December's Great Tree

Santa Claus came to town a week ago (on Thanksgiving), but for New Yorkers the closest thing to an "official" start of Christmas came last night (despite the wet weather) with the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. 

The first Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center was put up on Christmas Eve in 1931, during Rockefeller Center's construction, when Italian-American workers decorated a 20-foot balsam fir. Two years later in 1933, the first official Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was put up and lit, establishing what has since been a New York holiday tradition. In recent decades, the lighting ceremony has been broadcast nationally and has turned into a popular show of celebrity appearances, most of which I am quite content to skip, tuning in just in time for the tree-lighting itself. 

There is always something special about that moment - whether in the privacy of the family home or in a public space with a watching crowd - when the Christmas Tree's lights go on for the first time. Whether large or small, the Christmas Tree's bright and beautiful lights make a monumental impact against the darkness of these wintry nights.

Like most folkloric customs, the ultimate origin of the Christmas Tree is uncertain. The use of evergreen ranches to decorate homes during the pre-Christian pagan winter holidays is well known, as is the continuance of such customs into the Christian era. German tradition associates Martin Luther with the custom of bringing a tree indoors and illuminating it with candles at Christmas. From its apparent origins as an explicitly Protestant custom, the Christmas Tree spread slowly but inexorably throughout German lands and beyond. Britain's Queen Charlotte (born a German Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz) is said to have displayed a Christmas tree at a children's Christmas party in 1800, and her granddaughter, the future Queen Victoria, was familiar with the Christmas Tree in her childhood home. After her marriage to Prince Albert, the custom spread more widely among upper and middle class British families. Well before then, the custom was familiar in the U.S. in those parts of the country where Christmas was commonly celebrated.

By the time I appeared on the scene, the Christmas Tree was standard in most American homes, and tree-lighting ceremonies were common in public places. The 1965 Christmas TV show, A Charlie Brown Christmas satirized artificial trees as emblematic of the increasing secularization and commercialization of Christmas. I also remember evergreen trees in church when I was a child, but without lights. When fully lit and ornamented Christmas Trees became common in churches I don't really know. We certainly had them in all the churches where I have served. In my 10 years as a pastor, I happily blessed a tree set up right outside the church entrance annually on our parish's patronal feast, December 8.

When I was growing up, a fresh tree was purchased shortly before Christmas and decorated a day or two before the holiday, a task typically completed only on Christmas Eve itself. The more recent anticipation of all aspects of the Christmas season and the ubiquity of artificial trees has caused many to set up their trees right after Thanksgiving (or even before). Indoors as well as outdoors, the brightly lit tree has everywhere become part of the standard December decor - allowing for multiple interpretations, whether Christian or pagan, of the light overcoming winter's darkness.

Perhaps one of the more memorable Christmas Tree lightings of the 20th century - before such events became commercialized pop culture spectaculars - was the lighting of the White House Christmas Tree by FDR and Winston Churchill on Christmas Eve 1941, just weeks after Pearl Harbor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZTRbNThHnk.  

Probably somewhere in Ukraine there is a Christmas Tree that this year may evoke similar sentiments!

Against the Wind

 

A couple of years ago, American journalist and author published Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour 1932-1975 (Crown, 2020), which I commented on here on February 26, 2021. Now he has completed the story of the greatest of the Kennedy brothers with his mammoth (1280 pages!) sequel, Against the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Rise of Conservatism 1976-2009.

The first volume told the story of how an otherwise unqualified 30-year old younger brother of a dynastically oriented president unexpectedly became - over the course of 47 years - one of the stars of the U.S. Senate and one of the greatest advocates for liberal causes in American politics. In an overly rich, overly privileged, overly entitled family of unbridled, arrogant ambition, "Ted" Kennedy became the one most truly admirable figure from that family and from that time. The first volume prefigured a detailed and ambitious personal and political biography, and the second volume does not disappoint.

In the first volume, Gabler retold the familiar account of Ted's rise through the lens of his marginal status within the family itself - the youngest child, from whom little was expected in comparison with his star-quality brothers, but who unlike them developed precisely those personal empathetic qualities which enabled him to connect naturally and effectively with people and in the end made him a better and more effective politician than his higher stature brothers - "Teddy, the most empathetic of the Kennedys, in part because he was the most disrespected of the Kennedys."

In this volume, Gabler examines the radically changed circumstances against which  Kennedy's later Senate career enfolded - the American turn to the right, reflected in the disastrous election of Ronald Reagan and all that has followed since (and anticipated in the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter), as well as the deterioration in American political institutions, not least Ted's beloved Senate itself. 

Once Kennedy finally disappointed himself and many of his fans by not becoming president and instead turned his attention full-time to the Senate, his story really takes off. "Ted Kennedy, however, had come to the Senate with a different agenda, a different attitude. He was no less desirous than his brothers of getting things done, no less desirous of making a difference. But when he got to the Senate, Ted Kennedy had patience." For fans of legislative process, Gabler seems to recount virtually every detail of virtually ever bill Kennedy was connected with (one reason why the book is so monumentally long).

But ultimately this is not a process book. Gabler's account of Kennedy's legislative successes and failures finds its fullest meaning against the background the transformation of the political landscape from the highpoint of liberalism in the mid-1960s to liberalism's gradual exhaustion in the 1970s. Gabler interprets the end of the liberal era in primarily moral terms. "Trying to stir a liberal conscience in the electorate, as Bobby had tried to do in 1968, was not a road to success in 1980 either. In a survey conducted after the campaign, three political scientists found that the 'Senator’s compassion for the less fortunate, long considered to be an attribute, generated more criticism than praise.' The moral moment had long since passed." Gabler's concept of the moral moment may be the leitmotif of the entire book.

And, of course, closely connected with the loss of liberalism's moral authority, would be the loss of a traditional constituency, illustrated so well in the account of the politically and personally bruising Boston battle over school busing, with which this volume begins. Somehow, in Kennedy-friendly Massachusetts, Kennedy kept getting reelected, but elsewhere other liberals were less fortunate.

Nonetheless, Kennedy never gave up. The most dramatic example of that, of course, was his commitment to providing adequate health care for Americans. As the dying Kennedy said to the new President Barack Obama: "“This is the time. Don’t let it slip away.” That time, it didn't.

Obviously, the personal cannot be separated from the political - especially in a self-conscious political dynasty like the Kennedys. So Gabler fills us in on Kennedy's long-drawn out marital troubles with his first wife, Joan, his complex relationships with his children especially his son Patrick, and his successful second marriage and the benefits (both personal and political) which followed from it. Inevitably, we re-experience various Kennedy family tragedies - among them the particularly problematic episode surrounding Ted and his nephew William Smith.

As in the first volume, Gabler does not shy away from the importance of religion in Ted's personal story. So we hear, for example, a lot about Ted as a daily Mass attender. In the famous letter, he wrote to the Pope at the end of his life, which President Obama delivered on his behalf, Kennedy wrote that the gift of faith he had received from his mother had “sustained and nurtured and provided solace to me in the darkest hours. I know I have been an imperfect human being, but with the help of my faith I have tried to right my past.” And, even as he asked the Pope to pray for him, he recalled the causes that had motivated him so passionately: “I want you to know, your Holiness, that in my 50 years of elected office I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I’ve opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a U.S. Senator.” 

Few have been able to claim a nobler legacy.

Doomsday Sunday

 

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

   Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

   Dies at the opening day.

[Isaac Watts, O God, Our Help in Ages Past, based on Psalm 90]

Time, it seems, flies by faster and faster the older one gets. And so, behold, it is Advent again, the most time-conscious of liturgical seasons - and, by periodic quirk of the calendar this year, the longest possible Advent of all, a four full weeks!)

Inevitably, in our contemporary time and place, when Advent arrives we are already immersed in our annual, year-end Christmas extravaganza of celebrations of all sorts - Christmas music, Christmas cards, Christmas parties, and, above all, Christmas shopping! Advent, with its penitential purple vestments, seems somewhat restrained amid all this holiday exuberance. Our modern holiday season is an exciting, extravagant, celebratory time. At its best, it is in Charles Dickens' famous words: "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." 

At the same time, in the Church’s calendar, these final weeks of the year, beginning with All Saints Day and continuing into Advent, invite us to focus on the coming of God’s kingdom. If November’s emphasis is on a sober consideration of our natural human limits and the eventual end of all things - Dickens' fellow-passengers to the grave - Advent continues that theme with increasing tonal emphasis on our hope-filled joyful expectation of the renewal of all things in Christ. 

Meanwhile, the proximity of Christmas invites us to remember Christ’s first coming, which we will soon commemorate and which we are already anticipating in all our society-wide pre-Christmas celebrations. That first coming of Christ challenges us to recognize and respond to Christ’s presence and action among us, here and now, which in turn prepares us for Christ’s promised return – Christ yesterday, today, and tomorrow. As Saint Augustine famously said: Let us not resist his first coming, so that we may not dread the second [Discourse on Psalm 95].

 

Ostensibly the most future-oriented of seasons, Advent is thus really a sort of symbol for the entire Christian life, lived (as it inevitably must be) in the present - between the first coming of Christ and his hoped-for final advent. As Christians, we live our lives literally in this interval between Christmas and the end. And that is what Advent is all about. As Pope Saint John Paul II said in 2002: “the whole of our life must be an ‘advent,’ a vigilant awaiting of the final coming of Christ. To predispose our mind to welcome the Lord who, as we say in the Creed, one day will come to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize him as present in the events of daily life. Therefore, Advent is, so to speak, an intense training what directs us decisively toward him who already came, who will come, and who comes continuously.”

Perhaps among puritanical liturgists and other similar scolds, Advent is considered a competitor to Christmas. But Advent is not in competition with Christmas. Advent is not in competition with anything – except complacency. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of the night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into (Matthew 24:43).

Now the rituals and symbols of Advent, as we celebrate Advent in the Church today, rely a lot on the seasonal imagery of darkness and light that defines this time of year in our northern hemisphere. Recently re-popularized folkloric customs like Advent wreaths with their evergreens and candles are all reflections of that. Symbolic beings that we are, we readily respond to such imagery. and the imagery is indeed beautiful and attractive and comforting. That said, Advent uses seasonal symbolism, but Advent is more than some sort of seasonal pageant. The Christian life is not a season, nor is it a play. The world really was in darkness before Christ – the darkness of alienation from God. But unlike natural darkness the world’s alienation from God is not some abstract natural force.

Moreover, we are the ones who have contributed – and continue to contribute - to the world’s darkness. For this reason, Advent has long been observed as a genuinely penitential season. Thus, Pope Innocent III (1161-1216, Pope 1198-1216) prescribed black as the liturgical color for Advent - although purple eventually beat black to become the season’s official color. Conveniently, purple simultaneously symbolizes repentance but also royalty - Christ the King coming in glory.

If Advent is properly understood as a penitential season (even while we are immersed in our families, at work, and on the city streets in holiday celebrations of all sorts), what is the penance appropriate to Advent? The answer was long ago given by Saint Paul, in words with which Advent traditionally begins: throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light (Romans 13:12). 

If that be so, then we need to ask ourselves, exactly what is it that keeps us in darkness? Why isn’t the light of Christ shining forth from us and through us to light up the world? Paul’s words challenge us to be attentive to what is happening right now. Living as we do in a culture of institutionalized irresponsibility, Advent’s message is a radical wake-up call to mean what we say - to mean really to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Advent, we are often told, is all about waiting - for what has already begun with Christ's first coming to be completed at his final coming. But the fact that Christmas is already here in our daily activities and celebrations complicates that experience. Any anyway most of us really aren’t very good at waiting, which may be why we rush into Christmas so quickly. 

The good news of Advent, however, is that it is precisely the present that matters. Jesus’ warning in this Sunday's Gospel [Matthew 24:37-44] about the days of Noah, reminds us how fundamentally common, how universal, the experience of the present really is, in spire of everything that is going on and everything that is going wrong in our world, here we are are still eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – just as it was up to the day that Noah entered the ark. The fact that the present time is limited should make it all that more precious, ought to make it matter that much more, because what I do now, the way I live now, the kind of person I am becoming here and now, that is the kind of person I will be when the Lord comes, and so the person I am going to remain for all eternity.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

[Advent Collect, Book of Common Prayer]

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

To anyone anywhere who reads this, Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving Day has always been - and remains - my favorite secular holiday. It perfectly captures the season and invites us (whether or not we chose to respond) to reflect upon our history as a nation and on the condition of our current national community. But, most of all, it is an especially beautiful time for basic human community, that of family and friends gathered around the table of God's and nature's bounty and the results of human labor.

Deep in my treasury of holiday memories is Perry Como's classic rendition every Thanksgiving of Bless This House. For the authentic 1950 sound, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPeAyYg2Wj0.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

The Impeachment Quagmire

 

Into the ever expanding surplus of Trump-era books, journalists Rachel Bade and Karoun Demirjian have published Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump (Harper Collins, 2022). As its title suggests, this book is less about Trump than about his two impeachments - and less about Trump and the two impeachments than about Congress (and particularly congressional leadership) and how the two Trump impeachments were handled. And, as the word "Botched" in the title hints, the authors are also somewhat critical of the way congressional leaders handled the two impeachments. 

The sense one gets is that the Democratic leadership (Speaker Pelosi in particular) were too cautious in their embrace of impeachment. Some of this, of course, was due to the usual sorts of factors - ambitious politicians' personality and territorial conflicts. But there were also deeper philosophical concerns about how to approach impeachment (if at all), the fundamental division between the Democrats' ideologically progressive left flank and more mainstream Democrats, and practical political concerns about how impeachment would play with the public and its possibly negative effects on the Democratic majority (dependent as it was on members from non-safe districts).

Since my own view on the subject was then and remains now that the first impeachment was probably a mistake, I am more sympathetic to Speaker Pelosi's position. Like Speaker Pelosi resisting the ideologically progressive left flank for much of 2019, I too think the historical lesson is that for impeachment to work the case must be clear and convincing and the process bipartisan. The 1868 Johnson impeachment (which gave the process a bad name for over a century) and the 1998 Clinton impeachment were politically motivated, partisan attacks (deserved perhaps in Johnson's case, a scandalous overreach in Clinton's case). The Republican impeachment of Clinton backfired dramatically. Clinton's popularity soared, and the Republicans paid a political price. Pelosi remembered this and resisted her ideologically progressive left flank accordingly - until Ukraine.

I believe she was right - and, if anything, was probably wrong to give in to her ideologically progressive left flank. The transformation impeachment into a partisan political weapon has, unsurprisingly, made impeachment a largely unworkable dead-letter. (One consequence is the dilemma we now have about indicting presidents, which we might not have if impeachment - the proper constitutional remedy for abuses of p[residential power - were still viable.)

Prescinding from the more fundamental philosophical issues about impeachment, Pelosi's political instinct was correct that it would only work when the case is clear and convincing AND the support for it is bipartisan. This was what had happened in 1974. Had Nixon been formally impeached, he would likely have been convicted - by a bipartisan vote. But there was never any chance of that in 2019. As I said at the time, just as a good prosecutor should consider whether he or she can win a conviction from a jury, the House should first consider whether there is a realistic chance that the Senate will convict by a 2/3 vote.

Then there was the fundamental problem of political priorities. As the new Republican-led House prepares to focus on investigations and impeachments in 2023, many have asked whether that was really what Republican voters, preoccupied with inflation, etc., actually voted for a Republican Congress to do. That, the authors illustrate, was also very much Nancy Pelosi's concern, when she assumed the speakership in 2019. She definitely wanted to focus on a Democratic agenda which would resonate with voters and - unlike her ideologically progressive left flank - did not believe impeachment could or should be that agenda. Whatever the authors' views on what Pelosi's priorities should have been, their account confirms that she was right to want to focus on a voter-centric agenda rather than on an investigations and impeachment agenda, which would mainly appeal to her ideologically progressive left flank while leaving mainstream voters unimpressed and disengaged.

Thus, returning from the 2019 Madrid Climate Conference, Pelosi "was almost doleful as she implored her leadership team for help messaging the party through the last throes of their campaign to oust Trump. Impeachment headlines will dominate the next few weeks, she warned them at the beginning of December, but we need to focus on our legislative achievements." Meanwhile, "Republicans were accusing her of being on a crusade to oust the president because she was blinded by her hatred of him. The exact opposite was true. Impeachment was an albatross around Pelosi’s neck and always had been. She had never wanted to be in this position."

After Trump's impeachment by the House, the action shifted to the Senate. The authors' account of the machinations surrounding the Senate's trial makes for a fascinating read, one of the best sections of the book. Then, in one chapter, the authors take us through the eventful 11 months that followed (February 6, 2020, to January 6, 2021), followed by another chapter detailing how members of Congress experienced that dreadful day, leading to Trump's even more unique and strange second impeachment.

Once again there were divisions among the Democrats about whether and how to proceed. Again, Jerry Nadler was all in for impeachment, but Adam Schiff was more cautious. "At the Speaker’s personal request, he’d been making the case privately to fellow Democrats all week: if they went after the president in his waning days in office, it would look like they were just trying to keep him from running again. President-elect Biden was also clearly worried that if Congress got bogged down in another impeachment trial, it would upend his chances of accomplishing anything during his first months in office. Democrats, Schiff had told colleagues privately that week, 'should be on the same page as the new president'.” Schiff also foresaw the ultimate outcome. "A second impeachment would likely end exactly as the first had, Schiff told the others on the call, with Democrats on one side and Republicans on another. What was the point, he asked, when acquittal was likely a foregone conclusion?"

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, the obvious - if unprecedented and extreme - way to address the Trump problem (and avoid another pointless impeachment exercise) would have been the 25th Amendment, but that would, of course, required the cooperation of Vice President Pence, which was hardly to be expected. Increasingly, it seemed to the Speaker, "A second impeachment might be the only way to keep Trump in line."

The advantages of a more bipartisan impeachment effort this time than the previous one were obvious to Congressman Raskin, but in practice that proved beyond what could be accomplished. "It was one thing to vote to impeach, but entirely another for a Republican to join Democrats in prosecuting the leader of the Republican Party. Many of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach were getting death threats." Thus, Raskin never asked Liz Cheney to join the impeachment team. "It would be too much for her, he reasoned to himself. What he didn’t realize then was that Cheney was so determined to end the era of Trumpism that if he just asked for her help convicting him, she would have jumped at the chance. He would come to realize that only when she told him so, weeks after the trial was over."

The story of how Republicans like MCConnell and Graham briefly flirted with abandoning Trump but then were pulled back from that brink is a familiar one, which the authors retell here. The important point, in retrospect, is that the the failure to convict Trump (and disqualify him from returning to office) created the situation we are in now, in which Trump is still the savior-messiah figure for far too many Republicans - and could conceivably be voted back into the White House in two years.

The authors conclude: "First, that Pelosi’s initial gut instincts on impeachment were correct: Impeachment must be bipartisan to work. And second: Impeachment now appears destined to become a political weapon instead of a failsafe instrument to bring a president abusing office to justice."