Ash Wednesday and the Promise of Lent

Another Ash Wednesday. With repeatedly remarked upon but really unsurprising regularity, the annual cycle continues its progress from month to month and season to season, bringing us once again to the de facto centerpiece of the Church's calendar, Lent and Easter. As the Church prays in one of her Lenten Prefaces, by your gracious gift each year your faithful await the sacred paschal feasts with the joy of minds made pure. And so we start another Lent with Ash Wednesday, what  surely has become one of the most popular days in the year (increasingly a rival even to Christmas in church attendance).

The oh-so-popular ritual of receiving ashes today is, of course, a relic of the ancient expulsion of penitents as part of their period of public penance prior to their public reconciliation with the Church prior to Easter. The rigors of the ancient Order of penitents practically guaranteed that it would eventually die out, as it predictably did. The one relic that remained of it, however, the imposition of ashes, became overwhelmingly popular and something desired by everyone else - and has remained so to this day. 

Growing up n the Bronx in the American Catholic Church's post-war glory days, I remember how ashes were imposed at the end of each of the parish's four regular morning Masses as well as, without anyone having to wait through Mass, hourly at 3:00, 4:00, and 5:00 p.m., plus, of course, for us school children. Some years we would be brought over to church to receive our ashes. In other years, the precious ashes would be brought to us in our classrooms!

The other big collective Lenten event we did together as a school was, of course, the Friday afternoon Stations of the Cross, at which we all got to sing the glorious 13th-century hymn, Stabat Mater, which we usually managed to render as lugubriously as possible. We were also issued "mite boxes," in which to put our pennies (or larger coins) that we were somehow supposedly saving by our childish acts of self-denial. How much (or little) one put in one's "mite box" was effectively a private matter, however, as was the seriousness of whatever self-denial we actually did. 

Another individual Lenten practice which was widely encouraged and which inevitably took on a quasi-public character was attendance at daily Mass. Never being very good at self-denial, but always fond of religion's ritual expressions, that was a devotion I took too quite comfortably, Unless otherwise assigned as an altar boy to serve at some other Mass, that meant attending the 7:00 a.m. parish Mass, which gave me plenty of time to come home after to have some breakfast before reporting to school. adults also added daily Mass to their Lenten schedules in surprisingly large numbers - enough to warrant the parish to assign extra priests to distribute Communion (right after the Consecration as was common in those days) and also to take up a collection at daily Masses all during Lent.  

In those days, we all brought our Missals to church and followed along, reading silently in English what the priest was reading barely audibly in Latin. On "ferial" days (weekdays with no saint's feast day), the ancient Lenten stational Masses would be celebrated with their (often lengthy) readings from the Old testament, which made the Mass texts so much more interesting that those of almost any other time of the year.

Most of that is gone now, of course. The rigors of earlier centuries had been much mitigated by my childhood, but Lent was still serious enough to be affect ordinary lives. (I remember how the popular women's magazines even featured special Lenten menus for housewives to use during the season.) Now, like the rigorous ancient order of penitents, the Lenten fast has been effectively mitigated out of existence. And, after the temporary uplift of Ash Wednesday, weekday attendance drops again the next day  to its typical low.

For all that, Lent in its much mitigated form has still survived and remains for those who choose to avail themselves of its promise, the Church's great annual gift to all of us to focus on where we are going and who we hope to become, not just for now but for ever.

God in the Qur'an

Jack Miles regularly writes about God and other biblical figures, primarily as literary characters. His God: A Biography (1995), won  a Pulitzer Prize, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (2001), was named a New York Times Notable Book. Now, he has applied his technique to Islam’s scripture, insofar as so many of the familiar figures from the biblical narratives also appear there. Describing himself "a practicing Episcopalian," Miles acknowledges his starting point as a Christian , who nonetheless approaches the Qur'an "as a literary critic." “We must all learn,” he writes, “to read one another’s scriptures, be they secular or sacred, with the same understanding and accommodating eye that we turn upon our own.” 

The author focuses on biblical characters familiar to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike: Adam and Eve (known in the Qur'an only as Adam's wife), Cain and Abel (known as Adam's son and his brother), Noah, Abraham (and his father and his sons), Joseph, Moses, and Jesus and his Mother, all of whom appear recognizably in the Qur’an, but whose stories are in important ways also somewhat different from how they appear in the comparable Jewish and Christian accounts of them (canonical and apocryphal). "How," he asks, does the Qur'an expand upon, contract, or revise the Bible's account of a given biblical character or episode?" He is particularly interested in how Allah, as he speaks in the Qur'an, "explicitly corrects what Muhammad may have heard from Jewish or Christian sources."

One important difference Miles notes is that in the Qur’an God (Allah) speaks as the narrator, which is very different from most of the biblical stories we are already so familiar with, which are narrated largely by effectively anonymous authors. Allah as direct narrator imparts to the characters and the stories about them a distinctive dimension, which also reflects Islam's emphasis on acknowledging Allah - and Allah alone - as God of all creation. "What Allah, as the author and the speaker of the Qur'an, therefore requires of Jews and Christians is that they should acknowledge that they have lost or adulterated what God revealed to them." By observing how the Qur'an revises what it shares with the Bible, "an observant interpreter may infer how differently the Qur'an characterizes God."

Unlike the biblical account, the Qur'an's account of Adam and Eve incorporates important information about the angels and Satan, material  familiar to many Christians but not from the Bible. (Unlike the biblical authors, Muhammad, of course, would likely have had access to such post-biblical apocryphal stories.) Also unlike the Bible, the Qur'an account also does not portray Adam and Eve's efforts to evade responsibility. Rather they confess and repent and receive Allah's mercy. "Adam, by his humble repentance, becomes the first Muslim."

Likewise, unlike the biblical Noah, the Qur'an's Noah is more like a prophet, God's messenger to his idolatrous contemporaries. Noah anticipates already the self-understanding in both Christianity and Islam of not being about natural family but rather an intentional commitment - in the one case to Christ, in the other to Allah and to Muhammad as his messenger. This theme is reinforced in the account of Abraham's relationship with his father, making him "the truly paradigmatic Muslim not just in his maturity but even in his youth." Highlighting this theme, common to Christianity as well, Miles notes: "Faith can hold families together. It can also tear them apart." Like the new Testament Jesus, the Qur'an's Abraham is "subordinating familial to creedal values."

So too, in contrast to the Exodus story, in the Qur'an "the Egyptians's core offense is that they do not worship the one true God." Unlike God in Exodus, "Allah wants Egypt, and even Pharaoh himself to convert." Indeed, when drowning in the Red Sea, Pharaoh in the Qur'an does exactly that, saying, "I believe that there is no god except Him in Whom the children of Israel believe, and I am a Muslim."

One of the few things about the Qur'an that Christians are likely to know is that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is much more prominent there than in the New Testament. In fact, she is the only woman named in the Qur'an, which emphasizes her holiness. The Qur'an, of course, denies divinity to Jesus and, in what Miles calls "a kind of proto-Protestant radicalism" also denies divinity to Mary. Whereas the Gospels emphasize Jesus' Davidic descent (through Joseph, who does not appear at all in the Qur'an), that plays no part in the Qur'an account. "What matters is that Jesus is a Muslim who has received his own 'book" from Allah himself and indeed while still in his cradle." Finally, the Qur'ann portrays Jesus as Allah's prophet rejected by is contemporaries, as earlier prophets had been, but Jesus' death is accorded no salvific significance.

What is this book's greatest value? Miles believes that "the very  experience of imagining yourself thinking and living in another way will foster in you, out of transferred self-love, a measure of sympathy. ... Imagine yourself as other than you are and you begin imagining others as no less human, no less sincere, no less levelheaded, no less likable than you are yourself."

Those "Wooden Beams" in Our Eyes

We live in a society which prides itself on its tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion, and we are part of a Church which proclaims radical mercy. But, instead, what do we actually see and hear and experience everywhere around us more and more, but angry judgments and vindictive condemnations? There is perhaps no medium more designed for focusing on the splinters in other people’s eyes than Twitter. But even people who perhaps have never ever sent a single hateful tweet have been affected and corrupted by our ambient culture of self-righteous anger and condemnation, a culture which encourages us to minimize, if not ignore, our own shortcomings and failings, favoring what one commentator has called “being destructively judgmental” instead of “restoringly corrective.”

Judgments are, of course, inevitable in life. We cannot even the cross the street without making a judgment (hopefully an accurate one) about what the traffic is doing! But how we judge is critical, how rapidly we judge is critical, how well informed we are when we judge is critical, and ultimately how in touch we are with what is going on inside ourselves when we judge is absolutely critical. How often have our judgments been filtered through our personal, social, or ideological biases, those wooden beams in our own eyes? As Pope Francis reminded us in a much-quoted homily in 2016: “Behind the rigidity there is something hidden in a person’s life. Rigidity is not a gift from God. Gentleness, yes. Goodness, yes, benevolence, yes, forgiveness, yes. But rigidity, no!”

Yet despite all the personal, social, situational, and ideological biases that block our vision, there is, Jesus suggests in today’s Gospel [Luke 6:39-45], a way forward; for, when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher. Only by faithfully following and imitating the lessons given us by Jesus himself can we hope to move forward. That is the work of a lifetime, of course, never quite completed until we find our final fulfillment in the perfection of the Kingdom of God. Meanwhile, we keep going forward, helping one another along the way, not like the blind being guided by other blind guides, but more like short-sighted, near-sighted pilgrims leaning on one another, relying on one another, helping each other and being helped in turn.

And one of the resources given us to help us help each other is Lent, which begins this coming Wednesday. Everybody seems to love Ash Wednesday. But Ash Wednesday is just the gateway to this most wonderful season of the Church’s year. Lent is our annual wake-up call, our annual invitation to get up and get moving to get where we want to be – to become who we want to be – not on our own, but guiding one another and being guided, travelling together as one Church along the path the Lord leads us – the path of gentleness, goodness, benevolence, and, above all, forgiveness.

Homily for the 8th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 3, 2019.

"Facing the New Anxieties"

Facing the new Anxieties is the subtitle of a fascinating new book, The Future of Capitalism (HarperCollins, 2018). Its author, Paul Collier, is a development economist at Oxford University, who brings his personal experience (born and raised in Sheffield and living and working in Africa) to analyze the geographical, educational, and moral crises created by contemporary capitalism. While he sees himself, thanks in part to his personal life- experiences, as wanting to bridge those three divides, he worries that left and right have "each drifted away from their origins in the practical reciprocity of communities, and became captured by an entirely different group of people who became disproportionately influential: middle-class intellectuals."

(In making this argument, he also relies on Jonathan Haidt's now familiar typology of six major human values and the contemporary shriveling of elite values primarily to just two of them.)

The core of his concern is the loss of that "practical reciprocity of communities," in which rights and obligations are firmly linked,  in opposition to which left and right both have "in common and emphasis upon the individual, and a fondness for meritocracy," in which "superstars of the left became the very good" while "those of the right became the very rich."

Variations of this social-democratic argument are by now familiar - all rooted in the success of "social democracy" from 1945 to 1970. In that era, which I personally can well remember, capitalism was somehow directed, to some degree at least, to serve the common good. That post-war quarter century "experienced the rapidly rising prosperity achieved by states that pruposively harnessed capitalism for the benefit of society." Contemporary capitalism, however, has, he believes, become "morally bankrupt and on track for tragedy," its rationale built on a theoretical construct, "economic man," who is "selfish, greedy, lazy" and "utterly despicable." Basing himself on Adam Smith's arguments in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Collier focuses instead on a construct of "social man," motivated as much by "oughts" as well as "wants."

The bulk of the book applies these principles to the formation of ethical families, firms, and states. Given the present crisis of civilization, I found his analysis of the "ethical state" especially compelling.

Collier reminds us (again) that, from 1945 to 1970, "we experienced the rapidly rising prosperity achieved by states that purposively harnessed capitalism for the benefit of society." He reminds us because "it wasn't always like that, and it isn't now." By this he refers to how states failed in the 1930s because they "lacked the sense of ethical purpose to see full employment as their responsibility," After the war, came what he calls "the economic miracle" of 1945-1970. Since then, however, states are failing once again: "as our societies  have become more divided, they have become less generously disposed to those on the other side of the divide."

World War II was "an immense common endeavour in which leaders had crafted narratives of belonging and mutual obligation," which turned nations into gigantic communities "with a strong sense of shared identity, obligation and reciprocity,"  in which people were willing "to comply with social democratic narratives that linked individual actions to collective consequences."  Over time, however, "Utilitarian and Rawlsian vanguards" failed to renew the legacy of shared identity. So mutual obligation eroded, even as economic changes were making it that much more necessary. Meanwhile successful social elites have been"exiting the shared identity of nation," generating resentment among those they are leaving behind. Since, however, "the nation is the largest feasible entity of shared identity," Collier calls for a renewed "sense of belonging to place."

After analogous analyses of what he calls the ethical firm, the ethical family, and the ethical world, he addresses the geographical divide , the class divide, and the global divide, the predominant contemporary pattern of successful winner and left behind losers, he proposes some practical political reforms aimed at repairing our dysfunctional broken politics - proposals as diverse as reforming the way political parties select their leaders to restoring a lost sense of mutual obligation.so recently "supplanted by the entitled individual." Explicitly referencing our present state of affairs, he concludes that "by eschewing shared belonging," liberals have recklessly "handed it to the charlatan extremes, who are gleefully twisting it to their own warped purposes."

So What Else Is New?

“He is a racist. He is a con man. And he is a cheat,” President Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen said of the president. “I am not protecting Mr. Trump anymore,” Cohen said, stating the obvious, so to speak.

Obvious, indeed! Other than the inherently up-close and personal dimension that comes with the territory when someone has been for years a close associate of the person he is denouncing, what substantively new revelations have we learned that we did not know already? If, as Cohen claims, "racist ... con man ... cheat" is a reasonable assessment of the president's character, who did not know that already before the last election? 

More to the point, how many Trump voters would have been surprised by what Cohen had to say? In our politically polarized society, politics had become simply another expression of our increasingly unbridgeable cultural divide(s). Politics has increasingly become more and more about hating the other than about anything else. The point is not how many Trump voters may have voted for him because of his admirable moral character and now are suddenly going to reconsider their allegiance because of new revelations (which largely conform what was always already known anyway). The point is rather how many voted for Trump primarily out of hatred for the other side, whether that other side is understood by them primarily as privileged uncaring elites or as immigrants or other historically marginalized groups, or de facto an alliance of privileged uncaring elites with those other historically marginalized groups.

It may be politically possible for a certain sort of economic populism to bridge that ever growing divide that has been created by the malevolent miasma of cultural populism. Whether that will in fact happen very much remains to be seen.