Airport Travel and its Discontents

All this week, while I was in California for Thanksgiving (complete with freezing temperatures to accompany a week long festa of pasta, prosciutto, and provolone and other good things), I have repeatedly been asked by people about my experience of security at the airport. At Knoxville’s small, user-friendly airport, there was (not surprisingly) nothing out of the ordinary. Returning home Friday from San Francisco International Airport, on the other hand, I would not have been surprised to have had to go through the newest body scanning machines, etc. In fact, the only thing outstanding about my experience leaving from SFO was the enormous crowd – more than one might have expected on the day between the holiday and the weekend.

Judging from the news coverage (or, rather, hype), this latest development in airport security screening is, to put it mildly, controversial. On this, as on almost all other subjects of controversy, there is certainly plenty of room for legitimate differences of opinion and appropriate debate. Are these particular procedures really the best ones available to meet our security needs? Is this particular equipment really as safe as is being claimed? Have the screeners really been adequately trained to deal with people in an appropriately respectful manner? Etc. On all these matters, there is obviously room for debate. And, indeed, in a free society there should be debate. But, of course, what we have been hearing on this subject recently is hardly debate at all, but more of the same polemics that have poisoned our political culture and are tearing apart our social fabric.

To me, what we are hearing these days about this latest development in airport security screening seems to be just more of the same sad approach to our public life that has become the norm especially in the past decade or so – and shows no sign of diminishing. Americans want to be safe and secure in the air. Indeed, some seem to hold society somehow responsible if they are not – at least in the sense that they feel entitled to compensation from the state if they are victims of terrorism. At the same time, however, they don’t want to have to endure the slightest inconvenience, let alone anything resembling so old-fashioned a concept as “shared sacrifice.”

We see this, of course, not just in regard to the momentary controversy du jour of airport security. Rather, we run into it across the board in almost all aspects of our national life. Recall the immediately dismissive response from the ideological Left to some initial proposals floated by President Obama’s bipartisan deficit-reduction commission. Does anyone really doubt that entitlements will have to be curbed eventually if we are to get the deficit under control? The Right speaks eloquently about the crime of generational theft that the deficit really represents, but who on the Right is any more ready to bite the bullet on Medicare? And forget about tax increases! Again, what intelligent person really cannot understand that revenue must be increased to control the deficit? As a society, we are increasingly like those Californians, who (as one commentator has pithily put it) want to subsidize themselves like socialists, while taxing themselves like libertarians.

Is there no end to this nonsensical substitute for intelligent political discourse?

The solution certainly is not rallying for sanity or any other such self-righteous conversation among yet another niche group listening to itself in its own self-constructed cable-TV echo chamber. If anything, the solution likely lies with those who do not watch cable-TV news (or listen to talk-radio). People who do not watch cable-TV news, who do not nourish their prejudices on the ideological posturing promoted by MSNBC or FOX, are in fact the majority of Americans. Theoretically, in a well functioning democratic republic, it ought to be possible for the majority of Americans to influence our national “debate” and take it in a different direction.

There are, admittedly, structural dimensions to the way American politics is set up that may hinder such an outcome. The bigger problem, however, is that perennial problem of intensity. Some people perhaps disdain cable-TV news and talk-radio because they find its polemics unattractive. Most people, however, do not listen to cable-TV news or talk-radio primarily because they are less interested in politics than those who do. They are also less likely to be registered members of political parties and vote in party primaries. Indeed, they are less likely even to vote at all. Meanwhile, those who care the most intensely about politics are, not surprisingly, the most ideological and the most partisan. In the narrow world of political activism, they are the ones who matter most and set the tone.

Since most people are not avid consumers of political news, the need for effective filters to help people make sense of public policy issues is evident. Historically in the US, this essential filtering function was performed at election time by political parties – and performed fairly well. The gradual transformation of our political parties from broadly based, social coalitions into narrowly based, ideological interest groups has correspondingly altered the content of that filtering process. Meanwhile and more significantly, the diminished role of political parties in the nominating process, the greater openness of the process to more narrowly ideological candidates empowered by access to the media (and the money which enables independent candidates to get access to the media) has created alternative filters, more powerful in many cases than political parties. The result is that even those who are not enough interested in politics to pay a lot of attention to cable-TV news and talk radio are likely to be directly or indirectly influenced by those sources when they are processing information to form opinions and/or to vote in elections.

Meanwhile, we wait in vain for someone (our President, perhaps) to explain to us that Americans might actually have to accept some level of disruption and inconvenience if we want to fly safely.

Eating Together

The Thanksgiving holiday is not exactly about eating, but it is incomprehensible without eating – and not just any eating, but eating together. According to the Pew Research Center’s most recent study (The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families, p. 53), the typical host this Thanksgiving “will be setting places for 12 family members.” (My California family’s Thanksgiving dinner will be just half that. On the other hand, my New York relatives’ holiday dinner together will be at least double the average.) For most of human history, most meals (and not just “holiday” meals) were, when possible, eaten with others. And for most people, throughout most of human history, the ordinary shared meal was most often a family meal. At Thanksgiving, people (myself included) travel thousands of miles not to eat turkey, but to eat turkey with others – typically family members or others with whom one is comparably close.

The contemporary popularity of restaurants and of eating out (to the extent that it is a real meal and not just food eaten quickly, impersonally, and alone) may well reflect not just the obvious convenience of not having to cook for oneself but also may reflect a recognition of a real desire to commune with others over food. Those who resist the fashionable temptation to eat at their desks and actually take time for a real lunch hour with colleagues or friends may be expressing as much about their need and desire for human community as they are about how they prefer best to meet their nutritional needs.

Of course, there are all sorts of factors which get in the way of the classic common meal. Economic necessity forces many people to work too many hours. Many more work too many hours because that may lead to their feeling more validated in certain – particularly professional - circles. Families find themselves prisoners of individual members’ conflicting schedules. All these extrinsic factors impinge upon community (even religious communities), breaking bonds which might otherwise be stronger. Sometimes, competing schedules are less a consequence of economic necessity than they are a product of our greater individual freedom. Given the pervasive power and appeal of individual liberty today, I suspect that the only kind of human community that can seriously survive the assaults of our fixation on individual freedom is one which accepts and respects individual freedom and can negotiate new communal relationships and rituals. Herein lies perhaps the great practical challenge for the future of the common meal – that of transforming its present predicament of being in competition with our individual freedom (symbolized by our separate schedules) into a positive reinforcement of human freedom by furthering its fulfillment in relationships. If the common meal as an obligation is a thing of the past, shared meals as opportunities for genuine mutuality may be increasingly necessary.

In the life of Jesus, shared meals played a visibly important part in his ministry. Jesus’ practice of eating with all sorts of people, particularly with those he might otherwise not be expected to eat with, was widely recognized as a genuine sign of something new. A new kind of connectedness was created among people who, in that society certainly, would probably never have otherwise socialized together. Not just at Thanksgiving, but always, those committed to continue Christ’s work of healing and reconciliation would do well to keep in mind the memory of those early Christians who shared meals together “with glad and generous hearts” (Acts 2:46 NRSV).

Christ the King

83 years ago this week – this coming Tuesday, actually – a 36-year old Mexican Jesuit priest, Miguel Augustín Pro, was executed on the orders of Mexico’s President. Educated abroad because of the Mexican revolutionary government’s persecution of the Church, Pro had returned to Mexico, after his ordination in 1926, to serve in the underground Church, baptizing, hearing confessions, celebrating Mass – until his arrest and execution. On November 23, 1927, as the firing squad pointed their rifles at him, Padre Pro famously extended his arms in the form of a cross and proclaimed: “¡Viva el Cristo Rey!” (“Long live Christ the King”).

With those powerful words and his even more powerful martyrdom, Padre Pro reminded the world that there is a king greater than any earthly government or secular society. Just 2 years earlier, Pope Pius XI had made much the same point in an encyclical letter on the kingship of Christ, which established this feast of Christ the King, which we are celebrating today.

Now, obviously, the image of Christ as king was not some novelty of the 1920s. On the contrary, it is actually quite ancient – reflected, for example, in early Christ depictions of Christ on the cross, dressed in priestly vestments and wearing a kingly crown, as if the cross were his throne, which, in fact is precisely what today’s Gospel reading seems to suggest.

Most modern monarchs – for example, the 10 currently reigning European monarchs we are most familiar with – have ascended their thrones rather peacefully, usually as a matter of inheritance according to established constitutional rules, ritualized by suitable ceremonies. Once enthroned, a king acts as a kind of social glue that binds a people together and helps create a powerful bond of political unity and community.

That’s not always been the case, of course. For King David, the tribal warrior who successfully united Israel around its permanent new capital, Jerusalem, some 3000 years ago, the process, reflected in today’s 1st reading (2 Samuel 5:1-3), was less predictable – except in retrospect. To us in retrospect, King David personified Israel’s new national identity. His royal rule was a sort of earthly manifestation of God’s presence and power, binding separate tribes into one unified national and religious community.

This Sunday celebrates Jesus, David’s descendant, as the ultimate messiah-king, complete with all the symbolic and religious resonance the word “king” conveys – a king, however, who has obtained sovereignty, not through shedding his rivals’ blood but his own, making peace, as we have just heard St. Paul say (Colossians 1:12-20) by the blood of his cross.

In today’s Gospel (Luke 23:35-43), the title “king” is initially applied to Jesus as an insult. Throughout his entire public life, Jesus had been challenged about the nature and significance of his power. Nobody doubted that he did powerful deeds – driving out demons, healing the sick. The question at issue was always the source of his power and its significance, whether it was a good power or a bad power, a saving power or a threatening power.

On the cross, of course, Jesus appeared powerless. Yet with serene confidence in his power, Jesus unlocked the kingdom for one of those executed with him, thus revealing himself as a king of a kingdom of mercy. Mercy, of course, has traditionally been one of the virtues considered particularly proper for a king. It is, as Shakespeare famously said, enthroned in the hearts of kings. Jesus has gone even further and has revealed that mercy is, in fact, what his kingdom is all about.

The “good thief” (as he is traditionally termed) here represents all of us, whose only hope lies in God’s mercy – all, who recognizing our need and dependence, accept Christ as king. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” St. Paul speaks powerfully of how we have been delivered – just as the “good thief” was – from the power of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins, and share in the inheritance of the holy ones in light.

The strong Father-Son language St. Paul employs is not so much family language here as it is royal language, the image being that of the heir who inherits the crown. What is so striking about this kingdom, however, is how the succession is not confined to just one heir. In Jesus, God has overcome the great gulf that separates us from God, has identified himself with us sinners, enabling us sinners to identify ourselves with Jesus and so inherit the kingdom with him.

Like an earthly monarch, Christ the king binds his people together and creates a powerful bond of unity and community. What makes this community so uniquely powerful, however, is that the whole point of this kingship is that it be shared – and shared widely. Christ is most completely a king in conferring a share in his crown on all who seek salvation in the power of his cross and acknowledge his kingship for all the world to witness – and experience.

Homily at St. Anne's Church, Walnut Creek, CA, November 21, 2010.

Thanksgiving

Tomorrow, I fly to the West Coast to spend Thanksgiving week with my mother and celebrate Thanksgiving Day with her and my sister and her family. As Perry Como used to sing every year in anticipation of Thanksgiving, “there’s no place like home for the holidays.”

Thanksgiving harvest festivals are, in various forms, quite common across the world, but the American Thanksgiving is quite uniquely an American holiday, our foundational feast, our ritual reenactment of our origin as a people. In my six years stationed in Canada, I missed any number of things about the United States, and Thanksgiving Day was certainly high on that list. Thanksgiving is a civic celebration of who we are, by remembering who we have been, and so is also a symbol of who we hope to be.

Few of us, of course, are descended for the original Massachusetts Pilgrims. Most of us are more recent immigrants (or immigrants ourselves). I, for one, owe my American citizenship to that great wave of immigration from Sicily and southern Italy that inundated the Port of New York some three centuries after the Pilgrims had made their mark. Each immigrant group has added something significant and distinctive to our country’s cultural mix. Yet it was surely those hardy New Englanders who, early on, first gave our nation its soul, which is what we celebrate at Thanksgiving - in that most Christianly soulful of ways, by giving thanks through the sharing of a meal.

Most of us live lives of quiet caution. It is hard for us even to imagine what it must have been like to have embarked upon so hazardous an enterprise as did the Pilgrims (although the memories of immigrant relatives and the ever-present witness of immigrants in our country should help us to appreciate the awesomeness of the experience). Certainly, something so vast and mysterious (as the New World must have seemed) was bound to arouse all sorts of complex emotions among the settlers – both their brightest hopes and their darkest fears. Interpreted in the light of faith, the unknown of the ocean crossing became for the Pilgrims something known, as they recalled God’s Chosen People’s crossing of the Red Sea and the Jordan River. Good Calvinists that they were, those early immigrants to New England recognized the religious and political community as a creative force, part of what went into the development of a good human life.

Prosperity has a way of dulling our senses, making us feel more secure and contented than befits a truly pilgrim people. In the great ongoing struggle between virtue and narcissism for the soul of America, the pilgrims’ legacy recalls an almost forgotten concept of community – not as an abstract principle but as an experience akin to friendship. Our New England forefathers knew only too well what we as a nation forget only at our peril - that what is worth hoping for in our individual and collective lives as citizens requires real community and a kind of feeling for one another akin to that found among people who are friends. Whenever great things are at stake, they remind us – as Thanksgiving Day itself was originally intended to remind us – that we are all ultimately dependent upon one another and upon God.

An Election in Alaska

After yet another siege of vote-counting, Alaska's incumbent (Republican) Senator Lisa Murkowski has been pronounced the winner in that state's senatorial election - defeating the official Republican party candidate and "Tea Party" favorite, Joe Miller. Murkowski thus becomes the first senate candidate in more than half a century to win a write-in campaign.

In a political culture which historically has favored a two-party monopoly - the last time a "third-party" candidate captured the White House, it provoked a Civil War - Murkowski's win will certainly stand out. Of course, as an incumbent, already previously elected to the Senate and an heiress of an Alaskan political dynasty (initially appointed to the Senate by her father when he became governor), she hardly counts as an "outsider," however apt (and convenient) such a label may have appeared after her having been dumped by the Republican party's primary.

Indeed, whatever significance her victory may have may lie precisely in her insiderness. Of course, as in any election, particular circumstances and strictly local considerations undoubtedly played their part, thereby mitigating the election's larger or national significance. One such local consideration may have been the bad history between Murkowski and Alaska's potential 2012 "Favorite Daughter," Sarah Palin, who threw her considerable standing behind Joe Miller. Of course, any setback for Palin presumably has larger and national implications - not just for her own possible presidential ambitions, but for her long-term star-power and how that translates into real power, ideologiclaly and politically.

In any case, I think it is possible to see in the Alaskan results yet another example of the long-standing practice of the American electorate of first rewarding but then restraining extremist elements. Think back a few years to Connecticut Senator Joseph Liberman's political near-death experience - first his defeat in a left-wing primary coup and then his General Election victory as an "Independent."

In modern American politics, party primaries have become a principal vehicle for rewarding extremist elements - both left and right. That's what made Murkowski's primary opponent's candidacy possible in the first place. Murkowski's write-in win was a reminder of the sober side of American political culture which regularly pulls toward the middle - or at least back from the brink.

When political parties surrendered their control over nominations to primary election voters, they surrendered an important part of what had been one of their main historic funcitons in American politics - producing capable candidates and creating coalitions capable of actual governance and not just permanent political campaigns.