Epiphany

For Christmas, the British newsmagazine The Economist featured an interesting article on the Magi. Historically, there are a lot of interesting, but ultimately unanswerable questions about those today’s Gospel calls Magi, which just means wise men. But, because they were observing the movement of a star, the early Church imagined them as astronomers or astrologers – probably Persian Zoroastrian scholars. The Economist article cites a 4th-century account, according to which generations of such scholars had been watching for such a star on a mythical Persian mountain - starting with Adam himself, who had gone there in his old age with gold, frankincense, and myrrh he had somehow salvaged from the Garden of Eden. In the Middle Ages, the image of them as kings took over, suggested by both today’s familiar Isaiah reading and responsorial psalm. The Gospel doesn’t say how many they were; but, based on the three gifts, three seemed a logical inference. The “Three Kings” also acquired their now familiar names, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, of whom Balthasar eventually became identified as an African King – presumably from Ethiopia. The three also came to represent the three ages of humanity – Melchior an old man of 60, Balthasar a middle-aged 40, and Caspar a young 20-year old.

All that is just speculation, of course. The Gospel tells us none of these things, leaving us free to speculate to our hearts content. But the Gospel does tell us what it is important that we know about the magi.

First of all, it tells us that they were foreigners - Gentiles, pagans. As such, they represent the majority of the human race – past and present - in a world in which (as we just heard from the Prophet Isaiah) darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples The pagan magi relied on natural knowledge, what we would call scientific knowledge today. They sought for signs of God in his created world, hoping to find in the phenomena of nature – stars, for example - some clues about God and God’s plans for us.

Scientific knowledge is good, but it is limited. Searching for God in his created world may be a good start. But the Gospel story also tells us that, whatever varied paths different people start out on, our paths must all finally converge in Jesus, and that the interpretive key to the story of Jesus is God’s revelation of himself not just in nature but in history - in the history of his people, Israel. So it was to Jewish Jerusalem, that the star led the pagan magi for them to learn the star’s full significance – as revealed in the scriptures.

By way of warning, however, the story also illustrates how easily we may get it wrong. When Herod heard the Magi, he was greatly troubled and all Jerusalem with him. They were troubled, instead of being overjoyed like the Magi! What troubled them? What made what to the magi seemed like such good news seem to them like bad news? The same Christmas star that filled the magi with so much hope instead induced anxiety in those who sensed the threatening challenge it posed to their power and priorities. It’s a vivid lesson in just how easily we can, all of us, misplace our priorities and so turn the good news of the Gospel into bad news!

And then there were the scholars whom Herod consulted. They were wise too. At least they were supposed to be. They correctly quoted scripture. But, for all their knowledge of the subject, they seemed to lack the knowledge they needed. They had knowledge without wisdom. So none of them did the obvious thing and go to Bethlehem. Only the pagan magi did! Talk about missing the opportunity of a lifetime!

The magi, the Gospel tells us, were overjoyed, not troubled. The magi set out as true pilgrims – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage. In the old liturgy, when these words were read or sung in the Gospel on Epiphany, everyone was directed to genuflect. It was the liturgy’s dramatic way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi, experiencing what they experienced.

As for the magi, we never hear about them again. We know only what songwriter James Taylor chose as the title for his song about them, that they departed for their country by another way.

Nowadays, nativity scenes sometimes seem frozen in time. Everybody stays stationary – at least until it’s time to put the figures all back in the closet.

But the real magi didn’t stay still (any more than the shepherds did). They went back to wherever they had lived before, but they departed for their country by another way. According to one legend, the Magi were eventually baptized in India by the Apostle Thomas. That’s more speculation, of course, but it fits the narrative. They went back to wherever they had been living before. to whatever they had been doing before, but they would never be the same again. And, thanks to Christ’s coming into our world, so must it be for us.

In the Middle Ages, Christmas was a 12-day festival, followed by Epiphany. Then it was back to normal. Nowadays, most people go back to work the day after Christmas. We get another holiday at New Year’s. Sooner or later, however, “the holidays” come to an end. And we all return to our ordinary activities.

Like the magi, however, our challenge is to journey like perpetual pilgrims through our ordinary life by another way, because (to use a phrase from Pope Francis) “we are convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him” [EG 266].

So, even as we navigate our way through an uncertain and challenging present, the Christmas star invites us to travel with the magi – to go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem and back again – confident that, whatever else may be the case, the Christmas star will precede us to illuminate every new day of this new year, and so will guide us on that alternate way, which, like the magi, we are, all of us together, being challenged to find and follow.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, January 4, 2015.

We Three Kings

We put the Three Kings in the parish nativity scene after Mass this morning. Of course, today is only the 10th Day of Christmas. But, in the curious liturgical calendar now officially in use in the United States, instead of arriving the morning after "Twelfth Night," the Magi must make it to Bethlehem a little earlier this year - on the morning after what I guess would have to be called "Tenth Night"! 

More important than the date of their arrival, of course, is the fact of the Magi's coming to Bethlehem - their enormous significance as the first representatives of the Gentile nations of the world - which is why Epiphany is so much more important than the post-Christmas vestigial afterthought that it seems to have become in the U.S.  

The Three Kings clearly rank among the Christmas story's most attractive figures.  Hence their survival in so many popular customs - especially in those countries where they - rather than Santa Claus - remain the primary gift-givers. As for the custom of waiting until today to put them into the nativity scene, I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, it seems curious to put all sorts of other figures in the scene so much earlier and then leave them all there, while the Magi have to wait until their literal arrival date. In the U.S., where the creche is rarely kept up until February 2 as it is in Europe, that means the kings are actually only visible for a very short time, which - given their significance - seems a shame. On the other hand, the tradition of their delayed arrival is very popular. A recently published biography of Pope Francis (Austen Ivereigh, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope) highlights his devotion to popular religion as an antidote to certain more elitist theological trends that have become influential in the Church in the last 50 years.

Indeed, the widespread survival of nativity scenes in churches despite the rationalistic "stripping of the altars" we have suffered through these past 50 or so years is itself a tribute to the power of popular religion. Perhaps it helped that, despite such popular customs as the priest putting the bambino in the manger at the Midnight Mass, the creche itself is not, strictly speaking, liturgical at all, and is not mentioned in the liturgical books (except the modern Book of Blessings, which provides a modern blessing for it, while at the same time trying to sideline it somewhat in terms of its location in the church.)

Less lucky in terms of survival - precisely, I suppose, because it was an actual part of the liturgy - was the Epiphany genuflection. There were a number of such genuflections in the old rite - whenever Philippians 2:5-11 was read, for example, or Psalm 79:8, or most famously of all, the genuflection that always accompanied the daily reading of John 1:14 and also the et incarnatus in the Creed. It was in that spirit that the rubric hic genuflectitur accompanied the reading of Matthew 2:11. The traditional liturgy wanted us to identify fully with the Magi and so invited us physically to join them in worshipping the Christ Child in an embodied way. The suppression of the genuflection was one of many such gratuitous liturgical losses. It is truly a loss, unlikely ever to be recovered. But at least we still have the creche itself, in most arrangements of which one or more of the Three Kings still do get to kneel and still what we don't get to do anymore, vicariously adoring on our behalf.

A New Year

On New Year’s, I often like to repeat something that the late comedian George Burns once wrote in The New York Times: “Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I always looked forward to New Year’s mainly because it was the only thing we could afford that was really new.”  Burns was a lifelong, professional comedian, of course, and that was his laugh line. But then he added: “And we always believed that things were going to get better during the New Year.”

The Roman god Janus, for whom the first month of the year is named, was the god of beginnings and endings, of doors and passageways, of past and future. Hence he was typically portrayed with two faces – one looking back to the past, the other ahead to the future. In a sense, that is what we all do every year on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. We look back on the past, particularly the past year, perhaps with some mixture of gratitude and regret, while we likewise look ahead, sometimes with worry but with worry mixed always with hope.  Some of these sentiments are captured in the religious customs that have traditionally been associated with New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day – the traditional singing of the Te Deum, the Church’s official hymn of thanksgiving on New Year’s Eve, and the Veni Creator, the Church’s great hymn invoking the grace of the Holy Spirit on New Year’s Day.

This new year 2015 will also be the 50^th anniversary of the end of the 2nd Vatican Council, which was quite likely the single most influential religious event of the 20th century. To mark that anniversary – and specifically the 50th anniversary of the Council’s Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life - Pope Francis has proclaimed this a “Year of Consecrated Life.” These past few weeks, I have been commenting in the parish bulletin on the three specific aims Pope Francis has proposed to religious communities for this year. They are, first of all, “to look to the past with gratitude,” second, “to live the present with passion,” and then, third, “to embrace the future with hope.”

But what is immediately obvious about these three aims is their universal relevance – not just for priests, brothers, and sisters in religious communities – but for everyone (especially at New Year’s).

In inviting us “to embrace the future with hope,” for example, the Pope candidly acknowledges many of the difficulties which we in religious communities are currently experiencing – including, of course, the perennial problem of decreasing vocations and aging members. But, of course, many of the particular problems we in religious communities currently experience are actually also being experienced more broadly by the Church throughout the world. And they are not unlike the kinds of challenges that all sorts of ordinary people experience in our world today. “But it is precisely amid these uncertainties, which we share with so many of our contemporaries,” the Pope assures us, “that we are called to practice the virtue of hope, the fruit of our faith in the Lord of history, who continues to tell us: ‘Be not afraid … for I am with you’ (Jeremiah 1:8).” Our hope, Pope Francis reminds us, “is not based on statistics or accomplishments, but on the One in whom we have put our trust (cf. 2 Timothy 1:2), the One for whom ‘nothing is impossible’ (Luke 1:37).”

And so he encourages religious communities – and, by extension, I would suggest, all of us in the Church – not “to see things in terms of numbers and efficiency, and even less to trust in your own strength” but instead to “constantly set out anew, with trust in the Lord.”

During the Paulist General Assembly last June, in one of the committees I was on, I quoted from a letter that Isaac Hecker wrote to Orestes Brownson in 1851: If our words have lost their power, it is because there is no power in us to put into them. The Catholic faith alone is capable of giving to people a true, permanent and burning enthusiasm fraught with the greatest of deeds. But to enkindle this in others we must be possessed of it first ourselves.”

And that, as I said in last Sunday’s Bulletin, is the basic challenge not just for religious communities but for all of us in whatever state in life we occupy, and not just in some special Year of Consecrated Life but all year, every year – starting here and now with this new year of Our Lord 2015 that is just on the horizon.

Coincidentally, New Year’s is the also the 8th Day of Christmas. On this day, the Western Church celebrates in a special way the awesome mystery of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s motherhood. The Byzantine and Syrian Churches celebrate Mary’s motherhood on the 2nd Day of Christmas, December 26. Either way, this is one of the very oldest feasts in honor of Mary.

Continuing the Christmas theme, today’s Mass repeats the Gospel of the 2nd Mass of Christmas, adding a final verse recounting Jesus’s ritual circumcision and naming on the 8th day of his life, a very particular kind of event that highlights Jesus’ full embrace of our human condition and complete commitment to our human life and our human world. In the Gospel [Luke 2:15-21], we hear the Shepherds, the first to be told of Jesus’s birth, respond to that message and then become in turn messengers themselves All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds, while Mary, on her part, reflected on these things in her heart. Thus, ever so simply, does the Gospel give us our agenda for the new year: bringing the good news of Jesus into the wider world around us, while at the same time seriously letting it sink in, at the heart of who we are.

None of us can know now what this new year has in store for us. But, with Mary and the shepherds, we begin this year as new people, transformed both inwardly and outwardly by Christ’s coming.

Homily for the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God (New Year's Day) Immaculate Conception Church, January 1, 2015.

2014 at the Movies

This week I decided to make a list of my 10 best movies of 2014. As it happens, however, I can only recall 12 that I have actually seen this year. And two of them I just saw this week, thanks to the annual post-Christmas, pre-Oscar movie blitz (and the generous present of a movie gift-card). So, for whatever it may be worth, here is my personal list of the 12 movies I took the trouble to see in 2014 - ranked somewhat loosely in order of preference. (The top 5 are al roughy equal. I'd award any one of them an Oscar!)

1. Calvary
2. Boyhood

3. Ida

4. The Imitation Game

5. Philomena
6. The Hundred Foot Journey

7. Belle

8. My Old Lady

9. Chef

10. A Most Wanted Man
11. Foxcatcher

12. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Recalling Christmases Past and Present

After the Masses during the Night, some sleep, and the morning Mass, my religious brothers and I went out for a convivial Christmas dinner yesterday. Then came quiet time - time to catch one's breath, watch some Christmas programs on TV, make the all-important Christmas phone call to the West Coast, etc - basically some time to sit with myself in the lingering peace and beauty of that most peaceful and beautiful day. Spent alone like that, Christmas afternoon and evening inevitably invite reminiscences - rich recollections of Christmases past. We all have such memories. They flood our consciousness at this time of year, and help define how the holiday speaks to us.

I remember boyhood Christmases in the Bronx in the 1950s - getting up very early to see what gifts Santa had brought, sitting under the tree amid a pile of presents and a mess of torn wrapping paper, then getting dressed and going to Christmas morning Mass. After that, in the earlier years, came the New York Central Railroad trip to my uncle's house in Westchester, where my mother's side of the family gathered for Christmas dinner (to be followed by further visits with my father's side of the family later during Christmas week and on New year's Eve). As the years passed, one sister and then another joined the Christmas morning scene under the tree. In time too my father bought a car, and so we would then drive to my uncle's instead of taking the train.

I remember also as an altar boy serving one of the regularly scheduled Christmas morning Masses in church, and then inevitably getting pulled aside after Mass to serve one or more other side altar Masses, as all the priests in the community celebrated not the usual one but three Masses that special day.

I remember being nine years old and attending a funeral on Christmas Eve for a schoolmate's brother.

And I remember the anticipation Christmas always created - like the incredible activity that went into baking the traditional Sicilian Christmas cakes every December, some of which got packaged and shipped to far-off relatives and family friends. Then came the excitement of getting out the decorations and Christmas lights and buying a tree. And how the various creche scenes at home, at school, and at church always captivated my imagination, each different nativity scene speaking its distinctive idiom and message.

I remember too the anxiety gift-buying invariably induced in me, which it still sort of does (solved today, however, by giving mainly money and gift cards). I never seemed quite sure what to get people and whether they would like whatever I got them. And I can even remember sometimes getting gifts myself that I didn't particularly care for or couldn't really use for one reason or other, but always carefully pretending to be pleased so as not to hurt the gift-giver's feelings or appear ungrateful myself.

I remember getting older and the disruptions of those transitions in those turbulent times. Eventually all the locations of the particular parts of the familiar Christmas rituals changed. Little actually remained the same - except Christmas itself, its enduring significance speaking louder than the disruptive forces of ephemeral change. 

I remember a very special Christmas - Christmas 1981 in the novitiate - an absolutely unique experience with seven other novices and three priests, a day that encapsulated many of the tense struggles and terrific joys of the novitiate experience in our precious "1100 acres of rocks and trees" in northern New Jersey. 

I remember Christmas 1986 in Grand Rapids - perhaps my saddest Christmas ever. Even so what I remember most is happy - Christmas Day afternoon and evening spent in the Grand Rapids common room in friendly conversation with a certain older priest (now sadly in a nursing home).

I remember five Christmas mornings in Toronto celebrating the Missa in Aurora for the Italian community, doing my best with the language of my ancestors. I remember too the last of those Toronto Christmas Days, when I could not find any food at all in the house refrigerator, and so went for a long walk around the neighborhood, eventually stopping in a Second Cup that I was surprised to find open and there making my substitute Christmas dinner out of a cappuccino and a scone. I remember too asking the waiter whether he minded having to work on Christmas, only to be told how much he loved getting the extra holiday pay!

I remember my first Christmas Eve back in New York, celebrating the Children's Mass, and then later that night the excitement of concelebrating Midnight Mass in Hecker's great church and the awe I found myself feeling after kissing the altar and looking down the nave at the amazing crowd that offered the closest impression to the crowds that church was meant to hold and at one time regularly did hold!

I remember feeling that excitement again and again over a succession of 10 such Midnight Masses. I remember too the happy Christmas Eve dinners I enjoyed in subsequent years in NY with the present pastor and his predecessor and the Christmas Day dinner outings orchestrated by the late Fr. Dennis (of blessed memory). 

Christmas dinners come and go, presents increase and diminish, friends and loved ones may be near or far away. Yet Christmas continues to come and work its singular grace in all who, wherever and however they find themselves, listen to the angels' song and seek (however, feebly) to sing it themselves.