The Arrogance of Power and the Power of Friendship

Here is an offering from my guest blogger, Fr. William C. Graham.  Fr. Graham is a priest of the Diocese of Duluth in Minnesota, where he directs the emerging Braegelman Program in Catholic Studies at the College of St. Scholastica. His book A Catholic Handbook was published last year by Paulist Press and his forthcoming book will be published by Paulist in autumn 2011: A Catholic Handbook on Sex: Essentials for the 21st Century. I've had the privilege and delight of being his editor.

In our Church and in our society today, we are acutely sensitive both to the arrogance of power and the abuse of power. We are given examples and antidotes in the scriptures appointed for us in these Lenten days. For example, we heard on the first Sunday of Lent about Jesus, tempted in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). He does not turn stones to bread to satisfy his hunger; we note that the power of Jesus is used always on behalf of others, never to satisfy personal need or desire.
    We see something similar in the gospel story of the raising of Lazarus. I was helped to recognize this Lenten lesson by an e-mail one of my sisters sent out last week, a story making the rounds on the internet:
    An officer of the Drug Enforcement Administration stopped at a ranch in Texas and spoke with an old rancher. He told the rancher, “I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs.” The rancher said, “Okay, but don’t go in that field over there,” as he pointed out the location.
    The DEA officer exploded, saying, “Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me.” Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removed his badge and proudly displayed it to the rancher. “See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish. On any land. No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?”
    The rancher nodded politely, apologized, and went about his chores. A short time later, the old rancher heard loud screams and saw the DEA officer running for his life chased by the rancher’s enormous bull.
    With every step the bull was gaining ground on the officer, and it seemed likely that he’d be gored before he reached safety. The officer was clearly terrified. The rancher threw down his tools, ran to the fence and yelled loudly: “Your badge! Show him your badge!”
    How power is used and for whom is a question that leads us to consider what Dominican Sister Barbara E. Reid, writing in America magazine (April 4, 2011), calls the most puzzling part of the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45) that Christians who share the common lectionary read this year on the fifth Sunday of Lent.
    Jesus hears that Lazarus is sick, but does not go immediately to his friend. Later Martha says, “If you had been here my brother would not have died.” She and her cohort seem to wonder, Where is Jesus when you need him?
    Reid notes that as Jesus’s followers try to build communities of equal disciples, the challenge is to embrace as friends those who are not kin and those to whom we are not naturally drawn. This is the mission and example of Jesus: he loves all people—to the death. There are no favorites or best friends.
    We are to understand, writes Reid, that the anonymous Beloved Disciple represents each person who allows himself or herself to be loved by Jesus and to love him in return. All of us, beloved of Jesus, can put ourselves in the place of the one who rests on Jesus’ bosom (13:23).
    This Christian belief in the life-changing presence of Jesus will not take away our grief but, instead, turn our mourning into hope-filled joy.

St. Thomas Aquinas -- again

Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium.

Editing a manuscript on early and medieval theologians the other day, and using the Internet to check some facts, I happened upon some "interesting" claims about why St. Thomas is called the Angelic Doctor.
  A few self-proclaimed "authorities" said that it was because he wrote so much about angels, you know, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Some others recounted the story about how, when one of his brothers brought in a prostitute to tempt him to give up the idea of joining the Dominicans, Thomas chased her out of the room with a burning torch--and then they go on to add that angels visited Thomas to reveal to him that he had been granted the gift of perfect chastity and would never have to struggle with sexual desires.
  I'll spare you my rant about being very careful what you trust on the Internet; we all know that. But Thomas is one of my favorite saints (he's a Dominican, after all) and it appalls me to see this rubbish being propagated about him.
  First we have one of the greatest intellects that ever lived, who wrote not only theological treatises but also some of the most stunning poetry in the Christian tradition, being reduced to some New Age claim that he wrote chiefly about angels--and irrelevant nonsense at that.
  The well-known story about the prostitute may or may not be apocryphal; in any case, if I were making a film about Thomas's life I'd certainly include it, it's great drama. But the pious postscript about the gift of perfect chastity--What good does it do us to believe such a legend? What kind of a role model can such a person be? How do we honor Thomas (or any saint) by lifting him out of the realm of normal human struggles--and victories?
  Thomas was a Mensch.  Not for nothing was he a Dominican when there were so many other choices available. When I taught medieval Christianity to seminary students I had a segment called "What Made Thomas Tick," and I wrote on the board the words from Leonard Cohen's song "Suzanne" (in the verse about Jesus), "Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone."  Then I said, "This was not Thomas."
  No, it took others after Thomas to develop virtual caricatures of his theological method. As much as I dearly love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I somehow can't blame the Jesuits for being annoyed that, as theologians went, he favored Scotus over Aquinas.
  Well, March 7 is the anniversary of Thomas's death and thus should properly be his feast. But his feast was moved to January 28.  I doubt if Father Dominic and Jordan of Saxony and especially his teacher Albert the Great would mind if we celebrated the Angelic Doctor--so called because his intellect was so astounding that it seemed as if only a superhuman being could possess it--twice.

An Extraordinary God

“They ate and were satisfied. They picked up the fragments left over—seven baskets. There were about four thousand people.”

I don’t like Ordinary Time. To put it more accurately, I don’t like that there’s a season called Ordinary Time. Time was when we called the Sundays after the Christmas season “Second/Third/etc. Sunday after Epiphany” until we got close enough to Lent to give them the mysterious Latin names of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and so forth up to Lent; then between the Sunday after Trinity and the beginning of the next Advent we referred to the “Third/Fourth/etc. Sunday after Pentecost.” Many of our Protestant friends still do this with those post-Pentecost Sundays, except that they count them “after Trinity.” Either way, it’s a continual reminder of one of the central events or truths of the Christian faith.
    The problem with “Ordinary Time” is that it tends to make God ordinary. It makes Jesus ordinary. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all in favor of seeing God in the ordinary circumstances of our lives and would never want to return to the days when God and religion occupied a separate compartment that impacted not at all on the other aspects of our lives—the complete dichotomy between sacred and secular. If I pursue my photography with a passion, it’s because it’s my way of reverencing God’s creation; it’s my way of praying. It’s not something that has nothing to do with my weekly attendance at Mass. Nor am I promoting that old mindset—a sort of misplaced or exaggerated high Christology, if you will—that regards Jesus as some sort of supernormal human being instead of as “a man like us in all things but sin.”
    But there’s the point. Jesus was normal. He wasn’t ordinary. Could an ordinary person have fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a few fish?
    Seeing God in our ordinary everyday lives should not be confused with seeing God as ordinary. The “Ordinary Time” mindset drags him down to the ordinary, and the result is the invasion of today’s prevalent narcissism into our worship life so that First Eucharist services degenerate into school graduations that celebrate the kids, cantors are regarded as, and behave like, singing stars instead of servants of the Word, and—well, you can name your own examples, I’m sure. (I'd love it if you'd share some with me by posting a Comment.)  How many parishes do you know whose motto should be “It’s all about us”?
    What do you do to ensure that you regard God in awesome wonder instead of as ordinary?

Antiphon: Lumen ad revelationem gentium

"...You held in your arms Christ the Lord, the Savior of his people."

The week in which the month turns from January to February holds three of my favorite feasts. First, on January 28 we celebrate that most extraordinary intellect and mystic of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas. Now, many of my Dominican friends rightly clamor for the return of Thomas's feast to its rightful place on March 7, the day on which Thomas died. But at the same time, there's something appropriate about its present position a few days ahead of my other favorite feasts, the Presentation of the Lord (February 2) and St. Blaise (February 3).  Here's why.
    Before there was Thomas, there was St. Anselm of Canterbury, "father of Scholasticism," a ground-breaking theologian who also authored some of the most exquisite prayers. Anselm sought to prove the existence of God, and he did so entirely within the reasoning of his own mind. In other words, his proofs, called the Ontological Argument, take place entirely as an exercise of logic and do not depend on or refer to any external experience. Trust me, explaining Anselm's argument to divinity students, even grad students, is an interesting challenge.
    Then along came Thomas. Thomas also sought to prove God's existence, but to do so he went to the natural world, to the realm of sensory experience. You can infer God's existence from what you see, hear, experience all around you. No wonder that Thomas had fought so hard with his family to be allowed to join the Dominicans, that earthy band of black-and-white-clad religious soldiers whose founder, St. Dominic, believed that God "had not created the world in vain," as it says in Isaiah 45. The earth is good, God meant it to be lived in.
  And indeed, God took a giant leap out of heaven to come to the earth he created, become a human just like the ones he made, and pitch his tent among us. We celebrated that event forty days ago, on Christmas. Now, on the Feast of the Presentation, we recall the baby Jesus being brought to the Temple by his parents to offer the customary sacrifices expected of all good Jews. And there Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, were met by Simeon and Prophetess Anna, the two "senior saints" (see my blog for December 30) who had been anxiously awaiting the coming of the Messiah. Simeon takes the baby into his arms and calls him a "light of revelation to the Gentiles."
   Once again, light.  God is symbolized as light.  Light can be seen. Light helps us to see. When it's being produced by fire, light can be felt, as warmth.
    And so we celebrate the Presentation as a feast of lights.  It used to be called Candlemas Day, the "feast of candles." Even now, there is a solemn form of entrance for the beginning of the Mass in which the participants carry lighted candles and sing about Jesus as light of revelation. The 12th-century abbot Blessed Guerric of Igny has a wonderful sermon for this day on which he compares Christ to a candle and invites his Brothers now to light their own candles for the procession.
  And as February 2 gives way to February 3, candles are still with us--the special candles used to bless throats on the Feast of St. Blaise, venerated as patron of those suffering from throat disorders because he once saved a boy who was choking to death on a fishbone. The proper way to do this blessing is to hold the pair of candles, tied together in the form of an X, against the person's throat and pronounce the prayer of blessing. Alas, this is one of those time-honored, beloved customs that have largely gone by the boards in the last few decades. In the interests of time, or expediency, or some other excuse, the blessing is sometimes pronounced as a general blessing over the people at some point during the Mass--at the Intercessions or as part of the final blessing--and usually on the preceding Sunday, not the day itself.  Time was when you would line up after Mass on February 3 to have your throat individually blessed. One year when I was working in a parish in the NW Adirondacks I had the privilege of being dispatched, with candles and prayer card, to an apartment building that housed elderly and sick people to visit each of them and give them the blessing. 
    It's an event of the senses. Something that reminds us that our God is a God of the tangible--read Francis Thompson's poem "Kingdom of God." Now we've largely lost that. I don't think Thomas Aquinas would approve.

Turn the Car Around

 "Paul was transformed from being a persecutor of Christ

into a vessel of his grace."

The readings for today's feast of the Conversion of St. Paul offer a choice between the two accounts of this event from the Acts of the Apostles. One is a third-person account, the other is Paul's own testimony, and they are remarkably similar, though not identical. Whichever reading one chooses, each points out one very remarkable fact about Paul.
  Paul's conversion involved no less than a complete, fundamental change in his life orientation. From a devoted, even fanatical Pharisee intent on destroying this new "Way" of Jesus that seemed to be causing a rift in Judaism, Paul suddenly became an adherent of it--indeed, every bit as devoted and fanatical an adherent as he had been to traditional Judaism. Neither of the Acts stories says anything about his having been knocked off a horse; was he using any method of transportation other than his legs, anyway, en route to Damascus? We don't know; but if we want to use a car analogy, this would have meant a complete and utter U-turn.  Not only that, but Paul was quite open and honest about admitting his change of course; admitting that he had been drastically wrong in persecuting the followers of the Way. He tells his story to the assembled people of Jerusalem. And in his first letter to the Corinthians, he declares that he isn't even fit to be called an apostle, "because I persecuted the church of God." But he had the courage and integrity to do what had to be done: to admit publicly and honestly, "I was wrong." There's that somewhat touching story about how some of the early Christians were afraid of him, because his reputation had preceded him. But they must have been won over by his humility.
  The courage and integrity to "turn the car around" and the honesty to admit he was wrong. Where do we need, or have we needed, Apostle Paul's inspiration and prayers for something similar in our lives?

Antiphon: Out into Deep Waters

"The voice of the Lord on the waters,

the Lord on the immensity of waters."

I think of certain feasts as events on which the Lord Jesus blessed certain natural elements in a special way. For me, the Baptism of the Lord is such an event for water. The antiphons for the Liturgy of the Hours for this feast depict various aspects of this event as being on a cosmic scale: "the waters of the Jordan tremble"; "our Savior crushed the serpent's head and wrested us free from his grasp." And yes, "Springs of water were made holy as Christ revealed his glory to the world." I've never seen the River Jordan but I understand it's quite modest in appearance compared with what I like to imagine in connection with the Baptism of the Lord; in my mind it's as great and powerful as the waves in this photo, taken the day after a gale-force storm on Narragansett Bay.
  Jesus would go on to speak and preach a great deal using water imagery. In particular, he encouraged his disciples to launch out into deep waters. And in this, he provided a sterling example, leaping down from heaven to pitch his tent among us. The reading from Isaiah for today's liturgy is one of the Suffering Servant Songs. We are all called to serve. Unlike Jesus, we are not all called upon to serve in a way that entails extensive suffering.
  Unfortunately, however, some of us are. Today I think particularly of the young Congresswoman from Arizona, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Because of my connections with Sweden I can't help but recall, as well, another young woman politician, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, assassinated in 2003. Two who launched out into deep waters to serve their respective countries.
  Let us pray for the promise made in today's Responsorial Psalm: "The Lord will bless his people with peace."

Antiphon: With Royal Beauty Bright

"Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you."

All those promises we read throughout Advent about a great light are now, on the feast of the Epiphany, crystallized into this one light: a star. A star that isn't some cute excuse for a dash of glitter on a Christmas card, but one that is an intriguing blend of mystery and astronomical precision. Who, exactly, were these magi? How did they find and follow the star? Yet, Matthew's Gospel account as well as familiar and not-so-familiar carols describe its course through the heavens. The mystery has inspired great artists through the ages, including Giotto and Botticelli and, in turn, the composer Respighi, whose "Adoration of the Magi" is my favorite section of his Botticelli Triptych.
    One song that we wouldn't automatically think of as belonging to this season is actually delightfully appropriate, because its text is the reading from today's Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours: that splendid text from Isaiah, "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news." The song is "Our God Reigns," and you may remember its popularity from the 1970s and '80s. It was written by Leonard Smith, who lived out of irrepressible enthusiasm over the fact that God loves us. The third verse begins, "Wasteplaces of Jerusalem, break forth with joy."  Wasteplaces! Our Scripture translations usually say "ruins." "Wasteplaces"--the town dump, a burnt-out inner-city slum, a neighborhood flattened by a tornado--breaking forth with joy! This is one of those dissonances that make the Advent and Christmas seasons so intriguing--"How can this be?" as Mary asked--something that, in a most appealing way, just doesn't add up.
    Like those mysterious magi who come from God-knows-where to give precious gifts to an unknown baby King and then, their lives changed, return by a different route. What encounter with Christ has caused you to go by a different route?