Immaculate Conception

Concerning the significance of the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the famous 20th-century American monk Thomas Merton wrote in his journal on November 10, 1947: “It seems to me that that definition was a turning point in the modern history of the Church. The world has been put into the hands of our Immaculate Lady and she is our hope in the terrible days we live in.”

Perhaps because this dogma had been so contested for so long, perhaps because its definition was such an assertive magisterial act against the political project of the 19th century, and perhaps most importantly because the doctrine of original sin is so opposed to the reigning spirit of the modern age and its utopian perfectionism, the doctrine and the feast of the Immaculate Conception have always seemed to have an especialy triumphalist air about them. 

But, of course, insofar as the feast actually highlights humanity's desperately inescapable need for redemption, the triumph belongs entirely to God himself - God who, as Saint Paul so powerfully expressed it, in love destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace, that he granted us in the beloved [Ephesians 1:6].

That Mary's Immaculate Conception is celebrated in Advent is an historical accident, which unfortunately may further contribute to the not uncommon confusion of the mystery of Mary's complete preservation from original sin from the very first moment of her existence with the mystery of Mary's virginity. (The use of the Annunciation Gospel in the Mass may also add to that confusion. The Visitation Gospel - including Mary's Magnificat - might have made a better choice.)

Like it or not, however, the feast falls in Advent and certainly lends itself to an authentically Advent approach. Thus, for example, the eminent Pius Parsch, sought to make the most of its Advent context. "During the time when we are awaiting the Savior," he wrote in The Church's Year of Grace, "when we are striving to arouse in ourselves a deep consciousness of the need for redemption, when we lovingly look up to Mary as our chiefest model, then indeed does this feast seem like the golden dawn before the rising sun of Christmas."

What I find so intriguing about the Immaculate Conception is that, while, considered abstractly it would seem to highlight a separation between Mary and the rest of us (for she alone - apart from Jesus himself - was ever conceived immaculate), devotionally the opposite seems to be the case. In fact, Mary's unique connection with Christ gives her a unique connection with us. The first to be freed from the overwhelming power of sin, the first to be filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit, Mary became the first disciple and so led the way for us as well to become disciples gifted in turn with the grace of the Holy Spirit. So much so that, for example, Saint Augustine (Sermon 25) could speak of how she shares with us even her motherhood - the source and cause of her special place in the Church. We who have been reborn in baptism as members of Christ, Saint Augustine tells us, now by bringing others to birth in the same way have it in our power to become analogously mothers of Christ as well.

The parish church I am privileged to be pastor of was one of that first group of churches dedicated under the title of  the Immaculate Conception within one year of Blessed Pope Pius IX's dogmatic definition The fact of that date further highlights the persistent relevance of those modern and contemporary challenges to the Christian story which the Church fittingly responds by its proclamation of this ancient truth.

(Photo: Stained glass window celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the apse of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, Knoxville TN.)

Saint Nicholas (a.k.a.,"Santa Claus")

For several years, while I was parochial vicar at the Paulist Mother Church in NYC, I had the joy of playing "Saint Nicholas" (a.k.a. "Santa Claus") at the annual Winter's Eve celebration coinciding with Lincoln Center's Tree Lighting on the Monday after Thanksgiving. That's a picture of me in my "Saint Nicholas" costume - a kind of generic Bishop outfit, plus a big white beard. I doubt too many people really thought I was Saint Nicholas. And I can remember at least one kid making a point of telling me, "I know who you are." But it was all good fun, and it created an opportunity to tell the story of the real Saint Nicholas, whose feast the Church celebrates today and whose upcoming Christmas visit - under his now better known identity as "Santa Claus" - countless kids are eagerly awaiting.

The historical Saint Nicholas (270-343) was a Greek-speaking Christian from Asia Minor, who became bishop of Myra in 317, and attended the Ecumenical Council of Nicea in 325, at which he was one of the signatories of the original Nicene Creed. Legend has it that at that council he punched the heretic Arius in the face! Not quite yet Clement C. Moore's broad face, and a little round belly That shook when he laugh’d, like a bowl full of jelly.

In 1087, Italian sailors stole most of his relics and brought them to Bari, where they remain, while some of his relics made it to Venice. Hence he is patron of sailors. But much more importantly in terms of his long-term influence and significance he is also patron saint of children.

Jacobus de Vorqagine's 13th-century Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend) recounts several famous stories of Saint Nicholas' generous acts of charity, the most famous probably being his anonymously throwing three sums of gold into the house of a man with three daughters, who as a result was now able to provide dowries and arrange good marriages for them. 

Thanks to such stories, Saint Nicholas acquired a reputation for generous gift-giving that continued after his death - often ritualized in coins or gifts put by him in the shoes children had left out for him overnight. From shoes it was not much of a leap to filling stockings hanging on a mantlepiece (or under the Christmas Tree for those of us who grew up in apartments without fireplaces)! His modern American name "Santa Claus" clearly comes from the Dutch "Sinterklaas," whose popularity survived the Reformation and came with the Dutch settlers to old New York.

Like almost everything about our contemporary Christmas, Santa Claus can be dismissed as simply a smiling face camouflaging the rapaciousness of capitalism. That said, and duly acknowledging the damage capitalism and business have done to both Christmas and Saint Nicholas, there remains something immensely inviting about the generous figure of Santa Claus - all that much more so when we recall his saintly origin and the religious roots of his generosity.

So may Santa Claus continue to bring joy to children all over the world, and may the real Saint Nicholas lead them to the true gift-giver, whose birth and generosity in coming to save us ultimately define Christmas!

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight — 
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

The Repentance at the Heart of Advent

Every Advent, through the drama of the liturgy, John the Baptist emerges again from the Judean desert and assumes center stage, shouting up and down the Jordan Valley, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! [Mathew 3:1-12]

For us today, John the Baptist is at best a somewhat strange, maybe even mysterious, and probably not very appealing figure. He appears, ever so briefly, at the beginning of Jesus’ public life, and then, before we have barely gotten to know him, gets himself arrested and killed. Having heard his rather shrill shouting every 2nd Sunday of Advent, we are ready, right away almost, to put him back in storage, while we focus instead on the holiday season’s more attractive aspects.

But, attractive or not, John’s message most certainly seems to have been compelling to his hearers. At that time, the gospel story tells us, Jerusalem, all Judea, and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to him. And even as they acknowledged their sins, John challenged his hearers to produce good fruit as evidence of repentance. More than any other Advent image, I think John the Baptist represents what Thomas Merton once called “the deep, in some ways anguished seriousness of Advent,” in contrast to what he called “the mendacious celebrations of our marketing culture.”

John’s challenge has always been at the heart of Advent’s message, and the fact that the Church faithfully invites John back every Advent to tell us that may help us appreciate what Pope Francis, for example, was getting at in his programmatic Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (“The Joy of the Gospel”), when he said that “all of us are asked to obey [the Lord’s] call to go forth from our own comfort zone in order to reach all the ‘peripheries’ in need of the light of the Gospel’ [EG, 20].

Those words were meant as a challenge to the entire Church to look outside ourselves, recalibrating our priorities and activities to make the Church’s mission – that is, the mission of all of us - possible and effective.

Like John the Baptist confronting his contemporaries, Pope Francis in Evangelii Gaudium did not shy away from the challenges of our own time. Speaking of where and to whom to go when the Church "goes forth,” Pope Francis recalled Jesus’ famous instruction in the Gospel about whom to welcome to a feast [Luke 14:14]. “There can be no room for doubt or for explanations which weaken so clear a message,” the Pope reminds us. For “the poor are the privileged recipients of the Gospel” [EG 48].

(We will hear Jesus cite the poor having the good news proclaimed to them as one of the signs that validate his mission in next Sunday’s Gospel.)

Just as John the Baptist confronted the brood of vipers, as he labeled the Judean leadership, Advent confronts our contemporary politics and economics of exclusion with the alternative of the Church's challenging universal mission of inclusion. Welcome one another, Saint Paul tells us, as Christ welcomed you, for the glory of God [Romans 15:7].

We will hear more about the Church’s essential mission of welcome later, at the end of Mass, when we will read a pastoral letter from our Bishop, in which he reminds how, throughout our country’s history, the Catholic Church has been here to welcome new people who come with the dream of freedom and progress. It is part of our identity as the Church to be a place of hospitality and welcome.

John the Baptist prepared the way for Christ by challenging people to recognize the reality of their lives and relearn what that life is supposed to be about.  In reminding us of the priority of society in human existence and the imperative of solidarity in human relationships, Advent challenges us all to reconsider our present-day priorities, whatever they may be, in order to become the Church that we are eternally called to be, a community called, as Saint Paul says, to glorify God for his mercy [Romans 15:8].

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TB, December 4, 2016.

Patience

One of my favorite Advent readings whose recurrence I look forward to every year is the second Office reading for the Saturday of the 1st Week of Advent, which would be today were not that reading - an excerpt from Saint Cyprian's treatise On the Virtue of Patience - displaced this year for the celebration of Saint Francis Xavier. Obviously, I don't begrudge the great patron of the foreign missions the precedence the liturgy rightly accords him, but neither would I want to ignore Saint Cyprian's important Advent message on patience.

Admittedly, as virtues go, patience is not particularly popular - not nowadays, probably not ever!

But Advent, as I suggested last Sunday, while ostensibly the most future-oriented of seasons, is really in a sense a sort of symbol for the entire Christian life, lived inevitably in the present, between the first coming of Christ and his hoped-for final advent. Part of what it means to be a Christian is to live one's life literally in this interval between Christmas and the end. 

And if Advent symbolically expresses the experience that is the Christian life, patience is the virtue that expresses the way that life is to be lived. Saint Cyprian says is necessary for us if we are to be perfected in what we have begun to be. I have had 68 years so far to become what I hope to be for eternity. How much more time will be left to me I cannot know, which is why time is so precious, why the present is so precious, precisely because it is so limited and so must be made the most of. But it remains a process in which God's grace is the principal driver. The process challenges me to do my part - and certainly not to give up. Like the farmer in Mark's Gospel (Mark 4:26-29), I must work, but I must also wait. If life is one long Advent and Advent illustrates life, patience is the key to carrying on day by day.

I especially like how Saint Cyprian (following Saint Paul) unites patience with endurance and both with charity. Endurance specifies the practice of patience in concrete situations and struggles of life. Charity is what it is all for. The present peace and unity which enduringly patient charity makes possible anticipates - and, more than just anticipates, actually begins - the peace and unity for which patience enduringly strives and Advent awaits.

And so Cyprian concludes neither unity nor peace can be maintained unless the brethren cherish each other with mutual forbearance and preserve the bond of harmony by means of patience. 

Thomas Merton on Advent

I recently came across a 1963 essay by Thomas Merton on the meaning of Advent. Its title, “Advent: Hope or Delusion?,”  suggests a greater seriousness about Advent's meaning than is evoked by our at best half-hearted observance of it. At least he offers us something to think about.

Merton challenges us to remember the deep, in some ways anguished seriousness of Advent, when the mendacious celebrations of our marketing culture so easily harmonize with our tendency to regard Christmas, consciously or otherwise, as a return to our own innocence and our own infancy. 

The family-focused character of our contemporary Christmas notwithstanding, Merton recalls that the Church in preparing us for the birth of a “great prophet,” a Savior and a King of Peace, has more in mind than seasonal cheer. The advent mystery focuses the light of faith upon the very meaning of life, of history, of man, of the world and of our own being. In Advent we celebrate the coming and indeed the presence of Christ in our world. We witness to His presence even in the midst of all its inscrutable problems and tragedies. Our Advent faith is not an escape from the world to a misty realm of slogans and comforts which declare our problems to be unreal, our tragedies inexistent…In our time, what is lacking is not so much the courage to ask this question as the courage to expect an answer…We may at times be able to show the world Christ in moments when all can clearly discern in history, some confirmation of the Christian message. But the fact remains that our task is to seek and find Christ in our world as it is, and not as it might be. The fact that the world is other than it might be does not alter the truth that Christ is present in it and that His plan has been neither frustrated nor changed: indeed, all will be done according to His will. Our Advent is a celebration of this hope.