Death in an Afternoon

It's been a while since anyone has died on Downton Abbey. We were due, I guess. Fortunately (not for him, of course, but for everyone else) it was just Charlie Rogers, Henry Talbot's best friend, not Mary's suitor or a member of the family. On the other hand, the tragedy and the memories it stirs up are enough to make Mary ready to break it off with Henry, whose great looks aren't quite enough to make up for his being all about cars.

Edith, on the other hand, is faring better with her beau. In the endless rivalry between Mary and Edith, has Edith finally found true love ahead of Mary? But she really needs to tell Bertie about Marigold! When will people on this show finally figure out that their penchant for making everything a secret really gets in the way of their relationships with those they love?

Speaking of secrets, Andy's inability to read is finally out. And at least some of the servants know Thomas has been trying to help him. But he still seems left out. Molesley's moving on. Even Mrs. Patmore is moving on. But Barrow wants to stay in the one place he has put down roots. But, so far, the powers that be seem determined to make him go. My guess is he'll still be around for the finale.

At least the silly hospital saga is over. The Dowager has sets off for France to get away for a while, but not before uncovering what a nasty wife Lord Merton's nasty son has found for himself, and leaving behind a peace offering of sorts - a puppy for her son. What is it with this guy and dogs? (Lost in the jubilation about the new dog is the notion that it is really Cora she needs to make up with rather than Robert.) But the Dowager's escape to France gives her one of the best lines of the evening. Ostensibly she is going away to create some space between her and the quarrel with Cora. The goal is to want to come home. How to guarantee that she will want to return? "A month among the French should do it."

We're coming to the end of the series. We have only one more regular episode and then the finale. It's time to tie up the loose ends, which is what seems to be happening. Meanwhile, let's hope we see less time wasted on silliness like Carson and Mrs. highs' home meals!

In the Desert

So, did everybody make it to church for ashes last Wednesday? I’ll bet almost all of us did - and lots of others besides.  Ash Wednesday is a great example of the Church’s liturgical genius, that it can take something so unattractive – but so true – as our inevitable return to dust, and ritualize it so popularly every Lent.

Now back when Lent was still exactly 40 days (before Ash Wednesday and the 3 following days got added on), Lent began today, with this Sunday (as it still does, incidentally, in Milan, Italy, where to this day there is still no Ash Wednesday). That is why this Sunday is the day when those who have responded to the good news of Jesus Christ by becoming candidates for Baptism or for full membership in the Catholic Church at Easter are presented to our Bishop at our cathedral - to be formally enrolled as candidates to join with us in the full life of the Catholic Church, making their own the Church’s faith in Jesus and the Church’s way of becoming his disciple. That faith and that way of becoming a disciple – what St. Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome  [Romans 10:8-13], called confessing with one’s mouth that Jesus is Lord and believing in one’s heart that God raised him from the dead – are what Lent has always been about.

And so, every year, we begin our Lent the way Jesus began his mission – not in flamboyant miracles, exciting accomplishments, and popular acclaim, but in the threatening silence and solitude of the desert [Luke 4:1-13].

The Judean desert is a harsh and forbidding place – hot and sunny by day, cold and dark by night, silent as death. That was where Jesus made his Lent – in the desert, the domain of the devil. There, Jesus fasted from food, and so it was in that physically challenged state called hunger – a state with which too many people in the world are still all too familiar – it was in that physically challenged state of hunger that Jesus met face-to-face with the devil, who challenged Jesus in ways we can all understand: “If you are who you claim to be, then do something…”

This time it was actually Satan himself speaking, but he could just as easily have masqueraded as a faithful follower. After all, in God’s ears, how many of our own prayers must often sound like that? “If you really are who you claim to be, then do something – preferably something for me, something that I want.”

Not for nothing, then, do the devil’s many titles include liar and father of lies. He lied when he equated being Son of God with power to be used for purely personal advancement. He lied again when he tried to divert Jesus from his mission with the kinds of illusions that, in our society especially, pass for success – illusions of being a winner, of being great. He lied yet again when he equated being Son of God with special effects and popular acclaim, thereby anticipating what may ultimately be remembered as one of our contemporary culture’s most distinctive characteristics – equating celebrity with significance.

The devil’s lies and Jesus’ responses reveal the deeper underlying reality reflected in all the human choices we make – choices that in a real sense both make us who and what we are and reveal us to each other and to ourselves.

Imitating Jesus, we do well to fast during Lent - a fasting that takes us out of ourselves, focusing us outward not inward. In the words of Saint Peter Chrysologus, a 5th-century Bishop and Doctor of the Church: “Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. … So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. If you do not close your ear to others you open God’s ear to yourself. …When you fast, see the fasting of others. If you want God to know that you are hungry, know that another is hungry. If you hope for mercy, show mercy. If you look for kindness, show kindness.  If you want to receive, give. … When you fast, if your mercy is thin your harvest will be thin; when you fast, what you pour out in mercy overflows into your barn. Therefore, do not lose by saving, but gather in by scattering. Give to the poor, and you give to yourself. You will not be allowed to keep what you have refused to give to others” [Sermon 43].

Saint Peter Chrysologus’ sermon seems especially pointed in this Holy Year of Mercy, which invites us to a renewed appreciation of God’s abundant mercy toward us and a more generous sharing of that mercy with the whole world.

Every Lent, the same Spirit that led Jesus into the desert leads us to spend 40 days with him in the same place where it led him, in the desert that threatens and challenges us to choose – to choose not just whether or what to eat, but what we want to make of our lives. When the devil had finished every temptation, we are told, he departed for a time. That time came when Jesus returned to Jerusalem, not to the parapet of the temple, but to the top of the cross, where the devil’s challenge would be confronted again and all his lies finally refuted, when Jesus’ choice of obedience to his Father would finally reveal both who he really is and what true power and glory really are.

Lent is our opportune time to meet up with the real Jesus – undefeated in the desert and victorious on the cross – to learn whether and what kind of difference confessing him with the mouth and believing in him in the heart can really make – for us and for our world.

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Lent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, February 14, 2016.

Stations of the Cross

Yesterday I reminisced here about the Lenten stational churches of Rome, recalling my own privileged opportunity to participate in most of them four years ago. Today, this 1st Friday of Lent, my attention shifts to the more familiar Lenten stations - the ever-popular (but never more so than in Lent) devotion of the Way of the Cross. It is a common custom in the Catholic world to celebrate the Stations of the Cross as a community on the Fridays in Lent - in many places preceded (or followed) by a Lenten Friday Fish dinner.

I think the dinner tradition may be originally a midwestern custom. In any case, it was not common in New York when I was growing up - perhaps because of the size of the parishes there or because there were other preferred ways of building and expressing community. As for the Stations themselves, unless I happened to be assigned to serve at the 8:00 p.m. "adult" Stations, my experience of the annual Lenten Stations was with my fellow students, since all but the lowest grades were required to attend the Stations in the church at the end of the school day. Not quite (but almost) filling up that large church, we stood, knelt, and genuflected at the prescribed times as the priest and altar servers stopped and prayed at each station, and we sang the Stabat Mater as lugubriously as possible in between stations.Together with Benediction after the Stations, that meant we got to do lots of singing, which I always enjoyed in those days

An apparently quaint custom that could easily have been killed off in the craziness of the late sixties and seventies, the Stations somehow survived, sometimes admittedly with verbose texts that sounded more like a political ad than a meditation, but they survived to re-emerge triumphant another day. 

Recalling the Lenten Stations

One of the mistakes made in the Pauline reform of the Roman Liturgy was the unwarranted textual tinkering and rearrangement of the daily Masses on the weekdays of Lent, some of which were very ancient texts in fact. The mandate for a multi-year lectionary may indeed have justified certain changes in the Sunday Masses, but no comparably compelling reason warranted the weekday changes. One consequence, of course, is the loss of the connection between the ancient Roman stational churches and the texts which were often originally selected with the stational church in mind. (In fact, the stations are no longer even mentioned in Paul VI's Missal.) 

So, for example, the American church in Rome, Santa Susanna, was the stational church for the Saturday of the 3rd Week of Lent. For that reason, the famous story of Santa Susanna's Old Testament namesake in Daniel 13 was read at Mass on that day and, to parallel that, the Gospel reading was that of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). In the Paul VI liturgy, for no apparent reason, those texts are now read instead on the Monday of the 5th Week of Lent, severing the ancient link between the stational church and the liturgy celebrated there. 

Nonetheless, there has been a genuine revival of interest in the Roman stations.  In addition to the principal (Italian) celebration each afternoon, other language groups also celebrate stational Masses, at least on the weekdays. For me, one of the special joys of living in Rome for much of Lent 2012 was being able to concelebrate at the English-language stational Masses, celebrated daily at 7:00, organized by the students at the North American College. Not only priests and seminarians, but ambassadors and many other English-speakers living or working in Rome participated and formed a uniquely vibrant congregation.

Until 1969, the name of the stational church was listed as part of the heading for each day's Mass. That made it easy for anyone, anywhere int he world, to identify with the ancient origin of that day's liturgy. It may be harder now, but not impossible. And anyone who ever gets an opportunity to do the lenten stations at least once in his or her life should certainly try to do so.

As I wrote back then:

There is something special about going to these venerable Roman churches in the early pre-dawn darkness, walking literally in the steps of centuries of Christians who have visited those same churches on those same days, celebrating Mass surrounded by the relics and memories of martyrs, then emerging in the early morning light to continue one’s daily work. It is a true experience of the communion of saints! As the Italian Humanist Petrarch (1304-1374), describing his experience as a pilgrim in Rome in the Holy Year 1350, wrote: “How inspiring for a Christian to journey to that city which is like a heaven on earth, sanctified by the remains of martyrs beyond number, drenched in the precious blood of those early witnesses to the Truth.”

(Photo above is of relics exposed on the papal altar at Saint Peter's Basilica for the stational Mass on the Saturday of the 1st Week of Lent.)

Generation Gap

Yesterday's New Hampshire primary results remind me of a conversation I had with a someone in the fall of 2008. We were trying to figure out why younger voters were so excited about Barack Obama and were so eager to vote for him in the Democratic primary, rather than for a candidate with more experience, more of a track-record of public service, and presumptively more likely tactually to accomplish more as president if eelcted. That same conversation could, I suppose, be repeated this year. Of course, Bernie Sanders is not a freshman Senator as Obama was in 2008. He has actually been around a long time and has held political office for decades. Still, the situation is analogous in so many ways.

It appears that in New HampshireSenator Sanders won a majority of all voters under 65 - and over 80% of the under-30 vote. (Only in my over-65 age group did he win less 50% - some 44% to be precise.) For now at least, it is evident that expressive politics is driving the primaries in both parties this year, and expressive politics has often been especially appealing to younger voters. In my generation, the McCarthy candidacy in 1968 and the McGovern candidacy in 1972 were both instances of largely expressive politics, with little practical chance of electoral success. McGovern did, of course, actually win the nomination, but then went down to disastrous defeat in the 1972 Nixon landslide. More to the point it essentially took 20 years - and the candidacy of Bill Clinton - to undo the effect of that defeat. (By comparison, the Republican foray into ultra-expressive politics - the Goldwater debacle of 1964 - did not do the same damage to Republicans' longer-term prospects.)

Unlike those other races, the latest generation gap in this year's Democratic primaries is really less about issues than about the seductive appeal (especially to the young, although to others as well) of the emotional satisfactions of expressive politics (as opposed to such mundane matters as selecting an electable candidate).

As the campaign now turns a corner and the campaigning moves into more demographically and culturally representative communities, a big question will be whether this generation gap persists - how widespread it will turn out to be and how long it will last. On that may depend not just the choice of nominee but the outcome fo the general election as well.