The Leftovers: Season Finale

Verne Gay at Newsday.com recently wrote  that The Leftovers "turned out to be strangest, saddest, gloomiest -- and most addictively watchable -- TV success story of the entire summer." Even America magazine has joined in the critical acclaim, calling the show "the most thoughtful and brutally honest exploration of grief and loss every portrayed on television." I think that is not at all off the mark as an assessment of the series's first season. Certainly, it explains the eagerness and anticipation with which so many of us have been awaiting last night's season finale.

Having deviated significantly from the original book on which it was based and gone off in multiple directions of its own, the TV series' first season suddenly ended somewhat like the book - with Nora on Kevin's porch, where she has just discovered Holy Wayne's baby, which is mother has abandoned and which Tom in turn has anonymously deposited on his parents' porch. Nora's smile and her words to Kevin, "look what I found," end the season on an unexpectedly hopeful note. In a show all about the disintegration and loss of family, will this new baby's appearance help reverse the process?

The episode picks up where the story had left off two episodes previously (before the October 14 flashback episode). We're back in Cairo, where Kevin sits beside Patti's dead body, smoking (what else?). For once, however, he has the sense to call someone else - his friend, Reverend Matt Jamison. The fact that he has called a priest does not signify some serious spiritual conversion, but it does give Rev. Matt a chance to fulfill his vocation, as he has done earlier on other occasions. (I think that giving Matt such a  prominent role in the show is one of the areas where it is a definite improvement on the book.) Watching Matt help Kevin cope with Patti's suicide and his own ambiguous role in it, watching him help Kevin not only bury the body but pray over it and then process the whole experience over lunch in what amounts virtually to a confession experience, all represents another unexpected sign of hope in the midst of seemingly unremitting grief and despair.

Those default emotions are meanwhile taken to new heights when we witness the ultimate malice perpetrated by the Guilty Remnant that same day in Mapleton. As the forever miserable Meg writes when Kevin questions her, "We made them remember." That they sure did, and the result is complete chaos. The good citizens of the town have had it with the GRs, set fire to their house, and try to kill as many of them as they can. (If Rev. Matt represents religion in a positive fashion, then the GRs represent the human and social dangers inherent in pseudo-religious, cultish-like responses to tragedy. In their zeal to remember and get others to do so, the GRs seem to manage to get everything wrong.)

En route home, Kevin had encountered Holy Wayne, wounded and dying who invites Kevin to make a wish. Based on Kevin's "confession," I assume that what he wishes for is to get his family back. In the end, having saved both Laurie and Jill from the fire, he appears to have at least gotten Jill back. Laurie cared enough about Jill at least to use her voice for once, but at season's end she still seems like a lost soul. She reconnects (how seriously and for how long we don't yet know) with her son, but the two remain perversely disconnected from the only relationship that still holds any promise.

What to make of all this? 

The October 14 "Departure" was not so much a "rapture" as it was a rupture. It disrupted  -decisively and in most cases forever - what mattered most in people's lives, their families. But, as we have learned, all was not well even before October 14. (Is it ever all well?) In particular, both Nora and Kevin seemed to be already distancing themselves from their families on that fateful morning. Like the Last Judgment, the "Departure" seemed mainly to ratify an already existing rupture. But Nora, Kevin, et al, are all still alive.  So they still have a chance - not to change the past, but to change the future. (That's what repentance does, to put it in language Matt might understand, even if the others have lost that linguistic and moral universe.)

The reviewers are right. The Leftovers is certainly strange, sad, and gloomy (at times - as in Kevin's insane dream in the car - stranger than it has any real need to be). But it also points out the power of memory to lead to repentance - to be sure, not the malevolent memory project of the GRs, but something more like Kevin's confessional memory in the diner. 

The episode was called "The Prodigal Son Returns." Beforehand, I had naively assumed that that referred to Tom returning home with Wayne's baby. But it seems to me now more likely that Kevin is the real prodigal son, whose return trip from Cairo to Mapleton is meant to symbolize the entire trajectory of the show. It remains to be seen how Season 2 will build upon the foundation Season 1 has set for it.

Binding and Loosing

We live now - and are all very conscious of living - in a world torn apart by constant conflict. Of course, conflict has always been a perennial part of the human condition – at least since Cain killed Abel. But, thanks to our globalized consciousness and our modern media, we are much more aware of the big macro-conflicts that threaten the world’s security and stability. International, intra-national, and tribal disputes, invasions, civil wars, and terrorist attacks dominate the headlines and preoccupy policy makers in Washington and Wales and around the world.

And, besides those big, macro-conflicts, there are, of course, all the ordinary conflicts and disputes that divide families, break-up marriages, terminate friendships, and constantly wreak havoc on communities both large and small.

In today’s Gospel [Matthew 18:15-20], Jesus famously outlines a procedure for his disciples to deal with conflicts as they occur not in the world at large but within the community of the Church. It is what we might call a procedure for “due process in the Church.” But it is a very particular type of “due process.” Obsessed as we are in our society with ourselves and our individual rights, when we speak of “due process” typically what we emphasize is settling the score and achieving something called “justice.” The “due process” Jesus outlines here doesn’t necessarily ignore all that, but more importantly it is a process aimed at reconciliation. In that regard, it reminds me of the process in canon law for dealing with problematic people in religious communities. (Yes, there are such people sometimes!) The misbehaving member is warned and given a chance to change several times before the process ends in expulsion. That’s because the goal of the process is not expulsion but rather the person’s reconciliation with the community.

Of course, on this earth at least, not all problems are solvable, as we know. We’re all familiar with the so-called “Serenity Prayer” - God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. In human terms, some problems just can’t be satisfactorily solved; some conflicts just can’t be peacefully reconciled; and it is an important part of practical human and political wisdom to know which is which and how best to deal with them.

So, in the process Jesus outlines in today’s Gospel, expulsion may end up being necessary, but always only as a last resort. It is a patient process. As Pope Francis has written in his apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel: “Evangelization consists mostly of patience and disregard for constraints of time.” [EG 24]  And so, in the process Jesus outlines in today’s Gospel, it is only after 3 tries – individually, in a small group, and finally involving the whole community – that the person is excommunicated.

Even then, however, the story doesn’t quite end there. The excommunication prescribed by the procedure Jesus outlines is specified as: If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector.

Now, in the ordinary world, the meaning of that would have been perfectly clear. Devout, observant Jews avoided (as much as possible) having contact with such people, and they certainly would not admit them to their homes or eat and drink with them.

Yet, when Jesus says treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector, there is, – coming from him – a certain nuance to that, because, of course, we are all aware of how Jesus himself treated Gentiles and tax collectors. Such people may indeed be outside the community, and they may be there because of their own bad behavior, but they’re not forgotten. In the divided North African Church of the 4th century, St. Augustine (354-430), speaking about the heretical and schismatic Christians he opposed so vigorously, said: “My friends, we must grieve over these as over our brothers. Whether they like it or not, they are our brothers” [Commentary on Psalm 32 (33)]. So it is hardly surprising that the Church has always recognized reconciling wanderers back to the mainstream of the Church as one of the Church’s constant concerns.

The apostles’ power to bind and to loose includes both the authority to expel offenders from the community and also the power to readmit them. Elsewhere Saint Paul also addressed this issue. Writing to the Christian community in Corinth, which had taken disciplinary action against an offender, Paul reminded them that the offender’s eventual readmission should remain the goal of the process [2 Corinthians 2:5-8].

As some of you know, I am a big fan of medieval mystery stories, like Susanna Gregory’s Matthew Bartholomew Chronicles (set in 14th-century Cambridge, where Matthew is a physician on the university faculty) and Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael Mysteries (set in 12th-century Shrewsbury, where Cadfael is a Benedictine monk at Shrewsbury Abbey, who happens also to solve crimes). In the final book of the Brother Cadfael series, Cadfael breaks his vow of obedience. But, at the end of the story, he returns to the monastery and kneels before his Abbot, who responds simply: “Get up now, and come with your brothers into the choir.”

Whatever we are or whatever we do - as an individual, as a family, as a political or civic community, as a parish, and as a Church – the goal (not always achievable, perhaps, but our goal nonetheless) must always be to bring us all back together, so that we may eventually all be together - here and now at this altar, and forever in God’s kingdom.

As Cardinal Walter Kasper has recently written: “Mercy is the best and most beautiful news that can be told to us and that we should bring to the world. As God by his mercy always gives us a new chance, a new future, our mercy gives future to the other, and to a world that needs it so much” [“The Message of Mercy,” America, September 15, 2014].

Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, September 7, 2014.

The Bodies of Saints

Over at Crisis, Professor Donald S. Prudlo has written a provocatively titled article, "Thank Goodness Fulton Sheen's Cause Has Been Suspended." (To read it. go to http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/thank-goodness-fulton-sheens-cause-suspended).

Personally, I really don't know enough about the circumstances that seem to have led to the apparent suspension of Archbishop Sheen's Cause to offer any assessment or opinion of my own regarding what should or should not have happened or what should or should not happen in the future. I can well remember Bishop Sheen, as he then was, lecturing on black-and-white TV in the 1950s and early 1960s. He was certainly an impressive figure at the time, and his public prominence in the secular media was certainly an impressive accomplishment that has hardly been equalled since then by any American Catholic personality (nor is it likely to be equalled in the foreseeable future, given the dramatic changes in both Church and media since those long gone, glory days.) To me, Sheen certainly seems to be an eminently appropriate candidate for sainthood. God willing, he will in due course be raised to the honor of the altar. 

Meanwhile, his Cause appears to have stalled amid circumstances that have prompted much comment among those interested in such issues and disposed to comment about them. Professor Prudlo's article is, as I said above, provocatively titled - perhaps more provocatively so than his conclusion warrants, but on the other hand provocatively enough to get readers. (I, for one, am certainly not a regular Crisis reader. it was the provocative title that sent me there!) That said, however, I think Prudlo does make two particularly interesting points that are worthy of attention.

Prudlo, it should be stipulated, is not opposed to Sheen's Cause, per se. In fact, he concludes by saying, "Bishop Sheen, I am convinced, will be canonized." He does, however, applaud the slowing down of the process. He stresses the importance of popular devotion developing "from the ground up" and accordingly favors what he calls "the old fifty-year rule." That approach would "permit enough time to make sure that a cult was genuine, that it was a result of the unfolding of an authentic discernment of holiness in the life of the Church," which "should not conform itself to this age of instant gratification, with its attendant shallowness." Perhaps more controversially, he argues that that older rule provided "that people too intimately involved in the life and career of the potential saint had been mostly laid in their graves." There may be an obvious disadvantage to waiting too long, since the testimony of those who actually knew the Servant of God can contribute something especially unique to our understanding of him or her. And certainly there have been some historically rapids canonizations (St. Thomas Becket. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Dominic), the wisdom and appropriateness of which for the Church's long-term life can hardly be doubted. On the other hand, at least as a general rule, Prudlo's point is well taken, that a cult's endurance "long after the principals are dead is a telling mark of its validity."

Prudlo's other argument is not about the timing of the Cause but is a historical-theological reflection on the significance of the apparent disagreement about the disposition of Sheen's body and relics, which seems to have played a part in the decision to suspend the Cause. He notes that "faithful Catholics responded generally with dismay at what they saw as a tussle unworthy of princes of the Church." (In today's media climate especially, I think that is not an unimportant consideration.) But Prudlo sees something else - what he calls "a fervent affirmation of Incarnational Christianity."

In my limited experience, I tend to think that, along with the procedural requirement for miracles, and perhaps even more than miracles, the canonization process's emphasis on the Servant of God's body and tomb and relics seem increasingly out-of-step with what is an increasingly typical contemporary modern mindset - the same mindset, it should be recalled, that is increasingly dismissive of (and even uncomprehending about) traditional Christian funeral practices and rites, which traditionally presuppose the importance of reverence for the actual body of the deceased. 

So perhaps Prudlo's point really is particularly timely. "The bodies and tombs of the saints," he notes, "are a privileged nexus, a place where heaven and earth come together in a special way. There, before the devotee, lie the earthly remains of one whose soul is now in heaven, beholding the beatific vision. There one supplicates before not simply moldering bones and flesh, but that very body redeemed by the Risen Christ, which will with certitude be raised unto glory on the last day. ... We are not saved by Gnostic spiritualism, we are saved through bread and wine, water and oil, and yes, even through the bodies of the dead. ... The bodies of saints, besides the Eucharist, are the greatest thing possessed by the Church on earth, and both of them are present witnesses to the deep Incarnational reality of historical Christianity."

Another Anniversary

The centennial of World War I is understandably this year's biggest anniversary. Even so, today's 75th anniversary of the formal beginning of World War II should not therefore pass unnoticed. That second war was, after all, a direct consequence of how that first one was ended and the modernizing assumptions that underlay the disastrous post-war peace settlement. Meanwhile, by convenient coincidence this week, the President and european leaders will hold their NATO summit in Wales. NATO, of course, came about in the aftermath of World War II, thanks to the way that war was ended and the inevitable conflict (the Cold War) what that post-war arrangement produced.

I mention all  this because, it is so easy to forget the lessons of our sad century of history. More to the point, it is my impression that the President and his administration may persist in the opinion that the progress and success of modernity is inevitable. If that were so, then the solution to the mess that post-war modernizing assumptions have produced should be more of the same!

In today's New York Times, Shadi Hamid, author of Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a  new Middle East (2014), suggests an explanation for the President's alleged passivity in responding to the crisis in the Middle East to a belief that "History moves with intent, that the forces of reason, modernity and pluralism will inevitably prevail." All analogies are limited and history does not repeat itself as such. Still, what was the post World War I settlement (in the minds of the victors)? What was the gratuitous destruction of Europe's empires and inherited institutions and the consequent creation of  such anomalies as the Polish Corridor (and, for that matter, Iraq), if not the historical advance of those same "forces of reason, modernity and pluralism"? 

One legacy of this century of warfare seems to be how progressive elite opinion continues, in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson, to keep wanting to be on the right side of what it keeps wanting to think is the direction of history. 

The Pope of the Great War

On April 18, 2005, my then pastor in New York asked me what name I would take, were I to be elected pope in the conclave that was then taking place to choose a successor to Pope Saint John Paul II. Recent practice has been to  pick the name of some recent predecessor whom one particularly admires or with whose pontificate one wishes to identify. So, after a few minutes of thought, I ventured that I would choose as my name Benedict XVI, thus identifying with and honoring Pope Benedict XV (Giacomo della Chiesa,1854-1922), who was elected pope 100 years ago tomorrow and so reigned through World War I and its aftermath. Needless to say, I was quite thrilled the next day when the real winner of the actual conclave chose the same name I would have chosen!

In this centennial year of the Great War, which woodrow Wilson would foolishly endorse to make the world safe for democracy but which Pope Benedict XV more accurately diagnosed in his first encyclical (Ad Beatissimi Apostolorum, November 1, 1914) as "the suicide of civilized Europe, that little-noted and under-appreciated Pope deserves to be better remembered.

Physically awkward and unimpressive, Benedict lacked the charisma we have come to associate with modern media-star popes like Pius XII, John Paul II, and Francis. He did, however, come from a modestly noble family and was trained at rome's Pontifical Academy for Noble Ecclesiastics, from which he entered the papal diplomatic service. In 1907, he was consecrated Archbishop of Bologna, but he was not created a cardinal until May 1914. Yet, despite his being but three months a cardinal, he was elected pope in the wartime conclave that followed the death of Pope Saint Pius X. Allegedly, he chose the name Benedict in honor of Benedict XIV, who had also been Archbishop of Bologna. (Benedict XIV, 1675-1758, pope from 1740, was also the scholarly modern expert on the process of canonization, who wrote the classic text De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione, "On the Beatification of Servants of God and the Canonization of Blesseds.")

As pope, Benedict endeavored to mediate a peace, even issuing a seven-point peace plan in 1917. Had he been heeded, that might have ended the massive slaughter of the war and forestalled the destruction of the European political order that the war resulted in. Most world leaders, however, apart from Austrian Kaiser Karl I (since 2004, Blessed Charles of Austria), were too trapped in their positions to be able to break through the political logjam that corresponded to the stalemate in the trenches. and, of course, the French Republic was vehemently anti-clerical, and the Kingdom of Italy (which had occupied Rome since 1870) had a strong interest in marginalizing the Pope's international standing. (It would seem that the only lasting legacy of his peace efforts is the invocation of Mary as Queen of peace in the Litany of Loretto.)

Pope Benedict was much more successful in his humanitarian efforts, however,and was especially successful in negotiating prisoner exchanges - a role the papacy with its international reach is well suited for even in the modern world if it has lost any actual ability to influence political developments.Nonetheless, it deserves to be said that his diagnosis of the war and his proposals for resolving the conflict were - as my generation would say, "right on" - and the world has been ever so much poorer this past century for failing to listen to him.

The memory of Pope benedict's humanitarian outreach was publicly honored in, of all places, Muslim Turkey (one of the Central Powers during World War I). A statue of him stands in Istanbul (photo). Its pedestal says: The great Pope of the world tragedy ... the benefactor of all people, irrespective of nationality or religion.