God's Silence at Halloween

 

Saturday, our regular "community night" coincided with Halloween, in honor of which several of us watched Ingmar Bergman's classic 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. I first saw The Seventh Seal (along with some of Bergman's other early religiously themed movies) back in my undergraduate college days, when I was living in Chelsea (then a relatively inexpensive,  diverse, multi-class New York City neighborhood, unlike what it has since become. In that sense, today's Chelsea neighborhood is a metaphor for our country in this Reagan-Trump era). Bergman was very fashionable then, and the artsy Elgin theater on the corner of 8th Avenue and 19th Street showed his films somewhat regularly. It was part of the wider cultural horizon I was discovering and exploring in those days, while at the same time it connected (however ambivalently) with the long-term religious concerns that perpetually permeated my personal and intellectual investigations then and now.

The Seventh Seal is certainly not a typical contemporary Halloween movie. It is not a horror film, although it may seem somewhat scary in parts and in its style of presentation. It is certainly frightening in its ultimate implication - the fear that there is only "emptiness under the moon." Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), the son of a Lutheran minister who also served as chaplain to the King of Sweden, directed multiple movies, many of which were religiously themed or displayed intense religious resonances. The Seventh Seal is set in late medieval Sweden during the traumatic period of the Bubonic Plague ("the Black Death"). It stars Max von Sydow as Antonius Block, a Swedish knight returning (with his squire, Jöns) from the Crusades. While searching for meaning in a seemingly doomed world, Block meets and eventually plays chess with Death (played by Bengt Ekerot), presumably in an attempt to delay his own death. The film's title is based on the biblical Book of Revelation's "seventh seal," referenced both in the opening narration and again near the conclusion of the film. When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Revelation 8:1). The silence that follows the opening of the seal in the biblical narrative presumably reflects one of the film's central themes, God's "silence," (although the divine "silence" experienced in the film is potentially permanent and signifies a meaninglessness quite alien to the biblical silence).  

A 1969 book by Canadian theologian Arthur Gibson, studying seven of Bergman's religiously themed films, was titled The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Harper and Row). It is interesting to reread Gibson's take on The Seventh Seal, some 50+ years later and try to compare how I react to it now near the end of life versus when I read him in my youth. The same might be said for the movie itself, watching the film now, a half-century later, with all that has happened since then both in our world and in my own life after decades of religious community life and ministry. The "Black Plague" so prominent in the unfolding of the film obviously also resonates very differently now after our very recent plague-like experience of covid. That Plague is central to the way the film functions, although it is actually a historical anachronism. Antonius Block has just returned from the crusades, which would put him at the latest at the end of the 13th century (c.1291), while the Plague only reached Europe in 1347. The juxtaposition, however, has symbolic significance. The Crusades were an optimistic expression of European outreach attempting to restore what had been lost to the Islamic conquerers of the Christian Byzantine Empire's territories. Likewise, the post-war decade when The Seventh Seal was produced and the overall pre-covid secular world were expressions of an unparalleled humanistic optimism and confidence in reason, science, technology, and secular society in general. The medieval Plague produced a society seemingly stuck in a moment of despair. Analogously, we need only recall our own collective national nervous breakdown in 2020, that still lingers in our despairing, traumatized politics, completely undoing the optimistic self-confidence of the late 20th century..

Antonius Block's late medieval Sweden was, of course, Catholic. Hence Block's resort to the sacrament of penance (where, unfortunately, his confessor turns out to be his chess-partner Death himself). Bergman, however, was a 20th-century Swedish Protestant in his religious sensibility. So Block becomes a somewhat Luther-like figure, desperately seeking some guarantee of God, searching in his case for an intellectual certainty which will not be provided, a man alone in the universe with no mediating presence able either to reveal God to him or ease his path to God. Regardless of what the film may or may not have originally intended, it can certainly be seen as a depiction of a world without the Incarnation (or more precisely without faith in the Incarnation). Gibson appears to have recognized this. "The response demanded in the Christian dispensation," Gibson rightly recognizes, "is neither the mere intellectual assent to a series of propositions [Gibson's slam against Roman Catholicism] nor yet the blind faith in an unman [his implicit critique of Protestantism], but rather the personal acceptance of a divine person 'made man'." 

in the film, the foil for Block's search for certitude is his squire Jöns, who accepts life as it is - as it presents itself - without further expectations. The interaction between the two is both comic and serious. There is also Joff, the performer, and his family, who represent a purer and simpler, if unquestioning life, and with whom Block finally finds an alternative to his isolation. To Joff in his simplicity and humility, are granted visions, including a beautiful vision of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and an alarming vision of the knight playing chess with death, which alerts him to the need for him and his family to escape. 

The Seventh Seal's ending, however, dramatic, does not offer a neat resolution. In contrast, Bergman's 1960 medieval religious film The Virgin Spring (which Gibson does not include in his interpretation of Bergman's religious film) serves up a terrible tragedy, followed by righteous revenge and repentance. In his revenge and repentance, the prime protagonist (also played by Max von Sydow) likewise does not achieve certitude, confessing that he does not understand God, but he reconciles with God and vows to build a church at the sight of the tragedy, a site suddenly transformed into an apparent miraculous divine response. 

Halloween may be a good occasion to see The Seventh Seal, not because of its potential for fright value, but because of what All Hallows' Eve was originally about - the triumph of the grace of Christ as evidenced in the saints - and in contrast to what it has increasingly become - a celebration of a resurgent paganism's challenge to Christianity. In The Seventh Seal, the witch, Tyan, trusts totally in the Devil and in the Devil's power to protect her. If Antonius Block is a metaphor for disillusioned modern rationalism, perhaps Tyan is the true metaphor for modernity's anxious pursuit of demonic power and modernity's restless search for fulfillment in all the wrong places.

All Saints Day

 

Recently, a group of us were discussing our lengthy list of Paulist patrons, and someone suggested that maybe we have too many of them. At that, I remember responding somewhat indignantly, “How can you have too many saints? Aren’t saints an intrinsically good thing?”

 

Well, today’s feast may be the Church’s answer to that question. Today, we celebrate not just this saint or that saint or some saints, but ALL the saints – and there are a lot of them! In his vision, John saw a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue [Revelation 7:9].

Over at the Sacred Heart altar (photo), we have an amazing display of photos of family and friends who are no longer with us, whose earthly labors have ended, whom we hope to be with again at that great reunion in the kingdom of heaven! It is that great eternal reunion of what we call the communion of saints, which today’s 1st Reading [Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14] portrays and today’s All Saints’ Day solemnity celebrates.

 

In 1887, the founder of the Paulist Fathers and first pastor of this parish, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, wrote in the Paulist magazine: “When, in 1843, I first read in the Catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home.” The communion of saints had a decisive impact upon young Isaac’s spiritual search, leading him into the Catholic Church a year later.

 

And appropriately so! Indeed, what would we be without the communion of saints?

 

For one thing, church would certainly be a duller place! Just look around! Besides the multiple images of Mary and of our patron, Saint Paul, whose image appears here on my chasuble, just to my right here is the shrine of a great modern Doctor of the Church, Saint Therese of Lisieux, “the Little Flower,” right now accompanied by the recently restored statues of Saint Anthony and Saint Jude. Further down that aisle is an altar honoring an ancient Roman martyr Saint Agnes. Directly across the nave is the altar of a great early missionary Bishop, Saint Patrick, who obeyed Jesus’ command to go and make disciples, even if that meant going outside the comfortable boundaries of the Roman Empire. The altar next to his honors Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. Meanwhile, portrayed in paintings above those altars and decorating the walls of this church, we see numerous other saints, a mere hint of the multitude we remember today.

 

All Saints Day celebrates that part of the communion of saints known as the “Church Triumphant” – not just the thousands officially recognized as saints by the Church, but ALL the holy men and women, known and unknown, who have attained the goal for which we all aim. Living now with God and praising him forever in heaven, the saints – that great multitude from every nation, race, people, and tongue of whom we just heard– help us by interceding on our behalf, uniting their prayers with ours.

 

The regular reference to and invocation of the saints, not just today but in every Mass, every day, signifies our union, as the still struggling Church on earth, with the triumphant Church in heaven, and reminds us that the Church’s mission in this world is to mirror that heavenly community of angels and saints – and so transform the world according to the hope that is Jesus Christ’s great gift to his Church and the Church’s gift to the world.

 

The beginning of the dark winter season, the eve of November 1 was once imagined as a frightening in-between time when the spirits of the dead might roam about and possibly even try to haunt their old homes. Bonfires and jack-o-lanterns were part of the defense of the living against an assault from the other world.

 

Deliberately celebrated on this day after Halloween, All Saints Day celebrates the hope that replaces fear and the victory of grace over sin, exemplified in the lives of the saints and experienced by us here and now in our continued relationship with them – a communion which challenges that great opponent of human hope, death, by connecting us with all who have gone before us with the sign of faith.

Homily for All Saints Day, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, November 1, 2026.

31 Grace-Filled Years

 

On October 28, 212, the Roman Emperor Constantine defeated his rival at the battle of the Milvian Bridge, an event of world-historical significance for western civilization and for the future of Christianity.

Sometime in the next few centuries, October 28 became the feast of the Apostles Simon and Jude, the latter the patron of desperate situations.

Fast forward to October 28, 1886, on which day the Statue of Liberty was dedicated by U.S. President Grover Cleveland. That statue still stands on an island in New York Harbor and was the monument which greeted generations of immigrants to this country, including my four grandparents.

On October 28, 1922, Mussolini's Fascists began their "March on Rome." Two days later, King Vittorio Emmanuele III appointed Mussolini Prime Minister, and under il Duce's leadership Italy began its own tragic march to despotism, world war, and then civil war. Thanks to the U.S. 14th Amendment, my parents were already American citizens by birth, 

On October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, the Council's "Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions," which truly transformed the Church's relationship with the modern world.

Finally, on October 28, 1995, at Saint Peter's Church, Toronto, I was ordained a priest. Compared to all of the above, that was an event little noted nor long remembered - except by me, for whom it was the fulfillment of long-delayed aspiration and the beginning of a most fulfilling ministry and life.

Celebrating my 30th anniversary last year, I recalled "an amazingly grace-filled path, punctuated by daily Masses, Sunday Masses, school Masses, Spanish Masses, Italian Masses, Wedding Masses, Funeral Masses, an amazingly grace-filled path from Toronto to New York, to Knoxville,  now back to New York: singing Christmas carols on Bloor Street and blessing Saint Anthony’s Bread, living through the soul-searing sadness of 9/11 and the welcome comfort of weekly breakfasts with parishioners at the Flame, the spiritual uplift of pilgrimages to famous shrines and a summer spent studying at Windsor Castle, the challenge of walking for miles in the pre-dawn dark at World Youth Day in Cologne, and the adventures of saint-school in Rome, then pastor of Knoxville’s historic and beautiful first parish church, and the amazing adventure of chairing meetings, paying bills, replacing a boiler, restoring the church ceiling and climbing the scaffolding to touch a century-old ceiling painting, blogging, e-mailing, and eventually even live-streaming, teaching and learning, preaching, praying with the sick, baptizing babies, burying the dead, caring for a cemetery, now doing some of the same but on a much smaller scale as superior of this wonderful community – all the time being challenged and stretched in ways I had hardly ever expected."

A year later, what more can anyone say?

Let the Church's liturgy have the final word:

For the glory of your name, O Lord, I have joyfully celebrated the mystery of faith to mark the anniversary of my priestly ordination, so that I may be in truth what I have handled mystically in this sacrifice. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. (Postcommunion Prayer, Votive Mass on the Anniversary of Ordination).

Photo: Bishop Attila Miklósházy, SJ, Bishop of Hungarian Emigrants, lays hands on me at my priestly ordination, Saint Peter's Church, Toronto, October 28, 1995.

1995 Ordination Photo and Prayer Card.

Embracing the Winter Dark

At the British royal family's private Norfolk estate, Sandringhan House, it was once the custom to set the clocks half an hour ahead - in order to provide more afternoon daylight for shooting! (This "Sandringham Time" was abolished by that iconoclastic modernizer, Edward VIII, in 1936.) Of course, the amount of daylight on any given day at any particular time of year is dictated by the sun, not by a clock, let alone by our manipulation of the clock. Playing games with the clock is a time-honored self-deception, however, first proposed by Benjamin Franklin (ostensibly to save on candles), now practiced annually in the U.S. every April ("Spring forward!") and corrected every autumn on the first Sunday of November ("Fall behind!"). The system of summer "Daylight Saving Time" was codified in the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Since then, the beginning and end of "Daylight Saving Time" have been expanded slightly at each end, thanks to the Energy Policy Act of 2005. As that title suggests, that expansion of the "Daylight Saving Time" section of the year has often been defended as an energy-saving measure - in other words, as a politically evasive alternative to adopting any actual energy policy.

Admittedly, "Daylight Saving Time" has its partisans. Congress has repeatedly debated proposals to make "Daylight Saving Time" permanent nationwide, like the Sunshine Protection Act which passed the House in July 2026. Thankfully, however, the bill was stalled in the Senate. So, the traditional twice-a-year clock change remains legally required for now. (Some also assert that the one-hour time change is dangerous to people's health. Yet, thousands of people everyday fly across one or more time zones and change their watches one or more hours without noticeable health harms!)

Despite the way it is obsessively presented, "Daylight Saving Time" does not give us an extra hour of daylight, as is so often alleged. It just reallocates the existing amount of daylight, giving us darker mornings and brighter evenings - fine for wealthy golfers but not so fine for farmers who rise for work early and schoolchildren who have to wait for the bus in dangerously dark streets. Modern society has in so many ways de-linked us from nature and our natural biological rhythms. "Daylight Saving Time" just makes it that much worse, a further de-linking of our official, social, civilizational time from natural time.

Obviously we cannot live our complicated modern lives without some standardizing of time. What is called "Standard Time," to which we will return at 2:00 a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning, remains realistically the closest availably approximation to "natural" time and to the biological rhythms that are part of who we are as human beings.

"Daylight Saving Time" was invented in an era when humans hoped to transcend biology and to leave the constraints of the natural world behind as much as possible. That is still the unofficial ideology of modernity. Meanwhile, however, nature has begun to exact her revenge. The continuity of human civilization now requires renegotiating that relationship in a way which better respects natural limits on human hubris. Recalibrating our clocks to stay closer to natural time will not correct climate change nor solve any of our other pressing political problems. It is, however, one very modest and imperfect but still symbolic step in that direction.

In Saint Ambrose's hymn Aeterne rerum conditor, one of the hymns assigned to Sundays in the Liturgy of the Hours, we sing, You give the seasons of the year To take time's heaviness away. Rather than lament less afternoon daylight to play golf or go shopping, we would do better to learn to embrace the winter dark, with its implicit invitation to slow down and adopt a more contemplative stance to time as the planet presents it to us.

Fruitlands (The Book)

 

Fruitlands (the place) was a utopian community established in June 1843 by New England Transcendentalists Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) and Charles Lane (1800-1870) that lasted until January 1844. Lane purchased what was known as the Wyman farm and its 90 acres, which also included a dilapidated house and barn in Harvard, Massachusetts. Residents were committed to what today would be called a vegan diet, drinking only water, washing in cold water, avoiding animal labor on their farm, and communal ownership of property. The remaining historical buildings are now part of the Fruitlands Museum (which I visited in 2008).

Fruitlands (the book) is Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands, Compiled by Clara Endicott Sears, with Transcendental Wild Oats, by Louisa M. Alcott, first published in 1876, reprinted 1915 (Pantianos Classics). Fruitlands (the book) is this month's selection for our parish book club.

Unless one has a particular historical or philosophical interest in 19th-century New England Transcendentalism and its utopian community experiments at Brook Farm and its short-term unsuccessful offshoot Fruitlands, why read this book? The obvious answer (at least for our book club) is a particular youthful adherent of the Brook Farm community who joined the Fruitlands group briefly in the summer of 1843, namely Servant of God Isaac Hecker (1819-1888), who a year later abandoned transcendentalism for Roman Catholicism, and later became a priest and a famous Catholic apologist and in 1858 founded the Paulist Fathers

Hecker's own personal description of his experience of Fruitlands occupies some six pages of this book, which is a compilation of various contemporary commentaries and recollections of the Fruitlands experiment. Hecker's comments include diary entries from July-August 1843, corresponding with his actual time at Fruitlands, followed by some final comments from 1888, the year both Alcott and later Hecker himself died. The earlier comments reflect how Hecker  experienced Fruitlands and his feelings about it at the time. The end-of-life comments obviously reflect not just recollections from years long past but also his post-transcendentalist, Roman Catholic perspective and re-interpretation of his life.

In 1888, Hecker, asked about the recently deceased Alcott and how he had received Hecker at Fruitlands, responded, "Very kindly, but from mixed and selfish motives. I suspect he wanted me because he thought I would bring money to the Community. Lane was entirely unselfish." (The "money" presumably referred to the Hecker family wealth, which if Isaac had persevered at Fruiltands, might have been made available by his brothers and thus might have contributed to Fruiltands' survival - and seeming success.) Hecker acknowledged "Alcott was a man of great intellectual gifts or acquirements. His knowledge came chiefly from experiences and instinct. He had an insinuating and persuasive way with him." Alcott, however, was also, in Hecker's view, "naturally and constitutionally so odd." Hecker called Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau "three consecrated cranks."

Hecker's contemporary comments at Fruitlands were more well disposed but quite critical even then. He admired Alcott, et al., but doubted Fruiltands would fulfill his long-term needs. He was also homesick. "I have thought of my family this afternoon, and the happiness and love with which I might return to them." Eventually, he decided, "I will go home, be true to the spirit with the help of God, and wait for further light and strength." The Fruiltands community "have been the means of giving me much light on myself, but I feel I would live and progress more in a different atmosphere." After Hecker left, Alcott (according to Hecker's later-in life recollections) said "Hecker has flunked out. He hadn't the courage to persevere. He's a coward." Lane, however, replied, "No; you're mistaken. Hecker is right. He wanted more than we had to give him."

That "more" obviously was what Hecker would eventually find in the Church.

Hecker aside, Fruiltands (the book) is an often rather entertaining, occasionally comic account of the "consecrated cranks" and other unusual characters who briefly populated Fruiltands, along with the long-suffering Mrs. Alcott and her children. Ellery Channing said, "Mrs. Alcott was one of the most refined persons of my acquaintance. She told me afterwards that in 1843-44 she feared for her husband's sanity; he did such strange things without seeming to know how odd they were; wearing only linen clothes and canvas shoes, and eating only vegetables."  According to Lane, "Mr. Alcott makes such high requirements of all persons that few are likely to stay, even of his own family, unless he can become more tolerant of defect."

That last comment, by Charles Lane, summarizes the inevitably failed outcome of such secular utopian communal experiments, of which there were in fact many in the 19th century - a century which widely encouraged the post-Christian belief in human perfectibility and hence utopian possibility. (Contemporaneously, the Shakers were a religiously oriented utopian community which proved much more successful in their time - and were acknowledged as such even by the Fruiltands leadership. According to Lane, some associates, including Hecker, "visited the Shakers and were much attracted by them.")

The community at Fruitlands lasted seven months. It was dependent on farming, which turned out to be too difficult. Fruitlands quotes a certain Mr. Sanborn's Memoirs of Bronson Alcott, "A lack of organizing power to control the steady current of selfishness, as well as the unselfish vagaries of his [Alcott's] followers, was the real cause. Nothing in fact could be more miserable than the failure of this hopeful experiment."

Hecker, for one, went on soon to find something so much better, more long-lasting, more true to authentic human aspirations, while fully aware of human limits.