This Is the Day

Move over Saint Anthony! Move over war in Ukraine! Today's news knows only one topic - the news media's absolute favorite figure, the sun around which the media and its profits seem to revolve, Donald Trump. The ex-President (and potential next President) will formally show up in federal court in Florida today to be arraigned for his allegedly criminal misuse of classified national security documents, which he not only illegally took from the White House but then also obstructed the government's legitimate efforts to recover them (rather than cooperating with the government's efforts to recover the documents - as, for example, former Vice Presidents Biden and Pence did). 

Unlike the dubious New York State case, for which Trump was charged back in April, this charge is easy to understand and is actually quite serious. Moreover, unlike Hillary Clinton's infamous personal emails, for example, the documents in question in this case are actual government documents, which Trump can make no conceivable claim to own - despite the false equivalence some Republican spokespeople may try to make. And again, unlike the government documents which former Vice President Biden and former Vice President Pence apparently kept, but then returned, in this case the ex-President not only did not return them when asked to do so but apparently obstructed the government's efforts. Absent such unconscionable obstruction, it is hard to imagine the Special Prosecutor attempting to prosecute this case. 

In response, the usual suspects are saying the usual things. On one side, we hear ad nauseam how no one is above the law. They say this despite the obvious fact that, whatever we say or want to believe, rich and poor are seldom treated the same. And the rich, at least a lot of them, clearly see themselves as a caste apart to whom the rules that apply to others do not necessarily apply, at least not in the same way. (Remember when Leona Helmsley famously said that only "little people" pay taxes?)

On the other side, of course, there has been the predictable Republican rush to defend Trump, even while excoriating others (President Biden, Hillary Clinton) for far less serious offenses and even at the cost of undermining law enforcement and national security.  Once again, people in positions of authority and responsibility, who presumably ought to know better, are saying things that it is hard to credit them with really believing. In the process they are further stirring up the increasingly unhinged passions of MAGA world. 

Accordingly, there are widespread fears of how MAGA world will react in this conflict which Trump himself has called "the final battle" against "the deep state" and "the globalists" and Joe Biden. Such apocalyptic rhetoric reflects and highlights the dangerous divisions Trump - and his Republican party allies - have fostered. The Court will accord Trump due process, all Republican party fantasies to the contrary notwithstanding. Whatever happens in that courtroom today and in the months to come, however, our intensely stirred up, culturally divided, and politically polarized society will suffer further intense division and polarization and likely irreparable damage.

Climate Change Rules: California Comes to New York

New York City is increasingly unbreathable. The other day, its air was rated the worst of any city in the world. Blame Canada!

Yes, of course, it is Canadian wildfires that are sending their smoke this way. But wildfires are nothing new. California has them regularly, and New York's sickly yellow sky this week is eerily reminiscent of San Francisco's similarly sickening sky a couple of years ago. It's sickening not just to look at, but sickening in the literal sense that it can make people actually sick. As David Wallace Wells recently wrote in the NY Times:"Globally, all forms of air pollution are responsible for perhaps 10 million deaths each year, and, short of mortality, contribute to respiratory disease and cardiac disease, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, dementia, cancer, mental illness and suicide, miscarriage and premature birth and low birth weight. According to some recent research, of all forms of particulate pollution, wildfire smoke may be the most toxic."

And there is no escaping the smoke, Wells notes: "Sixty percent of the pollution from American wildfires is experienced by people living outside the state in which the trees are actually burning."

This is, of course, one more classic case of climate change chickens coming home to roost. While political leaders dawdle and dither and keep finding ways to postpone our needed national reckoning with the demon of fossil fuels, while the news media obsesses over the latest political polls and presidential primaries theoretically still many months away, happily distracting us from why we can't breathe or see more than a few feet in front of us, the crisis continues to escalate. To quote David Wallace Wells again: "the haunting gray glow of the sky this week was both a throwback to a more contaminated past and a portent of a future clouded more regularly by airborne toxic events such as these."

That future is one I am just barely living to see the beginning of, but which future generations will sadly suffer the full pain of.

Photo: Dave Sanders for the NY Times

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit

 

According to a familiar legend (the veracity of which it is impossible to establish), Saint Patrick used a shamrock to teach the Trinity when evangelizing Ireland in the 5th century. Resorting to something like a shamrock illustrates some of the difficulty of talking about the Trinity. But I think the principal problem perhaps is not so much that the Trinity is a mystery, which we can never completely understand, but that it seems more like an abstract philosophical idea than an expression of religious experience.

I say this, despite the obvious fact that as Christians, our religious lives are all thoroughly permeated by our faith in the Trinity. We begin Mass and most of our prayers with the Sign of the Cross, blessing ourselves In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The principal prayers of the liturgy are typically addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Way back when, we were all baptized in the name of the Holy Trinity – the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that occasion, we – or our parents and godparents - all made a profession of faith in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our sins have been forgiven many times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; and as a priest I have in turn many times absolved the sins of others, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As a priest I have also presided at weddings – at which rings have been exchanged, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The psalms in the Divine Office are all concluded – Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit – and we do the same in our private prayers with each decade of the rosary. That doxology is amplified at Mass in the Gloria, that great hymn of praise to the Trinity that we say on most Sundays and feast days. As Saint Basil the Great said, back in the 4th century, we pray as we believe, and we believe as we have been baptized.

Admittedly, the doctrinal language we use to talk about the Trinity - words like “nature” and “person,” when used not as we use them in ordinary language, but as technical philosophical terms - may seem somewhat abstract. But the doctrine of the Trinity is our fundamental – and uniquely Christian – insight into who God is.  Who God is - in his inner self - we cannot know on our own.  That had to be revealed to us. Hence, God himself has revealed who he is – a trinity of Persons in one divine nature. Each of the three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is distinctly divine, their distinction residing in their relationship to each other: the Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Spirit to both.

On the one hand, the doctrine of the Trinity expresses our uniquely Christian insight into the inner life of God – where the Son is the image of the Father, the Father’s likeness and outward expression, while the Holy Spirit in turn expresses and reveals the mutual love of Father and Son. At the same time, the Trinity also expresses something fundamental about how God acts outside himself. Who God is in himself is how God acts; and how God acts in the story of salvation reveals who God is.

Already in the Old Testament, God was revealing himself – as he did to Moses in today’s 1st reading, as one whose nature is revealed in how he acts toward us: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity. It was to such a God that Moses prayed – as we all pray – do come along in our company … and receive us as your own.

It is, of course, the Son, consubstantial with the Father, who, as the visible image of the invisible God, came down from heaven, so that the world might be saved through him. Risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father, the Son has sent the Holy Spirit upon his Church, which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is inseparable from the Father and the Son, in both the inner life of the Trinity and his gift of love for the world. The Holy Spirit unites us with the Father in the Body of Christ, the Church. Through the sacraments, Christ continues to communicate the Holy Spirit to the members of his Church.

Hence, the Church faithfully follows St. Paul in praying: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all!

Homily for Trinity Sunday, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY, June 4, 2023.

Photo: The Altar of Saint Patrick, designed by John La Farge, altarpiece painted by William Laurel Harris (1889), Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.

The Deal Is Done - Until Next Time

The shouting will continue, of course, but the crucial voting is done. All that remains is the signing. After all the angst about default and holding the country hostage, our pathetic political system seems has done what it does all too often -pulled a last minute "deal" out of a hat. Is it any wonder voters hardly take this process seriously? (With calamitous consequences for the eventual day when the system finally fails!)

The predictable "sky is falling" run up to expected default seems all that much more weird in this instance, given how simple it actually was to negotiate the deal in the end - once the parties had decided that they were actually willing to do so - and then how modest the ingredients of the negotiated compromise actually are. Once again, our forever underestimated President Biden has shown himself adept at negotiating with a Congress controlled by the other party - one of his main campaign claims in both the last and presumably the next presidential election. And, for what it is worth, to give the Devil his due, Speaker McCarthy acted like a Speaker rather than as an agent of the misnamed "Freedom Caucus."

If excessive debt really were the problem that Republicans allege it to be, they have nonetheless kept off the table the most obvious solution to that problem - raising taxes. That leaves cuts in discretionary spending (a small slice of the total budget and not the main driver of the debt) as the only negotiable item in the Republicans' toolbox. For all the Republican posturing, however, the "cuts" in spending, while unjust and cruel in the case of food stamps work requirements for older adults and downright idiotic in the case of the IRS, were in the end rather modest. Most importantly, some of President Biden's major accomplishments, like the Inflation Reduction Act, remain.

But, as long as the Democrats stupidly keep failing to abolish the debt ceiling when they get the chance, the debt ceiling will remain as a ready weapon for Republican extortion. No president of either party should have to negotiate to avoid defaulting on the nation's financial obligations, but it will likely happen again and again as long as the debt ceiling remains in place as a ready-to-hand lethal weapon, further confirming once again how little sense the Biden Administration's adherence to antiquated notions of bipartisanship ultimately may be in the long term.

As historian Jacques Barzun is alleged to have said: "When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent."

Summer

 

In our principal contemporary calculation, summer will not officially begin in our northern hemisphere for another three weeks, when the summer solstice occurs on June 21 at approximately 10:58 a.m. EDT. According to one traditional medieval way of calculating the seasons (which sees the solstice or equinox at the season's mid-point instead of its beginning) summer began on May 1. That said, in our American secular society today, we have become accustomed to treating Memorial Day (or, more precisely, the Memorial Day "holiday weekend") as the de facto beginning of summer, what I call the cultural (as opposed to the astronomical or meteorological) summer, which extends (again culturally) from the Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day.

An added complication to what gets culturally considered as "summer" is the variation in school schedules around the country. I have long believed that the school "summer vacation" is an unjustifiable anachronism that needs to give way to year round schooling. That said, in this part of the country, where elementary and high schools end their academic year in late June and start in early September, "summer" is mainly July and August. In other areas, the school year ends in May and starts in early August. So, for example, when I was in Tennessee for 10 years, we treated June and July as the summer months, and August was "back to normal" month.

I am old enough to remember when spring was really still spring, which meant that, while by June 1 we might already have hot summer weather, we also might not. This year, for whatever reasons, we have been enjoying a relatively mild spring, that seems to have helped put off as long as possible the onset of summer's enervating heat and humidity. That said, with the temperature supposed to be hitting the 80s today, summer (however mild so far) is certainly here. And the ominous predictions in the news are for a seriously hot rest of the summer. According to Tuesday's NY Times: "Ocean temperatures, soil moisture, forecast models and long-term trends are all contributing factors in predicting a warmer-than-normal summer this year. The coasts of New England could be hot because the Atlantic Ocean already feels like summer, while the center of scorching temperatures will once again almost certainly be the Southwest."

 About all that, well, time will tell.

(Photo: June from the famous Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, an early 15th-century prayer book, which is widely considered perhaps the best surviving example of medieval French Gothic manuscript illumination. The illustration depicts summer fieldwork against the background of  the Palais de la Cité and the Sainte Chapelle.)