A Pig's Breakfast

"A Pig's Breakfast" is a Britishism for a messed up muddle, which is what UK politics looks like right now in the wake of yesterday's disastrous parliamentary election that appears to have resulted in a "hung parliament." (It wasn't totally disastrous. The SNP lost something like 21 votes and both Conservatives and Labour picked up seats in Scotland, which was all to the good.)

Presumably Prime Minister Theresa May (the first regular, committed, weekly church-attender in 10 Downing Street in decades) had called this election ti increase her party's majority and so strengthen Britain's hand in the upcoming Brexit negotiations with the EU. Instead she has no majority and a likely much weaker position vis-a-vis the EU.

That is obviously not good for her, or for her party, or (most importantly) for the United Kingdom. Particularly worrisome is the increased stature of the radical leader of the Labour Party, whom NY Times columnist Ross Douthat recently characterized as a kind of analogue on the British extreme Left to marine Le Pen on France's extreme Right. However that may be, the ascendancy of such an extreme figure as Jeremy Corbyn again highlights the ongoing collapse of traditional politics in Western democracies, of which the traumatizing 2016 US election of President Donald Trump has thus far been the leading example.

Since Theresa May is a woman, comparisons have inevitably been made to Hillary Clinton's stumbles last year. And perhaps there is some similarity in how both underestimated the degree of popular disenchantment with governing political elites and politics as usual. The more important question, of course, is where all this will lead. Whatever kind of coalition Theresa May may manage to cobble together, whatever drama passes for (or substitutes for) governance in the US in this age of Trump, the fact remains that Western democracies are increasingly widely perceived by more and more of their citizens as having failed them - something not so widely experienced since the 1930s.

Despite the cultural assaults on traditional institutions that has been going on in Western societies now since the 1960s, it is, of course, those traditional institutions and the values they embody that the US and the UK must now depend upon to keep both our countries on course. 

Churchill - the Movie

Historically based movies often take some creative license with their stories and their characters. The movie Churchill takes this to an extreme that significantly distorts the historical record. Set on the eve of D-Day in June 1944, the movie revolves around Churchill's last-minute opposition to the Allied plan for the Normandy invasion. In fact while Churchill had expressed real reservations about a cross-Channel invasion earlier in the war, he had certainly become a supporter of the plan by June 1944. Indeed, the screenwriter, historian Alex von Tunzelmann, has acknowledged that she "telescoped" Churchill's opposition from earlier in the war into the days just before the invasion. Besides distorting the history,what this does is make Churchill seem at best ridiculous.

Of course, there was much in Churchill's character and way of operating that deserves to be examined more critically, without the aura of heroic greatness that has understandably enveloped him. (The portrayal of an even older Churchill in Netflix' The Crown, for example, certainly fits into that category.) But, it is one thing to pay greater attention to Churchill's personal peculiarities, his depression, his drinking, etc., and still be faithful to historical truth.

That said, the movie is still worth seeing. For one thing it does accurately depict some of the other high drama that preceded D-Day. This included Churchill's scheme to sail along with the invasion himself - something that the King himself had to intervene to stop him from doing. And the movie does depict effectively the stressful last-minute decision whether or not to count on a predicted break in the weather and go ahead with the invasion. That decision was Eisenhower's, of course, and the movie does a good job of portraying how stressful the decision was and ultimately how Ike took the responsibility to make the fateful decision.

Duty and responsibility are central themes in the film. Two characters in particular, Churchill's wife Clementine and King George VI are depicted - excellently - as both embodying those qualities and together calling Churchill himself to a fuller appreciation of how those qualities are to be best practiced in his wartime role. The movie actually does a good job of highlighting the differing challenges - indeed vocations - of political and military leaders and the importance of appreciating those differences in practice. 

The basis for Churchill's alleged opposition to the invasion in the film is his recollection of the carnage of World War I - especially his own role in the Gallipoli disaster - and his resulting revulsion at the idea of sending so many young men to die in a militarily problematic strategy. These are not in fact inappropriate considerations. They do deserve to be raised when discussing military strategy. One only wishes that the movie might have had Churchill voice these concerns in a compassionate way which did not exploit his character flaws to make him look foolish and even deluded.

The Leftovers' Finale

Finally, the  3rd season of The Leftovers has come to an end - and with it the entire series. Seven years after the October 14 "Departure" of 2% of the world's population, Nora (having dramatically separated from Kevin after a fight in a Melbourne hotel) goes ahead with the procedure that will supposedly take her to where her disappeared children have gone. Before doing so, she and her brother Reverend Matt (who is himself terminally ill) have a lengthy conversation about mortality. Then she enters the machine. 

Fast forward several years, and an obviously older Nora (now going by the name Sara) is living on her own in rural Australia, operating a kind of carrier pigeon service. Out of the blue, Kevin (also older) shows up and pretends he's on vacation and just happened to recognize her on the road. As if they had had no history together, he tells her he remembers her from Mapleton and invites her to a local dance. Nora stops at a pay phone to call her therapist - Laurie Garvey, who obviously did not kill herself, and in fact is still living in Texas. Eventually, Nora goes to the dance, which turns out to be a wedding, where she dances with Kevin and catches up on the other characters, but challenges his refusal to acknowledge their past life together. The next day, Kevin comes calling and tells the truth, how he has been searching for her for years. She in turn tells him what happened to her when she travelled through the machine to a parallel earth in which the "Departed" have continued their lives. Having seen how her family have moved on, Nora realizes she doesn't belong there with them and gets the inventor of the machine to build another one to send her back, which is what brings her back to Australia. Kevin believes Nora's story, and the two are reunited in the closest thing this grief-filled series could come to a happy ending.

After all the gratuitous weirdness of the last two seasons, I was almost ready not to like the finale, but I'm such a sucker for romantic schmalz that I couldn't resist the reunion of the the older Kevin and older Nora. I could have done without some of the snarky religious symbolism, but I admit that I really liked the way Nora and Kevin got back together, and I think that having Kevin try the approach of pretending that their history together hadn't really happened was crazy clever. 

Nora's revelation of what happened to those who disappeared that infamous October 14 may be no more plausible than any of the show's other forays into the world beyond, but it is a surprisingly satisfying explanation - including the poignant detail that the disappeared have actually lost even more than those left behind, having in fact lost the entire other 98% of the world that they left behind when they departed. It is almost as if the series is suggesting that, now that we know what has happened to the departed, life on this side of the divide can resume, and the survivors' grief can be put behind them just like human sins on a scapegoat (a ritual actually employed by the participants in the wedding scene). 

Above all, Kevin comes across as somewhat sane again. In the first season, Kevin seemed to me to be someone who was desperately trying to hold his family together, against all odds and in particular against the dysfunctional and secretive behavior of his wife and children. Through the second and third seasons, even against the backdrop of his love for Nora, Kevin seemed to be on a constant collision course with any semblance of sanity. Suddenly, Kevin comes across again as weirdly normal, happy even. He is still living in Miracle (and who knows how crazy that place may still be!). But he is apparently living happily with his entire remaining family (children and ex-wife) and neighbors all nearby - except for Nora, whom he travels to Australia for two weeks each year in the vain hope of finding her. The older Kevin who confronts an older Nora in this final episode seems genuinely at peace with himself and his world - lacking only one thing, his relationship with Nora. But, because he now has his act more or less together, he seems better equipped to listen to Nora's story and accompany her back into what is left of their world, sharing her recognition that the world that is left to them, while it will always be incomplete thanks to the absence of those who departed, is a a full-enough world for them at least to make it work for them. Which is what will have to pass for healing in this planet of the forever sad.

Jerusalem Memories

Today is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Six-Day War. At the time, I was temporarily living in a very Jewish environment in Queens, NY. I remember very well the anxiety that suddenly seemed to preoccupy people in response to Egyptian President Nasser's threats and the UN's obsequiousness - the sudden sense that the very survival of Israel and of the Jewish People was once again at stake. I remember the morning when the war began. Above all, I remember when and how it ended, with total Israeli victory. 

That victory made possible the unification of the Holy City of Jerusalem, artificially divided by the 1949 armistice. I can still visualize the enormous outpouring of emotion as Jews were once again free to pray at the Western Wall, which they had been prohibited from visiting since Jordan's seizure and occupation of East Jerusalem back during Israel's War of Independence. I had always wanted to visit the sacred Christians sites in the Holy Land, and now I mentally added the Wall and the Temple Mount to my list - little knowing, of course, when (or even if) I might actually get there. and certainly never imagining the vocational context in which I would finally find myself there. That came to pass some 26 years later, when I spent a summer at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem (photo).

Ironically, ground was broken for the Tantur Ecumenical Institute on a 36-acre hill on the Jerusalem to Bethlehem road, on June 4, 1967 - the very day before the war began. At that time, the site was in Jordanian-occupied Jerusalem. A week later it was in Israel. Tantur resulted from meetings of Pope Paul VI with Protestant Observers during Vatican II and with Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem in 1964. The property is owned by the Holy See, which leased it to the Notre Dame University for the administration of the institute. Although primarily set up for scholars, Tantur in the 1990s also ran a summer program for non-scholars, which I was able to take advantage of in 1993. The Director at that time was my own former novice master from 12 years earlier. So it was a naturally welcoming setting for me to experience the Holy Land. 

Summer 1993 was a relatively peaceful period In Israel. (I was there in June and July. On September 13, the so-called "Oslo Accord" was signed in Washington by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rbin and Yasser Arafat.) That summer we were able to travel safely almost everywhere. (Hebron was the one exception.) Not only did we get to visit most of the sites officially as a group, but there was plenty of free time to explore both Jerusalem and Bethlehem on one's own. I walked the couple of miles to and from Jerusalem on my own more than once and unhesitatingly rode both Jewish and Arab buses back and forth. 

It was fashionable then to refer to the Holy Land as 'the 5th Gospel." Certainly living in the Holy Land - "running where Jesus walked" (and often enough just walking where Jesus walked) - was a great eye-opener. I remember once waiting at a bus stop and watching a shepherd across the road call his sheep, and thinking, Oh, that's what Jesus meant!

As Paulist Fathers' Founder Servant of God Isaac Hecker himself expressed it, reacting to his own profoundly spiritual experience in the Holy Land in the early 1870s: "In reciting the Gloria and the Credo, after having been in the localities where the great mysteries which they express took place, one is impressed in a wonderful manner with their actuality. The truths of our holy faith seem to saturate one’s blood, enter into one’s flesh, and penetrate even to the marrow of one’s bones." 

The experience also highlighted for me the centrality of the promised land in the covenant God made with the Jewish People, a covenant which is still relevant. According to the Second Vatican Council's timely reminder: God does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the calls He issues (Cf. Romans 11:28-29).                                                  

Pentecost

Seven weeks have passed since we celebrated the Lord’s resurrection. That may seem like a long time to us - living as we now live at a faster pace than people have ever tried to live before. But it is not really a long time by any traditional measure. From the accounts that have come down to us – in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles - one gets a sense of that original Easter season as a time of transition, as the focus perceptibly shifts from what Jesus has been doing to what the disciples are going to do. As we all know, it takes time – sometimes a lot of time – to get people properly prepared for a major undertaking. We typically allow not seven but ten weeks for a newly elected American President to staff his Administration in the transition from election to inauguration. Likewise the Risen Lord used the transitional time from Easter to Ascension to prepare his disciples for the task ahead, laying out his program, and getting them “on board” to implement it, eventually empowering them with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Now, it’s Pentecost, and the implementation part begins in earnest.

That’s assuming, of course, that we even notice! Pentecost was once one of the greatest festivals of the Church year, on a par with Easter. Sixty years ago, it still had a week-long octave like Easter, and even had its own Saturday morning vigil (complete a blessing of baptismal water). At one time, Kings and Queens were expected to wear their crowns publicly on Pentecost. About all that’s left of all that now, in post-Christian Europe, is the 3-day Whitsun weekend. And here in the U.S., we don’t even have that.

Pentecost is Greek for the 50th day (in this case the 50th day after Passover). It started out as the second of the three pilgrimage feasts in the Jewish agricultural calendar. In time, it became a commemoration of the covenant at Mount Sinai, which occurred (according to Exodus) about seven weeks after Israel’s escape from Egypt. Just as summer fulfills the promise of spring, the giving of the commandments fulfilled the promise of nationhood, of which the exodus had been but the beginning; and Pentecost’s gift of the Holy Spirit fulfilled the promise of the resurrection, transforming the disciples into faith-filled witnesses testifying to the wider world.

The contemporary Easter hymn In the Breaking of the Bread tells the story of the Risen Jesus’ appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, which was our Gospel reading a few weeks ago on the 3rd Sunday of Easter. The third verse continues the story to Pentecost:

But then we became afraid without him,

In the darkened room we stayed without him,

Waiting for the One he said that he would send.

Then the Spirit of the Lord came down upon us,

Filling us, changing us, giving us the strength to say,

We saw him!

Suddenly our eyes were opened,

And we knew he was alive!

Pentecost is often called “the birthday of the Church,” since, as a result of having received the gift of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost following Jesus’ Ascension, the apostles began the Church’s mission of preaching the Gospel to the whole world. Pentecost and the Church are what fulfill and complete the promise of Easter and carry Easter into the world of day-to-day life and work.

In a famous mosaic in the dome of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, the 16 nationalities (Parthians, Medes, Elamites, etc.), who are mentioned in the story as having heard the Gospel preached in their native languages (thus undoing the damage done to the human community as a consequence of the Tower of Babel) are all represented in the scene, each by a male and female pair (an image of the universality of the Church).

For the Holy Spirit has not been given to us just so that we can feel good about ourselves, so that we can continue Christ’s presence among us in some purely private way (as if the Church were just a social club or some sort of inward-looking therapeutic community). On the contrary, the community which continues Christ’s life and work in the world must be as broad and wide as the world itself, which is why it must speak as many languages as there are to be heard in the world.

And so the hymn continues:

We ran out into the street to tell them,

Everyone that we could meet, to tell them,

“God has raised him up and we have seen the Lord!”

We took bread as he had done and then we

Blessed it, broke it, offered it. In the breaking of the bread,

We saw him!

Suddenly our eyes were opened,

And we knew he was alive!

The Pentecost story reminds us that, since apostolic times, Sunday has been the privileged day when the Church experiences in her liturgy the continued presence of the Risen Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is why our attendance at Sunday mass is such an essential requirement of Catholic life. But Pentecost is also an annual reminder of what happens every week with the transition from Sunday to Monday. In the calendar, Pentecost marks the annual transition from Easter time to Ordinary Time, our time, the time of the Church, when what began with the resurrection takes effect in our daily lives, and when those initiated into the Church at Easter finish looking back at that experience and become at last just ordinary Catholics. From our weekly Sunday celebration around the unleavened bread which has become the body of our Risen Lord, we are sent out to the world, as one body and one spirit in Christ, as the Risen Lord’s permanent presence in the leavened bread of our daily lives in the world.

In that sense, Easter doesn’t end at Pentecost - any more than Mass ends with the Dismissal. We do indeed depart, but we do so changed and energized – sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the earth.

And so the hymn concludes:

In the breaking of the bread,

He is here with us again.

And we know he is alive!

Homily for Pentecost Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, June 4, 2017.