Our Syrian Father

St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine holding aloft the Chair of Peter in Roma

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St. Paul became a Christian in Syria. St. Peter exercised his authority in Syria before he traveled to Rome. The word “Christian” entered the vocabulary of the human race in Syria.

St. Luke? Syrian.

Know anybody named Damien, Dorothy, Felix, Iggy, Rufus, or Sergio? Then you know someone named after a Syrian saint.

And, 1,606 years ago tomorrow, another Syrian saint entered his eternal reward. The Holy Doctor whose relics and statue adorn St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and whose relics also receive devout visits at Christ our Savior Cathedral in Moscow.

St. John Chrysostom.

Here’s what he said on Easter Sunday morning, around the year AD 400:

Are there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!

Trying Not to Misinterpret Christ

First: On Sunday we will read, among other things, the Parable of the Lost Coin. I learned something a few years ago that helped me understand it. Click HERE.

—

Love your enemies. (Luke 6:27)

Many people misinterpret this divine commandment like this: Christ preaches a sublime, otherworldly way of looking at things. Everyone knows both that this is the most beautiful doctrine ever and that in actual fact no one can follow it.

Because, in the real world, things get messy. God, of course, knows that. So we need Christ’s teaching to try to keep our ideals elevated. But then in the rough and tumble of actual events, we need a more practical approach. Christ meant to give us spiritual goals, for private cultivation.

The pivot point upon which this misinterpretation rests, I think, is this: When we get right down to it, what are the most fundamental facts?

How about:

You have to fight to survive. Enemies lurk around most corners, and they have countless tricks up their dark sleeves. Beauty dies and fades away. Chaos overtakes order. The only place where anything noble can really dwell is in my own head, or in the heads of my like-minded friends, to whom I cling for dear life against the cold winds.

Christ teaches us, though, that these are not the fundamental facts. We don’t know from cold winds really. Because we cannot even conceive of the nothingness that would overtake us–were it not for the real fundamental fact.

The fundamental fact actually is: Everything exists because of the love of God. Why is there a today, when there could not be one? Reality could be a tv with a “No Signal” message bouncing around the screen forever. That could be it.

But it’s not.

Things exist, like pancakes and guitars. Today exists. For one reason: Because God is waiting, with infinitely patient love, for us to turn to Him, love Him, praise Him.

Every day He makes for that one reason. As far as He is concerned, what happened yesterday really doesn’t matter. Yesterday wouldn’t have existed if He hadn’t made it, to be sure. But He made it to be a today, not a yesterday. And now that yesterday is a yesterday, God is prepared to forget all about it. That, in fact, is why He made today. Yesterday was not perfect, so forget it. Today can be better. Today we can love. Today we can live in the truth.

That’s why it exists. That is the most fundamental fact. There is one decisive difference between planet Earth, equipped with leaves, a moon, spaghetti and people smiling with white teeth—one difference between this and nothing, between this and the eternal “No Signal” message—one difference. Eternal, omnipotent love.

Loving our enemies does not mean living in a dreamworld, a fantasy, a counterfactual delusion. No. Not loving our enemies means living in a dreamworld, a fantasy, a counterfactual delusion. When we wake up to the fundamental fact, we love our enemies. Because it is immediately apparent that any other approach is really quite pointless.

Moral Argument?

Don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, “You’re too arrogant!” (Martin Luther King, Jr., April 30, 1967)

Will a Russia-brokered peace with Mr. Assad ensue now? May it please God that it does. But the devil always lurks in the details. We may very well find ourselves back at Square One–i.e., our sabers rattling. May it please God that we do not. But because we very well might, I feel obliged to point this out:

President Obama suggests that we re-watch youtubes of children choking to death on sarin gas. Is it me, or is this a sick suggestion? For the love of God, that’s the last thing in the world I want to watch.

But to the main point:

The President: “Okay. Yes, you, dear America, are war-weary. Yes, you shrink from armed conflict. I understand. But look: We have a moral obligation here. This evil dictator gassed his own people like Hitler gassed the Jews. We have a moral obligation to drop bombs on his country.”

Poor, bedraggled citizens of the US: “Okay, sir. We see your point. We understand that you have the moral high ground. But we are simply too lazy and self-centered to agree with you. You have the moral argument, but we are going to nullify it with the I-am-more-interested-in-The-Voice-and-Duck-Dynasty-so-please-stop bothering-me argument.”

…Bedraggled Americans, praise you! You stand in the position of Huckleberry Finn. He had let himself be brainwashed into thinking that he had a moral obligation to send Jim back to slavery. But he didn’t do it, because he enjoyed smoking a pipe with ol’ Jim.

The fact of the matter is that, 99 times out of 100, the moral high ground involves not dropping bombs that will inevitably kill innocent people. Make that 999 times out of 1000. 9,999 times out of 10,000. Basically 100% of the time, actually.

The President is trying to take us through the moral looking glass, into the Realm of Delusions, where it is immoral not to drop bombs that will inevitably kill more of the innocent people that we say we want to protect.

Thank God we are too lazy and distracted to go through the looking glass with him.

Miscellany + What the Jennifer Ehle Fan Notices

Click HERE for Timothy Card. Dolan op-ed on Reforma Migratoria.

…Here’s a little homily for today:

The Lord Jesus chose His twelve Apostles. Then He stood to speak to a great crowd. Anyone know what He said to begin? The first part of the great sermon? The heart of His teaching?

Here’s a hint: “Blessed are…” The Beatitudes.

Ok. Let’s review from the beginning. I mean literally the beginning. The first man’s name was… The very first man. Starts with an ‘A’…

Adam and Eve sinned and lost God’s friendship. They lost their blessedness. But the Lord began a covenant with another man whose name starts with ‘A,’ namely… The father of the nation of Israel…

Now, God asked Abraham to leave his homeland and wander as a nomad. God demanded absolute obedience from Abraham. Truth to tell, God gave Abraham a pretty rough life, a life requiring enormous faith. But Abraham kept going, because God had given him such wonderful…

To Abraham, God had made magnificent…

“You will have descendants more numerous than the sands of the seashore and the stars of the sky. In your descendants, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”

God promised Abraham that he would father a unique nation–the nation of salvation, the nation of blessedness. Abraham never completely understood the Lord’s promises. But he believed them. He believed them.

So maybe we could say: Lesson #1 we can take from the Holy Bible is this: God makes promises, and He keeps them.

Jesus’ Beatitudes promise us that if we dedicate ourselves to God, we will find His kingdom. In the meantime, we will suffer. We will be hungry. We will have to struggle to hold on to what is good and holy. When we dedicate ourselves to God, we find that other people wind up having more money and being more popular. Other people have fancy lives, while we wait on God in the cheap seats.

But: It’s worth it. God makes promises, and He keeps them. We read how power went forth from Christ, power that overcame sickness and evil. That power dwells in us, when we have faith.

Probably none of you young people can remember. Twelve years ago tomorrow, all of us older Americans had to look at death over our morning coffee. Because a catastrophic terrorist attack hit our country, almost out of nowhere. Over 2,000 innocent people died.

We needed spiritual power that morning. We needed to listen, as if for the first time, to Jesus’ Beatitudes. Yes, in this world, there is suffering. Yes, evil comes our way. But when we love God and seek His kingdom; when we try to make peace and act with justice; when we let go of the fleeting pleasures of life and reach out towards God’s eternal holiness: when we follow Christ, in other words, we have nothing to fear. Even death. We don’t even have to fear death, because the Lord has promised us eternal life.

Let’s pray for peace. Let’s hope for the coming of the Kingdom of God. Jesus keeps His promises. Blessed are we when we remember that.

…

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again. (The Tempest, Act III, Scene 2)

Any run-of-the-mill Jennifer Ehle fan takes note of the fact that she and Colin Firth re-united in “The King’s Speech.”* Ehle plays Lionel Logue’s wife Myrtle.

Myrtle says ‘perhaps’ exactly like Eliza did in the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice. Though, with only two short scenes with Lionel, Ehle hardly has the opportunity “to exhibit”–as Mr. Bennett would put it.

What would require a higher level of intensity in the Jennifer-Ehle-fan department: Noticing that the Pride-and-Prejudice reunion involves another actor, too.

Mr. Collins also appears in “the King’s Speech:” David Bamber plays the director of the Richard III production that Lionel does not get a part in.

But did any other Jennifer Ehle fan, while watching “The King’s Speech,” notice this? For the amusement of his sons, Lionel recites a speech from Shakespeare–Caliban’s speech, about the enchanted isle where The Tempest takes place.

Who dwells on the isle? Which innocent daughter of the resident magician? Miranda. And who portrayed Miranda in the Arkangel Shakespeare audio production?

Jennifer Ehle.

__________________________
* I know the movie came out some time ago. But it just arrived at the public library.

Pro-Life Pro-Immigrant

Which one of you, wishing to construct at tower, does not sit down and calculate the cost? (Luke 14:28)

Building anything requires deliberation, reflection, informed decision-making. We don’t need the Lord to tell us that; common sense tells us. But it helps when higher authority spells things out.

Now, I do not claim to know much about politics. I do know that politics involves the art of building up the nation. And I also know that when the American Bishops instruct us priests to preach on a certain political topic on a given Sunday, I had better try to do it.

In a republican democracy like ours, politics begins with our reflecting on a question like this: What kind of country do we want to live in?

We know we want a country that respects the gift of life. We want to live in a country where babies don’t get killed in the womb. We want a country where no one’s life gets snuffed-out arbitrarily. Where people get treated fairly under law.

[You may recall that we already discussed the topic which we are under orders to consider. I gave a little sermon on this subject on the Sunday before Independence Day.]

We want to have the kind of country that other people want to come to—a free and decent and honest country, a nation of humane laws and wholesome customs. And when people come here, we want to welcome them. We want to open our communities up to them. A community that can welcome new people is a strong community. A community obsessed with border-fences is not.

Things are Looking Bad and Good

The Gospel of Jesus Christ always comes as something fresh and new.

We can live as children of God! Our sins against our heavenly Father can be forgiven by Christ, and we can have a fresh start! We can learn to pray and live holy lives. We can hope for everything good, and the Lord will give us the strength to endure everything evil. In the great battle between death and love, love wins.

The Good News comes fresh and invigorating in every age, in every time and place. It brings us together and makes us a family.

And with every day that passes, during which we strive by faith and love to follow Christ—with every day that passes in the life of a Christian and in the life of the Christian family, the Church—with every day that passes in which the Gospel lives in us—with every passing day, the fresh new wine in us matures and gains flavor.

We build up discipline. We develop good customs and good manners. We produce beautiful things that help lift our hearts up to God. And we pray, pray, pray more and more.

The maturation process of the wine involves purification. In our first fervor, we retain misconceptions that come from our unconverted minds. Not everything that we think is of God actually is. Not everything which we think is against God actually is. With every passing day, which we live in faith, the Lord helps us to pacify ourselves. We develop an outlook that grows simpler and simpler—because we see things more and more as the Lord Jesus Himself sees them.

His Heart holds the abyss of infinite love. And Christ had a Heart to hold the infinite divine love because our Lady, out of the perfect purity, the perfect faithfulness of her heart, said Yes to the angel.

The Yes of our Lady, the love of Jesus: these are real, and they can give our lives meaning now, as much as they ever could.

Yesterday the upcoming fall looked to me like one of the most painful falls the United States will ever have had. It still looks that way to me.

But I think I said last spring, during the papal interregnum, that this year looked to me like the second year of Vatican II, a year of indescribable hopefulness, when a new pope got the world’s bishops together again. He kept the Council going, trusting that the Church will always move forward, like our Lady saying Yes to the angel. Because Christ lives, and His Heart will always animate our hearts.

And this year still looks that way to me, too. The rest of 2013 looks awful and wonderful at the same time. Fifty years ago today, the new pope, Paul VI, knelt praying for the Council Fathers coming to Rome, and for the world. Today, the new pope, Francis, kneels praying for all the pilgrims of peace coming to Rome, and for the world.

The Gospel sounds out, as fresh and new as always. The Lord will make it mature in us, exactly as He would have it mature. What He asks of us is faith.

Hard Fall, Hard Praying

The Lord has called us to be His disciples, to put out into the deep waters of this world, and fish for men.

Terrifying and bewildering as it may be for us to be summoned for duty by the good God Himself, we cannot say, ‘depart from me, Lord.’ Or, rather, we can say it—but He won’t do it.

So we must engage everything that comes our way as Christians, as servants of Christ. He guides our ship; He’s the captain. He will not take us out any further from shore than we can handle—even if, to us, it may seem like He has guided us out into the remote and uncharted expanses of the ocean.

This Sunday is our Lady’s birthday, which is when the wild ride of the fall flurry of activity usually begins. From all appearances, our nation, the United States, is in for a difficult, a taxing—potentially a very painful fall.

The fax machines and the internet connections at the US Bishops’ Conference have been running hot. We priests have orders to preach on immigration reform this Sunday. We are for immigration reform. The bishop who ordained me, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, published an inspiring short essay on Sunday in the Washington Post, outlining our Catholic vision for immigration reform. (More to come on that, in this Sunday’s sermon.)

But on Sunday we will also read the parable about the king preparing for war, and how he must prudently study the situation before marching to arms.

The Pope and the American Bishops have asked all of us faithful Catholics to pray for peace in Syria. We are against a US military strike. We pray that it will not occur. I will lead a rosary for peace on Saturday. Maybe all of us could recite the rosary at 5:30 pm, no matter where we are-—and we will all be united spiritually—and with our Holy Father, too, who will pray in St. Peter’s Square on Saturday evening for peace in Syria.

Like I said, I think this weekend is just the beginning of the hard praying we will need to do this fall–for our nation, for our leaders. From where I am sitting, I see a perfect storm brewing over Washington.

(May it please God that my spiritual meteorology is wrong here. May it please Him that the fall of 2013 doesn’t wind up feeling like the fall of 2001 and the fall of 1963, all rolled into one. But I am afraid that this fall will wind up feeling like that.)

Let’s pray: May the Holy Spirit of wisdom and truth enlighten and guide all those who hold reins of power.

…The good news is: The Beast is back in town! (Kinda.)

Please, Let’s Not Shoot

I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, says the Lord. (Luke 4:43)

Again and again, mankind will be faced with this same choice: to say yes to the God who works only through the power of truth and love, or to build on something tangible and concrete—on violence. –Pope Benedict XVI.

We make our gravest mistakes when we consider our options with false presuppositions. Probably the most famous case in literature is Huckleberry Finn. He learned that his friend Jim was still legally bound in slavery. So Huck thought he had a moral obligation to send Jim back to his owner. Huck didn’t do it—but he thought he was sinning when he didn’t. His presupposition was false, so when he considered his options, right and wrong were literally reversed in his mind.

The Christian leaders of the Middle East and our Holy Father honestly ask us, the United States: How can you possibly imagine that shooting into Syria will do any good? The Church, speaking with breathtaking universality, is asking us this question. We need to consider the question in order to shake off a false supposition that our government seems to have–seems to have had for fifty years.

Yes, if we could bring the innocent dead in Syria back to life, we would. Yes, if we could impose world peace from the bridge of a battleship, we would. But neither of these options fall within the repertoire of the U.S. military.

On Sunday, Pope Francis pointed out that God and history will judge and condemn anyone who uses chemical weapons and kills the innocent. The Obama administration’s case for a military strike has a number of gaping holes in it, but the first is this: Yes, using chemical weapons violates international law. But so would our unilaterally striking in order to “enforce” the chemical-weapons ban. The chemical-weapons accord does not empower us to make a punitive strike. If we believe we have an obligation to strike, then we must confer with all the parties to the treaty—in other words, with the United Nations.

Now, President Lyndon Johnson famously said, “The U.N. couldn’t pour water out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.” Actually, President Johnson referred to a liquid other than water. “The U.N. couldn’t pour [something I won’t mention in church] out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.”

President Johnson said that when he thought he had an obligation to strike the Viet Cong. Maybe the U.N. does have trouble pouring water out of a boot. But the Pope knows what he’s talking about. I was watching a few minutes of news, and one of the pundits had the decency to mention that Pope Francis opposes a U.S. military strike. But then everyone on the set laughed it off with a “Well, of course he does.” As if the Pope lives in an ivory tower of religion, but we know the realities of a rough-and-tumble world. So let’s get real and start shooting.

But who, really, lives in a fantasy world of false presuppositions? Isn’t it a fantasy to imagine that shooting a bunch of Tomahawk missiles will lead to peace? Isn’t it a fantasy for us to think that we can launch one round of missiles, which will hit only what we want them to hit, and will hit everything we want them to hit, and then ‘our duty’ will be neatly done and over with? That is a fantasy. When Lyndon Johnson fantasized about surgically striking the Viet Cong into non-existence, it was a fantasy. When we fantasized about surgically striking the Iraqi Republican Guard into non-existence, it was a fantasy. Peace did not ensue. War ensued.

The Pope has asked every Catholic on earth to pray on Saturday evening, the vigil of our Lady’s birthday—he has asked us to pray that we don’t shoot. He has asked everyone to pray that there not be more shooting, but less.

I will lead a rosary for peace at the foot of the altar at the conclusion of the 4:30 Mass at Francis of Assisi Church, Rocky Mount, on Saturday. May God help us and preserve us from decisions made with false presuppositions. God will judge the wrong-doers. The U.S. is one of many countries in this fallen world. May we be a country with truth and love for our decision-making criteria. If we love the poor, innocent Syrians who lost their lives on August 21—and we do—if we love them, then let’s love the poor, innocent Syrians who would inevitably get killed if we fire off a bunch of Tomahawks, and not do it.