Atlantic Crossing

 

Crown Princess Martha of Norway (1901-1954) was a Swedish princess who married Norway's Crown Prince Olav (later King Olav V) in 1929 and so became the mother of Norway's current King Harald V. In World War II, when the Germans invaded Norway, she and her three children fled across the Swedish border, while the King and Crown Prince continued the struggle, eventually settling with the Norwegian Government-in-Exile in the U.K. for the duration of the war. Martha's presence in her homeland was seen as problematic, possibly putting Sweden's (somewhat pro-German) neutrality in jeopardy. Fortunately, the Crown Prince and Princess had made an official visit to the U.S. the previous year and had met President Roosevelt, who now extended his personal invitation to her to take refuge in the U.S., where she and her children initially stayed with the President in the White House, while promoting Norwegian interests in the war. (I recall the 1983 TV miniseries Winds of War, based on Harman Wouk's 1971 book by that name, in which Princess Martha is one of the guests at a White House dinner attended by the series' main protagonist "Pug" Henry.) In 1941, the Princess accompanied FDR for the famous Atlantic Charter meeting with Winston Churchill. Roosevelt's son James said, "There was no question that Martha was an important figure in Father's life during the war." This was the historical relationship which is the basis for the new 8-part  PBS Masterpiece series Atlantic Crossing, the first episode of which was shown on Easter Sunday, but which can be watched in its entirety on PBS Passport. Here, however, I will confine my comments only to episode one.

After a brief prelude recalling Prince Olav and Princess Martha's happy marriage and their pre-war visit with FDR in 1939, the scene shifts to a year later. Olav and Martha's idyllic family life with their three young children and elderly widowed King Haakon is suddenly disrupted by the German attack on April 9, 1940. We get an insight into the confusing and uncertain political situation in Scandinavia as Denmark quickly falls to the invaders, while Norway's King and Government flee into the snowy north in what we know will be a fruitless exercise in resistance. Meanwhile we witness the sheer terror the German attack causes among the Norwegians - from hapless civilians on a ship to royal retainers separated from their children to the royal family themselves. Olav, of course, accompanies the King and the government officials in what appears to be pointless, obviously ill-planned wandering in the snowy north, just trying to avoid German warplanes. Meanwhile, Martha and the terrified children get in another car and flee toward the Swedish border, where she is denied entry, despite having been born a Princess of Sweden. Up until this point, Martha has appeared almost a passive witness to the complete collapse of her happy little world. Suddenly, she springs into action and tells her driver to ram through the barrier blocking the border. The episode ends with Haakon and Olav somewhere in the snow, while Martha and her children await an uncertain future in a Swedish hotel. Of course, we know, they will all make it out safely. So that somewhat standard ending of the episode on a suspenseful note serves no real dramatic purpose.

Despite the passing of the "greatest generation," World War II continues to fascinate. There seems to be an increased interest in portraying the complexities and ambiguities that upset and disrupted actual (often otherwise ordinary) lives. And that seems to be the direction this is going, highlighting the more "ordinary" aspects of the participants' lives. War, while not the equalizer it is sometimes supposed to be, proves universal in its unpredictable and disruptive impacts.

From Grief to Hope

Easter Sunday, April 5, 2021.

On Easter Sunday, April 16, 1843, more than a year before he became a Catholic, 22-year old Isaac Hecker attended a Catholic Mass for the first time. In his Diary, he wrote how he had found the experience “impressively affecting.” He was especially struck by how the priest pointed, while he was preaching, to a painting of Christ’s rising from the tomb “with a few touching remarks turning all eyes towards it which made his remarks doubly affective.”

However impressive that painting may have been and however effective a prop for that priest's preaching, the gospels are clear that no one actually saw the resurrection. Artists have tried to picture it, of course, but that’s art, highly imaginative art at that. We have nothing either visual or verbal that depicts the actual event of Jesus’ resurrection, an event which apparently defies description. Instead, John's Gospel [John 20:1-9] tells us that on the first day of the week. Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. What Mary and the other women saw and experienced - what we experience and keep experiencing - are the effects of the Resurrection. 

Every morning is, symbolically, a new beginning, a chance to start over. In the normal course of events, however, the Sabbath day of rest should have been followed in the morning on the first day of the week by business as usual – both for the living, who would go back to their regular daily work, and even more so for the dead, decaying in their graves, who (then as now) were universally expected to stay dead. If anything, the ubiquity of dying and death during this terrible pandemic this past year has reinforced for us the awesome reality of death's apparently terrible finality, which separates family, friends, and fellow citizens from one another, as surely as that stone was meant to separate the living from the dead.

John mentions only Mary Magdalene. The other evangelists tell us that she was accompanied by other women as well and that their purpose was to anoint Jesus' dead body. They came in grief, not in hope. Instead they found something surprising and unexpected. For that Sunday – and every day since – the world has awakened not to business as usual, but to something totally new. And, yet, the story leaves no doubt that the first few to be made aware of history's most momentous news saw nothing at first but an empty tomb, which left them more confused than elated, For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.

In a world which seemed permanently stuck in the dark, pre-dawn position, they needed to experience something more, the kind of change that could come only from the Risen Lord’s living presence among us in his Church. Easter invites us to put ourselves into the picture with Mary Magdalene, and the other women, and then with Peter, and all those disciples unexpectedly experiencing an alternative to endless grief.

Jesus’ resurrection was a historical event of the most monumental importance. Even so, however hard it may be for us to imagine - in this absurd age of social media and 24-hour news - the world hardly noticed the resurrection at first. And many still don't. Nor would we, if the story had stopped there.

Easter invites us to peer confusedly into the open door of the empty tomb, where nothing is anymore as it seemed before - and then to keep coming back, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, to be filled in on what happened next, what has happened since, and thus experience the effects of the resurrection for ourselves, to experience not just that Jesus was but that he now is. That is why every day for the next seven weeks, the Church retells the story of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles - the story of those who first experienced the reality of the Risen Lord and his power to change the world, changing them first of all.

Really important things are remembered for their long-term impact - not, as in the world of social media and 24-hour news, for the short-term noise they make. So, although no one actually saw or heard the resurrection, what we do see and hear are the resurrection’s effects – first of all on the disciples, and then on the world, and finally on us.

The resurrection’s effects on the disciples unfold in what we see and hear in the gospel stories of their visits to the empty tomb, then later of the appearances of the risen Lord himself, still later in the preaching of Saint Peter and others in the Acts of the Apostles and in the amazing response of those who heard their preaching, then finally in the testimony and letters of Saint Paul, who wasn’t there at all at Easter, but who himself eventually experienced the risen Lord and was forever changed as a result.

The effects on the world were soon evident in the enthusiastic response of Jews and pagans alike to the amazing story the apostles told. In the long term, its effects have been equally dramatic in how the story has spread and the Church has grown as a result, in the dynamism that is at the heart of the Church’s existence in the world and that has propelled it outward in almost 2000 years of world-transforming activity.

Finally, its effects are evident in us, transformed in mind and changed in heart, by the unique power of this utterly unexpected event, which has glorified the humanity Jesus shares with each of us, and which has brought us together in a way in which nothing else could have, empowering us - even in this world of ongoing grief - with unexpected and unimaginable hope. 

So, instead of the first day of the week condemning the world back to business as usual, this first day after the Sabbath is starting something new – not just a new week, but a new world, where grief gives way to hope. The resurrection is God’s powerful alternative to business as usual.  None of us were there that first Easter Sunday – and, had we been, we would surely have been as amazed and uncomprehending as the disciples themselves. But we are there now, because God has, on this day, re-created the world in his Son, Jesus Christ, crucified, dead, and buried, but now risen from the dead. That new day is today – and every day from now on, until we too will appear with him in glory [Colossians 3:4].

On the way, some of us run fast, like the disciple whom Jesus loved. Others, beset by doubts or daily difficulties, run much more slowly, like Peter – Peter, whom Jesus nonetheless chose to be his Church’s principal spokesman. But, whether we are runners or walkers, what matters most is that we too have come to that tomb that was supposed to stay forever closed and dark, but from which the stone has been removed, in order that we - and the world – may look inside, may see, and may believe, and may be changed by the experience.

According to an ancient tradition, when Jesus descended among the dead, our common ancestors, Adam and Eve, saw his bright light penetrating the deep darkness they had been stuck in for so long, whereupon Christ released them, and they and their descendants joyfully joined him in celebrating his triumph over death. For the disciples who came to see Jesus’ tomb early in the Sunday morning darkness, whatever they thought they were going to do, it was a dead man whose tomb they came to see. They too were stuck in the dark, like Adam and Eve and all the generations in between, in a world where grief always seems to have the final say. 

But the amazing experience of encountering the Risen Lord led the first disciples out of the dark and beyond their grief to risk everything to create a unique new community, whose story we read about in the Acts of the Apostles. It is in the ongoing creating of - and living in - this community we call the Church, that Christ continues to reveal his victory over death.

The disciples’ story highlights how what was happening then continues to happen in the everyday life of the Church, as the Risen Lord continues to reveal himself to us through the experience we share as members of the uniquely new community that is the Church, brought into being and animated by the Risen Lord's parting gift of the Holy Spirit.

And so we say today: This is the day the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad!

(Photo: Easter 2021, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY)

Easter Eve

There is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the king is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear. [From an ancient Holy Saturday Homily]

I have very distinct childhood memories of Easter Eve (even more distinct, surprisingly, than Christmas Eve, which presumably must have mattered much more to a child). My parents both worked on Saturdays in those days, and so Saturdays were spent with my grandmother. I can remember her bringing me to church sometime during the day on Saturday to see that the statues had been uncovered after the Easter Vigil service earlier that morning. What I remember best, however, was how at noon (when Lent officially ended and Easter began in those days) my grandmother turned on the kitchen radio tuned to the Italian station, which played the sound of the bells of Rome's hundreds of churches (recorded at noon Rome time, some six hours earlier). Then, as we listened to the bells, we ate our first Easter egg.

In faraway Kentucky on Holy Saturday 1949, the monk Thomas Merton wrote in his Journal: "The confusion of sorrow and joy is so complex that you never know where you are. ... This is the product of the historical circumstances through which the Holy Saturday liturgy has passed." It was those historical circumstances which Pius XII's Holy Week reforms in the 1950s were intended to undo by returning the Eater Vigil to Saturday evening and transforming Holy Saturday into a day of waiting "at the Lord's tomb in prayer and fasting, meditating on his passion and Death and on his Descent into Hell," while "awaiting his Resurrection" (Roman Missal). 

Of course, nothing like that is happening. On the one hand, the secular world goes about its workaday business or else has the frivolous feel of vacation time in those countries where Easter Weekend still has a holiday character. In churches, on the other hand, this is a time of frenetic activity and lavish decoration, all in preparation for the evening's Vigil service. The latter, meanwhile, is now no longer a preparation for the main event of Easter Sunday but, for most who attend, a substitute for Easter itself. This is just the most extreme example of the odd contemporary practice of allowing Mass on Saturday to substitute for Mass on Sunday. Indeed, the Vigil service itself, certainly once the Exsultet is over, is essentially structured not at all like a traditional Vigil but rather as a very long Easter Mass. (Its unconscionable length and oddly late hour are undoubtedly among the reasons why so few feel inspired to attend what must rank as one of the least well attended liturgies of the entire year.)

So, while the liturgy that inspired Merton's remark has disappeared, Merton's insight remains. Holy Saturday still remains a confusing complexity, "the product of the historical circumstances through which the Holy Saturday liturgy has passed." And any notion of reviving Holy Saturday as a day of waiting "at the Lord's tomb in prayer and fasting, meditating on his passion and Death and on his Descent into Hell," while "awaiting his Resurrection" remains as ephemeral and fantastic as observing Advent has become - and for more or less the same reasons.

Back in the 19th century, when the subsequent liturgical changes would have been well nigh unimaginable, Dom Prosper Gueranger wrote: "there is an apparent contradiction between the mystery of Holy Saturday and the Divine Service which is celebrated upon it; Christ is still in the Tomb, and yet we are celebrating his Resurrection: the hours preceding Mass are mournful—and before mid-day, the paschal joy will have filled our hearts. We will conform to the present order of the Holy Liturgy, thus entering into the spirit of the Church, who has thought proper to give her children a foretaste of the joys of Easter." 

Today, we must do the same, conforming our spirits to the present order of things, in which, despite all attempts at restoration and reform, the contradiction continues between "the mystery of Holy Saturday" and the way we actually observe and experience it now.

(Photo: Easter Vigil 2017, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN)

Good Friday

When I was growing up, often on Good Friday my father would get off work early, and my mother would be waiting for him to arrive home so that they could go to the Italian market to finish off the Easter holiday food shopping. Years later, I remember some office staff asking the Department Chair for time off from 12 to 3 because it was Good Friday, which he happily agreed to, and they then happily enjoyed at the local mall. While for most of American history Good Friday was probably a regular workday for most people, it has often enjoyed this residual quasi-holiday character, rooted in its sometime status as a holyday/holiday in Europe.

Pope Urban VIII had already recognized in 1642 that Good Friday was becoming an ordinary workday. Pius XII's Holy Week reform in 1955 referenced that and sought to boost attendance by moving the Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday services to evening and Good Friday to afternoon. There was, as I recall, an actual increase in attendance at such ceremonies in the immediate aftermath of the 1955 reform - until both the novelty wore off and other social changes had their inevitable effects. When I was a pastor, attendance at the official liturgical services on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, while nothing to brag about, was certainly respectable, Better attended and much more popular, however, were the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, possibly a matter of scheduling but more likely because so much simpler and shorter than the liturgical rites. 

Meanwhile the Good Friday liturgy has increasingly in the U.S. become more a mournful commemoration of Christ's crucifixion and death and less part of the unitary celebration of the paschal mystery, which it originally was. (This transformation has occurred mainly at the level of popular piety and is reflected, for example, in the kind of songs sung often in place of the traditional chants on Good Friday, but also in the liturgy itself in the displacement of the two readings traditionally read on Good Friday for more than a millennium, Hosea 6:1-6 and Exodus 12:1-11, both of which evoke the larger paschal mystery more than just Jesus' death.)

Last year, of course, I celebrated Good Friday in an empty church. It will be interesting to see what attendance is like in churches this year and which sorts of services are favored by more people. 

(Photo: The 1903 Hewit Crucifix, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.)

Holy Thursday

"On this day the sacrifice of the sacred Body and Blood of the Lord was initiated as a celebration by the Lord himself. On this day the holy chrism is consecrated throughout the world; on this day too pardon is granted to penitents, those at enmity are reconciled, those who are aggrieved are pacified" (Letter of Pope Sylvester, 4th century).

The Rite of Reconciling Penitents remained in the Roman Pontifical until the 20th century, but the reality had long since lapsed centuries earlier with the decline of public penance and the rise of private confession. In The Liturgical Year, volume 6, Gueranger gave a detailed description of the ancient ritual and of the Papal Blessing that used to be given from the inner loggia of Saint Peter's on this day.

But if the Reconciliation of Penitents long ago passed into. history the other two ancient aspects of Holy Thursday have successfully survived into the present. While a separate Chrism Mass had long since disappeared, over the centuries the blessing of the Oil of the Sick, the Oil of Catechumens, and the Sacred Chrism had become an integral part of the Pontifical Mass of the Lord's Supper celebrated at the Cathedral on Holy Thursday morning. Pope Pius XII's Holy Week reform in 1955 recreated the ancient Chrism Mass and assigned it to Holy Thursday morning, while moving the traditional Mass of the Lord's Supper from morning to early evening both in the cathedral and in parish churches. The Chrism Mass was radically revised as part of Paul VI's post-conciliar liturgical reform and has since acquired an unprecedented degree of popularity, particularly among clergy.

For the most part, "private" Masses have been prohibited on this day, with all priests encouraged to participate (and, since Vatican II, to concelebrate) at the one solemn community Mass., which since 1955 has been celebrated in the evening. Generally this has been my favorite of the Holy Week services, and I will especially miss celebrating it this year.

Other than the unfortunate transfer of the reading from Exodus 12 from Good Friday to Thursday, the other significant alteration in the post-conciliar Mass of the Lord's Supper was the elimination of verses 20-22 and 27-32 from the traditional reading from 1 Corinthians. The omitted verses frame and contextualize the institution narrative, which is all that now remains of the traditional reading. In recent years, as divisions within both the Church and society have increased (with the latter amplifying and further fueling the former), I have regularly referred to those missing verse in my Holy Thursday homilies to better relate Saint Paul's challenge to his contemporaries to our present situation. So, for example, as I said two Holy Thursdays ago in 2019:

Saint Paul wrote that earliest written account of what happened at that most memorable meal in all of human history not just to tell us a nice story about something that happened a long time ago. It was its present effect that Paul cared most about, and so Paul was in fact complaining, criticizing the Corinthians’ behavior in the present, telling them that they were missing the main point of the Lord’s Supper – receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood in an unworthy way, doing so to their peril. In giving this instruction, Paul wrote, I do not praise you. Your meetings do more harm than good. I hear that when you meet as a church there are divisions among you. When you meet, then, it is not to eat the Lord’s supper.

What an indictment! Saint Paul’s more complete account and discussion about the Last Supper was actually a challenge to the Corinthians - as, through them, it is intended to be a challenge now for us. Saint Paul highlighted the Corinthians’ conflicts, dissensions, and factions – in effect, their unfortunate failure to be changed by the Eucharist. Then as now, in 1st-century Corinth among those to whom St. Paul’s account of the Last Supper was originally addressed, all was not well in the Church. The social, economic, and class distinctions, the inequalities, conflicts, dissensions, and factions, endemic in ordinary Roman society were making themselves felt within the Corinthian Church community, so much so that even the celebration of the Lord’s Supper still seemed to mirror those same social, economic, and class distinctions, inequalities, conflicts, dissensions, and factions.

But those things that matter so much to us in the secular world, Paul insists, should have absolutely no significance whatever within the community of Christ’s body, in which Jesus’ death and resurrection have not only transformed our individual relationships with him but must also change our relationships with one another.

Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the world with them - any more than we can, when we come to Mass. That is why what happens here is so important, intended as it is to enable us to leave here different from how we came, to enable us to go beyond our individual self-enclosed limits and so bring something new to the world, something new and different from what we brought here with us from the world. For Jesus’ command to his disciples to do as he did is an invitation to a whole new way of life, made possible for us by what Jesus himself has already done on our behalf.

Back at the Last Supper, in the scene that follows next in John’s Gospel [John 13:27-30], Satan is said to have entered Judas, who, then, after taking a morsel of food from Jesus, left the Supper. How many times has Pope Francis warned us about the danger posed by Satan! The Devil, Pope Francis warned just about a year ago, “poisons us with the venom of hatred, desolation, envy, and vice” [Gaudete et Exsultate].

How well might Judas have benefited, had he heeded such a warning! Instead, we are told, he went out into the night – leaving behind Jesus and his disciples, the community that could have been his, in order to commit himself instead to Satan’s cause.

What was that morsel of food Judas had received from Jesus? Was it the Eucharist? What a warning there is for us in that! What a reminder of Saint Paul’s warning words to the Corinthians that we will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord for how we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

So too, for us now, as for Judas at the Lord’s Supper, how we depart from here may matter much more than how we arrive. What have we heard here, and what has happened to us here that has made us different from how we came? What kind of community have we become, thanks to the Lord’s Supper? In the constant competition for our attention and our loyalty, whose cause have we here committed ourselves to? What kind of people are we becoming? What kind of people do we want to become? What will we take with us from here to challenge and change this conflicted and divided world?

(Photo: Altar of Repose, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, Holy Thursday 2019.)