Praying with Queen Esther

 

The Old Testament reading at this morning's Lenten Mass [Thursday of the first Week of Lent], is part of the famous Prayer ascribed to Queen Esther, the heroine of the biblical book which bears her name, who, having head from her Uncle Mordecai the terrifying news about the impending threat to the survival of the Jewish People, Queen Esther, seized with mortal anguish, had recourse to the Lord. Next week, our jewish brothers and sisters will celebrate the joyful festival of Purim, which commemorates how God intervened in response to Esther's prayer to ensure the survival of the Jewish People. But, of course, when Esther made her prayer, she did not yet know what would happen. She could only hope, trusting in what she used to hear about God's goodness and reliability from the books of her forefathers.

To highlight the seriousness of the crisis, the context provided by the complete account in the Book of Esther tells us she took off her splendid garments (she was a queen, after all) and put on garments of distress and mourning. 

Esther's prayer is desperate, for the situation in which the Jews found themselves thanks to Haman's genocidal ambitions, was indeed a desperate one. It is also poignantly universal, expressing the sensibility of everyone who has ever felt threatened, alone, and abandoned.

"My Lord, our King, you alone are God. Help me, who am alone and have no one to help but you, for I am taking my life in my hand. ... O God, more powerful than all, hear the voice of those in despair. Save us from the power of the wicked, and deliver me from my fear."

Esther's prayer is one which could be prayed by anyone in serious anxiety about any impending evil - personal and private or political and public. The threat immediately facing the Jewish People was, of course, a political threat of national extinction. Hence the significance of Esther calling God Israel's King - presumably in contrast to the merely earthly sovereign whose royal rank she shared. But, while Esther seems to speak somewhat disdainfully of her royal (but Gentile) husband in her prayer, she is also well aware that it is her royal position which may be the means for her people's salvation. As her Uncle Mordecai himself had told her: "Who knows but that it was for a time like this that you obtained the royal dignity?"

We might well imagine pious Jews praying something like Esther's prayer at any of the many other threatening moments in their long national history, so often punctuated by persecution. In an analogous way, we might well imagine Ukrainians today praying something like Esther's prayer in this decisively dangerous time in their national history, with such implications for all of Western European civilization. We might well imagine any of us praying something like Esther's prayer in moments of acute danger we may have experienced or maybe will experience. Perhaps for some the global covid pandemic may have called forth somewhat similar sentiments. The story of Esther reminds us that life, both personal and national, is indeed dangerous, that threats abound on all sides, that feeling endangered and threatened, alone and abandoned, may happen a lot more than we would prefer to imagine. But it teaches - and that is, after all, the point of the story - that God's providential care for his people is infinite and manifests itself in surprising ways. And it also teaches us (at least by example) not to disdain the natural, human opportunities social and political life affords us to benefit from God's providence in the here and now.

Homily for the Thursday of the First Week of Lent, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, New York, March 2, 2023.

Image: Claude Lorrain (Claude Gellée), Queen Esther Approaching the Palace of Ahasuerus, 1658, The Metropolitian Museum of Art Collection. In portraying Esther's approach to the palace, the painting focuses  our attention on Esther herself and her courage in approaching the king at a moment when her eventual success was still uncertain.

A Lent for Our Time

 

Today is traditionally known as Quadragesima Sunday, the ancient beginning of the 40-day liturgical season of Lent (in Latin Quadragesima). Of course, in the present Roman Rite Lent now begins on the increasingly popular Ash Wednesday, but Ash Wednesday and the four following days were a later (already more than a thousand years old) addition to the (now increasingly less popular) Lenten season, which actually still starts counting the 40 days today, ending on the Thursday before Easter. This Sunday’s importance in the liturgical calendar is highlighted by the fact that the Roman stational church for today is the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, the “Mother Church” of Rome, the Pope’s official “cathedral.” Dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, Rome’s Lateran Basilica seems an especially appropriate place to recall Christ’s 40-day fast in the desert!

But before we get to the desert, the Church today takes us all the way back to the beginning – to the garden [Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7]. The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man whom he had formed – formed, incidentally, out of the clay of the ground, the same ground out of which God made the various trees and, a little later, the various wild animals and various birds of the air. The story is a familiar one, which we are apt to allow to gently pass over us (in one ear and out the other, as the saying goes). But its presence and prominence in this Lenten liturgy suggests that would be a mistake. It’s a story, to be sure, but more like a meditation, a study in story-form of who we are and where we've gone wrong.

In this story, that says so much, we learn that life itself is a gift. So too is the world, which we are not the owners of, but more like tenants. And, if our contemporary world environment is becoming, because of our greedy and destructive behavior, much less of a garden and more like a desert, the story has something to say about that too!

In the middle of that original garden grew a tree – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which the story suggests served as a kind of boundary, not to be touched, let alone eaten from.  It is a reminder that we human beings didn’t make the world, we don’t own it, and we are not completely in charge.

Neither, for that matter, is the smart, cunning serpent, the tempter, who acts as if he were in charge and whom tradition treats as a figure for the devil – the same Satan who will tempt Jesus in the desert, pretending there to be in charge of all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence.

The devil is thus a liar, albeit a subtle, cunning liar, who lied to Adam and Eve as he will later lie to Jesus in the desert. Like the seductions of modernity and of our modern politics, the devil is indeed a subtle, cunning liar. Superficially, of course, what the serpent says to Eve is true. Adam and Eve will not die – at least not right away. And their eyes will be opened to know what is good and what is evil. But, when what the tempter promises actually happens, then we quickly see how well we have been deceived!

True they did not die right away, but die they eventually did. Through one man, Saint Paul says, sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all. The same ground we once came from, originally filled with the Creator’s breath of life, to that same ground we must, on account of sin, return now in death – as we were so dramatically, ritually reminded this past Ash Wednesday. (In case the ashes themselves weren’t clear enough as a symbol of death, we were wisely told: Remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return!)

As so often unfortunately happens with our limited Lectionary, the first reading ends abruptly. Adam and Eve try to repair the damage they have done by making themselves clothes – in effect hiding from one another. They will soon also try to hide from God, for the tempter has taught them to think of God as an enemy, as an oppressor. But, so the story continues, God does not desert them nor abandon them to their guilt. That’s good news. And it looks ahead, looks forward, to the even bigger and better news Saint Paul proclaims in the second Sunday scripture reading [Romans 5:12-19]. But the gift is not like the transgression. For if by the transgression of the one, the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.

Unfortunately, far fewer will likely hear today's Gospel of the devil's lies to Jesus in the desert [Matthew 4:1-11] than probably received ashes four days ago. Yet I remain convinced that one of the (possibly many) reasons for the popularity of those ashes is in its shock value as a statement of the truth in a world dominated by lies and liars. Back when I used to preach on Ash Wednesday, I rhetorically used to ask what made those ashes so popular and answered my own question with some variation on the theme, "because it is true." In this “information age” when we are all bombarded on all sides with disinformation, with images and words we cannot even begin to sort out, in this politicized age of “alternative facts” and just plain old-fashioned lies, not to mention the infamous, political Big Lie about the 2020 election and all the lies which that has spawned, in this therapeutic age when we are routinely fed false narratives of human happiness and fulfillment, for once at least we are being told something that is simply and unambiguously TRUE.

We live in a world which prizes safety, comfort, and feeling good about oneself - three lies that are ubiquitous even in religion.  Yet, each year, Lent, with its sobering message of mortality and fragility and its solemn challenge to repentance, somehow still cuts through the poisonous political platitudes and psychobabble of our age to speak spiritual truth against the powerful lie of our narcissistic self-absorption. 

Thanks to Adam’s sin, the garden has become a desert. That is where we find ourselves now, and so where we encounter the devil – just as Jesus did. But because Jesus has himself not just encountered but defeated the devil, our own victory over Satan is already in sight. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.

Women Talking (The Movie)

 

"If God is a loving God, then he will forgive us himself. 

If God is a vengeful God, then he has created us in his image."

Women Talking is a 2022 American film, nominated for Best Picture, based on a 2018 book, itself inspired by actual events that had transpired at a remote and isolated Mennonite religious community in Bolivia. The opposite of an action movie, this film features almost all talk - serious talk among the afflicted women of the community about what to do when confronted with monstrous evil and how to reconcile responding to the evil with the received requirements of their faith, within which forgiveness may sadly be confused with and interpreted as permission.

The viewer enters the story in medias res, so to speak, requiring either pre-knowledge of the plot or intense attention and interpretation. The actual historical background involves a series of horrific events in the years 2005-2009, when 150 women and young girls in the community (called the "colony" throughout the movie) were apparently drugged and raped by men of the community. One of the men was caught in the act, and the crime was reported to the Bolivian authorities. A trial followed in which eight of the men were sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In the movie, it is 2010. Most of the men of the colony are away (apparently to post bail). The women have been left behind and have two days to decide whether to stay and forgive the men, to stay and "fight," or to leave. The heart of the film is thus an intense debate among 11 leading women of the colony to decide this. In the end, they decide to leave - for the safety of their children, to remain steadfast in their pacifist faith, and to be able to think for themselves.

The discussions that lead to their decision are the dramatic heart of the film. They are emotionally intense, as one would expect, and intellectually intense as well, which stands out that much more against the structural background of the women's lack of education. (The women don't know how to read, but, as the narrator boldly expresses it, "that day we learned how to vote.")

Visually, the film is bare and stark. The drama is all in the discussion - the "women talking" - as the women come to a new consciousness by means of deliberation and debate. The women represent several different generations of experience, and the wisdom gained by experience, refined through the crucible of intense suffering and a struggle with religious faith.

The Church's Mission in a Polarized World

 

In this increasingly conflicted era, when more and more people are worried about "polarization," Glenmary Father Aaron Wessman, his religious community's Vicar General and Director of Formation, has written The Church's Mission in a Polarized World (New City Press, 2023). 

Fr. Wessman starts from the widely experienced reality of polarization and division in the U.S., where "good, thoughtful, and caring people are being subsumed into the vitriolic intensity of cultural polarization." As a Catholic priest, he finds it "devastating" that those "united in divine bonds by the power of the Holy Spirit treat their fellow Christians with contempt beyond contempt," which leads to the painful admission "that the Church in the United States has, in part, lost her way through this valley of tears." 

Wessman draws on both religious and secular literature on the subject of polarization, of which there is now an abundance. For example, he follows Ezra Klein's 2020 Why We’re Polarized, referencing three now familiar contours: "sorting, homogenization, and intensification," and Journalist Bill Bishop's study of U.S. geographical sorting in his book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. The by-now familiar  result is that "most people throughout the United States are unlikely, within the county they live in, to have any in person, sustained interaction with people from a different political persuasion." 

As is widely recognized, religion plays an important part in contemporary polarization. When it comes to Catholics, Wessman notes, while U.S. Catholics "are equally represented in the Republican and Democratic parties, 48 percent, and 47 percent, respectively," there is however an underlying  "racial sorting" within the Church, in which "most white Catholics identify as Republican (57 percent) while most Hispanic and Black Catholics identify as Democrat (68 percent and 85 percent." Yet, even recognizing the legitimacy of making distinctions, there is a certain sense in which "Christians cannot be satisfied being separated by bastions with the out-group world if that separation hinders their missionary movement." Accordingly, Wessman highlights the contrast between our contemporary cultural "othering" and what he calls a "catholic" approach to the world - as demonstrated, for example, by Saint Justin Martyr, Matteo Ricci, and, perhaps above all, by Saint Thomas Aquinas.

In today's polarized society however, Catholics seem increasingly "more aligned with their political party than with the teachings of their church.” Strikingly (but hardly a surprise for anyone who has been involved in pastoral ministry in the United States in recent years), neither conservative nor liberal Catholics seem to rely primarily on their religion to form their moral perspectives.

Partcularly problematic, he feels, is the increasing reliance on the metaphor of war. Recalling the 2019 Sohrab Amari-David French imbroglio within the right wing Catholic world, Wessman

worries that "Ahmari’s invective against French showed that it was now unapologetically acceptable to some to use war as a lens to view interactions not just between two different political parties, but between members of the same Body of Christ." In contrast, he calls for what he terms "a missionary view of the ‘other’," a recognition that the "other" has "an inherent value that cannot be ignored, suppressed, or rejected."

The specifically religious alternative he envisions, then, depends on rediscovering discipleship, which (with a nod to Bonhoeffer) he notes has inherent costs. Throughout the book, the author has regularly returned to his experience of Hurricane Florence for his images and language. So now, near the end, he borrows further from that experience to speak of "crossing over into the storm of one’s out-group." This image of "crossing over" is explicitly religious and ineradicably Christian, connected as it is with the incarnation and God's self-emptying in Christ. "Jesus’ example should provide ample evidence that any Christian seriously dedicated to following Christ, and putting on ‘his mind,’ cannot help but feel called to engage in some manner of crossing over in his own missionary discipleship, to deepen Christ’s incarnational movement in the world."

Such behavior is, of course, the opposite of the narrowed vision, oversimplified analysis, and pigeonhole categorization of others that characterizes our normal posture in our polarized world. To live such an alternative requires authentic connection with the faith community and its unique spiritual resources. "Christians should not be naïve to think that they can maintain this essential aspect of missionary discipleship without regularly being fed themselves—fed by the sacraments, by prayer, and by communion with other Christians."

Negative or affective Polarization, such as we are currently experiencing in our society seems almost intractable in political and cultural terms. Fr. Wessman's focus, however, is on the Church's mission in this polarized world, which challenges us to look at these issues through a distinctive lens and to risk responding as disciples.

The Church after Innovation

 

Andrew Root is a Professor of Youth and Family Ministry, who has written several books on ministry in our secular age - most recently The Church After Innovation: Questioning Our Obsession with Work, Creativity and Enrtepreneurship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2022).

Root starts with an account of a Lutheran synodal event at which he spoke. a previous speaker , whom he nicknames "Applebees Boy," argued that the Church needs to be innovative and creative - or else die." Root also meets "Synod Executive Guy," a stereotypical church bureaucrat with the responsibility of disbursing money from the sale of closed churches. He, of course, favors investing in innovation. Later Root meets "Bearded Brown Turtleneck," who represents the interests of more traditional pastors, who would like some of the money so they can maintain their existing institutions and continue their ministry. "A few of them could have really used a roof repair. But as they spoke, they didn’t justify their opposition in such self-serving ways. Rather, they talked of liturgy, creeds, and sacraments. Innovation was wrong because it wasn’t deep, because it ignored the tradition, because it was a fad, just a hipster spin on church growth."

Not necessarily so opposed to all innovation as such, Root challenges his readers to dig deeper below the surface of the contemporary fad. He wants us to grapple with innovation and creativity's connections with contemporary capitalism and with the inherent contradictions in late capitalism. Thus the early chapters focus on the historical evolution of work and our attitudes about work. In part this is a variation on the classic Weberian thesis about Protestantism, work, and capitalism (appropriately updated by Daniel Bell's 1976 classic, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism).

In any case, whereas "once Protestantism and its commitments flowed directly into work, shaping work, now the ways we work in late modernity (driving toward permanent innovation) have come flowing back into the church, shaping what counts as ministry."

Meanwhile, capitalism's cultural contradictions combined with the unique experience of the Baby boom generation (a term I think Root rarely if ever employs, but which chronologically best identifies "the children of the 1950s and 1960s were creatures whose habitat was completely cordoned off from any self-denying work for the first time in history. They knew little to nothing of the childhood work on farms and factory floors from earlier American generations. This self-denying work was far removed from the experience and the imagination of the new American suburbs and the children.")

But capitalism requires such a sense of duty. So the "new source of duty became the self. It seemed perfect. It felt like a freedom beyond the contradiction of capitalism for the worker. But it wasn’t. It was deeply expressive and bound within you. But it was still a duty. You were now accountable to the project of your own self. You owed it to your self to work hard and advance."

Furthermore, for Root, it was Freud, whom he nicknames "the Viennese worm that exposes the true self," who has taken "us down a road where the self becomes fundamentally our own project."

Chapters 7 and 8 further develop the theme of the contradiction between contemporary capitalism's culture of innovation and  what the Church is ultimately supposed to be about. For one thing, "commitment and the neoliberal economy of permanent innovation don’t necessarily go together. Innovation produces engagement, but not necessarily long-term commitment." Drawing on Andreas Reckwitz, who builds off Foucault, Root writes about what he calls "an expressive creativity dispositif," in which - only in which - "in a dispositif that glorifies expressive creativity can disruption and insecurity (over routine and security) be embraced as a better way of being." But the "cultural realities that accompany expressive creativity corrode the faith life of the Christian confession. They become problematic for faith formation."

Chapter 9 returns to the period when money became so much more prominent. He recalls the story of Saint Francis, who "chose to be in the world naked with God, rather than follow the money." He links the reforming movement sin the medieval (Catholic) Church with the galvanizing effect of money, while also becoming "the object or target of the reforming spirit itself." Root regards the medieval Dominicans as especially interesting "for us as we seek to respond to singularity and recognize how innovation imposes an aesthetic of self-interest on workers." Root focuses on Meister Eckhart whose "mystical path, even inside a moneyed world, became the way to keep the self from curving in on itself, stripping money of its divinizing dreams and therefore its ability to overcome our desires and to inhabit our minds."

In chapter 10, "The Three Amigos of the Mystical Path," Root proposes resources from the past: "three fourteenth-century companions who will assist us in combating the inflation of the self. Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, and the Mysterious Frankfurter all enter the mystical path for the sake of embracing the world and finding God squarely in it." He then concludes, in chapter 11, with some more modern German figures - Friedrich Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Theirs was German Romanticism's response to French Enlightenment empiricism. 

Root concludes: "Perhaps in our secular age of authenticity and the drive for singularity, what the church needs isn’t innovators and entrepreneurs but poets who pray. We need more Eugene Petersons than Rick Warrens, more Kendrick Lamars than Mark Zuckerbergs. We need poets who seek the epiphanic, losing their self in the beauty of the event of God’s arrival, recognizing that their poems are prayers. Their prayer is poetry. Can innovation be epiphanic? Maybe. But not as it’s constituted now, not without its crucifixion, not without its release from an expressivist, Napoleon-like will to dominate by disruption. Innovation, without bearing the cross, is too bound in the logic of money. It is therefore obsessed with forming (schooling) not poets but entrepreneurs. As we’ve seen, innovation overindulges the subjectivity of creativity, glorifying not gift but performance."