Holy Thursday

This day we call Holy Thursday uniquely straddles the border between Lent and Easter. In the ancient Church, the Pope celebrated an end-of-Lent morning Mass at which those who had done public penance during Lent were reconciled.  The elaborate ritual for the Reconciliation of Public Penitents could still be found in our liturgical books up until the 1960s, even though by then it hadn’t been used for over 1000 years.

A second, centuries-old Holy Thursday tradition is the Bishop’s blessing of the holy oils, which will be used throughout the coming year in the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, holy orders, and anointing of the sick. Finally, with the setting of the sun, the Church crosses the threshold from Lent into Easter with this evening’s remembrance of the Last Supper, at which the various themes so long connected with this day all come together in the Eucharist. For tonight we don’t just remember the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, as some interesting thing that happened a long time ago. Rather we celebrate how Jesus’ Last Supper continues in the Church as the Lord’s Supper.

But first the oils! I mentioned that the holy oils the bishop blessed this week will be used throughout the year in the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, holy orders, and anointing of the sick. In addition, that the same oil is also used in the consecration of altars and churches. So the sacred chrism consecrated by the Bishop this week will be the same chrism used by him to consecrate the altar and walls of our beautiful new cathedral less than 11 months from now. By coincidence, this happens to be Immaculate Conception’s week to host the Cathedral’s Dedication Stone, which as you can see is on display in front of the altar where the newly blessed holy oils have been placed (photo). The two – the oils and the stone - really do belong together, for together they remind us of our unity as one Church, as a church community united around our Bishop as successor of the Apostles – the same Apostles Jesus instructed in such detail at that Last Supper which we remember tonight. None of them, of course, as they sat down to supper that night, knew that - by the time Passover began, 24 hours later - Jesus would be dead and buried, and that they would all be in hiding.

But we know. And so, with this festive celebration this evening, the Church begins the first of three dramatic days – the first devoted to Christ crucified, the second to Christ buried, and the third to Christ risen. We will end this first day, some 24 hours from now, at the foot of the cross, but we begin by remembering the most memorable meal in all of human history – remembering and celebrating how Jesus’ Last Supper continues as a perpetual institution in the Church as the Lord’s Supper.

Remembering is indeed what this night is all about. The church’s official Ceremonial instructs us to remember “how the Lord Jesus, loving those who were his own in the world even to the end, offered his body and blood to the Father under the appearances of bread and wine, gave them to the apostles to eat and drink, then enjoined the apostles and their successors in the priesthood to offer them in turn” [Ceremonial of Bishops, 297].

The Church celebrates this sacrament daily, and she commands us to come together at least weekly to remember Jesus’ words and actions and to celebrate their continued, ongoing power to make us who we are and transform us into who we hope to become.

Our life together as Christ’s Church, centered on the sacraments is a great inheritance – received from the apostles and passed on through countless generations of people like us. Whether in the splendor of a papal basilica or the simplicity of a missionary outpost, whether with the Bishop in his cathedral or with friends and neighbors in our local parish church, this same Lord’s Supper has been celebrated and treasured generation after generation as our most precious inheritance – an inheritance which it is now our precious privilege to share with the world today and to pass on to tomorrow’s generations to come.

But this Lord’s Supper also a challenge. The four short verses we just heard from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians (the earliest written account of the Last Supper) are part of a longer text (which used to be read in its entirety at this Mass), which highlights the Corinthians’ conflicts, dissensions, and factions – in other words, their resistance to being changed by the very Eucharist that they were privileged to experience together.

We hear a lot in the news about the seriously vexing problems of increasing inequality and of the many divisions in our society, and we can certainly see and experience the consequences of such divisions all around us. Well, back then, among those Corinthian Christians to whom Saint Paul was writing, all was not well either, even among themselves. It seems that the values of Roman secular society, with its social and class distinctions, its divisions, and its inequalities, were making themselves felt even within the Church community, to the point that even the celebration of the Lord’s Supper seemed to mirror those distinctions, divisions, and inequalities. Whatever was going on, Paul’s point that he was making to the Corinthian Christians was that they were missing the very meaning of the Lord’s Supper and the opportunity it offered for them to be transformed by it.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the world with them to Mass, any more than we can. And that is why being here together is so important, why what happens here at this altar is so important, enabling us to leave here somehow different from how we came, enabling us to take something new with us when we go back out into the world, something very different from the same old stuff which we are so easily tempted to bring in with us from the world.

In one of his early 5th-century Easter sermons, Saint Augustine invited his hearers to see themselves in the Eucharistic bread and wine. So just as you can see that what has been made is one, he told them, mind you are one yourselves too in the same way, by loving each other, by holding one and the same faith, one and the same hope, an undivided charity. … You are this together with us; we all take this together, all drink together, because we all live together. [Sermon 229]

So it is no accident that we consecrate church buildings and set them apart by their architecture and external appearance from the secular world and its transitory activities, as earlier generations of Knoxville Catholics did here at Immaculate conception 130 years ago and as our entire diocese is now doing with our new cathedral.

For the Eucharist is not some meal just like any other, and the community it creates is not some social institution like any other. What happens here in this sacred place is meant to make us, in an absolutely important way, different from who we would otherwise have been, different from the world we came here from and to which we must for the time being return.

The Gospel account we just heard tells us that the Devil had already induced Judas to hand Jesus over. In the next scene that follows tonight’s account, after Judas had received a piece of bread from Jesus, Satan entered him, and Judas went out into the night. He left Jesus and the other disciples behind. He left behind the Church community that could have been his, in order to commit himself instead to Satan’s cause.

What was the piece of bread that Jesus gave Judas? Was it the Eucharist? What a warning is there in that for us?

So too for us tonight – and every time we come together to celebrate the Lord’s Supper - how we depart from Mass may matter much more than how we arrive. What kind of person have I become, and what kind of community have we become, because of what we have experienced and shared together in this very special and sacred place, this consecrated place set apart from the ordinary, secular world? What will we take with us from this sacred, consecrated place to remake ourselves and our world? What will we take with us from this sacred, consecrated place to proclaim to one another and to all the world the death of the Lord until he comes?

Homily for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, Holy Thursday, April 13, 2017.

Entering Easter

In April 1874, Father Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Fathers, traveled from Cairo to Jerusalem. He had gone abroad, to Europe and the Middle East, in search of restored health, a goal which eluded him for more or less the rest of his life. Like so many pilgrims, both before him and since, however, he certainly experienced the special spiritual intensity that can accompany a pilgrim’s sojourn in the Holy Land. 

Reflecting on his experience, he wrote: In reciting the Gloria and the Credo, after having been in the localities where the great mysteries which they express took place, one is impressed in a wonderful manner with their actuality. The truths of our holy faith seem to saturate one’s blood, enter into one’s flesh, and penetrate even to the marrow of one’s bones.

Although, unlike Hecker, I was not yet a priest when I visited those holy places in 1993, I could certainly experience some of what he seems to have felt, from just being in those special places. For centuries, pilgrims have eagerly sought that sense of direct connection. The presence of Stations of the Cross in every Latin Catholic church testifies to the desire to bring that connection home, so to speak.

Holy Week is a profound sacramental. It is so much more than a prolonged passion play, some dramatic re-enactment of long-ago events. Even so, not unlike the devotion of the Way of the Cross, historically Holy Week evolved in part as a stretching out of the Easter mystery over time to experience through celebrating at special times what pilgrims in Israel experience through being present at special places.

And so it is that two millennia later we still re-enact Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. We still commemorate the institution of the Lord’s Supper on the anniversary of the Last Supper, even washing feet in imitation of that unique occasion. We venerate the unveiled Cross on Good Friday in imitation of pilgrims’ veneration of the exposed relic of the True Cross in Constantine’s Basilica. And we imitate the night of the Exodus by keeping vigil until we arrive at the empty tomb.

Secular time continues to follow its commercial rhythm, regardless of Holy Week's sacramental time. It seems that the rites and ceremonies of Holy Week can barely compete for attention against the background of so much activity and business. Precisely by using time to take us, as it were, to another place, however, Holy Week offers those who enter its unique rhythm an unparalleled alternative to our fragmented modern existence, wherever we are.  

(Photo: View of the Holy City from the Church of Dominus Flevit).

Carry The Torch

As in past years, I and several of my parishioners attended the annual "Carry the Torch" fundraising luncheon for Knoxville's Volunteer Ministry Center. (VMC was founded by a group of downtown churches back in 1987 to deal with the growing problem of homelessness in the community..VMC operates four main programs: the VMC Resource Center, the Bush Family Refuge, Minvilla Manor, and the VMC Dental Clinic. The goal for all VMC's clients is housing, utilizing case management and a "Housing First" approach in order to combat - and end - homelessness.)

The featured speaker at this year's lunch was Erin Gruwell, an educator and president of The Freedom Writers Foundation. When teaching English at Wilson High School in Long Beach, CA, she responded to her students and the way so many of them were effectively written off by the educational system. She transformed their classroom experience and in the process helped transform her students’ lives. Her and their story was captured in The Freedom Writers Diary - How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them. The book became the basis for the film, The Freedom Writers, in which Hilary Swank played the role of Erin Gruwell.

This year, I was privileged to be invited to deliver the Invocation (which explains why I as at the front table, from which I took the above photo.). My prayer was: 

Almighty and ever faithful God, you created men and women in your image and commanded us to recognize your image in one another.

We thank you for speaking your word to us and commissioning us to bring your word to all in the gathering of grace that is your kingdom on earth.

We ask you to enable us to recognize the extent and variety of human needs in our community, and to continue to come together as your people to respond to those needs.

We ask you to strengthen and bless this collaboration that we may accomplish the goals you have set for us.

Bless all of us gathered here today to support this ministry and to witness to our mission to extend your kingdom in our world.

Send us forth from here renewed in our commitment as neighbors to one another, practitioners of your peace, promoters of your justice, and servants of your compassion and mercy.

Bless this meal we share that it may be a sign to us of your blessing and our calling to share your blessing with all.

All this we ask of You who live and reign for ever and ever

Palm Sunday

Some 24 years ago, on the second day of my summer study in Israel, my former novice director took me to a village in Samaria (on the so-called West Bank) for the 1st Mass of a newly ordained local priest. We found everyone gathered at the village boundary, around an arch of palm branches and balloons, waiting there for the new priest to enter his hometown. As the procession began and all the villagers started shouting and waving palms in the air, my former novice director smiled and said to me: now you see what Palm Sunday looked like!

The Gospel read at the beginning of this Sunday’s Mass recalls Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem for the Passover holiday and his triumphal entry – minus the balloons but still full of messianic symbolism – into the Holy City.  We commemorated that event today with our own triumphal palm procession - again minus the balloons, but waving palms, and singing that wonderful 9th-century hymn that Theodulph, the Bishop of Orleans, composed for this very occasion around the year 810.

The rest of the story, which we have just heard, reveals the next phase of that journey – to the cross and to the tomb.

The cross stands as the central symbol of Christianity because the cross is precisely where we meet God in our world, just as the tomb – the eventually empty tomb – shows where he is taking us, where we now watch and wait with Mary Magdalene and the other disciples.

Meeting Christ on the cross we somehow sense a new connection with God that we would hardly have felt if he himself had not done what we all have to do – and are all so afraid to do – to die.

Jesus is God’s way of participating in our human world, God’s great act of solidarity with us in our day-to-day suffering and our final mortality.

In his Passion, Jesus confronted, once and for all, the power of evil in the world. Having done so, he invites us this week to accompany him to the cross and to the tomb – because, thanks to the cross of Christ, death no longer has the final word in our world. 

Homily for Palm Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 9, 2017.

As Holy Week Approaches

Catholics of my age will likely remember little or nothing of the traditional, unreformed rites of Holy Week, prior to Pope Pius XII's 1955 reforms. My minimal childhood memory of Holy Thursday from when the Mass of the Lord's Supper was still  in the morning is a fleeting one. I remember the church being very crowded (as churches tended to be in those days), and I remember the schoolgirls in their white communion dresses solemnly walking past in the procession at the end of Mass. I have no memories at all of the other Holy Week ceremonies, for the obvious reason that as a child I would not have attended them. 

In those days, when the Easter Vigil service was still celebrated in the early hours of Holy Saturday morning, I suspect not many were in church to hear the bells ring at the Gloria. But I do remember how, promptly at noon on Saturday, when Lent ended and Easter officially began, my grandmother would sit us all down at the kitchen table, where obedient to her command, we cracked open our Easter eggs, while we listened on the Italian radio station to the splendid celebratory cacophony of the bells of Rome (pre-recorded six hours earlier).

But I do remember how Pope Pius XII's Holy Week reforms were implemented and received in my parish - and presumably similarly elsewhere. (The above photo is of the High Altar of my home parish as it looked at Easter 1963.) For the most part they were well received and enthusiastically embraced (not least by budding liturgical enthusiasts such a myself). So this year, in preparation for Holy Week, I re-read Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae, the 1955 Decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites reforming (or, in the ideologically preferred language of the time, "restoring") the order of Holy Week.

Nowadays Pius XII's liturgical reforms tend to be seen through the prism of what followed - in other words as harbingers, whether for better and for worse, of Paul VI's much more radical reforms. That may make sense historically, but it misses the very different quality of how Holy Week was actually experienced thanks to Pius XII. In that sense, it really was a "restoration" of sorts - not so much in the polemical sense of being a restoration of real or imagined past liturgical practices, but in the even more important sense of really restoring the Holy Week liturgy to the faithful in a way they could begin to appropriate it in their devotional lives.

It was probably still the case then that the majority of Catholics attended only on Palm Sunday and Easter morning. Even so, it was widely believed at the time that the reformed services were being well attended and appreciated. For how long that lasted may be a matter of some debate, but at least at first there was certainly some real enthusiasm generated by the reform - if only because of the novelty of the hours at which the services were celebrated, the novelty of Communion on Good Friday, and the widespread publicity attached to the changes. There was even a TV program about Holy Week (filmed at some parish in France, I believe) which showed the services being celebrated in that parish - and also gave us a glimpse of the newly restored Holy Thursday morning Chrism Mass, which I doubt anyone I knew at the time ever saw celebrated in real life!

Now, of course, with generally diminished church attendance, it should come as no surprise if a more traditional pattern has reasserted itself, with widespread attendance only on Palm Sunday and Easter morning.   That's fine. But, for those drawn to how the Church lives out and teaches its story though the liturgy, the rest of Holy Week remains incomparably rich. As Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae tried to remind us,  "the liturgical rites of the Sacred Week possess not only a singular dignity but also a particular sacramental power and efficacy for nourishing the Christian life."