Ponder: "the world is being found out at last"

“Many are now [1932] suffering the loss of earthly goods.  What a most glorious occasion of thanksgiving! It is to me great anguish to see so many people suffering in that way. But there is also a deep sense of thanksgiving that the world is being found out at last. We are almost heartbroken to see the Prodigal Son herding with swine, but rejoicing that he knows swill is no food for man and swine no company for gentlemen. There is some chance of the poor prodigal thinking of his father’s home and turning back. To go back is often spiritual progress. It hardly seems right to sing ‘Te Deum,’ and yet deep down in our hearts there is gratitude to God that Mammon is at last revealing is essential cruelty and vulgarity, so that mankind in his utter destitution will see that the only thing sufficiently steadfast is Nazareth and the only God worth worshipping is Jesus of Nazareth.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 57.

"A Birth Like Death": A Sermon for Epiphany

“And being warned of God a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.” 

St. Matthew 2:12

Two different couples my wife and I know well have become parents for the first time in the last few weeks.  It’s been exciting to watch this very special time unfold in their lives, as they find themselves changing in ways they could never have understood.  One of the new dads told me the other day that he was supposed to head out of town for a conference next month.  But he just didn’t know if he could handle being away from his son for that long, that long being three days.

Our friends find love and joy drawn out of them in new ways, even as the demands of an infant bring all sorts of complications to the relatively well-ordered lives they had been leading before.  Enterprising, well-educated people aren’t used to having responsibility for creatures who cry and cry, but don’t give the slightest indication about what they really need.

Sleeping schedules, meal times, ways of socializing, eventually the furniture and the layout of the house—everything must be altered to accommodate the baby’s needs. “Having a baby changes everything.”  We told them this before, and they nodded politely, as you do at those transitions in life when everyone seems to feel entitled to pose as an advice columnist.  But now I’ve heard it from their lips as well.  I’ve seen that knowing look in their eyes.

For Meditation: "and when my all of strength shall fail"

"What though my shrinking flesh complain
  And murmur to contend so long?
I rise superior to my pain;
  When I am weak, then I am strong;
And when my all of strength shall fail
I shall with the God-man prevail.

Yield to me now--for I am weak
 But confident in self-despair!
Speak to my heart, in blessings speak,
  Be conquered by my instant prayer;
Speak, or thou never hence shall move,
  And tell me if thy name is LOVE.

'Tis Love!  'Tis Love!  Thou diedst for me;
  I hear thy whisper in my heart,
The morning breaks, the shadows flee,
  Pure Universal Love thou art;
To me, to all, thy bowels move--
  Thy nature, and thy name, is LOVE."

Charles Wesley, "Wrestling Jacob"

The Passing Bell's Question

“Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”  Romans 13:11

I walked down the street from the hospital with my faith renewed, full of joy, grateful to be a priest.  I had been called in a few hours earlier because Gertrude Worrall, my oldest parishioner, had reached the end.  She was 98, baptized at Christ Church when William Howard Taft was president, a saintly woman, greatly loved by her family.  They had surrounded her in the hospital room, four or five generations of them.  We’d prayed and sang hymns together.  There was laughter and tears, and she was delighted by all of it until she slipped peacefully away.  It may sound very odd if you haven’t seen one, but there are beautiful deaths, and sometimes, as a priest, I’m invited to be part of them.

I was walking a few inches above the sidewalk as I made my way back to the church to put away my stole and the communion kit.  And I decided this would be just the moment to expand the use of the passing bell at Christ Church. 

Ponder: "som New Way, as easy, but more strange"

"Even Earthly Corn from Heaven comes, tho sence
Discerneth not the secret Influence
From which it Springs; even Rie is rooted there
Altho the Ear and Blade do flourish here.
But we are inconsiderat and Dead
And Blind and Deaf, unsensible as Lead:
And till the Ordinance of Nature change,
And som New Way, as easy, but more strange,
Awakens us, that Heavenly Influence
From whence they come affecteth not the sence."
Thomas Traherne, Manna

Right Place, Right Time, Missing the Point

Roger was lounging in the lobby as I checked into the Hotel Sandy, a cheap hostel just down the street from Rome’s Termini Station.  It was nearly suppertime, and he was yawning and stretching, as if he’d just woken up.  I asked him if he knew where to find a good pizza, and in a high-pitched New Zealand accent, he said he knew just the place if he could come with me. 

We were unlikely dining companions: me, an earnest theology student, making my rounds of the shrines and ancient ruins; Roger, an accomplished carouser, wandering from club to club until the break of dawn.  He woke up just in time for supper.  But somehow, it worked.  For five days, every evening we’d meet again in the lobby and head out for pasta, and share what we’d been discovering in the Eternal City.

The fourth night, Roger announced he would be leaving soon, and wanted some advice on what he really needed to see.  His pious Catholic grandmother had suggested Rome, it seems, hoping it might nudge him a bit in the right direction, and he didn’t want to turn up in her parlor entirely empty-handed. 

 He needed to see the Sistine Chapel, I insisted. 

He came to himself

“He came to himself and said… ‘I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.’” St. Luke 15:17-18

At first, of course, he blamed everyone else.  We would do the same, sitting there by the pigs, our bellies gnawing with hunger.  It had been quite a ride for a while: sharp clothes, fancy meals, all the wine he could drink, fast women.  He was on top of the world, a friend on every corner.  No rules, no boundaries, no regrets.  How in the world could it all have come to pieces so quickly? 

He blamed his parents, of course.[1]  Half the inheritance--they’d promised that’s what it amounted to, but it sure didn’t seem like very much.  And what about that responsible brother of his—if he’d have come to mind the books, well it wouldn’t have all slipped away so quickly.  He blamed all those who called themselves his friends, and sponged on his good nature, all those who’d tricked him into schemes and promised to pay him back in a month’s time.  Who wouldn’t blame a thief—the dealer with the weighted dice, the pickpocket who snatched the sack from his coat, the women who left his bed before dawn.  It was the fault of tailors who made shiny clothes that wore thin too quickly, tavern men who overcharged for cheap food.  And this wretched famine—who could have seen it coming.  This master he was serving—surely he could pay more.  Surely he could find some work with more dignity.  He cursed his lot.  He cursed his enemies.  He cursed life itself, and then stared back at the pigs, and he would have climbed down into the trough beside them if he could.

He was miserable, of course.  But there’s a kind of steadfastness that can come with misery, especially when we are so certain it’s all someone else’s fault. 

Ponder: capable of imagining the loves of strangers

All these cases are illustrations of the central, familiar, moral insight of the book.  "If you can learn a simple trick, Scout," Atticus advises his daughter, "you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks.  You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

For Lee, this point demands more than observation.  By actively treating people as individuals, they can respond with unexpected virtue.  In the book, Walter Cunningham is part of a lynch mob.  When Scout causes Cunningham to recall that he is a father, he walks away from violence.  Men and women can be better than the mob, when they remember their hidden dignity, their secret honor.  Lee defends the possibility of the awakened conscience.

Right now, the world of adults seems increasingly like Lee's Maycomb, with a tiny religious minority stigmatized and targeted for exclusion, and another minority being accused of being criminals and rapists, demonstrating the strangely sexual content of bigotry.  And though we now it is not quite right, there are few who can manage tears.  

Once again--maybe always--there is a great drama in what Lee called "the secret courts of men's hearts."  Let us hope with Lee that people are better than the mob and capable of imagining the loves of strangers.  And whatever the outcome, Atticus--more real than any living politician--urges us to see it through.

Michael Gerson, "Timely Insights from 'Mockingbird'" The Washington Post 23 Feb 2016, A17

For Meditation: Something Flesh and Blood

"After resisting a potentially lethal drink, Beckel sat weeping on a rock in the middle of a field.  "And I knew," he writes, there was a force that had wanted me not to do that, a force that loved me enough to stop me in my tracks and redirect my steps.  That loved me?  Me?  If there is one moment I can point to, a moment when the idea of God's grace shifted from being some kind of abstract concept to being something flesh and blood, something meaty and rich, something real, that was it."

Conversion, in the Christian tradition, requires the recognition of sin and failure, which is the only way the offer of grace makes sense.  This, to be honest, is a difficult concept for many of us to accept.  But voices as diverse as Carson and Beckel promise something encouraging: that any moment, early or late, can mark the beginning of hope."

Michael Gerson, "When Hope Begins," The Washington Post 1 Dec 2015, A15.