Republicans Rebuked

 

A handful of off-year races don't define what will happen a year from now, but yesterday's obvious rebuke to the Republicans in certain significant states ought at least to let Democrats take a pause form their poll-focused hand-wringing. It is simply the fact that, despite being one of the most effective presidents in decades - perhaps the most effective since LBJ if not FDR, - President Biden seems to get no popular credit. After a stunning display of world leadership regarding Ukraine, he doesn't even get credit for that in the polls. For whatever reason, the most ordinary, humanly likable President in decades is personally unpopular. That matters, and it should worry Democrats. But, as yesterday's results show, Democrats are also popular, and their signature issues are apparently even more so.

What this may mean long-term, no one really knows - not even the all-knowing media pundits and prognosticators. (Only in today's bizarrely speeded-up world would 2024 be considered long-term!) One thing that it does mean, however, is that the electorate is more discerning than the simplistic portrait painted by the polls might suggest.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see what, if any, effect this injection of electoral reality may have on tonight's Republican debate among the competitors to qualify as Trump's runner-up and on the new House Speaker and his cronies' handling of the impending government shutdown.

Now and Then

The Middle East is in flames, the Ukraine War is stalemated to Putin's advantage, a Protestant Nationalist Theocrat Election Denier has been elected Speaker of the U.S. House, and Donald Trump is positioned to return in triumph to the White House. If now is not the time for some much needed nostalgia for a happier and more hopeful time, then when? And just in time, through the marvels of incomprehensible modern technology, the Beatles have just recorded their last song!

Well, not exactly, of course. Now and Then started out as a 1970s John Lennon solo, hidden away on a cassette which his widow later donated for a Beatles retrospective. Nothing came of it then, but Paul McCartney remembered it. Thanks to contemporary technology, the sound was restored to true vintage Lennon. To this Paul and Ringo made their contributions, and with the addition of sound from the late George Harrison, another - presumably final - Beatles song has been created.

I wouldn't classify it as the best of the Beatles' amazing repertoire, but it is very definitely and distinctly their sound - a sound that meant so much to my generation and still continues to resonate decades later, superior to most subsequent sounds. It transports us back to a better and more hopeful time, when the world still seemed to hold the promise of the prosperous uplifting period that followed World War II, what the French call Les Trente Glorieuses (the glorious 30 years).

It also reminds us of the amazing personalities the Beatles were - in particular the stars John and Paul and their long, loving, and conflicted relationship. According to Beatles producer George Martin's son, Giles, Paul wanted to finish this song because, Martin feels, Now and Then "I love letter to Paul written by John." If so, what a tremendous testimony to the ongoing and sustaining power of human friendship amid competition and rivalry!

Whatever the motivations behind its production and however dubious in the long-term the problematic technology that has made it possible, Now and Then is a joy and a gift to this our present troubled time for a lost but better world.

tOne can access the song at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW55J2zE3N4

November

In November, in the days to remember the dead,                                                                              When air smells cold as death,                                                                                                                    St. Malachy, who is very old, gets up,                                                                                                      Parts the thin curtains of trees and dawns upon our land.

So begins Thomas Merton's haunting poem St. Malachy. The first native-born Irish saint to be formally canonized, Saint Malachy (1094-1148) was Archbishop of Saint Patrick's primatial see of Armagh, who famously died in the arms of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux on All Souls Day and is accordingly commemorated in the Church's calendar on November 3. Saint Bernard later wrote a life of Saint Malachy, although what Malachy may be best remembered for is the so-called Doomsday Prophecy, a 16th-century fraud, which allegedly predicted (and gave now famous mottoes for) the reigns of 112 popes prior to the Last Day, from Celestine II ("Ex castro Tiberis") to the present. (My only actual personal connection with Saint Malachy derived from my having served as a deacon at Saint Malachy's Church, "The Actors' Chapel," in New York from 1990 to 1994 and then having celebrated my Mass of Thanksgiving there after my ordination as a priest in 1995.)

Merton's sentiments about November, however, have had a lasting resonance for me. Traditionally, November signals the beginning of the annual winter cycle. Especially with the return to "Standard Time" (something more resembling natural time than the even more artificial "Daylight Saving Time" which the summer season inflicts on us), the evenings now come ever earlier and with the dark also the increasing cold in the air. I likewise welcome my meditative mornings, sitting securely wrapped in my weighted blanket while it is still dark outside. 

All these natural autumnal alterations, of course, conspire to associate this season with serious thoughts about the end - whether the end of all things on that dies irae that the world is each year closer to, or the more personal end of oneself in death that each of us is also each year closer to. "When one is seventy, one cannot be sure of the future," the future Pope Saint John XXIII wrote while on retreat in French North Africa on Holy Saturday in 1950.  At no age, but especially for me now in my mid-70s, can anyone be sure of anything when it comes to the future. If, as some scholars suggest, the future tense evolved out of the subjunctive as life became more predictable, perhaps the reverse may be true in the life not of the species but of the individual, for whom the future is increasingly subjunctive as we age!

All this was brought home to me on Saint Malachy's feast day this year, when I received the sad news of the death of one of my novitiate classmates. We were novices together in 1981-1982 and then seminarians together in 1982-1986. He was undoubtedly the most talented and creative member of our class and perhaps the most talented and creative Paulist of that period. He was ordained a priest in 1987 and served for several years as a parish priest at the Paulist Mother Church in New York. He was a dynamic force in the parish and is still well remembered by many old-timers from that era. Years later, when I in turn was on the parish staff, he had by then sadly left the priesthood, but he still used to lead a group session at the parish center on Saturday mornings, and I remember many a Saturday stopping by to visit him before his session started. His gifts and talents were many and enriched the lives of parishioners and of many others beyond the parish, who benefited from his energy, his passion, and, above, all his kindness. May he rest in peace, and may the angels lead him to paradise!

That same Holy Saturday 1950, Saint John XXIII wrote how he comforted himself "with the thought that the souls that I have known, loved, and still love" were "in the other world, waiting and praying for me." While (like most mortals) I am in no great rush to join them there, I too am consoled by that thought. It assuages the regret one feels - that I certainly feel - about past relationships ruptured or otherwise lost to the passage of time, friends and colleagues and even family one was once associated with on this mysterious journey through life but whom I no longer see or hear for random reasons more accidental than purposeful. I miss them, just as much as I miss my departed family, friends, fellow-workers, and former parishioners!

The impending holiday season simultaneously softens the harshness of winter's evocation of our inevitable end with the warmth of sentimentality and nostalgia, while heightening the inevitable sense of personal and collective loss as one looks at the increasing number of empty places at the table (both literally and metaphorically) at the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts.

Faith (that is, Christian  faith) does not do away with those complex and awkward feelings, but they are taken up (aufgehoben, in the Hegelian sense) in the larger transformative narrative that the impending holiday season struggles to evoke, between Advent's somber focus on the end and the Christmas celebration of the incarnation's impact in the encounter of God-with-us that has replaced our estrangement.

 

All Souls' Day

 

Around the end of the first millennium, as a sort of sequel to yesterday's celebration of All Saints' Day, the Church added All Souls' Day on November 2, a day devoted to urgent prayer on behalf of all who, having died, are now still being purified from the consequences of their sins.

In his 2013 book Mercy: the Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life, Walter Cardinal Kasper called the doctrine of purgatory "a sign of this infinite mercy and forbearance of God for those who have not fundamentally and decisively decided against him.  ... Ultimately, it is the condition that results from encountering our holy God and the fire of his purifying love, which can only passively endure and through which we become altogether prepared for full communion with God. ... At the same time, it offers the community of the faithful the possibility, in solidarity, to intercede for the deceased before God."

Here in the northern hemisphere, thoughts about the end come quite naturally at this time of the year, as the sun rises a little later every morning and sets a little earlier every afternoon. Amidst withered leaves and barren branches, there is a melancholy sense of time passing by as yet another year draws to a close. The universe, as we know it, did not always exist and will not always exist. However distant the day, the world we know is doomed to end. Less distant, there is the individual - but no less definite - death of each one of us. Our human condition of alienation from God through sin makes mortality seem the ultimate frustration. Perhaps, that may help to explain modern secular society’s increasing inclination to downplay death, even to the point of failing to provide complete religious funerals for the deceased. 

As I age, I often find myself checking obituary notices to keep track of people I have known - classmates, professional colleagues, personal friends, former parishioners. In the process, I have increasingly been surprised by how many obituaries, instead of concluding with the customary notice of a funeral service in a church or a traditional wake, instead often end with some brief reference to a graveside service or perhaps not even that, or maybe something curiously called a "celebration of life" at some pub or other such strange location.

In contrast, in the Church’s calendar, both the month of November and the season of Advent, which immediately follows it, have traditionally focused on our end, as an inevitability which we humanly fear, but for which we wait with the hope made possible for us by Christ. Christian hope causes one both to treat all of life as a preparation for a good death and not to neglect the duty of prayer for those who have gone before us. Hence, how we think and speak about Christian hope regarding the end and the eternal fulfillment of God’s purpose for creation is fundamental for a coherent Christian faith.

Yet, as Karl Rahner already observed some 80 years ago in Theological Investigations: "Most contemporary Christians have already ceased to have any sense of being actively in communication with their own dead, the members of their family and the relations whom they have lost. ... They are forgotten, and in so far as they are thought of at all attention is focused upon their lives while they were still among us and not in any true sense upon the fact that they are still living." 

While very much a reflection of our contemporary alienation, our modern neglect of the Church's tradition of prayers for the dead may not be entirely unique to today at least in America. Thus, in his first Pastoral Letter  (May 28, 1792), the first U.S. Bishop, Archbishop John Carroll, already found it necessary to admonish U.S. Catholics: "Follow your departed brethren into the regions of eternity, with your prayers, and all the assistance, which is suggested by the principles of faith and piety."

The almost unthinking resort in the pre-conciliar liturgical practice to the Requiem Mass on ferial days with multiple options - an unfortunately overdone practice which I can well remember - may have distorted the place of prayer for the dead in the liturgy and, by extension, may have undermined the salience of the doctrine of the communion of saints in practice. That said, all those Requiem Masses focused on praying for the souls in purgatory probably did at least help sustain a real relationship between the living and the dead, even as the changing conditions of modern society were increasingly undermining that relationship.

As Saint Augustine told his congregation: "the dead can be helped by the prayers of holy Church, and the eucharistic sacrifice, and alms distributed for the repose of their spirits; so that God may deal with them more mercifully than their sins have deserved" [Sermon 172, 2; tr. Edmund Hill]. Or, as Dante expressed it in the hopeful words of the soul of Manfredi, grandson of the Empress Constanza, in the last line of Purgatorio, Canto 3 : "For those on earth can much advance us here" che' qui per quei di là molto s'avanza.

The great autumn triduum of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls challenges us to face our fears and contemplate the mystery of death – but to do so in faith and hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep [1 Thessalonians 4:14].

Photo: Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Knoxville TN.

All Saints Day

Many of us have been to high school or college reunions – many of us to our 40^th or 50^th high school reunion, as I was privileged to do in 2005 and again in 2015.  Sadly our high school had long since closed. Our reunion, however, was not an occasion for such somber reflections. Rather it was a celebration of one another and of the memories we still share from a world long gone. As for those classmates who could not be with us, whose earthly labors have already ended, we can only hope that we will all come together again at the greatest reunion of all in the kingdom of heaven! It is that great eternal reunion of the communion of saints which today’s 1st Reading [Revelation 7:2-4, 9-14] portrays and today’s solemnity of All Saints’ Day celebrates.

In November 1887, the founder of the Paulist Fathers, Servant of God Isaac Hecker, wrote in the Paulist magazine: “When, in 1843, I first read in the Catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home.” The doctrine of the communion of saints had a decisive impact upon young Isaac Hecker’s spiritual search, leading him into the Catholic Church a year later.

 

Appropriately so! What would we be without the communion of saints?

 

For one thing, church would certainly be a duller place! Just look around! Besides the multiple images of Mary and three images of our patron Saint Paul, just to my right here is the shrine of a great modern Doctor of the Church, Saint Therese of Lisieux, “the Little Flower.” Further down that aisle is an altar honoring an ancient Roman martyr Saint Agnes. Directly across the nave is the altar of a great early missionary Bishop, Saint Patrick, who obeyed Jesus’ command to go and make disciples, even if that meant going outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire. The altar next to his honors Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus. Meanwhile, portrayed in paintings above those altars and decorating the walls of this church, we see numerous other saints, a hint of the multitude we remember today whose names are known to God alone.

The communion of saints unites past and present, permeates the Church’s worship, and punctuates the Church’s calendar, culminating today in this great annual celebration in honor of all the saints. All Saints Day celebrates that part of the communion of saints known as the “Church Triumphant” – not just the thousands of saints officially recognized as such by the Church, but all the holy men and women, known and unknown, who have attained the goal for which we all aim. Living now with God and praising him forever in heaven, the saints – that great multitude from every nation, race, people, and tongue of whom we heard in today’s first reading – helps us by interceding on our behalf, uniting their prayers with ours.

 

The regular reference to and invocation of the angels and the saints, not just today but in every Mass every day, signifies our union, as the still struggling Church on earth, with the triumphant Church in heaven, and reminds us that the Church’s mission in this world is to mirror that heavenly community of angels and saints – and so transform the world according to the hope that is Jesus Christ’s great gift to his Church and the Church’s gift to the world.

 

As one of the seasonal turning points in the ancient northern European calendar, November 1 was once experienced as the beginning not only of winter but of a new year, the eve of which was imagined as a frightening in-between time when the spirits of the dead might roam about and possibly even try to haunt their old homes. Bonfires and jack-o-lanterns (originally carved out of turnips) were part of the defense of the living against an assault from the other world.

 

Deliberately celebrated on this day after Halloween, All Saints Day celebrates the hope that replaces fear and the victory of grace over sin, exemplified in the lives of the saints and experienced by us here and now in our continued relationship with them – a communion which challenges that great opponent of human hope, death, by connecting us not only with the saints already in heaven but with all who have gone before us with the sign of faith.

Homily for All Saints' Day, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, November 1, 2023.

Photo: "The Crowning of Mary, Queen of Heaven," Mural by William Laurel Harris highlighting the Communion of Saints, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY.