The Dawning of Salvation

Your birth, O Virgin Mother of God, proclaims joy to the whole world, for from you arose the glorious Sun of Justice, Christ our God; he freed us from the age-old curse and filled us with holiness; he destroyed death and gave us eternal life. 

Those words (from the antiphon at the Benedictus at Morning Prayer today) summarize the significance of the Church's celebration of the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

(The photo is of Giotto's early 14th-century fresco of the Nativity of Mary in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy.)

Today's celebration is one of the oldest Marian feasts in the calendar. Its origin is thought to be connected with the dedication of a church in Jerusalem - now known as the Church of Saint Anne - erected on a site associated in tradition with the home of Mary's parents. From the Eastern Church, the feast came to Rome toward the end of the 7th century. The celebration of Mary's day of birth (a liturgical privilege she shares only with Jesus and John the Baptist) is also an early testimony to the Church's faith in Mary's freedom from sin from the beginning of her life.

Curiously, a similar idea also exists in Islam. In Muslim tradition, Mary and Jesus are the only two born totally free from Satan's power. The Quran also recounts Mary's birth in a story seemingly influenced by the Old Testament account of Hannah's conceiving and giving birth to Samuel (cf. I Samuel 1). 

A sermon ascribed to Saint Augustine, which used to be read in today's Second Nocturn, highlights the ancient patristic parallelism between Mary and Eve: The canticle of Mary silenced the wailing of Eve. In the contemporary Office, the Mary-Eve parallelism is expressed through the scripture reading from Exodus 3 (replacing the traditional First Nocturn readings from the Song of songs). Then, instead of Augustine, it is Saint Andrew of Crete whose words we read. For him, Mary's birth was the prelude to the foreordained union of the Word with flesh and is the mystery that stands at the frontier where types and symbols give way to reality, and the old is replaced by the new.

Lots to think about on this feast!

Meanwhile, here in East Tennessee, today marks the 28th anniversary of the creation of the Diocese of Knoxville. Accordingly, today's feast is observed as the patronal feast of this diocese.

James F. Finley, CSP

Paulist Father James Finley (February 4, 1915-September 7, 1996) had a distinguished career as a priest, mission preacher, vicar general of his community, local superior, and parish pastor before retiring to senior ministry status in the late 1970s and taking up residency at the Paulist Fathers' novitiate in Oak Ridge, NJ. It was perhaps an odd choice of residence, since he himself had largely unhappy memories of his own novitiate year there in the early 1940s, but it proved providential for a decade and more of novices whose formation experience he became a part of  and with whom he shared the wisdom of his own life experience.

He kept to himself much of the time, except when explicitly asked by the Novice Master to give us a talk or some practical guidance on preaching. Mainly we saw him at dinner most evenings at which he often regaled us with stories from the community's distant and not-so-distant past. For many of us, he became a valued confidant - and later on a friend. 

After my First Profession in August 1982 (photo), whenever I came back to visit the novitiate community at Oak Ridge, I looked forward to knocking on Jim's door and spending an hour or more with him chatting about what was going on in my life and getting his take on the goings on in the community. Jim could be quite critical of things, but he had an important and valuable long-term perspective which informed his short-term assessments. Anyway, he always liked me and always showed real interest in me as a person and was always sympathetic and supportive of me in my troubles.

He was, accordingly, very happy for me when I was finally ordained. In November 1995, when I visited the novitiate as a newly ordained priest and the novice master kindly invited me to celebrate Mass for the community, Jim paid me the honor of attending the Mass. Attending another priest's Mass that way was something he seldom did, but he told me that after such a long wait, he really wanted to be there. That too meant a lot to me.

I visited him once more the following summer, but by then he had already become ill and was in evident decline. He died not many weeks later, 20 years ago today. He is buried in the local parish cemetery of Oak Ridge's Saint Thomas the Apostle Church, along with more than 70 other faithful Paulist priests, whose bodies were reinterred there when our beautiful novitiate property was sold to the state of New Jersey. Many of those buried there I never knew personally, but shared with them a precious common vocation. Some, like Jim, I remember fondly as true friends. Someday, I too expect to be buried there with all of them.

Labor Day

Today is Labor Day - still a legal holiday, although what a holiday actually means anymore in our society certainly seems open to question. 

Back when I was a graduate student in the mid-1970s, I dreaded the Labor Day "holiday weekend" because the University always chose that weekend to close the library for 3 days for its annual sprucing-up before the resumption of classes later in September. In those days, when so few places were air-conditioned, that meant not only no place for graduate students to read, study, and socialize with ease, but also no place to keep cool and to breathe pollen-free air! 

Labor Day, a federal holiday since 1894, sadly long ago joined most of our other national holidays in losing much of its original civic significance and has become just a "holiday weekend" – an opportunity for shopping and other diversions. Even when I was a child and the American labor movement was still strong and the traditional Labor Day Parade was still significant, Labor Day was already becoming more about the end of summer vacation, the last day for women to wear their white shoes and men their straw hats, and the imminent return to school and normal activities. It was already losing its primary purpose as a serious civic celebration of American workers (and the affluence that their astounding productivity had helped to produce).

That great post-World War II quarter century or so of unprecedented, nation-wide, prosperity rooted in a strong labor movement and high tax rates seems such a distant memory now in this present era of increasing economic inequality, political polarization, and social dysfunction. Thus, the U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2016 Labor Day Statement has called attention, among other things, to “the acute pain of middle and rural America in the wake of the departure of industry. Once the center of labor and the promise of family-sustaining wages, research shows these communities collapsing today, substance abuse on the rise, and an increase in the number of broken families.”

Solving our society’s decades-in-the-making economic and social problems has been made that much more complicated and problematic by the transformation of global economic activity and other social changes, which seem to have rendered obsolete so much that we used to be able to take for granted about economic and social life. That challenge, however, only makes it that much more urgent for us to recover an authentic understanding of human nature and human solidarity – and of fulfilling human labor as an essential component of a productive economy and a good society.

Alternative Wisdom

In anticipation of today’s canonization of Saint Teresa of Kolkata, Huffington Post highlighted 10 of her more famous quotes. The first of them, Do ordinary things with extraordinary love, sort of sums up how we often describe the saintly people we may have known in the world. But, because their extraordinary love has been expressed in otherwise ordinary activities, such saintly people seldom get noticed beyond their immediate environment. People who get canonized, like Mother Teresa, typically have done something we think of a extraordinary, even heroic – hence the expressions “heroic sanctity” and “heroic virtue,” often applied to the lives of canonized saints. The key thing about heroism, however, precisely what makes it stand out as heroic, is that it is something that we are more inclined to admire and respect than to want to imitate.

Jesus in today’s Gospel, however, seems to be speaking about heroism as something expected of all his disciples. Even when we make allowances for the very different cultural milieu in which Jesus was speaking, for an ancient middle eastern rhetorical style that actually encouraged exaggeration, Jesus’ words still seem extremely demanding, with the result that, while we may hear them, we may not really listen all that intently. Yet Jesus does challenge us, if we are really serious about being his disciples, to listen to all his words – not just the nice, comforting, convenient ones. And, if listening makes me worry that I am too swayed in my judgments by people who are close to me and whom I care a lot about, perhaps too timid at times about disagreeing with them or challenging them, or, if listening to Jesus’ words makes me worry whether I am too attached to things, well that is what listening to Jesus is supposed to do, that is the effect it is supposed to have! Even if there are lots of people far richer than I will ever be, I may still have more than enough, according to the Gospel, to make me question how committed I really am to being a disciple.

Indeed, just this past week, in connection with the Annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Pope Francis warned that we have grown comfortable with certain lifestyles shaped by a distorted culture of prosperity and a “disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary” (Laudato Si’, 123), and we are participants in a system that “has imposed the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.”

Most of us, of course, are usually quite uncomfortable with words that challenge. We prefer Jesus’ more sensible-sounding sayings – like the parable of the tower or the one about the king marching into battle. That’s the sensible Jesus we all know and love – or, rather, love to know – a Jesus who provides prudent practical advice that respects common sense and our ordinary feelings. The prudent tower-builder and the cautious king who knows when it’s time to fight and when it’s time to negotiate are examples we can all relate to – good examples of people who know how to put their priorities in order and whom we would all do well to imitate in our day-to-day lives.

But, just as we all know (or think we know) how to set short-term priorities, Jesus also challenges us to pick the proper priorities and act accordingly in the long term too – and to let no shorter-term personal relationship or possession deflect us from our long-term goal.

With all the people and things that constantly compete for our attention – nice people and nice things, that are all good in themselves and whose value no one should underestimate – Jesus wants us to focus, first of all, on him. But, with all the people and things that constantly compete for our attention, who knows where and how far focusing on Jesus will take us, just how much of a disruption it may prove to be? Just think of Saint Teresa of Kolkata’s life and how far afield, from her sensible life as a teaching sister, focusing on Jesus eventually took her!

The book of Wisdom, from which we just heard, confirms what our commonsense also tells us: the deliberations of mortals are timid and unsure are our plans. Even so, Jesus challenges us, as the psalm we just sang says, seemingly so simply, to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.

And today’s scripture even gives us a practical historical example of that alternative wisdom. In a world of precisely structured social relationships, the new, outside-that-structure relationship of being a disciple of Jesus, changed everything. It did so for Paul, for the slave Onesimus, whom Paul had converted and baptized, and finally (as Paul confidently hoped) for Onesimus’ master Philemon. The stories of Paul, Onesimus, and Philemon – like that of Saint Teresa of Kolkatta and other saints in our own day - show just what can happen when we take seriously our new relationship with Jesus and the whole new network of relationships that being a follower of Jesus creates among fellow believers.

Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, September 4, 2016.

September

The one thing I look forward to more than September is October, but we must wait another 30 days for that!  Still September is an improvement over June, July, and August and at least heralds the prospect of cooler and kinder days, weeks, and months ahead! (Of course, thanks to the destruction we have imposed on our environment, each year promises to be tragically warmer than in the past.)

In the Eastern Orthodox calendar September 1 (September 14 in the Gregorian calendar) is the beginning of the liturgical year, ostensibly commemorating the creation of the world. And, somewhere, I remember Blessed Pope Paul VI opining about autumn as a kind of natural beginning of the year. The Jewish calendar clearly gets that right! As does the academic calendar - at least in those places where it waits until September to start!

Since 2015, September 1 is now observed as a World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. In his Message in connection with this observance, Pope Francis called for "a serious examination of conscience," authentic repentance, expressing in confessing "our sins against the Creator, against creation, and against our brothers and sisters." The corresponding firm purpose of amendment, Pope Francis proposes, must in turn "translate into concrete ways of thinking and acting that are more respectful of creation."

In this Jubilee Year of Mercy, the Holy Father has incorporated the care for our common home into the traditional spiritual and corporal works of mercy:

As a spiritual work of mercy, care for our common home calls for a “grateful contemplation of God’s world” (Laudato Si’, 214) which “allows us to discover in each thing a teaching which God wishes to hand on to us” (ibid., 85). As a corporal work of mercy, care for our common home requires “simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” and “makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world” (ibid., 230-31). 

A lot to think about as we prepare for another autumnal renewal!