Playing "Chicken" with the Debt-Limit

The news media are having a field day, counting down the days to August 2 (or thereabouts) when the U.S. Government will no longer be able to pay all its bills. We have all gotten so used to this adolescent style of governance in which everyone postures until the last possible minute before striking whatever deal can be made. After all, how many contract negotiations have gone down to the wire? How many bills have been passed in the waning hours of a congressional or legislative session?

In most of those other cases, however, regardless of how immature the process and absurd the dithering, there was usually a reasonable expectation of eventual resolution - because it could be assumed that the parties involved wanted a resolution. That's less clear in this current case. For years, the debt-limit has been routinely raised, because everyone understood it had to be. (That didn't prevent individual posturing politicians, confident that the problem would be in any case solved by the grownups who were voting, from casting their own vote against an increase - as Senator Barack Obama once did). But this is different this time. There just don't seem to be enough grownups around anymore to do what needs to be done.

The bottom line, of course, is that we (the United States) have been eating some very expensive meals for years now, and (as regularly happens) the bill needs to be paid. This is not about increasing entitlements or other discretionary spending. It's about paying the bills we've already committed ourselves to. A case can be made, of course, for going on a bit of a diet, but that is another matter.

Which brings us to the heart of the problem. While there is plenty of blame to go around and both parties have earned their fair share of it, the pressing immediate problem has to do with one party's peculiar attitude toward government, and that party's apparent desire to use this crisis further to reduce the role of government. Hence the obsessive preoccupation with not raising taxes. The issue for them is not how to pay for the things people apparently want and expect their government to provide, but finding a way to stop providing for them (using the excuse that we can't afford them anymore).

No doubt, something will be done to prevent a catastrophe or at least minimize its effects. But it's not likely to be the grand bargain compromise an earlier era would have come up with, back when governing was still at least important as posturing and electioneering.

A Day at The Cloisters

This morning, I took the A Train 10 190th Street and, after a leisurely walk through Fort Tryon park, spent most of the day at The Cloisters. Since 1938, The Cloisters Museum, thanks to the civic-spirited generosity of the Rockefeller Family, has been a neo-medieval oasis at the Northern end of Manhattan - its heaven-focused stone structures subtly suggesting that modernity's concrete canyons of secularist materialism need not be humanity's exclusive option.

Like any museum, The Cloisters is, of course a collection of things - most of them "religious," to be sure, but some (furniture, for example, and the gardens of medieval plants) which a contemporary could legitimately classify as "secular." Since this is a medieval museum, as well as a branch of the Metropolitan Art Museum, it is largely a collection of beautiful, old things (as opposed, say, to a modern art museum's typical collection of ugly things). But, beyond being beautiful, the objets are also largely purposeful. Like most pre-modern art, the objects in The Cloisters were mostly created to serve some social purpose. In most cases, of course, that purpose was directly or indirectly connected with worship (the pre-eminent social activity of that period), Even the more "secular" objects, however, were typically intended to serve some social purpose - even if, to our way of looking at things, their purpose may have been primarily more "ornamental" than "functional." To me, it has always seemed strikingly characteristic of our own modern era that so much of our "art" is created with no purpose beyond itself - no purpose other than to be exhibited - perhaps because it serves more as an expression of the artist in isolation than of the values and priorities of the artist's society.

Anyway, The Cloisters is also, as I said, an oasis. (In fact, I myself first became a member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art back in 1987 in part because I lived and worked near The Cloisters and liked going there on occasion for an hour's "break." Only in the most superficial sense, of course, can The Cloisters be said to transport one to a different time and place. What it does do, however, is create a space within which one can absorb some of the harmony and tranquility, which the buildings and the objects enshrined within them recall and signify. These are not, needless to say, exclusively medieval qualities. (In any case, the real Middle Ages were not so terribly tranquil and harmonious as the values expressed in its art!) But they are qualities, whose value that era recognized (and celebrated) more effectively than we today are able to do. No doubt that is why so many churches were, until recently, constructed in a faux-medieval style - recognition of that art and architecture's ability to evoke certain spiritual values. (Sadly, contemporary cultural prejudices having diminished those values even in religion together with the problem of cost have conspired to produce so many modern churches which seem to be inspired more by the art and architecture of the shopping mall and the big box store, but that, of course, is another issue).

God and the Civil War

The 150^th anniversary of the Civil War has, not surprisingly, seen a veritable avalanche of books about that monumental conflict that cost us so much and was in so many respects the decisive episode in our national history – its importance heightened by the fact that we are still sorting our its legacy. I’d like to read all the new Civil War books; but, of course, I have neither the time nor the energy to read everything about what is undoubtedly the most written about event in American history. In anticipation of my vacation, however, I bought myself a copy of the one of the latest bunch of Civil War books, one which I anticipated I would personally find particularly interesting - Southern History Professor George C. Rable’s lengthy God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War.

Rable tells the religious history of the War on several levels – theologically, institutionally, and personally. Theologically, the war was widely interpreted in terms of what Rable rightly calls Americans’ shared “providential outlook on life.” Most famously, Abraham Lincoln eventually came to see the sufferings of that terrible war in relation to God’s purposes and in the light of God’s judgment on Americans – both Northern and Southern – for the sin of slavery. Of course, not everyone saw slavery as a sin. Especially in the run up to the war, abolitionism was often seen as anti-biblical, even atheistic. The way preachers and other religious figures (including such Roman Catholics as Browson, McMaster, and Archbishop John Hughes) wrestled with the moral questions connected with slavery and secession is presented in great detail, along with the institutional impact of the conflict upon the churches, forced to face questions about their polity and their relationship with the political state (either the United States or the Confederate States), as well as more traditional moral questions, all of which came to the fore both during and before the war. Rable is especially good on the whole “civil religion” dynamic, as it evolved under the pressure of events and in the context of both old and new, established and challenged loyalties. Then, there was the personal dimension, as many Americans struggled with the meaning and value of religious faith and observance under such novel circumstances. Rable is especially good on what it was actually like to be a soldier in a military camp – or a chaplain or preacher ministering to soldiers in such settings. And, although America was an overwhelmingly Protestant country at the time, he does not neglect the way the war was experienced religiously by Catholics and Jews, both North and South. The significant contribution of Roman Catholic nursing Sisters gets its due, as do the unique challenges experienced by the minority religions as problematic participants in Northern or Southern Civil Religion.

The American religious landscape has changed a lot in 150 years, of course. We are on the whole less open to, if not seriously suspicious of, theodicies that attempt to explain anything (let alone everything) in terms of God’s providence or judgment. Yet we are still an overwhelmingly religious nation- even if, what that actually means is open to question (just as it was back then). As long as religion remains so central to so many Americans’ world-view and as long as the unresolved issues of the Civil War continue to haunt our politics even today, the Civil War as a religious experience retains its immediate relevance – not just for who we were as a nation 150 years ago but for who we are now.

A Sower Went Out to Sow

One of the great things about being back at St. Paul’s is the opportunity to visit your wonderful parish bookstore. I was doing that this morning, and there I came across a display of magnets with Latin slogans. In light of today’s Gospel [Matthew 13:1-23], I just couldn’t resist one with this quote from Cicero: Ut sementem feceris ita metes. That more or less translates as, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

A sower went out to sow. How many times have we heard this parable? When I was studying the Gospels in the seminary, one of my professors was fond of citing that familiar opening line as an example of how we have become so accustomed to hearing certain parables that, when we hear a familiar line like that, we already know what follows and how it is going to end, and so our tendency is to start to tune out – which, of course, is one of the very things the parable is warning us not to do!

To us here in midtown Manhattan, where there hasn’t been a functioning farm now in a century or more, parables about famers sowing seed sound exotic – and, in this particular case, somewhat strange. What, we efficient modern city-dwellers, want to ask, is the farmer doing? Why does he sow his seed in such a helter-skelter way? Perhaps it may have seemed somewhat inefficient even to the Greek and Roman urban audiences for whom the Gospels were first written. Of course, Jesus’ actual hearers – the original audience for this parable - would have understood. Israel’s arid climate and rocky soil are not very farmer-friendly. Finding in advance the pockets of good fertile soil, with the limited technology available to traditional agriculture, would have been very difficult - and inefficient. Throwing the seed all over the place may mean a lot will be wasted, but it probably guarantees that some will fall on good soil and take root and produce fruit.

So what may seem like inefficiency to us turns out to be really quite efficient indeed!

Jesus uses this familiar fact to say something about how God produces fruit in the world, reaching out to us with extravagant generosity, recognizing that maybe not everyone will respond – or, having responded, really persevere. Even so, he reveals himself as widely as possible, in many and various ways. He does that because that is who God is and how God acts - and how he expects his Church to act in imitation of him. Above all, God’s extravagant generosity invites such an extravagantly faithful response on our part – producing fruit as much as a hundred-fold.

Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Church of Saint Paul the Apostle, NYC, July 10, 2011.

A Neighborhood Once Again

Visiting at St. Paul's College, the Paulist Formation House in Washington, DC, one can not miss the big change that has taken place on the property, as acres of grass (including what was once a ballfield - still called that in my time, although of course no one ever played on it anymore) have given way to fancy new townhouses, that seem to be enveloping the monumental seminary building, as it were embracing the palatial structure. The buildings are going up quite quickly. (Perhaps, that is a side benefit of an economy in which there must be lots of contractors eager for work!) I took a walk through the new development this afternoon, and visited the company office, where two model homes are open for inspection. Even though I wasn't there to consider buying a place, I was nicely welcomed and shown around.

Of course, I know nothing about building construction and can't evaluate the structures per se. Esthetically, however, the homes are very attractive and seem as though they would be nice to live in. A good number of units have been bought already, and some seem already occupied. Remembering what it used to be like, I complimented the company representative on creating such a potentially nice residential neighborhood and opined that the one thing still lacking for it to become a real neighborhood was stores. He then explained to me that just about a block or so away, where a former CUA dorm once stood, there will be construction of commercial space - i.e., stores.

Presumably all this will make our property safer and more attractive (and probably worth more). In the end it should all be good for the Paulists and the other adjoining institutions, good for the University, and good for Brookland. Living there as a seminarian almost thirty years ago, our lives seemed one the whole quite disconnected from the immediate environment. we lived there and went to school there, but practically everything else - shopping, a movie, dinner out - involved driving somewhere else. We were, of course, a bigger group than today's classes and so had much more of a community experience within our own walls. Still, it might have been nicer to have had more on-the-ground connectedness with our environment.

Neighborhoods are good things. They are par tof what makes urban living work - and work well. Si it's good to see Brookland becoming a neighborhood once again.