Prince and Other Particularities

“But we know where he is from.” (John 7:27)

Got me thinking about: Where am I from?

Upper-northwest Washington, D.C. I’m from Redskins fans. And from white people– the most well-meaning and well-mannered white people you’ll ever find. With every passing year, I admire my mother and father more, and I thank God more heartily that He brought me into this world from Kirk and Ann White.

I’m from Chevy Chase Playground, at Connecticut Avenue and McKinley Street, where I spent most of the 1970’s trying to learn how to play basketball. Speaking of the 1970’s: I’m from a time when people trusted each other more, and got along better, I think, than we do now.

I’m from the complicated East Coast. I’m from the United States. I’m from the English-speaking peoples, from the race of William Shakespeare. Praise God!

All of us have our own particular origins. None of us can altogether escape them.

In my limited experience I have learned that the greatest delusion a man can fall into is: thinking that there is some life for him to live other than being his father’s son. And the greatest delusion a woman can fall into is thinking she can live as someone other than her mother’s daughter. The Lord gives us each total uniqueness and sovereign free will, to be sure. But He also gives us particular origins, and to despise our origins is to despise ourselves.

…They thought that the Christ must be a man of incomprehensibly mysterious origin. How wrong they were! They had it altogether backwards.

The Nazarene, Who was raised by a carpenter and his wife, Who learned from them how to speak and walk and make pilgrimages down the Jordan to Jerusalem, Who frequented the same synagogue for years, where everyone could remember when He first started showing signs of a beard—the dusty-footed Galilean has revealed the truth:

We all have one origin: We come from God. And God brings each of us into the world in such a marvelously particular way that only He could come up with it all.

God gave me a teenage experience in which I listened to the greatest musician any of us will ever hear of, and I lived the years of high-school during his prime. God gave me Prince and the Revolution to grow up with, in their prime, when Prince wrote music and put on a show like no one since.

Only God could do something like that, give me something like that. Praise Him!

Franciscan Principles

Can we beat Syracuse without Chris Wright? We have Hollis Thompson. What is there to worry about?

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…Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?

…Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin.
But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them. If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

I think we would have to say that—after our Blessed Mother—the most beloved saint of all time is Francis of Assisi.

While he was on earth, St. Francis loved the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. He loved the Church and the sacraments. He loved music and poetry. He loved his fellow man. He loved the Word of God. He loved the world because God made it, and He loved God for being infinitely greater than anything in the world.

St. Francis had a deep, complicated, and maddeningly unpredictable personality. But we love him most of all because his fundamental principles were simple.

Has anyone ever known a Franciscan? Franciscans wear brown robes with white ropes as belts. Franciscans accomplish many different works: They pray, teach, help the poor, help parishes; they operate many different enterprises. But their fundamental principles are simple. ‘I don’t need money, because God provides. I don’t need a family, because I already have one.  God and everybody is my family.’

Well, looky here! Look at the words of the Sermon on the Mount that we just heard! Your heavenly Father knows that you need food and clothing. Your heavenly Father provides for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, who neither sew nor reap nor toil or spin.

God is our Father, and we are all brothers and sisters. These aren’t just the fundamental principles for Franciscans. They are the fundamental principles for Christians.

But here’s a question. It is the perennial question about the Sermon on the Mount and about St. Francis and his followers, whom everybody loves from a respectful distance. The question is this: It all sounds beautiful, but is it really practical? Can I live by these principles when I go to buy a car? Can I live by these principles when I need a paycheck, and it’s a hard, cold world out there?

How about if we put the question in another way: Would St. Francis be so lovable if he were a flighty, impractical, irresponsible dreamer? For that matter, could we revere our Lord Jesus as the ultimate law of every human life if He were just an ineffectual waif who painted castles in the sky?

To follow the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount does not make a person impractical. Quite the contrary. The Sermon on the Mount helps us to focus on the fundamental reality of life. And the fundamental reality is: God is our Father, and we are all brothers and sisters.

God is my Father. Fathers show their love by entrusting their children with limited responsibilities. When I was a child, I did not understand anything about the mortgage on our house that my father and mother were working to pay off. But I did know that when I came home from school, I had to sit down and do my homework, and that when dinner was over, I had to do the dishes.

Likewise now. I do not understand how it is that my Father in heaven makes the sun come up; I do not understand how He organizes things so that all I have to do to get food is go to Kroger’s. I do not understand how my car works, or the refrigerator in my kitchen, even though I couldn’t live without either of them. But I do understand that it is my responsibility to try to do my best and be a decent priest. My Father loves me enough to provide everything, including even a little area of responsibility for me to control.

Everyone is my brother or sister. We are all in this together. I owe everyone my love and respect. Meeting St. Francis changed people’s lives because he treated everyone he met as if he or she were a king or queen.

But St. Francis was never anyone’s doormat. He could respect others so gently because he respected himself for the child of God that he knew himself to be.

The Lord Jesus let Himself be spat on, crowned with thorns, and executed like a criminal for our salvation. But He never tolerated the slightest disrespect for His divine mission. He repeatedly castigated even His closest friends for insulting Him by trying to make Him out to be less than He is. They wanted a new petty despot for an obscure Roman province. But Christ is the divine King of the Universe, and everything He said and did and suffered bore witness to the indescribable grandeur of Who He is.

‘Everybody is my brother and sister’ does not mean that I let one of my brothers abuse me. If a brother tries to wrong me, it is my duty as a brother to stand up for myself honestly so that we can find our way together to what is true and just.

So let’s all try to be good Franciscans. Or rather, let’s all be good Christians. God is our Father. We are all brothers and sisters.

Looking for a Cheerful Thought?

…If so, you have come to the wrong place.

Do we live on “in memory” after we die?

When I visit my dear father’s grave, I also visit the graves of my great-great grandparents. They are buried next to my father. Their graves are well over a century old.

They were dead before my father was even born. I never knew them. I can say without the slightest doubt that there is not a soul on earth who remembers anything about my great-great grandparents. I may be the only one who ever gives them a thought, which I do when I see their grave markers, and I pray that they will rest in peace.

Someday, a century or two from now, no one on earth will remember any of us.

A century or two after that, our graves themselves will be forgotten, their markers destroyed by some force of man or nature. All memory of us will be wiped off the face of the earth.

Shall we not, therefore, hope in Christ?

What other hope do we have?

Either we hope to live forever in Him, or we accept the inevitable darkness of utter oblivion.

I choose Christ.

Also–I root for the Caps!

Hidden in the Womb

The Basilica of the Visitation

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the infant leaped in her womb. –Luke 1:41

We all started off our lives in our mothers’ wombs. We were hidden from the eyes of men, but we were very much alive.

When St. John the Baptist was in St. Elizabeth’s womb, he realized that the Son of God had come to his house. In other words, St. John exercised his mission as a prophet even before he was born.

Christ Himself also exercised His mission before birth. At the moment the Lord Jesus was conceived, God first lived with a human soul. At that moment, Christ made an act of submission to the Father. The act is perfectly expressed in the words of the fortieth Psalm:

I waited, waited for the LORD, who bent down and heard my cry, drew me out of the pit of destruction, out of the mud of the swamp, set my feet upon rock, steadied my steps, and put a new song in my mouth, a hymn to our God.

Happy those whose trust is the LORD, who turn not to idolatry or to those who stray after falsehood…

Sacrifice and offering you do not want; but ears open to obedience you gave me. Holocausts and sin-offerings you do not require; so I said, “Here I am; your commands for me are written in the scroll. To do your will is my delight; my God, your law is in my heart!”

Our lives begin at the moment of conception. Life begins to unfold in the womb. St. John’s mission in life was to point out the Lamb of God. He began to fulfill this mission even before he was born. The Lord Jesus’ mission was to offer Himself completely to the Father, to sacrifice Himself for the redemption of the world. Christ accomplished His self-offering perfectly even while He was still hidden in Mary’s womb. His 33 years on earth were simply a matter of living out what He had already resolved to do.

100 Years of the Cathedral School for Boys

Andre Agassi, last to win U.S. Open in five-set Finals match

It has been a decade since a U.S.-Open Men’s Finals match went to five sets. Delpo just beat Federer in the fourth-set tiebreaker. The tall man is making Federer Federer. Very exciting…

My father, my brother, and I attended St. Albans School during some formative years of our lives. The school opened 100 years ago this fall.

I was pretty miserable at the time, but I thank God for my years at St. Albans.

I had more homework at St. Albans than I ever had in college or graduate school. The boys at the National Cathedral school were mean to each other, cruel. The cross-country coach made us run until we threw up.

But I came to understand four crucial things while I was a St.-Albans boy:

1. Being a gentleman is always its own reward.

2. The Church is as inevitable as the sun and/or moon.

3. Liberal Protestantism could not account for the truth of #1 and #2, so the discerning man looked to the Pope for clear teaching.

4. If you can write a clear sentence, you can make an impact in this world.

I wouldn’t be who I am without these precepts firmly entrenched in my mind. Therefore, I feel it is my duty to pray to God: “Vouchsafe thy blessing, we beseech Thee, O Lord, upon the School and upon all other works undertaken in thy fear and for thy glory,” as the St. Albans school prayer has it.

…More to come on Delpo and Roger…

Our Lady’s Birthday

In person, it is even stranger looking.

My father is buried in a venerable Washington cemetery.

The place is run by a very strange individual. I know this because I negotiated with him about having my dad buried with our forebears.

Anyway, I thought I would pay my dad a visit on the occasion of our Lady’s birthday today.

As I entered the cemetery, I was confronted with the sight of a small, wooden Washington Monument, with a dragon on the top of it.

I would have been stunned. But I knew the handiwork of my old friend.

Brumidi's fresco in the dome of the US Capitol

Three years ago, as he and I drove across the cemetery to see if there was room to put my dad next to his grandmother, the custodian asked the man in a Roman collar sitting next to him: “So…what religion do you follow?”

Anyway…Apparently a storm killed a few old oaks in the cemetery. So my buddy hired a chainsaw artist to sculpt the tree trunks into a depiction of Revelation 20.

Not a good idea. Sculptures of Revelation 20 are not recommended, even under the best circumstances. A “chainsaw sculpture” of Satan being released from hell, carved into the dead trunk of an oak tree? Well, it’s a prescription for hideousness.

My dad is buried fifty yards from Constantino Brumidi, an illustrious nineteenth-century artist who painted the “Apotheosis of Washington” in the Capitol dome. Brumidi’s august presence makes “Unleashed!” (the new sculpture’s title) all the more incongruous.

Thankfully, my father’s grave is not in the same section as “Unleashed!” You can still see both the Basilica to the north and the National Cathedral to the west while you are standing at my dad’s grave. It is still a beautiful, peaceful place. And when the Last Day comes, and my dad stands up again, the fire of God’s glory will have burnt the ugly sculpture to ashes.

…If you didn’t have the chance to read it a year ago, perhaps you would like to read last year’s post for the Blessed Virgin’s birthday.

Gaffer and Other Wonderful News

My dad loved sailing

Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal. –John 6:27

What is the seal that the Father has set on Christ?

Setting a seal involves impressing something upon a recipient, something that was not there before.

From all eternity, the Son of God is divine with the Father. There is no seal-setting in the generation of the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Both Persons are eternally divine.

The seal that the Father set must therefore be in the humanity of the Son. It is the seal that has united human nature with God in such a way that there is only one Person: Christ, true God and true man.

We too have our share in this same seal, through the sacrament of Confirmation.

My new nephew, Raphael

When we are confirmed, we are sealed with the Holy Spirit. Divine grace is impressed upon us in such a way that we are equipped to participate fully in the sacrifice of Christ. We become priests. We can come to the altar and offer acceptable sacrifice to God: ourselves and the whole world, along with the divine Victim…

…Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest characters ever created.

He has countless symphathetic qualities. One of them is his loving devotion to his father, who is known as “the Gaffer.” (‘Gaffer’ is a Hobbit term for ‘old man.’)

Sam always speaks of the Gaffer as an old friend whom he wants to make proud. He worries about the Gaffer’s well-being. Sam tenderly overlooks his father’s aged weaknesses.

When the Hobbits return from destroying the ring and conquering the evil Lord Sauron, Frodo tells the Gaffer that Sam is one of the great heroes of Middle Earth. But the Gaffer is not impressed. Sam takes his father’s incredulity humbly:

Kirk White in 1978

“It takes a lot o’ believing,” said the gaffer, “though I can see he’s been mixing in strange company. What’s come of his weskit? I don’t hold with wearing ironmongery, whether it wears well or no.”

[weskit: waistcoat, vest. ironmongery: in this case, armor]

…Three years ago today, my dear dad went to his eternal reward. I had the privilege of receiving him into the Church, confirming him, and giving him Holy Communion shortly before he died in Easton, Maryland.

As the plan of God would have it, today is also the birthday of my new nephew. Raphael’s older brother is named after my dad, and he also has my dad’s monogrammed cufflinks. (Although, at three, he is not yet ready to wear French cuffs.)

May God be praised! May the dead rest in peace. And may the holy Archangel watch over his newborn namesake and guide him through a holy life.

Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, from the book of Tobit

Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much

The equinox has come and gone. Easter will arrive after the next full moon!

“Praised be the Lord Jesus Christ!”

“Praised be His Holy Name!”

This is the exchange I had in the middle of Columbia Rd., N.W. at 8:30 this morning.

The brother was wearing a tanktop with “Jesus is Lord” on the back.

Don’t talk to me about basketball, because…