Preparing for Mercy

If today were not a Sunday, we would be celebrating one of the Church’s most popular saints, Saint Nicholas, the 4th-century Greek Bishop of Myra, in what is today Turkey. Nicholas lived from 270 to 343 and became known and celebrated for his generosity. In some parts of Europe, Saint Nicholas still comes to bring gifts on the eve of his feast day – as, 34 years ago, he did for us novices at the Paulist Novitiate in Oak Ridge, NJ. Nowadays, in much of the United States, Santa Claus has already arrived in a multitude of Thanksgiving and Christmas parades, but we must still wait patiently another few weeks for his presents.

Of course, Santa Claus isn’t the only figure whose annual appearance heralds the coming of Christmas. As she always does on this 2nd Sunday of Advent, the Church today introduces us to the mysterious figure of John the Baptist, who comes out of the desert each Advent proclaiming: “Prepare the way of the Lord” [Luke 3:1-6] .

John’s message may be timeless, but Luke the Gospel writer went to great length to pinpoint precisely when in historical time John made his first appearance to announce the arrival of the salvation of God. What one notices immediately is the special solemnity of the story's language - the style of an official imperial proclamation, complete with the names of the reigning emperor and his representatives. That's Luke the historian, telling us who, what, when, and where - situating John's message in the larger sweep of human history.

The point is that, while the message itself may indeed be timeless, God’s grace and mercy come to us in real time, in the specific circumstances in which we happen to find ourselves. That was what the Prophet Baruch was explaining to the people in the sad and troubled time that followed the Temple’s destruction and Israel’s exile to Babylon [Baruch 5:1-9]. Baruch invited the people to put aside their mourning and contemplate the exiles’ return at the time of the fall festival when the autumn rains bring new life to the parched land. He portrayed the return of the exiles as if they were on a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage brought about by God alone, who is revealed in his mercy and justice.

Some 25 centuries later, we read and hear this prophecy in a world which once again is witness to a seemingly endless procession of exiles – refugees from Syria and other places where war and chaos currently destroy lives and families and the very fabric of society itself. Unlike in Baruch’s prophecy, the exiles don’t all end up in the same place. But wherever they come from and wherever they go, our obligation, as the United States’ Bishops at their November meeting have just recently reminded us is “to care for and stand with newcomers, authorized and unauthorized, including unaccompanied immigrant children, refugees and asylum-seekers, those unnecessarily detained, and victims of human trafficking” [Faithful Citizenship, 81] .

The similarities between then and now remind us that the stage on which John's solemn pronouncement is being proclaimed is not just some far-off 1st-century desert oasis but every time and place, including notably our own. As Paulist founder Isaac Hecker famously said, in the middle of another terrible war in 1863: "Our age lives in its busy marts, in counting-rooms, in work-shops, in homes, and in the varied relations that form human society, and it is into these that sanctity is to be introduced." ["The Saint of Our Day']

And that is why God’s gift of grace and message of mercy are so central to our experience here and now, which is why Pope Francis has challenged the Church to take a pause from business as usual and go on pilgrimage, like Baruch’s exiles, through the Holy Door of Mercy in this Extraordinary Jubilee, this Holy Year of Mercy, which will begin in just two more days.

For most of us, preoccupied as we inevitably are with our narrow here-and-now concerns, this Holy Year of Mercy reminds us what Advent and Christmas are actually all about - God's active movement of grace and mercy into our world. Isaiah prophesied that all flesh shall see the salvation of God, but John wants us to recognize how that future is already happening here and now in the present. And, as in Isaiah's day and as in John's, there are certainly plenty of valleys to be filled and mountains and hills to be leveled by God’s grace and mercy in our world.

Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 6, 2015

Happy Chanukah

The Memphis, TN, hotel where I stayed while attending a meeting earlier this week was, of course, quite decked out for Christmas. But it also featured this Chanukah display in anticipation of the week-long, joyful, Jewish holiday that begins at sundown tomorrow. 

Unlike Passover and Pentecost, Chanukah has no precise Christian analogue. Chanukah and Christmas coincide as winter light festivals, but otherwise are unrelated either historically or theologically.  

In the bible, the two books of Maccabees recount how, in the 2nd century B.C., Israel came under the rule of the Syrian-Greek Seleucids, who outlawed Jewish practices and attempted forcefully to Hellenize the Jewish people – and how, an army of faithful Jews, led by Judah Maccabee (Judas Maccabeus) of the Hasmonean dynasty defeated the Gentiles, reconquered the Jerusalem Temple which had been desecrated, and festively rededicated it for sacrificial worship on the 25th of Kislev (December 14, 164 B.C.)

Jewish tradition amplifies the account with the story of how, when they sought to light the Temple's the seven-branch candelabrum (menorah), they found just a one-day supply of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks. Miraculously, that one-day supply burned for eight days, until new oil could be prepared under ritually pure conditions.

The festival of Chanukah was then instituted to commemorate these events and the miracle of the oil. 1 Maccabees 4:36-59 tells the story of the rededication of the Temple, ending with the decision to celebrate an 8-day Dedication Festival each year. 2 Maccabees 10:1-8 repeats the story and adds  the idea of the 8-day fall Feast of Booths (Sukkot) as a model for Chunkah. It was during the celebration of this annual Festival of the Dedication" (cf. John 10:22) that Jesus gave his famous Good Shepherd discourse. 

At the heart of Chanukah is the nightly lighting of the special Chanukah menorah: one lamp or candle on the first night, two on the second, etc., until all eight lights are kindled. When I was in kindergarten in a New York public school in 1954, we had a chalk menorah on the blackboard and used to "light" in chalk one of its lights each day! Other popular Chanukah customs, which I only learned about later in life, include eating foods fried in oil, e.g., potato latkes (pancakes), playing dreidel (a spinning top inscribed with Hebrew letters, and the giving of money (Chanukah gelt) to children.

Not having been prescribed in the Torah, Chanukah is considered a minor holiday. Thus, it does not compare with the position of Christmas in the Christian calendar. But, occurring in December, it is inevitably a Jewish alternative to Christmas - as well as functioning, like Christmas, as an authentic winter light festival. As an alternative to winter's darkness, Chanukah can comfortably accompany Christmas as a winter holiday for post-modern secular society, a contemporary pagan Saturnalia of lights and gift-giving.

But, like Christmas, the religious Chanukah holiday highlights a powerful message. In the case of Chanukah it is a message about faithfulness to religious law and tradition, the bulwarks of society, the cornerstone of which is authentic faithful worship in spirit and truth.

Our Lost Christmas Gospel

I first got to know Dr. Rita Ferrone about 25 years ago when she was the Director of the Catechumenate in New York. Sometimes, I don't completely agree with what she writes (e.g., her negative assessment of the traditional Roman liturgy and its contemporary revival), but then sometimes I do agree with her. One such instance is her latest Commonweal column, “'His Own Received Him Not': The Perfect (Neglected) Christmas Gospel Reading.” 

It definitely deserves reading in full!

One of the many unfortunate aspects of our collaboration in the evolution (i.e., secularization) of Christmas has been the diminished attendance at Christmas Day Mass in favor of anticipations of Christmas on the evening (or even worse in the afternoon) before. And, of course, one consequence of that has been the de facto downgrading of the principal Mass of Christmas (the third Mass or Missa in die) with its glorious gospel reading from John 1, the famous "prologue," which, until 1965, was also fittingly read at the end of almost every Mass. Even worse, as Rita notes in her column, even when people do attend Mass during the day, they might not hear the proper daytime gospel and may get instead the Lucan gospel from the Midnight Mass.

"Many priests routinely avail themselves of the permission to use other readings in place of the readings proper to the Mass of Christmas day,” she writes. “People want to hear about shepherds and angels,” a pastor she once worked for told her, “and that’s what we give them.” She is "convinced this represents a loss" - as I too am convinced. (For what it may be worth, I always faithfully follow the Missal’s order and use the appointed readings on Christmas Day. But I can also recall one year, way back when I was a deacon, when the priest insisted on using the Midnight readings at all the Masses on both Christmas Eve and Day, along with Eucharistic Prayer II. I have no doubt he believed he was giving people what they wanted! And maybe indeed he was!)

“Here is where I think the church’s ministry too often fails," Rita responds, "it does not show people how to enter into mystery. Much sensitivity is needed to bridge the divide between the secular world and its habits of mind, and the sacred, to which gospel and liturgy invite the faithful.”

Of course, she is right. But, if our ministry “often fails,” if it fails “to bridge the divide between the secular world and its habits of mind, and the sacred, to which gospel and liturgy invite the faithful,” isn’t that sort of built into our individualistic, consumerist, post-modern, American style of life – and a corresponding style of liturgical worship – that is itself riddled with “the secular world and its habits of mind“?

Often, when people get worried about what the world has done to Christmas – and what our contemporary liturgical adaptations have collaborated in doing to Christmas – often the proposed solution is Advent. But I am convinced, as I have said before, that the solution cannot be some sort of competition between Advent and Christmas (a competition Christmas will surely win and Advent can only lose!). And, anyway, in themselves, the Christmas things that occupy us for most of Advent – parties, decorations, gift-giving – are not per se in themselves bad things. They too can be valid vehicles for incarnating the Christmas story in the sights and sounds of our culture.

The problem is not some supposed competition between Advent and Christmas but the lack of seriousness of both Advent and Christmas in today's "Holiday" season. As I wrote here last week, the issue is not whether one's Tree is already up at home but whether one's heart is at the mall. The Advent Wreath is not an alternative to the Christmas Tree. Like the Christmas Tree, the Advent Wreath is itself just another cute folkloric custom, which in its contemporary incarnation can become yet another frivolous substitute for Advent's challenging message about the impending Day of Judgment – just as the illuminated Tree can become yet another frivolous substitute for John’s gospel’s challenging message of the light that shines in the darkness.

(Rita Ferrone's Commonweal  column on the Christmas gospel can be found at https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/his-own-received-him not?utm_source=Main+Reader+List&utm_campaign=b1360ad627-July+18_The_Week_at_Commonweal&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_407bf353a2-b1360ad627-92355161).

Praying Advent

In P.D. James' dystopian novel, The Children of Men (1992), a group that meets in an old church as its cover calls itself the "Cranmer Club," and claims to be devoted to studying The Book of Common Prayer. "Is it?" is the response. "So what do you do when the State Security Police ask you to recite the collect for the First Sunday in Advent?"

(The Children of Men was eventually also made into a movie in 2006, but I can't recall whether that episode also made it into the film version.)

Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556), Henry VIII's and Edward VI's Archbishop of Canterbury (1533-1555) did enormous and terrible damage to both the indissolubility of marriage and the unity of the Church, but he also gave us the literary treasure that is The Book of Common Prayer. And, for the First Sunday of Advent, the BCP has this justly famous collect: Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.

In the Prayer Book, so important is this collect - inspired by Advent Sunday's traditional Epistle (Romans 13:8-14) - that it is immediately followed by a wonderful rubric requiring it to be repeated with the other collects every day during Advent! (At least in my limited experience in England 10 years ago, this wonderful practice of multiple collects  - or, as we used to call them. "commemorations" - is still alive and well in the C of E liturgy.) 

The Collect for the First Sunday of Advent in the contemporary Roman Rite is certainly an appropriate prayer for Advent, but that fine prayer is nowhere nearly as evocative as Cranmer's: Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God, the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ with righteous deeds at his coming, so that, gathered at his right hand, they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.

Perhaps the closest we came in the old Roman Rite to the sentiments so well expressed in Cranmer's beautiful prayer was the old Collect (now discarded) for Christmas Eve: O God, who make us glad with the yearly expectation of our redemption, grant that we who now joyfully receive your only-begotten Son as our Redeemer, may also without fear behold Him coming as our Judge, the same our Lord Jesus Christ your Son: Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end. Amen (Deus, qui nos redemptiónis nostræ ánnua exspectatióne lætíficas: præsta; ut Unigénitum tuum, quem Redemptórem læti suscípimus, veniéntem quoque júdicem secúri videámus, Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum Fílium tuum: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti, Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.)

Discarded or not, the old Christmas Eve collect would be a good daily prayer for Advent, as would the current 1st Sunday prayer, and - maybe best of all - Cranmer's Advent collect!

Apocalypse Sunday

One of the constants in American history has been the periodic appearance of movements and people preparing for some sort of impending calamity, real or imagined, including even the end of the world. Usually they are fringe groups at the margin of mainstream society, although sometimes the anxieties are more reality-based and more widely shared. I think back, for example, to the fallout shelter movement in the early 1960s, which was actively promoted in New York, where I lived, by no less mainstream a person than Governor Nelson Rockefeller and was also taken seriously and discussed within the Kennedy Administration, as well as in the pages of the weekly Jesuit magazine America.

Anticipating an actual and total end to the world may be more than most contemporary disaster-worriers really care to contemplate. But it does have a long history. Add to that the prospect of divine judgment, and we can get into some really scary stuff! No surprise then that the early Christians – who took both the end of the world and divine judgment very seriously - prayed, in the third century: “for Emperors, their ministers, for the condition of the world, for peace everywhere, and for the delaying of the end” [Apologetics, 39].

To us today, living in a world that is at least as dangerous and disorderly if not more so, and where we hear right away about every terrible thing that happens almost anywhere in the world, to us that sounds like a familiar enough list – except for the final petition, which we seldom give much thought to, even while we pray every day at Mass for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.  Yet that “end” is precisely what the Church calls on us to contemplate today, as indeed we do every Advent.

Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla: teste David cum Sibylla. O day of wrath, O dreadful day, when heaven and earth shall pass away, as David and the Sibyl say. So begins one of the most famous Latin liturgical hymns, a hymn especially suited to the spirit of Advent.  (When I was growing up, before our feel-good therapeutic culture took over, those words were sung at every Catholic funeral). Advent acknowledges the fear people have always felt about what lies ahead. As Jesus himself said in today’s Gospel [Luke 21:25-28, 34-36], People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world.

Recent events have highlighted how dangerous our world is. We hardly need Advent to warn us of what is coming upon the world. Advent, however, is also about hope. The Jesus who said all those scary things also said, when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand. And so it seems somehow especially fitting that at this time of national and international tension and worldwide worry, that the Church is about to announce the good news of God’s grace and mercy even louder than usual with an Extraordinary Jubilee, a Holy Year of Mercy, and is inviting us to put our fears behind us, to stand up and raise our heads, as Jesus said, and go on pilgrimage together, literally and spiritually – literally, to the Holy Doors in Rome or at least to the local Door of Mercy right near us at our cathedral church.

“God,” Pope Francis has reminded us, “always shows us the greatness of his mercy” and “is always with us in order to help us go forward. He is a God who … is with us, to help us, to strengthen us, help us go forward. … Always forward!” [Angelus, December 15, 2013].

We will certainly have plenty to worry about this year – as in every year.  We all have our individual anxieties, our unfulfilled longings, and our painful memories of lost opportunities and ruptured relationships, all of which seem to haunt us even more intensely at this festive time of year and in this conflicted, war-ravaged world. But in the midst of all this, Advent challenges us to recognize the coming of Christ bringing light into anxious lives and a worried world.

In the words of Paulist founder, Fr. Isaac Hecker, There is little or no hope at all of our entering into the kingdom of heaven hereafter, if we are not citizens of it here. If Christ is to be to us a savior, we must find him here, now, and where we are; otherwise he is no Christ, no Saviour, no Immanuel, no “God with us.”

Homily for the 1st Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 29, 2015.