Responding to Trumpian Pseudo-Isolationism

Isolationism - a go-it-alone and/or stay-out-of-it attitude toward the rest of the world - has always plagued American politics. Pearl Harbor and the inevitability of World War II dealt traditional isolationism a severe blow and led to the U.S. definitively becoming the dominant world power, assuming its rightful role in world affairs, supported at home by a bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy. Vietnam cracked that consensus and gave rise to a new left-wing variant of pseudo-isolationism, a soft version of which was, for example, George McGovern's campaign plea, "Come home, America." The debacle unleashed by the 2003 neo-conservative Iraq war empowered the pseudo-isolationist wing of the Democratic party to push for Barack Obama over Hilary Clinton in 2008. It also empowered right-wing pseudo-isolationism, which eventually found its victorious spokesperson in Donald Trump.

Democratic pseudo-isolationism has sometimes seemed dangerously close to certain left-leaning, unpatriotic, anti-American attitudes which instinctively seem to blame the US for the world's problems. On the other side, Republican isolationism has sometimes seemed to coexist with a sense of grievance that thinks the US has been taken advantage of by others (including our own Allies) and to coexist even more oddly with a reflexively aggressive, militaristic, approach to international threats. The Trump Administration's subversion of NATO and other alliances reflects this obsession that the US has somehow been taken advantage of (a win-or-lose mindset that cannot appreciate common shared interests and outcomes where everybody can "win"). This stupid outlook has obviously been intrinsic to the Trump Administration's aversion to accommodation with Iran and its rejection of the Iran nuclear agreement (JCPOA) which the Obama Administration had successfully negotiated - an admittedly imperfect agreement in that it did not end all Iranian misbehavior, but a very good one in that it accomplished something very important which benefited all parties to the agreement and left the region and the world at least moderately better off.

The current crisis  if, of course, a direct consequence of the Trump Administration's ill-advised withdrawal from that Iranian Agreement, sacrificing the limited but real benefits of the agreement while getting absolutely nothing in return other than than the superficial satisfaction of sounding bellicose.

Consistent with his politics of grievance, Trump campaigned successfully on the idea that the US is ill-served by its international alliances and commitments - an argument rendered significantly more plausible by the abysmal failure and human cost of our bipartisan foreign policy establishment's commitment to "endless wars." Obviously Trump had a point which resonated - and still resonates - with a lot of Americans, especially those whose sons and daughters have borne and will bear the principal burden of such adventures. His position - like all pseudo-isolationist positions - is, however, also potentially problematic because dangerously unrealistic. The dangers of Trump's approach are exacerbated further by his simultaneous personal attraction (and a significant segment of his political base's attraction) to an aggressive, bellicose,  militaristic posture, which coexists uncomfortably with the perennial isolationist impulse to stop the world and try to get off.

Both sides of Trump's pseudo-isolationism have been on conspicuous display in the recent crisis Given that the Republican party is hopelessly compromised by its reflexive subservience to the President and by its own very evident division between bellicose neo-conservative types and more isolationist types, it will really fall to the Democrats to surface some serious alternatives that respect both the inevitability of American involvement in managing world conflicts and the realistic limits of both actual American power and what actual Americans are willing to undertake and endure. Asking such questions at Tuesday's debate would serve the country better than the probably predictable silly sound-bite questions about whether Trump has been right or wrong in his Iran policy (the answers to which we already know without the need for asking the questions).

One Year from Today

One year from today, as the law dictates, the Congress will meet in joint session to carry out the prescriptions of the 12th Amendment, which stipulates: The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;—The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed. And with that legal formality, barring some even more dramatic system failure, the endless 2020 presidential election will finally come to its conclusion. 

How satisfactory that conclusion will be remains to be seen. As I wrote here a few days ago, whatever the result it will likely leave about one-half of the country's population pleased but still very angry - and the other half just very angry!

In one sense, that may be the most important point of all. Despite the ubiquity of politics in contemporary American life, despite the ways so many other aspects of life have been corrupted by polarization imported from secular politics, our politics seems increasingly incapable of fulfilling our communal needs in anything like a satisfying way.

Meanwhile, what impact will our latest foreign-policy imbroglio have on the increasingly fragile state of our international relations? In the Middle East? With our European and other Allies? And what impact, if any, will that have on the election? What about impeachment? Will it be forgotten by election day? Or will the Republicans successfully use it as an issue in their favor? What other surprises will happen along the way, and what difference, if any, will they make in the election's outcome. 

Will the Australian apocalypse catch fire (so to speak) with the American public and push the escalating climate crisis more to the center of our election-year debate? Or will one more danger sign be ignored, wasting that much more preciously limited time before the United States awakens (let alone responds to) the peril that threatens the planet?

And, of course, who will be the Democratic nominee? Will the front-runner remain the front-runner all the way, or will his campaign falter?  Will Biden successfully advocate a Harding-like "return to normalcy" (exactly 100 years after Harding's election)? Or will the Democrats nominate someone with a more ambitious agenda for America after Trump? 

Of particular interest to me, what role will religion play in the coming campaign, given the patterns of religious politicking we have seen so much of in recent decades? Preaching about the Epiphany yesterday and reflecting on the collaboration of the chief priests and the scribes with King Herod, I was reminded of Psalm 146, Put not your trust in princes. Then as now, supposedly religious people, like those Jerusalem chief priests and scribes allied with Herod, presumably knew the words of that psalm, but somehow they totally and tragically missed its point! They remind me of something Reinhold Niebuhr famously said half a century ago about clergy who got too close to unworthy political leaders (in that case, President Richard Nixon): "It is wonderful what a simple White House invitation will do to dull the critical faculties."

In his 2018 Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete et Exsulate (101), Pope Francis warned against the "harmful ideological error" of dismissing or relativizing certain forms of social engagement "as superficial, secular, worldly, materialist, communist, or populist," as if "the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend." In a sentence which ought perhaps to be seen as foundational for authentic political engagement, the Pope asserted: "We cannot uphold an ideal of holiness that would ignore injustice in a world where some revel, spend with abandon and live only for the latest consumer goods, even as others look on from afar, living their entire lives in abject poverty."

One year from today, how much will any of this have mattered?

Epiphany

Entering our church today, you will have noticed an alteration in our nativity scene. The shepherds have been joined today by the magi. (In the actual story, of course, the shepherds came and went the same day and so were long gone by the time the magi arrived on the scene.) 

In his recent Apostolic letter “On the Meaning and Importance of the Nativity Scene,” Pope Francis summarized the significance of the story of the magi: The Magi teach us that people can come to Christ by a very long route. Men of wealth, sages from afar, athirst for the infinite, they set out on the long and perilous journey that would lead them to Bethlehem (cf. Mt 2:1-12). Great joy comes over them in the presence of the Infant King. They are not scandalized by the poor surroundings, but immediately fall to their knees to worship him. Kneeling before him, they understand that the God who with sovereign wisdom guides the course of the stars also guides the course of history, casting down the mighty and raising up the lowly. Upon their return home, they would certainly have told others of this amazing encounter with the Messiah, thus initiating the spread of the Gospel among the nations.

The title “magi” suggests that they were wise, learned men, probably from Persia, perhaps astrologers. Beyond that, however, we really know next to nothing at all about the magi themselves – not their names (although tradition has given them the familiar names Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar), nor their exact social status (though tradition, inspired in this case by Psalm 72, has crowned them as kings), nor even their number (though tradition, based on the gifts itemized in the Gospel, has counted them as three, which in time came to represent the three then-known continents - Africa, Asia, and Europe - and the three ages of human life – youth, maturity, and old age).

We may be very curious about such things, but Matthew’s Gospel tells us none of these things. It does, however, tell us what it is important for us to know about the magi.

First of all, it tells us that they were foreigners, Gentiles, pagans. They represent the majority of the human race – past and present – where (as we just heard from the Prophet Isaiah) darkness covers the earth, and thick clouds cover the peoples [Isaiah 60:2]. In other words, the magi had only human, natural knowledge, and sought, as Saint Paul said in his famous speech to a pagan audience in Athens, the God who made the world and all that is in it and gives life and breath to everyone [Acts 17:24-25].  Natural knowledge, human knowledge, scientific knowledge may be limited, but it is real knowledge. We moderns would do well to re-learn the ancient lesson that there is a lot to be learned from the world.

That said, the Epiphany story also tells us that, whatever varied paths different people may start out on, for the full story our paths must all finally converge in Jesus, the one and only Savior of the world. And the interpretive key to Jesus’ story is God’s revelation of himself not in nature but in the history of Israel.

Thus, it was to Jerusalem that the magi came to learn the full significance of the star – a meaning revealed in the Jewish scriptures, where Isaiah had prophesied, Nations shall walk by Jerusalem’s light, and kings by her shining radiance [Isaiah 60:3].

In today’s troubled world, in which anti-semitism is increasing both in our own country and around the world, we would do well to remember Christianity’s origin in Judaism and the special bond that has created. The Church, as the Second Vatican Council reminded us, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. … [and] the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews … decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone. [Nostra aetate, 4]

By way of warning, however, this story also illustrates how easily we may miss the point, thanks to misplaced priorities and the pursuit of religious and political power. When Herod heard the Magi, he was greatly troubled and all Jerusalem with him. They were troubled not overjoyed like the Magi! What troubled them? What made such good news seem to them like bad news?

Then as now, the same Christmas star that filled the magi with hope somehow seemed like an evil portent to those who somehow sensed the threatening challenge it posed to their power and priorities.

And then there were the chief priests and scribes whom Herod consulted. They correctly quoted the scripture, but they didn’t get it either. So none of them did the obvious thing – go to Bethlehem and do Jesus homage. Only the magi did!

Talk about missing the opportunity of a lifetime!

And another warning of what happens when supposedly religious people put their trust in tyrants, when they ally themselves with unworthy political rulers in order to acquire or retain religious or political power or influence in society. Not for nothing does Psalm 146 warn: Put not your trust in princes. Then as now, supposedly religious people, like those Jerusalem chief priests and scribes allied with Herod, presumably knew the words of that psalm, but they totally and tragically missed its point! They remind me of something Reinhold Niebuhr noted half a century ago about clergy who got too close to unworthy political leaders: "It is wonderful what a simple White House invitation will do to dull the critical faculties," he wrote.

The magi, on the other hand, were overjoyed, not troubled. “The Christian life,” Thomas Merton once wrote [March 3, 1950] “is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.”

The magi set out as authentic pilgrims and so found what they were seeking – and on entering the house they saw the child with Mary his mother … prostrated themselves and did him homage, the homage due to a true king.

In the traditional Roman liturgy, for centuries when these words were read or sung in the Gospel everyone was required to genuflect. It was the liturgy’s way of physically bringing the point of the story home, helping us to identify personally with the pilgrim magi.

As for the magi, we never hear anything about them again. We know only that they departed for their country by another way. As I suggested earlier, nativity scenes sometimes seem, so to speak, frozen in time. Everybody stays stationary – at least until it’s time to put the figures all back in the closet.

But the real magi didn’t just stay put in Bethlehem, any more than the earlier arriving shepherds did. Instead they went back to wherever they had lived before, but they departed for their country by another way. They went back to whatever they had been doing before; but, thanks to what they had experienced, they would never be the same again.

And, thanks to Christ’s coming into our world, we like the magi must also be different now from whatever we would otherwise have been.

Every January, after the holidays, we return, as we inevitably must, to our ordinary activities – at home, at school, at work, whatever and wherever. Like the magi, however, our challenge is to travel through our ordinary life by another way, because something so special has happened that makes everything different from what it would otherwise have been.

Long before there were funeral homes to print parish calendars, Epiphany became the annual date which the Roman Liturgy assigned to announce the date of Easter and other important dates in the coming year, thus putting the entire year and all of human time in its proper perspective.

None of us, of course, can even begin to foresee what this new Year of Our Lord 2020 will bring, whether for better or for worse. Yet, even as we navigate our way through an uncertain and challenging present, the Christmas star invites us to travel with the magi – to go on pilgrimage with then to Bethlehem and back again – confident that, whatever else may be the case, the Christmas star will precede us to illuminate every new day of this new year, and so will guide us, first, to Christ, and, then, thanks to Christ, on that new way, which, like the magi, we are, all of us together, being invited to find and to follow.

Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, January 5, 2020.

Lessons from Schisms Old and New

The disagreement became so sharp that they parted company (Acts 15:39). One of my seminary professors used to refer to the famous quarrel between Paul and Barnabas in the Book of Acts as the first instance of team ministry - and its failure - in the history of the Church. However that may be, it is certainly an example of what has been all too common in the history of the Church - conflict, followed by separation. There have been many such conflicts caused by many seemingly irreconcilable disputes. The resulting separation in the case of Paul and Barnabas seems to have been relatively amicable - in the sense that each party went its own way without further harm to the other or to the life and mission of the Church. That could hardly be said for most subsequent schisms and conflicts in the Church, the intensity of which often spilled over into politics, producing persecutions and wars. 

In the present instance of the conflict that has apparently ripped apart the United Methodist Church, it may be politics (in the form of so-called "culture war")  that has spilled over into the inner life of the Church. Such conflicts have become increasingly characteristic of contemporary Church life (which increasingly mimics contemporary cultural and political divisions).  What seems distinctive - and hopeful - about the United Methodists' response to their internal disagreements is their apparent readiness to take the Paul-and-Barnabas route of peaceful separation. If this separation proceeds as planned, we may be spared such unedifying spectacles as congregations and denominational structures suing each other in civil courts - scandalously ignoring Saint Paul's warning that to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you (1 Corinthians 6:7).

The fact that the Church is divided - despite Christ's explicit prayer that all may be one (John 17:21) -  is a regrettable result of disagreements during the course of the Church's history, disagreements in theological understandings that in some instances may seem so incredibly abstract as to be incomprehensible to outsiders.  Yet those differing theological understandings meant - and may still mean - much to those involved, one reason why the ecclesiastical divisions between, for example, the Eastern Churches and the Western Church and later within the Western Church at the Reformation still persist.

"We tried to look for ways that we could gracefully live together with all our differences," Methodist Bishop Harvey of Louisiana said in The New York Times. But when that increasingly became impossible, given the perceived seriousness of this issues in conflict, the Methodists settled on separation as what Bishop Harvey called "the best means to resolve our differences, allowing each part of the church to remain true to its theological understanding."

Obviously the ideal would be for all to agree and for the Body of Christ to be completely united. Short of that, however, it is imperative that all Christians, which remaining scrupulously faithful to their particular theological understandings, recognize, as the Catholic Church teaches, that those who believe in Christ are still in some sense in communion with one another as members of Christ's Body and that separated communities certainly can truly engender a life of grace in ways that vary according to the condition of each Church or Community (Vatican II, Unitas redintegratio, 3)

There may be a tendency among some in our world today to give primacy to culture-war politics even in religious matters - as if the sole point of being a Christian were to engage in constant conflict. That too, like division within the Church, is a part of the sinful state of our fallen world. That said, we would do better to follow the famous suggestion of Saint Augustine, so many conflict-ridden centuries ago: We entreat you, brothers, as earnestly as we are able, to have charity, not only for one another, but also for those who are outside the Church. Of these some are still pagans, who have not yet made an act of faith in Christ. Others are separated, insofar as they are joined with us in professing faith in Christ, our head, but are yet divided from the unity of his body. My friends, we must grieve over these as over our brothers; and they will only cease to be so when they no longer say our Father. (Commentary on Psalm 32, 29).

Happy New Year!

On New Year’s I like to recall what the late comedian George Burns once wrote in The New York Times: “Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I always looked forward to New Year’s mainly because it was the only thing we could afford that was really new. And we always believed that things were going to get better during the New Year.”

New Year’s – especially the run-up to the end of the old year – lends itself to both nostalgic and serious reflections both about the state of the world and about one’s life, about where one has been so far and where one may be going in whatever time may yet be allotted. But New Year’s, as George Burns’ comical comment reminds us, is, by definition, also something new, a gift freely given us that offers an opportunity for hope.  However we may approach the beginning of a new year, that hope has to be a part of it.

Yet for all our holiday cheer, we know that we begin this year at a truly turbulent time in our national life, in a country bitterly and angrily divided along ethnic, racial, educational, and geographical lines, at a time when anxiety rather than hope seems to be the dominant feeling for so much of today’s world, menaced as our world now is by our changing climate and other threats.

It’s not for nothing that we pray every day at Mass that we may be safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Our distress is real enough, and our anxiety about it is honest, but so must be our hope, the hope we all share as Church, the hope we have been proclaiming this Christmas season, and on which we must all rely in all things and at all times, all the year round: the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

Our hope is founded and focused on Jesus Christ, the one whose birth 2000+ years ago is the very basis for the calendar we mark today. When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman – Mary the Mother of God and the Mother of the Church. He was born under the law – that is, he was a member of the Jewish People, circumcised on the 8^th day of his earthly life, in fulfillment of God’s covenant with his Chosen People. God’s showing up in the world in Jesus – born to a particular mother, of a particular nation, in a particular place, at a particular time in human history – has realigned all of time and given all of history a new and more hope-filled meaning, giving us a hope for the future we would never otherwise have had.

In the Gospel story we just heard, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are joined by the shepherds. As Pope Francis recently remarked: “Unlike so many other people, busy about many things, the shepherds become the first to see the most essential thing of all: the gift of salvation.” [Admirabile Signum, 5]. In the 4th century, Saint Ambrose of Milan (340-397) famously called the shepherds’ arrival at the manger “the beginning of the infant Church.”

In most Nativity scenes, including ours here, the shepherds stick around. They will still be here, still kneeling, on Epiphany, when the Magi arrive. In the real story, however, they stayed just long enough to find Mary and Joseph and Jesus – just long enough to be found in turn by God. And then the shepherds went back – back presumably to their work and to their ordinary lives. But nothing for them would ever be the same again. They returned glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. However socially insignificant they may have been, however ordinary the lives they returned to, the kingdom of God was being born among them. And, however insignificant and ordinary we and our daily concerns may seem today, the kingdom of God is also being born among us – if only, like the shepherds, we hasten to find it in Mary’s Son.

The same Son of God who revealed himself to the shepherds in the Son of Mary continues to reveal himself to us in his Church. Like the shepherds, we too hasten with wonder to find him and to be found in turn. And, as his Church, we continue doing what the shepherds did, making known to one another and to the world the message about this child in whom the kindness and generous love, the mercy and forgiveness, of God our savior have appeared and forever more continue to appear.

Among us this New Year’s Day, no less than among those shepherds so long ago, the kingdom of God is being born, breaking into our otherwise ordinary, self-enclosed world and offering it the precious possibility of hope. So may that same precious and powerful hope move us and fill us and change us, as surely as it did those long ago shepherds.

Time has always been very precious – precisely, I suppose, because we have only such a limited supply of it. By becoming part of our time, however, God has turned our limited time on earth into a time of unlimited opportunity. So today he invites us to receive this new year – this year of our Lord 2020 – with gratitude as his gift and to enter it not in fear or anxiety, but with the hope that counts as one of God’s greatest Christmas gifts to us.

           

Happy New Year!

Homily for the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville TN, New year's Day, January 1, 2020.