Festa

Yesterday, the church celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Downgraded in 1961 to a "Commemoration," Our Lady of Mount Carmel has experienced the fate of so many other feasts and saints now reduced to "optional" in the contemporary calendar. Yet it is a feast I never fail to celebrate, not just for its inherent beauty but for the childhood memories it evokes.

For whatever reason, the Carmelite Order's special devotion to Mary under the title "Our Lady of Mount Carmel" became a particularly popular devotion in Italy and was carried by Italian immigrants to America as a characteristically ethnic devotion. Thus, the Italian "National Parish" on Arthur Avenue in New York's Borough of the Bronx, founded in 1906 (the same year as my own home parish just about one mile directly west on Fordham Road) was dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

That neighborhood still features its Italian market and restaurants, although the actual Italian population must surely be much diminished. In the 1950s, however, it was a bustling, thriving ethnic neighborhood, which featured a full-scale, traditional Italian street festival for the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Every year in those days, my family would go to Arthur Avenue in the evening of July 16 for Italian ices and the other delights of a traditional Italian Festa, while Our Lady's illuminated statue made its way in procession through the neighborhood. Earlier that morning, however, my mother and grandmother and I would have already taken the bus to Mount Carmel Church to attend the Solemn Mass. Since the pastor at that time was a bishop, it was a Pontifical Mass - although, since he was just an Auxiliary Bishop, it was what was then called a Missa Pontificalis ad Faldistorium. Needless to say, it was the only Pontifical Mass I ever attended at that age. I sometimes trace my budding interest in all things liturgical to my youthful fascination with the intricacies of that ceremony, my eyes glued to the faldstool trying to keep count of how many times the bishop's miter was removed from or replaced on his head and even (when I was a little older and observed more) which of those times the mitra pretiosa was used and which of those times the mitra auriphrygiata. Those were the days! We shall not see their like again!

Aesthetics and ethnic reminiscences aside, the Mass found in the Carmelite Proprium proclaims the perennial significance of this devotion in the life of the Church:

"So intimately does she hare in the mystery of Christ
that she is still a mother,
continuing to give you children with the Church,
encouraging them by her love,
and drawing them by her perfect example
to pursue perfect charity.
She is the model
of all who live by the spirit of the Gospel;
as we look up to her in prayer
we learn from her mind
to love you above all things,
from her spirit
to be rapt in contemplation of your Word,
and from her heart
to serve the needs of others."
(Preface)

The Newsroom Season 2

The HBO series, The Newsroom, started its second season this past Sunday. Once again, the acting is great, and, while it is certainly no Downton Abbey, the show is generally fun to watch.

And, once again, we get to watch the incredibly complicated news anchor Will McAvoy's personal and professional narcissism on display - posing as moral self-righteousness, in turn posing as public spirited journalism. And we get to watch the continued the personal and professional fallout from Will and MacKenzie's miscarried love affair, which in a vividly sane moment of analysis at the end of Season 1 MacKenzie herself had held up to her protégé Jim Harper as a model not to be followed in his own tangled relationship with Maggie. (MacKenzie's genuine personal concern for Jim's personal and professional well being is surely one of her  more attractive traits). MacKenzie clearly wishes she hadn't ruined her relationship with Will ever so many years earlier. So what stops them from getting back together? Individually, each of them has some attractive qualities, but overall one is left wondering (as I myself wondered in my post at the end of Season 1) why anyone would ever like - let alone love - either of them.

And, once again, the over-arching political and moral pretentiousness of the leading characters is balanced by the continuing relational soap-operas of the much more sympathetic younger characters. Are they much more sympathetic because they are younger? Are twenty-somethings' lives permitted to be a relational mess in ways we think more mature adults should have outgrown? If so, is one of the themes of the show that, just as in post-modern America, "young adults" are permitted to exhibit non adult behavior at a later age than would have been tolerated in any previous generation, perhaps the pattern is continuing up the age ladder. Perhaps no one is really ever expected to "grow up" any more. And what exactly would growing up mean in a post-modern world where relationships no longer sem to presuppose marriage and children? (Only Elliot seems to have a "normal" family life. Perhaps that is why he is such a seldom seen marginal character?)

For whatever reason, Jim, Maggie, and even Don all seem so much more likeable than their bosses. We kind of want them to succeed - whatever exactly "succeed" might mean. Now that Don has broken up with Maggie (having just so recently invited her to move in with him), will he gravitate to Sloan Sabbith on the rebound - now that her interest in him has been made evident? Will Jim actually pursue Maggie, or will Mackenzie's warning prove prophetic? And will Neal fall in love with that girl from Occupy Wall Street?

Meanwhile, as regards the show's political-moral takeaway on current events, will Season 2 simply replay the pattern of Season 1 or will it break some new ground?

As I observed at the end of Season 1: "The program wants us to believe that news stories like the debate on the debt ceiling really matter more than the Casey Anthony trial or Anthony Wiener's texting. I suspect most of the show's audience already agrees. A decade ago, when 9/11 hit after a silly summer of similarly trivial news coverage, there was considerable hand-wringing about the media's addiction to such stuff. But there somehow needs to be a better way of making that case than playing right into populist stereotypes about liberal elites who are contemptuous of ordinary people - or trying to make moral heroes out of people whose own selves seem as trivial as the news they disdain." Whether Season 2 will - or can - accomplish that is what remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, let's enjoy the show.

Much more sympathetic are the younger characters - Maggie, Don, and Jim - caught up in their seeminly inescapable love triangle. Don's actually not such a bad guy, but I at least found myself rooting for Maggie to dump him for Jim. That looked as if it might at last actually happen in the final episode, but Don won Maggie by "committing" to her. That is, he asked her to move in with him - and gave her a key to his apartment. Is a key the post-modern version of a ring? That's not an absolutely outside-the-box question, since Sloan Sabbith, the sadly single economic reporter explicity told Don earlier in that episode that she would regard a propposal of marriage as the true sign of someone's commitment. Apparently, marriage is just way beyond Don's imagination - or Maggie's expectations. (Sloan's belief in marriage might help explain her unfortunate singleness at least as much as her supposedly off-putting intellectualism and her supposed social awkwardness.) Meanwhile, Maggie's and Don's continuance as a couple seems to leave Jim stuck in an even more incongruous relationship with Lisa.

Back to the political track, the show seems to veer from an emotionally powerful episode (the killing of Osama Ben Laden) in which everyone seems to rise above partisanship and actually embrace patriuotism to totally absurd scenarios, such as expecting the Republican National Committee to accept a debate format the sole purpose of which apparently is to ridicule and denigrate the candidates while further inflating McAvoy's ego. One certainly doesn't have to like or agree with any of the actual candidates to sympathise with the young RNC apparatchik who complains to his older (more traditonally "moderate") colleague, "I hate these people. I don't know why you don't."

The show really is fun to watch, and it has some really engaging sub-plots. One such is Will's psychotherapy, which offers intriguing insights into his neurotically lonely life, facilitated by a well played therapist.There's the story of the tech nerd, Neal Sampat (who, of course, is also charming and sexy, as well as intensely intelligent and talented), whom one would hope to see more of in any second season. There's the corporate sub-plot about the tension between the high-minded news division and the bottom-line preoccupations of the parent company's CEO, Leona Lansing (superbly played by Jane Fonda), and her son Reese, who is presented as the unambiguous bad guy in the group.Of course (as every scene of McAvoy's Manhattan apartment reminds us), Reese's bad-boy greed only highlights the hypocrisy of the elite lifestyle enjoyed by McAvoy, et al, who even in this economy know absolutely no personal financial anxiety.

The program wants us to believe that news stories like the debate on the debt ceiling really matter more than the Casey Anthony trial or Anthony Wiener's texting. I suspect most of the show's audience already agrees. A decade ago, when 9/11 hit after a silly summer of similarly trivial news coverage, there was considerable hand-wringing about the media's addiction to such stuff. But there somehow needs to be a better way of making that case than playing right into populist stereotypes about liberal elites who are contemptuous of ordinary people - or trying to make moral heroes out of people whose own selves seem as trivial as the news they disdain.

The Trial

It wasn't just the media's "All Trial, All of the Time" style of coverage that turned me off about the  Zimmerman Trial. It was also the persistent emphasis on which side scored the most points each day that made me want to watch almost anything else instead. Of course, a criminal trial is set up as an adversarial process - as are elections. But both are meant to be about more than that. At times, it seemed to me that much of the trial coverage was replicating the way we increasingly cover politics - all inside "who's up, who's down" stuff, with much less attention to actual substance or (in the case of politics) policy. That's the world we live in - the culture we have created for ourselves.

 

But now that the trial is over and the verdict is in, we would do well to be asking ourselves some other questions - not about the particulars of the case, which rightly or wrongly have now been legally settled - but about the kind of society we are and what kind of society we really want to be.

Do we want to be a society in which an unarmed black teen cannot safely go shopping and walk home without being stalked and shot?

Do we want to be a society in which an ordinary citizen is free to play policeman - not just harmlessly in his imagination or in video games, but in real life on the public streets with real world consequences?

And do we really want to be a society in which the plague of private gun ownership continues unabated?

"Go and do likewise"

I've often thought there are few things more exasperating than asking a question and not getting a real answer – whether what one gets is no answer at all or an evasive kind of answer or (worst of all) instead of an answer another question throwing it all back at you. So I suspect the lawyer in today’s Gospel [Luke 10:25-37] may well have been very exasperated indeed!

After all, the question he’d asked was a perfectly legitimate one to ask of a religious authority figure: Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus, however, had answered him with a question of his own, putting all the onus back on him: What is written in the law? How do you read it?

Now the lawyer certainly knew his subject. Having had the ball thrown back at him, he took it and (as they say) ran with it – and ran rather well, judging from Jesus’ approving reply, You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.

Not a bad answer top get from Jesus anytime!

But, of course, the lawyer had answered correctly because he had been properly taught in the first place. Properly instructed in the Jewish law, he could quote it correctly and well. But the Gospel says he wished to justify himself, and so he demanded further clarification. The law says to love my neighbor as myself. OK then, exactly who is my neighbor.

This time, Jesus replied at length, but with a story, a parable, the one we call the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”

At this distance of some 2000 years almost, we’ve all heard it so many times, that we already know the story. So we are not surprised when a Samaritan appears as the good guy in the story. So we call it the “Parable of the Good Samaritan,” conveniently forgetting or ignoring what a complete contradiction in terms a “Good Samaritan” would have seemed to Jesus’s audience.

Of course, our only experience of Samaritans is this parable and others like it. We haven’t experienced the way the lawyer and the rest of Jesus’s audience would have experienced them – as permanent ethnic and religious enemies (something like the way Sunnis and Shiites see each other today).

And so we miss the surprise in the story – and so miss the parable’s point, its invitation to think about things in a very new way.

And, as the title we give it suggests, we also see the story from the Samaritan’s perspective – forgetting that Jesus’ hearers would not have known in advance who the hero was going to be and would have heard the story from the victim’s perspective.

Let’s remember the point at issue. It’s a discussion about the law, the Old Testament law of love for God and neighbor. Jesus never answered the lawyer’s original question. He let the lawyer himself do that. We don’t need Jesus to quote the Bible to us. We can do that ourselves. But we do need Jesus to make the commandments come alive in our world – to tell us who is our neighbor.

The problem is that, like the lawyer, when we ask that question, we mean “To whom am I obligated in some way?” The ordinary logic of our ordinary world asks: “Is this man left on the road my neighbor? Do I have to help him? Is that something he’s owed – by me? In other words, what is the moral minimum that I as a conscientious person am obliged to do?

But, if you look at it from a different angle, if you look at it from the perspective of the man left on the road, then your question will be a very different one. Jesus has subtly shifted the focus from neighbor as an object of obligation, someone to whom something may be owed, if perhaps grudgingly, to neighbor as someone who acts on your behalf, someone who intervenes and saves, someone who comes close enough to touch me and become my friend.

As everyone listening would have understood, in an ordinary world both the priest and the Levite had legitimate reasons to pass by and stay on the opposite side. To do their jobs,  they had to be ritually pure, which precluded contact with corpses ( a real danger since the victim, we’re told, was left half-dead). The Samaritan, however, was already impure – just by being a Samaritan. So he had nothing to lose by touching the wounded man – nothing, that is, except his right to remain free and aloof.

But the point of the parable, of course, is that he did not remain free and aloof! The stranger became a neighbor!

Jesus’ parable portrays otherwise ordinary people in an otherwise ordinary world – in which nothing is ordinary anymore. It gives us a glimpse of how God acts – as seen in the actions of Jesus. The question for us is whether we want to be part of that new world.

To ask, as the lawyer did, what my minimum obligation is to another presumes we see ourselves as free individuals for whom the connections involved in community with others are a burdensome obligation to be kept to a minimum. That is the logic of our ordinary world – very much so in our contemporary world in which social networks and community connections are increasingly damaged and in decline. It was to counter that logic that this past Monday Pope Francis made his first pastoral visit outside of Rome, a pastoral visit of great symbolic and social significance to a Mediterranean island which serves as one of the primary European entry points for immigrants from North Africa, a site associated with the sorts of human tragedies that often threaten immigrants, where hundreds of migrants have drowned or gone missing in this past year alone. Celebrating Mass there on an altar built from an old fishing boat, the Pope lamented: "We have become used to other people's suffering, it doesn't concern us, it doesn't interest us, it's none of our business!"

Such is the moral logic of our ordinary world.

But the God who is no longer a stranger, because he has made himself our neighbor in Jesus, has given us – in Jesus – a glimpse of God’s logic in God’s kingdom.

And so, says Jesus, finally answering the question: Go and do likewise.

 

Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, July 14, 2013.

Utopia Reconsidered

Last week on July 6, there came and went the anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas More (1478-1535) . His stalwart defense of the papal primacy and the indissolubility of marriage are what made More a saint and what he may be most remembered for now. But before his martyrdom in his own lifetime, he was widely known in Europe as a scholar and the author, most famously, of Utopia - a title which has since given its name to a whole genre of literature.

Now few things could be more obvious about Utopia than its central and animating symbol - poverty.Every 10 years, the Utopians change houses by lot, but without any of the economic profit usually attached to selling one's house in our even more mobile society. Everyone on the island wears the same style of clothing - rough work clothes made with long-term durability in mind and a cloak the color of natural wool - and each household produces its own clothes. Possession of precious metals provide no tangible economic benefits. And the Utopians are attracted to Christianity because of Jesus' attitude toward possessions and because of the practices in regard to possessions traditionally associated with those considered the truest Christians.

Of course, there is a considerable difference between the poverty of the Utopians and the degrading poverty experienced by so many poor people in the real world. Indeed, Utopia itself may have been a protest against the economic plight of many in Renaissance England. Thus, R.W. Chambers, author of a prize-winning More biography (Thomas More, 1936), saw in Utopia a protest against economic and political emancipation from medieval tradition and an appeal to the king "To turn a deaf ear to the counsellors who would make him all-powerful" and to the landlords not to subject their tenants "to economic progress and the law of supply and demand in the wool market" (p. 131).

Of course, that early modern process of economic liberalization was a prerequisite for the development of our modern free-market, capitalist model. The specific issue so troubling to More in his time was the increasing enclosure of once common land. In The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), Hannah Arendt called attention to the irony that the enormous accumulation of wealth in a society supposedly based on the sanctity of property had its inception in the expropriation of the peasants.

In the ancient world, Plato had organized his philosophy around the symbol of knowledge as an alternative to opinion, the Socratic symbol for the inadequate basis for conventional politics. Similarly, Saint Thomas More's early modern utopian construct was structured around the symbol of poverty, which he put in place of greed, the capital sin which would serve as the engine for modern free-market economics.

A  essential feature of More's Utopia is that his imaginary Utopians were not in actual want - however hard their workaday lives and however simple its material rewards. They suffered no noticeable lack of genuine necessities. They were, however, relatively poor in comparison with what might have been the case had they focused completely on developing their full productive capacities, in other words, if the production and accumulation of abundance animated their institutional philosophy instead of poverty.

More had no animus against work and productivity per se. Yet the symbolism of the six-hour work-day was obvious.

It seems Saint Thomas More took to heart the widespread human experience that abundance for some entails misery for many and spiritual scarcity for all.