Candlemas Day

The familiar carol stops at day 12, but today is actually the 40^th day of Christmas. It marks the definitive end of the Christmas season. In Italy (and some other places), the presepio or nativity scene typically remains in place in church until today. So two years ago at this time, when I was studying in Rome, I had almost a full month to visit the various presepe – some monumentally elaborate, some surprisingly simple – on display in Rome’s many churches.

In the western, Latin Church, today is currently called the Presentation of the Lord, but for several centuries it was also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the Gospel we just heard, Mary and Joseph took the infant Jesus to Jerusalem according to the law of Moses, that is to say, in obedience to God’s law, in order to observe two important religious obligations. The first was the ordinary obligation to be purified after childbirth, reflecting ancient beliefs about the sacredness of blood, and the requirement of ritual purification after any direct contact with blood. The second concerned the special status and religious responsibilities of a first-born son (because of God’s having spared Israel’s first-born at the time of the Exodus). Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’s participation in these rituals highlights for us, first, the inviolable sacredness of all human life, and, second, the special status (and corresponding responsibilities) which now define our entire lives, because of our relationship with Jesus.

But, whatever the official title, the most common popular title for today’s celebration in the West has consistently been Candlemas Day, because of the Blessing of Candles and the Procession - originally in Rome an early morning, pre-dawn procession, originally somewhat penitential in character – with which today’s Mass begins.

The name Candlemas calls attention, obviously, to the blessed candles, but also to their light – and to Jesus the One whom that light symbolizes. The Church’s official ceremonial says that “on this day Christ’s faithful people, with candles in their hands, go out to meet the Lord and to acclaim him with Simeon, who recognized Christ as ‘a light to reveal God to the nations.’ They should therefore be taught to walk as children of the light in their entire way of life, because they have a duty to show the light of Christ to all by acting in the works that they do as lighted lamps.”

A secular version of Candlemas is “Groundhog Day.” Not so long ago, everyone in the Western world knew about Candlemas Day. Today many people, probably, have forgotten Candlemas completely. Yet even those who may never ever even have heard of Candlemas can recognize the folklore that connects the day with the change of seasons. While the weather is still decidedly wintry, the days are getting noticeably longer. Whereas Christmas comes at the mid-point of the winter’s darkness, with the year’s shortest day and its correspondingly longest night, Candlemas comes at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the transition (according to one ancient way of reckoning the seasons) from winter to spring. Soon, day and night, light and dark will be equal. So this last of the great winter light festivals invites us to look ahead to what these ancient seasonal feasts are meant to symbolize.

Today we recall with joy the Lord’s entry into his Temple: and suddenly (so says the prophet Malachi) there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek. At the same time, we hear, in wise old Simeon’s words to Mary, the first reference to what lies ahead, the first reference to the cross. Behold, this child is destined … to be a sign that will be contradicted – and you yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

So, even as we take one last look back at winter and Christmas, Candlemas looks ahead to spring and Lent, and reminds us that the point of Christmas is Easter.

Meanwhile, Simeon and Anna’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple points us toward our own encounter with the Risen Christ here and now.

In the Eastern, non-Latin Churches, this day is appropriately called the Encounter, the Feast of Meeting. Today, Christ comes to meet us, and we in turn get to meet him. Every Christmas we encounter Christ in a special way in the image the infant Jesus in the manger. When we encounter the infant Jesus in the nativity scene in church and at home, we appreciate anew the great mystery of the incarnation of God’s Son. When Simeon and Anna experienced in the infant Jesus the human face of God, they spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. They hastened to proclaim and share their good news. That remains our task today – to take the light of these candles out into our spiritually still so very dark world, and so to share with all the light reflected in our own lives from the brightness of the human face of God.

Homily for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, February 2, 2014.

Thomas Merton

The 20th century's most famous Catholic monk, Thomas Merton (Fr. Mary Louis, OCSO), was born 99 years ago today. It would be hard to exaggerate Merton's impact and influence in the second half of the 20th century, both within the distinctive subculture of Roman Catholic religious life, and in wider worlds of spirituality, ecumenism, and religiously motivated social activism. When one considers how incredibly prolific a writer he was, one can only wonder what his impact might have been had he not died suddenly in 1968 and instead lived something closer to his predictable life span!

I first encountered Merton as a confused and unsettled teenager, hanging out in the public library, alternately killing time and looking for answers to life's questions. At that stage, The Sign of Jonas was undoubtedly my favorite - if only because it appealed to my then only partially acknowledged and in any case immature interest in religious life. (Published in 1953, The Sign of Jonas was Merton's journal of his formational years in the monastery. His much more complete journals, of which The Sign of Jonas was really just one part, have since been published in some seven volumes, all well worth reading.) As for the classic that initially made Merton famous, I might have run across The Seven Storey Mountain on my own, but I was in any case guided to it by a helpful social worker, who thought I would find in it material to identify with. And I did!

It is possible that Merton may have become too popular in his time and that only now, 45 years after his untimely death, that he can be better appreciated. Last year, I undertook to re-read the seven published volumes of Merton's journals.  Not everything held equal appeal. There is much in Merton's later writings that I find somewhat troubling, especially some of his ill-considered forays into political analysis. On the other hand, his alternately affirming and critical comments on the changes in the Church in the 60s (especially the liturgical changes) offer a good window on how catastrophically disruptive that period was on so many levels. Still, it is the earlier Merton that I tend to go back to the most. His spiritual journey from atheist intellectual to cloistered but completely engaged monk continues to resonate with the troubled history of the 20th century and (more parochially) with my own much less notable spiritual search as it took place against that larger background.

A monk I sought vocational advice from in the late 70s said that Merton wasn't perhaps all that good as a  model monk but that his writings had done much to illuminate monasticism, vocation, and the spiritual life. I'll leave it to others to judge how good a monk Merton was. But there is no gainsaying his impact and influence - and, I believe, his continued relevance for anyone aspiring to any sort of religious vocational commitment.

Snow Day 2014

Thanks to the Knoxville News Sentinel photographer who took this picture of my church in Tuesday's snowstorm! Perhaps it wasn't quite a blizzard by the standard definition, but it was certainly more snow that had been expected, and it practically paralyzed the town. So I stayed home all day yesterday, the best (and certainly safest) place for me to be. Sure, there were things I had planned to do that day, but they can wait, which is actually true of many things in life. The whole experience reminded me a bit of the two severe snowstorms I experienced in Italy two years ago. Writing in Rome on February 3, 2012, I posted on this blog: I have always loved snow, which I frankly consider one of the most beautiful of God’s creations. I hate driving in snow (but then, of course, I hate driving, period!) The fact that snow impedes us from carrying out some of our ordinary activities may be a good reminder that winter was intended to slow us down and stop some of those ordinary activities. It’s not winter’s fault if our modern, industrialized economy needs to continue at the same consistently frantic pace all year round. Winter is just being winter!
 

Of course, for so many of us the expectation is that we will keep on going, keep on doing what we would have been doing ordinarily - and for most people, of course, that means driving, one of the major sources of snow-related danger. So I really appreciate the local officials who closed down not just schools but most government offices. Back when people lived more in harmony with the rhythm of the seasons, it was a lot easier to slow down and even to stop. Things naturally slowed down during winter - one reason it was possible to have a 12-day feast at Christmas! But that's all just part of the world we once had but have long since lost. And there is little to be done about it.

Of course, I grew up in a city, and there we did do a lot more of our normal activity even when it snowed. Certainly closing school because of snow (while it did happen occasionally) was still the exception. On the other hand, most of us walked to school. So the dangers associated with driving were minimal. In most places, where people are slaves to their cars, schools really do need to close when it snows, and it is good for everyone that they do so. (Students probably would benefit from more school rather than less, but that's another matter and calls for other solutions.)

Certainly one thing we could all benefit from would be to try to get over some of our reflexive anger at the weather's impact and our almost automatic tendency to blame public officials for not being able to undo the weather immediately in order to guarantee uninterrupted continuance of our ordinary routines and personal plans. Even in today's modern cities, nature can still trump our modern priorities. That's just something we need to learn to accept (especially as climate change probably means more big storms of all sorts down the road). Public officials need to be on the ball, especially as regards public safety. And part of public safety increasingly involves getting people to slow down and even stop.

The State of Our Union

The cold (3 degrees outside right now) and snow and ice have virtually paralyzed my town - an unusually apt visual metaphor, perhaps, for the actual state of our actual Union. While the snow was still falling here last night, the President gave his annual address to the Congress. He spoke well enough, as one expects him to do. He addressed the crisis of increasing inequality and declining mobility, recognizing its centrality in the social struggle of the age. He spoke eloquently about the need for immigration reform, called for extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed, and pointedly skewered his opponents on health care. Notably, the President emphasized doing what he could without Congress.

That, of course, highlights the fundamental problem. As Matt Miller observes in today's Washington Post, putting aside the progress this Administration has made towards universal health care coverage, in the last 20 years "the measure of a good society have gone in the wrong direction." That is the problem that bedevils that actual state of the actual Union. It is something a President can talk about (the famous "bully pulpit") and hopefully mobilize voters to care enough about. But by himself it is not something any President can appreciably alter. It's not just that fixing a broken culture requires legislation. It requires consensus - not unanimity, of course, but some degree of common consensus in society. And that - in our cynical, apolitical, self-absorbed, culturally polarized country - remains elusive at best.

The kind of society we have become is no one President's fault and is way beyond any one President's power to fix. All he can do is talk - the famous "bully pulpit" again. And, while what the President said was  good, it is nowhere near enough. The President is being faulted by pundits for his mainly modest proposals, the idea being that they represent an admission on his part that he can't get much more. True enough, but it is the country as a whole that must also be faulted for having in effect virtually given up on itself.

To his credit, the President largely avoided highlighting his (and his party's base's) extreme positions on polarizing social and cultural issues. Yet that omission also highlights an ongoing part of the problem. Extending health care coverage is an important step in healing the maldistribution of wealth and opportunity in our society. So is immigration reform. So is extending unemployment benefits.  So are higher wages. So are any number of other worthy things the President is proposing. But moral and cultural calamities like the so-called "marriage gap," for example, also need to be addressed. The decline of marriage and the collapse of the American family are both symptoms of economic inequality and declining mobility and contributors to its intensification and long-term continuation from this generation to the next.  As long as one side in our politically polarized non-debate remains wedded to economic policies that favor the few at the expense of the many and the other side remains wedded to a moral and cultural ideology that undermines family and community, our divisions cannot easily be repaired nor our decline reversed.

Waiting for the State of the Union

The President's annual address to Congress on "the state of the Union" is prescribed in the Constitution. Or, rather, the message itself is. As is well known, Thomas Jefferson abandoned his Federalist predecessors' practice of addressing Congress in person, perceiving it to be too monarchical. And for 112 years no President ever again addressed Congress in person, until the Anglophile Woodrow Wilson resumed custom in 1913. 

Obviously modeled on a European monarch's "Speech from the Throne," the occasion is the closest we come to such regal ceremonial. The President comes to the House Chamber, formally escorted as Head of State. From the House Doorkeeper's traditional cry, Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States, to the President's formulaic introduction by the Speaker, the President embodies the sovereignty of the nation, and is received accordingly. It is and rightly should be an opportunity for some serious, unifying, patriotic uplift 

Unifying regal ritual on this very formal occasion notwithstanding, the event is also a divisively partisan one - reflected not just in the somewhat unbecoming custom of a televised partisan response by the opposite party, but even more dramatically in the partisan applause patterns that periodically punctuate the speech. It is, after all, the President's presentation of his program. Once upon a time, the expectation was that the Congress would debate and act upon the President's proposals - accepting, rejecting, compromising as appropriate. Nowadays, however, the speech is really addressed to the TV audience (in other words, to the voters). In the absence of the deliberation and debate that was originally supposed to characterize the legislative branch, both sides seem instead to concentrate on scoring points prior to the next election.

My guess is that the President will focus heavily on the growing inequality and mobility gap in our society, a situation in which even a the economy is improving and growing ordinary, working people continue to fall behind. I presume he will also highlight how health insurance reform (the Affordable Care Act) is helping address an important dimension of this crisis. I'm sure he'll call for a higher minimum wage and for comprehensive immigration reform. Hopefully, he can make the necessary connections to mobilize a nation to recover the communitarian character that has been in the process of consistently being eroded since 1980. 

But, now, the President has arrived. So let's see what he has to say. And then think more about it tomorrow.