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.

 

Saint Augustine of Africa

 

Everyone who knows about Saint Augustine (354-4300 presumably knows that he was African, which is to say that he was born in Roman North Africa and, after a relatively short sojourn in Italy, returned to live the rest of his life and his ministry as bishop in Roman North Africa. The Roman province of Africa corresponded to the territory south of the Mediterranean, north of the Sahara, and west of Egypt (i.e, much of modern Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco). That said, most know Augustine as the great Latin-speaking, Latin-writing, late Roman Doctor of the Church, whose contribution was and remains fundamental to the development and character of western, Latin, European theology and ecclesiology, both Catholic and mainline Protestant. Without negating any of that, Catherine Conybeare (Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College) seeks to balance Augustine's acknowledged Romanness by lifting up his admittedly familiar but much less familiar Africanness in Augustine the African (Liveright, 2025).

Augustine was born in Thagaste (Souk Ahras, Algeria), studied in Carthage (Tunisia), and served as priest and bishop in Hippo (Annaba, Algeria), which Pope Leo XIV - himself a Friar of the order of Saint Augustine - plans to visit later this year. Conybeare effectively portrays those ancient cities and the wider panorama of busy, diverse, and often violent Roman North Africa. Conybeare takes seriously those places and their complex Roman-African culture and the impact of those places on Augustine, as a native son of Africa who was therefore both a Roman insider (by education and formation) and an outsider (by geography and accent). "In the Roman Empire, social advancement hung on how you spoke and which region of the empire you came from, not what you looked like."

Conybeare first leads her readers through the familiar story of Augustine's early life as recounted in his Confessions, highlighting those aspects of his early life and education (e.g., his emotional identification with Dido in the Aeneid) that reveal his cultural Africanness. The second section of the book covers the Donatist conflict and Augustine's strong identification with the universal Church in opposition to the schismatic local Donatist Church, which the author (somewhat distractingly) insists on calling "the African Church." The third section offers interesting insights into the challenges Augustine experienced preaching to congregations in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual (Latin and Punic) society, simultaneously composed of diverse social classes. As Augustine himself wrote, in one of the letters Conybeare quotes, "I don't know where on earth we could find to live," without acknowledging our differences. The fourth and final section focuses on Augustine's reaction to the trauma of 410, culminating in The City of God, and his great final controversy, his defense of God's grace against the heresy of Pelagianism. Conybeare highlights how Augustine personal experiences with Roman politics. in Africa contributed to his famously extensive theology of history. "The hard lesson that he continued to learn as he grew ever closer to people with real political power was the fact that peace could not be an abstract thing. It was a complicated equilibrium held in balance by flawed human beings, and it could waver at any moment."

The book's Epilogue ends with Conybeare's travel to Pavia, where Saint Augustine's body was reburied early in the eighth century (a pilgrimage I have myself regretted never having made). She seems to regret how his final resting place reflects "the appropriation of Augustine to a European tradition that he had profoundly influenced, to be sure, but that was only ever partly his own." I find that final observation strangely sad, since it ignores what makes Augustine most lastingly important for us, his total transformation into a saint of the universal Church.

The Blizzard of 26

 

According to the forecasts, this weekend's snowstorm was anticipated to be the biggest, most dramatically impactful storm to hit the New York City area in ten years, since the historic blizzard of January 2016, which dropped a record of 27.5 inches in New York's Central Park. That record has not been surpassed. TIn 30 hours of snowfall, this blizzard dropped only 19.7 inches in Central Park!

That was enough to give city public school students a real snow day - their first since 2019, ever since remote learning (or non-learning) became the fad. It was also enough to make it illegal to drive in the city from 9:00 p.m Sunday through noon Monday. I usually appreciate the quiet and darkness during my early morning "contemplative" hour, but the absence of almost any external activity at all early Monday morning presaged an especially tranquil day.

Which is what a snow day ought to be! it is an arrogant contemporary conceit of our soulless modernity that work must always continue no matter what else is going on around us. For those lucky enough to have heated homes and food and modern media luxuries, it was a truly tranquil day.

The State of the Union Is Not Good

 

In his January 15, 1975, State of the Union address (photo), President Gerald Ford famously declared, "the state of the union is not good". That was 51 years ago - in a very different century in a very different America with a very different kind of president. A lot has happened in between, but the state of the union is again not good, whatever our president may choose to tell Congress and the country on Tuesday..

Donald Trump is by far the least ideological president in my lifetime. Tariffs seem to be among his few strongly held personal beliefs. They have also been central to his second-term domestic agenda, along mass deportations of immigrants. Tariffs, the White House has variously argued, could help rebuild lost American industries, reduce prices for consumers, lower the national debt, and even (a la the 19th century) replace income taxes with tariffs filling the gap in revenue.

Major American companies declined to challenge Trump's tariffs in court. So it fell to smaller businesses, in Learning Resources v. Trump, to argue that Trump’s tariffs went beyond what the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) authorized. That law allows a president to "regulate" imports during a national emergency but makes no specific reference to tariffs. From 1977 untill Trump, no president has attempted to levy tariffs by invoking IEEPA.

In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts held that Trump had exceeded his powers under IEEPA and "must identify clear congressional authorization to exercise it.” Trump reacted typically, telling reporters, “They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.” In fact, it was a rare rebuke from the Court to a president who has often appeared to be governing as some unaccountable monarch, who needs to be reminded that we have a constitution and that the congress, not the president, is the constitutional organ entitled to impose taxes and raise revenue through tariffs. The Congress can, of course, continue its modern tradition of irresponsibility and delegate tariff-imposing power to the president, but the point of Learning Resources v. Trump is that Congress thus far has not done so, at least not in the manner the president has claimed.

Congress, in fact, has not done much of anything lately. Far from acting like the first and only legislative branch of our federal government and thus a check on a president's authoritarian aspirations, it has both actively and passively empowered this administration to arrogate additional power to itself. 

Perhaps the voters might not mind if the results were lower prices and an overall sense of national well-being. But Trump's tariffs have had the opposite effect. Likewise, his war against immigrants has escalated into a war on American cities and American citizens. And, while it is not uncommon for lame-duck presidents to focus on foreign policy (where a president's opportunities to be effective may often be greater), this is obviously not what Trump's 2024 voters wanted.

Undoubtedly, the President will tell the Congress and the country that the state of the union is good. But, unlike when he tries to tell us grandiose things about himself, what he is claiming about the country is being contradicted by voters' direct experience. Trump might be better served by some of Gerald Ford's humility. But Gerald Ford he is not. And humble he most certainly is not.

The Epstein Class

The recent shocking arrest in Britain of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly HRH Prince Andrew, the 12th Duke of York) illustrates the increasingly serious after-effects of the international scandal surrounding the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein. (The charge against Andrew is "Misconduct in Public Office" and refers to alleged official misconduct while Andrew was a UK Trade Representative from 2001 to 2011, allegations based presumably on revelations derived from the recently released Epstein files.) The arrest of the former prince demonstrates how seriously Epstein-related scandalous misbehaviors are being taken in the UK and elsewhere in Europe (e.g., France, Norway).

At the same time, this event also highlights how the opposite seems to be the case in the US at present. While some public figures have suffered loss of reputation, and some have stepped back from certain public positions, this has all happened in the private sector. So far, no American (other than the late Epstein himself) has been held to account in any legal process. Indeed, no American seems to have suffered anything comparable to the  public scrutiny suffered by three British citizens (Ghislaine Maxwell, Peter Mandelson, and Andrew) implicated in various ways in this scandal. (All three, it should be noted, deny any wrongdoing. Maxwell was convicted by a US Court in 2021. Neither Peter Mandelson nor Prince Andrew has been tried for - let alone convicted of - anything, and so both retain a legal presumption of innocence.)

What this obviously highlights is precisely what the contemporary populist critique has long claimed - that there is, in this supposedly anti-aristocratic democratic country of ours, a largely unaccountable elite defined by wealth and cultural power, who hang out with one another, enjoying the myriad benefits that flow from such oligarchic and meritocratic connections,  and go about their amazingly privileged lives with little no public accountability. This suggests a system of shameless apparent contempt for ordinary Americans, who are typically subject to a very different set of standards when it comes to responsibility for one's behavior. It is not just that the very rich may be able to buy themselves out of legal and other troubles. That is bad enough. Rather it highlights a whole alternative culture of meritocratic oligarchy which seems literally to live in a different system from the rest of us. This is the so-called "Epstein Class."

The MAGA movement achieved prominence in part because of conspiracy theories which referenced the Epstein affair. Prior to his reelection in 2024, candidate Trump apparently expressed openness to releasing all the relevant Epstein information. Many of his supporters expected this to happen, and the reactions of the likes of congressman Thomas Massie and ex-congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene reflect their apparent disappointment with how this has been handled since. 

What this sordid affair exposes about the unaccountability of some very wealthy and powerful people is bad enough. The account also highlights how strangely vacuous the lives of many of the rich and famous now appear to be. In what kind of a world would a married Ivy League University president and former Cabinet member, pursuing a relationship with someone who considered him her mentor, seek relationship advice from the likes of Jeffrey Epstein? In what kind of a world would a future Cabinet secretary, having claimed to have previously cut off all ties with Epstein, be shown instead to have visited his private island with his wife, children, and nannies? In what kind of a world would supposedly smart, accomplished people be so attracted to - even seemingly besotted by - the likes of Jeffrey Epstein? What does that all say about the corrupting character of wealth and privilege?

In the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274) discussing the religious practice of evangelical poverty, noted that wealth poses three obstacles to virtue. They are "the anxiety which often accompanies wealth," second, "love of wealth, which increases with the possession of wealth," and, third, "vainglory or conceit, which is a product of wealth." [Cf. Summa Theologiae II.II, q. 188, a. 7].

Along with the depravity of possibly actionable crimes and many victims' damaged lives, the Epstein files have revealed a long-standing sickness which deeply infects our society, that very "vainglory," which Saint Thomas so rightly recognized as "a product of wealth."

Photo: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, younger brother of Britain’s King Charles III, leaves Aylsham Police Station on Thursday night. (Phil Noble/Reuters)