of being bullied at school, and especially the on-line world's mixed messages about masculinity and the fear of being labeled an "incel." Then, the final episode, set over a year after the crime, focuses on Jamie's parents and sister and how they have coped with this family crisis and the inevitable feelings of recrimination and guilt which these multiple tragic events have left them with. There are no family secrets to be uncovered (as one might be tempted to expect there will be), just seemingly ordinary people experiencing sadness and regret over something that can no longer be fixed.

This is a very difficult series to take in. It is depressing and at times shocking. It invites us to examine what kinds of messages contemporary on-line culture may be conveying and how such messages may further complicate the already chaotic challenges of growing up unsure of who one is or whether one is valued. It also challenges contemporary society not only about what boys may experience but also about how society should respond and better enable them to to navigate through this increasingly toxic and dangerous world of masculine expectations and pseudo-expectations.

The Leopard

 

Several years ago, when I was still in Tennessee, I read The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) a wondefrul novel by Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, which chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento that resulted in Sicily becoming part of the newly unified kingdom of Italy. The author was the last in a line of minor Sicilian princes, and he based the novel on his great-grandfather, Prince Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi. Published in 1958, it became one of the top-selling novels in Italian history and is regarded as one of the more important novels in modern Italian literature.  Lampedusa's elegy to fading Sicilian aristocracy has sometimes been compared to Gone With the Wind, in its intimate, familial portrayal of a certain type of society doomed to give way to modernity, in this case in the form of the unified kingdom of Italy in the 1860s. In 1963, the novel was made into a film, which I have not seen. Now, however, it has reappeared as a series on Netflix.

Probably the book's most memorable sentence is “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” The story, both in the book and in the Netflix series is ultimately all about the process of socio-political change (in this case Italian unification), who benefits (and who doesn't), and the toll the process takes on everyone, both those who adhere to the old and those who fight for the new.

Like the novel, the Netflix series starts in 1860 with Garibaldi's Redshirts invading Sicily to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and (eventually) unite Sicily and southern Italy with the northern Italian Piedmontese kingdom of Sardinia ruled by Vittorio Emmanuele II, who in 1861 will be proclaimed king of a united Italy (which at that point still lacked Austrian ruled Venice and papal ruled Rome). The series alludes to these political events and their consequences, but it is mainly their consequences as experienced by a small group of central characters centered around Don Fabrizio Cordera, Prince of Salina, his wife and children, most especially his daughter Concetta, his favored nephew Tancredi, who fights for Garibaldi and then becomes an official in the Turin government,  and is at various time sin love with Concetta, but marries thr mayor's rich and ambitious daughter Angelica. 

The series compresses the story, which in the book ends with Concetta's retrospectives as an old woman in 1910. In the Netflix series everything (including Concetta's later recollections) takes place in real time in the early 1860s. It ends with the Prince's death, which effectively symbolizes the end of the old society although aspects of it (including the family's continued rule over its lands) do continue even under the new regime.

The series deftly combines the social and political changes the Prince and his fellow Sicilians are forced to adapt to with more personal familial crises which transcend the immediacy of politics. The three-way love entanglement of Tancredi, Angelica, and Concetta is simultaneously a time transcending familial crisis of love, affection, and loyalty, as well as also a parable of the changing mix of confusing affections and loyalties that accompany social and political change.

All this Netflix does in the most visually beautiful and engaging manner. One feels as well as sees the beauty of the Sicilian landscape, the grandeur of the life stye of its aristocracy, the increasing tensions in society and Church, and the growing attractiveness of the new Italy. The Netflix version of The Leopard combines the book's timeless love story and historically specific social and political conflicts with a gorgeous sensate display that effectively reflects Sicily's natural beauty and its historical problematic of attraction and repulsion.

Photo: Cover of the first Italian edition of the book (1958).

 

O Canada!

 

"I, Mark Carney, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be a true and faithful servant to His Majesty King Charles III as a member of His Majesty's Privy Council for Canada." With these words, the new leader of Canada's Liberal party became Prime Minister of Canada. In explicitly promising "true faith and allegiance" to His Majesty the King of Canada, the Prime Minister implicitly rejected any contrary or competing allegiance to King Donald of the United States.

I spent six happy years stationed at a parish in downtown Toronto. So I likely have enjoyed more on-site personal experience of Canada than many other Americans have. Also, even back when we still seriously studied history in our schools, the snippets anyone learned about Canada were likely few and far between - and almost certainly U.S.-centric. So it is safe to say that few Americans really know enough about our peaceful and friendly neighbor to the north. Some seem barely aware of its existence as an independent nation, from whom we long ago separated when the two parts of what was then British North America divided and went their very separate ways.

That said, Canada and the U.S. are neighbors, who have peacefully shared a common border since the War of 1812. We are different, but we have much in common. Only now, thanks to the Trump Administration's unaccountably aggressive policy of rediscovered Manifest Destiny, do the differences seem to matter so much more. Those differences are not only real, they derive from the very different histories of our two countries and our different founding experiences.

At the time of our initial separation - the successful revolt by British colonists located largely along the eastern seaboard, who were unwilling to pay their share of taxes, the event that we now remember as the America Revolution - the European colonists in what is now Canada were largely Quebecois, that is, French settlers and traders, whose mother country had been defeated in the Seven Years War (known among English-speakers in North America as The French and Indian War) and who were now suddenly subjects of the British Crown. Presumably, such subjection was reluctant initially, but it was hardly intolerable, thanks to the Quebec Act of 1763, which guaranteed free practice of Roman Catholicism and restored certain of the Church's legal status, as well as maintaining some aspects of French civil law. This incensed the largely Protestant British colonists to the south and was one of their complaints in their 1776 Declaration of Independence: "He [the King] has combined with others [Parliament] ... giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation ... For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province." 

It was no wonder, therefore, that, when a delegation of American rebels tried to persuade Canadians in Quebec to join in our revolution, their efforts were roundly rejected. The American revolutionaries had already attempted a military conquest of Quebec in 1775-1776 and failed. A more peaceful approach followed in the negotiating efforts of the delegation, which included Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll of Maryland, the best known Roman Catholic in the Colonies, and his ex-Jesuit cousin, John Carroll, the future first Bishop of Baltimore. The intense anti-Catholicism of the Continental Congress and the secure status Quebec's Catholics already enjoyed under British rule guaranteed the futility of all such efforts on the part of the revolutionaries.

The American Revolution was really a civil war between revolutionaries and loyalists (with as many as one-third of the colonists sitting on the fence). After the war, many of the loyalists left. - either for Britain or for Canada. (Unlike the U.S. in Vietnam in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021, the British remained in New York until they had evacuated as many loyalists as possible.) Many loyalists settled in what is now Ontario, and became the basis of Canada's bi-lingual founding identity. (One of our parish staff when I was a priest in Toronto was a descendent of United Empire Loyalists.)

The separation between the two countries was solidified after the U.S. unwisely declared war on Britain in June 1812. Once again, the U.S. invaded, and once again the attempt ended in catastrophe. In April 1813, American troops occupied York (now Toronto) and burned Upper Canada's Parliament building. In retaliation, the British occupied Washington, DC, and burned the Capitol and the White House. The pointless war ended inconclusively, but it conclusively created a distinctive Canadian identity which has ever since remained different from that of its southern neighbor.

In 1841, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty definitively settled the border between eastern Canada and the U.S., and in 1846, the 49th parallel was set as the border between the rest of Canada and the U.S. A final border treaty was signed in 1908. For most of the time since the end of the War of 1812, Canada and the U.S have lived next to each other in peace, each country developing in its own way. Canada became noted for "peace, order, and good government," and more recently for its national health care. The U.S. in contrast has emphasized individual liberties, like virtually unrestricted gun ownership and the right to  be victimized by inadequate health care controlled by for-profit insurance companies. 

I am an American, born and bred, happy to be so. But my years working in Canada have  given me an appreciation of the particular paths Canadian national development has taken, from which we self-regarding Americans could learn some lessons.. 

Despite our differences, the historical and cultural similarities between our two nations have mattered more. Canada and the U.S. are each other's principal trading partner, are NATO allies, and have forged the closest cooperation possible militarily for the common defense of North America. None of that should be forgotten or ignored, which suddenly seems to be happening thanks to an amazingly unwise turn in the U.S. posture toward Canada in the current administration.

Et ta valeur, de foi trempée, Protégera nos foyers et nos droits, Protégera nos foyers et nos droits.

House of David

House of David is an 8-episode series that retells the biblical story of King David's rise from youngest son (stuck tending the sheep) to King of Israel. Its first three episodes premiered on February 27, and season finale will be on April 3. Already in its first week, this series reached second place on Prime's most watched list.

Any retelling of the biblical story of David could easily be done in a few episodes, certainly in a single season at most. So, as with all such attempts (e.g., The Chosen) dramatization demands fictionalization, filling in the gaps in the story with imagined additional developments in the lives of the characters - and indeed with imagined additional characters. Season one starts with Saul's disobedience of Samuel after his victory over the Amalekites and will end (so it appears) with David's defeat of Goliath. That is all of just three chapters in the first book of Samuel. So, obviously, narrative engagement requires considerable additional amplification of the biblical account. In itself, this is perfectly legitimate. In theory, this allows more in-depth character development, helping the once universally familiar biblical story become more fully accessible to contemporary audiences.

On the other hand, the series, while well produced and visually appealing, may (in my opinion) perhaps go too far in amplifying the biblical account, adding questionable elements not only without any obvious basis in the story (e.g., David's illegitimacy) but also explicitly contradicting the biblical story (e.g., the death of David's mother when he was a child, which explicitly contradicts 1 Samuel 22:3-4). How dramatically helpful such dubious additional aspects are may be debated, but I think it may be a mistake when the biblical account is explicitly contradicted or obviously distorted.

Again, while the series is generally well done dramatically, it may test the patience of anyone who knows the actual account and wonders when it will finally get around to those exciting events themselves. In the four episodes aired so far, we have seen Samuel's rejection of Saul and alternative anointing of David in secret, followed (as in the actual account) by Saul's being tormented by an evil spirit and the summons to David to attend Saul and play the harp for him. Everything else in the series so far is made up - including the fact that Saul's daughter is presented as instrumental in bringing David to the king's court. The series seems to want to make more than may be warranted out of the romance between David and Saul's daughter Michal - including (contrary to the biblical account) anticipating the romance by initiating Michal's attraction to David well before David's defeat of Goliath. Given that David's first marriage will in fact be neither happy nor dynastically significant, this seems a somewhat strange choice, unless, of course, it was simply deemed dramatically required to highlight a romance as a necessary condition for accessibility to a contemporary audience. The hero has to fall in love and be seen at least in part as motivated by such!

Be all that as it may, the numerous fictional sub-plots (including a story about Saul's unsatisfactory second son Ishbaal) makes me at least a little impatient for the series to get on to the (what I would consider) much more compelling drama of the actual characters from the actual biblical account. If the series ultimately falls short in my estimation, it may well be because it goes so far in focusing on minor characters and their fictional sub-plots rather than emphasizing the very real drama inherent in the primary figures in the story.

Still, the series is well worth watching. It manages to depict, in an apparently convincing way, what life at that place and time (c. 1000 BC), in such a society so different from ours, may have been like. Moreover, in its own roundabout way, it does seem to highlight the biblical account's fundamental theme of God's election of David and providential purpose for him in Israel's history (and, hence, in salvation history).

Five Years Ago

It is a truism that, when a new year begins, none of us knows how it will end. But that was more than typically true five years ago. When 2020 began, I was in a somber mood because I knew I was beginning the final months of my assignment as a pastor in Tennessee. Not only did I love being a pastor, but I was definitely not looking forward to my imminent (chronologically inevitable, but no less undesirable for being inevitable) demotion to "senior status." Meanwhile, parish life was continuing its accustomed pace, while the wider world was watching President Trump's first impeachment trial and the Democratic primary debates. Super Tuesday would come in March, by which time the Democrats' nomination contest would effectively be all finished, although that was not yet the case when I availed myself of "early voting" in the hectic weeks before Super Tuesday.

I am not sure when I first heard of the new coronavirus sweeping through China. February saw the usual winter flu epidemic - enough to close schools for a few days and for the diocese to prohibit Communion from the chalice until March 1. By the end of February, when the directive came to resume the chalice, I was already aware of the new virus from abroad and wondered whether we might do better to prolong the prohibition. Nonetheless, everything seemed normal as Lent began with the usual crowds coming for ashes on February 26 and the usual Friday Fish Fry and Stations two days later.

Unvesting after Ash Wednesday noon Mass, however, I got a call from my sister in California informing me that my mother had been taken to the hospital. At 97, she had been slowing down, but she had seemed normal enough on the phone only a few days before. We had the Rite of Sending for the Catechumens on Sunday as usual, but I spent much of the week on the phone as my mother's condition quickly worsened. By Monday, we were arranging for home hospice care, but that was cancelled on Tuesday as it suddenly became clear that she would not be leaving the hospital after all. On Thursday, March 5, my mother died. (That same day, although I probably paid insufficient attention, Tennessee conformed its first covid case.) Meanwhile, the family started planning the funeral, and I made travel plans for California. 

That weekend, we had guests at the house and went out to dinner together (for what turned out to be our last restaurant dinner together that year). On Monday I went to the doctor for a pre-scheduled appointment. I talked about my mother's death and my feelings about presiding at my mother's funeral. Unexpectedly, the doctor discouraged me from making the trip! Then, the next day, Tuesday, we had a diocesan priests' meeting, at which anxiety was beginning to be widely expressed. When I spoke privately with the Bishop about my mother's death and my imminent travel plans, he recommended that we postpone the funeral and I avoid any travel! The next day, WHO declared a pandemic. The State of California forced us, first, to cancel the lunch we were planning to host after the funeral and, then, the funeral Mass itself. On the day when I had been scheduled to travel, I watched horror scenes of panic at Chicago's airport, where I had originally expected to be changing planes that day. That same day, Monday, March 16, the Mayor declared a state of emergency.

Attendance was down at Sunday Mass on March 15, and I celebrated an abridged Scrutiny Rite. That turned out to be the last regularly attended Sunday Mass for more than two months. Life had gotten tense as the worldwide crisis quickly closed in on us. By the end of the week, Tennessee, California, and most of the rest of the country had effectively shut down, something none of us had ever experienced before.

Family grief was put on hold. (It would ultimately be 15 months before we would bury my mother.) A weird panic set in. I wore gloves when putting gas in the car, and I left the mail out on the porch for a day for the sun to kill any viruses on the envelopes! Instead of answering condolence cards, I started a daily email to keep in touch with parishioners, which I continued until my last day as pastor. Happily, my tenure as pastor was extended until December, which was good for parish stability, but also beneficial for me personally.

We were directed to "live stream" Sunday Mass, something I had no idea how to do. Fortunately, I was able to get guidance from a seminarian in Washington and much needed assistance from some parishioners. Eventually we invested in cameras and other equipment, which are still in use there today. But, for the first few weeks, it was just myself at the altar, with someone sitting in the nave "live streaming" on my laptop!

By late May, Mass resumed under constricted conditions - masks, social distancing, spraying the pews with disinfectant between Masses. All things considered, we got through it all rather well, but political polarization was setting in over contentious issues such as masking, and local divisions developed that echoed the wider national conflicts, which have only gotten worse in the years since then.

The heartache was enormous, but somehow I made it through the year without catching covid. Only one person in the house got sick. Only one parishioner died of it (on New year's Eve, literally on my last day as pastor). I got to celebrate my 25th anniversary of ordination in October with a modestly attended, live streamed Mass, with beautiful music and friendly words from the Bishop. My gratitude for 25 years of priesthood were amplified by the harrowing events of that year and the unexpected experiences and lessons learned.

The year ended with me still in Knoxville, but getting ready finally to move on. January 2021 brought me to New York and soon the first of many covid vaccinations. (Ironically, it would only be in September 2024 that I would finally get the virus - twice, in fact, as I was one of those to get a "rebound" infection from taking paxlovid.)

What happened to us in Tennessee and throughout the U.S. in mid-March 2020 was a challenging experience that ought to have brought us together and taught us how to prepare for future threats to the common good. Unfortunately, in the end, it seems to have done the opposite, as our society seems more polarized than ever since the Civil War, and our divisions have damaged out precious stock of social capital and left us traumatized and embittered. Ominously, I fear that if some "covid-25" were threatening us this March, our response would actually be significantly worse than it was five years ago.

The Lesson of Nineveh

 

Once upon a time, the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh was the largest city in the world. On the eastern side of the Tigris, right across the river from the modern Iraqi city of Mosul, its ruins still remind us of its onetime greatness. 

It was to that enormously large city, which it took three days to go through that our great Lenten preacher, the prophet Jonah, once went preaching repentance. To this day, some of the ancient Churches in the Middle East commemorate Jonah’s mission with a three-day fast, called the Fast of Nineveh. And, until 11 years ago, among the ruins of Nineveh was a shrine (photo) believed to be the site of Jonah's tomb, revered as such by both Christians and Muslims, a popular place of pilgrimage – until ISIS briefly conquered Mosul, expelled its Christian community, and destroyed Jonah’s tomb as part of its campaign of destruction and desecration.

 

Jonah’s mission and Nineveh’s repentance were already ancient history by Jesus’ time, when Jesus himself cited it as a warning to his contemporaries – an evil generation, that seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given it, except the sign of Jonah.

 

Likewise, the Lenten liturgy returns each year to this story of Jonah – because, after all, what generation isn’t evil, what generation doesn’t seek a sign, and what other sign is there for every generation to remember and relive but the sign of Jonah?

 

Lent is the Church’s annual wake-up call to take to heart the preaching of Jonah, as did the hard-hearted king and people of Nineveh, and to join with them in the ashes of repentance – so that, through that simple movement of letting ourselves be turned around by the power of God’s word we may experience that change of heart which we call conversion and repentance, and so we too, like the king and people of Niniveh, may find the forgiveness that brings life.

Homily for Wednesday of the 1^st Week of Lent (Jonah 3:1-10; Luke 11;29-33), Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, March 12, 2025.

Lent in a Time of Moral Helplessness

It is almost axiomatic that the more authoritarian and/or distant a government or society seems to become in the experience of its citizens, then the less actively engaged and effective will those citizens' experience likely be likely. This was illustrated somewhat in the ineffective-to-silly behavior of Democrats at the recent Presidential Address to Congress. Some absented themselves entirely - the ultimately passive disengagement, which demonstrated their complete and utter powerlessness. Of those who attended, some seemed to sit on their hands, failing to applaud even at the sorts of feel-good stunts that traditionally get widespread applause. Some wore silly outfits. Some held silly little signs, which might have caused them to be mistaken for bidders at an auction. And, of course, one congressman stood up and waved his cane to protest the Administration's possible cuts to Medicaid. That was, by the way, the only mention of the impending threat to Medicaid that whole evening! Of course, the congressman's futile gesture just got him thrown out of the chamber and then officially censured a few days later (a censure supported unbelievably by 10 Democratic votes). The irrelevance and ineffectiveness of such stunts is really quite breathtaking. The obvious reaction to such silliness is why did anybody bother?

Why does anybody bother? Moral helplessness is a real thing. People who might otherwise feel compelled to care about the condition of the world and the sorry state of our society sense that they are failing to make a difference and are helpless to accomplish anything beyond expressing outrage, which in turn degenerates into a sort of mere virtue signaling, which in turn further highlights their moral ineffectiveness and helplessness.

From the start, Christians have lived under inhospitable regimes - some extremely repressive, many much less overtly so (more something like some 1960s notion of "repressive tolerance"). Modern societies have unique capacities for overt repression, but also - more challengingly - are increasingly capable of a more subtle sort of repression, which simply isolates would-be citizens and reduces them to ineffective and helpless consumers. The 20th-century provided abundant examples of such regimes, in which it was quite possible to live from day to day, disengaged and passive but hardly persecuted or repressed in any plausibly recognizable sense of that word. (I had relatives who lived for a time in Fascist Italy, for example, a society which for many - at least prior to the war - appeared sufficiently satisfactory to live in, but one which fostered political apathy and moral helplessness.)

Active or apathetic, however, political citizenship can never completely express who we are - not, that is, if who we are, first and foremost, is disciples our one ultimate Lord, Jesus Christ, who as we hear again in today's Gospel reading (Luke 4:1-13), reprimanded Satan, reminding him, You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.

In out utilitarian world, we inevitable measure ourselves by our power, by our effectiveness. That is the significance, of course, of the Gospel's temptation scene, with its terrifyingly inviting image of all this power and glory of all the kingdoms of the world.

Of course, there is nothing inherently virtuous about being ineffective. There is nothing commendable about being unable to improve the condition of our world or the sorry state of our society. The challenge is to rediscover what may matter more than all the power and glory of the kingdoms of the world. 

In the immediate term, one challenge is to discern how one can advance the kingdom as a disciple in the contexts - family, work, neighborhood, etc. - in which we are called to play a part for the better, utterly regardless of how powerless and ineffective we may be on the larger social stage.

It may be that the more constricted the area in which one can act, the less effectively helpless one may become.

Be Religious! Really?

 

Ross Douthat, a New York Times opinion columnist since 2009, has been the author of multiple books on diverse subjects, including books on religion - notably Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (2012) and To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (2018). His latest such venture - this one of a quasi-apologetical nature - is Believe: Why Everyone Should  Be Religious (Zondervan, 2025).

The context for this effort is Douthat's impression that, at this juncture, many seem "to experience secularism as an uncomfortable intellectual default, not a freely chosen liberation."  His response - his style of apologetic, if you will - is to "begin with the basic reactions to the world that lead people and cultures toward religion, and argue that these are solid grounds for belief - indeed more solid that was apparent at earlier stages of modern history and scientific progress."

Accordingly, the first part of the book agues that, contrary to the once assumed trajectory of the modern secularization thesis, "the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order that what was available to either the senses or the reasoning faculties in the premodern world." He goes on to argue, for example, that "to acknowledge a point of origin, to recognize a moment of creation, makes it intuitively more likely that the universe as we know it now has some specific importance to its creator - that any divinity isn't just perpetually emanating or sustaining space and time, but using them to tell something we would recognize as a story."

As a person of faith, I, of course, am gratified by these insights. Obviously, I agree with the overall conclusion that faith makes sense and that the case against it, despite its assertions and claims, has not quite been completely made. Hence, the persistence of religion worldwide, despite those whom Friedrich Schleiermacher in the 19th century famously labelled its "cultured despisers." Thus, Douthat reminds his readers that while "intellectuals" may have "stopped taking mystical experiences seriously," nonetheless, "actual human beings kept on having the experiences. When Official Knowledge ruled out the supernatural, in ordinary life it kept breaking in." Moreover, the contemporary "decline of institutional religion in America has had no effect on the share of Americans who report supernatural experiences."

Al this is very edifying. Whether it can really convince is, I suspect, a question of entirely other order. Personally, I have always been satisfied with the minimal claim that religion's case cannot be falsified by modern science and have never much seen the point of pushing the argument further to the contention that somehow science specifically supports the case for religion. Such is the subjectivity of faith that I have no problem picturing someone being completely unmoved - and hence unconvinced - by Douthat's data.

Thus I personally found more interesting - and maybe also more compelling - Douthat's case for commitment, especially commitment to what he calls the "Big Religions." Revealingly, he recognizes that religions (including Douthat's own Catholicism) "are filled with people who maintain private heresies or private doubts, who feel agnostic two days out of seven - but who have made the sensible decision that it's better to live inside the tradition they consider most plausible  while holding doubts than to reject any system in the name of those difficulties."

For all his public commitment to Catholicism, Douthat argues somewhat encouragingly that "if some kind of God exists and ordered the universe for human beings, then even a false or flawed religion will probably contain intimations of that reality, signposts for the discerning pilgrim, some kind of call to higher things - such that a sincere desire to find and know the truth can fail to reach truth's fullness and still find its reward."

That said, Douthat concludes with a case for his own religion of (Catholic) Christianity. He agues for the credibility of the Gospels and the uniqueness of the story of Jesus. He especially emphasizes how "the Jesus of Scripture isn't always the Savior that my native self finds relatable, the kind of God I would have invented for myself, because there is a tension between some of His hardest and most inscrutable sayings and my own personality, my natural intellectual perspective, my instincts and desires."

Anyone who seriously engages with Christianity will recognize Jesus' challenge to be otherwise than who and what one would choose on one's own as Christianity's distinctive demand. Way more than any classical apologetic argument - intellectual, historical, or even moral - that demanding challenge is the place where the search best comes to an end.

Emendemus in Melius

It is Lent once again. The pre-Easter penitential season starts somewhat late this year, one of the consequences of the variability of the date of Easter, which is one of the traditional features of the Christian calendar that has not yet been destroyed by modernity!

While the Council of Nicea in 325 established a 40-day period of pre-Easter fasting for the universal Church, this observance took on various forms in different localities, and it was a while before our Roman Lent reached its current length and form. Ash Wednesday was a relative latecomer to the Lenten calendar, when a concern to have exactly 40 days of fast (excluding Sundays) led to front-loading the season with an extra four days. While beginning Lent on the First Sunday (Quadragesima) might seem more liturgically traditional (and is still when Lent begins in Milan, which follows the non-Roman Ambrosian Rite), Ash Wednesday is without doubt one of the most popular and faithfully observed days in the entire Catholic calendar.

At some point, the Church began to impose ashes at the beginning of Lent on those performing public penance during Lent, who would later be reconciled to God and the Church on Holy Thursday. By the end of the First Millennium, the Order of Penitents had died out, replaced by the more modern form of individual Penance, but ashes had become so popular that everyone eventually wanted to receive them, as is still the case! The reformed post-conciliar Lent may have lost some of its zest, but Ash Wednesday has, if anything, grown in popularity

Ashes, obviously, are meant to serve as a reminder of human mortality, as well as a sign of sorrow for one’s sins and the desire for conversion. The first symbolism is reflected in the traditional formula used when imposing ashes: “Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The second is echoed throughout the season in the scriptural texts and liturgical chants and prayers that are employed. Among these is this traditional responsory for the former Second Nocturn at Matins on the First Sunday of Lent, which begins, Emendemus in melius (Let us change for the better).

Amendment of life is, inherently, a lifelong task, which we traditionally focus on with special intensity in this Lenten season. Different times and circumstances, the life transitions we experience, and the fluctuating currents of the secular world all offer context for our Lenten penance, our amendment for better.

So what about this year?

Before his recent hospitalization, Pope Francis issued his annual Lenten Message, entitled (in the spirit of this Jubilee Year), Let us journey together in hope. The theme of journey is especially salient right now. In his message, Pope Francis recalled, our brothers and sisters who in our own day are fleeing situations of misery and violence in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones. What Pope Francis calls A first call to conversion thus comes from the realization that all of us are pilgrims in this life; each of us is invited to stop and ask how our lives reflect this fact. Am I really on a journey, or am I standing still, not moving, either immobilized by fear and hopelessness or reluctant to move out of my comfort zone? Am I seeking ways to leave behind the occasions of sin and situations that degrade my dignity? Then, connecting with the worldwide migration crisis, which is taking such a terrible turn on our own country right now and so especially impinges upon our consciousness and on our conscience, the Pope adds: It would be a good Lenten exercise for us to compare our daily life with that of some migrant or foreigner, to learn how to sympathize with their experiences and in this way discover what God is asking of us so that we can better advance on our journey to the house of the Father. This would be a good “examination of conscience” for all of us wayfarers.

Carnival in Time of War

 

The traditional name for this Sunday was Quinquagesima (approximately the 50th day before Easter). It is also commonly called Carnival Sunday, referencing the carnival (carnevale, "Goodbye to meat," in Italian), widely celebrated, especially in Catholic countries in these final days before Lent, the penitential season which begins in another three days on Ash Wednesday. Now that the Lenten fast has become virtually vestigial, so perhaps is the pre-Lent Carnival (despite its famously successful secular survival in sites like Rio and New Orleans).

By convenient coincidence, however, tonight will also be the occasion for the 97th Academy Awards, an ostentatious display of wealth and obnoxious snobbery, combined with amazingly extreme political obtuseness, but which is also yet another significant event of widespread communal festivity. Obviously, the Oscars are not the Super Bowl, which has become one of the primary remaining unifying national events in which most of the country participates together. Far fewer people watch the Oscars, apparently fewer every year. Some 20 million do watch it, however, and so it is still one of those occasions when many gather together to watch and celebrate, which we will be doing in my house tonight. The Academy Awards show may leave a lot to be desired, but movies are still an important shared component of our common culture, and "Oscar Night" remains a grand occasion for friends and families to gather, just to be together.

Unlike some film devotees, I have not seen all the nominated movies. In fact, I have seen only three of them - Conclave, A Complete Unknown, and The Brutalist. All three of them probably deserve a prize, and I would be happy if any of them won Best Picture. But, of course, not having seen the other nominated films, my personal preferences for the few that I have seen inevitably say very little about what will actually happen.

With so much that is going wrong (and getting worse) in the world right now at home and abroad, it seems a bit off-key to talk about partying right now. The world is still reeling in shock and dismay from the recent, grim display of the shameful behavior, unworthy of their offices, on the part of the U.S. President and Vice President toward the heroic Ukrainian warrior President, Volodymyr Zelensky. This Carnival Sunday, this Oscar Night, cannot but be overshadowed by a sense of shame and by worry about what is happening to undermine what remains of the post-war American commitment to our common civilization.

But, for better or for worse, life goes on: As it was in the days of Noah ... they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all (Luke 17:26-27). 

Photo: Italian Carnevale Mask.