Megabus

Generally speaking, my favorite way to travel is by train. That's just fine if you live in the so-called Northeast Corridor, where, in addition to the commuter rail lines, there are the major Amtrak lines connecting New York with Boston to the north and Washington, DC, to the south. Of course, I don't live there right now. And the city where I now live, Knoxville, lost its train service some time ago. (There are still freight trains passing through. I can hear them every night. But no passenger trains). Unless one wants to drive everywhere, long-distance travel means air travel. Air travel is super expensive, however, and has many other inconveniences - e.g., my 30-hour trip last month from San Francisco to Knoxville, much of it spent stranded at Dulles Airport outside Washington. At least Washington and NY have direct flights to and from Knoxville, although the other inconveniences - high cost and the persistent problem of stormy weather - remain. So, rather than fly to NY for my summer vacation this year, I decided to experiment with Megabus. Megabus has been around awhile, providing service to and from various cities and recently instituted a run between Knoxville and DC. The thing about Megabus is that, if you purchase your ticket far enough in advance, you can ride for $1.

So, yesterday, I took the Megabus to Washington. It's about a 9-hour trip, which is a bit on the long side, to be sure. By definition, the bus lacks some of the amenities of train travel. But, for $1., who's going to complain. Actually, the service was good. The bus left Knoxville on time and was only about half-full. It made one rest/lunch stop and then stopped again somewhere in rural Virginia to pick up more passengers. So, for the last few hours, the bus was almost full. That's good. It means they will stay in business!

We arrived in Washington just slightly behind schedule, thanks to some rather heavy traffic entering the city. But otherwise, it was a fine ride. I doubt I would always choose the bus over the plane to go to Washington, but it's a handy option to have - especially if one's plans are tentative. If it costs (literally) just a couple of dollars, I may not hesitate to buy a ticket even if i am still unsure about whether I will actually be able make the trip, whereas with airfare that would be much more problematic. Of course, if air travel were cheaper and more user-friendly, that would be great. Having a passenger train connection would also be great. But, for the time being, the bus is a worthy alternative.

So, I am here at the Paulist seminary in DC, just hanging out for a couple of days, before heading up north to New York (by train) for some serious vacation.

Otto von Hapsburg (1912-2011)

Yesterday saw the death of Archduke Otto von Hapsburg (November 12, 1912 – July 4, 2011), who by right ought to have been Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary. Those were the roles he was born for, as the eldest son of the Archduke Karl (who reigned as Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary from the death of Franz Josef I in November 1916 to the collapse of the multi-national Empire in the political and cultural shipwreck of Central Europe that was the result of World War I). Otto’s father, Kaiser Karl I, died tragically in exile in 1922, but in 2004 was beatified by Pope John Paul II and is now venerated as Blessed Karl I – his feast day October 21, the anniversary of his happy and loving marriage to Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma in 1911. Related by royal blood to virtually every Catholic royal family, he was the heir of the pre-eminent Catholic family of Europe, the dynasty that remains a living link to the whole heritage of Christendom that had been embodied for almost 1000 years in the Holy Roman Empire (the 1st German Reich).

Otto himself, in his almost a century of life, linked our anxiety-ridden 21st century with an earlier, pre-world War I world, his life-span largely corresponding to the tragic wars and destructive ideological movements which dominated that intervening century and turned the ancestral lands of the Hapsburg Empire into bloody killing fields, and centers for political tyranny, destructive social engineering, and monumental economic mismanagement.

The first half of Oto's life was defined dynastically by the tragic outcome of World War I, a series of unsuccessful efforts at restoration, and growing up in exile in Spain and Belgium (where he studied at Louvain) and, during World War II, in the U.S. Prior to the War he had unsuccessfully sought to fulfill his dynasty's historic mandate by trying to prevent the 1938 Anschluss. In the post-World War II era, Otto worked to fulfill his dynasty’s historic mandate as a Christian-Democrat member of the European Parliament, a role in which he distinguished himself.

When I first visited Vienna in 1970, as a college student studying German over the summer, Austria was still recovering from World War II and still trapped in the vise created by the Cold War’s division of Europe. It seemed to this tourist that Vienna’s history had sort of stopped on November 11, 1918. Not much that had happened in that part of Europe since then had been very nice. Much of it had been pretty awful. Nostalgia for a glorious, imperial past, now virtually out of reach, made a certain sort of sense. So I visited the Stefansdom and the Hofburg. I saw the Holy Roman Crown and regalia. I visited the crypt in the Kapuzinerkirche where the Hapsburgs lie buried (and where, presumably, Otto himself may be interred, as was his mother, Empress Zita in 1989). More than three decades later, after attending a concert in Prague, I asked our guide if the shabby ampitheater we’d been in had been built in the Communist era. She replied, “Of course. No self-respecting Hapsburg would have built anything so ugly!” Nostalgia aside, that comment powerfully summarizes both the Hapsburg legacy and the tragic mess that replaced it.

Glorious Fourth?

July 4 is supposed to be a happy holiday. Even during the Civil War, when the future of what had begun back in 1776 seemed more up for grabs than ever before or since, both sides celebrated July 4. And we still do today (even if some of our presidential candidates can't seem to get the story of the Founders right). Yet, for many Americans, there seems precious little to be celebratory about this Fourth of July. According to a new TIME/Aspen Ideas Festival Poll, the U.S. in this post-9/11 decade is in a long period – one of the longest ever – of unhappiness and pessimism.

What seems newsworthy about that is how out of character that is with the predominant tradition of optimism that has characterized American and its people. Thus, some 71% of Americans see us as worse off than we were a decade ago. Even more pointedly, there is the widespread perception that some have borne the brunt of American decline more than others. In view of the increasing inequality in American society, such a perception is simply stating the obvious. The same July 11 edition of Time that published those poll results also contained the sadly unsurprising news that, while still slow to spend capital to create much needed jobs, many corporations continue to spend big-time on private jet travel to top resort destinations.

Seniors, for all their angst about any attempt to introduce the least amount of rationality into entitlements, probably have the least to worry about. As my Baby-Boomer generation prepares to climb aboard the Social Security & Medicare gravy train, however, just how long that ride will last and how far that train will be able to travel have become an increasing source of anxiety. Add to that my generation’s justified fears for their children and grandchildren’s future prospects!

Of course, it could always be worse. We could be like those societies where young men (educated or not) are increasingly likely to be unemployed – and in some societies decreasingly likely to be able to find wives. Somewhere between such extremes and our American malaise there is the ominous state of Europe – where what we have been watching happen in Greece is likely not the end of the story.

So there is a lot to be anxious about this 235th anniversary of that Glorious Fourth. The present state of our politics – and the prospects for worse as we head into another election – offer little grounds for optimism. Somehow, however, after the fireworks have finished and the hot dogs have been digested, we will all need as a society to get serious again about making the promise of July 4 really happen – for ourselves and for the generations after us.

No More "Week in Review"

Since I was at least 10 or so, I have regularly read the Sunday New York Times and have usually either begun or eventually gravitated to what used to be known as Section 4: The Week in Review. In an era of weekly magazines of all sorts, I suppose the idea of a "Week in Review" made sense on a host of levels. Whatever it may have been originally, by my time the section certainly was not actually a chronicle of the week's events, so much as a section of articles on various newsworthy topics both a little longer and a little more analytical than your average news story. It was also where the editorials and columns were, which as the years passed became more and more prominent was such features as the Op-Ed page became standard newspaper fare. I confess I often turned first to some of the columns, probably because the the facts themselves were already often largely known, and it was to making sense of all of that news that I was reading it. (Likewise on TV, I have always had a fondness for traditional discussion shows, appreciating the efforts of others to put the news in helpful perspective).
Which probably explains why The Week in Review is now gone, replaced last month by The Sunday Review, which seems to be just as fine a publication but somewhat heavier on the analysis and opinion stuff. I'm guessing the layout reflects that as well. However, since I now read The Times on-line most Sundays (not because I prefer it that way, which actually I don't, but because I don't live in NYC anymore, and it is an extra effort on a busy Sunday morning to go and get a paper copy.)

According to "The Public Editor," most of the complaints about the change "were laments for the political cartoons and late-night television gag lines that have been eliminated." His greater concern seems to be whether this change will in the long term further erode the already somewhat fine line that separates actual "news" from officially acknowledged "opinion." That's very much a clssic concern of professional journalists, but not one which energizes the rest of us very much, I suspect. My concern (such as it is) is related, but differently focused.

The cartoons are a real loss, I suppose, and I can't imagine why they were dropped. That said, I suppose the move toward even more analysis and opinion is, as "The Public Editor" notes, in sync with where our culture is right now. While I admittedly enjoy that emphasis, I am not completely convinced that is the best thing. As I've often said, few justifications are as shallow as being"on the right side of history." It's true that in this "Information Age" we may have more news than we can possibly digest, and so we really do need help in digesting it - and, frankly, I'm all for that. However, it is also true that we live in an age of increasingly compartmentalized communities of knowledge, where every ideology and point of view not only forms its own opinion but frequently creates its own facts to support them. The days when we all shared a fairly common body of facts, to which there was wide, if not universal, assent, are obviously gone. It's not obvious that this extremely "post-modern" arrangement of compartmentalized fact-substitutes really is such a great improvement. So, while I have no really strong objections to the new Sunday Review section per se (and will probalby quickly grow to like it), it is possible that the trend it represents may be just another case where being "on the right side of history" may end up being the very wrong thing to do.

Independence Day

There are, I think, two truly American holidays. Thanksgiving Day (in late autumn, after the harvest) looks inward to the heart and soul of America, and so is celebrated at home, at table, among family and friends. Independence Day (in summer) looks outward to the world of nations and states, and so is celebrated (as John Adams said it should be) “by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”

As citizens of the United States, we properly celebrate our national day as Adams proposed. We honor this great legacy left for us, often at great sacrifice, by generations of citizens past, immigrants to this new land, with whom we remain linked in a great social compact, bounded by history to one another, both past and present, for the sake of the future. And so we celebrate this holiday weekend our past history as a nation, our present life together, and our hope for our common future. At the same time, we assemble today, as we do every Sunday, to profess our faith. “

In one sense, I suppose, the link may seem obvious. It may no longer be the case, as it was in 1782 when Benjamin Franklin wrote, “that persons may live to a great age in [this] country, without ever having their piety shocked by meeting with either an Atheist or an Infidel.” That said, however, there is still no other Western country in which Christian faith is so strong and vibrant as it is in the United States. And, despite the determined efforts of some elite elements to exclude religion from our public life, religious people continue to consider their beliefs important and so resist reducing them to some socially harmless private hobby. As that great observer of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in 1835, a person “will endeavor … to harmonize the state in which he lives upon earth, with the state which he believes to await him in heaven.”
As Catholics, of course, we have a long history (going back to the Roman Empire) of thinking seriously about how to relate our faith to civil society – a long tradition of practical wisdom concerning social and political life, a tradition we need to take seriously both as disciples and as citizens.

Coincidentally, today’s first reading, from the prophet Zechariah [9:9-10], foretells the coming of the Messiah as the ultimate king, whose dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. It reminds us that, over and above all the many inter-related networks of human relationships of which we are a part and which we need to care about – family, work, country – we are also, first and foremost, citizens of the kingdom of God, a relationship which gives added meaning and transforms all those other relationships.

Likewise, St. Paul, in our second reading today from his letter to the early Christian community in Rome [Romans 8:9, 11-13], reminds us that, even while we remain thoroughly engaged in the otherwise ordinary-seeming life of our world, we are simultaneously living a new life, given to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Paul’s idea is that Christ’s new life has become our new life too, thereby reversing the death-ward direction of our ordinary existence and empowering us to allow ourselves and our entire lives – public and private - to be re-shaped by the Gospel’s stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.

Of course, the complexities and very real burdens of living in our world do not automatically get erased just by the fact of our becoming disciples of Jesus. In fact, what Jesus seems to be proposing in today’s Gospel [Matthew 11:25-30] may appear as adding yet another additional burden – the burden of following him – to the complexities and burdens we already have. Yet it is precisely this added dimension – this yoke, as Jesus himself calls it - which somehow puts all the other complications and burdens of living in a totally new context – an insight, which (Jesus warns) is sometimes lost to the wise and the learned of the world.

So the rest that Jesus promises us is not a release from our ties to the world and the tough realities and responsibilities of ordinary human life. It is rather a new way of living and being involved in the world, a new way of making sense of our relationships and responsibilities with and for one another.

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, July 2-3, 2011.