Saturday, November 23, 2024
Studying History
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Mary in the Temple
Today's feast of The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (in the East, The Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple). is one of the oldest Marian feasts - if also one of the most historically problematic. The event it ostensibly commemorates is found in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, according to which Mary's parents (there identified as Joachim and Anne) brought Mary as a child of three to the Temple to thank God for having at last given them a child and to consecrate her to God. More elaborate versions of the legend suggest she may have remained longer in the Temple as preparation for her exalted role as Mother of God.
What actually did happen on this date in 543 was the dedication of a Byzantine church (The New Church of the Theotokos) near the site of the Jerusalem Temple, the anniversary of which became the commemoration of Mary's legendary presentation as a child in the Temple. In the post-Tridentine liturgical reform of 1568, Pope Saint Pius V suppressed the feast, but popular piety won out and it was soon restored by Pope Sixtus V in 1585. In his 1974 encyclical Marialis Cultus, Pope Saint Paul VI mentioned this feast's "lofty and exemplary values."
Christianity is in important respects an historically-based religion, in that the principal events in salvation history happened in the course of. human history. However, Christianity transcends mere history, and it is good on occasion to celebrate, as we do today, a non-historical event rich in religious symbolism. Mary's imagined presentation in the Temple highlights her life-long commitment (dogmatically elaborated in the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception) to align herself with God's will and God's great plan for the salvation of the human race. Insofar as Mary is also a symbol of the Church, her lifelong commitment challenged each of us, as members of the Church, to imitate her in our own journey through this life.
Photo: Altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
1000 Days
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
"Advice and Consent"
Monday, November 18, 2024
Our Overaged Constitution
For a long time now, the sheer longevity of the U.S. Constitution has often been held up as one of its greatest merits. It is, after all, the oldest written constitution in the world. Moreover, most western (more or less democratic) states have in fact had multiple constitutions during the 135 years that the U.S. Constitution has been in effect. That latter fact should at least invite the question about whether our overaged Constitution is still completely up to the task - or fit for purpose, as the Brits say. Given the fact that the basics of constitutional and democratic governance may be increasingly at risk in the next presidential term, it may be that much more important to distinguish the Constitution's flaws from its acknowledged virtues.
That our Constitution has lasted this long might have surprised its authors. Thomas Jefferson (who was not one of the Framers) famously thought there should be a revolution every generation. The Founders for the most part were not so radical and certainly valorized stability. That said, I suspect they would be surprised that their constitution has lasted so long in such a very different kind of world.
In fact, of course, the original Constitution recognized its inherent limitations by providing for amendments. The constitutional amendment process is so cumbersome as to be virtually unusable in today's politically polarized context, but the early republic was smaller and more politically healthy and disposed to constitutional change. Thus, the first 15 years saw 12 amendments, including the all-important "Bill of Rights" and a modification of the already dysfunctional constitutional process for electing presidents.
The next series of constitutional amendments were the Reconstruction Amendments (14-15), which, thanks to a bloody Civil War, radically transformed the Constitution from being state-centric and slavery-tolerant to being somewhat more more federally centered, anti-slavery, and somewhat less anti-democratic. The next spurt of constitutional amending came with the early 20th-century Progressive era. So we got the Income Tax (16), popular election of Senators (17), Prohibition (18), Women's Suffrage (19), and then a little later, the "Lame Duck" Amendment (20), and the repeal of Prohibition (21). Prescinding from Prohibition, these all contributed to the increasingly democratic character of a constitutional system that was originally so much less so. These were vital improvements, which defined the 20th century's political progression.
I regard the 22nd Amendment limiting presidential terms as an unfortunate, anti-democratic regression, but a rather modest one. (In the present circumstances, in fact, the 22nd Amendment may be a prerequisite for salvaging constitutional and democratic governance.) The rest of the post-war amendments, moreover, definitely represented further democratic improvements on the original system - electoral votes for D.C. (23), abolition of poll taxes (24), presidential disability and succession (25), and the 18-year old vote (26). That last great spurt of amending activity reflected the post-New Deal, post-war, increasingly egalitarian and democratic society that the U.S. was then becoming. - and from which it has so dramatically regressed.
The fact that we haven't had any meaningful amendments since 1971 is telling. We have become much too divided a country to accomplish anything so consensual as amending the Constitution. But our polarized politics also highlights the dysfunctionally anti-democratic directions our Constitution makes possible.
Luckily, the recent presidential election did not see another repeat of 2000 and 2016 when the winner lost the popular vote. But, of course, that possibility remains. And, even without that outcome, the electoral college continues its massive distortion of our elections and of presidential campaigns. There is some evidence, for example, of different performance by the candidates in so-called battleground states and in so-called safe states. Trump lost states like New York, of course, but he did significantly better there than expected. and he performed better there than in some battleground states, which suggests that the Harris campaign may have had some effect in those places. Imagine an election in which candidates campaigned in all states, and voters in all states knew that their votes actually mattered! We can't predict exactly what our politics would look like, but we can be confident that it would be very different if we elected our presidents the way we elect other officials, i.e., the way a democracy would do.
The Electoral College was never intended to function as it does now. That fact itself further justifies efforts to replace it. The Senate is another story. The Framers' attraction to the classical idea of a "mixed constitution," which itself has much merit, gave us the Senate as a pseudo-aristocratic check on the democratically elected House. Personally, I regard those aspects of the Senate - such as 6-year terms, staggered tenure, and the Senate's role (very much at risk at the moment) in advising and consenting to appointments and treaties - as positive "checks and balances." Less positive, however, is the Senate's historical birth as a federalist compromise to reflect and represent the inordinate importance of the states. To be fair to the founders, none of them could have anticipated the eventual growth of the United States and thus the absurd disparity between, for example, California and Wyoming. There was no comparable disparity at the time of the founding.
Tragically, there is nothing to be done about the Senate. Certainly, viable alternatives could be imagined which would preserve the original sense of the Senate in a more sensible way. For example, we could divide the country into real regions, which make infinitely more sense than artificial states. A Senate structured to represent individual states more differentially but to represent equally the main regions of the U.S. - Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Mountain and Prairie states, Far West, and Southwest - might make sense of the Senate, but of course cannot be accomplished.
(The Senate, of course, could at least reform itself somewhat by abolishing the filibuster, which would be a major democratic advance. That would ironically also be more in line with the original sense of the Constitution, which never envisaged the filibuster. If the Republican Senate sees fit to eliminate the filibuster at some point to achieve some aspect of Trump's agenda, that might be tragic in the short term but it would be a long-term good for the country, for which the filibuster has never been anything but an antidemocratic curse.)
The third pseudo-aristocratic component of our outdated Constitution is the Judiciary, specifically the life-tenure of federal judges and Supreme Court Justices, which was part of the original Constitution, and the usurped power of judicial review, which was not. Obviously, judicial reform is also off the table, given our present inability to amend the Constitution.
So whatever a post-Trump liberal reformist agenda will look like, it will remain constrained by these anti-democratic institutional constitutional barricades. All this is especially relevant right now because the Constitution was so designed in large part to be an instrument against tyranny. Yet now it is those problematic elements in the Constitution that are especially salient in diminishing the Constitution's effective ability to be an instrument against tyranny.
Sunday, November 17, 2024
At the Gates
“When you see these things happening, know that he is near, at the gates.”
In every period of human history, but especially in times of rapid change and confusion, people have looked for prophecies and predictions and dubious private revelations to explain what was happening to their formerly familiar world - as if that were what Jesus was talking about! For the same Jesus who told his hearers to be on the lookout and to recognize the signs of his coming, also assured them that “of that day or hour, no one knows.”
Even so, Jesus challenges his followers to be on the lookout for signs of his kingdom.
So, we need to ask ourselves what things do we see happening in the world right now?
We certainly do seem to be in one of those times of rapid change and confusion. We live in situations that “pose new challenges, which, for us at times are difficult to understand.” In this country, we have just had a very contentious polarizing election, in which both sides employed apocalyptic language, and which, while decisive in its result, still leaves our country very divided and many of our fellow citizens very angry at one another.
In the Gospel we just heard, Jesus made his ominous predictions just prior to Passover, in the springtime, when the fig tree sprouts leaves, a sure sign that summer is near. It is, however, in the autumn of the year that the Church annually repeats this message. Autumn is the long-awaited and hoped-for season of harvest, when the year’s work finds fulfillment in our season of thanksgiving.
Harvest, however, also marks an end. In nature, November vividly anticipates both the eventual end of the natural world and the eventual end of each individual. The Church recaptures for us that natural cyclical mood, as it recalls Christ’s warning words about the end, when the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of the earth to the end of the sky.
And so we wait – not just for the end of the world, but for our own individual end, which inevitably gets closer all the time. And it is precisely how we wait that identifies what following Jesus in the world is all about.
For following Jesus is not about pinpointing that day or hour. Nor is it about trying to identify in advance which of our neighbors shall live forever and which shall be in everlasting horror and disgrace. On the contrary, following Jesus is all about the how in the now – how we live and what we love in the here and now, what we make of this interval, whether it be long or short, until the end – in other words, the durability and quality of our commitment and our faithfulness to him and to one another for the duration. That’s what matters most over the long haul and will determine who we will be for all eternity. That is the wisdom which shall shine like the splendor of the firmament and lead many to justice.
Meanwhile, we are fortified for that long haul by the durability and quality of Jesus Christ’s commitment and faithfulness to his Father, the same Christ who, in the words we just heard from the letter to the Hebrews, took his seat forever at the right hand of God.
Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, November 17, 2024.
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Transition
Autumn weather, the welcome annual transition from summer to winter, at last seems to be (albeit belatedly) on its way. Meanwhile, in the political world, we in the United States have long been accustomed to another transition tradition at this season, as one "lame duck" President finishes out his term and prepares to transfer power to his recently elected successor.
For much of the Republic's history, the transition just happened, with greater or lesser degrees of amity and concord. With the 20th-century growth of the federal government, however, a more systematic transition became necessary. Federal law now requires requires the White House and agencies to begin transition planning well before a presidential election and the General Services Administration to provide office space and other core support services to presidents-elect and vice presidents-elect, as well as pre-election space and support to eligible candidates. Famously (or, rather, infamously) that didn't work so well four years ago. We will see how well it works this time.
The more visible - and somewhat ritualistic - aspects of the transition concern the direct, personal interactions of the principals, that is, the President and the President-elect. This usually entails at least one formal meeting of the two at the White House sometime after the election and then the formal, ceremonial meeting and ride together to the Capitol on Inauguration morning. Even that hasn't always gone so well. Witness four years ago when the outgoing President Trump boycotted his successor's inaugural. The last time that had happened was 1869, when President Andrew Johnson refused to attend President-elect Ulysses S Grant's inauguration. (Because of his health condition, in 1921 Woodrow Wilson did not attend Warren Harding's actual swearing-in, but he did do the traditional ride with him to the Capitol beforehand.)
It remains to be seen what January 20 will look like and how much of the traditional ritual will actually occur, but today at least President Biden is doing his part in welcoming President-elect Trump to confer with him at the White House. How well the outgoing and incoming staffs are collaborating may be another question, the answer to which we will learn soon enough.
The legal stipulations for transition-planning and inter-Administration cooperation reflect contemporary concerns about effectively staffing the federal government. What that federal government will actually look like once staffed by MAGA Trump cronies is something else again!
The personal and ceremonial aspects of the transition are more about constitutional and democratic symbolism - the sort of thing Americans used to take great pride in, although perhaps not so much anymore. At the first presidential transition I can really remember - from Eisenhower to Kennedy - one memorable line of commentary was, "Thus passes power, freely won, freely given." That, of course, is at the heart of constitutional, democratic governance. If not lost, that mindset has been irretrievably injured by President Trump's behavior in the 2020-2021 transition. While a return to the traditional rituals would in itself be welcome, much more important will be the long-term impact of our recent political crises on popular beliefs and attitudes about constitutional and democratic governance.
Monday, November 11, 2024
Veterans Day and Our Wider World
When I was in elementary school in the 1950s, November was for us a wonderful month full of school holidays. There were five of them - All Saints Day (November 1), Election Day, Veterans Day (November 11), Thanksgiving Day, and the Friday after (at a time when most folks went back to work that day). Veterans Day is still a legal holiday (no mail, no banking), but otherwise gets little attention - unlike, say, in Canada, where the Remembrance Day two-minute silence still has real power. In a better world, perhaps, we would make more of Veterans Day. But that is not where we are.
That said, the Veterans Day we do have still has salience. Primarily, it evokes personal, familial, and local appreciations of those who have served our country in uniform, especially in our many wars. That is certainly edifying and important. At a more remote remove, however, Veterans Day has an historical component. It is, after all, the 106th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the First Word War, which (along with the war itself) paved the way not for a century of peace but a prolonged period of wars and civil and global conflicts.
When the Armistice Day Centenary was celebrated in 1918, Donald Trump was the U.S. President, someone whose understanding of what World War I had been about and whose appreciation of military service and sacrifice were both severely attenuated at best. His presence at the commemorations created some dissonance at the time.
Now Donald Trump is to be President again, and his neo-isolationist outlook offers an alternative perspective to the traditional themes of this holiday.
The first widespread takeaway from the experience of World War I was that the pre-war order (Churchill's "Old World in its sunset" that was "glorious to look upon" ) had failed and could not be put back together again. The question then became what new international order could be created to replace what had self-destructed. The post-war world the winners created proved disastrous (which could and should have been predicted at the time). The gratuitous destruction of the Hapsburg Empire, the calumny of German war guilt, the imposition of reparations, plus the rise of the Soviet Union on Europe's eastern end, all created an international order set up for failure which it did within 20 years.
The victors of World War II won much more decisively, and that perhaps gave them greater freedom to restructure the international order in a way which appeared to them to be more promising. Even the Cold War, which was my first introduction to international relations, unintentionally created a kind of stability. And, while the end of the Cold War was a bountiful benefit for those living in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe, it in turn created unexpected new problems and new disruptions.
We are now coming to the end of that post-Cold-War era, wondering what exactly is going to take its place. One thing that is clear is that unlike the previous two post-WWII eras, the U.S. will not play the kind of exceptional role it has hitherto played.
And that is a very somber reflection for this Veterans Day.
Saturday, November 9, 2024
Realignment
Matthew Sitman (co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast) has argued that the story of this election is "the story of Western politics over the past fifty years: class dealignment and education polarization, which is to say the continued abandonment of center-left parties for the political right by working-class voters."
It is hard to argue with that almost obvious assertion, which Sitman amplifies as follows: Trump "told people who to blame for the problems in their life, real or imagined, and promised to fix it all. ... Working class Americans didn’t turn out for Trump because he threatens democracy. They did so because our democracy, such as it is, didn’t seem worth defending. Any arguments about the way forward need to begin with this depressing reality."
Sitman may be expressing a more ideologically jaundiced feeling about American liberal democracy than the average contemporary Democrat would easily identify with, but what may be hard to identiy with may need to be at least considered. An important reality is that, while the Democrats are increasingly vulnerable on issues the majority of voters care about and are, therefore, diminishing, the Republicans have been building a growing, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class, non-college-educated coalition.
The fact is also that that coalition also includes tech billionaires and other super-rich who stand to benefit from Trump's policies, likely to the detriment of the "working-class" components of the coalition. It remains to be seen whether those components of the emerging Republican coalition will hold the party accountable for its failures or - more likely, based on recent history - whether they will remain loyal, contrary to their immediate economic interests, because of their cultural identity politics.
Cultural identity politics remain the Democrats' Achilles Heel. The infamous ad about Harris supposedly endorsing tax-payer-funded gender surgery for illegal immigrant prisoners may well have been the single most successful Republican ad, one which effectively symbolizes the wider cultural dissonance at the heart of so much of the Democratic party's present problems.
It is not that Democrats don't offer policies which would be beneficial for members of the new multi-racial, multi-ethnic, working-class, non-college-educated coalition. But voters can usually discern what matters most motivate and inspire a candidate. And at present that perception is that an array of counter-cultural (even counter common-sense) identity politics positions may be what most motivate and inspire many elite, college-educated Democrats.
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Reckoning for Liberalism
Early this morning after the election, I went across town to a regularly scheduled medical appointment. At that early hour, the New York streets were full of people going to work or school. Everyone seemed to be doing what people probably would have been doing had there not been an election. It was a salutary reminder that life is about more than politics.
That said, today we need to talk about politics. The American people have overwhelmingly elected the most problematic presidential candidate in modern history, with potentially catastrophic consequences for many Americans, for immigrants, and for the world order we have known for decades. The severity of the challenge to democratic institutions and norms that the country will face in the next few months and years will be unprecedented. It will be a dark and difficult time for America.
Meanwhile, we have just had an election, and it behooves us to analyze its meaning and import. Not only did Trump win in the Electoral College, but he appears also to have won the popular vote. If so, he would be the first Republican to do so in 20 years. He overwhelmingly improved over his past performance in much of the country (apparently getting the largest vote-share of any Republican since 1988). It was a genuinely stunning popular victory, which also confirms what an angry and divided country this is at present.
Undoubtedly, critics will now attack Kamala Harris' campaign. While I think more analysis is called for, my sense is that she ran about as good a campaign as she could. Perhaps, a different candidate might have done better, but I believe the basic lesson of the election is a strong popular rejection of contemporary liberalism and the liberal "establishment." Obviously, the cultural issues the Democrats thought might carry them to victory could not overcome the widespread dissatisfaction with the Biden Administration and especially with its handling of the economy and immigration. While it may be true that the U.S. economy is in fact the envy of the rest of the world, the Democrats' seeming insensitivity to how ordinary Americans actually experience the economy seems to have doomed their efforts to change the subject to cultural concerns.
Whether a different candidate could have done better than Harris is really also a question about Joe Biden's initial insistence on running for a second term. That became unsustainable after the June debate; but it is possible that, if he had announced at the end of 2022 that he would not run again, the subsequent primary process might have produced a better candidate (or even made Harris a better candidate). But it is really hard to see what more Harris could have done, given the strong headwinds she was facing.
There probably will be an argument about whether her "popular front" strategy made the most sense. She apparently premised her campaign on the belief that lots of centrist voters (including many anti-Trump Republicans) would support her. In the end, there do not seem to be many such centrists left! On the other hand, it would seem almost ludicrous to argue that an alternative, more leftist, "progressive" campaign strategy would have wooed many voters away from Trump. Whatever may be said for or against "progressive" politics, the reality is that "progressive" politics tends to read the culture wrong.
"Populism" is ultimately an electoral NO to continued rule by the elite governing political class, which the Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans represent right now. The election results undercut any moderate Republican argument for some sort of recidivist Reaganism. More importantly, however, the election was a great rebuke to contemporary post-cold-war liberalism and especially to its increasingly "woke" expressions, which appear increasingly irrelevant to ordinary people's lives and offensive to their moral values. How the Democrats sort this out in the inevitable internal party struggle that is ahead may determine what, if any, prospects for success the Democratic party may have in the near future.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
The Greatest of All Plagues
Capitalism solved the problem of production, one of my professors used to say, but it's up to others to solve the problem of distribution. That "problem of distribution" is increasingly the problem of economic inequality, which is incredibly worse now than it was 50 years ago when I was studying political theory. As political scientist David Lay Williams reminds us in this latest - and very traditional - conversation within the history of political theory, whereas 'in 1965, the average CEO earned 21.1 times as much as a typical worker at the same company," by 2021, the average CEO "earned 351.1 times as much as a typical worker at the same company."
The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx (Princeton U. Pr., 2024) is written in the format of a traditional history of political theory, treating the political philosophies of Plato, the NewTestament, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. The book takes its title from Plato's Laws, 744d, where the Athenian Stranger characterizes civil war as the greatest of all plagues, which he describes as an inevitable outcome of economic inequality. Plato's Laws in fact famously restrict inequality to a 4:1 ratio.
Williams takes us through some of the traditional canon of political theory, focusing on theorists' (beginning with Plato) preoccupation with civic unity and harmony and the obstacles that inordinate accumulations of great wealth have long been recognized as posing for societies. "Perhasp the single most common theme uniting thinkers in this book regarding the problem of inequality is the degree to whcih inequality divides political communities."
His particular bete-noir is sufficientarianism, which is preoccupied with alleviating poverty rather than overcoming inequality. With Adam Smith, the traditional zero-sum view of the economy changed importantly with the new capitalist understanding of economic growth. One consequence of the reality of economic growth has been the sufficientarian preoccupation with poverty to the neglect of inequality. Yet, as Plato's 4:1 ratio reminds us, there are limits to how much inequality a society can appropriately tolerate. Sufficientariansim, according to Williams, "severely constrains the moral imagination as it has been expressed throughout history." It also ignores something well understood by the theorists analyzed in this book, namely "the corrupting effect of inequality on the rich themselves."
This well written retrieval of the tradition of the history of political thought offers a rich treatment of why and how economic inequality contributes to social disunity, political instability, and deep-seated personal and collective moral corruption.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Jaywalking in NYC
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Dilexit Nos
On October 24, Pope Francis issued an Encyclical Letter Dilexit Nos ("On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ"). This was the first encyclical devoted entirely to the Sacred Heart since Pius XII's encyclical Haurietis Aquas, published on May 15, 1956, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Pope Pius IX. Given the special relationships between Jesuits and the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Like so many such documents, Dilexit Nos is longer than it needs to be and unlikely to attract casual readers. That said, there are a few points it would be particularly desirable to mention. Francis highlights how what we contemplate and adore in this devotion "is the whole Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, represented by an image that accentuates his heart. That heart of flesh is seen as the privileged sign of the inmost being of the incarnate Son and. his love, the heart of Jesus is 'the natural sign and symbol of his boundless love" (48). The Pope stresses the significance of the image of the heart. "Universal human experience has made the image of the heart something unique" (53). "The venerable image portraying Christ holding out jis loving heart also shows him looking directly at us, inviting us to encounter, dialogue and trust; it shows his strong hands capable of supporting us and his lips that speak personally to each of us" (54).
Devotion to the Sacred Heart highlights the humanity of Christ. "The Fathers of the Church, opposing those who denied or downplayed the true humanity of Christ, insisted on the concrete and tangible reality of the Lord's human affections" (62). "Devotion to Christ's heart is essential for our Christian life to the extent that it expresses our openness in faith and adoration to the mystery of the Lord's divine and human love" (83).
Francis recalls the historical importance of this devotion in the battle against Jansenists, who "looked askance on all that was human, affective and corporeal, and so viewed this devotion as distancing us from pure worship of the Most High God" (86). Moving to today, "we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality" (87). Francis also adds "that the heart of Christ also frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes" (88).
Regarding the history of the devotion, "the Church today rejects nothing of the good that the Holy Spirit has bestowed on us down the centuries, for she knows that it will always be possible to discern a clearer and deeper meaning in certain aspects of that devotion, and to gain new insights over the course of time" (109). Unsurprisingly, the Pope highlights the devotion's resonances within the Society of Jesus. He quotes Pedro Arupe: "From my novitiate on, I have always been convinced that what we call devotion to the Sacred Heart contains a symbolic expression of what is most profound in Ignatian spirituality, and of an extraordinary efficacy - ultra quam speraverint - both for its own perfection and for apostolic fruitfulness" (146).
Finally, the Pope addresses what he calls "the missionary dimension." Accordingly, "our work as Christians for the betterment of society should not obscure it religious inspiration, for that, in the end, would be to seek less for our brothers and sisters than what God desires to give them" (205).
Francis concludes: "Christ's love can give a heart to our world and revive love wherever we think that the ability to love has been definitively lost" (218).
Friday, November 1, 2024
November
In November, in the days to remember the dead
When air smells cold as earth,
St. Malachy, who is very old, gets up,
Parts the thin curtain of trees and dawns upon our land.
So begins a famous poem by the 20th-century American monk Thomas Merton. (Saint Malachy was a 12th-century Cistercian who became Bishop of Saint Patrick's See of Armagh, whose feast is customarily kept of November 3, the day after All Souls Day.)
Once upon a time, November 1 marked the beginning of the old European/Celtic winter. Even if, sadly, the weather isn't quite so cold as it used to be at this point in the year (thanks to the self-inflicted damage of climate change), the November Triduum of Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day does bring with it an inescapable shift in mood, traditionally reflected in the change of seasons. (In Tennessee last weekend, I did get to see fantastic fall foliage, another seasonal sign that sometimes seems increasingly muted.)
These annual days to remember the dead keep us connected with those who have gone before us, whose number, of course, keeps increasing as we age and come closer to joining them. It is more than merely a matter of nostalgia. Remembering is a fundamentally human activity, all the more to be treasured as we age. Remembering those whose lives once intersected with ours affirms that their lives were real and genuinely mattered. Factor in the faith dimension of the Communion of Saints, which All Saints and All Souls Days are intended to focus on, our remembering those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith celebrates our shared destiny and shared hope.
Photo: November Memorials to the Departed, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.