News on the Nile

It's not quite "All Egypt All the Time" on the news channels, but it comes close. Starting with TV and now exponentially so with the Internet, we have become addicted to the fantasy of being on the scene whenever and wherever events of world-historical significance are (or appear to be) occurring. The fact is, however, that how much I know about what's happening in Egypt makes absolutely no difference to anyone or anything. Policymakers, of course, are another story. Naturally, if I worked in the White House or the State Department, I would want to be getting up-to-the minute reports on the Egyptian situation - although even then whether a reactive, crisis-driven response is really in the best interest of the US is still another question.

The tragic fact is that - even for policymakers - having up-to-the-minute information ("in real time," to employ the more trendy post-modern idiom) may not make much of a difference either. It might actually do more harm than good, if it results in an obsession with "being on the right side of history" - without, of course, the critical distance necessary to know what history's direction will be.

I don't know what is going to happen in Egypt. Does anyone? Of course not! The reality is that the only thing we ever really know about history's direction is the past. The past may indeed (and often does) give us some sense of the likely direction of the future, but then it might not. Nor is the past necessarily univocal. The last Egyptian "revolution" (really a military coup, actually) was the overthrow of the monarchy some 60 years ago, which led to Nasser's pan-Arab "socialism" - a movement which inspired all sorts of havoc in the Middle East. "Pan-Arabism" probably and "Socialism" certainly are outdated ideas unlikely to be able to provide the ideological superstructure for Egyptian policy in the long run. The other obvious - and even worse - precedent from the past is, of course, the 1979 Iranian revolution, which replaced another reliable American ally and force for stability in the Middle East with a radically anti-American, anti-Israel, Islamist tyranny.

The world may dodge that particular bullet this time - if we're lucky. But, even if Egypt escapes Iran's radical fate, it is hard to imagine any particularly positive outcome from change in Egypt. Ever since Sadat made peace with Israel, Egypt has been a significant stabilizing force in that region. Egypt's ceasing to play that role would be an outcome hardly to be overly welcomed.

So the bottom line is no one really can know what is going to happen, but past experience suggests whatever happens will likely make things worse.

What a Week!

There's still lots of snow on the ground - though, of course, in classic New York fashion the street corners are now mainly puddles of cold wet slush. Walking around on Thursday, I went home at one point just to change my socks and dry my feet! But then I went out again for dinner and a movie down on Houston Street. At my age, one walks carefully on snow and ice. But in New York one still keeps walking. Were it not for having to navigate the slush, I'd probably have walked even more and done some of the shopping I had originally planned on doing. Even so, I'm sure I have walked more here in one week than in an average month at home. Walking is good. Three cheers for urban life that allows such luxuries as walking!

What with walking, eating, catching up with some friends, and the fun of spending Saturday morning with the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Book Review, I've still managed to make time to compose an appeal talk for this weekend. It's something I have never had to do before and have no real template to draw upon. But that may be just as well! I get to talk about where I am now, connecting the IC story and the Paulist mission in Tennessee and across America, within the larger narrative of how Hecker's vision that proclaiming the truth of Catholic faith would be a calming oil poured upon the troubled waters of our world.

At the Paulist Mother Church

In his monastic journal, The Sign of Jonas, Thomas Merton mentioned how a certain monk who had previously been sent to staff a daughter foundation in Georgia returned to Gethsemani in 1948 to participate in the election of a new abbot. The monk “sat in choir as though he were in heaven,” Merton remarked - and then added, “Afterward I gave him a good hug.”

I confess I’m feeling a little bit like that monk, being back at the Paulist Mother Church in New York (in my old room even) after almost six months. In fact, it will be exactly 6 months ago tomorrow that I celebrated my final Mass at St. Paul's - a joyful Mass of Thanksgiving for 10 blessed years as associate pastor. Now, tomorrow I am scheduled to celebrate Mass here again - for the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, the patronal feast of this church, this parish, and the Paulist community.

In 1858 (three years after my present parish - Immaculate Conception in Knoxville, TN - was established), Servant of God Isaac Hecker and three other ex-Redemptorists founded the "Society of Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle," known ever since as “The Paulist Fathers.” The Archbishop of New York assigned the new community the care of a new parish to be created on the west side of Manhattan – the parish, like the community itself, placed under the patronage of St. Paul the Apostle. For over 150 years, the Paulists have ministered here in this parish, the life and mission of both the Paulists and the parish being intimately tied together, and both blessed by the patronage of St. Paul the Apostle, the feast of whose Conversion we celebrate this week.

For 126 of those years, the spiritual center of this parish has been its big beautiful church. Within Stanford White’s golden dome above the High Altar is a verse from the Divine Office for St. Paul's feast: “You are a vessel of election, holy apostle Paul.” The response, “Preacher of Truth in the whole world,” is inscribed in the mosaic on the floor at the foot of the sanctuary steps.

For the 1^st century or so of this church’s life, communicants coming to the altar rail would see that mosaic, designed in 1920 to highlight the symbols of St. Paul’s apostleship – the book, open to St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians at the verse, To me, the very least of all the holy ones, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ, and the sword, the symbol of St. Paul’s martyrdom. Over at the west end of the south aisle, over the altar dedicated to St. Paul, is Robert Reid’s evocative painting of Paul kneeling calmly and confidently awaiting his imminent martyrdom. Above and below are the famous words from his Second Letter to Timothy: I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course. I have kept the faith!

The event we commemorate this week – the decisive turning-point in Paul’s life – is portrayed above the main entrance to the church in a monumental frieze by Lumen Martin Winter (who also designed the equally monumental tomb at the east end of the north aisle, in which Isaac Hecker was re-buried 52 years ago today). Commonly called Paul’s “conversion,” that event transformed Paul into a disciple of Jesus and an apostle on equal footing with the others, an apostle sent to evangelize, that is, to make disciples of all peoples and nations without exception. That mission is the theme of the other floor mosaic, at the main entrance of the church, which recalls Paul’s preaching outreach to the Greek world in 1^st-century Athens.

Paul was not one of the original 12. He wasn’t there when Jesus said to his disciples: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” But he absorbed those words as surely as if they had been addressed to him initially – as we also must do.

That’s what the Paulist Fathers are for, focusing on the Church’s evangelizing mission in an intentional way, continuing the work begun by Isaac Hecker to proclaim the truth of Christ and the Catholic faith throughout this country. The Annual Paulist Appeal (which I am here to preach this coming week) will enable today’s Paulists and the Paulists of tomorrow (whose seminary training the appeal helps support) to continue Isaac Hecker’s mission – here in New York, in East Tennessee, and throughout the North American continent.

Listen and Follow

Galilee is a rather small and relatively unremarkable place. Israel and its enemies have been fighting each other for it for over 6 decades, of course, and before that others had fought over it for centuries. But, to outsiders, it must still seem a somewhat insignificant, little place. So it must have seemed in Jesus’ time too. Then, it had only recently been resettled by Jews after several centuries of having had a predominantly Gentile population. Hence, we have Isaiah’s reference to it as the District of the Gentiles [Isaiah 8:23]. In modern terms nothing is very far from anything else in that part of the world, but to the religious establishment in Jerusalem Galilee was no doubt far enough. It just wasn’t the sort of place where religiously significant things would normally be expected to happen.

Then, all of a sudden, along came Jesus, a Galilean from Nazareth, who went to live in Capernaum by the sea [Matthew 4:12-23]. God has a way of sometimes doing the most unexpected things in the most unexpected places and with the most unexpected of people – like the two brothers Jesus saw casting a net into the sea, to whom he said simply, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

Nowadays you can go for a ride on the so-called “Jesus Boat” across the Sea of Galilee and get a demonstration of how the fishermen of Jesus’ time would fish, casting a net into the sea. Perhaps to us, de-natured city-folk, that may seem exotic, but it’s really quite ordinary stuff. But to say to two fishermen busy earning a living, “Stop what you’re doing, and come and join up with me,” that’s anything but ordinary. Perhaps the only thing more extraordinary about it was their response: At once they left their nets and followed him.

Simon and Andrew’s surprising response was then quickly imitated by two other brothers, James and John – and, after them, by many others in the 20 centuries since then. All of us, in fact, are here today because somebody somewhere took Jesus up on his offer – often because again God did unexpected things in unexpected places with unexpected people. It’s too bad that “National Vocation Awareness Week” was 2 weeks ago. Today’s Gospel could be a Vocation Director’s dream text!

When we in the Church use the word “vocation” or “calling,” we often use it in multiple, somewhat overlapping senses. Sometimes, we are speaking of the call of everyone to live a holy life as a disciple of Jesus in the Church – everyone’s vocation (as my High School Commencement speaker said some 46 years ago) to become a saint. At times we also use the word when speaking of different ways of life of living life in the world.

Finally, we also use the word in a particularly precisely sense to refer to the particular calling of some of the Church’s members to live lives publicly identified with the ministry of the Church – as bishops, priests, deacons, or as members of what we call Institutes of Consecrated Life or Societies of Apostolic Life. In the case of the first four apostles, whose story we just heard, these varied meanings all came together in one encounter. Called by Jesus himself to be his disciples, to follow him to holiness, Simon and Andrew and James and John were also called to their life-long, full-time work as apostles, official leaders in the Church.

Like them, we all need to listen and to respond. In this “Information Age,” we have all become accustomed to being deluged by all sorts of information we have no real need for and no useful way to process. So now we even have mechanisms on our computers to filter out at least some segments of it. We can even hide or ignore some of our hundreds of Facebook friends, when their news becomes too much to absorb.

With all the information coming at us from so many directions, it may be increasingly difficult to imagine hearing something that really matters, something that may actually be worth listening and responding to. But God doesn’t give us information. He doesn’t update his status. He calls us directly and personally to a relationship with him, and then invites us to share in his work in our world. We all need to listen to him and to respond. To do so, we rely on the Church to help us filter the noise and to listen to God’s call and so be better able to respond. And, as members of the Church, we all need to be ready and willing be there for one another, helping one another to listen – and to respond.

Homily for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN,

January 23, 2011.

January 22

Today is the 38th anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. In recognition of this tragic anniversary, in all the dioceses of the United States of America, January 22 is observed every year “as a particular day of penance for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion, and of prayer for the full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life.”

More than just an occasion to wear violet vestments midway between Advent and Lent, this annual National Day of Penance is an opportunity to reflect on a wrong turn taken by our country in 1973. January 22 challenges us to speak truth to power – the truth of the inviolable dignity of every individual human being from the moment of conception. That we do this is essential to who we are. How we do it is also critical to our witness, for how we witness also expresses who we really are.

This anniversary always reminds me of another judicial decision with comparably catastrophic consequences for our nation’s history. I refer, of course, to the 1857 Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sanford, which ruled which ruled that no person of African ancestry could claim US citizenship. (It was to overturn that decision that in 1868 the 14th Amendment guaranteed US citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – a guarantee now being challenged in some circles!)

The Dred Scott analogy easily comes to my mind – as it immediately did to one of my classmates on this day 38 years ago at dinner in Princeton’s Proctor Hall. Reflecting on that, I recently re-read President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Delivered March 4, 1865, as the American Civil War was winding down and barely 6 weeks before his own assassination, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural articulated his attempt to reflect upon the tragic circumstances of the Civil War and to situate it morally in relation to the national sin of slavery.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. ... Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. …

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

It is always problematic to pronounce in moral terms about political events - and even more so to suggest a causal connection between bad things that happen in the Body Politic and some sort of divine judgment. All too often has that mistake too easily been made. It is perhaps a perennial temptation - if one takes seriously the fact that we do indeed all stand under divine judgment for our sins - to claim perhaps too much knowledge of the mind and judgment of God.

That said, there is something compelling about Lincoln’s analysis of God’s judgment on the sin of slavery – and something equally compelling about his appreciation of the complexity of the human predicament. In Lincoln’s analysis, consciousness of God’s judgment was coupled with a humble empathy not just for those most sinned against but for the perpetrators and indeed all parties caught up in the conflict. So Lincoln famously concluded:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

January 22 indeed challenges us to speak truth to power – the truth of the inviolable dignity of every individual human being from the moment of conception – and at the same time, like Lincoln, to strive to maintain the fragile human bond that unites us all, despite our disagreements.