Remembering What the Civil War Was About

It was 150 years ago today that Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, effectively ending the confederate states' rebellion against the United States. For all practical purposes, the American Civil War was over; and April 9, 1865, was thus a great day in American history, not just for ending four years of intense conflict and human suffering, but for what was accomplished on the battlefield that politics could not accomplish..

Most wars are fought (at least ostensibly) to solve certain specific problems. Some fail - for example, the War of 1812, which accomplished next to nothing at all, and World War I, which left the world in almost every respect worse off that when it started. Some succeed  - for example, the American Revolution, which solved the 13 colonies' problem (as they perceived it) of being part of the British Empire, and World War II, which solved the problem of German aggression and Japanese imperialism. For its part, the American victory in the Civil War solved the problem of the U.S. Constitution's greatest failing - slavery. Slavery has often been called "the original sin of American society." It was a problem that the political process clearly could not resolve and which was finally only resolved on the battlefield. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution then wrote into law what had been made possible by a decisive military victory - in the process overturning the US Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision, the most ignominious and morally repugnant Supreme Court decision of the 19th century (much as Roe v. Wade would later be the most ignominious and morally repugnant decision of the 20th century.)

The Civil War also solved the problem of federalism.  It didn't do so completely, of course, for we are still a union of states, but it solved it to the extent that it settled where ultimate sovereignty really lies - in the Federal Government and only in the Federal Government. Pre-Civil War politics had been burdened by theories of secession and nullification and states' rights, all of which were completely discredited by their proponents' defeat on the field of battle.

Or so it seemed. Sadly, the U.S. remains still sectionally divided and profoundly polarized ideologically - and in ways which seem viscerally reminiscent of the divisions which that Civil War was supposed to have already resolved 150 years ago. So today is a good day to recall what that Civil War was about, what the stakes were for this country and its people then and what they still are now, in light of the ways in which our society has recently regressed.

Grant did defeat Lee. Lincoln's superior moral vision triumphed over slavery and secession. The challenge today is to remember what that means and to return to building a more just and equal society upon the new and improved foundation of the post-civil War American Constitution.

Easter Sunday

Last night at our Easter Vigil, I mentioned how, as far back as I can remember, the ringing of the bells at the Gloria has probably been one of my favorite parts of the Vigil – a moment of sheer joy to be remembered throughout the year, and beyond – which is why I asked the altar server to ring them again this morning! It’s as if, having heard again the ancient story of how God saved his People in the past - its full meaning now unlocked for us by Jesus’ triumph over death - the Church simply cannot contain her joy. And no wonder! For what bigger news has there ever been? What better news has there ever been?

When I was growing up, back in the Bronx in the 1950s, the sound of the Easter bells set in motion an important annual ritual in our apartment. In those days, the Easter Vigil service was still celebrated in the early hours of Saturday morning, when hardly anyone was in church to hear the bells ring at the Gloria. But then, promptly at noon, when Lent ended and Easter officially began, churches all over the world let loose a cacophony of bells. At that moment, my grandmother would sit us all down at the kitchen table and tune the radio to the Italian station, where we could hear what I’m sure she assumed were the best bells of all – the bells of Rome’s several hundred churches (recorded 6 hours earlier at noon Roman time) – all peeling gloriously, as we, obedient to my grandmother’s command, cracked open our Easter eggs, which we quickly consumed in eager anticipation of the next course – our Easter chocolate! Maybe, many of us here today may also be looking forward to some Easter chocolate – or maybe have had some already!

But back to those bells! As I said, it is no wonder we ring bells at Easter! How else will the world hear this story? And hear it the world must - for everyone’s sake! That, after all, is what the Church is for – commissioned to preach to the people and testify (as Peter proclaimed in the reading we just heard from the Acts of the Apostles) that Jesus really is risen from the dead and that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.

Now the Church obviously isn’t just me and the deacon here, or the Bishop, or the all the Bishops together and the Pope. The Church is all of us. And there are a lot of us, and obviously we’re not all the same. In the Church, some of us run fast, like the disciple whom Jesus loved. Others, beset by doubts or daily difficulties, run much more slowly, like Peter. But what matters most, the Gospel story seems to suggest, is that we are here.  Whether we are runners or walkers, we too have come like those first disciples to that tomb that was supposed to stay forever closed and dark, but from which the stone has been removed, in order that we - and the world - may believe.

In the normal course of events, the Sabbath day of rest should have been followed in the morning on the first day of the week by business as usual – both for the living, who would go back to their regular daily work, and even more so for the dead, decaying in their graves, who (then as snow) were expected to stay dead. Presumably, those who went to visit Jesus’ tomb early in the morning on the first day of the week also started out with similar expectations. John’s Gospel says that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early in the morning while it was still dark. The other Gospel writers, however, tell us that Mary was accompanied by other women as well, and that their purpose in visiting the tomb was to anoint Jesus’ body. However many they were and whatever they expected to do, it seems safe to say that their expectations that morning were well within the range of the normal.

Instead, they found something surprising and unexpected. For this morning, this 1st day of the week, the world awakens not to business as usual, but to something totally new – to, of all the things that God has ever done, the greatest of them all. And so we say today: This is the day the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad!

Easter invites us to put ourselves in the position of Mary Magdalene, and Peter, and all those disciples unexpectedly experiencing something surprisingly new in a world where everything else seems so ordinary and old. Even so, as we just heard, the first few to be made aware of this momentous news left the empty tomb more confused than elated: For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.

Nor would we, if that were all we had of the story!

Jesus’ resurrection was the most important event in all of human history. And yet, however hard it may be for us to imagine (in this multi-media age of the 24-hour news cycle), the world hardly noticed the resurrection at first. In a world which seems permanently stuck in the dark, pre-dawn position, where death always seems to have the final say, the disciples needed to experience the kind of change that could come only from the Risen Lord’s living presence among them. And so do we, which is why we are here, where the Risen Lord brings us together as no one else can.

So that is why we have to keep coming back, Sunday after Sunday, to be filled in on what happened next and thus experience the effects of the resurrection in ourselves. That is why every day for the next 7 weeks, the Church retells the story of the first Christian communities in the Acts of the Apostles - the story of those who first experienced the reality of the resurrection and its power to change the world, starting with changing them.

Throughout the entire Easter season, the Paschal Candle, the symbol of the Risen Christ and visible reminder of his great victory, will stand in its place of honor in the sanctuary. Also prominently displayed in our church throughout this Easter season is the icon of the Resurrection (photo). This famous image portrays the Risen Christ standing over the broken gates of hell, lifting up Adam and Eve from their coffins – while, on one side, Moses, Isaiah and Elijah, and, on the other, the Old Testament kings and John the Baptist look on. 

Again, like the two disciples in the Gospel, in the Church some of us run fast. Others obviously run much more slowly. But what matters most is where we finally end up.

The story of those first disciples and that of those first communities of Christians invites us to live in the here and now with the assurance - as Pope Francis has written - that “Christ’s resurrection is not an event of the past; it contains a vital power which has permeated this world” [Evangelii Gaudium, 276]

Peter's prominence in the gospel stories of the events that followed Jesus’ resurrection highlights how what was happening there continues to happen in the everyday life of the Church, as the Risen Lord continues to reveal himself to his people through the experience that we share by baptism as members of the uniquely new community that is the Church, brought into life by the Risen Lord's parting gift of the Holy Spirit.

The promises of Holy Baptism, which we will solemnly renew in another few minutes are our solemn and collective commitment to keep those Easter bells ringing loudly, in our lives and in our world - in our hearts and in our minds, in our thoughts and in our actions, at home and at work, among friends and among strangers.

So may the sound of those bells continue to ring on in us - and through us. May everything we do ring with Easter joy, so that the whole world can experience that something really new has happened - the new life we now share with Christ our Risen Lord.

Homily for Easter Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 5, 2015

A Vigil for the Lord

This is the night, when once you led our forefathers, Israel’s children from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea. So sang our deacon a short while ago, beginning our Vigil with the stirring words of the ancient Easter Proclamation, commonly called the Exsultet (its opening word in the original Latin).  Every year, when I hear that ancient text sung, I think back to my own experience of singing it as a deacon way back when. That year, I prepared by listening to a recording of it every day of Lent, listening and repeating it until I somehow had every note and every up-and-down of the melody memorized so as to fulfill that challenging chore – as the celebrant says to the deacon when blessing him beforehand – to proclaim his paschal praise worthily and well.

America’s most famous, 20 th-century monk, Thomas Merton, once called the Exsultet "the key to the whole business.” One year, when it fell to him to sing it, he wrote, “I am going to sing the whole of theology. It is marvelous. … And the people who hear it are learning all theology, and the Holy Ghost, Who operates what is signified, throws light in darkness upon the whole meaning of Christianity.” [April 6, 1947, & April 15, 1949]

Merton wasn’t alone in his praise. The great 20th-century liturgical scholar Pius Parsch, whom I sometimes like to quote in the parish bulletin, once called the Exsultet "a hymn that never ceases to touch the heart and mind." Now how does it do that? It does so, I believe, by bringing us back to the very heart of the ancient Passover story, which we recall tonight with this Vigil, just as the Jewish People have for so many centuries celebrated the Passover night’s annual return each spring. In the Book of Exodus we are told: This was a night of vigil for the Lord, as he led them out of the land of Egypt; so on this same night all the Israelites must keep a vigil for the Lord throughout their generations. This they have done, generation after generation; and so also must we on this our own annual Christian Passover night.

On this night, when once God led Israel from slavery and brought them safely through the waters of the Red Sea, we too follow our own pillar of fire, our paschal candle marked with 5 grains of incense to signify the holy and glorious wounds of Christ’s passion, to relive that night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.

Throughout the entire Easter season, the Paschal Candle, the symbol of the Risen Christ and visible reminder of his great victory, will stand in its place of honor in the sanctuary. Also prominently displayed in our church throughout this Easter season is the icon of the Resurrection. This famous image portrays the Risen Christ standing over the broken gates of hell, lifting up Adam and Eve from their coffins – while, on one side, Moses, Isaiah and Elijah, and, on the other, the Old Testament kings and John the Baptist look on. 

In the centuries-old Passover ritual, it is said that “in every generation” every person should view him or herself as having personally come out of Egypt. Passover is not just some historical anniversary. It is something that happens in the lives of God’s People here and now. And so it is for us on this Passover feast of the Church. For, as the Exsultet says, this is the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.

Tonight, having heard again the ancient Passover story - its full meaning now unlocked for us by Jesus’ triumph over death - the Church simply cannot contain her joy. Sadly silent these past two days, the bells now ring again with all the clamor they can muster. I’ll talk more about the Easter bells tomorrow morning. For now, suffice it to say that, as far back as I can remember, the ringing of the bells has probably been one of my favorite parts of the Vigil – a moment of sheer joy to be remembered throughout the year, and beyond. And no wonder! For what bigger news has there ever been? What better news has there ever been?

Tonight, however, I want to stay focused on the Exsultet, and with the strange way we began this Vigil, following the way led by that single candle - the symbol and expression of our community’s prayer, a community created by that candle’s glowing fired ignited for the honor of God. Now a candle – even a big and beautiful one such as this – is still just a candle. The night is still dark, despite all our efforts to the contrary. Life is like that. Hence, the deacon’s prayer on our behalf: Therefore, O Lord, we pray you that this candle, hallowed to the honor of your name, may persevere undimmed, to overcome the darkness of this night.

Just as God once led his Chosen People through the threatening sea and the frightening desert by the light of a pillar of fire, so he continues today to lead his Church through the dangerous darkness of our world by the amazing brightness of the Risen Christ.

In centuries past, the faithful of Rome assembled at nightfall at tonight’s Stational Church, the Basilica of St. John in the Lateran, the Mother Church of both the City and the world, for an all-night vigil, while next-door in the Baptistery the newest members of the Church, solemnly renouncing Satan and all his works and all his empty show, passed through the saving waters of baptism - an experience meant to be every bit as transformative for them as passing through the Red Sea was for the Israelites. The Exsultet expresses how they undoubtedly would have experienced their emergence from that Baptistery in the dawning light of Easter morning: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.

And so again it must be for all of us. Whether we are being baptized or confirmed tonight or were baptized and confirmed many decades ago. As at the Passover, so on this most holy Easter night, we each of us experience coming out of Egypt. We each of us experience Christ breaking the prison-bars of death and rising victorious from the underworld. And, as his Church on this most holy Easter night, together we will each of us solemnly renounce Satan and all his works and all his empty show. Then, indeed, this night shall be as bright as day, dazzling and full of gladness.

Homily for the Easter Vigil, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 4, 2015.

At the Lord's Supper

As many of you may know, I had a birthday last week.  The only reason that that is of any relevance tonight is that 67 years ago when I first entered this world, it was on Holy Thursday night. I’m not going to claim that being born on Holy Thursday predestined me to be a priest, but it may have increased my affection and affinity for this day, which has long been one of my favorite observances of the Church’s year.

My earliest memory of this Holy Thursday Mass is a fleeting one. The Mass was still in the morning. So I was, at most, only seven years old. I remember the church being very crowded – as churches still were in those days. I was in a side aisle, and the only picture I have retained is of the schoolgirls in their white communion dresses solemnly walking past me in the procession at the end of Mass.

I was seven years old in 1955 when Pope Pius XII reformed the Order of Holy Week, and the Mass of the Lord’s Supper (the Missa in Coena Domini, as it was then called) was moved to evening.  In the years that followed, once I was old enough to walk to church on my own at night, I became very fond of this Mass. I was always struck by how our Gothic, 1200-seat parish church looked and felt at night.  For some reason, what especially impressed me was how different the stained glass windows looked at night. Actually, they were just dark. That was what was different, but for some reason that struck me as memorable.  Perhaps it was the contrast with how bright the stone structure within was, with all the lights on.  The altar was dressed as for a feast. The celebrant, deacon, and subdeacon all wore the finest gold vestments. The organ played and the Sanctus-Bell rang for the Gloria, then fell silent, the bell replaced for the next two days by a weird wooden clapper. (In the absence of an authentic clapper, we’ll be using a gavel here tonight.) Then, after Mass, came the part everyone was waiting for - the procession, still with lots of school-girls in their communion dresses, strewing flowers on the floor before the Blessed Sacrament.

The Church’s liturgy, like the rest of the world, experienced radical disruption in the 60s and 70s.  Change came even to this special Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Even so, a time traveler joining our congregation here tonight would readily recognize what day this is, and what we are remembering here tonight.

Remembering is, of course what this is all about. One Holy Thursday in the mid-1980s the celebrant of this Mass at our seminary where I was then a student began his homily by playing a recording of the song Memory, from the Broadway musical Cats. (One student mistakenly called it an aria. It’s funny sometimes the things we remember most!)

Even so, for all the changes you and I have lived through (some of us longer than others) and for all that has happened these 2000 or so years, memory – remembering – is what this night and this Mass are so pointedly and noticeably all about. 

The church’s official liturgical books explicitly instruct us to remember tonight – to remember “how the Lord Jesus, loving those who were his own in the world even to the end, offered his body and blood to the Father under the appearances of bread and wine, gave them to the apostles to eat and drink, then enjoined the apostles and their successors in the priesthood to offer them in turn” [Ceremonial of Bishops, 297].

These are the themes highlighted in the Gospel [John 13:1-15] we just heard and the reading from Saint Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians [1 Corinthians 11:23-16], which take us back in time to the most remembered meal in human history - Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples on the day before the Passover.

Unlike the Gospel and the reading from Saint Paul, tonight’s 1st Reading – from the Book of Exodus [Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14] – was not, until recently, part of the Holy Thursday tradition. Instead it was for many centuries read on Good Friday. Read on Good Friday, its focus is on the Lamb sacrificed on Passover Eve – at the very hour Jesus was crucified. But, relocated to tonight, the story’s emphasis shifts to the Passover as a primordial ritual of remembering. This day shall be a memorial feast for you, which all your generations shall celebrate with pilgrimage to the Lord, as a perpetual institution.

And so we come together tonight to remember. On this, our memorial feast, we remember and celebrate the most sacred day on which our Lord Jesus Christ was handed over for our sake, and we observe the day on which our Lord Jesus Christ handed on the mysteries of his body and Blood for his disciples to celebrate – Jesus handed over for us, Jesus handing on to us.

As I said earlier, both the Gospel and the reading from Saint Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians take us directly back to that most remembered meal in human history - Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples on the day before the Passover. But what we remember is not just some interesting things that Jesus and his disciples did a long time ago, but rather how that otherwise ordinary meal was dramatically transformed by Jesus’ own words and actions into the Church’s central sacrament - Jesus’ Last Supper continuing as a perpetual institution in the Church as the Lord’s Supper.

It is not back to Jesus’ Last supper, but to the Church’s Lord’s Supper that we return time and again, day-in and day-out, in the here and now. It is the Church’s Lord’s Supper, celebrating what God has done for us, that continues to make us who we are and transform us into who we hope to become.

So, for example, the great North African Doctor of the Church, Saint Augustine, could imagine the Lord saying to him: “Grow, and you shall feed upon me. You will not change me into yourself, as you change food into your flesh, but you will be changed into me” [Confessions, VII, x, 16].

So the Church remembers and celebrates this sacrament daily and commands us – as part of what it means to be Christ’s Church – to come together on the first day of each week to remember Jesus’ words and actions and to celebrate their continued, ongoing, transforming power to change us.

The Lord’s Supper is the Risen Christ’s gift to his Church, but it is also a challenge. The four short verses we just heard from Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians are part of a longer text (which used to be read in its entirety at this Mass), which highlights the Corinthians’ conflicts, dissensions, and factions – in other words, their resistance to being changed by the Eucharist, to being taken to someplace new, as Peter was at the Last Supper.

Then as now, among those to whom Saint Paul’s account of the Last Supper was originally addressed, all was not well. The ordinary life of Roman society, with its social and class distinctions and inequalities, was making itself felt even within the Church community, to the point that the celebration of the Lord’s Supper still seemed to mirror those social and class distinctions and inequalities. Well, that was then, when the Church was such a small and seemingly feeble presence in a very pagan world. But what about us now? We too, today, as Pope Francis has reminded us, “Sometimes we prove hard of heart and mind; we are forgetful, distracted and carried away by the limitless possibilities for consumption and distraction offered by contemporary society” [EG, 196].  Perhaps the Corinthians couldn’t quite help bringing the world with them to Mass, any more than we can. That’s why being here together is so important, why what happens here is so important, enabling us to leave here different from how we came, enabling us to take something new out into the world, something different from the same old stuff we bring in with us from the world.

In the vestibule is a photograph taken in 2011 at the end of the Mass celebrating this building’s 125th anniversary. Whenever I look at that picture, side-by-side with the one taken 125 years previously in September 1886, I think of all that has happened in this beautiful building and all the wonderful church life that, like the crowd in that picture, has spilled outward from here, beginning at this altar, but not stopping there, but flowing out, building something special in our world.

Our life together as Christ’s Body, the Church, centered on the sacraments we celebrate here is a great inheritance – an inheritance which we have received from the apostles, passed on to us through countless generations of people like the ones in those photos, people like us. Whether amid the splendor of a papal basilica or in the simplicity of a missionary outpost, whether with the Bishop in his cathedral or with friends and neighbors in our local parish church, this same Lord’s Supper has been celebrated generation after generation and treasured by every generation as its most precious inheritance – an inheritance which it is now our precious privilege to pass on to today’s world and to tomorrow’s generations to come.

Homily, Holy Thursday, Mass of the Lord's Supper, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 2, 2015.

Triduum

Later this afternoon, Lent ends and the Sacred Paschal Triduum begins. It begins with the celebration of the Mass of the Lord's Supper, the first act of a day that will conclude with the Liturgy of the Lord's Passion sometime tomorrow afternoon. Continuing through Vespers on Easter Sunday, this contemporary Easter Triduum attempts to restore the ancient liturgical Triduum of Easter Sunday and the two-day fast that originally preceded it.

Now I am old enough to remember when a different "Sacred Triduum" (then still seen as part of Lent) consisted of the three days - Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, each of which was heralded by the celebration of Tenebrae the afternoon before (except, of course, that hardly any parishes actually did Tenebrae). Easter, however, had somehow become a separate celebration, with a sort of "triduum" of its own, consisting of Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, and Easter Tuesday, which outranked the remaining days of Easter Week. Except insofar as Easter Monday is still a civil holiday in some places, that latter "triduum" has largely been forgotten. Such is the power of older, long established customs, however, that the obsolete notion of a "triduum" beginning Thursday morning and ending on Saturday evening seems to have survived in the way we often think and speak about these days - even though that is contrary to the spirit of the reformed liturgy, and even though it means in effect ignoring Easter Sunday itself (which still remains, of course, the best attended service of the Triduum). 

In any case, the Sacred Paschal Triduum is an unparalleled privileged moment in the annual cycle of Catholic life. Ideally, it ought to be a time when all other activities recede and our contemplation of and identification with Christ's death, burial, and resurrection dominate our consciousness. Ordinary life has a way of intruding here, however. At least since Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday ceased being holydays of obligation in 1642, people's participation in the solemn celebrations of these days has inevitably and understandably  diminished. The demands of ordinary life in a modern secular society do not disappear just because Christ once died and rose from the dead.

All the more reason, therefore, for us to invest these special days with all the solemnity and energy we can call upon. As one of the priests involved in formation used to say to us in seminary, "celebration takes work." Celebrating the Sacred Triduum is not necessarily hard. After all, it doesn't change from year to year! But it does demand effort and a unique focus, in order for all present to experience it with maximum fruit - and for that matter for the rest of the Church who are not present physically but are nonetheless an integral part of the wider community of God's People for whom this Easter celebrate is intended. 

Hence the importance of the final Easter Sunday celebration, to which everything (including the anticipatory Mass of the Easter Vigil) has been leading and when (in the words of Pius Parsch) "the full noonday glory of the feast" bursts forth - and when in fact God's people will most noticeably be present in abundance.