Friends

 

One of the more distressing observations about life in our contemporary society is how many people seem to have very few friends, some say none at all. Aristotle long ago famously said that friendship is something that no one would choose to live without even if one possessed all other goods. In the New Testament, even Jesus had his special friends and strongly valued his personal friendships. Today, the Church commemorates three of those special friends, the sisters Martha and Mary of Bethany and their brother Lazarus. The Collect we just prayed mentions something specific to each of them. O God, Whose Son called Lazarus back from the grave and was pleased to be a guest in the home of Martha, grant us, we pray, that, faithfully serving him in our brothers and sisters, we, with Mary, may be found worthy to be nourished by the contemplation of his word.

Each is mentioned for the thing that he or she is most famous for - being brought back to life from the dead, serving as Jesus' super-conscientious hostess, listening attentively to Jesus' words. But we commemorate them together - together as a family, of course, but more than just a family - together too as Jesus' disciples, and, more than disciples, also as Jesus' faithful, much loved friends. It was Lazarus' loving friendship with Jesus that his sisters' emphasized when they sent Jesus the message that Lazarus was seriously sick. Presumably, it was Martha's also authentically close friendship with Jesus, which enabled her to confront Jesus so dramatically when he showed up late for Lazarus' funeral. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." We get the same feeling from Martha's other famous confrontation with Jesus in Luke's Gospel. “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me.” That is less a disicple talkign to her teacher than one good friend talking to another.

Both these scenes took place in Bethany.at Martha, Mary, and Lazarus' home, where Jesus was apparently a frequent visitor. Not all visitors are friends, of course. Hospitality to strangers was a very high value in the ancient world, as the The Odyssey movie has recently reminded us. But Jesus seems to have been a regular visitor at Martha, Mary, and Lazarus' home near Jerusalem, occasions for more than conventional hospitality but rather for deeply human experiences of mutual friendship.

In becoming human in Jesus, God has fully experienced our human life, sanctifying the sorrows and challenges of our ordinary lives but also blessing life's joys, among the benefits we receive from friendship.

Homily for the feast of Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, July 29, 2026.

Photo: Traditional Site of Tomb of Lazarus near Jerusalem.

The Elephants in the Room (A Book about Trump's Party)

 

Throughout this entire decade of Trump and Trumpism, numerous journalists have enriched our impressions of this president and the movement that has attached himself to him - most recently Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster), by two New York Times journalists, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. After the journalists, inevitably come the political scientists, until finally in due course the historians will weigh in. Seth Masket is a Political Science professor at the University of Denver, a specialist in political parties, who has already attempted to address the Democrats story in this period with Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), has now turned his (and our) attention to an important part of the Republican story with The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Masket starts from the fact that until recently both parties' presidential nominating processes "have followed a predictable set of rules." The Republicans, however, have changed "because the DC-based 'establishment' elites who used to run the party lost control of it to a populist, nativist grassroots faction outside Washington." It was Donald Trump who facilitated that faction's acquisition of power. "They don't see this as temporary madness; they see this as the movement that put them in charge and actually cares about the things they care about." Masket "uses the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as a lens for examining changes within the Republican Party and in the relationship between party insiders and voters."

What Masket calls populist conservatism has three key tenets: People-centrism, Anti-pluralism, and Moralized anti-elitism. He traces the history of the rise of this element in the party (at the expense of the previous "fusionist" consensus) through several stages:

1. 1960-1968 Learning from Nixon's Loss.                                                                                    2. 1970s The Rise of Primaries, the Fall of Gatekeepers.                                                            3. 1990s Pat Buchanan, Nativism, and Populism.                                                                        4. Mid-1990s The Gingrich Revolution.                                                                                        5. 2008-2012 The Tea Party and Obama's First Term.                                                                  6. The Rise of Conservative Media.                                                                                            7. Late 2000s-2010s The Demise of the Republican Establishment.

Having recounted this history, Masket moves into the present (the period after 2020). His methodology basically involves interviewing and surveying Republican party county chairs.  One might counter that county chairs and other formal party officials don't matter that much anymore, but that, of course, is precisely Masket's point.   "Trump did not win the 2024 nomination because party leaders were pulling for him and guiding party voters.  Indeed, many party leaders, including those who strongly supported him in his first term, were quite cool to a third Trump nomination.   They worried about his ability to win and the baggage he brought with him, and looked to a range of other candidates as possibilities. But they had no mechanism for picking such a candidates over the very strong preferences of party voters."

Masket concludes that neither party insiders nor donors rallied to Trump "until the party's voters made him the nominee." He had, after all, lost re-election, which is usually not rewarded in American politics. In particular, "the indictments caused many Republicans to rally behind Trump and defend him." Evangelical Christians are known to be among Trump's strongest supporters. "Opposition to an immoral person holding the presidency was one of the most commonly cited rationales among evangelicals for impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998-9, but less than two decades later, immorality was not a dealbreaker. Christianity did not undergo any major doctrinal shifts during this time; rather, its conservative adherents rethought the political implications of their faith."

Masket also examines the differences between Trump supporters and other Republicans. Trump's "supporters are considerably poorer, less educated, more conservative, and more likely to identify as evangelical Christian." They also share "a commitment to social order and hierarchy, endorsement of conspiratorial thinking, strong opposition to 'elite' rule in their party, a focus on immigration, and less acknowledgment of the existence of racial discrimination."

Masket concludes that the changes that brought Trump to power "are very much still present and aren't about to change back." 

God's Gracious Patience

When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, New York City (sadly noted for its summer heat and humidity) tried to promote itself to tourists with the slogan “New York is a summer festival.” Festival or not, we certainly have had a festive summer, an exciting summer. We had the Knicks. We celebrated our semi-quincentennial – complete with tall ships, fireworks, and a celebrity wedding – and more locally our own Paulist Pilgrimage to Liberty Island in Support of Immigrants. And, of course, we have had the World Cup, which will come to its glorious conclusion later today in the final championship match between Spain and Argentina at the stadium across the Hudson.

 

Meanwhile, here in church this summer, we have been making our way, week-by-week, through Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, the longest and most studied of all Saint Paul’s letters. Before I had ever formally studied it, however, my first serious personal encounter with the letter to the Romans occurred some 50 years ago, right around the 1976 bicentennial. It was in a Peanuts cartoon, in which Charlie Brown was moaning and groaning in his characteristic way, until finally someone said to him, “Stop sighing,” to which he responded, “It’s scriptural,” and then proceeded to cite Saint Paul’s words from the short passage we just heard today – in the more elegant, more traditional translation, for the Spirit helps us in our weakness, with sighs too deep for words [Romans 8:26].

 

Well, of course, there really is a lot to sigh about. Just listen to the news – or the poisonous brew that is social media. Paul’s words express the problem of the present, that is, the tension between, on the one hand, our obvious weakness and the sense of overwhelming futility that seems to characterize the world, and, on the other, our hope as children of God and joint heirs with Christ. We have, Saint Paul insists, been offered an alternative, already in the present. Hence, his stirring call to a total reorientation of our lives.

Even so, we remain burdened by what we have made of ourselves and our world, in the here and now. Left on our own, we would stay stuck. Paul, however, wants to alert us to something better and brighter than the present but which is already accessible to us now, thanks only to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us, filling us, surrounding us, transforming us.

 

Similarly, the parables Jesus proposes in today’s Gospel [Matthew 13:24-43] all illustrate the slow – but inexorable – progress of God’s kingdom, transforming our pathetic present into God’s glorious future. God sows his good seed in the field of the world and patiently waits until the harvest before separating the wheat from the weeds. The weeds are very real and must be recognized and dealt with eventually. But God’s judgment is patient with the world – for our sake. Because, of course, God is not at all like us! As we just heard in the book of Wisdom, God’s mastery over all things makes him judge with clemency. He governs us with much lenience, thus giving us good ground for hope that he would permit our repentance [Wisdom 12:16-18].

 

God is not at all like us! In our frustratingly futile present, we lack patience – with God, with ourselves, with one another, with our world. But, again, God is not like us! Like the yeast which, when mixed with flour, leavens the whole batch, God is patiently filling, surrounding, and transforming our world with the presence and power of his Holy Spirit.

 

As the first fruits of the Spirit, we – the Church, Christ’s witnesses in the world – reflect the Holy Spirit’s leavening presence and power at work.  We are not quite there yet, of course, as the parable of the field so dramatically demonstrates. Wheat and weeds coexist in the Church – as they do in each one of us individually.

 

With the presence and power of the Holy Spirit acting upon us and within us, we are being aided to trust God’s process and make good use of the opportunity God’s patience provides us.

Homily for the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, July 19, 2026.

The Odyssey (The Movie)

It has been a year since Christopher Nolan's new film version of The Odyssey was first advertised. It has been a long - if ultimately worthwhile - wait. 

I first read Homer's The Odyssey in high school. When I first read its companion epic, The Iliad, I had the striking experience of realizing that I knew much of the story already, because I had read the Classic Comics version of it years earlier as a boy sitting in the barbershop waiting for a haircut! (My mother wasn't a big fan of comics, and most of my childhood comic book reading was while waiting for haircuts at the neighborhood barbershop.) The Odyssey, however, when I first encountered it in high school, was completely new to me, and it seemed so completely unlike any of the heroic comics (e.g., Superman, Batman) I had earlier been accustomed to reading on haircut days.

The Odyssey is the putative sequel to The Iliad, that other great Greek epic set in the "Heroic" bronze age, what is sometimes called the "palace" culture of Mycenaean Greece, which came to an apparently abrupt end early in the 12th-century B.C. Together, The Iliad and The Odyssey are the foundational texts of our civilization and of western literature. Both were originally orally recited poems, dating from the much poorer "Archaic Age" (c. 800 B.C.), which looked back nostalgically to that much more glamorous heroic era, the familiar stories from which were well known to the audiences that listened to their recitation. 

In its 12,000+ lines,The Odyssey tells the story of the resourceful and cunning Greek hero Odysseus' prolonged, danger and adventure-filled journey home to Ithaca from the Greek victory in the Trojan War. As such, it is one of the world's oldest adventure stories, richer in many respects than the contemporary superhero adventure stories that typically clutter our modern movie screens. Indeed, as classicist (and Odyssey translator) Daniel Mendelsohn put it, The ‘Odyssey has "bequeathed to the West entire genres” - from science fiction to romantic comedy.

Odysseus is a "hero" in the ancient sense of someone with extraordinary physical and mental prowess who was successful in war.- not in the modern sense of a morally virtuous figure deserving of admiration and emulation. (Arguably, Nolan's Odysseus is portrayed as an ancient hero gradually turning into - or aspiring to turn into- a modern moralistic version of a hero.) Odysseus' epic journey highlights the uncertain character of life in an ancient world, which was harsh, unpredictable, and subject to the whims of gods who behave as badly as mortals but who possess so much more power. Odysseus was a relatively minor king among the Greek heroes, but he was not only a great warrior but also a "trickster," a clever, cunning and very shrewd schemer, author of the deceptive strategy remembered forever as the "Trojan Horse." 

Odysseus was favored by Athena (the only Olympian who appears personally in Nolan's film), but made a deadly enemy of Poseidon, the god of the sea and father of the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom he had blinded. The Greek gods are terrifying not only in their power but also in amoral arbitrariness toward mortals. (Unlike in The Iliad, where the gods are constantly active and involving themselves in the story, Odysseus is often on his own a lot of the time, which may make his story more relatably modern. On the other hand, whether Nolan's film may take that too far in diminishing the visible presence of gods in the movie may be an argument worth having about the movie's modernistic tendencies.) 

The Odyssey, however, is above all an epic story of longing for home (a Bronze-Age Wizard of Oz story). Odysseus - complex character that he is - does all sorts of things that imperil his eventual return. But, underneath it all, home is where he wants to be, with his long suffering faithful wife, Penelope (who serves as a sort of anti-type to her cousin, Helen, and Helen's sister, Clytemnestra), and the son he hardly knows (who, in his own coming-of-age story, embarks on a journey of his own, which helps fill us in on familiar stories of the Trojan War's aftermath). Along the way, he and his crew encounter some superficially pleasant obstacles like the land of the Lotus Eaters and lots of deadly obstacles like the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis. Even beautiful and powerful minor goddesses (like Circe with whom Odysseus willingly spends a year and Calypso with whom he somewhat less willingly spends seven more years) ultimately cannot compare with his wife, who faithfully awaits his return, skillfully manipulating the suitors who greedily compete to replace her husband, in the process violating the norms of hospitality and highlighting both the familial and the political character of the crisis caused by Odysseus' prolonged absence. Their final reunion is a romantic panegyric to marital love, and also a restoration of proper political order. His homecoming is in every way the opposite of Agamemnon's ill-fated return home, but both share the same overwhelming atmosphere of violent revenge. (For some inexplicable reason, Nolan omits the sex from Odysseus' encounters with Circe and Calypso, which somewhat detracts from Homer's presentation of those episodes. Likewise, he omits Odysseus' name trick with the Cyclops and then his hubristic revelation of his real name, which is what reveals his identity to Poseidon and sets him up for his future troubles.)

Odysseus' complicated and problematic journey also expresses the anxieties that accompany the adventure of sailing on strange seas, something which would certainly have resonated with ancient Greeks sailing the Mediterranean Sea, setting out for far-flung parts of their known world. Odysseus also undertakes the most fearsome journey of all - to the house of Hades, the home of the dead, where the spirit of fallen warriors articulate a very Greek appreciation of the tragedy of human mortality. (Sadly, Nolan's movie version omits some of the most powerful scenes from this encounter - Odysseus' fleeting attempt to embrace his dead mother and his conversation with the dead hero Achilles.)

Christopher Nolan's unsurprisingly very long movie version of the ancient epic effectively captures the extreme expansiveness of this universal adventure story and homecoming tale in modern form, filled with the high-tech special effects that successively make this ancient adventure story a visually extravagant modern summer blockbuster. Nolan's film stars Matt Damon as Odysseus,  Anne Hathaway as his wife, Penelope, and Tom Holland as his son, Telemachus. These are familiar actors, and so their casting creates familiar expectations.

Thus, one expects a Matt Damon Odysseus to be a somewhat relatable everyman, and for the most part so he is. To the extent that this is a story saturated with universal themes - loss, longing for home, marital love, growing up, the ravages of war - that may be a legitimate way to go, one which may make the ancient epic more relatable to modern audiences. But it remains an ancient epic about a mythic ancient hero, about people very different from ourselves, about their gods, and about a pre-Christian culture imbued with a very different psychology and moral sensibility from ours. Some of that may inevitably be lost when Odysseus becomes too relatable. Thus, the translator Daniel Mandelson recently remarked that, while more colloquial translations' styles may be legitimate, he personally prefers a slightly more formal style, highlighting the fact that this was in fact a grand formal poem, filled with ancient emotions and rituals that ought not to be made to seem too familiar. (One thinks of the Jacobean translators of the King James Bible who deliberately used understandable but slightly archaic-sounding Elizabethan English to convey a sense of the special sacrality of their text.). In this regard, perhaps, Nolan's effort would have benefited from more appearances by the gods - not just for authenticity's sake of fidelity to the text but also to remind us that Odysseus and his interlocutors, however universally human we may imagine them, were not exactly people just like us. 

It is perhaps inevitable that a modern audience (or more to the point, perhaps, a modern director) demands a modern sensibility on a modern movie screen. Throughout the film, Nolan's Odysseus is just a tad more modern in his feelings and attitudes and responses to what happens than the ancient Odysseus would have been (or could have been). There is also a strange undercurrent of premonition that the heroic age is ending, that the ancient Mycenaean palace culture is about to be destroyed and give way to a "dark age." Homeric bards who sang this saga obviously knew that, but it is anachronistic in the extreme to attribute such an expectation to the era itself! Presumably, the motivation for this approach is in support of movie's moralizing tendency.

Homer looked back nostalgically to that great age of "Heroes." We judge that age by different standards, some of which inevitably creep into Nolan's portrayal of Odysseus. The epic itself ends on a triumphant note of vengeance and restoration. The movie, however, has a more morally ambivalent ending. Odysseus' gets his vengeance, and Telemachus gets his throne, but Odysseus seems anguished and repentant about his warrior life. He and Penelope, happily reunited, leave Ithaca together for some sort of voluntary expiatory exile. It is certainly a satisfactory ending, but undeniably a modern one.

L.P. Hartley's famous observation, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," remains relevant. We learn about ourselves from ancient classics - both from what is universal that we share with ancient people, and also from what was very different from us about those same ancient people.

World War II (with Tom Hanks)

 

It requires no special insight to observe that our appetite for World War II stories seems insatiable. That may be a good thing. World War II was, after all, the defining conflict (the "Trojan War," so to speak) of the 20th century, although itself part of a larger "war" which began with World War I in 1914 and ended - sort of - with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991). World War II created the world I grew up in - and more specifically the America I grew up in. It created an international order that lasted more or less for some 80 years. It created the most prosperous period in human history. It offered a focus for national identity and patriotism for second and third generation heirs of immigrants, like my own relatives and a whole generation of postwar political national leaders (including Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush I), who fought in that war and learned some of their most fundamental lessons from that experience.

The series spans 20 episodes. They are only loosely chronological, as each episode focuses on a specific aspect of the war (e.g., Italy). This approach allows for added attention to aspects of the war's story that seldom get as much attention in a strictly chronological account, especially accounts which frame the war almost entirely in terms of an American victory story. For example, episode 15 is devoted entirely to the very different ways in which Germany and Japan related to their own citizens on the domestic front. Episode 16 is devoted entirely to the resistance movements in occupied countries, in France (with a largely very successful outcome) and in Poland (with a totally tragic outcome).

With the passage of time and the decline in the quality in American education, it must be assumed that actual knowledge of World War II has diminished and will continue to do so. Hence, the civic value of programs like this that can remedy some of our increasing collective ignorance. We need to remember World War II - how it happened, the colossal mistakes that led up to it, the terrible damage it did as largely a war against civilians, and the leating impact of the Holocaust and other World War II genocidal actions.

Of course it is likely those who already know something about World War II in the first place that will tune in to watch a program like this! That said the History Channel and Tom Hanks are to be commended for this very valuable effort!