Saving Civilization

Yesterday I saw the new movie The Monuments Men, directed by George Clooney and starring Clooney and such other worthies as Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, and Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey's Lord Grantham). It is a wonderful movie that I think everyone should see. It is based on Robert Edsel's even more wonderful 2009 book, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which tells the story of Allied effort in final year of World War II to salvage and recover Europe's historical and artistic treasures that had been looted by the Nazis and were in danger of being destroyed or irreparably lost. 

 

I've always been interested in the history of World War II (especially the European Theater where my father and several uncles fought). After all, when I was growing up the war was still recent history, and its impact overshadowed everything. By the time I first read Edsel's book in 2009, all that had long changed, of course. Still, the story fascinated me. Perhaps it seemed especially salient to me then, since one of the major art treasures in the story is the "Bruges Madonna," one of the very few extant copies of which is housed in our own Paulist "Mother Church" of Saint Paul the Apostle in New York. At that time, I was Associate pastor there and often gave tours of the Church. Those tours were primarily religious and historical but they, of course, also highlighted the church's artistic treasures, which are part of the precious patrimony of the church and of which the bronze copy of the Bruges Madonna (photo) is certainly one of the most notable. 

 

The original in the Onze Lieve Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Lady) in Bruges, Belgium, is a marble sculpture of the Madonna and Child by Michelangelo, and it is the only known Michelangelo sculpture outside Italy. Except when stolen, it has been in that church since 1514. It was first stolen by the French in 1794, after the French Republic conquered the Austrian Netherlands. It was stolen a second time 150 years later in 1944, wrapped in mattresses and taken by the retreating Germans. Its subsequent recovery in Altausee, Austria, is a major episode in the book and (along with the search for the Ghent altarpeice) serves as a major leitmotif for the movie.

 

World War II has often been seen (then and since) as a war to save European civilization. As the movie tries to argue, destroying a civilizations's cultural achievements is effectively to destroy that civilization itself. Conversely, saving its achievements is a critical component of saving a civilization. That is why the work of the "Monuments Men" was so important and is so deserving of belated recognition. That so many of the artifacts of our civilization find their homes in churches further highlights the inescapably Christian character of European civilization. That is a reality contemporary society, which seems increasingly so out of touch with its past, seems increasingly inclined to forget - to its loss and its peril.

The Beatles

The first Beatles' single to be played on a U.S. radio station was, I believe, I Want to Hold Your Hand. That was in late 1963. But I didn't really become personally conscious of the Beatles until 50 years ago this week when they did their first American tour. On Friday, February 7, 1964, the Beatles landed at the just recently re-named JFK Airport to a tumultuous welcome, that The New York Times estimated included more than 3000 teens standing four-deep on the upper arcade of JFK's International Arrivals Building. (Equally importantly, they were also met by some 200 reporters and photographers who sparred with them at a humorous airport press conference.) All this was prelude, of course, to Sunday, February 9, when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by a TV audience of some 73 million people, myself among them.  To the extent that one can usefully date such things, that was probably the symbolic beginning of the 1960s Youth Culture.

Whatever else one might say on its behalf, The Ed Sullivan Show had never struck me as particularly exciting. But I remember vividly how very exciting The Ed Sullivan Show suddenly seemed that Sunday night. Of course, I myself still had very little sense of what it really meant and even less of a clue as to what it would soon mean for my generation. At just the right transition-point in the affluent, post-war baby boom generation's life cycle, teenagers went wild with excitement at this new sound (a creative marriage of pop, American R&B, and British working-class style) that seemed to suggest that the future might not mean just more of the same. Meanwhile girls especially responded en masse to the Beatles' evident and exuberant heterosexuality.

Within the still staid, still assumed to be predictable, Bronx blue-collar culture I somewhat restively inhabited, two responses captured what I'll call the establishment mood. I remember asking one of my classmates whether he thought the Beatles' hairstyle would catch on in America. He absolutely assured me that it wouldn't. Meanwhile, our English teacher, trying to introduce us to epic poetry, pointed out that an epic had to be about something great, that one couldn't compose an epic about the Beatles. How wrong they both were! How thoroughly the putative certainties of our narrow world were about to be exploded! At that point, of course, I didn't know how it would turn out, what that amazing musical revolution would come to mean in so many respects.

The Beatles began what has often been called the "British Invasion." In short order came The Dave Clark Five, The Kinks, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Zombies, The Animals, and, most long-lasting and most influential of all, The Rolling Stones. Pre-Beatles pop music's lyrics had been quite conventional. It was music to dance to (for those fortunate enough to have someone to dance with.) It was subversive only in the most minimal sense - in that it was something teenagers shared with each other that didn't include adults. (In those days, most of our lives still included adult activities and responded to adult expectations. So that was something new, a foretaste of much more to come.) But teen music, listened to on a transistor radio, was widely still assumed to be something one would grow out of. It certainly wasn't political, for example. In fact, the politically subversive music, such as it was in the 1950s and early 1960s, was "folk music," and that was more popular among certain sorts of adults than it was among teens (the same sorts of adults who would soon invent the incongruous "folk Mass.") Pop music itself was pretty apolitical and unserious, but that too would soon change.

Thanks also to the Beatles, record albums seemed to become more thematic - not just a convenient collection of songs but a vehicle for a coherent message. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band would, I guess, be remembered as the best example of this. 

That was all still in the future when John, Paul, George, and Ringo stepped off that plane in New York 50 years ago today. In 1964 few fans - certainly not I - grasped what radical changes were in store for us all, and what we and the world would eventually come to look like as a result. As musicians, the "Fab Four" were creative geniuses. They were also young men of their time and place. The effect of their astounding creativity on that particular time and place produced a new sound to express a new spirit - the genuine spirit of an age of transition and turmoil. 

CVS and Tobacco

I seldom have occasion to praise corporations, but the pharmacy chain CVS earned a gold star today with its announcement that its 7600 stores around the country will cease selling tobacco products by October 1. In a statement issued earlier today, President Obama also lauded CVS for setting "a powerful example" that will help advance "efforts to reduce tobacco-related deaths, cancer, and heart disease, as well as bring down health care costs."

Being old enough to remember the 1964 Surgeon General's Report that first sounded the alert against smoking, I am amazed at how thoroughly our society has changed on this important issue. I can well remember how, when cities started outlawing smoking in public places, all sorts of people said it would never work, that people wouldn't conform, that bars and restaurants would go out of business. But here we are in 2014, and smoking - while still a very real social curse and threat to public health - is definitely in decline.

When I was young, smoking was normal. And it was "cool" and sexy. Jacqueline Kennedy, that queen of fashion and style, is said to have introduced ashtrays as White House events.(Talk about the Owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk!) Having reach its apex, smoking and the culture connected with it is now cascading to its nadir. And that is all to the good.

I shop at CVS. I buy all my prescription medications there. I've often stood on line at the cahier watching while someone purchases cigarettes. I'm very happy that's a sight I won't be seeing too much longer. Along with private gun ownership, smoking remains one of the great blights on our culture. Every move to ending it deserves to be applauded.

According to legend, when tobacco smoking was first described to King James I in the early 1600s, he was horrified and said it was something no Christian gentlemen should do. He should have been listened to!

Up and Down at Downton

Mercifully, no one has died or been killed yet in Season 4 of Downton Abbey.  Even so the tension is rising. Will Mary find a new man? Will Tom Branson throw in the towel and emigrate to America? Will Mr. Bates do something stupid to avenge Anna and thus ruin the one really good thing he has in his life? How will Isobel Crawley renegotiate her place In the family and in the larger world of Downton society? What mischief are Barrow and Baxter really up to? Will Mosely make it in his reduced status? And then the really big questions after the latest episode: What is Edith going to do? And how far is Rose ready to go?

Rose’s involvement with the Black bandleader, Mr. Ross, clearly crosses more than one boundary.  To an American audience, because of our troubled racial history, it is the racial dynamic that we notice right away. But, while the racial angle undoubtedly adds further fuel to an already highly combustible situation, this is Britain not America, and I think we are meant to see this relationship (and all relationships at Downton) primarily through the prism of class.

Dramatically, last night’s episode made that point loud and clear, I think, through the way it portrayed both Violet’s and Isobel’s dealings with Peg the gardener, through the sad but comic trials of the downward-mobile Mr. Mosely (almost reduced to becoming Joseph, but spared that assault to his dignity by the superlative sensitivity of the Dowager Countess and Lord Robert), and finally by the snobbery experienced by Mr. and Mrs. Bates at a local restaurant (humorously turned to their advantage by Lady Grantham’s intervention on their behalf). All these little vignettes highlight how social class – a person’s defined social position – dominates everything in that world and is the primary lens through which all experience is interpreted.

We Americans have a history of trying to not quite acknowledge class. And, of course, class in America was never quite the pervasively decisive factor it was in the 1920s Britain portrayed at Downton. Yet, as Lady Edith’s aunt presciently warned her at the end of the previous episode, some things change but some other important things stay the same. Downton is a case study not just in whether Mary and Tom can make the estate a going concern in the modern economy but in how real people completely caught up in the consciousness of class can negotiate the complex challenges of a modern world which is gradually eroding the certainties, securities, and comforts of a world in which the social boundaries and the behaviors that accompany those boundaries are all always completely clear to everyone.

Candlemas Day

The familiar carol stops at day 12, but today is actually the 40^th day of Christmas. It marks the definitive end of the Christmas season. In Italy (and some other places), the presepio or nativity scene typically remains in place in church until today. So two years ago at this time, when I was studying in Rome, I had almost a full month to visit the various presepe – some monumentally elaborate, some surprisingly simple – on display in Rome’s many churches.

In the western, Latin Church, today is currently called the Presentation of the Lord, but for several centuries it was also known as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the Gospel we just heard, Mary and Joseph took the infant Jesus to Jerusalem according to the law of Moses, that is to say, in obedience to God’s law, in order to observe two important religious obligations. The first was the ordinary obligation to be purified after childbirth, reflecting ancient beliefs about the sacredness of blood, and the requirement of ritual purification after any direct contact with blood. The second concerned the special status and religious responsibilities of a first-born son (because of God’s having spared Israel’s first-born at the time of the Exodus). Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’s participation in these rituals highlights for us, first, the inviolable sacredness of all human life, and, second, the special status (and corresponding responsibilities) which now define our entire lives, because of our relationship with Jesus.

But, whatever the official title, the most common popular title for today’s celebration in the West has consistently been Candlemas Day, because of the Blessing of Candles and the Procession - originally in Rome an early morning, pre-dawn procession, originally somewhat penitential in character – with which today’s Mass begins.

The name Candlemas calls attention, obviously, to the blessed candles, but also to their light – and to Jesus the One whom that light symbolizes. The Church’s official ceremonial says that “on this day Christ’s faithful people, with candles in their hands, go out to meet the Lord and to acclaim him with Simeon, who recognized Christ as ‘a light to reveal God to the nations.’ They should therefore be taught to walk as children of the light in their entire way of life, because they have a duty to show the light of Christ to all by acting in the works that they do as lighted lamps.”

A secular version of Candlemas is “Groundhog Day.” Not so long ago, everyone in the Western world knew about Candlemas Day. Today many people, probably, have forgotten Candlemas completely. Yet even those who may never ever even have heard of Candlemas can recognize the folklore that connects the day with the change of seasons. While the weather is still decidedly wintry, the days are getting noticeably longer. Whereas Christmas comes at the mid-point of the winter’s darkness, with the year’s shortest day and its correspondingly longest night, Candlemas comes at the mid-point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the transition (according to one ancient way of reckoning the seasons) from winter to spring. Soon, day and night, light and dark will be equal. So this last of the great winter light festivals invites us to look ahead to what these ancient seasonal feasts are meant to symbolize.

Today we recall with joy the Lord’s entry into his Temple: and suddenly (so says the prophet Malachi) there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek. At the same time, we hear, in wise old Simeon’s words to Mary, the first reference to what lies ahead, the first reference to the cross. Behold, this child is destined … to be a sign that will be contradicted – and you yourself a sword will pierce – so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

So, even as we take one last look back at winter and Christmas, Candlemas looks ahead to spring and Lent, and reminds us that the point of Christmas is Easter.

Meanwhile, Simeon and Anna’s encounter with the infant Jesus in the Jerusalem Temple points us toward our own encounter with the Risen Christ here and now.

In the Eastern, non-Latin Churches, this day is appropriately called the Encounter, the Feast of Meeting. Today, Christ comes to meet us, and we in turn get to meet him. Every Christmas we encounter Christ in a special way in the image the infant Jesus in the manger. When we encounter the infant Jesus in the nativity scene in church and at home, we appreciate anew the great mystery of the incarnation of God’s Son. When Simeon and Anna experienced in the infant Jesus the human face of God, they spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem. They hastened to proclaim and share their good news. That remains our task today – to take the light of these candles out into our spiritually still so very dark world, and so to share with all the light reflected in our own lives from the brightness of the human face of God.

Homily for the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, February 2, 2014.