Alone

According to The Economist (September 1-17, 2008), 22% of American adults "always or often feel lonely, or lack companionship, or else feel left out or isolated." The plague of loneliness is such that in January the British Prime Minister appointed "a minister for loneliness." (The same survey cited above found the same result for 23% of British adults.)

So I am not alone in feeling alone!

Loneliness itself is not new, of course. According to the article in The Economist, loneliness is "a reflex honed by natural selection. Early humans would have been at a disadvantage if isolated from a group."

The problem is that human beings are still disadvantaged when isolated, but the long-term isolation seems to be on the rise. until the 20th century most people lived in families, My father, for example, had 2 brothers and 4 sisters; and, apart form his military service during World War he never lived out of easy commuting distance from his siblings. Nowadays, however, more and more people live alone. Even worse, "From 1985 to 2009 the average size of an American's social network - defined by the number of confidants - declined by more than one-third." And, as everyone knows by now, membership is churches and other voluntary associations is on the decline. It seems as if the traditional ways in which most people experienced automatic connection with others or were able to forge personal connections of their own with others are all in serious decline.

Of course, technology gets a good deal of the blame as well. As The Economist notes, "A sharp drop in how often American teenagers go out without their parents began in 2009, around when mobile phones became ubiquitous.

So what is to be done? Turning off the phone would certainly help! Even in contexts where there are actually other people around, withdrawal into one's phone can be an obvious way of isolating oneself. That is why, for example, in my own religious community, I have made it my personal policy to leave my phone in another room when i go to dinner. 

In the UK, the National health Service has apparently started "social prescribing" - sending patients to social activities in lieu of giving them medications! That sounds very interesting. But if loneliness is systemic, if it is built into the very structure of modern life, the problem may prove beyond fixing.

Labor Day

Today is Labor Day, a federal holiday since 1894, which sadly long ago joined most of our other national holidays in losing much of its original civic significance to become just another "holiday weekend" – an opportunity for shopping and other diversions. Even when I was a child and the American labor movement was still strong, Labor Day was already becoming more about the end of summer vacation, the last day for women to wear their white shoes and men their straw hats, and the imminent return to school and normal activities - and so less of a serious civic celebration of American workers (and the affluence their astounding productivity had helped to produce).

That great post-World War II quarter century or so of unprecedented, nation-wide, across-the-board prosperity and a strong labor movement seems such a distant memory now in the present era of increasing economic inequality. Solving our society’s economic problems has been made even more problematic by the globalization of economic activity, which, while undoubtedly beneficial in certain significant respects, has not benefitted everyone and has in the process rendered obsolete so much that used to be taken for granted. That challenge, however, only makes it that much more urgent to recover an authentic understanding of human nature and human solidarity – and of fulfilling human labor as an essential component of a productive economy and a good society. As the United States Bishops’ reminded us a year ago, work can be a place of great sanctity, giving expression to the deep yearnings of the human person; where people are permitted to—and, indeed, do—embrace work as a cooperation with God's creative power, the mundane can become transcendent. 

In a particular way, Labor Day celebrates the essential role of labor unions in making possible a more just and equitable society. As far back as 1986, in their Pastoral letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops were warning against the already increasing efforts to undermine labor unions” No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself. Therefore, we firmly oppose organized efforts, such as those regrettably now seen in this country, to break existing unions and prevent workers from organizing  [Economic Justice for All, 104].

For this year's Labor Statement from the Chairman of the Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development of the USCCB, go to: http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/labor-employment/labor-day-statement-2018.cfm

A Decisive Generational Change

“So much of our politics, public life, public discourse can seem small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast, and insult, and phony controversies, and manufactured outrage,” former President Barack Obama said in his eloquent eulogy for Senator John McCain at the latter's funeral service in Washington's National Cathedral. Contrasting McCain to today's "politics that pretends to be brave and tough but in fact is born of fear,” Obama said. “John called on us to be bigger than that. He called on us to be better than that.”

This was one occasion when listening without watching was definitely insufficient. What we needed as a nation was to see the congregation - the closest thing to perfect attendance among our nation's political and cultural elite, as "bipartisan" an assemblage as we are likely ever to see. One wonders if they were all actually listening - and watching one another - and realizing how their very presence represented a rebuke to our current "politics, public life, public discourse" that have become so "small and mean and petty, trafficking in bombast, and insult, and phony controversies, and manufactured outrage.”

As we have been reminded over and over this week, Senator McCain was a heroic veteran of the Vietnam War. But what seems to stand out for me in watching how he has been remembered is our national nostalgia for something pre-Vietnam (something indeed which our conflicted Vietnam experience helped destroy). To me McCain seemed  to embody not the contentiousness of the Vietnam era and the "culture war" it unleashed, but the earlier values of the "Greatest Generation," the World War II generation, my parents' generation. He seemed to embody and live by the values my generation was initially instructed in, but which we collectively lost in various ways. What is being praised about McCain's politics reflects the older values of an admittedly imperfect but united nation, before we separated ourselves from one another and sorted ourselves out according to the vagaries of our ever-shifting divisive identity politics. 

In mourning McCain, maybe we mourn as well the loss of that sense of national community and communal purpose that made possible precisely that politics of hope rather than fear that is increasingly now merely a memory.

Priestly People

Back in the 16th century, in the aftermath of the European conquest of the “New World,” the Dominican theologian Francisco di Vitoria [1492-1546] pointed out what he called “many scandals and cruel crimes and acts of impiety,” that accompanied – and in his view undermined - the attempt to evangelize the Native American population. He wrote: “It does not appear that the Christian religion has been preached to them with such sufficient propriety and piety that they are bound to acquiesce in it.” Then as now, scandal and sin obscured the Gospel’s message and undermined the Church’s mission.  Nowadays it is moral failures and failures of leadership primarily on the part of those of us who publicly represent the Church that have scandalously disfigured the Body of Christ, obscured the Gospel’s message, and undermined the Church’s mission. Meanwhile, in this terrible time of testing for the Church, opposing factions within the Church are attacking each other with even more than the usual ferocity, mimicking the hyperpolarization we see in secular society, further obscuring the Gospel’s message and undermining the Church’s mission. As the great 20th-century American convert-theologian Avery Dulles [1918-2008] once warned, "A polarized society simply cannot attract new members or new leaders of high quality."

The situation recorded in today’s Gospel [Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23] between Jesus and the Pharisees was somewhat different. For one thing, the Pharisees themselves were for the most part good people with the best of motives.  The Pharisees were one of several factions in 1st-century Jewish life. Other major factions included the somewhat aristocratic Sadducees (who were the Temple priests), the Zealots (who wanted to liberate Israel from Roman rule), the Essenes (who lived a quasi-monastic life in the desert), and then, later in the century, those who believed Jesus was the Messiah and had risen from the dead, the faction that came to be known as Christians.

The Pharisees in Jesus’ time were committed to take religious observance as seriously as possible, while combining that with life in society. They promoted a day-to-day spirituality, that sought to make the Law come alive in daily experience, relating its commandments to the various spheres of life, and so living an active, involved life but remaining - as Saint James says in today’s 2nd reading [James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27] - unstained by the world.

In Jesus’ time, the Pharisees’ zeal and dedication were widely recognized, Although not a Pharisee himself, Jesus engaged in discussions with Pharisees and accepted dinner invitations to Pharisees’ homes. Nonetheless, the Gospel reports that Jesus also sometimes had some very harsh words for the Pharisees. What Jews call the Torah - the statutes and decrees Moses taught the people to observe - was God’s gift to Israel, a sign of God’s special closeness to his people even in the regular routines of daily life. It challenged the people to become wise and intelligent enough to observe it, and so serve as a witness to the nations. The Pharisees’ problem was that, while the Law was supposed to be a special sign of God’s closeness, here was God himself present in Jesus, but the experts in the law were completely missing the point.

In their desire to build what was called a “Fence around the Law,” the Pharisees, who, like Jesus himself, were all laypeople, not Temple priests, had apparently adopted rigorous rules of ritual purification that applied primarily to the Temple priests - thus taking seriously the biblical image of all Israel as in some special sense a priestly people. The evangelist, trying to explain all this to his 1st-century Gentile Christian audience, emphasized that this tradition of the elders represented a human addition to God’s commandments. The Gospel clearly portrays Jesus as a higher authority than the Pharisees when it comes to the interpretation and application of what God commands as opposed to merely human custom.

Identifying what is essential to living an authentic Christian moral life, sorting that out from the human and cultural envelope within which we inevitably receive it, is – always has been, and will always remain – a constant challenge for as long as the good news of Jesus brings new people from every nation, culture, and language into his Church.

This becomes especially challenging in times of significant and rapid cultural change such as we have been living through in our lifetimes. The family, for example, as a social institution is radically different from what family was a century ago. In addition to traditional extended families and modern nuclear families, we also have single-parent families, multi (i.e., more than 2) parent families, blended families, childless families, and individuals single by choice. Identifying what is essential for an authentic Christian moral life, sorting that out amid the many human and cultural envelopes we have inherited - or adopted – is no small challenge, especially since so much depends on really getting it right.

On the other hand, creating and maintaining some sort of recognizable cultural envelope – a sort of “Fence around the Law” - within which one can live a moral life in community with others and that can be passed on to the next generation is also important. Some – not all, but some - of the difficulties we have experienced in recent decades have certainly been exacerbated by discovering how fragile the cultural envelope we inherited has been in practice, leaving us less certain and less confident about how to proceed. Sorting out which of what today’s Gospel calls human traditions are best suited to foster an authentic life in today’s context is one of the greatest challenges we face going forward.

How we navigate our way through these opposing challenges matters, lest we delude ourselves, as James warned us against in today’s 2nd reading. If anything, Jesus actually challenged his hearers to an even more demanding standard. Listen to the list of sins Jesus warned against: evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. (Imagine if we all gave up folly!)

In Jesus, God has become present to transform us into the priestly people which the Law was meant to signal, to turn us around, to turn our entire lives around, to authentic, life-long, day-in, day-out discipleship – or, as James more poetically expressed it, that we might be a kind of first fruits of his creatures.

Homily for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, September 2, 2018.

Operation Finale

I was in the 8th grade when Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem after the Israeli government's successful operation to locate him in Argentina and secretly abduct him to stand trial in Israel. I was already in high school a year later when he was finally executed. I can well remember all that happening and that it was considered important, but I doubt I reflected more deeply about those events until later when I read Hannah Arendt's famous (and somewhat controversial analysis) of Eichmann and of his trial, Eichmann  in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

The story is a familiar one, of course, an illustration of Israeli effectiveness at accomplishing what few others seemed interested in (although the German Eichmann-hunter, Fritz Bauer, is given a cameo in the movie). The film tries hard to create suspense, and indeed many things did go wrong that imperiled the mission, but again we all know how the story ended, so suspense is ultimately lacking. More effectively the film focuses in particular on one member of the Mossad Team, Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), in effect telling the story through his interactions with Eichmann (Ben Kingsley) and the ghosts in his own haunted memory of the Final Solution.

Like those TV documentaries that have tried to dramatize the hunt for Eichmann and his successful abduction and extraction for Argentina, the movie mainly illuminates the bizarre experience that Eichmann's captors had to endure, cooped up with him for days on end, essentially staring evil directly in the face. In the process, while Kingsley does a great job giving some sort of personality to the character he plays, in the end one is left with yet another illustration of what Arendt so famously - and fittingly -termed "the banality of evil." 

In 1960, the war was, of course, still a recent memory. (I can remember being in Vienna just a decade later and having lunch there with someone from that generation who was still arguing the case that the West should have sided with the Reich against Russia.) So, historically speaking, we are not surprised at the horrifying evocation of the Nazi movement's continued survival and ideological resonance in the conservative  Argentinian ambience. At the time, the world would have dismissed most of them largely as losers who would not accept the verdict of defeat. Some 60 years later, they seem almost totemic figures, symbolizing a perennial type of hatred that seems successfully to resist final defeat.

Historically, the Eichmann trial brought the Nazis' Final Solution (as the Holocaust was them much more likely to be called) to center stage in a way which had been avoided hitherto - and which made it forever harder to forget. That, of course, was a major part of Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's purpose. As Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale), speaking not so much as the Prime Minister but more as the collective voice of the long-suffering Jewish people,  tells the agents in one of the film’s finest scenes, “If you succeed, for the first time in our history we will judge our executioner, and we will warn off any who wish to follow his example.”