Good Riddance to a Wretched Year!

On this New Year's Eve, I feel tempted to reprise and adapt to this sad year that is now ending some of the sentiments famously expressed by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II back in 1992:

2024 "is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. ..., it has turned out to be an 'Annus Horribilis'. I suspect that I am not alone in thinking it so. Indeed, I suspect that there are very few people or institutions unaffected by these last months of worldwide turmoil and uncertainty."

The end of the year is inherently a melancholy time, when we look back and remember, among other things, those we have lost this year - from the news world, Harold Fineman and Robert MacNeil, from the world of entertainment, James Earl Jones and Bob Newhart, from sports, Pete Rose and Willie Mays, from popular culture, Phil Donahue and Dr. Ruth Westheimer, as well as two priests from my own local community - all among many others. Their memory is a reminder of what we have lived through together and will never experience again.

For me personally, this has been a particularly tough year in terms of aging and health concerns. But that is perhaps to be expected at my age. What was not expected - or, at least, would not have been expected a decade or more ago. - and which is way more important than any individual personal concerns has been the horrendous transformation of American public life. Our country has always had its problems, and as a nation we have always been anything but perfect. But America 10 years ago was a nicer place than it is now. The political transformation that has overtaken our country is both a cause and a symptom of an accelerating national fall from grace. 

The year has had its share of surprising heroes (e.g., Gisèle Pelicot in France) and unsurprising villains (whom we may leave nameless). If politics provided the year's low point, the restoration and reopening of Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral may have marked one of the year's outstanding (if few) high points. In addition to restoring and reopening its glorious monument to Catholic culture, French Catholicism has also been experiencing its own modest revival. In 2024, over 7000 French adults - over one-third of them in the 18-25 demographic - chose to be baptized in the Catholic Church.

Closer to home, I was next door in the parish office one day earlier this month. It was the monthly day for distributing food. The line of those patiently waiting for food was quite long, despite it being one of the coldest days of the year. That such severe need exists in a city of such conspicuous consumption of superfluous abundance points directly to the moral failings of our society, highlighting so much of what is wrong right now with our increasingly unhappy country. 

And yet... All those people patiently waiting in line were there because other people - parishioners primarily - were working hard inside organizing and distributing an enormous quantity of much needed food. In their own way, at their own pace, in their own corner of the country, they were doing something helpful. They may or may not have had opinions about the larger national catastrophe. But whatever they thought about that, whatever their worries or frustrations, those did not get in the way of their doing something necessary and useful. How encouraging that, in spite of all the socially manufactured sadness that permeates our world, people are still inspired to let go of that and focus instead on making others' lives better - even if only a little bit better!

In the bigger picture, of course, the end of this wretched year promises the arrival of even more wretchedness.From the fact that 2024 was in so many ways a truly terrible year it sadly does not follow that we are leaving all that behind us. It is hardly the case that we are now moving ahead into a new and better year.  The challenge will be not to be overwhelmed by all the wretchedness we citizens have inflicted on ourselves and one another but somehow to let go and look for whatever opportunities present themselves to shine some light into the deepening darkness.

Jubilee

On Christmas Eve, Pope Francis solemnly opened the Holy Door of Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, thereby formally inaugurating the Ordinary Jubilee of 2025. Yesterday, in cathedrals all over the world, diocesan bishops were directed to open the Holy Year locally, along with the announcement of the Jubilee Indulgence. In the course of the coming year, the Pope proposes, "every effort should be made to enable the People of God to participate fully in its proclamation of hope in God's grace and in the signs that attest to its efficacy" [Spes Non Confundit, Bull of Indiction for the Ordinary Jubilee year 2025, 6].

I remember well the Great Jubilee of 2000, when I went on pilgrimage with parishioners from New York, walking through the opened Holy doors of the four papal basilicas in order to receive the Jubilee Indulgence. While the Holy Doors were a later addition, the Jubilee itself dates back to 1300 and Pope Boniface VIII. The practice of celebrating a Jubilee every quarter-century goes back to 1475 and Sixtus IV. With a few inevitable exceptions, the custom has continued ever since. It is a time-honored opportunity to highlight the kindness and generous love of God our Savior (Titus 3:4), which the Christmas liturgy proclaims

Having opened this Jubilee Year of Hope, Pope Francis, in his Christmas Day Urbi et Orbi message, referenced the Holy Door, which he said:

 

represents Jesus, the Door of salvation open for all. Jesus is the Door; the Door that the Father of mercies has opened in the midst of our world, in the midst of history, so that all of us can return to him. We are all like lost sheep; we need a Shepherd and a Door to return to the house of the Father. Jesus is that Shepherd; Jesus is the Door.

Brothers and sisters, do not be afraid! The Door is open, the door is wide open! There is no need to knock on the door. It is open. Come! Let us be reconciled with God, and then we will be reconciled with ourselves and able to be reconciled with one another, even our enemies. God’s mercy can do all things. It unties every knot; it tears down every wall of division; God’s mercy dispels hatred and the spirit of revenge. Come! Jesus is the Door of Peace.

Often we halt at the threshold of that Door; we lack the courage to cross it, because it challenges us to examine our lives. Entering through that Door calls for the sacrifice involved in taking a step forward, a small sacrifice. Taking a step towards something so great calls us to leave behind our disputes and divisions, and surrendering ourselves to the outstretched arms of the Child who is the Prince of Peace. This Christmas, at the beginning of the Jubilee Year, I invite every individual, and all peoples and nations, to find the courage needed to walk through that Door, to become pilgrims of hope, to silence the sound of arms and overcome divisions!

Coming at this genuinely depressing moment in world history, when the immediate future appears so bleak and dangerous, the Pope's invitation to pass as pilgrims through the Jubilee Year as people of hope is yet another reminder that a morally meaningful existence extends well beyond the tawdry boundaries of our impoverished politics.

Holy Family

 

One of the English-speaking world’s more popular modern Christmas traditions is the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols created in 1918 at King’s College, Cambridge. It begins with a single choirboy singing the 1st verse of the 19th century English hymn Once in David’s Royal. The choir and eventually the whole congregation soon join in the singing. One of the verses seems to have been tailor-made for today’s feast of the Holy Family:

And through all His wondrous childhood / He would honor and obey,

Love and watch the lowly Maiden, / In whose gentle arms He lay:

Christian children all must be / Mild, obedient, good as He.

Of course, today’s feast of the Holy Family is about more than children being told to obey their parents. Introduced by Pope Leo XIII in 1892, it reflects the modern Church’s concern, in the wake of so much revolutionary social change, to reaffirm the fundamental importance of the family as a natural institution in society and as the unique human community through which society institutionalizes its commitment to the next generation, and addressing that concern is inevitably a critical component of the Church’s social mission in the modern world. 

Like those Old Testament parents Hannah and Elkanah, about whom we heard in today’s 1st reading [1 Samuel 1:20-22, 24-28], the Gospel [Luke 2:41-52] depicts Jesus, Mary, and Joseph a devout family, faithful to their religious obligations, which include the annual Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem. So, in the story we just heard, Mary, and Joseph travel to the Temple in Jerusalem for Passover. Jesus is now at an age when he will soon assume his responsibilities and obligations as a member of God’s Chosen People, and so Jesus also accompanies his parents and their extended social network on the pilgrimage. 

In one sense, this can be thought of as a kind of “vocation” story – Jesus’ first public acknowledgment of who he is and what his mission will be. Already anticipating his later behavior as an adult, Jesus here puts his priority on his relationship with his heavenly Father rather than his earthly family. Hence, his mission is to be in his Father’s house, rather than in the caravan among relatives and acquaintances. Likewise, the wonder experienced by the teachers in the Temple anticipates the wonder so many will soon experience at Jesus’ teaching during his public life - and the wonder we continue to experience as we experience his continued life among us in his Church.

Like Hannah and Elkanah, Mary and Joseph had a son dedicated to the Lord, a son whose mission in life would take him – and his followers – beyond the limits of natural human relationships. We can hear this in the contrasting uses of the word “Father,” first in Mary’s question and then in Jesus’ surprising response. Through the Church, our new relationship with God in Jesus incorporates us into a new network of relationships both wider and more inclusive than any natural human relationships – including even the family. Jesus situated family relations within the context of the Kingdom of God, introducing a radical call to universal brotherhood and sisterhood. 

At the same time, just like the 12-year old Jesus, we Christians continue to be involved in and dependent upon that natural network of human relationships, of which the family is the first.  Hence, the Church has developed over the centuries a rich teaching on marriage and family, for the family is where we learn to live with others despite our differences and to belong to one another; it is also the place where parents pass on the faith to their children.

On the other hand, as we are all so well aware, the family today is experiencing what Pope Francis has called “a profound cultural crisis, as are all communities and social bonds.” We've all heard of the book Bowling Along, the emphasis on Alone, with fewer and fewer people feeling connected with one another and many saying they have no friends at all.

The reality in our society is increasingly one in which fewer and fewer people feel that they are able to get married. And many who do marry experience that their marriages do not last. There are obviously all sorts of social problems, such as decades of stagnant wages, which contribute to these difficulties. And then there are all sorts of social problems which follow from these difficulties. Obviously, wise public policies are needed to address these problems and their social and economic causes.

The Church meanwhile is called upon not only to advocate for such sound public policies but also to accompany families that are stressed in these various ways. 

The Jerusalem Temple to which Jesus, Mary, and Joseph went on pilgrimage, was the principal and privileged place where one would experience God’s presence among his People. Likewise, what happens here in our uniquely privileged encounter with the Risen Lord in the Eucharist is intended to intrude into and transform everything else and all those day-to-day natural human relationships, including our families. 

Today’s feast calls our attention to the transforming effect of the Incarnation in all aspects of our daily life. When he established this feast, Pope Leo XIII wrote: “When Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are invoked in the home, there they foster charity, there they exert a good influence over conduct, set an example of virtue, and make more bearable the hardships of every life.”

Homily for the feast of the Holy Family, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, December 29, 2024.

 

 

A complete Unknown (The Bob Dylan Movie)

A Complete Unknown (the title derived from the chorus of Bob Dylan's 1965 single, Like a Rolling Stone) portrays Bob Dylan's early career from 1961 his through his earliest folk music success until the his controversial use of electronic instruments at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Timothée Chalamet stars as Dylan, with Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbara as Joan Baez, and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a renamed version of Dylan's girlfriend during that time.

Although the film covers only a few years (1961-1965), it is an eventful journey through that magical time. It starts with Dylan's arrival in New York City in 1961 seeking to meet his idol, the hospitalized Woody Guthrie. He sings for Guthrie and Pete Seeger, impressing them, and leading to his introduction to the New York folk-music scene, from which he quickly rises to performing and recording stardom. Along the way he moves in with Sylvie, whom he met at a concert, and also begins an artistic collaboration (and an affair) with Joan Baez.

Dylan's talent brings him fame and stardom, but also adds stress to his life and his relationships with Sylvie, with Joan Baez, and with the folk music community. He chafes at being beholden both to the recording industry and to the folk music community, and he throws an unedifying on-stage tantrum while supposed to be performing with Joan Baez. He increasingly experiments with electronic guitar and rock instruments, which alienates the 1965 Newport Folk Festival planning committee and ultimately the festival audience. Alienated from the folk music community, if now liberated artistically, Dylan pays one last visit to the hospitalized Guthrie.

The film is, as I said above, a tour back into a magical time. Of course, the reality of life in the sixties was less magical than we aging boomers may choose to remember, but the film and, above all, the music bring us back to when we were young and when - for all its threats and problems -  the world seemed so full of promise.

Hanukkah

 

By calendrical coincidence the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah 5785 (in the Christian calendar 2024) coincides with Christmas this year, having begun at sundown on Christmas Day and ending next week on January 2. 

Obviously I do not personally celebrate Hanukkak or any other Jewish holiday. But I well remember how when I was a pupil in a New York public school in 1954, my class sort-of celebrated Hanukkah. We had a chalk menorah on the blackboard, and we used to illuminate in chalk one of its “lights” each day. (Sadly, I suspect such inter-religious experiences are probably not permitted in public schools anymore!) 

Hanukkah, as most people presumably know, is based on events recounted in the (Catholic) Old Testament in the two Books of Maccabees, which describe the horrendous suffering inflicted upon the people of Israel by their Hellenistic persecutors and the contrastingly heroic history of resistance led by Judas Maccabeus and his priestly Hasmonean dynasty, who eventually defeated the Gentiles, reconquered the Jerusalem Temple which had been desecrated, and festively rededicated it for sacrificial worship on the 25th of Kislev (December 14, 164 B.C.)

 

Famously, Jewish tradition has amplified the account in Maccabees with the story of how, when they sought to light the Temple's the seven-branch candelabrum (menorah), they found just a one-day supply of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks. Miraculously, that one-day supply burned for eight days, until new oil could be prepared under ritually pure conditions. Thus, the holiday's famous ritual of the nightly lighting of the special Hanukkah menorah - one lamp or candle on the first night, two on the second, etc., until all eight lights have been lit. 

 

We can assume that Jesus observed Hanukkah. The Gospel of John - the New Testament book most attuned to the Jewish liturgical calendar - specifically mentions both the festival and Jesus' presence in the Jerusalem Temple: The feat of the Dedication was then taking place in Jerusalem. It was winter. And Jesus walked about in the temple area on the Portico of Solomon (John 10:22-23). It was during that celebration of Hanukkah that Jesus gave his famous “Good Shepherd” discourse.

 

Even beyond explicitly religious observance Hanukkah’s popularity seems deeply rooted. A 1960s radical friend of mine once told me how his socialist, religiously non-observant family celebrated no Jewish holidays – with the one exception of Hanukkah, which his socialist father considered a people’s holiday. 

Meanwhile, The restoration of the State of Israel and the repeated challenges to Israel’s existence and the Jewish people’s survival in their land has also obviously given renewed salience to Hanukkah, which originated, after all, as a recollection of the last sustained experience of Jewish independence prior to 1948. With the 20th-century restoration of Israel as a Jewish state, the holiday's original historical significance has, naturally enough, undergone a revival, and both the Jewish theme of national liberation and the universal theme of cultural and religious freedom have moved to center stage. Religiously, this patriotic holiday, rooted in Israel's struggle against a secularizing political establishment, also simultaneously celebrates God's miraculously abiding presence among his people.

 

This year, the current threats to Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and the widespread increase in expressions of antisemitism all around the world (including in the U.S.), highlight the relevance of Hanukkah for Israel, for Jews everywhere, and for all people of good will who support the survival of the Jewish people against contemporary enemies every bit as implacable as Antiochus IV. 

 

For Jews, of course, Hanukkah has its own integrity and fullness of meaning apart from any Christian glosses. For Christians, however, God’s intervention in history to save his people and God's abiding presence with his people (signified by the Temple and, more immediately, by the miracle of the oil) are Hanukkah themes which can also resonate readily with the Christmas story. For the Incarnation is, after all, the fulfillment of God's ancient promise to save his people, which he does by becoming present among us in his Son's humanity. And like the miracle of the oil, the Incarnation has a modest, ordinary appearance. 

 

Just as the Hanukkah story contrasts the monstrous pomposity of the Hellenistic king and his elite collaborators with the more powerful simplicity of God's powerful will to save his people, so too for Christians the Christmas story contrasts the pretentiously false power of pagan emperors, kings, and governors (Augustus, Herod, Quirinius) with the divine power of the Word-made-flesh, in whom God's great visitation of the world he created continues. Meanwhile, the Hanukkah story reminds us that, despite historical and contemporary obstacles, the divine presence, symbolized by the long-burning oil, continues in his people Israel, for the gifts and call of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29).

Photo: Lighting the large menorah near the Ellipse, close to the White House, The New York Times.