"Heavenly Realities Here Foreshadowed"

And so, we approach the table of this wondrous Sacrament, so that, bathed in the sweetness of your grace, we may pass over to the heavenly realities here foreshadowed (Preface II of the Most Holy Eucharist).

In the Universal Church, this Thursday after Trinity Sunday is celebrated as Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord. (In the United States, Corpus Christi gets postponed to Sunday - a fate it shares with the Epiphany and - in much of the country - the Ascension).

Corpus Christi originated in the 13^th century as a popular expression of the Church’s devotion centered on the presence of Christ in this sublime sacrament. In 1264, Pope Urban IV issued the papal bull Transiturus in hoc mundo, which established the feast throughout the entire Latin Church. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) composed the texts for the liturgy – including the popular Vespers hymn Pange Lingua (the last two verses of which are our familiar Tantum ergo) and the Sequence hymn Lauda Sion for the Mass.

In the Eucharist, as the Church teaches, Christ is “truly, really, and substantially” present – his flesh given us under the appearance of bread and wine - given us, as Jesus himself has said, for the life of the world.  In both good times and bad, in sickness and in health, Christ is present in the Eucharist, and we in turn participate in his presence and share in the new life he so abundantly offers to the world through his Church.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2007 Post-Synodal Exhortation On the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church’s Life and Mission, highlighted what he called “the intrinsically eucharistic nature of Christian life.”

“There is nothing authentically human” - the Pope wrote – “that does not find in the sacrament of the Eucharist the form it needs to be lived to the full.  Here we can see the full human import of the radical newness brought by Christ in the Eucharist. … Worship pleasing to God thus becomes a new way of living our whole life, each particular moment of which is lifted up, since it is lived as part of a relationship with Christ and as an offering to God.”

Clearly, the uniquely precious moment of Holy Communion is intended to continue, permeating every moment and aspect of life - just as the real presence of Christ in the Mass continues in the Real Presence of Christ in the tabernacle, prolonging our supreme act of adoration as his Church in the world. As St. Augustine famously put it, in his commentary on Psalm 98: “no one eats that flesh without first adoring it; we should sin were we not to adore it.”

Each of the Church’s many different liturgical festivals, seasons, and devotions highlights in a particular and specific fashion some significant aspect of our Catholic belief and life. Today’s celebration invites us to focus - particularly and specifically - on our devotion to Christ’s Real Presence, celebrated sacrificially in the Mass and prolonged in continued adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, whether it be reserved in the tabernacle or exposed on the altar (for an experience of more intense adoration, such as we will have here today after the 8:30 a.m. Mass). This annual festival and our year-long devotion to the Eucharist invite us to a fuller, more conscious, and more active participation in the Body of Christ, the Church, by believing firmly, celebrating devoutly, and living intensely Christ’s Eucharistic Presence.

Recall

The news from Wisconsin yesterday, while the polls were still open, was all about high voter turnout in that state’s recall election. The turnout seemed more like what one would expect in a presidential election rather than in an “off-year” election (let alone a race taking place at the beginning of the summer vacation season). In fact, the record turnout was probably better by far than what we sometimes see even in some presidential elections. So, whatever else one concludes about this episode, it was, in that one specific sense at least, an experience of popular electoral democracy. And, these days especially, that’s something to give at least a cheer about.

But surely not three cheers!

One reason for limiting the cheers is certainly the role played in this campaign by the pernicious power of money. One of the traditional arguments against restricting campaign spending is that challengers need to spend more to gain recognition and make themselves better known. In this instance, however, it was the incumbent Governor who vastly outspent his challenger. And, of course, he won. Much of the victor’s cmapaign money also came form out-of-state.

So that should surely bring it down to two cheers at most!

But, most importantly perhaps, the recall is the third of the familiar trinity of century-old, progressive-era, populist reforms – the famous trinity of Initiative, Referendum, and Recall. Traditionally touted as intensifying the experience of direct democracy, recall elections seem to me to be particularly problematic for democratic governance. If part of what bedevils our current politics is what has come to be called the permanent campaign,which makes difficult if not impossible the give-and-take, good-faith deliberation and debate, needed for post-election governing (further coarsening our culture in the process), then the recall is the permanent campaign taken to the ultimate extreme. It’s hard enough to exercise serous political leadership when everyone is focused not on policy but on the next election. If the next election is going to get triggered ahead of time, the chilling effect on even the limited amount of serious governing that goes on now will be intensified. Like the Republicans’ legally frivolous impeachment of President Clinton in 1998-1999, this effort to unseat a Republican governor who had only been elected less than two years ago not only failed to accomplish its goal, but also in the process probably further de-legitimized the normal electoral process and elected officials’ actual capacity to govern. 

So a cheer may well be called for to acknowledge the high voter turnout, but it should be only one cheer at most!

Jubilee

The Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Britain's Queen Elizabeth II have featured some truly memorable scenes - starting with Sunday's floating feast on the River Thames. That amazing, historically resonant pageant, was made that much more dramatic by the pouring rain, which seemed to to emphasize traditional British perseverance in the face of adversity and also Her Majesty's own long life of devotion to duty (also despite adversity). Then there was last night's ceremony of lighting the National Beacon. The Queen, flanked by her heir and his wife (along with Paul McCartney and Elton John), received the tribute of her people as she lit the last of thousands of jubilee beacons. The National Anthem, always stirring, somehow sounded more heartfelt, sung by a crowd that just a few minutes earlier had responded with a full-throated roar to the Prince of Wales' touching suggestion that a good shout would be heard by his father from his hospital bed. And then came this morning's Service of Thanksgiving at St. Paul's Cathedral, attended by a congregation of some 2000 invited guests, followed by the endless cheering of the massive crowds that accompanied the carriage procession to the Palace in the 1902 State Landau.
In a world where celebrity has eclipsed seriousness, where some people really are, as they say, "famous for being famous," even royalty sometimes suffer by comparison with temporary celebrities - or, even worse perhaps, see their royal role equated with passing celebrity. In such a world, Europe's remaining 10 monarchs have their work cut out for them if they are to be what they really are and remain about what they are supposed to be about. One of Queen Elizabeth II's significant personal accomplishments has been how well she has steered that course and always been a Queen, without aspiring to celebrity. So successful has she been as a person that her tireless devotion to her duty to her 16 kingdoms and the far-flung Commonwealth has earned her enormous appreciation and love - in spite of the obvious fact that the world she now reigns in is so sadly noted now for its failures precisely in such areas as fidelity and duty and devotion. Those in positions of civil or religious responsibility are constantly being advised to adapt themselves to today's ethos, to accomodate to our post-modern dumbed-down values. To all such advice, the Queen's well earned popularity offers a perennial rebuttal.
The Queen's devotion to duty has long been noted. What is also so noteworthy about it is its rootedness - her personal rootedness - in an authentic Christian faith. (Of all the arguments for an Established Church, perhaps the best is personified by the Queen herself). In a world so sadly bereft of serious models of social and civil engagement, in which, not un-coincidentally, examples of powerful Christian witness are also very much weakened and quieted, the Queen carries on, faithful to St. Paul's instruction in the 12th chapter of his letter to the Romans (read at this morning's service by the Queen's  own Prime Minister): think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

"A Trinity of One Substance"

For many (maybe most) of us, the Trinity has always seemed somewhat abstract – a doctrine duly believed in, of course, but not something otherwise given a lot of thought.

I say this, despite the obvious fact that we were all baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, we – or our parents and godparents - all made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our sins have been forgiven in the sacrament of Penance, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those of us who are married have exchanged wedding rings in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We have all been blessed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The principal prayers of the Mass are all explicitly addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In short, our entire religious lives, both individually and as a Church community, have been defined, formed, shaped by the awesome mystery of who God is, that defines the Triune God’s relationship with us and ours with God.

Admittedly, the words we use when we speak about the Trinity, words like one “nature” and three “persons,” when used not as we use them in ordinary language, but as technical terms of philosophical language, may seem – especially perhaps to post-modern ears – to be much too abstract. For all its apparent abstraction, however, the doctrine of the Trinity is our fundamental – and uniquely Christian – insight into who God is.  As human beings, created in the image and likeness of God, we have a built-in natural, longing for God. The fact that God is, that is something we can experience naturally.  Who God is, however, who God is in himself, is something we most certainly could never completely come to know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us. And so God himself has revealed who he is – one God in three distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

We do not worship three gods, but one God – a unity of Persons in one divine nature or substance. Each of the three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is truly God, each distinctly God, but in relationship to each other, that is to say, what is distinct about each Person is his relationship to each of the others: the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both.

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the inner life of God, what today's Preface calls "a Trinity of one substance" – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, who perfectly reflects his Father, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself. Who God is in himself is how God acts; and so how God acts reveals who God is.

Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as Moses testified in today’s 1^st reading [Deuteronomy 4:32-34, 39-40] - as one who reveals himself in how he acts toward us.

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who, for our salvation, came down from heaven. Risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, the Son has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son, in both the inner life of the Trinity and his gift of love for the world. Led by the Holy Spirit, St. Paul tells us, we become true sons and daughters of God the Father and joint heirs with Christ [Romans 8:14-17].

The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ, the Church. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church. Thus, in the Eucharistic Prayer, at the very heart of the Mass, the Church petitions the Father to send the Holy Spirit, so that bread and wine may become the body and blood of Christ and that those who receive Christ’s body and blood may then be transformed into the image of Christ as participants in the mission of the Church.

Hence, the Church faithfully and gratefully prays: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 3, 2012.

National Doughnut Day

June has never been one of my favoirte months. But what a wonderful way to begin it - with National Doughnut Day! Supposedly, National Doughnut Day started in Chicago in 1938 as a fund raiser for the Salvation Army, which had served coffee and doughnuts to U.S. soldiers in France during World War I. It was a way of raising money to support the Salvation Army's extensive efforts to assist the poor during the Great Depression.
Somehow that seems so approrpiate. It has often been observed that, in time of economic distress, coffee-and-doughnut shops still seem to survive. It seems as if, even then, the ubiquitous coffee-and-doughnut are an indulgence many people are just not inclined to give up. The persistent popularity of coffee-and-doughnut shops' upscale equivalents even during economic downturns seems to me to confirm this.
Speaking for myself, I remember how much I enjoyed taking a break at Bloor Street's Second Cup while serving at the parish in Toronto in the 1990s. In New York during the decade that followed, it was, of course, Starbuck's (conveniently located right on the corner) that got a lot of my business - although in both cities the new fashion for cafes in big, chain bookstores often offered attractive competition. Here in Knoxville, I am a regular cusotmer at the Knoxville Visitors Center, located in a charming century-old building a short walk from the church down the hill to the corner of Summit and Gay. Besides tourist information, the Knoxville Visitors Center provides a valued venue for live music daily. And it sells good coffee at a good price.
Unfortunately, I can no longer consume doughnuts (at least not real ones). But I can consume them in spirit, so to speak, while drinking my coffee, reading the local paper, and enjoying live Tennessee music - and thus remain at heart sitll a part of that great, shared human experience, in good times and bad, of coffee and doughnuts.