The Boston Tea Party at 250

 

Today is the 250th anniversary of the (in)famous Boston Tea Party, which took place on December 16, 1773. The memory of that historical event has been more recently degraded by the unfortunate, early 21st-century "Tea Party" Movement. That said, the actual, historical Boston Tea Party (so-called only in 1834, before which it was more accurately called "the destruction of the tea") was a significant event in the run-up to what became the American Revolution. More than anything else, the American Revolution was a tax-revolt largely led by people who could afford to pay for government services (in that case, primarily defense) but preferred not to.  Could anything be more prototypically American?

The British Parliament's Tea Act of May 10, 1773, had allowed the British East India Company to sell Chinese tea in the American colonies without paying any taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts, which some colonists objected to as a violation of their ostensible right not to be taxed by Parliament without representation in that Parliament. (Tell that one to the citizens of Washington DC.) The "Sons of Liberty," some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company to Boston. They boarded the ships containing the tea and threw the chests of tea into Boston's harbor. This provoked a harsh response on the part of the British government against Boston, which contributed to the growing colonial attitude of impending apocalypse, which led eventually to armed insurrection and the War. of Independence. 

When I was in grade school in the 1950s, we were taught that the Boston Tea party had been a sin - since the "activists" (as we would call them today, although "terrorists" might also be a word used to describe them) destroyed other people's property (a sin agains the seventh commandment) and appeared to be trying to pin the blame on the Indians (a sin against the eight commandment). As a naive school kid, I was somewhat shocked (if also unconsciously liberated) by this idea that one did not have to think everything Americans did was automatically right and good.

From that, it was a short step - years later, when studying political philosophy professionally - to question the wisdom of the American Revolution itself. Of course, the independence of the United States is an historical fact and the Revolution's wisdom or lack thereof is now a moot point, of primarily theoretical interest. But, as the country careens toward the commemoration the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, how to evaluate the founding era and its accomplishments is again a contentious question.

One unambiguous cultural benefit of the American Revolution is that many Americans on the winning revolutionary side came to consider tea drinking to be unpatriotic. (Presumably Tories still favored tea.) So tea drinking declined during and after the Revolution, resulting in tea's replacement by coffee as the new country's preferred hot drink - an altogether welcome change, which has improved American life immensely.

As a coffee-drinker, I am grateful for the American Revolution, but it remains an open question how to evaluate that entire event and the political attitudes (like anti-tax libertarianism) it celebrated and enabled. Ideally, the upcoming anniversary should be an opportunity for serious scholarly and popular examination of such questions. My guess is that that won't happen, and that reflections on the Revolution will be filtered through - and in service to - contemporary ideologies and the toxic polarization in which we currently have chosen to revel. That will surely be loss on so many levels. The U.S. has been in many ways a unique political experiment. Its achievements and its defects deserve to be examined seriously, a process from which all Americans would benefit, but which I suspect few of us will actually experience.

The 1976 Bicentennial celebrations in New York City seemed to me at the time to highlight less the colonial-era experience and more the city's subsequent experience as a nation of immigrants' primary city of immigrants. (The symbol of that, of course, is New York's Statue of Liberty, which, whatever the original intention, was soon transformed into an icon of immigration.) But that too was a part of the American story, as much as 1776 was. The American Revolution was not just something from the 1770s but is an ongoing experiment in civic life and political philosophy that has continued for 250+ years, with (hopefully) no end in sight. 

While immigration has undoubtedly benefited the U.S. enormously, it has also had its problematic aspects, which current controversies have highlighted. One of the best ways to observe the upcoming anniversary might be for the powers that be at long last to resolve the current crisis with a full-scale reform of immigration that reflects actual contemporary realities. Sadly, the dark side of American life seems to be in the driver's seat at present, precluding immigration reform and any number of other things that need to be done to fulfill what Herbert Croly so famously called "the promise of American life."

That promise seems sadly to be receding further from our imagination as Americans of all sorts seem to be giving up on both the purpose and the process of political life.

Image: In 1973, the US Post Office issued a set of four stamps, together making one scene of the Boston Tea Party.

The Crown Concludes

 

The Crown finale (season 6, episodes 5 through 10) has finally been released on Netflix. Having devoted the entire first four episodes of the final season to just a few Diana-centric weeks in 1997, the rest of the series must move at a gallop to get the series to where it wants to finish. In the process there is still too much precious screen time wasted on the Al Fayeds. (Every minute the series spends on an Al Fayed is multiple minutes too many.) And there is the perennial problem of which peripheral royal to focus on, until the series circles back finally to where it has always been at its best, focusing on the Queen herself.

The Crown chooses to end in 2005, when (as the audience knows) the Queen still has another 17 years to reign. It would have been difficult to cram the remaining years into the already rushed pace of the final episodes; and, if the attempt had been made, it would probably (based on previous precedents) have gotten over-focused on the Harry-Meghan storyline, which would benefit nobody (except perhaps the exiled Court in Montecito). As it is, while the Queen does not die in the series finale, her death is, as it were, anticipated. 

 

Throughout all this, the series remains forever stuck in what seems to be its creator’s leitmotif: the purported conflict (at least in a modern, narcissistic, therapeutic culture)  between a life of duty and public service and the pursuit of one’s own personal happiness. In real life, Queen Elizabeth herself may have been a shining rebuttal to that series obsession, although some of her relatives - from Uncle David (The Duke of Windsor) to her sister (Princess Margaret), to her son and heir (the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III), and finally perhaps her grandsons - have at times provided fuel for this modernist fire. Probably that is why the Queen Mother's death in 2002 gets relatively brief treatment, while that of Princess Margaret earlier that same year gets so much more attention. Both were central figures in the actual Queen's life, but Margaret's sadder story better fits the duty-vs.-happiness arc that the series stubbornly insists on sticking with.

 

The series, brilliant as it is in so many ways and beautifully acted, seems stuck in this ideological obsession that being a captive to tradition and responsibility and public service is a prison, which prevents one from being one’s true self. It seems to want a pseudo-happy ending in the Queen’s abdication. Whether or not the Queen actually considered that course of action (as the series suggests) in 2005, the fact, which the show must acknowledge, is that in the end she didn’t. She kept her vow of lifelong commitment. Hence, the dilemma of how to end the show, which causes the Queen to be presented as reviewing her reign and wondering whether she and her role are really relevant or obsolete.

 

A suitable foil for this is Tony Blair, the “modernizing” Prime Minister, whose (temporary) popularity forces Elizabeth to consider all sorts of superficial “reforms,” like eliminating the Warden of the Swans and reducing the splendor of the State Opening of Parliament. Eventually, Elizabeth realizes what presumably she has always inwardly understood, the there is strength in tradition, which it is her real role to represent and preserve. 

Ironically, it is the iconoclastic Cherie Blair (of all people), who inadvertently rebuts her husband's modernizing program, when she makes an obvious analogy to the recent experience of the Catholic Church: "They modernized ... they got rid of the Latin and the incense and the miracle and the mystery, and people stopped coming."

Of course, the audience knows that the Queen will outlast Blair, who will end his term much less popular than when he began it. As the Queen Mother says, in her only good line in this final season, "Prime Ministers come in on a blaze of glory and good will," to which Princess Anne responds, "and leave on a stretcher a few years later with the reputations and usually their health in tatters." It is a theme that the series has repeatedly touched on, season after season, but which could have been more fully developed, this perennial contrast between the superficiality of democratic electoral politics and the solidity of the tradition the monarchy represents.

Ironically, after all the earlier preoccupation with Charles's failed marriage and his much more successful relationship with Camilla, it is only in the final episode that that significant storyline returns to center-stage with Queen's decision at long last to permit Charles and Camilla to marry. The complexities of that decision and the subsequent wedding are, however, rushed through and somewhat overshadowed by the final episode's inevitable focus on the impending end of the Queen's reign, and its implication that only Elizabeth was actually able to do this impossible job. Not insignificantly, The Crown presents Prince Philip describing the Queen (and himself) as a “dying breed.”

But maybe, the series suggests, her grandson William will be up to it. It is William who is the main protagonist in these final episodes - as he grows up, copes with the aftermath of his mother's death, and finds true love and happiness with Kate, while beginning to differentiate himself from his younger brother and so become more like a 21st-century version of what the Queen had been. The series does highlight the apparently close and mutually supportive relationship between the Queen and her grandson, all of which is generally thought to be historically accurate. Whether it is historically accurate that Kate's mother schemed from early on the achieve a royal romance for her daughter, I do not know. If she was not the schemer the series suggests, then it seriously misrepresents the Middletons. Be that as it may, the William coming-of-age and falling-in-love story becomes (along with the end of the Queen's reign) the main plot of these final episodes, to the point that the other stories seem secondary at best and sideshows at most. Again the implication, unfair to King Charles (much as actual history has been unfairly underestimated King Charles) is that it will be William who will be able to do what needs to be done to make the monarchy more fully viable in this celebrity-obsessed contemporary time.

The story starts with a grief-stricken William harshly lashing out at his father, as he struggles not just to cope with the loss of his mother but to adjust to a future lifetime of unrelenting public scrutiny. William is well-played, and his story takes on a compelling character. His hapless younger brother is an updated version of Princess Margaret. As she played the seemingly self-centered sister and foil to the Queen, Harry plays the predictably disreputable younger brother as foil to the more serious William. While Harry's youthful misbehaviors reflect real history, one wonders whether some of the royal brothers' contemporary animosity and alienation from one another has been dramatically retrojected back. It is not clear to me that Harry's eventual tragedy was inevitable, apart from his unfortunate marriage. But perhaps, as this story seems to suggest, it was.

The Crown concludes with Charles and Camilla's wedding and the Queen, who still has another 17 years to reign, rather clear in her role and ready to see it through to its end. In that at least, The Crown clearly got the main point right.

"Herald of Good News"

  

Late last month, like so many other Americans I traveled across the country to spend Thanksgiving with my sister, her family, and their friends. On Thanksgiving night, after we had eaten our fill, some of us watched one of the classic movies of the 20th century, The Wizard of Oz. Famously, in that movie, the Good Witch wisely advised Dorothy “to begin at the beginning.” 

That is exactly what the Church invites us to do today as it announces: The beginning of the gospel [that is, the “good news”] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It’s literally the title page of Mark’s Gospel, a title that tells us the central story of Christianity. Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, God’s Anointed One. In Jesus, God himself has come among us. And it’s all good news.

All the more noteworthy, therefore, that the story doesn’t actually start with Jesus, but begins instead with John the Baptist, who appeared in the desert – almost, as it were, out of nowhere. From the harsh Judean desert, John the Baptist returns each Advent, as we hear his shrill voice shouting up and down the Jordan Valley: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Every year at this Advent time, the Church takes John the Baptist out of storage, so to speak, to outshout the deafening din of our ordinary everyday noise and our holiday pandemonium, with his ancient and ever timely warning, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”

 

For most of us, I suspect, John the Baptist seems a somewhat strange, mysteriously elusive figure. Having appeared, ever so briefly, as a kind of warm-up act at the beginning of Jesus’ public life. John then, when we’ve barely even gotten to know him, gets himself arrested – and is soon dead. 

 

Were we today to encounter such an apparently odd-looking character, clothed in camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey, chances are that many – maybe most of us - might try to ignore him.

Fortunately, that did not happen the first time John’s jarring message was heard in the land. On the contrary, so we are told, the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins. What, one wonders, was it that they could see in John that we cynical, sophisticated moderns and post-moderns might be more tempted to ignore? Whatever it was that they saw, the point is that they listened and acted. They acknowledged their sins. So, when we hear him now, our task too is to listen – so as to act on what we hear.

 

One thing we do know that they saw in John – or rather hoped they were seeing, or perhaps feared they were seeing – was another prophet, another Elijah. When it comes to just how John the Baptist and Elijah are connected in the larger story, it helps to remember how the Jewish Bible and the Christian Old Testament differ in the way the biblical books are sequenced. The Jewish Bible, oriented to the present, concludes at the end of the second book of Chronicles with King Cyrus authorizing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. The Christian Old Testament, oriented toward the future coming of Christ, concludes with the prophetic books and ends with these words of the prophet Malachi: Lo, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and terrible day, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the  hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with doom.

 

The key word in Malachi’s prophecy is, of course, lest – lest I come and strike the land with doom. Elijah’s assigned role is to make the day of the Lord not (what it would otherwise be) a day of doom, but a day of blessing. The gospels record elsewhere that Jesus himself saw in John the fulfillment of this prophecy. So, however shrill John may sound to our super sensitive ears, attuned as we are to very different kinds of marketing appeals, we need now to hear his call to repentance for the forgiveness of sins as an invitation to the true blessing that Christmas offers.

John’s mission, as clarified by the Gospel’s reference back to Isaiah’s prophecy, was about filling in valleys, leveling mountains and hills, and repairing whatever is rugged and rough – picturesque, ancient imagery that suggests not environmental catastrophe, but facing up to all those gaps and flaws and failings and sins in our personal lives, in our relationships, in our work, and in our world, and allowing God to lead us in fixing them. It’s a challenge we may be tempted to try to evade - but dare not, for as Isaiah says so pointedly: Here is your God.

 

Advent invites us to prepare the way of the Lord – not just as some abstract idea, detached and divorced from whatever else is going on in our lives right now, still less as just another item to be worked on in some ever-lengthening list of things to be done before Christmas. Rather, the point of Advent is to let the anniversary of Christ’s 1st coming concentrate our attention on his actual presence among us in the here and now and so prepare us for his final coming for which we say we wait in joyful hope. The challenge of Advent is to transform our anxious and fear–filled present that hopeful future promised by Christ’s 1st coming in the past. 

 

Advent challenges us set aside our self-destructive sophistication and internalize John the Baptist’s invitation in every aspect of our lives and so bring John the Baptist’s message into the very heart of our society – through our participation in the community of the Church, a community acutely conscious of Christ’s coming and eager to share him and so remake our conflicted, anxiety-ridden world.

 

Homily for the Second Sunday of Advent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, December 10, 2023.

 

Immaculate Mary

 

My eighth-grade teacher, way back in 1960, used to like to refer to the Immaculate Conception by quoting the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth [1770-1850], who famously addressed Mary: Woman! above all nature glorified, Our tainted nature’s solitary boast. 

It was 169 years ago, in 1854, that Blessed Pope Pius IX formally defined the Church’s faith in Mary’s Immaculate Conception – our belief that, thanks to the salvation accomplished by her Son, Mary was preserved from all sin from the very beginning of her earthly existence and thus came into the world completely holy. 

Eight years earlier, in 1846, the Bishops of the United States had proclaimed Mary the patroness of the United Sates under the title of her Immaculate Conception. More recently, in the mid-20th-century, the famous American convert-monk Thomas Merton, who was one of the four famous Americans Pope Francis mentioned in his address to Congress in 2015, said that the definition of the Immaculate Conception “was a turning point in the modern history of the Church. The world,” Merton wrote, “has been put into the hands of our Immaculate Lady and she is our hope in the terrible days we live in.” [November 10, 1947]          

Why and how all of this matters, what it means for us, here and now, in these terrible days we live in, is what today’s celebration is all about. For starters, the scripture readings we have just heard suggest a comparison between Eve, the mother of all the living, and Mary, mother of Jesus and mother of the Church.

The Old Testament passage we just heard [Genesis 3:9-15, 20] highlights the damage done to the world by our representatives, Adam and Eve, and illustrates the seriousness of sin. Adam and Eve represent us and the damage all of us have done to ourselves and to our world, thanks to our alienation from God. Mary, however, holy Mary, symbolizes and represents the effect of God’s power – and his powerful plan to save us from ourselves.

Calling Eve the mother of all the living celebrated the fact that, in spite of sin, human life continued – the very first sign that God would never give up on us. Of course, the serpent still lives and continues his mischief, but his doom is already certain.

God’s plan for our salvation, the mystery decided upon from all eternity and hidden for centuries, has been realized in Jesus Christ and is now revealed in the life and mission of the Church, as we have just heard St. Paul explain [Ephesians 1:3-6, 11-12]. 

Mary’s holiness at the beginning of her life is the Church’s holiness at its beginning, even as it symbolizes and represents Church as it will be in the perfect holiness of the world to come. 

All of us have been empowered by Christ to share in the Church’s holiness, modeled by Mary. Thus, the Church invites us today to turn our attention to the Annunciation, one of the most famous scenes in all of human history, the centerpiece of Mary’s earthly life from her Immaculate Conception to her Assumption, and the basis for her heavenly life since then as Mother of the Church. At the Annunciation, Mary’s life-long fullness of grace was first formally acknowledged. More importantly for us, at the Annunciation, her life-long fullness of grace led her to answer “Yes” to God’s great plan to save the world with his mercy. For Mary is the living open door through whom Christ comes into the world so that we may enter into God’s kingdom.

Despite my 8th-grade teacher’s generally positive influence, I never took much interest in Wordsworth or his poetry. Being a Bronx boy, however, I could less easily ignore the poet who had once lived just a few blocks away, Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1846, the same year that the U.S. Bishops had proclaimed Mary the patroness of the United Sates under the title of her Immaculate Conception, Poe moved to the small cottage ,which still bears his name, within walking distance of St. John’s College (now Fordham University), where he became friends with the Jesuits and felt the vibrations of the college’s church bells. In his poem, called “A Catholic Hymn,” which references the Angelus, the three-times-a-day prayer to Mary announced by the ringing of bells, Poe prayed Mother of God, be with me still,

Recognizing God’s grace given to Mary leads us closer to her Son and to a better future.

As Poe put it:

Now, when storms of fate o’ercast

Darkly my Present and my Past,

Let my future radiant shine

With sweet hope of thee and thine!

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Patronal Feast of the United States, Saint Paul the Apostle church, NY, December 8, 2023.

Photo: Ecce Ancilla Domini ("Behold the Handmaid of the Lord"), by Bela Pratt, Annunciation Altar, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

Hanukkah 5784

 

The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah 5784 (in the Christian calendar 2023) begins tonight and will end eight days from now at sundown on December 15. 

Growing up in New York City, I was inevitably aware of all the major Jewish holidays. (When I was in kindergarten in a New York public school in 1954, we had a chalk menorah on the blackboard and used to illuminate in chalk one of its “lights” each day.) Hanukkah of course, is not, as such, a major Jewish holiday. It is not prescribed in the Torah, like the "pilgrimage" feasts of Pesach (Passover), Shavuot (Pentecost), and Sukkot and the autumn "high holy days" of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Moreover, the historical event on which Hanukkah is based is not even included in the Jewish biblical canon - although it is found in the Catholic Old Testament in the two Books of Maccabees, which recount the sad story of the suffering inflicted upon the people of Israel by their secularizing persecutors and the heroic history of resistance by a minority of Jews led by Judas Maccabeus and his priestly Hasmonean dynasty, who defeated the Gentiles, reconquered the Jerusalem Temple which had been desecrated, and festively rededicated it for sacrificial worship on the 25th of Kislev (December 14, 164 B.C.)

 

Famously, Jewish tradition has amplified the account in Maccabees with the story of how, when they sought to light the Temple's the seven-branch candelabrum (menorah), they found just a one-day supply of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks. Miraculously, that one-day supply burned for eight days, until new oil could be prepared under ritually pure conditions. Thus, the nightly lighting of the special Hanukkah menorah - one lamp or candle on the first night, two on the second, etc., until all eight lights have been lit. 

 

Hence, however major or minor the holiday, Hanukkah has been a part of the Jewish calendar for over two millennia.  Jesus certainly celebrated Hanukkah, for The Gospel of John - the New Testament book most attuned to the Jewish liturgical calendar - specifically mentions both the festival and his presence: The feat of the Dedication was then taking place in Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus walked about in the temple area on the Portico of Solomon (John 10:22-23). It was during that celebration of Hanukkah that Jesus gave his famous “Good Shepherd” discourse.

 

Even beyond religious observance Hanukkah’s popularity seems deeply rooted. A 1960s radical friend of mine once told me how his family was socialist, religiously non-observant, and so celebrated no Jewish holidays – with the one exception of Hanukkah, which his socialist father considered a people’s holiday. 

 

It does seem rather obvious that in the 20th-century Hanukkah became as big as it is in the U.S. as a kind of Jewish alternative to the overwhelmingly omnipresent Christmas holiday. Thus, the tradition of giving Hanukkah geld to children could easily evolve into full-scale gift-giving analogous to Christmas.  

 

But something even more important happened in the 20th century - the restoration of Israel as a Jewish state after 19 centuries of dispossession and lost sovereignty. The restoration of Israel and the repeated challenges to Israel’s existence and the Jewish people’s survival in their land has also obviously given renewed salience to Hanukkah which originated, after all, as a recollection vof the last sustained experience of Jewish independence until 1948. For modern Israel, it undoubtedly meets the natural need for a nationalist holiday. If 19th and 20th-century Socialists could interpret Hanukkah primarily as a "people's holiday" rather than a religious one, post-independence Israelis could likewise interpret it primarily as a patriotic holiday. (It was, thus, no accident that Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, presented U.S. President Harry Truman a Hanukkah menorah.)

 

I've been told that pre-modern rabbis often downplayed the military and nationalistic dimensions of the holiday, and that the emphasis on the story of the miraculous oil may have served as an alternative - more edifyingly "spiritual" - emphasis (a particularly practical approach, perhaps, during the long centuries of dangerous exile under unfriendly Gentile rulers). With the 20th-century restoration of Israel as a Jewish state, the holiday's original historical significance has, naturally enough, undergone a revival, and both the Jewish theme of national liberation and the universal theme of cultural and religious freedom have moved to center stage. Religiously, this beautiful patriotic holiday," rooted in Israel's struggle against a secularizing political establishment, also simultaneously celebrates God's miraculously abiding presence among his people.

 

This year, the recent terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas and the widespread increase in expressions of antisemitism all around the world (including sadly in the U.S.), highlight the relevance of Hanukkah for Israel, for Jews everywhere, and for all people of good will who support Jews and Israel against contemporary enemies every bit as implacable as Antiochus IV. 

 

Religiously, God’s intervention in history to save his people and God's abiding presence with his people (signified by the Temple and, more immediately, by the miracle of the oil) are Hanukkah themes which can also resonate with the Christmas story. For the Incarnation is, after all, the fulfillment of God's ancient promise to save his people, which he does by becoming present among us in his Son's humanity. And like the miracle of the oil, the Incarnation has a modest, ordinary appearance. 

 

Just as the Hanukkah story contrasts the monstrous pomposity of the Hellenistic king and his cosmopolitan collaborators with the more powerful simplicity of God's powerful will to save his people, so too the Christmas story contrasts the pretentiously false power of pagan emperors, kings, and governors (Augustus, Herod, Quirinius) with the divine power of the Word-made-flesh, in whom God's great visitation of the world he created continues. Meanwhile, the Hanukkah story celebrates the reality that despite human and earthly obstacles, the divine presence, symbolized by the long-burning oil, continues in Israel, for the gifts and call of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29).