Downton Abbey - Season 4

Downton Abbey's much anticipated fourth season started its US run last night. For many of us, this was the highlight (so far) of the new year - a nice Twelfth Night present and fair compensation for the imminent end of the holiday season. PBS outdid itself last night, offering a double-episode season opener, preceded by an hour-long special on Highclere Castle, the country seat of the current Earl and Countess of Canarvon, now one of the most recognized aristocratic houses in the world thanks to its role as the film site for Downton Abbey.

The two-episode season opener can be summed up in two memorable quotes. Early on, Mr. Carson, the butler, says to Mrs. Highes: “We shout and scream and wail and cry, but in the end we must all die.” Death dominates the house as the entire family - especially, of course, Lady Mary and her mother-in-law Isobel - still mourns the tragic death of Matthew six months earlier. As most of the world probably knows, Matthew - a distant "middle class" relative - had unexpectedly become the Earl of Grantham's heir in 1912 and had finally married the Earl's eldest daughter Mary after the war. In the final episode of season three, Earl Robert had finally acknowledged his debt to Matthew for having put Downton on a sounder financial footing. Alas, at the end of that same season finale, Matthew was killed in a car crash, just hours after the birth of his son, George, the new heir.

As usual, the new episodes contain numerous sub-plots which may become major as the season unfolds - Edith's continued relationship with Michael Gregson, Lady Rose's problematic high-spiritedness, O'Brien's abandonment of Downton and the resulting re-hiring of Edna as the Countess's new lady's maid, Thomas Barrow's perpetual scheming, etc. But the main theme is Mary's emergence from her deep mourning to take her rightful place in the management of Downton. Hence the important second quote - this one from the Dowager Countess herself, advising her granddaughter to "choose life." With some nudging from Carson and her brother-in-law Tom (who also knows something about prematurely losing a beloved spouse), Mary returns to the land of the living and seems set to resume her husband's role as her father's main challenger. (Her mother-in-law Isobel goes through a similar process, returning - through Mrs. Hughes' help - to her commitment to a life of active good works.)

Poor Lord Robert! He seems perennially to be cast as the maker of mistakes, the one with poor judgment, a well-meaning nobleman out of his depth in the actual running of the estate in the modern world! In Season 3, his mother-in-law had advised him to adapt. He does, but he always seems to be dragged into doing so by others. Perhaps that is how it usually happens!

As the documentary on Highclere Castle illustrates, great houses and the aristocratic traditions and values they embody still exist, but as pale ghosts of their former selves. Downtown Abbey gives us a very personalized insight into what it was like to go through that particular 20th-century trauma. It illustrates the positive benefits modernity has brought - primarily to individuals, liberated from the constraints of tradition to find their own way and define their own lives. But it also highlights the social costs that have accompanied the loss of those constraints..

We Three Kings

Those magic men the Magi 

Some people call them wise

Or Oriental, even kings

Well anyway, those guys

They visited with Jesus

They sure enjoyed their stay

Then warned in a dream of King Herod's scheme

They went home by another way

So begins James Taylor's song, Home By Another Way, about our friends the Magi, who, as we just heard, came from the east to do homage with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 

In the summer of 2005, I attended World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany. Cologne’s most famous landmark is its great Gothic Cathedral, which was originally built to house the supposed relics of those magi. Meanwhile, entering the church today, you will naturally have noticed an alteration in the nativity scene. The shepherds, who have been there since Christmas, have now been joined by the magi. (In the actual story, of course, the shepherds left Bethlehem that same day, and so they were probably long gone from the scene by the time the magi arrived.) 

In the United States, sadly, Epiphany now seems little more than a hardly noticed and very vestigial postscript to Christmas. Historically, however, Epiphany is actually the oldest festival of the Christmas season. It is older than Christmas Day itself, and (noticed or not) it still ranks among the principal festivals of the Church’s calendar. In many more traditionally Catholic countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America), it is the principal Christmas gift-giving day. In the Eastern Churches, Matthew’s story of the magi is already read on Christmas Day. Epiphany in the East is primarily a celebration of Jesus’ baptism, the beginning of his mission as an adult. Here in the West, we postpone the commemoration of Christ’s baptism until next Sunday, focusing today almost exclusively on the story of the magi.

That said, however, the fact is that we really know next to nothing about the magi. We do not know their names (though tradition has given them the familiar names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar), nor their social status (though tradition, inspired by Psalm 72, has crowned them kings), nor even their number (though tradition, based on the gifts itemized in the Gospel, has counted them as three, which in time came to represent the three then-known continents - Africa, Asia, and Europe - and the three ages of human life – youth, maturity, and old age).

The Gospel tells us none of these things, but it does tell us what it is important for us to know about the magi.

First of all, it tells us that they were foreigners, Gentiles, pagans. As such, they represent the majority of the human race – past and present – in a world in which (as we just heard from the Prophet Isaiah) darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples. The pagan magi relied on natural knowledge, and so sought for God through his creation, hoping to find in the phenomena of nature, some clues about God and God’s providential plans for the world.

Searching for God in the natural world he created is a good start. But the story also tells us that, whatever varied paths different people may start out on, our paths must all finally converge in Jesus, and that the interpretive key to the story of Jesus is God’s revelation of himself not only in nature but in history, in the history of Israel. So thus it was to Jewish Jerusalem, that the pagan magi came to learn the star’s full significance – as revealed in the scriptures, which translated the natural light of a star into the revelation of a person. As Isaiah prophesied: Nations shall walk by Jerusalem’s light, and kings by her shining radiance.

By way of warning, however, the story also illustrates how easily we may miss the point of it all. When Herod heard the Magi, he was greatly troubled and all Jerusalem with him. They were troubled, instead of being overjoyed like the Magi! What troubled them? What made such good news seem to them like bad news? The same Christmas star that filled the magi with hope somehow seemed like an evil portent to those who sensed the threatening challenge it posed to their power and priorities. What disposes some people even today to misplace their priorities such that they react to the good news of the Gospel as if it were bad news?

And then there were the scholars whom Herod consulted. They correctly quoted scripture. But, for all their knowledge of the subject, they seemed to lack the knowledge they needed. So none of them did the obvious thing, go to Bethlehem. Only the pagan magi did! Talk about missing the opportunity of a lifetime!

The magi, on the other hand, were overjoyed, not troubled. The magi set out as true pilgrims – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage. In the old liturgy when these words were read or sung in the Gospel on Epiphany, everyone was directed to genuflect. It was the liturgy’s dramatic way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi, experiencing what they experienced.

As for the magi, we never hear about them again. We know only what James Taylor chose as the title of his song, that they departed for their country by another way. Nativity scenes sometimes seem frozen in time. Everybody stays stationary – at least until it’s time to put the figures all back in the closet. But the real magi didn’t just stay there (any more than the shepherds did). They went back to wherever they had lived before, but they departed for their country by another way. They went back to whatever they had been doing before, but they would never be the same again. And, thanks to Christ’s coming into our world, so must it be for us.

Every January, with the holidays behind us, we return, as we all must, to our ordinary activities. Like the magi, however, our challenge is to travel through our ordinary life by another way, because something so special has happened that makes everything different from what it would otherwise have been. So, even as we navigate our way through an uncertain and challenging present, the Christmas star invites us to travel with the magi – to go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem and back again – confident that, whatever else may be the case, the Christmas star will precede us to illuminate every new day of this new year, and so will guide us on that alternate way, which, like the magi, we are, all of us together, being challenged to find and follow.

Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, January 5, 2014.

New Year's Reading

I try to avoid New year's predictions - thus also avoiding the eventual embarrassment of having to acknowledge how wrong I was! Similarly, I generally also avoid New Year's resolutions. Experience suggests that the only ones likely to be kept will be those resolving to do what I would have done anyway! Thus, while I will almost certainly read a lot in 2014, I prefer to avoid predicting how much and what I will read - with one exception.

This week, I have joined an on-line reading group committed to reading designated chapters of Saint Augustine's City of God more or less daily during the new year, beginning next Monday, January 6, and finishing sometime next December. I last read Augustine's City of God in graduate school. That was almost 40 years ago! It's certainly time to read it again. But Augustine's City of God is very long and not always a page-turner. So, when I learned about this collective effort to read it together, I saw an opportunity. Usually, New Year's resolutions fail for a failure of discipline. This resolution will remedy that failure and hopefully have me doing what on my own my undisciplined self would find it hard to persevere at.

I'll certainly read other things during the year. Who knows I may even find other reading groups? I've often reflected on the benefit I derived from being part of the "Great Religious Fiction" reading group at Saint Paul the Apostle in New York a few years back. That was an old-fashioned, live, we-meet-together-every-month kind of group, being part of which got me reading some wonderful religious fiction - e.g., Oscar Hijuelos' Mr. Ives' Christmas, which I spoke about in my Christmas homily last week.

Why Augustine's City of God?

Undoubtedly it is one of the most influential books in the history of western civilization, as well as a classic in the Christian interpretation of history. An eminent French historian of late antiquity Henri Marrou (1904-1977) once called Augustine "one of the few Christian thinkers of whose existence non-Christians are aware, and to whom they allow a place, at least, in the evolution of the human mind." Unlike a modern academic theologian, Augustine was a classic Bishop-Theologian, who exercised authority within the Catholic community and played a public role in the wider Roman society. That the City of God was occasioned by a need to rebut pagan claims that Christianity was socially and politically harmful certainly has a somewhat contemporary ring to it. At the very least it reminds us that Augustine lived and wrote at a time when, while Christianity was definitely the paradigm of the future, serious alternatives still existed and Christianity still had to make its case to a not completely compliant world - as it is once again being challenged to do today. And, while it is certainly true that Augustine's famous "conversion" was in fact a sophisticated adult's return to and embrace of the Church of his childhood, the influence of which had always been there lurking as it were in the background, it is also the case that along the way Augustine had investigated the principal intellectual and spiritual alternatives his society had to offer. He was (to speak in anachronistically post-modern categories) "spiritual but not religious" for much of his early life, for what could be called (again speaking anachronistically) his "young adult" years. All of which ought to heighten his salience for the challenge of today's  "New Evangelization."

Photo: Saint Augustine in His Study, by Sandro Botticelli (1480).

 

Mayor 109

On the steps of New York's 1811 City Hall, the 109th Mayor of New York took office today. Former President Bill Clinton administered the oath to Bill DeBlasio, his hand on FDR's Bible. After an effusive Grazie/Thank you to his family (including visiting Italian relatives), to the multi-faith corps of clergy who graced the ceremony with prayers, and the prominent politicians present - the Clintons, Governor Cuomo, and former Mayors Bloomberg and Dinkins, the Mayor quickly got down to business. 

"We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA" the Mayor said, setting himself squarely in the city's progressive tradition of Al Smith, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Fiorello LaGuardia.

"So let me be clear," the Mayor continued. "When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it. And we will do it."

He promised to expand the Paid Sick Leave law and guarantee that some 300,000 more new Yorkers will benefit from it. He promised to require developers to build more affordable housing, to stem the tide of hospital closures, and to expand community health centers, "so that New Yorkers see our city not as the exclusive domain of the One Percent, but a place where everyday people can afford to live, work, and raise a family." 

And he promised to "ask the very wealthy to pay a little more in taxes so that we can offer full-day universal pre-K and after-school programs for every middle school student."

Like the Pope, he challenged so-called "trickle-down economics" and called for "rebuilding our communities from the bottom-up, from the neighborhoods up." In sum, the city he sees is one which "remembers our responsibility to each other." That last phrase, of course, captures the core conceptual difference from the ideology that has increasingly dominated our society, especially since the 1980s. 

New York's new mayor may or may not succeed. But he has certainly articulated a more communitarian model for society in contrast to the individualism, consumerism, and libertarianism that have so corrupted our country and its politics. 

Will the way New York goes once again become a model for where this country could go?

2014

On New Year’s I like to repeat what the late comedian George Burns once wrote in The New York Times: “Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I always looked forward to New Year’s mainly because it was the only thing we could afford that was really new.”  Burns was a professional comedian, of course, and that was his laugh line. But then he added: “And we always believed that things were going to get better during the New Year.”

Historically, different peoples and cultures have marked the passing of the year on many different dates and with many different customs. Our preoccupation with the computing of time, the movements of the sun and the moon, the changing of the seasons, and the repetitive cycle of years, however, has been universal. Whether celebrated in spring, summer, autumn, or (as we do) in the dead of winter, the end of an old year and the start of a new one have universally been seen as a special moment in time, when past and future meet.  Before anyone ever exchanged Christmas presents, people were giving each other New Year’s gifts.  The Chinese even had New Year’s greeting cards – over a thousand years ago.

Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years – our preoccupation with time is itself apparently timeless. It may be one of our most distinctly human traits, since one of the earliest things that human beings became aware of must have been our own mortality – the fact that we live and we die in a set period of time. Time is truly precious - precisely perhaps because we have just a limited amount of it.

Of course, most of that time is what we might call “Ordinary time” – the day-to-day routine of work and personal life, punctuated by those special moments, the highs and lows of life, most of which happen when they happen, not particularly according to any calendar. Yet the calendar is always there, and never more obviously than on this day, when the simple act of changing the date makes us stop and think about what, if anything, it all means.

In 2013 Immaculate Conception Parish completed 155 years as the City of Knoxville’s oldest Catholic parish, still serving this community, still bringing the light of Christ and the good news of God’s kingdom to the heart of this city. A church is a special place that reveals its purpose by the way it is built and how it is furnished and adorned. So this past summer we undertook the replacement of the Church’s ceiling and the cleaning and highlighting of our three historic ceiling paintings. Meanwhile, our Parish “Town Hall” meeting in October, our parish has begun a new period of reflection on our mission in today’s world. A basic framework for our continued reflections in this new year will inevitably be Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium ("The Joy of the Gospel"). I encourage anyone who can to take time to read “The Joy of the Gospel” as we enter the new year.

If history has taught us anything, of course, it has taught us the fragility of some of so many of the things we are tempted to pin our hopes on. For all our holiday cheer, many of us may be marking the end of another very difficult and challenging year of economic and personal struggles by looking ahead to 2014 with more than a little anxiety. All over the world, people are beginning a new year with worries and anxieties about basic, important things – the world economy, far away wars and close-to-home violence, and, of course, the perennial worries about one’s job, one’s health, one’s family, in other words the future. It’s not for nothing, after all, that we pray every day at Mass that we may be safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

New Year’s – especially the run-up to the end of the old year – lends itself to both nostalgic and serious reflections both about the state of the world and about one’s own life, about where one has been so far and where one may be going in whatever time may yet be allotted. But New Year’s, as George Burns’ comical comment reminds us, is, by definition, something new, a gift freely given us that offers an opportunity for hope.  Like George Burns, we want to believe that things may be better in this new year, better for ourselves, better for the world.

“In the heart of every man and woman,” Pope Francis has written in his New Year’s Message, “is the desire for a full life” [2014 World Day of Peace Message]. Hope is, I think, everyone’s response to that universal human desire. Hope keeps us from giving in to discouragement and sustains us in times of difficulty. Hope takes us out of ourselves and unites us with others.

Our hope – the hope that brings us here to this church today – is founded on Jesus Christ, whose birth some 20 centuries ago is the very basis for the calendar we are so conscious of today. In an 1870 Christmas sermon, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulist Fathers, said: “In the creation God made man like Himself.  In the Incarnation, God made Himself like man. … Christ is our brother whom we can approach with feelings of confidence and affection. … The invisible became visible.  God became Man. … The Almighty God a helpless infant.  O folly of Divine Love, thus to stoop and win human hearts.”

The birth of Christ – to a particular mother, part of a particular nation, in a particular place, at a particular time in human history - has realigned all of time and given all of human history a new significance. The birth of Christ – to that particular mother, part of that particular nation, in that particular place, at that particular time in human history - has offered us a new hope for a future which we would never otherwise have imagined.

By becoming part of our time, God has turned our limited time on earth into a time of unlimited opportunity. So today he invites us to receive this new year – this year of our Lord 2014 – with gratitude as his gift and to enter into it with the joy and hope that counts as one of God’s greatest Christmas gifts to us.

Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, January 1, 2014