Listen!

Any modern pilgrim, who has just had the experience of reaching the Church of the Transfiguration at the top of Mount Tabor after a high-speed taxi ride up the narrow mountain road might well be tempted to echo Peter’s reaction to Jesus’ transfiguration, “Lord, it is good that we are here.”

Peter presumably had walked up the mountain, but the experience to which he was reacting was anything but pedestrian. For what Peter, James, and John were being treated to was nothing less than an experience of the glory of God, an awesome peak into another world, so to speak, a glimpse of Jesus’ divine nature as Son of God and his fulfillment of the Old Testament (represented on the mountain by Moses and Elijah).

No wonder Peter wanted to stay there as long as possible – even to make three tents there, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah – as if this were it, and he had finally reached where he wanted to be. He didn’t understand that this was just the beginning – an invitation to join Jesus on his journey.

An ancient tradition dates the Transfiguration 40 days before the Crucifixion, which is one reason why, every year, the Transfiguration Gospel is read early in Lent. In the actual gospel narrative, however, the time-reference points back to Peter’s profession of faith and Jesus’ first prediction of his impending passion, six days previously.  The unusually explicit time-reference makes it clear that the two events (in both of which Peter plays a prominent part) are connected. In both events, there is the revelation of who Jesus ultimately is and reference forward to his impending death and resurrection. And in both Peter is the spokesman for the others, the one most intimately associated with Jesus and at the same time the one who seems somehow to miss much of the point Jesus was actually making.

Paralleling Peter is the figure of Abraham, who makes his first appearance on the world stage in today’s 1st reading. Until Abraham, human history had been one sinful calamity, one tragic debacle after another – culminating in the decisive breakdown of human society and community at the Tower of Babel.

Then suddenly God intervened in human history in a new way – singling out one specific individual, and through him one particular family and eventually one specially chosen nation – to be his partner, his human partner, in repairing the massive damage we have done to God’s good creation. Under the provisions of the extraordinary covenant God made with Abraham, God and Abraham – and Abraham’s descendants – will collaborate together and so become a blessing for the whole world.

Abraham is considered the common spiritual ancestor of Judaism and both of its two daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. In all three religions, Abraham is revered for his faith. As the Second Vatican Council reminded us, Muslims, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind. [Lumen Gentium 16]

Abraham’s faith summoned him - at an age when most of us are already retired – to go forth to a new land. But Abraham’s assigned destination was vague. We call Abraham our father in faith; but, if Abraham is a model of faith for us, his story also reveals how much real faith really requires. Abraham’s faith was his response to the ambiguous and complicated events in his life in a way that fully reflected his deep recognition of God’s presence and action in those ambiguous and complicated events. His faith meant total trust in and reliance on God through whatever changes might be required and whatever challenges might have to be met.

Change is always challenging, which is why wise people avoid change as much as possible. I often like to quote the 2nd Viscount Falkland’s (1610-1643) famous observation: "where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." Human history has more than confirmed the wisdom of that statement. Still, sometimes change is necessary, and therein lies the challenge – first to know when, and then to know how. It may mean abandoning the familiar for the frightening. It may mean something totally new. Or it may not. Sometimes, the most challenging change may be to undo bad decisions and recent choices in order to return to a lost or forgotten or abandoned older and wiser path.

We all talk at times about making necessary changes in our lives. Sometimes we may even mean it.  But we are just as likely to conclude that we have too much at stake to change course. Lent is our annual opportunity to let Abraham demonstrate the power of faith to overcome our cynicism, despair, defeatism, and spiritual inertia.

That this is possible is, of course, all because of Abraham’s greatest descendant, Jesus, who fulfilled in life and death his nation’s destiny and so made Abraham’s blessing fully available to the entire world.

Even so, our temptation will always be to do the opposite and to think, like Peter, that we are there already - without having to make the journey. But the same God who first called and challenged – and blessed – Abraham also continues to invite us, through Jesus, instructing us as he instructed Peter: "This is my beloved Son … listen to him."

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 12, 2017.

Populorum Progressio + 50

In two weeks, Laetare Sunday (March 26) will mark the 50th anniversary of Blessed Pope Paul VI's landmark encyclical Populorum Progressio ("On the Development of Peoples"). A lot has happened in 50 years. A lot has changed in the world in 50 years. Yet, for all that has happened and all that has changed, Paul VI's challenge to the contemporary world remains as relevant as ever - and maybe more so. Thus in his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, the present Pope categorically warned a world, which seems no more ready to listen now than it was in 1967, that we also have to say "thou shalt not" to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills [Evangelii Gaudium, 53].

Faithful to tradition, Paul quoted Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno on the international imperialism of money to warn against the capitalist economic order and the politics it produces in the form of concepts that present profit as the chief spur to economic progress, free competition as the guiding norm of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right, having no limits nor concomitant social obligations [Populorum Progressio 26]  Citing the Church Fathers that the right of private property may never be exercised to the detriment of the common good [PP 23]  Paul boldly asserted that the common good sometimes demands expropriation [PP 24] 

Like his contemporary successor, Pope Francis, Paul highlighted not only the material inequalities and injustices that are consequences of an unjust economy but also its spiritual and cultural consequences: even more necessary still is the deep thought and reflection of wise men in search of a new humanism, one which will enable our contemporaries to enjoy the higher values of love and friendship, or prayer and contemplation, and thus find themselves [PP 20] .

Of course, one of the many calamitous consequences of the capitalist economic order and the politics it produces is the devaluation of human solidarity. In contrast, Paul stressed how the social question ties all human beings together in every part of the world [PP 3] This is not only the case across space but equally so across time. Therefore we cannot disregard the welfare of those who will come after us to increase the human family. the reality of human solidarity brings us not only benefits but also obligations [PP 17]. Paul obviously did not foresee our contemporary climate-change deniers, but his words of warning surely should challenge any mentality which would imperil future generations for the short-term profits of certain industries which have disproportionate influence in our politics.

Paul did foresee - and was certainly sensitive to - the culturally destructive dimension that renders economic development so ambivalent. He warned of the tragic dilemma: either to preserve traditional beliefs and structures and reject social progress; or to embrace foreign technology and foreign culture, and reject ancestral traditions with their wealth of humanism. The sad fact is that we often see the older moral, spiritual and religious values give way without finding any place in the new scheme of things [PP 10].

History has not been kind to Paul VI, to whom it fell to try to steer the Church through one of the more challenging periods in her history. Indeed, history will likely judge him harshly in particular for his role in enabling a liturgical radicalism, which, rather than following the plan for authentic reform proposed by the Second Vatican Council, turned out to be more like a dismantling of the Roman Liturgy - a development which was both a symptom of and in its own way a further contribution to the Church's apparently increasing loss of self-confidence in the face of secular modernity. Even so, Populorum Progressio shines as one of the brighter accomplishments of Paul's troubled pontificate, proclaiming a perennially necessary corrective to the spirit of secular modernity and a  message that continues to challenge the world today.

Musicam Sacram + 50

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the post-conciliar Instruction Musicam Sacram, which, despite its felicitous name, was ironically contemporaneous with the virtual disappearance of traditional sacred music in many  communities and its replacement by "folk" and other musical idioms more secular in inspiration. Pope Francis himself, speaking last week to participants at an International Conference on Sacred Music, recently added his own comments to the unending discussion about liturgical music, suggesting sacred music has sometimes suffered from mediocrity, superficiality, and banality. His comments are available for reading on the Holy See's website - but only in Italian!

In my opinion, perhaps the most radical thing that Musicam Sacram did was to breakdown the previously absolute wall between sung Mass and low Mass. It introduced the principle that some parts of the Mass might be sung without requiring that all the traditionally sung elements in a sung Mass must in fact be sung. One curious consequence of this was the widespread disappearance of the practice of singing the Creed, for example. Even more significant, however, by effectively releasing celebrants with limited musical skill from the obligation to sing the celebrant's parts, it largely eliminated the celebrant's musical role and made musical education in seminary seem unnecessary. For example, had I been a seminarian a little earlier, I would presumably have learned the basics of chant. Most likely I would never have become an accomplished singer, but I would at least have been able competently to read the music for the celebrant's parts and to execute them at a minimum standard of acceptability. As a seminarian in the 1980s, however, I never received even an hour of musical training. Hence the common situation in which some parts traditionally sung by the celebrant (e.g., the intonation of the Gloria) have been taken over by musically trained laypersons, while the rest (e.g., the Preface) are usually simply recited.

At the time of Musicam Sacram and ever since, the dominant debate has been about the suitability of the secular musical forms which were introduced into the liturgy, forms which in those early days were often of the guitar-based "folk" idiom. It cannot be denied that some of that music was actually reasonably good music and did genuinely appeal to its audience - a generation, some of whom nostalgically cling to it even today. Of course, one of the motivations for introducing such music was the (even then) dubious theory that that music would somehow appeal to young people and so somehow keep them in the Church. That it could not accomplish any such outcome and in fact failed abysmally at it should not have come as a surprise. Whether good or bad, no music should not have been burdened with the expectation that it could accomplish such an outcome. Today, of course, those who nostalgically cling to the musical innovations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc., sometimes still make analogous claims, despite the obvious fact that their music in no way resembles the music of contemporary young people and makes no actual connection with young people today. 

But the real problem, I think, with what happened to liturgical music in the post-conciliar period is rooted in what immediately preceded it. Liturgically traditional communities today regularly celebrate sung Masses, and they generally celebrate them well, both ceremonially and musically. But that was hardly the experience of most American Catholics on the eve of the liturgical changes. Most American Catholics sadly seldom experienced sung Mass at all - usually only at funerals, Christmas Midnight Mass, and (for the really devout) the special liturgies of Holy Week and Forty Hours. The Sunday High Mass was faithfully celebrated in parishes, but it was seldom the best attended Mass. Most people fulfilled their Sunday obligation at a 30-40 minute low Mass. Other than the hymns at Benediction, most American Catholics had very little familiarity with Catholic liturgical music. (One of my relatives once dismissively said of sung Masses, "Who needs them?") The "folk" Masses and other subsequent musical fads did not replace the Church's rich musical heritage for most American Catholics. They replaced an absence of music.

I myself as a teenager, very much influenced by the pre-conciliar liturgical movement, was perhaps atypical in my preference for sung Mass. But, even so, my exposure to the rich and diverse treasury of traditional sacred music was modest - Gregorian chant as sung by my parish's choir of men and boys and a smattering of sacred polyphony (probably Palestrina). The first time I heard something as elaborate as Mozart's Requiem was January 19, 1964, when it was sung at a televised Pontifical Requiem Mass Cardinal Cushing celebrated at Boston's cathedral for the recently assassinated President Kennedy. (Even Kennedy's actual funeral Mass on November 25, 1963, however, had been a low Mass!)

It has often been suggested that the original aim of the liturgical renewal was to eliminate the low Mass and to restore the sung liturgy to its traditional and proper place in Catholic life by facilitating people's more effective participation in it. In retrospect, however, what happened instead was more like the effective elimination of the traditional sung liturgy in favor of a continuation of a kind of low Mass - now embellished with various musical elements of various genres, some good and perhaps worthy of liturgical use, much of it not.. 

A Revolutionary Century

100 years ago today, on March 7, 1917, workers at a large industrial plant in Petrograd (the patriotically renamed capital of the Russian Empire) called a strike for the next day, thus setting in motion what we now know as the Russian Revolution - the 20th century's revolution par excellence, ranking right up there with the 18th-century's French Revolution in its disastrous disruption of society and overall harm to the human race. 

At that time, Orthodox Russia still followed the Julian calendar, civilly as well as religiously. So it was still February 22 in Russia. Hence the familiar title "February Revolution" for the calamitous events of March 1917 - and the analogous title "October Revolution" for the even more calamitous Bolshevik takeover on November 7, 1917.

Had there been some more genuine statesmen in positions of power in 1914, they might have successfully prevented World War I from ever even starting - or, failing that, they might at least have stopped it sooner, thus minimizing its tragic consequences. Had there been a more genuine statesman in the White House in 1917 instead of Woodrow Wilson, the United States might never have tipped the scales in World War I with all the destabilizing effects that followed. That first scenario might well have prevented the Russian Revolution. The second might at least have prevented the spread of the revolutionary infection throughout much of Europe at the end of the war and for decades to follow.

Admittedly, the Russian Empire under the Romanov dynasty left a lot to be desired. Still the final decades of the 19th century saw the end of Russian serfdom and the beginnings of a genuine middle class. The turn of the 20th century saw sufficient industrial development such that Russia came to be considered among the major industrial nations by the beginning of the war.  That war and the disastrous revolution it facilitated sent Russia backward economically, not forward. And it would take much of the 20th century for Russia even to catch up again to where she had been in 1914

The international order had to live with the disorder introduced by the Russian Revolution until eventual end of direct Russian imperial domination of Eastern Europe and of Russian meddling elsewhere around the world - and the internal collapse of the Soviet Union itself - in the last decade of the 20th century. For the peoples of the former Russian Empire and former Soviet Union, the legacy has been bitter and the price paid in lives lost cultures destroyed has been high. To this must the be added the toll on a century's moral and intellectual life by a morally bankrupt ideology.

If ever there were any reason to believe that there is a "right side of history," that fallacy should have been decisively discredited by the damage done to real human beings and their societies by the evils unleashed by World War I, notably the Russian Revolution, the damaging effects of which are still so evident one century later.

The Nave of Lent

Ash Wednesday and the three following ferial days post cineres are a later addition to the original 6-week Roman Lent, which begins this Quadragesima Sunday, with its station at the Pope's "cathedral" in Rome. the papal basilica of Saint John Lateran (Photo). If Ash Wednesday and the three following days are sometimes imagined as the "vestibule" of Lent, then the four weeks which begin this Sunday, can accordingly be considered as representing the "nave" of Lent. 

The modern popularity of Ash Wednesday easily overshadows the original significance of this Sunday as the original beginning of Lent, but the day's ancient association with the "election" of catechumens for initiation at Easter, revived in the modern Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, still identifies a major transitional moment - for those who are disposed to take notice. (In the traditional Roman Rite, this distinction was even clearer, inasmuch as many of Lent's proper features - the hymns, chapters, responses, and responsories in the Divine Office, for example - began on this Sunday, not on Ash Wednesday. as they now do) 

Again, this Sunday’s historic importance in the liturgical calendar is highlighted by the fact that the Roman stational church is the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the “Mother Church” of Rome, the Pope’s official “cathedral.” Dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, Rome’s Lateran Basilica seems an especially appropriate place to recall Christ’s 40-day fast in the desert, the obvious model for our own much more modest 40 days of fasting and prayer!

But before we even get to the desert, the Church takes us all the way back to the beginning – to the garden. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed – formed, incidentally, out of the clay of the ground, the same ground out of which God made the various trees and, a little later, the various wild animals and various birds of the air. The story is a familiar one. So we are apt to let it gently pass over us (in one ear and out the other, as the saying goes). But it’s presence and prominence in this Lenten liturgy suggests that would be a mistake. It’s a story, to be sure, but more like a meditation, a study in story-form of who we are and what we’re about.

In this story that says so much, we learn that life itself is a gift. So too is the world, which we are not the owners of, but more like tenants, renters. And, if - as each year gets hotter and the climate changes more erratically, while climate-change deniers pursue short-term profit at the cost of long-term risk - this world, in which we are tenants, is itself becoming less like a garden and more like a desert, the biblical story has something to say about that too! 

The original biblical garden is traditionally associated with somewhere in what is now Iraq - a place that in the actual present practically epitomizes everything that is the opposite of the biblical garden. As this world, which God has rented to us, deteriorates increasingly ("progressively"?) from garden to desert, everything about the Genesis story seems even more, rather than less, relevant to our situation today.

In the middle of the original garden grew a tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which the story presents as a kind of boundary, not to be touched, let alone eaten from.  It’s a reminder of limitations - that we human beings didn’t make our world, that we don’t own it, and that we are not completely in charge.

Neither, however, is the smart, cunning serpent, the tempter, who always acts as if he were in charge and whom tradition treats as a figure for the devil – the same Satan who will tempt Jesus in the desert, pretending there to be in charge of all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence.

Like the seductions of modernity and of our modern politics, the devil is a liar, but a subtle, cunning liar. Superficially, what the serpent says to Eve is true. Adam and Eve will not die – at least not right away. And their eyes will be opened to know what is good and what is evil. But, when what the tempter promises actually happens, then we quickly see how well we have been deceived!

True, they did not die right away. But die they eventually would, as we will too. Through one man, Saint Paul says, sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all. The same ground we once came from, originally filled with the Creator’s breath of life, to that same ground we must, on account of sin, return now in death – as we were again so dramatically reminded in the ritual of this past Ash Wednesday. In case the ashes themselves weren’t clear enough as a symbol of death, we were also told it in words: Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return!

As sadly so often happens with our impoverished Lectionary, the 1st reading ends abruptly. Adam and Eve try to repair the damage they have done by making themselves clothes – in effect hiding from one another. They will soon also try to hide from God, for the tempter had taught them to think of God as an enemy, as an oppressor. But, as the story continues, God does not abandon them to their guilt. That’s the good news. And it looks ahead, looks forward, to the even bigger and better news Saint Paul proclaims in Sunday's 2nd reading. But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one, the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.

Thanks to Adam’s sin, the garden has become a desert. That is where we find ourselves now, and so where we encounter the devil – just as Jesus did. But because Jesus has himself not just encountered but defeated the devil, our own victory over Satan is already in sight. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.