Solid News

In one of his pre-monastic journals, Thomas Merton described the experience of walking through the New York City streets on a June evening when the same event "was on all the radios, and came out of all the windows: the same voice at the same time coming from in front of you and behind you and from both sides..." The effect on Merton was profound: "The city having this one voice made the buildings become liquid and unsubstantial, that most solid thing was this voice that flowed constantly through all the stone buildings at once." [Run to the Mountain: The Story of a Vocation, The Journals of Thomas Merton Volume One 1939-1941, June 1, 1939, Harper Collins, 1995, p. 13]

Merton's surreal experience may seem somewhat over the top. I can remember spending many a summer evening outside and hearing the radios and TVs from all the neighborhood's open windows, but my imagination never quite took me as far as Merton's did. But recalling Merton's strong experience powerfully reminded me of that time - just decades ago - when there were a lot of things we all heard (and listened to) together. It wasn't that long ago, for example, that many of us regularly watched the evening news. In the pre-cable world, there was a limited number of channels. Most households had only one TV; so everyone - adults and children, old and young - all watched the same shows and so shared in a common cross-generational culture that can no longer exist in this age of niche programming.

But back to the news!  From the early 60s certainly through the 80s, the three networks' half-hour evening news programs were commonly and widely watched. (Thus, at Princeton's Graduate College in the 1970s and again in seminary in the 1980s, students regularly watched the news together. I'm sure my experience of, for example, the Watergate saga, would have been very different indeed had I experienced it all alone). Whatever stylistic and personality differences distinguished the three networks, the basic coverage was usually more or less the same. It reflected - and helped perpetuate - a common understanding of the facts about the larger world, about what mattered, and why. It gave people common references they could talk about and discuss and debate. As such it was, I suppose, somewhat limited - as we are constantly being reminded by those who praise contemporary media culture for having radically opened up the process and democratized it. That may well be true. In fact, I am sure it is. But at what price?

Just as today parents and teens don't watch the same programs anymore and more broadly share less and less of a common culture, i.e., a common experience and understanding of the world and a shared basis for communication, so it is with the news, as each cable channel and internet media outlet caters to its particular niche market. These niche markets are increasingly ideologically identified audiences of like-minded people, who choose to hear the news they agree with and are less and less exposed not just to opinions but even to any facts that don't support their beliefs.

For Merton that June evening, that one common sound seemed like the most solid thing in the city. Likewise, the shared cultural experience of common acts and a common frame of reference for forming opinions and being able to discuss and debate was something solid - something sadly long-since lost and almost unimaginable today.

Walls

It was Sunday, August 13, 1961, a typical summer Sunday spent picnicking at the Bronx's Orchard Beach with my multitude of aunts, uncles, and  cousins. I was 13 and about to start high school in a month. The news came over the portable transistor radio (required for listening to the obligatory baseball games). The East Germans had closed the border between East and West Berlin. The full impact - and horror - of this would become clearer in the coming days as a permanent wall was erected to demarcate the boundary, becoming for the next 28 years one of the most recognizable symbols of the Cold War.
Coverage of national and international news was much more sober in those days. Still, the wall was treated as a provocation and the beginning of yet another crisis. In fact, as we all know now, it actually defused the crisis. By imprisoning the East German population behind it, the wall solved the East German Communists' problem - and by extension that of their masters in Moscow. It also solved the West's problem of constantly being worried about the defense of West Berlin. It took time for that to sink in. Thus, a year later at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and his advisers worried whether this might be a distraction from a serious Soviet move on Berlin. But in fact the wall's permanence became the symbolic guarantor of the permanence of the division of Europe and the consequent Cold War. That Cold War would warm up occasionally with this or that crisis, but the underlying arrangement seemed to have become permanent. And its permanence seemed to guarantee that the Cold War  would stay cold (even as it continued forever). So adjustments of various sorts became the order of the day - Ostpolitik, "Détente," etc.
Apocalyptic expectations persisted in certain quarters. Teaching in the 1970s, I recall a colleague seriously suggesting a scenario for a Soviet move westward to take over most of Europe. Anti-nuclear advocates tried to scare audiences with visions of total destruction, "nuclear winter," etc. Some theorists argued against the morality of nuclear deterrence - thus seeking to undermine the very thing that had kept the Cold War cold all along and had made Berlin a divided city instead of a battlefield. When Andrei Amalrik wrote Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? his thesis was widely rejected as not credible. He was wrong of course - but just by a few years.
In the end the Wall came down as quickly as it went up, and the monstrous apparatus of the Soviet Evil Empire soon followed suit. One can still see some deliberately preserved pieces of the Wall in Berlin (photo taken August 13, 2005). There are other mementos here and there of the old border, but Berlin and the world have long since moved on.
No one should minimize the malevolence of Communist rule in eastern Europe or the misery it inflicted on its captive population. That said, however, the Cold War proved to be a rather peaceful and prosperous period in the west - especially in western Europe, which made a phenomenally swift recovery from its post-war state. While the Wall was surely a symbol of how bad things were on the eastern side, it was just as surely a symbol of how really good things were on the western side. Sadly, it was also assumed to be a symbol of the permanence of it all.
None of us knew it at the time, but underneath the surface stability and permanence serious social and cultural change was underway. Paradoxically it was in the 1960s aftermath of the Wall that the centuries' old culture of the west began to unravel. Perhaps it was the very stability the Wall symbolized that accelerated that process. The West's cultural transformation was already well advanced by the time the Wall fell and the East rushed headlong to embrace that transformation for itself.
And so here we are - better off in some ways, worse off in so many others. And that mean and ugly Wall we all professed to hate so much seems to have helped the process along, becoming in retrospect as sign of the wall of incomprehension between the familiar past and the novel present.

What's Worth What?

This past Sunday's New York Times Magazine featured a very revealing article about family life today, "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In." The article looks back at a group of 22 women who a decade ago were "highly educated, very accomplished, well-paid professionals with high-earning spouses" who "made headlines for leaving the work force just when they were hitting their stride" in order to be full-time mothers. The stories are complicated and diverse - as all human stories are - but the basic leitmotif that runs through them all is how these accomplished, well-paid professionals, having abandoned their careers to be full-time mothers at home, have found themselves once again unsatisfied and looking for something more. The article examines the difficulty (especially given the changed economy, which presumably no one would have predicted a decade ago) of re-entering the work force at anything like the level they left. 

Needless to say, their story is simultaneously that of many families and few - many in that most mothers have to somehow sort out and accomodate the responsibilities of parenthood and family and the economic necessity and cultural expectation of work outside the home, few in that these particular families were in the relatively small subset of American households that could afford to make it a matter of choice. My own mother worked when I was growing up. I think she liked it, but it was also an economic necessity. Fortunately, she had my grandmother living with us to help out. Indeed, as the author acknowledes, when these well-positioned women were choosing to leave the work force, others "poor mothers who couldn't afford child care" had to do so without attracting media notice. 

This highlights what for me stands out so dramatically in this discussion. There is a lot in these stories that is reflects the different ways we value different activities and the complex ways in which our society values and devalues different activities and those who engage in them. But underlying it all is that old problem of how we as a society make those value judgments largely in terms of money. Generally speaking, we value higher earners more than lower earners, and earning an income of one's own has enormous power over our psyches, which makes the choice to forego doing that perennially problematic. Thus we read, for example, that trading in "business meeting, client dinners and commissions" resulted in growing dependency "and a sense of personal dislocation. Without a salary or an independent work identity, her self-confidence plummeted."

How society solves the problem of adequately socializing the next generation while simultaneously meeting the economic and personal-fulfillment needs of modern parents is a big question beyond the scope of this modest post. But I suspect any such solution will always be hard to come by unless and until we can more successfully incorporate other considerations besides income - and on an at least equal par with income - in evaluating one's fundamental life choices.

The Church's Treasure

Quam clarificata est Jerosolyma Stephano, tam illustris fieret Roma Laurentio ("As Jerusalem is made glorious by Stephen, so Rome is made illustrious by Lawrence"). So said Saint Leo the Great preaching on today's feast of the great Roman deacon-martyr Lawrence. During my time in Rome last year, I got to visit three Roman churches named for Saint Lawrence - San Lorenzo in Lucina, San Lorenzo in Panisperna (honoring the site of Lawrence's martyrdom), and the great Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls, where Lawrence is buried. (Photo is of the altar at the site of his burial).

 

Christian Rome produced many martyrs - among them Pope Sixtus II and four other Roman deacons who were martyred just four days before Lawrence in 258 during the persecution of Emperor Valerian. What made Lawrence stand out so?

 

As deacon, Lawrence was apparently in charge of the material possessions of the Roman Church and of its alms for the poor. According to tradition, after the execution of Pope Sixtus the Prefect demanded that Lawrence turn over the Church's treasure. Supposedly, Lawrence quickly distributed as much of the Church's property as possible to the poor and then went to the Prefect and presented to him the poor. "Behold in these poor," Lawrence said to the Prefect, "the treasures I promised to show you." 

The site of Saint Lawrence's burial, the Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls (one of the traditional seven "Pilgrimage Churches" of Rome), is located in the traditionally working-class neighborhood that suffered a direct hit during the American bombing of Rome in July 1943. That event famously brought Pius XII rushing there, with money for local victims.(That event is memorialized there in this monument to Pope Pius as "Defender of the City").

 

In the late 20th century, it became quite common, especially among professed Religious, to talk about a "preferential option for the poor." Lawrence lived it. Hence his standout status in 3rd-century Rome - and a good reason why we remember (and hopefully imitate) him even today.

More on Preaching

150 years ago, one of Isaac Hecker’s original companions in the Paulist community’s founding, Paulist Father Francis Baker (1820-1865) preached a sermon at the Paulist Mother Church, entitled “The Preacher, The Organ of the Holy Ghost.” The occasion was the 4^th Sunday after Easter in the historic Roman Calendar, for which the traditional Gospel reading would have been John 16:5-14.

Father Baker started with the text, When He the Spirit of Truth shall come, He will lead you into all truth (John 16:13).  After clarifying that this refers to “truth relating to our salvation” and not ordinary scientific knowledge which we are expected to discover “by our own intelligence,” he asked how this promise is fulfilled. His answer: “The Holy Ghost leads us into all truth necessary to our salvation by the public preaching of the Word of God.” Acknowledging the human limitations of preachers, Baker asserted “a law that goes all through Christianity, and even through all the arrangements of the natural world. In ever department of human life, God makes man His representative – man fallible and weak.”

Writing in the mid 19^th-century, Father Baker could still easily assume an existing moral consensus. For him, natural reason illuminates the natural moral law and forms consciences accordingly. Thus, the preacher is not required, so to speak, to start from scratch. Rather his task is to build upon what people already know. “A man believes more, he is more conscious of his belief, his belief becomes more distinct, more serviceable, when he hears it from another’s lips.” But the preacher must also proclaim those revealed truths that are beyond natural reason: “it must depend on the preacher’s office to keep these mysteries in men’s minds, and to secure for them a place in men’s intelligence and affections.”

One of the images Father Baker used, which I suspect must have been a consolation to preachers then just as it is to preachers now, was “the Divine Sower scattering the seeds of truth and virtue.” It is an image that I think every preacher ought to keep constantly in mind – not just because it explains why not everyone will respond positively, but because it highlights God’s extreme generosity and patience, which ultimately account for whatever fruit preaching produces.

But Baker became genuinely poetic depicting the experience of preaching as a renewed Pentecost: “See, the priest has clothed himself to celebrate the unbloody sacrifice. He has ascended the altar. Already the clouds of incense hang over the mercy-seat, and hymns of praise ascend; - but he stops, he turns to the people. Why doe she interrupt the Mass? Has he seen a vision? Han an angel spoken to him, as of old to the prophet Zacharias? Yes, he has seen a vision, He has heard a voice. A fire is in his heart. A living coal has touched his lips, the Breath of the Spirit hath passed over him, and he speaks as he is moved by the Holy Ghost.”

Living in this much more prosaic age, I confess I have never imagined my preaching in this way. And, frankly, I think it somewhat challenging to do so, for all sorts of reasons which reflect today’s changed sensibilities. That said, however, it is a challenge to take somewhat more seriously the unique encounter with the Lord which we believe occurs at the altar and to allow oneself to be as awestruck by it as the prophets were.