The King's Birthday

I suppose that, if ours were an acknowledged monarchy rather than merely a de facto one (like the Roman Empire under the Caesars), today might be a holiday. For today is our king's birthday. President Donald Trump beat me into the world by almost two years at the very beginning of the "Baby Boom." Happy 71st Birthday, Mr. President! Since Marilyn Monroe is lamentably no longer with us, we will have to make do with this old recording from May 1962: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqolSvoWNck.

By convenient coincidence, today is also Flag Day, the official birthday of "Old Glory." As we all learned in grade school, on June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress passed the Flag Act, which declared that the new flag would have "13 stripes alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation." At 240, the flag trumps all of us aging Baby boomers in seniority! If we ignore the changes over the years in the number of stars, the US Flag is surely one of the oldest national flags continuously in use. Even the current UK "Union Flag" dates back only to the creation of the United Kingdom in 1801, when the Irish Cross of St. Patrick was added to the already existing combination of England's Cross of St. George and Scotland's Cross of St. Andrew. But, if we treat that change analogously to the addition of stars to the US flag, then, of course, the British "Union Flag" - uniting the Crosses of England and Scotland and dating back to 1606 - is older than the US flag. (That British flag was obviously familiar to the American founders and presumably provided the American emblem with its famous red,white, and blue color scheme.)

For all the attention the flag gets in American popular culture, however, Flag Day has never managed to make it into the pantheon of official federal holidays (of which there are 10). So the day is acknowledged or not, according to individual and local priorities. (It has, however, been a state holiday in Pennsylvania since 1937.)

According to https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/proclamations. as of May 31 President Trump has proclaimed the month of June 2017 "National Homeownership Month," "National Ocean Month," "African-American Music Appreciation Month," "National Caribbean-American heritage Month," and, last but not least, "Great Outdoors Month." Given the role devotion to the flag has often had in our popular culture (obviously a symbolic substitute for a monarch as a focus of national loyalty and symbol of unity), perhaps a presidential proclamation of a "National Flag Appreciation Month:" might be in order. 

Or, even better, a full-fledged federal holiday, honoring both the king's birthday and the flag's?

Trinity Sunday

According to a famous legend, Saint Patrick is said to have used a shamrock to teach the doctrine of the Trinity when evangelizing Ireland in the 5th century. (The lovely window of Saint Patrick in our church is one of the few depictions of him not holding a shamrock!)The fact that Patrick had to resort to using a shamrock illustrates our awkwardness when talking about the Trinity. The problem perhaps is not so much that the Trinity is a supernatural mystery, which we can never completely understand, but rather that it seems so hard to connect with experientially. It seems abstract, more like a philosophical idea than an expression of our regular religious experience.

And yet, as ideas go, it is inseparable from our religious experience as Christians. All of us, after all, were baptized in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, we – or our parents and godparents speaking on our behalf - all made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. My sins have been forgiven many times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And as a priest I have been privileged many times to absolve the sins of others - in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. I have officiated at weddings – at which rings have been exchanged, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We have all been blessed – and have blessed ourselves – so many times in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We began Mass this morning with the Sign of the Cross, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and we will end it with a blessing, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The principal prayers of the Church’s liturgy are all explicitly addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In short, our entire lives in the Church have been defined, formed, and shaped by the awesome mystery of who God is, that defines the Triune God’s relationship with us and ours with God. If we seem sometimes to take the idea of the Trinity for granted, that may be because the Holy Trinity seems to surround us all the time.

So for all its apparent abstraction, the doctrine of the Trinity is our fundamental – and uniquely Christian – insight into who God is.  Created in the image and likeness of God, we all have a built-in natural longing for God. So we can theorize about God’s existence by our ordinary, natural reasoning process. But who God is - in himself - that is something we cannot possibly know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us.

Even so, the words we use to speak about God’s Trinitarian self - for example, the language of the Nicene Creed that we sing every Sunday at Mass – that language is very much the product of a process of reasoned discussion and debate in the early Church. We call it the Nicene Creed in memory of the 1st Ecumenical Council of the Church, held at Nicaea (in what is today Turkey) in 325, at which the famous “318 Holy Fathers” put the Church’s Trinitarian faith into official language. (The Creed we recite at Mass is actually the product of the first two ecumenical councils – Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 – and is officially called the “Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed” or “Nicene Creed,” for short).

The issue at Nicaea in 325 was the so-called Arian heresy which denied the divinity of Christ. It was in response to this that the Creed was composed, formally articulating the Church’s faith in who God is. After that, devotion to the Holy Trinity developed in the Church and increased throughout the Middle Ages. Eventually in 1334, Pope John XXII established this feast for the entire Church and directed that it be celebrated annually on the Sunday after Pentecost.

We do not worship three gods, but one God – a unity of Persons in one divine nature or substance. Each of the three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is truly God. They are distinct. – not three modes or appearances of God but three identifiable Persons, each distinctly God, but inherently in relationship to each other. That is to say, their distinction resides in their relationship to each other: the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both.

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, who perfectly reflects his Father, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself. Who God is in himself is how God acts. And so how God acts reveals who God is.

Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as he did to Moses in today’s 1st reading, as one who reveals himself in how he acts toward us: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. It was to such a God that Moses prayed – as we all pray – do come along in our company … and receive us as your own.

God’s action outside himself is the indivisible, common work of the Trinity of Persons, which each Person performs according to his unique personal property. Thus the 2nd Ecumenical Council of Constantinople [553] confessed: “one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are.”

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who, as the visible image of the invisible God, came down from heaven, so that the world might be saved through him. Risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, the Son has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son, in both the inner life of the Trinity and his gift of love for the world. The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ, the Church. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church.

So it is no merely theoretical abstraction that God's grace is given to us from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. As the 4th century Bishop and Doctor of the Church, St. Athanasius, famously wrote in one of his letters: “When we share in the Spirit, we possess the love of the Father, the grace of the Son, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit himself.”

Hence, the Church faithfully follows Saint Paul in praying: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all!

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 11, 2017

A Pig's Breakfast

"A Pig's Breakfast" is a Britishism for a messed up muddle, which is what UK politics looks like right now in the wake of yesterday's disastrous parliamentary election that appears to have resulted in a "hung parliament." (It wasn't totally disastrous. The SNP lost something like 21 votes and both Conservatives and Labour picked up seats in Scotland, which was all to the good.)

Presumably Prime Minister Theresa May (the first regular, committed, weekly church-attender in 10 Downing Street in decades) had called this election ti increase her party's majority and so strengthen Britain's hand in the upcoming Brexit negotiations with the EU. Instead she has no majority and a likely much weaker position vis-a-vis the EU.

That is obviously not good for her, or for her party, or (most importantly) for the United Kingdom. Particularly worrisome is the increased stature of the radical leader of the Labour Party, whom NY Times columnist Ross Douthat recently characterized as a kind of analogue on the British extreme Left to marine Le Pen on France's extreme Right. However that may be, the ascendancy of such an extreme figure as Jeremy Corbyn again highlights the ongoing collapse of traditional politics in Western democracies, of which the traumatizing 2016 US election of President Donald Trump has thus far been the leading example.

Since Theresa May is a woman, comparisons have inevitably been made to Hillary Clinton's stumbles last year. And perhaps there is some similarity in how both underestimated the degree of popular disenchantment with governing political elites and politics as usual. The more important question, of course, is where all this will lead. Whatever kind of coalition Theresa May may manage to cobble together, whatever drama passes for (or substitutes for) governance in the US in this age of Trump, the fact remains that Western democracies are increasingly widely perceived by more and more of their citizens as having failed them - something not so widely experienced since the 1930s.

Despite the cultural assaults on traditional institutions that has been going on in Western societies now since the 1960s, it is, of course, those traditional institutions and the values they embody that the US and the UK must now depend upon to keep both our countries on course. 

Churchill - the Movie

Historically based movies often take some creative license with their stories and their characters. The movie Churchill takes this to an extreme that significantly distorts the historical record. Set on the eve of D-Day in June 1944, the movie revolves around Churchill's last-minute opposition to the Allied plan for the Normandy invasion. In fact while Churchill had expressed real reservations about a cross-Channel invasion earlier in the war, he had certainly become a supporter of the plan by June 1944. Indeed, the screenwriter, historian Alex von Tunzelmann, has acknowledged that she "telescoped" Churchill's opposition from earlier in the war into the days just before the invasion. Besides distorting the history,what this does is make Churchill seem at best ridiculous.

Of course, there was much in Churchill's character and way of operating that deserves to be examined more critically, without the aura of heroic greatness that has understandably enveloped him. (The portrayal of an even older Churchill in Netflix' The Crown, for example, certainly fits into that category.) But, it is one thing to pay greater attention to Churchill's personal peculiarities, his depression, his drinking, etc., and still be faithful to historical truth.

That said, the movie is still worth seeing. For one thing it does accurately depict some of the other high drama that preceded D-Day. This included Churchill's scheme to sail along with the invasion himself - something that the King himself had to intervene to stop him from doing. And the movie does depict effectively the stressful last-minute decision whether or not to count on a predicted break in the weather and go ahead with the invasion. That decision was Eisenhower's, of course, and the movie does a good job of portraying how stressful the decision was and ultimately how Ike took the responsibility to make the fateful decision.

Duty and responsibility are central themes in the film. Two characters in particular, Churchill's wife Clementine and King George VI are depicted - excellently - as both embodying those qualities and together calling Churchill himself to a fuller appreciation of how those qualities are to be best practiced in his wartime role. The movie actually does a good job of highlighting the differing challenges - indeed vocations - of political and military leaders and the importance of appreciating those differences in practice. 

The basis for Churchill's alleged opposition to the invasion in the film is his recollection of the carnage of World War I - especially his own role in the Gallipoli disaster - and his resulting revulsion at the idea of sending so many young men to die in a militarily problematic strategy. These are not in fact inappropriate considerations. They do deserve to be raised when discussing military strategy. One only wishes that the movie might have had Churchill voice these concerns in a compassionate way which did not exploit his character flaws to make him look foolish and even deluded.

The Leftovers' Finale

Finally, the  3rd season of The Leftovers has come to an end - and with it the entire series. Seven years after the October 14 "Departure" of 2% of the world's population, Nora (having dramatically separated from Kevin after a fight in a Melbourne hotel) goes ahead with the procedure that will supposedly take her to where her disappeared children have gone. Before doing so, she and her brother Reverend Matt (who is himself terminally ill) have a lengthy conversation about mortality. Then she enters the machine. 

Fast forward several years, and an obviously older Nora (now going by the name Sara) is living on her own in rural Australia, operating a kind of carrier pigeon service. Out of the blue, Kevin (also older) shows up and pretends he's on vacation and just happened to recognize her on the road. As if they had had no history together, he tells her he remembers her from Mapleton and invites her to a local dance. Nora stops at a pay phone to call her therapist - Laurie Garvey, who obviously did not kill herself, and in fact is still living in Texas. Eventually, Nora goes to the dance, which turns out to be a wedding, where she dances with Kevin and catches up on the other characters, but challenges his refusal to acknowledge their past life together. The next day, Kevin comes calling and tells the truth, how he has been searching for her for years. She in turn tells him what happened to her when she travelled through the machine to a parallel earth in which the "Departed" have continued their lives. Having seen how her family have moved on, Nora realizes she doesn't belong there with them and gets the inventor of the machine to build another one to send her back, which is what brings her back to Australia. Kevin believes Nora's story, and the two are reunited in the closest thing this grief-filled series could come to a happy ending.

After all the gratuitous weirdness of the last two seasons, I was almost ready not to like the finale, but I'm such a sucker for romantic schmalz that I couldn't resist the reunion of the the older Kevin and older Nora. I could have done without some of the snarky religious symbolism, but I admit that I really liked the way Nora and Kevin got back together, and I think that having Kevin try the approach of pretending that their history together hadn't really happened was crazy clever. 

Nora's revelation of what happened to those who disappeared that infamous October 14 may be no more plausible than any of the show's other forays into the world beyond, but it is a surprisingly satisfying explanation - including the poignant detail that the disappeared have actually lost even more than those left behind, having in fact lost the entire other 98% of the world that they left behind when they departed. It is almost as if the series is suggesting that, now that we know what has happened to the departed, life on this side of the divide can resume, and the survivors' grief can be put behind them just like human sins on a scapegoat (a ritual actually employed by the participants in the wedding scene). 

Above all, Kevin comes across as somewhat sane again. In the first season, Kevin seemed to me to be someone who was desperately trying to hold his family together, against all odds and in particular against the dysfunctional and secretive behavior of his wife and children. Through the second and third seasons, even against the backdrop of his love for Nora, Kevin seemed to be on a constant collision course with any semblance of sanity. Suddenly, Kevin comes across again as weirdly normal, happy even. He is still living in Miracle (and who knows how crazy that place may still be!). But he is apparently living happily with his entire remaining family (children and ex-wife) and neighbors all nearby - except for Nora, whom he travels to Australia for two weeks each year in the vain hope of finding her. The older Kevin who confronts an older Nora in this final episode seems genuinely at peace with himself and his world - lacking only one thing, his relationship with Nora. But, because he now has his act more or less together, he seems better equipped to listen to Nora's story and accompany her back into what is left of their world, sharing her recognition that the world that is left to them, while it will always be incomplete thanks to the absence of those who departed, is a a full-enough world for them at least to make it work for them. Which is what will have to pass for healing in this planet of the forever sad.