D + 2

One of my few family heirlooms, one that travels around with me when I move, is a map my father made tracing his wartime service in Europe as part of the 186th Field Artillery Battalion, V Corps Artillery, from June 8, 1944 ("D-Day + 2") to May 9, 1945. Historical attention has rightly emphasized the heroic exploits of the initial landings on D-Day, but the landings continued as artillery and other units came ashore in the days that followed the first assault. My father illustrated his map with military markings whose meaning is now lost to me. But it clearly traces his route from the D+2 landing at Omaha Beach through Normandy (Caumont, St. Lo) and on to Paris. From Paris, the map marks my father's route into the Rhineland and the Ardennes and the defense of Monschau-Eupen-Liege. (My father did not talk overly much about his war experience, but when he did the Battle of the Bulge usually loomed large in his recollections). The route continues through Germany to the Elbe, then down into what is now the Czech Republic, where the war ended for my father in Pilsen.

I see the map on my wall every day. I don't look at it - i.e., study it carefully - that often, but its lessons are never lost on me. Born in 1919, my father grew up in the Depression, in a large immigrant family, in a densely populated neighborhood - with all the economic and cultural deprivations and social and cultural riches that went with that life. It's a life that was still recognizable in the world I grew up in, even as as new world was being born in which my generation would have access to different riches (and experience different deprivations). For my father and so many of his generation it was that overseas war that was most fully formative. That we now aptly call them "the greatest generation," is a testament not only to the world-historical impact of their war service but to how it defined them. And, of course, its legacy defined us, the greatest generation's "baby boomer" heirs.

Next year's 70th anniversary of D-Day will undoubtedly inspire perceptive reflections on the greatest generation's larger historical accomplishment. On this 69th anniversary of my father's landing in Normandy, however, two considerations emerge as foremost in my thinking. The first is one of appreciation for the greatest generation and gratitude for giving us boomers a far better world than the one they had been left. The second is the sense of regret that we have not done the same for the generations after us.

Good Pope John

Fifty years ago today - June 3, 1963 - Blessed Pope John XXIII died. By the time he was beatified by Blessed Pope John Paul II in 2000, today's date in the Church's calendar was already claimed by the Ugandan Martyrs (canonized by Paul VI in 1964). So Blessed John XXIII is commemorated not on the anniversary of his death but instead in October on the anniversary of the Council he had convened in the hope of what he fervently called "a new Pentecost."

It was in fact Pentecost Monday (which we still celebrated in 1963 in the as yet unreformed calendar) when Pope John died. To an impressionable 15-year old with a perhaps more than average interest in religion, it seemed as if the whole world were assembling in a vigil at his deathbed. That evening, a special Mass was celebrated in St. Peter's Square for the assembled crowds, and it was shortly after that Mass's end that the Pope died. (Earlier, he had received the sacrament of Extreme Unction from Bishop Peter Canisius Van Lierde - the same Bishop who had confirmed me six years earlier).

The Pope's death set in motion the traditional rituals of ecclesiastical mourning. Those rituals were augmented by an unprecedented degree of popular interest and participation. I remember watching the evening news with a high school classmate as the Pope's body was brought out of the basilica into the square at the end of his lying-in-state to give the huge crowd a chance to pay its respects. I recall how the news commentator commented that in the early Church this would have amounted to "canonization by acclamation." Not quite - but at least he's finally been beatified and now lies in honor unde an altar in St. Peter's!

John XXIII's legacy is simultaneously simple and complex. His down-to-earth, human saintliness was what made him so popular with ordinary people and is still remembered by those of us who are old enough. Think of the continued appeal of his 1962 Discorso della Luna! His Journal of a Soul still merits reading even if the language - and the spritiuality - seem somewhat dated. At a time when the papacy had finally fully re-emerged from its post-1870 isolation, John gave the Church a remarkably attractive human face. Who knows how many may have been more disposed to hear the Church's message because they had come to like the messenger? The modern media-driven emphasis on personality and charisma has likely done the Church and the world more harm than good overall, but it is undeniable that an attractive personality who can lovingly project the joy of disicpleship is great gift not to be minimized.

That simple side of his legacy is what, I suspect, accounts for his continued popular appeal. And that appeal has survived the complex and conflicted history he inadvertently set in motion with his Council. Pope John was a true traditionalist, who loved the Church and its liturgy, and who knew its history well. His northern Italian background and historical study had disposed him to appreciate the accomplishments of the Council of Trent and the reforming zeal of the likes of St. Charles Borromeo (whose heart he went to venerate in preparation for the Council's opening). He had great hopes for the spiritual renewal the Council would facilitate. Neither he - nor, for that matter, the Council Fathers - could have anticipated the moral and cultural revoluton that was just around the corner in the late 60s and how so much of the Council's promise would get derailed by the spirit of the age. It is almost impossible to separate one's evaluation of John's successor, Paul VI, from one's evaluation of that tragic time in the Church. But John died in time to be spared that fate and can be remembered and admired for what he personally embodied without reference to the chaos that came about during his successor's reign. (In that regard, he resembles John F. Kennedy, who died less than six months later, and who can sitll be invoked by anyone who wishes to do so - on whatever side of the late-60s battle lines).

Immediately following his election in 1958, the new pope experienced being carried aloft on the sedia gestatoria for the first time. He reminisced about how as a child he had been carried on his father’s shoulders. Then he added: “The secret of everything is to let oneself be carried by God, and so to carry him to others.”

Sacrament Among Us

The custom most associated with Corpus Christi is the procession in which the Blessed Sacrament is carried in a monstrance through the local streets with great solemnity and communal festivity. The procession is a public witness of the Church’s belief in and popular devotion to the sacrament of the Eucharist. Beginning with Blessed John Paul II, recent popes have revived the custom at the papal level, celebrating Mass at the Papal Basilica of St. John Lateran (Rome’s Cathedral), and then going from there in procession with the Blessed Sacrament up the Esquiline Hill to the Papal Basilica of St. Mary Major, where the procession concludes with Benediction outdoors. That was on Thursday, the traditional day for Corpus Christi. Today, Sunday, at 5:00 p.m. Rome time (11:00 a.m. our time), the Holy Father will preside over a special hour of Eucharistic adoration extended all over the world. The world’s cathedrals will be synchronized with Rome and will, for an hour, join the Pope in Eucharistic adoration.

In 1984, I got to attend a particularly impressive Corpus Christi procession in Montreal, Quebec, where we followed the Blessed Sacrament through the narrow streets of the Old City to the historic basilica of Notre Dame. But perhaps the most impressive, certainly the most moving outdoor eucharisitc procession I’ve ever attended was not on Corpus Chrsti but the one that takes place every summer afternoon at the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France. After being exposed all day under a tent, the Blessed Sacrament is carried at the end of a procession of sick pilgrims and their caregivers to the massive underground basilica. Empty, the basilica (the only structure large enough to contain the vast number of piolgrims present on any given day) resembles an ugly underground parking lot. Crowded to capacity for afternoon Benediciton, however, the experience is – as my British friends would say – “brilliant.”

A more traditonal word might be”awesome” – a word which really used to mean something before it became a contemporary synonym for “nice.” Thus, we used to start the Mass for the Consecration of a Church with the words of the Patriarch jacob in Genesis: How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven; and it shall be called the court of God [Genesis 28:17].

We build and maintain churches to be “awesome,” so that “awesome” things can happen there - so that the community of faithful we call the Church (with a capital “C”), can assemble to pray, to hear God’s word, and to celebrate the sacraments, especially the Eucharist in which Christ is present in a unique way in his Body and Blood. Prefigured by the bread and wine offered (as we just heard) by the priest and king Melchizedek [Genesis 14:18-20], the Eucharist was established as a sacrament (as we also just heard) by Christ at the Last Supper [1 Corinthians 11:23-26], and now is celebrated daily on our altar and  permanently reserved for adoration in the Taberancle. Today’s celebration is meant to highlight all of that, all the while inviting us to a deeper devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It is that Real Presence which is so vividly celebrated in the tradtional Corpus Christi procession, in which the Church ritually acts out the reality of Christ coming into our world, walking our streets, so to speak.

In the Eucharist – and in the life we share together as Christ’s Church united by and through the Eucharist we celebrate – Christ comes among us. And he remains with us, blessing the streets we and he walk together, nourishing our ordinary and sometimes somewhat messed up lives with the real, felsh-and-blood presence of God himself, who invites us – like the 5000+ people in the Gospel [Luke 9:11b-17] – to eat until we have more than enoough.

Homily for Corpus Christi, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, June 2, 2013.

Reaching for Joy

According to by Stanford Anthropology Professor T.M. Luhrmann, in yesterday's New York Times, "the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don't seem good now. That's what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/luhrmann-belief-is-the-least-part-of-faith.html?ref=opinion. (Luhrmann is the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God.)

 

I was much taken by her column. While not ignoring what she calls "the puzzle of belief" (the "abstract and intellectual" questions which often seem so central in secular observers' impressions of religion), she focuses more on "the practical issue of how to experience the world," which she sees as more fundamental for ordinary people's attachment to religion. "You don't go to church because you believe in God;" she argues (floowing Durkheim), "rather, you believe in God because you go to church."

As anyone who has ever been an integral part of a faith community knows well, the "abstract and intellectual" aspects of belief do matter - more to some than to others, perhaps, and more at some times than at others - but are part of a larger picture of faith and a life lived in hope and in relationship with fellow believers. Christianity, after all, is an historical religion, premised on the facts of Christ's incarnaiton, death, and resurrection. But biblical faith has always been about much more than assenting to philosophical propositions or historical data.

Indeed, Luhrmann cites the late comparative religionist William Cantwell Smith (whose The Meaning and End of Religion I remember reading in grad school) to the effect that "I believe in God" used tomean something like "Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusitng His mercy." That is certainly a far fuller exposition of faith in the classical Christian sense than an "absrtact and intellectual" position on the controverted question of God's existence.

In fact, the propositional affirmations found, for example, in the Creed, while "abstract and intellectual" formulations of officially agreed upon language," the subjects which they affirm are experienced by believers relationally. Doctrinal statements about Jesus speak directly to the quesiton of whether and how we are saved. Doctrinal statements about Mary matter for how we are related to Jesus (and how Mary continues to help us along in that relationship). Doctrinal statements about the Church (e.g., papal primacy and infallibility) are about who we are as a community, how we are connected and hold together, etc.

Those profound, doctrinal realities come alive, so to speak, in the multitude of grace-filled experiences people have in life. Church-going, sacraments, community all in various ways mediate God's grace and provide the experiential context in which doctrinal affirmations are affirmed and lived. 

 

Bring Back the Lever Voting Machines!

It is surely a sign of our time that New York City's election officials are considering bringing out of storage the old lever voting machines for use in the city's September mayoral primary. The reason is that the new electronic scanner machines apparently take so long to count and to prepare for a runoff if one should be needed. The lever voting machines were first developed in the 1890s. The city's current stock of them dates from the 1960s. So that make sthme "old" - and hence suspect to today's post-modern tastes. so some are predictably upset about this. Today's New York Times describes the conflict in all its  absurdity: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/nyregion/new-york-city-wants-to-revive-old-voting-machines.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

 

I have fond memories of watching my parents vote in the 1950s on those wonderful old machines and then using them myself when I started voting after I turned 21 in 1969. Whenever I have voted elsewhere with other technology, I have always wistfully remembered and missed the solemn solidity of those old lever machines. Sadly, in this as in so many other matters, progress cannot be stopped. In this case, progress has also cost the city some $95 million. (To his credit, the mayor has been a frequent citric of the new voting machiens).

I can sympathize with the argument that. having spent so much money on new voting technology, the voters deserve for it to work at least as well as the older machines, and certainly should not have to bring back the old machines because of defects int he new system. but what should one make of a complaint like that of the executive director of Citizens Union, quoted in today's Times as saying: "It's absurd that in a 21st-century New York, we would go back and vote on machines first used in the 19th century..."?

Imagine that!

Imagine using something old (and better), when something new (and slower and more expensive) is available!