The Newsroom

Other than news and analogously nerdy talk programs, I faithfully follow only a few TV programs. My latest is The Newsroom, an Aron Sorkin production, which purports to be a behind-the-scenes look at a cable news show and the various people who make it happen. It’s presumably about the state of news in today’s America, but also (and much more interestingly) about the interpersonal dynamics of the news program’s anchor, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels), the Executive producer (and McAvoy’s former lover), MacKenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer), the President of the News Division, Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterson), and the younger newsroom staff – a bunch of energetic, driven, nerdy news junkies, who all manage nonetheless to be very good-looking and to juggle complicated emotional and sexual relationships right there in the newsroom.

As one would expect from a Sorkin production, the politics – ideology really – is for the most part perfectly predictable. It’s the orthodox, politically correct world-view presupposed by any right-thinking member of the urban, liberal cultural elite. Like President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in Sorkin’s super successful West Wing, McAvoy is somewhat flawed, but in his case considerably less likeable personally than Bartlet was. His obnoxiously, self-righteous, bullying “mission to civilize” is simply the external face of a desperately conflicted, ultra-self-absorbed narcissist. It certainly speaks volumes about the self-confidence of current elite opinion that the show’s hero is someone so hard to admire, let alone like. Obviously, he is intended as some sort of latter-day Edward R. Murrow. But journalistic conceits about Murrow’s heroism just don’t translate well into a much different social world, whose characters lack the moral framework for such heroism.

As one would expect, there are (besides the news itself) a number of interesting, intersecting sub-plots. There is the unresolved emotional tension between McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale. There is Charlie Skinner, the somewhat old-fashioned News Division’s president (who also, one suspects, would like somehow to re-incarnate Murrow) and his on-going clash with the bottom-line concerns of the parent company. By far the most personally compelling sub-plots, however, are the soap-opera-like lives of the younger newsroom staff – notably Neal Sampat (Dev Patel) and the complicated love triangle of Don Keefer (Thomas Sadoski), Maggie Jordan (Alison Pill), and Jim Harper (John Gallagher, Jr.)

All in all, it’s a classic soap opera, grandly dressed up in elite concerns of purportedly world-historical significance. On occasion, as in the most recent episode recalling the killing of Osama ben Laden, those concerns manage to transcend sentimentality and express meaningful human (and even patriotic) emotion. Most of the time, It’s a lot of fun and a great show!

Transfigured

Today, the Church celebrates the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. To me the word “transfigured” – as in he was transfigured before them [Mark 9:2] – has always sounded way too technical. Like “transubstantiation,” a technical word we now in effect reserve to refer only to Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist, “transfiguration” is a word with no other reference except for this totally unique event in the life of Christ. So mysterious was that event, however, that it was described in such a way as avoid any precision as to what it actually entailed. What it meant, however, is another story. To the disciples, it represented a unique, one-time manifestation of Christ’s divine glory otherwise hidden during his earthly life.

In Israel in the summer of 1993, I visited the Mount of the Transfiguration. After an adventurous taxi-ride to the top, I was tempted to echo – out of relief at having made it - Peter’s famous words “Rabbi, it is good that we are here!” [Mark 9:5]. The temptation to open with that line was well nigh irresistible 12 summers ago, when I celebrated my first Sunday Mass as parochial vicar at St. Paul the Apostle parish in New York on this date. Not really such a good idea, however, given that the Gospel account quickly informs us that Peter hardly knew what to say [Mark 9:6].

On that awesome occasion on that high Galilean mountaintop, it was God himself who spoke to Peter to clear up his confusion – and ours.  With Jesus’ passion and death inexorably approaching, God the Father spoke to identify Jesus as his Son in a kind of fast-forward to what would only become clear after the Resurrection.

Indeed, according to some traditions, the transfiguration was thought to have occurred 40 days before the crucifixion. That may account for the western liturgical usage, which associates the transfiguration Gospel with the beginning of Lent. (In the Roman Rite, the Gospel account of the transfiguration is read each year on the Second Sunday of Lent. Anglicans and Lutherans read it on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.) And It also just so happens that August 6 comes 40 days before the feast of the Holy Cross!

In any case, no wonder Jesus himself charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead [Mark 9:9]. In the meantime, they were told by God to listen – This is my beloved Son. Listen to him [Mark 9:7].

Obviously, it wasn’t some isolated saying or some particular parable they were being told to listen to. Jesus himself is the message. He himself shows his disciples who God is and what God is about. Christianity has no place for some generic “spirituality.” It’s about a person – the one and only person, who directly links the world with God.

So, before I can have anything of use to say to anyone else, I must first be overpowered and transformed by God’s unique Word to the world, his Son. Only then, like Peter himself, overpowered and transformed in head and heart by the Risen Lord, alive in his Church, then one will have plenty to say to the world.

The Bread of Life

Now I know it’s still summer. But try to imagine a gray Scandinavian sky faintly lighting the snowy ground in a small Swedish village one early-winter Sunday morning. There, in the chilly little church, the local Lutheran pastor celebrates a Communion service for his small, somewhat somber congregation.

So begins Ingmar Bergman’s 1962 film Winter Light, an old favorite of mine, the only movie I know of that begins with a Communion service. Five worshipers kneel at the communion rail to receive Communion from their sad-looking pastor, who says to each, “The Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for you,” and again, a second time around, “Christ’s Blood shed for you.”

The film follows Pastor Thomas Eriksson through his Sunday – from the morning service to Vespers in the mid-afternoon darkness. Through it all, he seems somewhat troubled, preoccupied with himself, detached from the world around him. One of Pastor Eriksson’s parishioners, a fisherman, afraid the Chinese are getting the atom bomb, comes for counseling (prodded by his pregnant wife, who sensibly seems not so worried about the bomb but very worried about her husband). In response, the pastor rambles, referring to himself as “a spoilt, shut-in, anxious wretch,” which may well be true but hardly helps the poor, disturbed fisherman, who leaves and then shoots himself. Called to the scene, Pastor Eriksson dutifully rushes to the site; but. once there, he seems embarrassingly ineffectual. By now, the police have taken charge, and all the pastor can do is stand there while they do their job.

The unfortunate fisherman had come for counseling. Later that day, the old sacristan will come seeking spiritual direction, and the village schoolteacher will come looking for love. None of them get much from him. In fact, really the only thing they get from him that day – and the only thing that gets him out of himself enough to connect with any of them at all – is Communion, the Eucharist promised by Jesus in today’s Gospel [John 6:24-35} set in Capernaum’s sun-baked synagogue centuries earlier and half-a-world away – the bread of God which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.

Now, suppose that, instead of being focused so exclusively on himself and his problems, Pastor Eriksson had been able to appreciate and identify with the experience of the crowd in the gospel story we have just heard. Maybe he just might have been able to recognize how very much like him, how equally “spoilt, shut-in, [and] anxious” Jesus’ audience probably was that day in Capernaum – as were their ancestors before them in the desert, whom we just heard [Exodus 16:2] grumbling against Moses and Aaron. He might, maybe, even have begun to appreciate how Jesus was offering himself in the Eucharist in part as a remedy for all that, precisely as an alternative to what they could be on their own – much as the manna in the desert had been a remedy for the people’s hunger, an alternative to whatever food they could find on their own. Unlike the manna, however, which was (in the end) more like a temporary snack, the Eucharist is really more like a full meal – intended to remain with us, to change us into something new, to transform us, to get us out of ourselves and give life to the world.

This was something the Capernaum crowd would have a tough time accepting – as we shall see over and over again in the Gospel readings over the next few weeks. This was something Pastor Eriksson had a tough time accepting – as we see in his tragic inability to bring life into the fear-filled world of the suicidal fisherman. Not that I would necessarily have done any better in his situation! The fact is that, like Pastor Eriksson, we naturally tend to live - as Saint Paul says [Ephesians 4:17] - in the futility of our minds, clinging, however uncomfortably, to whatever is “spoilt, shut-in, [and] anxious” in ourselves.

The Eucharist, however, gives life to the world, precisely by signifying an alternative vision of life – life not as a problem, but as a gift – a gift from God who is so deeply connected with us as to become food for us for ever.

In Jesus’ sharing of his life with us through the Eucharist, we are introduced to a new pattern of love, hope, and meaning, which destroys detachment and creates connection. If only we could actually get out of ourselves enough to experience it as it is meant to be experienced! Then, we would understand the sense of Saint Augustine’s famous saying, “Become what you receive.”

If only we could actually - as Saint Paul says [Ephesians 4:22-24] - put away the old self of our former way of life and put on the new self created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth!

In the end, of course, Winter Light is just a movie. It simply portrays a Communion service. The real thing is … the real thing. And it’s here. Here, we experience the power to live the Eucharist and the life it gives to the world.

That begins when we appreciate that there is no moment when we are more obviously loved than when we are addressed with the words The Body of Christ.

Homily for the 18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, August 5, 2012

Happy Birthday, Mr. President

No, I am not trying to sound like Marilyn Monroe!

For some time now, however, ads have been appearing on my computer reminding me of the President’s birthday. Generally speaking, I dislike ads and normally ignore them. But I do like birthdays. A friend of mine recently said that he thinks one of the nicest things about Facebook, for example, is its weekly notification of the upcoming birthdays of one’s friends. Frankly I rather agree that that is in fact one of Facebook’s finer features!

President Obama was born in Hawaii on this date in 1961. That makes him (but just barely) a Baby Boomer.  The post-World War II Baby Boom began in 1946 and ended in 1964. So Obama is, technically at least, a Baby Boomer. It seems to me, however, that he has tended to present himself more as a post-Boomer, someone whose experience presumed rather than participated in the great cultural shifts associated with my generation’s experience.

I think that's right. A 1985 study of U.S. generational cohorts divided us Baby boomers into 2 groups. Cohort 1 (to which I belong) includes President Obama’s two immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.  Born in 1948, I can well remember the deepest freeze of the Cold War. I remember fondly the Eisenhower era, the excitement of “Camelot,” and the turbulence of the 1960s.  I remember vividly Vatican II, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, the Goldwater revolution, Vietnam, 1968, the “sexual revolution,” the Moon Landing, and Watergate – events which profoundly influenced my generation and in much of which my generation played a profoundly influential part. President Obama, born towards the end of the second Baby Boomer cohort, more or less missed most of that, although the world he inherited – and which he now leads – was thoroughly shaken up by those events and in some important respects has not yet completely come to terms with them.

Because we were so many, we 1st-decade Baby Boomers got used to being the center of attention. When we were kids, schools and playgrounds were full of us. (Some 1400 students attended my parish elementary school the year I graduated). Undoubtedly, one factor contributing to the chaos of the 60s was that so many of us became adolescents and then young adults all at that time, with all the internal and external turbulence associated with that stage of life. With so many young people going through so many changes and interacting with a society itself undergoing tremendous changes, the world of the Greatest Generation suddenly came unglued. Some good clearly came of that, as did a lot of bad. That’s probably the way it has always been, but magnified in intensity by our numbers and our sense of being special, always the center of attention.

But, in contrast to his Boomer predecessors Clinton and Bush, the President’s personality does not strike me as particularly Boomer-like. His high self-regard seems merely what is typical in many highly successful, smart people. High self-regard combined with a desire for love and acclaim have characterized most of our modern Presidents. Who else, after all, would be willing to run for the office and subject himself to the absurd process by which we choose the most powerful person in the world? He is rather, I think, very much an exemplar of a post-Boomer world, which just takes for granted so much that we elder Boomers fought about and still fight about.

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Meanwhile as we Boomers age – again, I guess, because there are so many of us - we will apparently continue to set much of society’s agenda. Our concerns (retirement, health care, etc.) will continue to be at the center of attention – marginalizing other important concerns (like the prospects for future generations, the ones who will have to live in the hotter, more stressed world we are leaving them).

I didn’t intend to end on such a somber note! Birthdays are appropriate occasions for serious, somber reflections, to be sure. But they are above all meant as happy occasions. So, as they say in Italian, Cent’anni!  Or, better still, Happy Birthday, Mr. President!

Chicken and Freedom

I’ve never eaten at Chic-fil-A. In fact I don’t think I’d really been much aware of the chain’s existence prior to the current controversy. Not that I don’t like chicken! In fact, I love chicken! And, back when I still ate sandwiches, I probably wouldn’t have gone out of my way to turn down any brand of chicken sandwich. I guess that particular chain and I just never crossed paths. (Even now, I don’t know where I’d have to go to find it, although a quick Google search is showing me that there actually are several of them in the Knoxville area).

So, I won’t be either patronizing or boycotting Chic-fil-A anytime soon. Personally, I have never been big on patronizing (or not patronizing) particular stores or brands to make a political point. It is a time-honored American tradition, however, which has sometimes proved very effective. Patronizing (or not patronizing) a store to support (or oppose) its owner’s beliefs – and organizing others to do the same – is perfectly acceptable in a free society, where the right to offend one another is reciprocal.

What is, however, totally unacceptable in America is for a public official (in this case, several mayors and a putative future mayor) to try to stop a company from having a store in a city because the mayor disagrees with the owner’s religious beliefs.

To his very great credit, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg said what every public official ought instinctively to know and ought immediately to have said, “You can’t have a test for what the owner’s personal views are before you decide to give a permit to do something in the city.”

Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from having one’s religious beliefs criticized or opposed. On the contrary, no one should ever feel entitled to go through life without his or her sensitivities being insulted or offended. (To expect that is to play into the victimization pathology, which permeates post-modern society – at great cost to us all). What freedom of religion most certainly does mean, however, is that one may freely profess one’s faith without overt government interference. The same applies analogously to freedom of speech, which does not protect one from being disagreed with or criticized or insulted or otherwise offended, but does protect one from government punishment for one’s opinions. (That is why the concept of punishing a “hate crime” – that is, punishing the beliefs behind the crime, rather than the crime itself - is so problematic in a free society).

Government is a great good. But, precisely because it is so powerful, coercive state power must be constrained within legitimate limits. The founders of the American republic obviously thought this important enough to improve upon their newly adopted constitution by amending it to make explicit its citizens’ freedom of religion and of speech. Sadly, after more than two centuries of experience, in which the many benefits of a free and open society ought to have become clear, the totalitarian impulse still seems surprisingly strong.