O Christmas Tree!

Putting up "the Tree" has long been an infallible sign that Christmas is coming closer. When I was but a boy in the Bronx in the 1950s, my parents used to purchase a Christmas Tree, usually from a local neighborhood vendor, a few days before the holiday and then left it out in the cold on the fire escape outside my bedroom window until it was time to decorate it. Typically, that would happen on Christmas Eve or maybe a day or two before. Over the years, the almost universal tendency everywhere - not just in stores and commercial settings but also in homes and even in churches - has been to set up and decorate Christmas Trees earlier and earlier. The lamentable but widespread practice of using an artificial "Tree," which obviously avoids the problem of how to keep it from drying out too much indoors, has contributed to this ever earlier decorating. Nowadays, some homes even put up their Christmas Tree as early as Thanksgiving, thus imitating commercial establishments for which the Christmas Tree is less a symbol of the Savior's birth than an invitation to endless Christmas shopping.

Whenever the Tree appears, however, it is invariably a sign of joy and a symbol of hope. Something special happens to a room when the Christmas Tree is put in its place and lights begin to appear on its branches. Against the cold gloom of a December afternoon and the sheer blackness of a long winter night, the Christmas Tree stands as the silent but bright reminder of what the Gospel for Christmas Day proclaims: The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world (John 1:9).

Although some earlier forms of tree decorations existed, such as the medieval "Paradise Tree" adorned with apples for mystery plays, popular legend attributes our modern Christmas Tree to 16th-century Germany and in particular to Martin Luther. How accurate the legend about Martin Luther and the domestication of the Christmas Tree actually is probably cannot be resolved. That said, it still speaks powerfully to what the Christmas Tree signifies. 

According to the legend, Luther, walking through a forest one winter night, was struck by the sight of a fir tree sparkling in the starlight. Thus inspired, he cut down one small fir tree and brought it indoors, replicating the light of the stars with the light of candles on the tree's branches, thus making the illuminated fir tree into a symbol of the light of Christ coming into the world. Christmas is indeed the ultimate winter light festival, and the Christmas Tree is the most common domestic expression of this symbolism.

Along with millions of others all over the world this week and next, we are decorating our Christmas Tree. These are not the best of times. Yet Christmas comes faithfully in good times and bad to lift up our depleted spirits just as it lifts up our gaze to its evergreen branches and bright and beautiful lights. Face-to-face with Christmas, we are enabled to get beyond our anger against one another and our justified anxieties about our future and once again feel loved and look forward with hope.

Our Hope in Terrible Days

 

Just 171 years ago in 1854, while guiding a Church still struggling to recover from the calamitous experience of the French Revolution, Blessed Pope Pius IX formally defined the Church’s faith in the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception – Mary's fullness of grace from the very beginning of her earthly existence, "Adorned from the first instant of her conception with the radiance of an entirely unique holiness" [Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 56]. Mary’s fullness of grace, Pius IX taught, exists because she received it freely, before any action on her own part, “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race” [Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854)]. 

Almost immediately after that dogmatic definition, San Francisco's Old Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, the first purpose-built California Cathedral and now a parish served by the Paulist Fathers, was dedicated at Midnight Mass that Christmas. Not long after, the parish where I pastored for 10 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, dedicated the following September, was also one of the early churches dedicated to the Immaculate Conception.

Already in 1846, the Bishops of the United States had unanimously placed the United Sates "under the special patronage of the holy Mother of God, whose immaculate conception is venerated by the piety fo the faithful throughout the Catholic Church" [6th Provincial Council of Baltimore, Pastoral Letter, 1846]. Much more recently, in the mid-20th-century, the famous American Catholic convert and Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who was one of the four famous Americans Pope Francis mentioned in his address to Congress in 2015, wrote in his Journal that the definition of the Immaculate Conception “was a turning point in the modern history of the Church." Merton continued: "The world has been put into the hands of our Immaculate Lady and she is our hope in the terrible days we live in.” [November 10, 1947]          

What exactly did Merton mean by that seeming indulgence in mid-20th-century American Catholic triumphalism? Although a feast honoring Mary's conception had originated in the Eastern Church by perhaps as early as the fifth century, was celebrated in the West by the ninth century, and was extended to the Universal Church as a feast of obligation in 1708, intellectuals had argued - as intellectuals do - about the meaning and truth of the doctrine for centuries before it was finally definitively defined. 

Once the doctrine had been defined, the Immaculate Virgin Mary herself seemed to weigh in on the issue. In February 1858, she appeared to a poor, rather sickly girl in a riverside grotto in an off-the-beaten-track town in southern France, and surprisingly identified herself with the mysterious words, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” That title was surprising and mysterious to the young visionary, Bernadette Soubirous, who did not at that time understand the meaning of those strange-sounding words.

Even today, many may wonder at this unique title of Mary, which might easily be misinterpreted almost as some sort of esoteric advantage Mary was awarded apart from any immediate connection with the rest of us. Yet, as Mater Populi Fidelis, the recently published "Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles Regarding Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation," has reminded us "grace makes us like Christ." As "the most perfect expression of Christ’s action that transforms our humanity," Mary manifests "all that Christ’s grace can accomplish in a human being." 

That, I think, is what it means  to call Mary "our hope in the terrible days we live in.”

Indeed, these are "terrible days." So much that was not so long ago taken for granted - whether in religion or politics or human relations -  has now gone so seemingly wrong. Inevitably, we are left wondering what has happened and why and how (if at all) we can get our conflicted world back on track. Yet however "terrible" these days may appear, the Immaculate Conception is a salutary reminder of the far more promising reality which has entered into our troubled world.

As today's liturgy reminds us, Adam and Eve experienced "terrible days." It is comforting to consider that our salvation in Christ and Mary's role in it were all already in process from the time when sin first entered our world, which means the human race was never beyond hope. The distresses and difficulties we currently endure may be particular to our time and place, but the experience of distress is seemingly universal. We have, however, been delivered from distress by the possibility of solidarity - a solidarity in grace which overcomes our solidarity in sin. That solidarity is signified powerfully by Mary's initial and permanent fullness of grace.

I was born less than a year after Merton's "terrible days" Journal entry. I grew up in the New York City borough of the Bronx, a few blocks from the small cottage to which the poet Edgar Allan Poe had moved in the same year that the U.S. Bishops had proclaimed Mary the patroness of the United Sates under the title of her Immaculate Conception. The cottage, which still bears Poe's name, was within walking distance of St. John's College (now Fordham University), where Poe became friends with the college's Jesuits and enjoyed the vibrations of the college's church bells.

In his poem, A Catholic Hymn, which referenced the daily Marian prayer announced by the ringing of those bells, Poe prayed Mother of God, be with me still. Appreciating how God's grace given to Mary signifies our solidarity with her and with her Son, may help us too in these "terrible days." Or, as the poet put it:

Now, when storms of fate o’ercast

Darkly my Present and my Past,

Let my future radiant shine

With sweet hope of thee and thine!

Photo: Immaculate Conception Window, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN.

The Perils of "Post-Liberalism"

When asked in the past, I have most frequently associated myself with Daniel Bell who famously described himself as "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture." More recently, undoubtedly influenced by the perilous direction of current events, I have have probably become maybe moderately more "socialist in economics," moderately more "liberal in politics," and moderately more confused about culture - probably a little less "conservative" on particular cultural issues, while still responding nostalgically to the fundamental "conservative" critique of the corrosive character of modern culture. Thus, of all the factions that make up the intellectual New Right - so well described  by Laura K. Field in her recent Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2005), about which I posted last week - the only one which at all resonates with me morally, culturally, and intellectually is "post-liberalism," whose "aestheric" Field characterizes as "sober, traditionalist, and highbrow."

The academic most associated with "post-liberalism" is Patrick Deneen, one time student of Wilson Carey McWilliams, currently professor of political science at Notre Dame, author of Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023). That later book suggests some sort of post-liberal conservatism that focuses on the "common good" as liberalism's replacement. Steeped inthe Catholic philosophical tradition, I find the language of "common good" attractive, but less o its advocates and what they appear to propose.

In 2018, former President Barack Obama recommended Why Liberalism Failed as part of his summer reading list. Obama wrote that he found Deneen's book "thought-provoking. I don’t agree with most of the author’s conclusions, but the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril." Even as what was not so long ago a "conservative" critique of modernity's failings has increasingly degenerated into an apologia for cruel authoritarianism, that critique remains relevant. Any serious attempt to get beyond the present political impasse needs to grapple with secular modernity's colossal failure, which Obama rightly described as a felt "loss of meaning and community."

In a somewhat similar vein, Field characterizes Deneen as "the most palatable, sanitized version of Trumpy populism that one is likely to encounter. His writing combines a stern social conservatism and republicanism with strident anti-liberalism and anti-elitism. It is likely to be alienating to economic liberals (so to both neoliberals and neoconservatives) but appealing to anyone who cares about culture and community, or about the environment, or who has suffered the vicissitudes of late modern capitalism in their own lives."

Deneen's critique comes out of a Catholic conservative tradition, which has long harbored reservations about liberalism's individualistic premises and the amoral and ultimately nihilistic directions in which it has steadily been leading society. But Deneen developed his argument to a cynical extreme. As Field notes Deneen effectively "accused liberals of being without genuine affection, feeling, or meaning in their own lives." She cites Ezra Klein's response to this kind of caricature during his own interview with Deneen, "Everybody I know is tangled up in complex family, loving, critical, difficult, beautiful family relationships." 

There is, of course, probably some degree of truth in both positions. Liberalism does undermine all not-autonomously assumed obligations, and so at some level is profoundly damaging to all traditional ties, including those of family. And anyone who doubts that should just read contemporary ethical advice columns, which often presume the primacy of the individual and celebrate liberation from traditional ties, even family. On the other hand, people are complicated. Without condoning late-life marital separations, for example, society needs to recognize and grapple with the new relational challenges posed by longer life-spans. That aid, te human craving for relationship and call to community are powerful natural forces which still survive even despite an officially professed individualistic liberatory ideology. Those same ethical advice columns that may undermine traditional relationships and strong community bonds also testify to the perennial persistence of such relational anc communal needs.

The problem with "post-liberalism" is not that it fails to diagnose what we have lost, but that it offers no plausible path to something better. In 2018, Deneen echoed Rod Dreher's 2017 Benedict Option in advocating local community building efforts, which do have a certain real merit (especially, I would suggest, when religiously motivated). But that can only go so far. Most people cannot (let lone will not choose to) go off the grid into pseudo-utopian sectarianism. Short of that, even a religiously motivated life must continue to be lived in late-capitalist, consumerist, relationship-impaired modernity. More basically, it must also be lived amidst disagreement on even the most fundamental matters, the perennial problem of politics.

Of course, it is still possible to imagine solutions to at least some of our problems. "Democratic Socialism," while sharing many of modern liberalism's liberatory impulses and hence its corrosive approach to community, can offer real, more genuinely just alternatives to our presently established regime of extreme oligarchy., which liberalilsm has failed to protect people from.  For its part, "Post-liberalism" can clealry diagnose, for example, the failed economic policies which have produced our astronomical degree of inequality. But it cannot overcome the straightjacket of contemporary political divisions, which limit the set of acceptable solutions and confine political actors within polarized tribal limits which inhibit crossing the barriers necessary to experiment with diverse solutions, regardless of their ideological origins.

Catholic convert Sohrab Ahmari, founder of Compact Magazine, recognized as much when he wrote in Newsweek in 2023, that Trumpy populism could not succeed in helping working people to "attain lives of security and dignity," because he realized that "the Republican party remains incorrigibly a vehicle for the wealthy."

Thus, the alliances that "post-liberalism" is inevitably attracted to are - as inevitably - a dead-end. They seem likely further to foster the intolerance, lawlessness, and cruelty that liberalism initially sought to ameliorate. The price paid by society for liberalism's moral relativism and nihilism has been high, but the post-liberal nostalgia for a less free, less mobile, more closed community also exacts a price, and we are seeing all around us how dangerously high that price can also be.

Advent

As it was in the days of Noah,
so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
In those days before the flood,
they were eating and drinking,
marrying and giving in marriage,
up to the day that Noah entered the ark.
They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.
So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.

(Matthew 24, from the Gospel for this First Sunday of Advent)

Last month, I watched the new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite. All of the principal characters in the film's three sequences have private lives. They are married with children (or are planning to get married), when suddenly and unexpectedly a missile appears out of the Pacific with Chicago as its target. It reminded me of how, back when I was a kid in the deep freeze of the Cold War, we regularly participated in "civil defense" drills, hiding under our desks during an imaginary nuclear attack, Yet, in between such moments of intensely focused apocalyptic expectation, we went about our ordinary lives and planned our futures, as if we fully expected the world to have a future. As it was in the days of Noah.

Sadly some recent iterations of apocalyptic seem to have an even darker dimension, as (at least according to some worried reports) some of the more contemporary generation appear to be foregoing marriage and family formation, claiming climate change and other contemporary calamities as their excuse. The calamities are legitimste, but not the excuse. Somehow some seem to have forgotten the basic imperative to keep the human story going- despite our fears and worries - as it was in the days of Noah.

All of which suggests that the Church's annual Advent message may be increasingly timely. Ostensibly the most future-oriented of seasons, Advent is in fact really a sort of stand-in for the entire Christian life, lived (as it inevitably must be) in the present - between the first coming of Christ and his hoped-for final advent. As Christians, we live our lives literally in this interval between Christmas and the end, which is what Advent is ultimately all about. We live in intensely focused apocalyptic expectation, while simultaneously preoccupied with our ordinary daily lives and planning our this-worldly futures - as it was in the days of Noah.

Indeed, as we pray every day at Mass, we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. The point, however, is not when Jesus will come (an obsessive preoccupation found far too frequently in sectarian American Apocalyptic) but being ready for his coming – not as something to be put off to some far-off future, but as our present preoccupation. The future will indeed come – at its own time and on its own terms – but our task is the present, which is what, in fact, will determine who we will be in the future.

Obviously Advent, especially the way we celebrate it in the Church today, relies a lot on the seasonal imagery of darkness and light that defines this time of year in our northern hemisphere. Folkloric customs like Advent wreaths with their evergreens and candles all attempt to employ that natural seasonal imagery. Symbolic beings that we are, we readily respond to such signals. But we must be careful. Advent uses seasonal symbolism to make a point, but Advent is more than some sort of seasonal pageant. The Christian life is not a season, nor is it a play. The world really was in darkness before Christ – the darkness of alienation from God. and, inasmuch as so much of the world still suffers that same alienation, the darkness persists, coexisting with the light coming from Christ. But, unlike natural darkness, our world’s persistent alienation from God is not some abstract natural force.

We are the ones who have contributed – and continue to contribute - to this world’s darkness. For this reason, Advent was long rightly regarded as a penitential season. Pope Innocent III even prescribed black as the liturgical color for Advent - although violet eventually beat black to become the season’s official color. Conveniently, one and the same color can simultaneously symbolize both the purple of royalty (Christ the King coming in glory) and the violet of repentance.

The penance appropriate to Advent is, of course, what Paul commanded the Christians of Rome - to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light (Romans 13). So, we all need to ask ourselves, exactly what is it that keeps us in so much darkness? Why isn’t the light of Christ shining forth from us and through us to light up our communities, our country, our world? Paul’s words challenge us to be attentive to what is happening right now. Living as we do in a culture of institutionalized irresponsibility, Advent’s message is a radical wake-up call to mean what we say - really to throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Our traditional account of Christ's coming into the world sets his birth during the night, the light of Christ coexisting with the darkness of a world of imperial decrees, forced migration, and. homelessness. At his final coming, of course, darkness will be destroyed. Meanwhile, however, here and now, in this interim time – between Christmas and the end – darkness and light continue to coexist, the darkness a constant challenge of a sinful present resisting Christ's brighter future

Of course, as even our annual rush to start celebrating Christmas earlier and earlier each year suggests, most of us aren’t very good at waiting. We want to know as much as possible in advance, so that we can rush into the future. The good news of the Gospel, however, is that it is precisely the present that matters. Jesus’ warning about those long ago days of Noah, reminds us how common, how universal, the experience of the present really is. We are - as we should be - still eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage – as it was in the days of Noah. The fact that the present time is limited (something one become if anything even more acutely aware of with each passing year) just makes it all the more precious, makes it matter that much more. 

Whatever surprises we may be hoping to find under the Christmas Tree this year, the coming of Christ is not one of them. Christ has already come. (If he hadn’t, we would have no Advent season to observe - let alone Christmas!) The question is whether his presence in our world today matters enough to make a difference in the way we live and what we care about – whether and how we are making the most of our limited but precious present time to become now what we hope to be when he comes again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Now that the shutdown is done and air travel has returned to something resembling normal, I - like so many of my fellow Americans - have flown across the country to celebrate with family and friends this most American of holidays Thanksgiving Day. 

Increasingly, I hate air travel, hate traveling cross-country, and do it less and les. Last year, I was so worn out from two major official trips that I skipped Thanksgiving travel altogether. In the end, I think I regretted that and was resolved not to repeat that mistake again this year. Travel may be a pain, but it is the only way to be with what little natural family I have left, which makes it worth the effort - especially on Thanksgiving.

As a pastor, of course, I had liturgical responsibilities on Christmas, but Thanksgiving is not that kind of holiday. Despite its origins in an explicitly Protestant American sensibility (or perhaps precisely because of that), for those of us outside that historic tradition, Thanksgiving has always been a more secular celebration of family and community, especially when family was much more accessible - just over the river and through the wood. The fact that everyone celebrated it made Thanksgiving a truly national celebration. Smaller and fewer families and the contemporary fraying of our national bonds have diminished communities to the detriment even of Thanksgiving. Hence the somewhat silly annual anxiety about how to talk to people about politics at Thanksgiving. The very question (1) implies that we do not talk much to each other the rest of the year (a problem in itself), and (2) it highlights the perversely disproportionate importance of politics in our contemporary life. Why talk about politics on Thanksgiving, when we ought ideally to share so much else that we can talk about?

Long before "post-liberalism" became an academic meal ticket, the corrosive effects of liberal modernity on family, community, and country were already obvious. Inevitably, the effect would also be felt on Thanksgiving, which liberal modernity has increasingly degraded into "Black Friday Eve." Back in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving Day holiday, he mentioned "our national perverseness and disobedience." Try talking about that at any Thanksgiving table!

Thanksgiving Day has always been a celebration of plenty, of American abundance. But it also painfully highlights the absence thereof. One parish I know has had a 50% increase in the number of turkeys distributed to needy families in anticipation of the holiday. While such sharing is and ought to be a characteristic of Thanksgiving's observance, it also points to the deepening distress that is endemic in our society at this time, which no Thanksgiving festivities can completely cover over. This increasing inequality and the deepening distress that has accompanied it - not some real or imagined squeamishness about political polarization - is the real challenge that overshadows and darkens ourThanksgiving holiday.