Requiem Aeternam

O God, who commanded us to honor father and mother, have mercy in your compassion on my mother, forgive her her sins, and bring me to see her one day in the gladness of eternal glory (Roman Missal).

My mother died a week ago today at age 97. She was hospitalized on Ash Wednesday, and as late as the following Monday we were actively arranging for hospice care at home. but then she underwent severe kidney failure and died on Thursday, March 5. We made plans for her funeral Mass to be celebrated on March 18, but then the coronavirus epidemic intervened.

So, out of an abundance of caution, to reduce the likelihood of spreading infection in particular among those most vulnerable to this serious illness because of age, we have decided to postpone her funeral to a later date, as yet to be determined, when all will be able to participate without anxiety.

I want to express my personal gratitude for the many expressions of prayer for my mother's eternal rest and salvation and of sympathy for  my family in this time of mourning. My mother was blessed with a long and productive life, in which she saw so much of modern history, had so many experiences, and received so many blessings. We give thanks for that life and for all the blessings she experienced in her many years, even as we now commend her to God's great mercy.

When we are able to do so, her funeral Mass will be celebrated in her parish church in California, in the community where she moved after my father died so as to be near her daughter and her grandchildren, and where she experienced a whole new chapter of her life there, filled with new friends and new experiences. Eventually, she will be interred in New York next to my father and my other sister and near her own parents, bringing the story of her long and faithful life to its close. She was the last of her generation, my family’s last link with our Italian immigrant heritage.

May the angels lead her into paradise; may the martyrs come to welcome her and take her to the holy city, the new and eternal Jerusalem.

Listen!

Any modern pilgrim, who has just had the thrilling 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 God’s glory, a sneak 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 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, one reason why, every year, the Transfiguration Gospel is read early in Lent. In the actual gospel narrative, however, the time-reference points back six days to Peter’s profession of faith and Jesus’ first prediction of his impending passion.  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 a 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. (The others probably also missed the point, but the story focuses on Peter.)

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 eventually one specially chosen nation – to be 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 both of Judaism and of its two daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. In all three religions, Abraham is revered for his faith. 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 what 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 to change, and then to know how to change. It may mean abandoning the familiar for something frightening. It may mean something totally new. Or maybe not. Sometimes, the most challenging change may be to undo bad decisions and recent choices 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 for us is, of course, all because Abraham’s greatest descendent, Jesus, 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 8, 2020.

Super Tuesday

Joe Biden's blowout victory in South Carolina and the evidence of his continuing and strong support in the African-American community served as a catalyst for the Democrats to act on the lesson the Republicans failed to learn in 2016, when the Republicans failed to unite around one alternative to Trump's candidacy. Between South Carolina and "Super Tuesday," first Pete Buttigieg and then Amy Klobichar did the adult thing and dropped out and endorsed Biden, coalescing into a united front to try to nominate the candidate with the most support in the base of the party and the best prospect of winning in November. (Michael Bloomberg has since also dropped out and endorsed Biden.)

Iowa and New Hampshire have a valuable role to play in the nominating process as places where candidates are required to engage with actual voters, but this year's experience has confirmed that we all - and pundits, in particular - need to be more cautious about according "front runner" status to someone simply because he or she does well in Iowa or New Hampshire and correspondingly cautious about counting anyone out based solely on Iowa or New Hampshire. If nothing else, Biden's performance Saturday and on Super Tuesday demonstrates the wisdom of waiting for a lot more voters to have their say.

Letting voters have their say raises the problematic issue of early voting. For philosophical reasons, I have always had mixed feelings about early voting, which prioritizes indiviudal convenience over the communal experience of participating in the civic ceremony of voting. But - in the absence of an Election Day holiday or something similar (like European style weekend voting) - I do recognize the value of convenience and its contribution to increasing total voter turnout. I voted early myself. But one obvious consequence of early voting this year was that many voters ended up voting for a candidate who dropped out on the eve of the actual primary. Given the popularity and obvious utility of early voting, eliminating early voting does not seem to be a desirable option. Introducing some form of ranked-choice voting, however, would be both possible and a great improvement. It could easily be introduced and would offer voters the opportunity to indicate other preferences in case their first choice dropped out or failed to qualify for any delegates.

The Decadent Society (The Book)

New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat, author of (among other books) Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics  (2012) and To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (2018), has now given us The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Although not, like me, a "Boomer," he begins with an elegaic invocation of the 1969 moon landing and the technological and cultural confidence that era exuded. In contrast, he contends, "the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, and abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope."

That is quite an indictment! Such stagnation and exhaustion is what he means by decadence. Referencing Jacques Barzun, Douthat defines decadence in terms of "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and a cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development." He highlights how this is evident in the diminished experience of change in recent decades. He notes, for example, apart from the Internet, not much that is comparable has happened since 1970 to compare with "the cascade of changes between 1870 and 1970." (Is the fact that both the incumbent president and his most likely opponents are all septuagenarians reflect this?)

Douthat's analysis ranges freely from stagnant technological innovation to repetitive pop culture. But the most dramatic - and probably most indicative - evidence of stagnation is our increasing failure to reproduce in sufficient numbers. "Aside from Israel, there is no rich country in the world whose population would not, absent immigration, be on track to shrink." He highlights P.D. James' The Children of Men (the 1992 book, not the movie), which incidentally is set in 2021, to emphasize the dramatic damage done to a society that ceases to reproduce. We are not quite at that point, of course, but below replacement-level birthrates in so many developed societies, with resulting aging populations, fewer workers to support the old, fewer young people to innovate and make progress, and the reduction in natural family networks and the social support they provide, leaving more and more people to grow old alone are already abundantly in evidence. 

This is a natural issue for social conservatives. "Religious practice correlates with higher fertility within most societies, and conservative religious practice correlates especially. But I think it ought to be recognized as more of a challenge as well by those social progressives, whose insensitive policies and uncompromising ideologies have contributed to this development, curiously conniving in different ways with economic, capitalism-affirming conservatives in creating this crisis. The price of the turn to individualism and away from social solidarity in culture as well as economics has been high indeed!

Douthat recognizes a peculiar - and perhaps unexpected - component of this crisis in how "men and women seem to be having more and more trouble successfully and permanently pairing off" apparently thanks in significant measure to "the rise of the Internet, the iPhone, and all the virtual alternatives to old-fashioned copulation."

Meanwhile, in politics, Douthat suggests that "interest group protection racket is the entire Republican agenda," while "the story of Trump's liberal opposition is one of transformation, half accomplished so far, into an ideological formation, woke progressivism, that mirrors the decadent phase of the conservative movement in its ideological demands and litmus tests, its airless certainties, and willful disdain for moderation." At the same time, Douthat also detects the now familiar pattern of stagnation in "our culture war debates" which reflect the same recurring cycle of hard-to-resolve arguments created by the genuine revolutions of fifty or sixty years ago."

Likewise with religion, Douthat detects a persistent "conflict between traditionalists and progressives" that "has been stalemated for forty years, with seemingly new developments ... swiftly bringing the same exact moral and theological debates to the surface, with the same predictable results." He sees a contemporary scene not unlike what Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah described in the 1970s, but without the "ferment and experimentation of the kind that yields religious renewal within existing institutions ... and yields competitors as well."

One possible outcome might be what he calls "sustainable decadence.," already apparent in the numb safety of virtual reality and such sad phenomena as the opioid epidemic. There is also what he calls "the Pink Police State," already somewhat in evidence on some campuses, in which "private conduct is freer in the variety of acts that are allowed, but more closely regulated in any case where there is a possibility of not just physical but also psychological harm." Then there is the reality of climate change, "a crisis created unintentionally by Western industrial development," which "could, in one of history's cruel ironies, help a decadent West hold off challenges from its rivals because it imposes greater ecological costs on the formerly colonized, the formerly defeated, than on that led the first industrial wave and firsts began to warm the world."

Conceding that "human beings can still live vigorously amid a general stagnation," still, he recognizes, "the case for sustainability carries you only so far."

Douthat does have some hope, however. "Africa is the outlier: relatively poor in a world of affluence, still war-torn in a world more at peace than in the past, increasingly religious rather than secularizing, youthful in a graying world, and fertile in an age of sterility and demographic decline." In one particularly hopeful image, he invites us to "imagine a Eurafrica in which black Christians fill the Gothic churches of the Old Continent - something that happens already if you look in the right Parisian neighborhood - and then gain enough power and influence to build new ones, in new-old styles."

He concludes that he "would be a poor Christian if I did not conclude by noting that no civilization - not ours, not any, - has thrived without a confidence that there was more to the human story than just the material world as we understand it."

This is a creatively conservative book of the sort we have come to expect from its author, a challenge to so many common conventions and easy certainties on both sides of our seemingly hopelessly divided society.

Into the Desert

Today is traditionally called Quadragesima Sunday, the ancient beginning of the 40-day season of Lent (called Quadragesima in Latin). Of course, our contemporary Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, but Ash Wednesday and the four extra days that follow were a later addition to the original Lenten season, which actually still starts counting the 40 days today, ending on the Thursday before Easter. This Sunday’s importance in the liturgical calendar is highlighted by the fact that the Roman stational church for today 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!

But before we get to the desert, the Church today 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 its 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 our very life itself is a gift. So too is the world, which we are not the owners of, but more like tenants. And, if our changing climate has highlighted how the damage we humans have done has made the world less of a garden and more like a desert, the story obviously has something to say about that too!

In the middle of the garden grows a tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which we soon learn is a kind of boundary, not to be touched, let alone eaten from.  It’s a reminder that we human beings did not make the world, we don’t own it, and we are not supposed to be completely in charge.

Neither is the smart, cunning serpent, the tempter, who 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.

The devil is a liar, a subtle, cunning liar, a figure for our time if ever there was one. if we listen  to him, then – as Pope Francis warns us in his Message for Lent – ‘we risk sinking into the abyss of absurdity, and experiencing hell here on earth, as all too many tragic events in the personal and collective human experience sadly bear witness.’

Superficially, what the serpent says to Eve is true. Adam and Eve do 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 Adam and Eve did not die right away, but die they did. 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 so famously reminded ritually this past Ash Wednesday, when we were told again: Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return!

As so often happens with our limited Lectionary, the 1^st 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 desert them nor abandon them to their guilt. That’s good news. And it looks ahead, looks forward, to the even bigger and better news Saint Paul proclaims in the 2^nd 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 is where we encounter the devil – just as Jesus did. But, because Jesus has himself already 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.

Every Lent, the Church invites us to break our routine and do something we usually seem so reluctant to do – to take an honest and critical look at ourselves - at where we are, where we are going, where we would like to be going, and how hope to get there.

Homily  for  the  1st  Sunday of Lent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, March 1, 2020.