Let Us Dream (The Pope's New Book)

 

This business of Popes' publishing books is still relatively new, but I guess it's here to stay. Given any pope's already supersized influence both within the Church and on the world stage  and given the de facto popular amalgamation of personal papal utterances to quasi- magisterial standing, the practice of papal book-writing (or at least of publishing papal books while the author is still on the papal throne) may appear unnecessary at best and problematic at worst. Yet the practice is obviously here to stay and is yet another dimension of the contemporary, increasingly powerful papacy. That said, Pope Francis and his literary collaborator have given us a unique book for this perilous moment in our history. 

Composed in collaboration with his English-language biographer and admirer Austen Ivereigh, Let Us Dream The Path to A Better Future offers, as its subtitle suggests, Pope Francis' expansive proposals for an alternative path for individuals and societies.

The Pope begins by exploring what this pandemic can teach us, the opportunities for change contained in this crisis. He calls  Covid-19 "our Noah moment, as long as we can find our way to the Ark of the ties that unite us: of love, and of a common belonging." For Francis, the pandemic "has made visible the throwaway culture," thus enabling us to respond to what indifference hides, opening us to new and unexpected possibilities that "burst the bonds of our thinking."

On the other hand, the media, that have become "our main windows onto the world," can instead obscure reality. Here the Pope takes a poke at "certain so-called Catholic media that claim to be saving the Church from itself." In our American context, it is not hard to guess what media outlets he might be referring to!

The Pope comments quite a bit on some contemporary developments and movements (e.g., the #MeToo Movement and the protests following the murder of George Floyd). But he is also alert to another sort of protest: "an angry spirit of victimhood. but this time among people who are victims only in their own imagination: those who claim, for example, that being forced to wear a mask in an unwarranted imposition by the state, yet who forget or do not care about those who cannot rely, for example, on social security or who have lost their jobs." Again, it is evident which country's particular social pathologies, so much on display in this plague year, are being noted. And again he does not "ignore those in our Church who fall into the same mindset."

Particularly attractive is the Pope's style of writing and especially the way he recalls his own personal experiences and how he has learned from them. In particular, he shares with us three very personal crises in his own life, what he calls the "three 'Covids' in my own life: my illness, Germany, and Cordoba." From each of these profoundly painful personal experiences, he learned  "that you suffer a lot, but if you allow it to change you, you come out better. But if you dig in you come out worse."

What kind of change does Pope Francis envision?  He says "we must redesign the economy so that it can offer every person access to a dignified existence while protecting and regenerating the natural world." He says "we have to avoid falling back into the individual and institutional patterns that have led to Covid and the various crises that surround it: the hyperinflation of the individual combined with weak institutions and the despotic control of the economy by a very few."

Again he takes particular aim at the United States, diagnosing well what has happened to this country in the last 40 years especially:: The hyperinflation of the individual goes along with the weakness of the state. Once people lose a sense of the common good, history shows that we are left with anarchy or authoritarianism or both together: a violent, unstable society."

The first, diagnostic part of the Pope's book is called A Time to See. The second is called A Time to Choose. Our Jesuit Pope, formed by the Ignatian process of discernment, invites us to enter into a similar process: "A time of trial is always a time of distinguishing the paths of the good that lead to the future from other paths that lead nowhere or backward. With clarity, we can better choose the first." For this process, he recalls fundamental principles and criteria of Catholic Social Teaching: the preferential option for the poor, the common good, the universal destination of goods, solidarity, and subsidiarity. While this section suffers from the perennial problem of trying to address too many issues and trying to justify particular papal projects and policies, it is a wonderful window into Francis' own spirituality of discernment and reading the signs of the times.

The third section is called A Time to Act. In language somewhat reminiscent of his recent encyclical, the Pope speaks of this as a "time to restore an ethics of fraternity and solidarity, regenerating the bonds of trust and belonging. For what saves us is not an idea but an encounter. Only the face of another is capable of awakening the best of ourselves. In serving the people, we save ourselves."

As he has done elsewhere, the Pope speaks eloquently about the failures of the prevailing market economies. None of this is really new, not even at the level of papal teaching, but the informal and very personal way the pope presents it gives traditional teachings a certain freshness their more philosophical presentations might seem to some to lack. Nonetheless, he remains rooted in traditional teaching, as for example when he praises his predecessor Pope Saint Paul VI's 1968 encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, which warned "of the temptation to view human life as one more object over which the powerful and educated should exercise mastery. How prophetic his message now looks!"

Francis proposes a sort of blueprint for constructing a better world for all. one which puts the poor and the marginalized at the center, seeking to empower ordinary people to collaborate together despite differences and so usher in new possibilities for our troubled world.

Intensely personal books like this are not a substitute for magisterial teaching, but Francis has demonstrated how such efforts can effectively illuminate what the Church can be for the world - at all times but especially in this era of inevitable transformation.

God Is Faithful

Even without a pandemic, autumn – late autumn, autumn turning into winter –always gives this year-end holiday season a somewhat solemn and reflective mood, a mood that the Church’s annual cycle captures so singularly in this season of Advent, which begins today

Advent originated as an annual period of repentance focused on preparation for Judgment Day, and this Sunday, rather than starting something completely new, continues the end-of-time, Judgment Day themes of the last several Sundays, summing them all up in the warning: “Be watchful! Be alert!”  Like the servants in today’s Gospel [Mark 13:33-37], we have been left with a mission, each with his or her own work, while we wait for the lord of the house to return.

Meanwhile, of course, there are many distractions that get in the way of our being attentive. As Pope Francis has warned: “Whenever our interior life gets caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades.” [EG 2]

So, Jesus said to his disciples, “Be watchful! Be alert!” Be on guard against whatever distractions dull our senses and lull us into sleeping!

In the darkness of the winter night, when sleeping seems so natural, Advent yanks us out of our ordinary, secular time into what we might call liturgical time, which teaches us to wait for Christ’s coming in the future by looking back, by our annual remembrance of Christ’s 1^st coming in the past, so as to recognize Christ’s continuing presence in the present. Advent annually ritualizes for us our ongoing present reality, where we actually are right now, living and waiting between Christ’s 1^st coming at Christmas and his final coming for which we claim as Christians to be waiting, when (as we say in the Creed) he will come to judge the living and the dead.

In the true spirit of winter – winter as it used to be experienced when people actually lived according to the rhythm of the seasons – Advent challenges us to slow down and take stock, to pay attention. Of course, the pandemic has already slowed us down, interrupting all our customary activities, disrupting our long-term life plans as surely as it has disrupted our short-term holiday plans. It has, as I said on Thanksgiving, brought our world to the abyss of the abyss of an apocalyptic-like crisis, in which almost everything we used to take for granted seems to have evaporated all at once, separating and isolating us, dividing and diminishing us, and shattering all our empty illusions of individualism, national exceptionalism, and self-sufficiency. As Isaiah laments in today’s 1^st reading [Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2b-7]: we have all withered like leaves. What we see and observe are autumn’s withered leaves, winter’s barren branches, and the imminent end of another year. What we feel and fear is the end of ourselves.

And those fears are real. We fear many things, which we rightly ought to fear – from climate change to economic recession. Above all, we fear the coronavirus and covid-19. Religious faith is not delusional thinking and denialism. Religion recognizes reality and the legitimacy of our human fears.

Yet, while Advent starts out being about fear, it is also about faith and hope –the passing of an old year and our hopes for the new, the enveloping winter darkness of a dying world and the dawning brightness of Christ’s coming to save us. As Saint Paul assures us in today’s 2^nd reading [1 Corinthians 1:3-9]: God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The older I get, the more aware I become that time is running out, and the more I appreciate the importance of the present, the limited time I actually have.  Time – this time, our time – is precious, precisely because it is limited, but also (and that’s the Christian spin on what is an otherwise universal human experience) because it has a future.

Advent annually expresses in ritual form for us what we actually presently experience, where we actually find ourselves right now, living and waiting between Christ’s 1^st coming at Christmas and his final coming for which we claim as Christians to be waiting, as we say at every Mass, in joyful hope.

The point of Advent is to let the anniversary of Christ’s 1^st coming concentrate our attention on his coming again, while we, meanwhile, recognize his action on our behalf in the present. That present has plenty of problems, as we all know and all have experienced in different and challenging ways in this difficult and challenging year. The challenge of Advent is to let our anxious and increasingly fear–filled present be brightened and transformed into that hopeful future promised us already by Christ’s coming in the past.

That means re-imagining Christmas as more than just shopping and presents and parties (those wonderful things that we will especially miss this year) - to recognize in the reality of the Christmas story something even more wonderful, something really new.

In his 2008 book, Why Go to Church: The Drama of the Eucharist, the former Master General of the Dominican Order, Timothy Radcliffe, recalled how one of the first things immigrants did when they settled in cities like Liverpool during the Industrial Revolution was to build big churches. Radcliffe writes: “it was a sign that they were not as they might seem, mere members of the urban proletariat, but citizens of the kingdom. They were fellow citizens of the saints whose statues filled their churches, God’s own children. Their houses might be slums, but their home was heaven.” Similar sentiments undoubtedly characterized the immigrant Catholic community that founded Immaculate Conception parish and built our parish church – a visible sign not just for them but for the whole world of the Kingdom of God present and active here in East Tennessee.

Advent is a wake-up call to all of us here and now to respond to Christ’s coming and so live as people for whom the Christmas story really matters – matters enough to make everything different from what would otherwise be in a world without the presence of its one and only Savior, Jesus Christ.

And so we say with Saint Paul: God is faithful, and by him we have been called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN November 29, 2020. 

The entire Mass can be watched at:

https://www.facebook.com/128972640480016/videos/181959196899533

"To Deliver Us in Our Days"

This will be my 11th Thanksgiving as your pastor, but only the second one I have celebrated here in Knoxville. Usually, I used to fly to California to spend this most familial of holidays with my mother and my sister and her family. This year, however, is very different - not just for me but for most of us.  My mother died in March, but the pandemic precludes any long-distance travel or large family gathering for almost everyone. So this holiday, so associated more than any other with travelling and gathering around the table, must be celebrated very differently this year.

And, anyway, some may wonder, what is there really to be thankful for?

Some of you who watched the HBO series Succession  may recall an episode from the first season, set on Thanksgiving Day, when the much too rich and much too dysfunctional Roy family and their guests go around the table and say what each one is thankful for. As you’d expect, most of the thanks are perfunctory – for the food, for family, for having been made to feel welcome in the family, etc. The obvious awkwardness of the scene may be one of the few occasions when the overly rich and overly dysfunctional Roy clan come across as almost normal in their awkwardness.

And maybe there is something awkward about Thanksgiving itself. Thanksgiving is – or at least it used to be – the ultimate American holiday. In recent years, however, it has more and more become just a prelude to Black Friday, which itself in recent years increasingly seemed to begin sometime on Thanksgiving Day itself. Of course, if we think of America as the world capital of out-of-control, predatory capitalism, then perhaps Black Friday should be thought of as the ultimate American holiday. But some of us certainly are old enough to remember when holidays were really holidays, when most people didn’t have to work; and we can remember Thanksgiving as it was then, when it really was the ultimate American holiday, and its story was one with the story we tell about our national origins.

At least since the Civil War, the New England narrative of the pilgrims, has served as the symbolic centerpiece of our national imagination. The PBS series The American Experience ran a 2-hour show on the Pilgrims some years ago. An excellent program, worth the effort to watch whenever it is repeated, it highlights the Pilgrims' relationship with the world around them before they came to America and with the indigenous peoples they encountered after they arrived, some of whom made a mutually beneficial alliance with the Pilgrims against other Indian tribes. This was possible in part because they already spoke some English as a result of earlier encounters with Europeans, and because of the extensive devastation recently brought about by a plague that had almost wiped out the tribes that had previously lived in the area where the Pilgrims would settle. When the Pilgrims' arrived exactly 400 years ago this month, they found not some pristine wilderness, some re-imagined Garden of Eden, but a place of death and desolation. What we now look back on as the first "Thanksgiving," was a celebration of sheer survival and relief from the shared, mutual losses experienced by both the natives and the English settlers.

The Pilgrims had abandoned Europe for America early in the apocalyptic conflict of that continent's Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, - only to find the fruit of another apocalypse here in America. Out of all this tragedy, a new society would be built. If it wasn't quite the biblical "City on a Hill" that it aspired to be (and that the Puritan settlers some 10 years later would explicitly challenge it to be), the Pilgrims at least aspired. And they attempted the next best thing with a social contract (the famous “Mayflower Compact" we all learned about in school) creating for a fallen world a government based on the consent of the governed.

Historians and others can argue about the precise significance of that "social contract." Symbolically, however, it expressed something of our American self-understanding of what it means to be a people, whose freedom is protected by a system of law. Having just come through a period of notorious lawlessness at the highest levels, we as a society would do well to relearn the lessons our Pilgrim predecessors understood so well about the "guardrails," as they are commonly now called, that are so essential to who we are and who we hope to be.

We celebrate Thanksgiving this year - as so often in our history since Abraham Lincoln nationalized the holiday in 1863 - in a time of turmoil, when once again the world seems poised on the abyss of apocalyptic crisis thanks to this terrible pandemic, when almost everything we used to take for granted seems to have evaporated all at once, this terrible time which has so separated and isolated us, so divided and diminished us, and so shattered all our empty illusions of individualism, national exceptionalism, and self-sufficiency. As Lincoln wisely sensed, there are lessons for us in the present - from the faith, which the Pilgrims kept even in a time of crisis and in a place of devastation, and from the hope, that they lived by even in spite of their suffering and grief.

The Pilgrims probably would never have read the Book of Sirach at their Thanksgiving feast, but I think the reading [Sirach 50:22-24] we heard earlier would have spoken to their experience, as I hope it still speaks to ours:

And now, bless the God of all, who has done wondrous things on earth;

Who fosters people’s growth from their mother’s womb

and fashions them according to his will!

May he grant you joy of heart and may peace abide among you;

May his goodness toward us endure in Israel to deliver us in our days.

Homily for Thanksgiving Eve, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 25, 2020. 

The entire Mass may be watched at:

https://www.facebook.com/128972640480016/videos/284216306355316

(Photo: Signing the Mayflower Compact 1620, a painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1899) 

Turkey Day

Ancient religious holidays like Christmas have an abundance of popular customs, which typically include an amazing variety of national and ethnic foods popularly associated with the holiday. Thanksgiving, being a uniquely American holiday, has, for all intents and purposes, only one such tradition - the Turkey Dinner, immortalized in Norman Rockwell's famous Freedom From Want illustration (photo), part of his Four Freedoms series, based on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous Four Freedoms Address to Congress in 1941. 

Some years ago, I was shocked to hear form an acquaintance how he had eaten not turkey but  prime rib on Thanksgiving in the company of some very wealthy hosts. At the time, I dismissed it as an oddity, a wealthy host's eccentricity.  I had 9and still have) no idea how widespread such a practice might be among our plutocratic elite. Perhaps it is more widespread than I then imagined. If so, it might be just one further example of how our globalized elite has become more and more alienated from the country they live in and the fellow citizens they ostensibly share it with.

It is, I suppose, one more sign of the social catastrophe covid-19 has visited upon us that this most American holiday has been impoverished at its core, thanks to our inability to gather together at family tables this year. I suspect fewer turkeys than usual will be cooked this year. I have heard from others how they are just buying turkey breasts and cooking them (or even buying them already cooked) in lieu of the traditional large bird. In this time of pandemic when so many are sick and so many have died, that seems at most a modest loss. But, as a symbol of all the many other losses so many of us have endured this terrible year, it somehow speaks volumes.

Besides taking all the necessary and proper precautions that reflect our legitimate fears, the next thing to do this Thanksgiving Day is to recommit ourselves as individuals, as families of all sorts, and as a nation to the values our annual turkey feast is supposed to signify - values articulated so well by one of our country's greatest presidents in that famous Four Freedoms speech almost 80 years ago.

"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.                                                                                     

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb."

Christ the King

This past week, along with lots of other fans, I watched, one after another, all the episodes of Season 4 of The Crown, the Netflix series that dramatizes the life and reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. That has become a kind of November ritual for me. (In the past, I would do it twice – once by myself, and then, visiting my family in California for Thanksgiving, with my mother.)

Season 4, which is getting rave reviews as the best season so far, highlights (among other things) the relationship between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first woman Prime Minister. Like all relationships, it was a complicated one; but at its core was a conflict between competing concepts of what a country is and what different elements in society owe to one another. Thatcher, you may remember, was once famously quoted as saying there is no such thing as society. 

Here in the United States we too have just finished presidential election campaign which has likewise pitted two competing concepts of what a country is, what a society is, and what we owe to one another as members of society.

In our Church too we have witnessed deep divisions between competing factions favoring competing conceptions of Catholic life in this world.

Of course, there is nothing new or surprising about people having differences of opinion and the conflicts they cause. But, when it comes to the Kingdom of God, Christ the King himself has already revealed his priorities. In the gospel account we just heard, Christ the King has already revealed what the Kingdom of God’s priorities about our life in the world are, and what we are supposed to care most about in this world. And they may come as something of a surprise for religious people whose idea of religion reflects very different priorities.

On this annual celebration of Christ the King, the Church challenges us to contemplate Christ’s return in majesty - his coming again “in glory” (as we say all the time in the Creed) “to judge the living and the dead.”

Traditionally, we speak of two judgments – the general and the particular. Like Michelangelo’s famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel, today’s gospel portrays a final, general judgment, which we associate with the end of time.

Yet, that final, general judgment will really ratify and confirm the particular judgment of each one of us at end of our individual life. Likewise, that particular judgment just confirms each one of us individually in the kind of life we have been living on earth - in the kind of person you and I have become over the course of our life.

The Gospel’s judgment story illustrates the connection between what we profess to believe and how we live, who we really are, who we have become by how we have chosen to live and what we have cared about. It dramatically demonstrates how my own choices and actions here and now can either unite me with others or cut me off from others. It illustrates how the person that I am going to be forever is the person that I am presently in the process of becoming – by how I am living here and now.

What I do with others, how I live with others, my actions, my relationships, my whole life matters. Each one of us is the story of a lifetime. And it is, of course, a process – a lifelong process, in the course of which each one of us experiences his or her own particular set of challenges and opportunities.

And, just like with the servants in the parable we heard last week, the gifts God has given us to work with can be multiplied many times over by going beyond ourselves and joining with others here and now in this world, which we have been entrusted to love and care for, and in our life together as his Church. As Pope Francis has reminded us, defeatism stifles [EG 85], whereas God’s love summons us to mission and makes us fulfilled and productive [EG 81].

Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 22, 2020. 

The entire Mass may be watched at: https://www.facebook.com/Immaculate-Conception-Church-128972640480016