100 Years of War

100 years ago today, on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on the German Empire, throwing itself into a European conflict (World War I) that need never have begun. But, having begun, what were needed were courageous statesmen to end it, rather than expand it as Woodrow Wilson disastrously did. This year is, of course, also the centenary of the Russian Revolution, one of many catastrophic consequences of World War I and surely one of the most disastrous over the long term. World War I did not just lead to a second World War and the Cold War, it essentially started a century of wars, revolutions, and unimaginable human dislocation and cultural disruption.

The tragedy that was the 20th century (continuing into the 21st) has been a convincing counter-lesson to the previous century's optimistic assessment of human possibilities. It decisively disproved the myth of inevitable human progress and the false view that the progressive secularization of society represents the "right side of  history." But what a price humanity has had to pay for these revelations that really ought always to have been self-evident!

Personal Shopper

As a general rule I avoid horror films. Scary movies generally frighten me! So I probably would never have gone to see Personal Shopper if a friend hadn't earnestly recommended it. Personal Shopper is a French thriller (set mostly in France but spoken mostly in English), that the reviewer for Variety called a “never boring mix of spine-tingling horror story, dreary workplace drama and elliptical identity search.” That's an awful lot for a mere 1 hour and 50 minutes!

The heroine, Maureen (Kristen Stewart), is a young American in Paris. How long she has been there we never really learn, but we know that she stays there in order to connect with her dead twin brother who apparently also lived and worked there and just recently died there. It seems both of them share a common genetic heart defect, and each had promised the other that whoever died first would try to communicate from ... wherever. In short, both the dead brother and the surviving sister are into what has traditionally been called "spiritualism." Some of the movie's scariest scenes suggest some of her interaction with not necessarily benevolent spirits. Also genuinely creepy is her interaction with an anonymous stalker (possibly alive, possibly dead) who starts texting her while she is on a business errand to London.

Meanwhile, Maureen supports herself by working for a celebrity model Kyra. She motorcycles from one fashion designer or jeweler to another or takes the train to London and back to pick up appropriate clothes, shoes, etc., for her barely present boss. Not being into horror or spiritualism and not desirous of being frightened any more than necessary, my attention almost automatically focused more on her subservient relationship with her spoiled rich, high-status, highly entitled, demanding employer. Kyra (and those she surrounds herself) with seem to epitomize the global celebrity elite in all its vacuous rootlessness. Maureen is Kyra's trusted and apparently well paid servant, but (being ultimately always just a servant) is prohibited from trying on Kyra's elegant fashions, which, of course, Maureen wants to do - and does indeed do in a secret ritual of defiant disobedience. Her job is superficially glamorous in the sense that she interacts with glamorous people and places, but at the same time it comes across as a degrading experience of servility to the rich. Maureen evidently  hates her job (and perhaps even her employer). Apart from skyping with her boyfriend who is away working in the Middle East, her only real relationships seem to be with her dead brother's widowed partner and some other friends of his who are eager to buy the house where she goes to try to seance with him.Like so many contemporary busy people who seem to be forever going somewhere, she actually goes nowhere and seems ultimately alone - frightfully so. Throughout, even while busily serving her haughty mistress, her emotional focus remains tied to her brother and to her confusing attempts to communicate with him (or have him communicate with her). 

Whatever the audience is supposed to make of her supposed spiritualism, her (and her friends') responses to her brother's death seem to confirm G.K. Chesterton's often quoted observation: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

But whatever we are supposed to make of her supposed spiritualism, Maureen remains ultimately a sadly haunted solitary - like so many of her contemporaries, most of whom of course lead more conventionally dull existences as neither would-be mediums nor personal shoppers for the glamorous rich. 

The Filibuster

On March 4, 1917, in the final hours of the 64th Congress, 11 anti-war senators led by Nebraska’s George Norris filibustered to prevent a vote on a bill (which had already passed the House) to arm (supposedly still neural) American merchant ships against potential German submarine attacks. In response, President Woodrow Wilson said of the senators: “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”  Four decades later, however, Senator John F. Kennedy, who probably shared Wilson's interventionist worldview, nevertheless included Senator Norris among his "Profiles in Courage" in his 1957 book with that title. 

Thus it has been with the filibuster, both reviled and applauded, both denounced as destructive of democracy and hailed as one of the Senate's venerable traditions, both of which are to some extent true.

But the filibuster seems to have reached a crossroads. When I was growing up, even when I first started studying political science, the filibuster meant senators actually talking a controversial bill to death. The expenditure of effort and the practical damage to the Senate as an effective legislative body combined to keep down the number of actual filibusters. They tended to be associated with profoundly controversial issues of genuine importance, as the 1917 example illustrates. By my time, it was the possibility of civil rights legislation that tended to provoke the threat of filibuster. I can still recall the famous Senate vote to invoke cloture to cut off debate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In those days a two-thirds vote was required for cloture. That has since been reduced to 60, even as filibusters - or at least the notion of filibuster without necessarily people actually talking without end - have increased in frequency, so much so that it is now increasingly almost routine to require 60 votes for most legislation. 

This 60-vote requirement, which was in no way envisioned in the constitution (which does provide for a 2/3 vote in certain specific circumstances), ought, it is sometimes suggested, to contribute to greater bipartisanship, since it may often require the majority party to depend on at least some minority party voted to pass its program in the Senate. De facto, however, as each party's membership has grown more ideologically narrow in recent decades, it has highlighted the partisan divide, making it increasingly difficult (if not impossible) for a congressional majority to govern at all, and (much more truly than when Wilson said it) has increasingly "rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

Of course, other factors have contributed to that as well. Surely, the reckless behavior of the Republican majority in not allowing a vote on the confirmation of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee last year was a very vivid instance of rendering "the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”  Even more contemptible was the threat by some senators, anticipating Hilary Clinton's election as president, to prevent anyone nominated by her from being confirmed. For this reason, the Democratic Senate Minority would, I believe, be responding reasonably by filibustering the Gorsuch nomination and indeed by opposing in whatever way possible any Republican judicial nomination.

It is suggested that this will provoke the Republican Majority to change the Senate's rule for Supreme Court nominations in order to get Gorsuch confirmed. Perhaps it will. The filibuster is already gone for other nominations. But, if the threat to abolish the filibuster is going to function as the equivalent of the reality of its abolition, then why not just have the reality sooner rather than later? While Gorsuch's confirmation will likely be bad for the country, ending the filibuster in my opinion would not necessarily be so bad.

Of course, there have been bad filibusters and good filibusters - in the sense of causes I would or would not have sympathized with. Everyone can take his or her pick. For example, I think Norris, LaFollette, et al., were right in trying to stop Woodrow Wilson, who, however, ended up getting his way anyway - and then took the country into war one month later. But Wilson's nasty characterization of them was not for that reason any less accurate. Any political institutional arrangement, the filibuster included, will likely produce some outcomes I would favor and other outcomes I would not. At its best, the filibuster as a political institution makes the inherently unrepresentative Senate even less responsive to the national will. At its worst it has aggravated our excessive partisanship and political dysfunction, indeed rendering "the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

So let's let go of the filibuster, once and for all.  The immediate policy outcomes may not be very good. But, in the long-term, the health of our political institutions can only be bettered by the elimination of this degradation of democratic governance.

Call the Midwife - Season 6

One of the best television series started its sixth season yesterday. Call the Midwife, on PBS, portrays an order of Anglican sisters and their lay colleagues who, from their religious base at Nonnatus House, treat the predominantly poor people of Poplar, a lower-class neighborhood in London's East End. (The first three seasons were based on the memoir of Jennifer Worth, a nurse who had worked with the Anglican sisters of the Community of Saint John the Divine, an Anglican nursing order founded in 1849.)

Beginning in the 1950s, the sisters and laywomen of Nonnatus House have served the people of Poplar, primarily the pregnant women and mothers and their children, combatting the complex health challenges of pregnancy and motherhood through the many exacerbating complications caused by poverty, prejudice, and family and social dysfunction - including situations which the context of the time made it difficult to acknowledge and approach sympathetically (e.g., single motherhood, homosexuality).  Last year's 5th season brought the story forward to the early 1960s - and to the terrible birth-defects crisis caused by the drug thalidomide.

As I wrote on this blog (May 23, 1916) at the end of that season, not since Going My Way has TV seriously tried to depict the simultaneously ordinary and challenging ministry of religious institutions in such a sympathetic way. Particularly powerful is the compelling presentation of the sisters and how they interact with the community, even while they struggle with their own distinctive vocation and their inner spiritual lives. The sisters, the lay midwives, the local doctor and his family, the local vicar, the constable, and other fixtures in the neighborhood sympathetically recreate the strong communal commitments that combined to ameliorate the dreary, difficult, deprived, and dangerous lives that poor East End slum dwellers endured.

Now comes season 6. Last night's season opener saw Nurse Gilbert at length happily engaged to the local vicar, Tom Hereward, while the doctor's wife is unexpectedly pregnant at last. Less happily, a more disruptive surprise came in the form of a new (and somewhat strict Superior), Sister Ursula (Harriet Walter, who played Lady Shackleton on Downtown Abbey), with the consequent demotion of the much beloved Sister Evangeline. More disturbingly, Sister Mary Cynthia, still suffering from the after-effects of what happened to her in season 5, was suddenly sent away. Meanwhile on the mean streets of Poplar, almost everyone connected with Nonnatus got drawn into in trying to help a pregnant mother (and her young son), who was being abused by her husband, who was himself just out of prison. After some harrowing scenes, somehow through the combined efforts of all, the new mother and her children were permanently relocated to safety, but not before highlighting the challenges facing an abused wife in the world of the early 1960s. All in all, a promising beginning to the new season, exploring both the blessings and the challenges of trying to make it day-to-day in a poor neighborhood and the blessings and the challenges experienced by those serving them while themselves committed to a consecrated form of life.

New Life

The altar crucifixes, the statues, and other sacred images are all covered in purple today. Until relatively recently, this 5th Sunday of Lent was called “Passion Sunday.” With just 2 weeks to go till Easter, today marks the beginning of Lent’s final phase, as the Church focuses our attention more and more on the final events of Jesus’ earthly life – and why those events matter for us today.

The gospel we just heard recounts the last miracle of Jesus’ public life – miracles which John’s Gospel calls “signs” because they function to reveal Jesus and invite us to respond to him with faith. The raising of Lazarus is the last and greatest of these “signs.” But it also led the authorities to seek Jesus’ death. So life and death are mixed together, as the same event that suggests the new life Jesus makes possible for us also results (on the part of his enemies) in a decision for death. The apostle Thomas’s somewhat surprising exclamation, “Let us also go to die with him,” is actually addressed to us, as the Church invites us to accompany Jesus in his final journey.

Meanwhile, what starts out as a genuinely touching and tender story about the human friendship between Jesus and Lazarus - and the dramatic extension of Lazarus’ earthly lifespan - becomes a story about our relationship now with the Risen Christ and his offer to us of a resurrection similar to his own.

The friendship shared by Jesus and Lazarus extended also to his sisters, Martha and Mary, who first sent him the news of their brother’s serious sickness. Strangely, however, he initially seemed to ignore their message, letting Lazarus die and be buried, thus setting the stage for his greatest miracle, but before that for an important conversation with Martha, which for so many centuries has been the standard gospel reading at Catholic funerals.

No doubt we all have had the experience at a funeral or a wake of wanting to say something significant but ultimately having nothing more than the tried and true common expressions of conventional consolation, to answer the sad and anguished feelings that inevitably arise out of broken hearts. Perhaps that was how Jesus’ initial response sounded to Martha.

Listening in on their conversation today, we hear Jesus’ one-sentence answer to Martha, Your brother will rise, (and her rather matter-of-fact response) rather matter-of-factly ourselves. Perhaps we forget that most people in the ancient world, including virtually all non-Jews, were unanimous in their agreement that, whatever else may happen to people when they die, dead people definitely do not rise back to life from the dead. Many modern people today share that view. Thirty-something years ago, when (as a seminarian studying in Washington, DC) I was teaching 1st Communion class at a somewhat upscale parish near the US Capitol, one second-grader totally dismissed what I was trying to teach about the resurrection. “Once you’re dead, you’re dead,” she said. “That’s all there is to it,” she insisted

.

Among 1st-century Jews, however, at least one group – the Pharisees (whose beliefs both Martha and Jesus apparently shared) – held the distinctly contrarian view that, whatever else may happen to people when they die, some sort of general resurrection of the dead would follow - on the last day.

As he did in his earlier conversations with the Samaritan woman and the man born blind, Jesus uses the conversation to reveal something important about himself. Jesus’ surprising answer to Martha, I am the resurrection and the life, was intended to hint ahead to his own unique experience of resurrection – something neither Martha nor anyone else would have understood at the time, since no one was then expecting the Messiah (or, for that matter anyone else) to rise from the dead, all by himself, ahead of everyone else.

We, however, can follow the story backwards, so to speak. We start from the fundamental fact that Jesus has risen from the dead, and then we understand his death - and his whole life - in the light of that.

Lazarus was brought back from the tomb to resume his ordinary life (and then eventually to die again).  Unlike Lazarus, however, Jesus would rise out of his tomb in order to live forever. Bystanders had to take away the stone for Lazarus to be able to come out, and Lazarus himself emerged bound hand and foot. In Jesus’ case, however, no one would either have to help him to come out or have to untie him. The resurrected life of the Risen Christ is something altogether new and different. It signals death’s decisive defeat.

Hence the threat that this subversive belief in the resurrection posed – and still poses – to those who see only the familiar world we now know. John’s Gospel goes on to tell how, as a result of this event, the political leadership decided to kill Jesus - and to eliminate the evidence by killing Lazarus too.

The raising of Lazarus looks ahead to the resurrection of Jesus, which will finally fulfill God’s promise to Ezekiel, which we heard earlier: I will open your graves and have you rise from them. I will put my spirit in you that you may live. I have promised, and I will do it, says the Lord.

Martha’s invitation to Mary, The teacher is here and is asking for you, is addressed to all of us, who are in turn invited to address it to one another - and to a world which seems so lacking in hope and so desperately needs to hear it, but which sometimes seems increasingly at a loss about what Christians actually believe about human death and resurrection. This is increasingly evident, for example, in contemporary trends in funeral customs.

What we as Christians affirm is not some supposedly pre-modern, mythological worldview in contrast to some supposedly scientific modern one. What Christian faith affirms is hope – our hope - in a God who, rather than giving up on his creation, can create something new - in contrast to a worldview that refuses to allow for anything so new.

After experiencing what Jesus had done for Lazarus, many believed in him, but others went to report him to his enemies. Jesus’ own resurrection, to which the experience of Lazarus looks forward, likewise challenges each of us to respond - one way or the other.

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Lent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 2, 2017.