Chanukah

The Jewish holiday of Chanukah begins Saturday night. Growing up in New York City, I was always aware of all the major Jewish holidays. Chanukah, of course, is not 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 holydays" of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Moreover, the historical event on which Chanukah is based is not even included in the Jewish Bible  - although it is found in the Catholic one (1 Maccabees 4:36-59). On top of that, the popular Talmudic story of how a single-day’s supply of oil for the Temple’s menorah miraculously lasted for eight days only appeared about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees.  More pointedly, perhaps, the prohibition of work associated with the Sabbath and the really major holidays does not apply to Chanukah.

It seems pretty obvious that Chanukah became as big as it is in the U.S. in the 20th century as a kind of Jewish alternative to the overwhelmingly omnipresent Christmas holiday. Thus the tradition of giving Chanukah geld to children could easily evolve into full-scale gift-giving analogous to Christmas. Even so, Chanukah’s popularity seems deeply rooted. A 1960s radical friend of mine once told me how his family was non-religious and celebrated no Jewish holidays – with the one exception of Chanukah, which his socialist father considered a common people’s holiday. As for Jesus, presumably he too observed Chanukah, along with the other Jewish festivals, for the New Testament 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).

The 20^th-century restoration of Israel as a Jewish state has also been a boost for Chanukah, which originated after all as a commemoration of the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabees’ victory over King Antiochus IV, who had profaned it and outlawed Jewish religious practices. The 2 books of Maccabees recount the heroic resistance of the Jewish people under the military leadership of the Maccabees, as well as the sufferings of Jewish martyrs. For modern Israel, it undoubtedly serves as a good nationalist holiday – especially given the constant threats to Israel’s existence. Last month’s anti-Israel action by that institutionalized expression of international immorality, the United Nations, highlights the relevance of Chanukah for Israel and all people of good will who support its survival against enemies every bit as implacable as Antiochus IV.

I'm 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 exile under Gentile rulers). With the 20^th-century restoration of Israel as a Jewish state, the holiday's original historical significance has, naturally enough, undergone a revival, and both the Zionist theme of Hewish national liberation and the universal theme of cultural and religious freedom have moved to center stage. Meanwhile, the survival of the festival's popular, folkloric customs - like potato pancakes - adds to the permanent appeal of the holiday.

Like the autumn harvest festival of Sukkot, which the New Testament typically calls the Feast of Booths or Tabernacles, Chanukah has no real Christian analogy. The relationship between Passover and Easter (and between Shavuot and Pentecost) is genuinely theological, but there is nothing in the Christian calendar corresponding to Sukkot or Chanukah. The coincidence of Chanukah with Christmas is largely just that - coincidental. They are, to be sure, both winter light festivals; but it was most likely a pagan, Roman winter feast which inspired the dating of Christmas. Chanukah did not inspire Christmas. (If anything, as has been said, the reverse is true in the case of the contemporary American Chanukah celebration).

That said, the fact that Chanukah and Christmas are both winter light festivals does suggest one important point of contact. Amidst all the bright lights of the modern Christmas season, Chanukah focuses on the special candelabrum (known as a chanukkiah), which, unlike an ordinary menorah, has eight candles (plus an additional shamrash candle). The chanukkiah is supposed to be at a window, where it can be seen from outside, so others can see it and be reminded (catechized?) about the Chanukah miracle.

Now I think that most people put their Christmas Tree near a window whenever possible. Like the more modern displays of lights outside of houses, putting the tree near a window enables its light to be seen by others outside. Perhaps, we Christians need to be more intentional about seeing our Christmas lights as vehicles of evangelization, symbols of Christ, the light of the world, catechizing everyone outside about his coming into our world. As I have often observed, there is no other time of year when our homes and cities are as beautifully decorated and illuminated as at this season. So we need to let the lights and symbols of the season speak out the good news of great joy for all the people (Luke 2:10).

Servant of God, pray for us!

In his 2008 book, Why Go to Church: The Drama of the Eucharist, the recently retired Master General of the Dominican Order, Timothy Radcliffe, recalled how one of the first things the Irish immigrants did when they settled in cities like Liverpool during the Industrial Revolution was to build big churches. Radcliffe writes: “it was a sign that they were not as they might seem, mere members of the urban proletariat, but citizens of the kingdom. They were fellow citizens of the saints whose statues filled their churches, God’s own children. Their houses might be slums, but their home was heaven.”
 

Similar sentiments undoubtedly characterized the immigrant Catholic community that founded Immaculate Conception parish in 1855 and built our "Church on Summit Hill" – a visible sign, not just for them, but for the whole world of the Kingdom of God present and active here in East Tennessee. We come to our parish church to hear God’s word and to be fed from his altar. United around that same altar, we are then sent forth to announce the Gospel of the Lord and glorify the Lord by our lives.
 

So caring for the physical fabric of this 126-year old church is a key component of my job as pastor. This year’s project - replacing the church’s 19^th-century slate roof – has just been successfully completed. Going forward, I look forward to phase two - the replacement of the church’s inside ceiling this coming summer.

 

Inside the church, meanwhile, a special place has been set aside for prayer for the canonization cause of Paulist Founder, Isaac Hecker, and for the mission of the Paulist Fathers, as well as prayer for one’s own personal intentions (for which is provided a prayer invoking Hecker’s intercession). Displayed there is a copy of an ancient icon of the Mother of God, venerated in the the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, in the Cappella Paolina (Borghese Chapel) built especially to house it in. After his expulsion from the Redemptorists in 1857, Servant of God Isaac Hecker prayed before this image as he prepared to undertake his new mission which led to the founding of the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle (The Paulist Fathers) in 1858. (The Paulist Fathers undertook mission work in Tennessee beginning in 1900, and have served at Immaculate Conception parish since 1973). Like the proverbial incense at evensong, may Hecker's prayers rise to heaven on behalf of those who invoke his intercession, and may the good work he began when he founded the Paulists contine in the fertile field of East Tennessee.

Sleep

At the end of Book I and the beginning of Book II of the Iliad, Homer paints a picture familiar enough to any sufferer of sleep disorders. (I had my annual follow-up appointment today with the sleep therapist). Book I ends with  the Olympian gods going to bed after a splendid feast, each one to his or her own room (built for each god by the cleverly skilled Hephaistos).  Zeus too retired to his own bed, where, we are told, he was accustomed to sleep soundly. But Book II begins on a jarring note. While everyone else - both the Olympian gods and the earthbound mortals - slept soundly the whole night long, Zeus could not sleep, for Homer has him pondering how to rig the next battle and so shower Achilles with glory.

I can picture Zeus tossing and turning - perhaps even (as a sleep therapist would surely advise him to) getting up out of bed and doing something else for a while. It's a scene I can easily identify with, although of course my preoccupations and anxieties are admittedly much more modest, much less world-historically significant than those of Zeus. In fact, for the most part, anxiety is only rarely a contributing factor to my poor sleep patterns! Anxiety is, in any case, a fact of life. Even Saint Paul acknowledged his many sleepless nights and the daily pressure upon him of his anxiety for all the churches (2 Corinthians 11:27-28).

I have been burdened with variations on the theme of sleeplessness - of greater or lesser severity - on and off for years. Finally, in February 2003, I was duly diagnosed with a sleep disorder. that was almost 10 years ago, and I have used a CPAP machine ever since. (So do many others, as I have since discovered!) It can be a nuisance at times - especially having to pack it whenever I travel and take it through airport security. But I have grown quite accustomed to it and the various styles of masks I have tried over the years. The machine is supposed to deal with the physical dimension of the disorder, but insomnia has multiple dimensions. An steady night of deep sleep remains a somewhat elusive goal. So, when I say my prayers each night before bed, I never fail to include a Hail Mary for a safe, restful, and uninterrupted night's sleep!

Evangelization Today

Today’s commemoration of the great Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552) - who was distantly related to Tennessee’s 1^st Governor, John Sevier (1745–1815) - is certainly an appropriate day to think about what the 1974 Synod of Bishops famously reaffirmed as “the essential mission of the Church” – the mission to evangelize. Indeed, today's collect explicitly prays "that the hearts of the faithful may burn with the same zeal for the faith [as St. Francis Xavier showed] and that Holy church may everywhere rejoice in an abundance of offspring." And yet it is widely believed that, on the contrary, missionary enthusiasm has slumped somewhat in recent decades.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I read Ralph Martin’s Will Many Be Saved?: What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (Eerdmans, 2012).  As the adverb “actually” in the title suggests, the author discerns some selective misreading of Vatican II’s teaching on the subject of the possibility of salvation for all, including those without explcit faith in Christ, which, he believes, has contributed to what he (and many others) see as a post-conciliar “crisis” for missionary activity.

The possibility of salvation for non-Christians is not a new idea. It was not invented at Vatican II. It is implicit in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, but it was only in the modern period (when Christians again encountered large populations to whom the Gospel had never been preached) that the issue became theologically so salient. Trent had further opened the door in its teaching on Baptism of Desire. The possibility of salvation for non-Christians had been more explicitly explained by Blessed Pope Pius IX in his 19^th century encyclical Quanto conficiamur moerore (1863). In fact, what Vatican II ultimately taught had been on the agenda for Vatican I, but that Council was unfortunately interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War and then never resumed thanks to the Kingdom of Italy’s occupation of Rome in 1870. Between Vatican I and Vatican II, the issue had been comprehensively dealt with by Pope Pius XIII in the Holy Office’s Letter to the Archbishop of Boston (1949), responding to the errors of Jesuit Leonard Feeney. In a sense Vatican II simply confirmed what had by then become standard teaching. In the ferment which followed, however, the culture changed in unanticipated ways, one result of which was the so-called “crisis” for missionary activity.

 

The first half of Martin’s book is a detailed treatment of Vatican II’s teaching and of its scriptural and doctrinal antecedents. His fundamental point is that, while the first seven sentences in Lumen Gentium, 16, effectively explain the possibility of salvation apart from explicit faith, the final three sentences recall the various difficulties and obstacles in the way of salvation: But very often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, have exchanged the truth of God for a lie and served the world rather than the Creator (cf. Rom. 1:21,25). Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed to ultimate despair. Hence to procure the glory of God and the salvation of all these, the Church, mindful of the Lord’s command, “preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mk. 16:16), takes zealous care to foster the missions.

Much of the second half of Martin’s book is taken up with his critique of two very influential post-conciliar theologians, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In Rahner’s theology of the “anonymous Christian” and in Balthasar’s “hope” that all will eventually be saved, he sees a problematic tendency toward the ancient heresy of the certainty of eventual salvation for all (apokatatasis), a view Martin sees as ultimately irreconcilable with scripture and tradition – including Lumen Gentium, 16. The problem, Martin believes, is that a resulting “atmosphere of universalism” is undermining the motive for evangelization.

That a casual, unreflective optimism among Christians about salvation - certianly about their own and probably about that of others - has become normative is fairly evident. Just attend a typical contemporary Catholic funeral!

Obviously, no one should want anyone not to be saved. The question is whether this ought to lead one to casual, unreflective optimism (in obvious disregard for all the evil evident in the world) or whether it ought to call for intensified efforts at conversion and repentance. 

What Martin recommends is what he calls a new “pastoral strategy.” He applauds Vatican II’s texts, which are characterized, he says, by “balance, theological quality, solid scriptural bases, and pastoral sensitivity” and provide “a solid foundation for that true renewal and revitalized evangelization that was the twofold purpose of the Council.” What he calls the Church’s  “pastoral strategy” at and after the Council was “to affirm everything it could about the endeavors of the modern world and modern man and not speak much about the consequences of rejecting the good news.” Fifty years later, however, it has, he argues,  “become clear that an adjustment in her pastoral strategy is needed.” That is because “contemporary culture has proven more resistant to the gospel as it has been presented than the Church has been resistant to the secularizing pressures of contemporary culture.” Hence the need for a new "pastoral strategy." To this end, he calls for “an unashamed teaching of the explication of Romans about what the human condition actually is apart from Christ.” He cites then-Cardinal Ratzinger quoting a fellow bishop lamenting our contemporary failure “to make to our age this elementary evangelical appeal, with which the Lord wants us to acknowledge our sinfulness, to do penance, and to become other than what we are.”

Sounds like an Advent strategy for our time - and every time!

Fear and Hope

As we get closer to December 21 and the supposed end of the so-called Mayan Calendar, there's been even more than the usual amount of end-of-the-world talk in the media. A few years back, when the movie 2012 came out, I watched a TV interview with someone who had been stocking up supplies in anticipation of the assorted calamities predicted to occur in the real 2012 – that is, later this month, if all the superstitious scare-mongers are to be believed. What struck me most about that interview was how the man being interviewed and his interviewer both kept referring to “the end of the world.” But, obviously, if you’re stocking up supplies, then you must be expecting (or at least hoping) to survive the disaster. In that case, whatever else it may be, it’s hardly “the end of the world.”

One could, of course, talk that way and not really mean the earth’s total destruction but just the end of civilization as we know it, which is typically what such disaster movies are all about. The world’s actual end may be more than even disaster-fans really care to contemplate. Add to that the prospect of divine judgment, and we’re getting into some really scary stuff! No surprise then that the early Christians prayed, in Tertullian’s famous phrase: “for Emperors, their ministers, for the condition of the world, for peace everywhere, and for the delaying of the end.” Yet that “end” is precisely what the Church challenges us contemplate today, as indeed it does every Advent.

Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla: teste David cum Sibylla. So begins one of the most famous medieval liturgical hymns: O day of wrath, O dreadful day, when heaven and earth shall pass away, as David and the Sibyl say.

When I was a boy, before our feel-good therapeutic culture took over, those words were sung at every Catholic funeral. But in fact the Dies Irae began its life actually as an Advent hymn. Advent acknowledges the fear that people have always felt about what lies ahead. As Jesus himself said in today’s Gospel, People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world. [Luke 21:26].

Advent originated, after all, as an annual period of repentance focused on preparation for Judgment Day, and the Dies Irae’s somber sentiments served to concentrate people’s attention on Christ's final coming at the end of time as judge of all the world.

Advent, however, is also about hope. The same Jesus also said, when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand [Luke 21:28].

Actually, Advent is about both fear and hope – both the passing of another year and our hopes for a new one, both the darkness of winter and the living light of Christ coming to make everything bright and new, both the end of this world and the coming of God’s kingdom.

After all, we don’t celebrate Christmas in June, when the sun is high and the days are bright. We celebrate it now, when the days are dark and the nights are long, when we must search in the darkness to recognize the bright light of God’s kingdom coming into our world.

In the dark winter’s night, full of fear, danger, doubt, and anxiety – in this long night of the present – between Christ’s 1^st coming and his hoped for final advent, Jesus bids us: Be vigilant [Luke 21:36].

There is plenty of darkness to go around. We all have our painful memories of personal failures, lost opportunities, unfulfilled longings, and ruptured relationships - all of which seem to haunt us even more intensely at this time of year. And then there is the worldwide darkness of our anxious, conflicted, war-ravaged time. Jesus was born in an anxiety and conflict-filled world - in that regard at least not so unlike ours. Then as now, people were on the lookout for something or someone - in their case, the Emperor Augustus - that could make things right, or at least make a difference. Then as now, such stopgap solutions proved temporary at best, illusions at worst. In the midst of so much darkness, Advent challenges us to recognize God's solution - the coming of Christ bringing light into anxious lives and a worried world.

In the words of Paulist founder, Servant of God Fr. Isaac Hecker, There is little or no hope at all of our entering into the kingdom of heaven hereafter, if we are not citizens of it here. If Christ is to be to us a savior, we must find him here, now, and where we are; other wise he is no Christ, no Saviour, no Immanuel, no “God with us” [Questions of the Soul, 1855].

Advent is a winter wake-up call to face up to our responsibility to live our lives like people whose God really has come. And, if God’s coming into our world means anything, it means a change so thorough that nothing should ever be the same again.

 

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 2, 2012.