Climbing the Mountain

“Lord, it is good that we are here”! [Matthew 17:4]

Any modern pilgrim, who’s had the scary experience of reaching the top of Mount Tabor after a high-speed taxi ride up the narrow mountain road might well be tempted to echo Peter’s sentiments!

Peter presumably had walked up the mountain and in any case the experience to which Peter was reacting was a much more transcendent one. For what Peter, James, and John were being treated to was nothing less than an experience of the glory of God, an awesome peak into another world, and a glimpse of Jesus’ divine nature as Son of God and his fulfillment of the Old Testament (represented by Moses and Elijah). It must have been a very exciting experience! No wonder Peter was so glad to be there! Wouldn’t we all? No wonder he wanted to stay there as long as possible – to make three tents there, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah! No wonder he thought that this was it and that he’d reached where he was going! No wonder he didn’t yet understand that this was just the beginning – an invitation to join Jesus on his journey.

In contrast to Peter, today’s Mass offers us the image of Abraham’s first direct encounter with the Lord, whose very first word to Abraham was Go! [Genesis 12:1]

(Last spring and summer, when I was dealing with the stress of moving from New York to Knoxville, I occasionally tried consider what it must have been like for Abraham to be completely uprooted – at age 75!)

Today’s 1st reading from Genesis recounts that pivotal historical moment when Abraham first appeared in the world stage. Until then, human history had been one tragic calamity after another – culminating in the decisive breakdown of the human community at the Tower of Babel. Suddenly, God was intervening in history in a new way, singling out one individual – and, through him, one family and, eventually, one special nation – to be his partner, his human partner, in repairing the damage done by human beings to God’s good creation. Under the provisions of the extraordinary covenant God made with Abraham, God and Abraham – and Abraham’s descendents – will collaborate together and so become a blessing for the whole world.

Abraham is considered the common spiritual ancestor of Judaism and its two daughter religions, Christianity and Islam. In all three religions, Abraham is revered for his faith, a faith that summoned him (at age 75!) to go forth to a new land. But the destination was vague. We call Abraham “our father in faith.” If Abraham is a model of faith for us, he also reveals how much faith requires. What we call Abraham’s “faith” was a way of responding to the ambiguous and complicated events in his life, a way that reflected his recognition of the presence and action of God in those events. His “faith” meant a total trust, confidence, reliance on God through whatever changes and challenges might be required.

Change is always challenging. That’s why we wisely try to avoid it unless necessary. I am particularly fond of Chesterton’s line (at least I think it was Chesterton who said it): “If change is not necessary, then it is necessary not to change.” But sometimes it is necessary, and therein lies the challenge. It may mean abandoning the familiar for the frightening. It may mean something totally new. Or it may not. It may mean, rather, recovering what we’ve lost or forgotten or abandoned. Indeed, the most challenging change may be to undo bad decisions and recent choices in order to return to an older and better path.

We all talk about making necessary changes in our lives. Sometimes we may even mean it. But we’re 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.

All this has finally and effectively been made accessible to us through Abraham’s greatest descendent, Jesus, who fulfilled in himself his nation’s destiny and made Abraham’s blessing fully available to the entire world.

Even so, the temptation will always be to do the opposite of Abraham and to think, like Peter, that we’re there already, without having to make the journey. But the God who first called Abraham continues to invite us through Jesus, saying what he said to Peter and now is saying to us: “This is my Son ... listen to him”! [Matthew 17:5]

Homily for the 2nd Sunday in Lent, at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 20, 2011.

St. Joseph

Last night, at our weekly parish Lenten supper before the Stations of the Cross, I blessed the meal using the formula for the “Blessing of St. Joseph’s Table” – a tradition of blessing food in honor of St. Joseph, who provided for the Holy Family, and whose feast the Church celebrates today.

In modern times, St. Joseph has, so to speak, come into his own. Even this morning's Knoxville News Sentinel featured a column devoted to him, entitled "Honoring Joseph, a father who 'manned up'."

In the New Testament, however, St. Joseph appears only briefly (and silently) in connection with the early life of Jesus. Matthew’s gospel praises him as a righteous man [Matthew 1:19], but significant devotion to him did not develop until much later. Amid the many calamities of 14th and 15th century Europe, however, popular preachers like St. Bernardine of Siena saw St. Joseph as a model family head and household administrator. In the 16th century, St. Teresa of Avila placed her reform of the Carmelites — and the dangerous journeys it involved — under his protection. As part of the Counter-Reformation’s strategy of re-evangelization, families were encouraged to imitate the Holy Family headed by St. Joseph. In 1729, his name was inserted in the Litany of Saints. After the Kingdom of Italy conquered Rome from the Pope in 1870, Blessed Pope Pius IX proclaimed him the Patron of the Universal Church, under which title the Church venerates him today. In 1955, Pope Pius XII established an additional new feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1, to counteract the Socialist-Communist May Day holiday. In 1961, Bl. Pope John XXIII made St. Joseph patron of Vatican Council II, and the following year inserted his name in the Roman canon (et beati Ioseph, eiusdem Virginis Sponsi).

In 1851, a group of Redemptorist missionaries (among them the relatively recently ordained Isaac Hecker) sailed from Europe to the U.S. Delayed by bad weather, they made a novena to St. Joseph in the hope of arriving in New York by March 19. “St. Joseph will have to do his very prettiest to get us in,” the Captain retorted. On March 16, he said “St. Joseph can’t do it – give it up.” But the priests persevered in their prayers. That night the wind changed, and the ship began to speed – at 14 m.p.h.! After 52 days at sea, the ship arrived in New York on March 19, the feast of St. Joseph, and the Redemptorists were soon ready to commence the first English-language parish mission in the U.S. - at St. Joseph’s Church in Manhattan.

In one of his most famous sermons (“The Saint of Our Day,” preached in New York 1863), Isaac Hecker, said of St. Joseph: “His virtue was like the light, colorless because it was complete. He was an all-sided man. He combined in himself the sanctities of different and variously separated states and conditions. … He was in the world and found God where he was. He sanctified his work by carrying God with him into the workshop. … He attained in society and human relationships a degree of perfection not surpassed, if equaled, by the martyr’s death, the contemplative of the solitude, the cloistered monk, or the missionary hero.”

The Pope's Book

I recently finished reading Jesus of Nazareth: Part Two, the 2nd volume of Pope Benedict’s book about Jesus' life, words, and actions. These 2 volumes are, in the Pope’s own words, his attempt “to develop a way of observing and listening to the Jesus of the Gospels that can indeed lead to personal encounter and that, through collective listening with Jesus’ disciples across the ages, can indeed attain sure knowledge of the real historical figure of Jesus.” The book presupposes but “seeks to transcend” historical-critical exegesis “to arrive at a genuinely theological interpretation of the scriptural texts.”

For whatever reason – perhaps because this second book deals with the Passion narratives or perhaps for purely personal circumstantial factors – I found the second book both easier to read and more interesting. The Pope’s approach – alluding to and occasionally answering academic theories but always rooted in the text itself and in the ancient traditions of patristic interpretation – is engaging and clearly oriented toward its stated goal “to make possible a personal relationship with Jesus.”

It is always refreshing to read a work which takes the canonical text and the way it has been interpreted int he Church's life seriously as a fundamental point of departure. Since the book basically covers Holy Week and Easter, it offers some fresh insights for prayer and preaching as Holy Week approaches.

With their personal books, Pope Benedict and his soon-to-be-beatified predecessor, Pope John Paul II, have certainly raised the bar in terms of what will now be expected intellectually from contemporary popes!

St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day was unavoidable in New York. In High School, I had to march in the parade. In the 1990s, when I was working for the Archdiocese, I, of course, had the day off. For the past 10 years, as a priest in New York, I was required by the rubrics of the liturgy to celebrate the local patronal feast. Here, however, although my church has a beautiful window dedicated to St. Patrick, it is a day like any other.

Great misisonary evangelizer that he was, St. Patrick undoubtedly deserves all the honor he receives, however far afield some of that honor may stray from what he was actaully all about. The son of a deacon and grandson of a priest, Patrick was born into a well-to-do family of landed gentry in the Roman province of Britain. At 16, however, his comfortable life suddenly ceased when he was captured and enslaved by Irish raiders. During 6 years as a slave herdsman in Ireland, Patrick’s conventional Christianity was transformed into an ardent, fervent faith. After a successful escape and return to Britain, he felt a call to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity. Ordained a bishop, he returned to Ireland and remained there until his death on this day in 461.

Unlike Patrick’s home island of Britain, Ireland had never been part of the Roman Empire. It was beyond the borders of what then constituted civilization. St. Patrick stands out as one of the first in Western Christian history to feel the imperative to evangelize beyond the borders of the Empire, to take literally the the Gospel’s mandate to teach all nations. In his Confession, Patrick described his sense of mission. “I want to spend myself in that country, even in death, if the Lord should grant me this favor. I am deply in his debt, for he gave me the great grace that through me many peoples should be reborn in God, and then made perfect by confirmation and everywhere among them clergy ordained for a people so recently coming to believe, one people gathered by the Lord from the ends of the earth. ... It is among that people that I want to wait for the promise made by him, who assuredly never tells a lie. ... This is our faith: believers are to come from the whole world.”

The de facto leading spokesman for the Church in contemporary Ireland is Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin. Last month, Archbishop Martin spoke at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he offered a telling analysis of the current state of (and the challenges facing) the Church in Ireland. That analysis was amplified further a few days ago in another talk he gave, this one on the relationship between Church and State in Ireland. Inevitably, much of his analysis speaks to a specifically Irish situation (a one-time "bastion of traditonal Catholicism" now quite changed from "the conformist Ireland of the Archbishop McQuaid era"). The present of every local Church is conditioned by its past, and the future of every local Church is correspondingly conditioned by how it intereacts with that historical legacy. That said, Archbishop Martin's analysis also addresses the wider concerns of the Church in contemporary, post-modern, secularised societies.

The bottom-line difficulty facing the Church not just in Ireland but throughout the secularised West (including even the United States) is reflected in (and in turn exacerbated by) the vocation crisis and its ripple effects. "The number of priests are falling. There is more work to be done by preists who are getting older. The task of simply responding to the deay-to-day demands of ministry leaves many priests with little time to take on new tasks and address radically new ways of life and ministry."

At the very time - the last third of the 20th century - when Western society took its giant leap into secularism, the Catholic Church also underwent a period of rapid and intense internal change. As Martin notes, "the [Second Vatican] Council was ineviatably received in terms of the culture of the day which at times may have coloured the interpretation of what the Counciul intended." Certainly in the U.S., disputes over the correct intepretation of the Council's intent have contributed to contrasting visions of what the Church is all about and a demoralyzing polarization that has further sapped the Church's evangelizing energy.

At Cambridge, Martin suggested that all was not well in "the good old days" - resulting in "faulty foundations" for "structural change." In his March lecture, he makes the broader observation that, while Church renewal requires structural renewal, such "a renewal of structures alone would be sterile." Renewal, Martin argues, "can only be shaped from the perspective of Chrsitian life" and it is "the nature of the Church" which must dictate the "strucutres of reform of the Church." My own sense is that so much debate about structures in the Church suffers from an excessive reliance on political categories of analysis and lacks precisely the all-important focus on the essential nature of the Church, which, whatever its relation with its surrounding culture, cannot allow itself to be assimilated to it.

Martin himself makes this point quite clearly, emphaiszing it by repeating it in both talks: "the farther the Church goes in adapting to the culture of the times, the greater the danger is that it will no longer be able to confront the culture of the time. It will only be able to speak the language of the culture of the day and not the radical newness of the message of the Gospel which transcends all cultures. There this happens, then the life of the Church becomes a sort of civil religion, politically correct, but without the cutting edge of the Gospel."

In light of the concerns expressed in recent studies highighting the Church in America's ambibuous perfomance both in retention of its members and in the recruitment of new members, do we in the U.S. need to take more to heart this challenge from one of the heirs of St. Patrick?

Ash Wednesday

Remember, you are dust and to dust you will return.

What is it about having dirt smudged on your face and being told that you're going to die that makes this day such an irresistible draw for so many people? Could it be - could it just be - because it is true? In this "information age," we are assailed on all sides by all sorts of "information," whether we need it or not and whether it is true or not. Could it be - could it just be - that in this age of "spin" and lies upon lies, we are finally being told something that is true?

To be sure, dying has never been among the more popular topics of conversation - although that may be beginning to change now that my generation of so-called "baby boomers" has started to hit 60 and look forward to Medicare. As I look ahead to turning 63 in two weeks, I am acutely aware that I'm not anymore what I once was - and never will be again!

Death, of course, is that divine command that says "Stop" - the one divine command that we absolutely cannot disobey, no matter how hard we try. I think it is really a great example of the Church's liturgical genius that it can take something so fundamentally ugly as death and ritualize it so well!

Clearly, Lent owes a lot of its unique and powerful appeal to the way it confronts us with the inescapable reality of of who we are in relation to God and challenges us to face up to that reality - something we sinners by and large generally don't care to do and try so hard to avoid doing. Lent is the Church's annual wake-up call to make us remember who we are and where we're going and how we hope to get there.

Ultimately, of course, Lent is not about death but about life - the new life in Christ that began for each of us at baptism. Lent is the Church's annual wake-up call to take seriously who we are in Christ and what this new life of his that began for each of us at baptism really is. It's a time to reflect once again on life's big picture, to renew ourselves at the heart of who we are, in the community of Jesus' disciples - converted, renewed, and reconciled in a new and better way of being human.

Homily for Ash Wednesday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, March 9, 2011.