Sunday Shopping

Anyone as old as I am will remember when Sundays (and holidays) were really Sundays (and holidays) - in other words, when stores were closed, and the one thing one absolutely did not expect to do on Sunday was to go shopping. I don't remember exactly when the change occurred. It was probably gradual as laws changed, and more and more stores opened for more and more hours, depriving workers and customers alike of their traditional day of rest. The transformation must have been in full swing by the 1990s, because I remember visiting London at the end of 1992 and remarking how refreshing it was that stores there were still closed on Sunday and that the main noise on Sunday morning was that of church bells! 

Recently, Poland's Parliament has taken a courageous stand for the restoration of Sunday. This humane, anti-capitalist measure was supported by both the Catholic Church (still strong enough in Poland to matter socially) and Poland's still strong labor movement (which still prizes its identity as a movement in the interests of workers rather than business). The new legislation restricts Sunday shopping in the new year, restricts it further in 2019, and then outlaws it almost completely (with just a few exceptions) after that.

The U.S. is probably too far gone down the path of total surrender to predatory capitalism ever to hope to see such a reform here. (Witness the growing phenomenon of stores opening on Thanksgiving Day!) 

And, of course one of the biggest casualties of the corruption of Sunday in this country has been church attendance!

The U.S. is not likely to imitate Poland. But what the Polish example reminds us is that these are choices that we have made and continue to make. There was nothing inevitable about  the choice to make consumerist predatory capitalism our highest cultural value. It was a choice we as a society consciously and deliberately made. And what a world of far greater value we have lost as a result!

Novitiate (The Movie)

The film Novitiate follows the story of Cathleen, raised in rural Tennessee in the 1950s by an irreligious single mother, and her experience as a postulant and then novice in a cloistered convent in the mid-1960s. It focuses on what was going on inside her and inside the convent - but also on the complicating consequences for religious life of the Second Vatican Council, simultaneously taking place in the world outside. Movies made about religious life by those outside the experience inevitably suffer from secular society's incomprehension and misunderstanding. This film also displays more than its share of historical errors and implausibilities. Still it captures something about the mystery - and romanticism - of discerning a religious vocation in any era and especially in the confusing late 20th-century.

Although irreligious, Cathleen's mother exposes her daughter to religion and eventually sends her to a Catholic girls' school, where she comes under the influence of the good Sisters and discovers a religious vocation - not, however, to a teaching order but to an enclosed contemplative community. Her actual grounding in the faith seems somewhat ambiguous, but she is clearly captivated by the idea pf being in love with God. She is also a loner, from a dysfunctional family, searching for stability and - as she describes her first childhood experience of Mass - peace.

The film portrays Cathleen's mother's reluctance to see her daughter do this as well as the seemingly incomprehensible (to a secular mentality) practices of pre-conciliar religious life. Presumably it serves the plot's purpose to emphasize those aspects and merely to mention - but seldom to illustrate - any of the "joys" of religious life. There are some scenes of "normal" behavior among the postulants, who are, after all, teenage girls, and there are expressions of kindness and care among the Sisters, but they are subordinated to an overall impression of archaic and inhumane religious observance that seems to have become an end in itself - especially in the hands of a difficult Mother Superior. (Likewise, the presentation of the celebration of the community's Mass is consistently inaccurate and reflects little familiarity with how it would have actually been celebrated or much understanding of how it would actually have been experienced by its contemporary participants.)

That said, the Mother Superior's seeming obsession with religious observances provides a distinctive context within which Cathleen (and her sister postulants and novices) struggle to discern their vocation, struggle to translate their natural human neediness and romanticized image of being a "Bride of Christ" into some kind of actual lived reality, which, as the Mother Superior tells them on the first day, requires "work." Like any young person seeking to live a holy life, Cathleen has to struggle with what faith means, what love means, and what community means, while still growing up to become an adult woman - with all that that process entails.

Meanwhile the outside world impinges on the convent's enclosed life through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The Mother Superior is portrayed as extremely resistant - to the extent that she tries to hide the Council's prescriptions from the other Sisters. It is only due to the intervention of the local archbishop - unattractively portrayed as a stereotypical ecclesiastical careerist out to enforce what he sees as the company line - that any changes come to the monastery. In fact, however, only two changes actually occur in the course of the movie - Mass celebrated versus populum in English and a significant departure of nuns from the convent - the first not actually prescribed by the Council and the second certainly not intended by it. There is no serious grappling here with the what the Council actually did prescribe or the renewal of religious life which it in fact intended - something that really existing religious communities actually did experience with varying mixtures of good, bad, and confusing consequences. There is certainly a real story that could have been told about the disruptive effect of the Council and its unintended consequences.  But the movie only alludes to that reality. 

In her resistance to the supposed mandates of the Council, however, the Mother Superior's character is more deeply revealed. Her fetishizing of religious observances turns out to reflect her own quest for identity and belonging. She had, she admits in a crucial scene, no family, no home, and had come to the convent in search of precisely those things - an identity and sense of purpose which the seemingly oppressive observances of religious life had given her. So it turns out that she and Cathleen are a lot alike. She is, I suspect, what Cathleen would have been 40 years earlier, and Cathleen is probably what the Mother Superior would have been if she were a novice 40 years later. Both sought in religious life the identity, sense of purpose, and experience of community and belonging that their secular lives failed to provide. In Cathleen's case, the convent was her alternative to her mother's chaotic life. To a modern secularist ideologue, her mother's dysfunctional life may represent liberation. For Cathleen, however, it was something to escape from. The final credit announcing that 90,000 nuns left their convents in the immediate aftermath of the Council may be meant to suggest liberation for Cathleen and many others like her. In fact, if the convent proved to be a different kind of trap for Cathleen from the home life she escaped from, then perhaps the message is not how that dysfunctional home life was any less a trap, but rather how elusive freedom really is - at least for most people in this world.

A better, more nuanced presentation of the pros and cons of traditional religious observances might have better illuminated not only the real and tragic toll which the obsessive preoccupation with religious observances may have imposed on Religious, but also the benefits an ordered, structured, purpose-filled life may have provided them. The movie makes clear the Mother Superior's fear that the letting go of such observances might spell the end of religious life - at least as she knew it - and thus the end of the stability, sense of purpose, and community belonging she had found. The massive departures of nuns and sisters which the film seemingly celebrates would seem to confirm the Mother Superior's intuition. But what of those that remained - or future Cathleen's that might subsequently come in search of something? The movie does not ask or answer that question. If the Mother Superior's model of religious life had made a pagan idol of religious observances, what would eventually take their place? In today's world, an over-obsession with religious observances may be replaced by an over-obsession with work. For some, perhaps, work would fill that gap and replace the idol of religious observances with an alternative, catch-all, alternative idol of "mission."

Be Alert!

A couple of weeks ago, in one of his regular weekday morning homilies, Pope Francis reminded us that, although no one knows when “the call will come,” nonetheless, “the Church says to us these days: stop a while, stop to think…stop, stop, every day will not continue like this. Do not get used to thinking of it as if it were eternity … think that our life will have an end.”

The season of Advent, which we begin today, originated as an annual period of repentance focused on preparation for Judgment Day. So this Sunday continues and further highlights the end-of-time, Judgment Day themes of the last several Sundays, summing them all up in the warning: “Be watchful! Be alert!”  Like the servants in today’s Gospel [Mark 13:33-37], we have been left with work to do, while we wait for the lord of the house to return.

Meanwhile, of course, there are many distractions that get in the way of our being attentive. What are some of those distractions? “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism,” Pope Francis wrote in his programmatic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, “is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. Whenever our interior life gets caught up in its own interests and concerns, there is no longer room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades.” [Evangelii Gaudium, 2]

So, Jesus said to his disciples, “Be watchful! Be alert!” Be on guard against whatever distractions dull our senses and lull us into sleeping!

In the darkness of the winter night, when sleeping seems so natural, Advent yanks us out of our ordinary, secular time into what we might call liturgical time - by looking back, to get to the future. Thus, the 4th Sunday of Advent will recall Jesus’ conception in his Virgin Mother’s body. The 2nd Sunday, however, will recall the adult Christ’s public appearance on the historical stage as announced by John the Baptist. Then, on the 3rd Sunday, we will hear John’s challenge to recognize Jesus, here and now, in the present. Meanwhile, this 1st Sunday puts past and present in perspective, focusing on Christ’s final coming, when (as we say in the Creed) he will come to judge the living and the dead.

Hence this Sunday’s somber tone. What we see and observe are autumn’s withered leaves, winter’s barren branches, and the imminent end of another year. What we feel and fear is the end of ourselves. As Isaiah laments in today’s 1st reading [Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2b-7]: we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind.

Yet, while Advent starts out being about fear, it is also about faith and hope – both the passing of an old year and our hopes for the new, both the enveloping winter darkness of a dying world and the dawning brightness of Christ’s coming to save us. As Saint Paul assures us in today’s 2nd reading [1 Corinthians 1:3-9]: God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Advent challenges us to slow down and take stock, and, above all, to pay attention. Of course, everything about the way we live nowadays conspires against slowing down – let alone taking stock of ourselves and paying attention to anything.

The older one gets, however, the more aware one becomes that time is running out, and thus the more one appreciates the importance of the present.  Time – this time, our time – is so precious, precisely because it is limited, but also (and that’s the Christian spin on what is an otherwise universal human experience) because it has a future. Advent annually ritualizes for us our ongoing present reality, where we actually are right now, living and waiting between Christ’s 1st coming at Christmas and his final coming for which we claim as Christians to be waiting.

Advent is not, therefore, some irrelevant, vestigial interlude on the way to Christmas. Much less is it some artificial exercise in make-believe. The liturgy isn’t a play. We’re not reenacting God’s entry into our world a long time ago, or pretending Jesus hasn’t already been born, so that we will be somehow surprised on Christmas morning - as if Jesus were Santa Claus.

Advent recalls Christ’s 1st coming to concentrate our attention on his coming again, while we, meanwhile, recognize his action on our behalf in the present. The challenge of Advent is to let our anxious and increasingly fear–filled present be transformed into that hopeful future promised us already by Christ’s coming in the past. That present has plenty of problems, as we all know and all have experienced in different and challenging ways. The challenge of Advent is to recognize something even more wonderful than shopping and presents and parties, to recognize something really new and wonderful, pointing us hopefully into the future, by the bright light of Christmas past.

In his 2008 book, Why Go to Church: The Drama of the Eucharist, the former Master General of the Dominican Order, Timothy Radcliffe, recalled how one of the first things the Irish immigrants did when they settled in cities like Liverpool during the Industrial Revolution was to build big churches. Radcliffe writes: “it was a sign that they were not as they might seem, mere members of the urban proletariat, but citizens of the kingdom. They were fellow citizens of the saints whose statues filled their churches, God’s own children. Their houses might be slums, but their home was heaven.” Similar sentiments undoubtedly characterized the immigrant Catholic community that founded Immaculate Conception parish and built our parish church – a visible sign not just for them but for the whole world of the Kingdom of God present and active here in East Tennessee.

Advent is a wake-up call to all of us here and now to respond to Christ’s coming and so live as people for whom the Christmas story really matters – matters enough to make everything different from what would otherwise be in a world without the presence of its one and only Savior, Jesus Christ.

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, December 3, 2017

Advent

Tomorrow is the First Sunday of Advent. The distinctive liturgical features of Advent include the omission of the hymn Gloria in excelsis and the use of violet or purple vestments. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) prescribed black as the color to be used during Advent, but violet had become the preferred color by the end of the 13th century. Before the liturgical changes of the late 20th century, the solemnization of marriage with Mass and Nuptial Blessing was not permitted out of respect for the seriousness of this season. In the same spirit, the placing of flowers and relics of Saints on the altar and the playing of the organ also used to be excluded during this time.

Why such seriousness? Nowadays Advent is hardly noticed amid all the frivolity of our increasingly extended, commercialized American Christmas season. Actually, Advent is a continuation of the liturgy’s end-of-time and judgment themes that have predominated these past several Sundays. The continuity between the final weeks of “Ordinary Time” and Advent is obvious, and we need to think of Advent that way - as being in continuity with the messages about the end and Christ’s coming again as judge, which we have been hearing these past several weeks. (The modern notion that Advent "begins" the liturgical year is an inference from the fact that printed Missals and Breviaries have to start somewhere.)

Looking forward to Christ’s coming to judge the word at the end of time, Advent recalls Israel’s hope for the coming of the Messiah. As Christians, we remember his First Coming among us (which we will celebrate formally at Christmas) to focus on his coming into our lives in the present, his coming to each of us at our death, and his final advent when he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. Thus, the magnificent hymn Dies Irae, which for so many centuries was part of the Church’s liturgy of intercession for the dead was originally composed as a sequence for the first Sunday in Advent. We would do well to meditate on its somber sentiments to help us to recover the authentic spirit of Advent amid the frivolity, selfish commercialism, and materialistic extravagance of our American Christmas season.

Advent is, I think, the most counter-cultural of all the liturgical seasons. It is about slowing down, whereas we are always busy. It is about patience, whereas we are always in a hurry. It is about waiting patiently, whereas we are always in a rush. And it is about judgment and accountability, whereas we are all about affirmation and self-actualization.

Recalling the world’s preparation for Christ’s 1st Coming to focus our attention on Christ’s 2nd Coming, Advent captures the experience of where we are now – in this in-between time – between Christmas and the End. Jesus’ instructions "Be watchful! Be alert!” are about what we need to be doing now in order to be the people we hope to be at the end.

December

December, my favorite month, gets its name from the Latin word decem (10) because it was originally the tenth month of the year in the original Roman calendar, which began in March. It retains its ancient name even though it is now obviously the 12th month of the year.

Two ancient Roman holidays have given December a distinctive legacy. Saturnalia, a week-long festival in honor of Saturn, the father of Jupiter (the Greek god Kronos, father of Zeus), was celebrated December 17-23 by gift-giving and the contravening of Roman social norms. The Latin poet Catullus famously called it optimo dierum ("the best of days"). Saturnalia's season of festivity and gift-giving has continued in the customs surrounding the Winter Solstice, Christmas, and New Year's.

Another Roman holiday, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti ("the Day of the Birth of the Unconquered Sun", was celebrated on the Julian Calendar's Winter Solstice (December 25), the shortest day of the year, immediately after which the days being to lengthen. It may - or may not - have been a major factor in the choice of that date for the celebration of the Birth of Christ. Regardless, the symbolism of the Solstice has long been incorporated into the liturgical celebrations of the Advent and Christmas seasons. Likewise the imagery of the winter light festival has long been incorporated into the secular celebrations of the season. (Similarly, the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, although the historical event it commemorates - the rededication of the Temple by the Maccabees after its profanation by the Gentiles - itself has nothing to do with winter or wintry darkness, in the holiday's manner of celebration fits in perfectly with the winter light festival theme.)

So December is nature's darkest month but has been turned into the brightest by massive festive illumination, both indoors and out. It is my favorite month, ending the annual cycle on its most hopeful note. 

Among the many wonderful and historically significant things that have happened in December, on December 19, 1843, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. Within a week it was sold out, and charitable giving had gone up! Perhaps no other single individual has done so much as Dickens to help our capitalism-ravaged society rediscover the transformational possibilities revealed in the story and message of Christmas.

(Photo: December from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is generally considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination)