House Divided

 

Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste and house will fall against house (Luke 11:17).

When Abraham Lincoln famously quoted these words of Jesus, at what was then the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, on June 16, 1858, he was a senatorial candidate, his presidency and the civil war which characterized it then still in the future. When Lincoln quoted Jesus, everyone in his audience would have recognized the words and understood the reference.  Biblical literacy has declined enormously since then. So some may think Lincoln's words were original. Indeed, given the precipitous decline in historical literacy in recent decades, many may not recognize the quote or associate it with Lincoln at all, let alone with Jesus.

What Jesus said was supposed to be seen as self-evident. Division undercuts the unity necessary for a successful state - whether in a kingdom or nation or in a household.  The kingdom of God, of course, cannot suffer division. Jesus even goes so far as to warn us: Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. But earthly realities remain prone to division, as we all know. 

Theoretically, our connection with the Kingdom of God should bring us together and create an overarching unity that transcends and subordinates all out human divisions. But, again as we all know too well, such spiritual unity still eludes us. Lincoln had something to say about that too. In his Second Inaugural Address in March 1865, reflecting on four years of civil war, Lincoln famously said: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. ... The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."

In our own day, we seem to be divided as we have not been since Lincoln's time. We hear how families have been fractured and friendships forever ended because of political disagreements. And not only has our common communion in Christ not healed those division, those very divisions have penetrated into the life of the Church, so much so that for many Americans religious allegiances are reflections of - and even determined - by political allegiances, instead of the other way around.

We are accustomed to refer to Lent as a time of grace and reconciliation. That is a lot harder than it sounds. We all know - perhaps from personal experience - how hard it can be to reconcile quarrelling friends or jealous siblings, let alone unite a politically polarized nation or heal a divided Church. But such is the challenge of being Christ's Church today.

Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste and house will fall against house (Luke 11:17).

Homily for the Thursday of the Third Week of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, March 12, 2026.

Communication Without Community

 

Byung-Chul Han is a Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Berlin's University of the Arts. His The Disappearance of Rituals: A Typology of the Present, tr. Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2020) is a short but complex critique of our contemporary "symbol-poor," neoliberal, narcissistic, commodified, consumerist culture. For Han, "rituals serve as a background against which our present times may be seen to stand ot more clearly." For Han, "rituals are symbolic acts," that "bring forth a community without communication," in contrast to which today "communication without community prevails." Rituals "stabilize life," through "their self-sameness, their repetitiveness." Rituals "bring people together and create an alliance, a wholeness, a community."

Han is particularly critical of the contemporary cult of authenticity., which he calls a "compulsion" which "leads to narcissistic introspection, a permanent occupation with one's own psychology." When "ritual gestures and manners decay, affect and emotion gain the upper hand." Hence, "narcissistic disorders are on the rise because we are increasingly losing the ability to conduct social interactions outside the boundaries of the self."

Rituals are not exclusively or uniquely religious, but religious rituals and their heightened form in religious festivals have obviously been a prominent part of human ritual experience. He examines, for example, the religious institution of the Sabbath; "when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine." The silence of the Sabbath "gives rise to listening. It is accompanied by a special receptivity, by a deep contemplative attentiveness. Today's compulsion of communication means that we can close neither our eyes nor our mouths. It desecrates life." Unlike traditional religious festivals, "today's popular festivals have become mass events, and masses are not communities." he contrasts capitalism with religion. "Money, by itself, has an individualizing and isolating effect. It increases my individual freedom by liberating me from any personal bond with others."

Han challenges the prevailing conceit that modernity has been liberatory. Sketching what he calls a "genealogy" of rituals' disappearance, he pointedly interpret that disappearance as not "an emancipatory process." Our impolite society, it appears, has become a brutalized one. Han is hardly the first critic to make this case, although he does so in a very distinctive manner. His claims are quite sweeping, especially given the shortness of the book. Nor is it completely clear how, if at all, we can emerge from our present malaise. He explicitly eschews nostalgia and introduces his book by saying  it "is not animated by a return to ritual." yet obviously he is somehow trying to point the way toward the recovery of a shared dwelling in our divided world.

Fascism - Then and Now

 

When Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Columbia University, first published The Anatomy of Fascism (Random House, 2004, Vintage Books, 2005), it was a definitive historical study of what he called "the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." A definitive historical study of a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon it still is, of course, but 20+ years on it also speaks presciently to troubling contemporary political movements and events.

For Paxton, fascism is "the most important political novelty of the twentieth century: a popular movement against the Left and against liberal individualism. Contemplating fascism we see most clearly how the twentieth century contrasted with the nineteenth, and what the twenty-first century must avoid." Paxton clearly distinguishes fascism from conservatism and conservative authoritarianism. Thus, for example, he finds little or no fascism in Franco's Spain. (Both "Franco and Salazar reduced fascist parties to powerlessness.") On the other hand, he emphasizes the importance of conservative collaboration with historical fascism. "Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites ... The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment." That combination of anti-liberal populism and elite establishment acquiescence seems again relevant in our contemporary context.

Historical fascism in 1920s Italy and 1930s Germany was related to the liberal political order's inability to deal adequately with the challenges of the post World War I world. Perhaps, we can see some similar parallels today in the apparent collapse of the traditional liberal politics in the post-Cold War, post-9/11, post-financial collapse era.

Rather than articulate an abstract definition of fascism, Paxton focuses on what historical fascists actually did - "a succession of processes and choices: seeking a following, forming alliances, bidding for power, then exercising it."

Examining historical fascism in interwar Italy and Germany, he. highlights how World War I "discredited optimistic and progressive views of the future, and cast doubt upon liberal assumptions about natural human harmony. Socially, it spawned armies of restless veterans (and their younger brothers) looking for ways to express their anger and disillusion without heed for old-fashioned law or morality." This is not 1920s Italy, but we too live in a society which has increasingly rejected progressive illusions and from which young men especially are increasingly alienated and nihilistic. All this is combined again with a distinctly problematic expression of resurgent nationalism. "Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle." Fascism involves "a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history."

Fascism presupposes the mass politics of the 20th century. Looking for 19th-century precursors, however, he identifies interestingly the American Ku Klux Klan as "the earliest phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism" and "a remarkable preview of the way fascist movements were to function in interwar Europe." He finds it unsurprising "that the most precocious democracies - the United States and France - should have geneerated precocious backlashes against democracy."

Italian and German fascisms contended successfully in the political arena. They offered "a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that 'politics' had become dirty and futile." Doesn't that sound familiar? "When a constitutional system seizes up in deadlock and democratic institutions cease to function, the 'political arena' tends to narrow."

Mussolini famously lacked any actual program and adapted as opportunity presented, changing his tune to ally eventually with the Church and the monarchy. Both he and Hitler came to power by legitimate constitutional means. Neither formally abolished "the normative state" (and in Mussolini's case the state was still sufficiently strong to bring  him down in the end).

While charismatic leadership is not limited to fascism, it appears that fascism requires it. That dependence on charisma "may help explain why no fascist regime has so far managed to pass power to a successor." Without necessarily pushing the analogy too far, something similar still seems to be the case.

Mussolini's compromises with traditional elites and the Church made his regime increasingly appear more authoritarian than fascist. Hence his need for a war of aggression. "War provided fascism's clearest radicalizing impulse... both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes."

Paxton considers the "inoculation of most Europeans against traditional fascism by its public shaming in 1945" to be "inherently temporary." Future fascism "- an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis - need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols." He imagines an "authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well." Also the collapse of the Soviet Union has left "the radical Right" with "no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry 'losers' of the new post-industrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe" - and we might add the U.S. Armed with "reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans. might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State ... efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that coudl be labeled antinational or decadent."

As "ominous warning signals," Paxton identifies "situations of political deadlock in the face of crisis, threatened conservatives looking for tougher allies, ready to give up due process and the rule of law, seeking mass support by nationalist and racialist demagoguery." 

Remember, Paxton anticipated all this over 20 years ago!

Only at the end, does Paxton finally formulate this working definition of fascism:

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

On Purim

 

By coincidence of calendars on this Lenten weekday, our Jewish brothers and sisters celebrate the holiday known as Purim. (The sequence of events in John’s Gospel suggests that the healing of the disabled man at the pool of Bethsaida might have taken place at Purim.) The story of Purim is found in the biblical book of Esther, which tells how the exiled Jewish community living in Persia was threatened with genocide and then saved through the intervention of Esther the secretly Jewish Queen of the Persian king. The infamous villain of the story was Haman, sort of the Prime Minister, who hated the Jews because one of the Jewish leaders Mordecai had refused to bow to him. Mordecai was Esther’s uncle and went to her and told her, “Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for such a time as this?” Esther fasted and prayed and then courageously went to the king and eventually exposed Haman’s plot, saving the Jewish people from Haman’s malice.

Purim has a special salience this year. It occurs at a time of increasing antisemitism all over the world, across the political spectrum on both left and right. Secondly, it occurs at a time when we find ourselves engaged in an undeclared and unpredictable war with the modern successor state to the ancient Persian Empire, ruled by a contemporary version of a Haman-like government. These considerations contribute a certain added seriousness to what in contemporary Judaism is normally actually a very happy, very festive, fun-filled holiday.

But these are serious times. Regarding the war, we can only hope and pray that our national leaders and the leaders of the nations of the Middle East will find a way to work through this latest crisis to afflict that perennially fractured and troubled part of the world. As regards antisemitism, we need to remind ourselves of the explicit teaching of the Second Vatican Council that “God holds the Jews most dear … [and] does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues,” and that “the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews … decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone” [Nostra Aetate, 5]

Homily for the Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent (Purim), St. Paul the Apostle Church, NY, March 3, 2026.

Photo: Dutch Painting, The Feast of Esther (c. 1625), by Jan Lievens (1607-1674).

Mountaintop Faith

 

It is more than 30 years now since I had the thrilling experience of reaching the Church of the Transfiguration at the top of Mount Tabor after a high-speed taxi ride up the narrow mountain road. I remember it well. So did Peter, James, and John [Matthew 17:1-9]. They didn’t take a taxi, of course, but they had an even much more memorable experience. Hence Peter’s spontaneous reaction, “Lord, it is good that we are here.”

What exactly did they see? Jesus, we’re told, was transfigured before them. What is that supposed to mean? The only time we usually hear the word transfigured used is in relation to this event, when Jesus’ face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. Whatever that looked like, Peter, James, and John were being treated to nothing less than an experience of God’s glory, a peak into another world, a glimpse of Jesus’ divine nature as Son of God and his fulfillment of the Old Testament (represented on the mountain by Moses and Elijah).

No wonder Peter wanted to stay there as long as possible – even to make three tents there, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah – as if this were not just the beginning – an invitation to join Jesus on his journey.

An ancient tradition dates the Transfiguration 40 days before the Crucifixion. In the actual gospel narrative, however, the time-reference first points back to Peter’s profession of faith and Jesus’ first prediction of his impending passion, six days previously.  The unusually explicit time-reference makes it clear that the two events (in both of which Peter plays a prominent part) are connected. In both events, there is the revelation of who Jesus ultimately is and reference forward to his impending death and resurrection. And in both Peter is the spokesman for the others, the one most intimately associated with Jesus but who, in the moment, seems somehow to miss the point.

Paralleling Peter, this morning, is the figure of Abraham, who makes his first appearance on the world stage in today’s first reading [Genesis 22:1-4a]. Until Abraham, human history had been one sinful calamity, one tragic debacle after another – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Flood, and finally the complete collapse of community and breakdown of human society at the Tower of Babel.

Then suddenly God intervened in history in a new and wonderful way – singling out one specific individual, and through him one particular family and eventually one specially chosen nation – to be his human partner, in repairing the massive damage we have done to God’s good creation. God and Abraham – and Abraham’s descendants – will collaborate together and so become a blessing for the whole world.

Abraham is considered the common spiritual ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In all three religions, Abraham is revered for his faith. By which we mean what exactly?

Abraham’s faith summoned him - at an age when most of us are already retired – to go forth to a new land. Abraham’s assignment was exciting, I suppose, but full of generalities and less certain on specifics.  Abraham responded to the ambiguous and complicated events in his life in a way that somehow reflected his sense of God’s presence and action in those ambiguous and complicated events. His faith meant total trust in and reliance on God through whatever changes might be required and whatever challenges might have to be met.

Change is always challenging, which is why try to avoid it as much as possible. Still, sometimes change is necessary, and therein lies the challenge – first to know when, and then to know how. It may mean abandoning the familiar for the frightening. It may mean something totally new. Sometimes, it may mean undoing bad decisions and recent choices in order to return to a lost or forgotten or abandoned older and wiser path.

We all talk at times about making necessary changes in our lives. But we are just as likely to conclude that we have too much at stake to change course.

Lent is our annual opportunity to let Abraham demonstrate the power of faith to overcome our cynicism, despair, defeatism, and spiritual inertia.

That this is possible is, of course, all because of Abraham’s greatest descendent, Jesus, who fulfilled in life and death his nation’s destiny and so made Abraham’s blessing fully available to the entire world.

Even so, our temptation will always be to do the opposite and to think, like Peter, that we are there already - without having to make the journey. But the same God who first called and challenged – and blessed – Abraham also continues to invite us, through Jesus, instructing us as he instructed Peter: "This is my beloved Son … listen to him."

 

Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, March 1, 2026.