May

The "merry" month of May ("the lusty month of May," according to the musical Camelot), the 5th month of our current calendar, is commonly thought to have been named for the Greek goddess Maia, identified with the Roman fertility goddess Bona Dea, whose festival was observed on May 1. 

In the U.S., Mother's Day occurs in May. It increasingly seems more like yet another commercial holiday of corporate capitalism than what Anna Jarvis probably had in mind when she founded the American version of Mother's Day early in the 20th century. Already in the 1920s Jarvid spoke out against Mother's Day cards (advocating hand-written letters instead).

In the Western Church, the month of May is especially associated with various devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary – such as the familiar May Crowning. As far back as the 13th century, King Alfonso X of Castile in his Cantigas de Santa Maria wrote about the special honoring of Mary during specific dates in May. In more recent centuries, the entire month has often been filled with special observances and devotions to Mary. In his 1954 encyclical Ad caeli reginam, Pope Pius XII created a feast of the Queenship of Mary to be celebrated on May 31 and marked the occasion by crowning the image of Maria Salus Populi Romani, the same image which Isaac Hecker visited while in Rome and which Pope Francis regularly venerates before and after his foreign trips. That feast is now celebrated on August 22 to highlight, as the Rosary does, the connection between Mary’s Assumption and her queenship. According to the Second Vatican Council's Constitution on the Church, "Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen of the universe, that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son" (Lumen gentium, 59).

Since the month of May mostly corresponds to some extent with the season of Easter, May would seem to be an especially appropriate time to highlight Mary’s role in the post-resurrection Christian community. All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers (Acts 1:14), which anticipates her present heavenly role as Mother of Church. 

This year the Monday after Pentecost (May 21) will be celebrated as the newly established festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church. Blessed Pope Paul VI declared Mary "Mother of the Church" at the end of the 3rd session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964. A Votive Mass in her honor under that title has been in the Missal since 1975, and the title was added to the invocations of the Litany of Loretto in 1980. Now this celebration will be universal. According to the Decree establishing this observance: “This celebration will help us to remember that growth in the Christian life must be anchored in the mystery of the Cross, to the Oblation of Christ in the Eucharistic Banquet and to the Mother of the Redeemer and of the Redeemed, the Virgin who makes her offering to God."

Here in the United States, the last Monday in May is Memorial Day. It was first observed in Waterloo, NY, in May 1866. Two years later, General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Civil War veterans' organization, issued a proclamation that "Decoration Day" be observed nationwide on May 30. After the Civil War, many communities set aside a day as a memorial to those who had died. These observances coalesced around Decoration Day (to honor the Union dead) and various Confederate Memorial Days. The alternative name of "Memorial Day" was first used in 1882. It became common after World War II, and was declared the official name by Federal law in 1967. The Uniform Holidays Bill (which went into effect in 1971) moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to its present celebration on the last Monday in May. The traditional date had not specific significance. So moving the holiday to Monday does not damage it the way moving Washington's Birthday  did, but it does reinforce the contemporary diminishing of public, civic holidays in favor of private, commercial pursuits - a symptom rather than a cause of the decline of our public civic culture and of the public-spiritedness and civility that ought to characterize it.

The (Lame-Duck) Speaker vs. the (Fired) House Chaplain

“May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.” That prayer, offered by the Jesuit Chaplain of the House of Representatives, Father Patrick J. Conroy, earlier this year, may (at least so it has been widely rumored) be what cost the Catholic House Chaplain his job. Apparently, praying for "benefits balanced and shared by all Americans" was just a prayer too far for the lame-duck House Speaker, an Ayn Rand fan since high school, who notoriously has focused on the opposite of guaranteeing that benefits be anything but "balanced and shared by all Americans."

The 60th Chaplain of the House of Representatives and only the second Catholic ever to serve as House Chaplain, Father Conroy was chosen by former Speaker Boehner and has been serving in that post since May 2011. He has now become the first chaplain in history ever to be fired from that office! One might have thought that the Lame-Duck Speaker would have enough other, more worldly matters to preoccupy him, but apparently not. 

As Spencer McBride wrote Saturday in The Washington Post “Every week in churches throughout the country, clergymen offer sermons and prayers that urge men and women to pay special attention to the needs of the poor and those whom society has marginalized. … Yet when the same, seemingly noncontroversial sentiment is uttered in a polarized chamber of Congress, sensitive political agendas will too often serve as the lens through which lawmakers view such remarks. At stake in the firing and replacing of Conroy as chaplain is the transformation of a congressional position designed to promote civil discourse into nothing more than another tool of partisanship.”

Obviously, for the Congressional Majority, echoing Jesus' priorities for the poor and marginalized may be quite controversial indeed!

Discernment

Every day during the Easter season, the Church at Mass reads from the Acts of the Apostles – the evangelist Luke’s account of how the Risen Christ’s parting gift of the Holy Spirit transformed a small group of 120 disciples into a missionary movement that spread from Jerusalem to Rome, how a small Jewish sect became a world Church with a universal mission.

To us who already know the story, the Church’s growth and expansion may seem like a natural development, both obvious and inevitable. Back then, however, it was one learning experience after another. And one of the leading figures in that process was Saint Paul, who makes his first Sunday appearance in this year’s readings of Acts in today’s 1st reading [Acts 9:26-31].

At that point Paul – then still known as Saul – was not yet the leading figure he would soon become. In fact, when he first tried to join the disciples in Jerusalem, they were all afraid of him, not knowing that he was a disciple. That was hardly surprising, given his recent history as a ferocious persecutor of the new Christian movement. As we all know, our past actions often linger with us long after we would like them to be forgotten. (Not for nothing did the European Union try to establish a right to be forgotten in social media!)

So what we now take for granted, namely that every new member of the Church needs a sponsor, was also the case even for Saul, who was, in effect, sponsored by Barnabas, who took charge of him and brought him to the apostles, and in effect testified to them that Saul’s conversion was the real deal.

This episode raises an interesting question that is in some sense always with us. How do we remain open to the possibility that God is telling us something new or doing something unexpected, while at the same time distinguishing what is truly from God from what is not, what is authentically holy from what is transient, temporary, a passing fad, or just plain false? Just this past month, in his Apostolic Exhortation On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, Pope Francis warned against “all those forms of ersatz spirituality – having nothing to do with God – that dominate the current religious marketplace.”

The classical religious answer is what we call discernment. “Without the wisdom of discernment,” Pope Francis has written, “we can easily become prey to every passing trend.” We need discernment, the Pope writes, “to help us recognize God’s timetable, lest we fail to heed the promptings of his grace and disregard his invitation to grow.”

At some level we do this all the time. So we speak, for example, of people discerning their vocation, their calling in life, or of attempting to discern what God is calling us to do in new situations as they arise in our lives. Acts illustrates how the apostolic community did it – by looking at the results. Anticipating John’s injunction in today’s 2nd reading [1 John 3:18-24] that love is not just about word or speech but about deed and truth, Barnabas told the apostles about Paul’s encounter with the Risen Christ and confirmed its authenticity by the evidence of the genuineness of Paul’s transformation. As Saint Therese of Lisieux famously said: “Love proves itself by deeds.”

As a practical matter, that is one more reason why being – and remaining – connected with the larger community is so important, lest, as Pope Francis warns, we grow “isolated, lose our sense of reality and inner clarity, and easily succumb.” Paul may have been personally called by the Risen Christ to become his apostle. Even so, he had to have his credentials validated, so to speak, by the judgment of the authorized leaders of the Church, who in turn based their judgment on what the Church community actually experienced in regard to Paul, as attested to by Barnabas.

As Jesus’ farewell address in John’s gospel illustrates [John 15:1-8], the future for which we hope is already present in our union with the Risen Lord – a union which is not myself alone, or Jesus and me alone, and Jesus and me and my friends alone, but rather Jesus and the whole Church (of which I am a part). The choice for a life in union with Christ is a choice of a life of communion with Christ’s Body, the Church, within which we are both welcomed and challenged, forgiven and changed, taught and fed.

Homily for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN April 29, 2018.

Baptized

At a General Audience on January 8, 2014, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Pope Francis referenced Saint Paul's famous identification of Baptism with Christ's death (Romans 6:3-4) to describe Baptism as no mere "formality" but as "an act that touches the depths of our existence. A baptized child and an unbaptized child are not the same. A person who is baptized and a person who is not baptized are not the same. We, by Baptism, are immersed in that inexhaustible source of life which is the death of Jesus, the greatest act of love in all of history; and thanks to this love we can live a new life, no longer at the mercy of evil, of sin and of death, but in communion with God and with our brothers and sisters."

The Pope then encouraged his hearers to be aware of the date of their baptism. "It is important to know the day on which I was immersed in that current of Jesus' salvation. ... To know the date of our Baptism is to know a blessed day. The danger of not knowing it is losing awareness of what the Lord has done in us, the memory of the gift we have received. Thus, we end up considering it only as an event that took place in the past – and not by our own will but by that of our parents – and, thus, has no impact on the present. Indeed, we must reawaken the memory of our Baptism. We are called to live our Baptism every day, as the current reality of our lives. If we manage to follow Jesus and to remain in the Church, despite our limitations and with our weaknesses and with our sins, it is precisely through the Sacrament that we have become new creatures and are clothed in Christ. It is by the power of Baptism, in fact, that, freed of original sin, we are inserted into Jesus' relation to God the Father; that we are bearers of a new hope, for Baptism gives us this new hope: the hope of going on the path of salvation our whole life long. And this hope nothing and no one can extinguish, for it is a hope that does not disappoint. Remember, hope in the Lord never disappoints. Thanks to Baptism, we are capable of forgiving and of loving even those who offend us and do evil to us. By our Baptism, we recognize in the least and in the poor the face of the Lord who visits us and makes himself close. Baptism helps us to recognize in the face of the needy, the suffering, and also of our neighbor, the face of Jesus. All this is possible thanks to the power of Baptism!"

What a wonderful catechesis - simple and pointed - on the lifelong significance of an event which, for most of us, took place when we were infants and so cannot possible be remembered! But, just as we cannot possibly remember the actual day of our birth, we can all know and celebrate its anniversary on our birthday, we can all know and commemorate the anniversary of our baptism. 

And so, today, I recall and commemorate my own baptism - 70 years ago today.

In her classic 1955 amalgam of liturgical and popular piety, Around the Year with the Trapp Family, Maria Trapp recommended that families reverently wrap and keep their children’s baptismal candles – “and remind each other to light our candle for any of us in case of sudden death, as a symbol that we want to die in our baptismal innocence, that the light which was kindled at that solemn moment has not been extinguished voluntarily by us.” Maria Trapp regretted that, as refugees, most of her family no longer possessed their original baptismal candles. Actually, neither do I. I have many pictures of my baptism to  recall the event, but I have never seen my baptismal candle. In fact, I would not be at all surprised if, in keeping with the liturgical minimalism which ruled in the American Church at that time, the priest would brought one lighted candle to the baptistry, which he then presented to each set of godparents and then immediately took back! Unlike the common practice nowadays of lighting an baptismal candle during the ceremony and then actually giving it to each family, I suspect my godparents never actually got a candle and never brought one home and that no one would have known what to do with one if they had! 

Obviously, one can go through life perfectly fine without having one's own baptismal candle as a keepsake of the event. But, as Pope Francis is trying to teach us, we ought not to go through life forgetting our baptism or thinking of it merely as some social ceremony celebrated by our families way back in the distant past. Commemorating the anniversary of our baptism may indeed help us to recover more of Bsptism's lifelong and ongoing significance for each of us and for the Church we are each an inseparable part of now ,thanks precisely to our Baptism. 

(Photo: the Baptismal Font at Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN .)

Good Shepherd Sunday

The familiar image of Jesus the Good Shepherd, is a very popular one – even in our modern, urbanized society, in which most of us are not shepherds and know next to nothing about sheep. What we do know is that the luckier sheep live to provide us with wool, while the less lucky sheep become lamb chops.

And that may be precisely the point – precisely what makes Jesus so special as a shepherd. Jesus the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep – a totally unexpected reversal of roles, one which brings about a totally new kind of relationship between the shepherd and his sheep.

In most ancient religious understandings, what distinguished the pagan gods was their much envied freedom from death in contrast to our inescapable mortality. But by becoming one of us and experiencing our human predicament by dying, Jesus overcame this separation between God and us, and so reversed not just the traditional job description of shepherd, but also the pagan idea that human beings exist, like sheep, simply to serve for the satisfaction of the gods.

It turns out, in fact, that God actually takes satisfaction precisely in this reversal. This is why the Father loves me, Jesus says, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. So an age-old separation has been overcome, and something new has happened in our world. A brand new connection has been created between God and us by the Good Shepherd, who accepted the limits of our mortal life in order to bring us with him to something new beyond those limits.

Now that’s all well and good, but didn’t it happen such a long time ago? And not much really seems to have changed in the world, has it? Whether in far-away Syria or around the corner in Granger County, how many lives are still being lost or ruined, how many of the Good Shepherd’s flock still seem to be sacrificed for others’ power, domination, and control? We hear the Good Shepherd’s Easter news year-in and year-out, but if we are not paying proper attention it can begin to sound abstract at best.

But there was nothing abstract, certainly, about Peter’s sermon in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, in the aftermath of the first post-Pentecost miracle, an amazing cure which Peter somewhat modestly calls a good deed done to a cripple. It all happened, Peter proclaims, in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, whom God raised from the dead … ‘the stone rejected by the builders, which has become the cornerstone.” There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.”

What a claim! The sheer boldness of it – that humanity can be saved and that Jesus Christ is its one and only savior!

Recognizing the boldness of that claim and taking it seriously – making it our own claim – is what Easter time is all about. Admittedly, given the inevitable limits of our attention, it takes some effort to keep up that Easter enthusiasm – to keep it from wilting along with the Eater flowers!

And so we celebrate Easter for seven weeks, during which we read every day from the Acts of the Apostles – to recall the fervor of those very first Christians, who were transformed forever by the presence and power of the Risen Lord, experienced in the here and now in his word and sacraments. And we see how eager they were to share that experience with everyone around them – an eagerness we need to learn from, for each of us is being propelled by the power of the Easter story to trust in its power to transform the world. For, as Peter’s sermon makes clear, the universal power of Jesus’ name is not limited or constrained by any human failure to hear it.

Jesus himself says he has other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also he must lead, and they will hear his voice. The Savior of the world calls all people to his Father, as he continually transforms the world through the uniquely saving power of his death and resurrection. In Jesus, God can now be found in every aspect of human life, in places and people where one might least expect, in situations which our limited imaginations may even turn into obstacles to God’s presence.

As Pope Francis has just recently reminded us, in his Apostolic Exhortation, On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World, “God is mysteriously present in the life of every person, in a way that he himself chooses, and we cannot exclude this by our presumed certainties. Even when someone’s life appears completely wrecked, even when we see it devastated by vices or addictions, God is present there.”

Our mission, our mission as a Church animated by the power of the Risen Christ, is to go beyond the limits of our imaginations, and become, like those otherwise ordinary people whose story is told in the Acts of the Apostles, effective witnesses to God’s saving power in our world through the death and resurrection of his Son.

Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 22, 2018.