05-23-2010: Pentecost

Pentecost

Acts of the Apostles 2:1-11 / Psalm 104 / 1 Corinthians 12:3-7,12-13 / John 20:19-23

A few years back a woman needed a kidney transplant. In testing her sons as prospective donors, researchers discovered that the woman seemed genetically unrelated to either of her sons. It was eventually determined that the woman was a human “chimera,” possessing two different strands of DNA. Researchers concluded that the woman, while in utero, had absorbed into her body, the body of her dead fraternal twin.

Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are currently debating how humans and Neanderthals might have related. Did they interbreed? Did Neanderthals possess language capacity?

Back in the 1950s Jean Bruller, under the pseudonym of Vercors, wrote a little known novel You Shall Know Them about the offspring of a human being and a monkey, an intriguing way of exploring what it means to be human. “All men’s troubles arise,” Vercors wrote, “from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.”

Pentecost is about many things. It’s about big things: like providing the legend to explain the phenomenal growth of an obscure Jewish sect into a religion which today claims more than a billion adherents. And it’s about small things: like breath. Breath, so subtle a thing, that it’s at one and the same time absolutely essential for human life yet continually being taken for granted by all of us until something threatens to take it away. Breath, in its pushing out and sucking in, is also the fuel that propels human sound which, when passed through larynx and palate and tongue and teeth, forms a most remarkable thing – human speech expressed in a particular language. The story of Pentecost is bound up with human speech, its origin and its immense diversity through time and space. Which is to say that Pentecost is about one of the greatest of human endeavors: making yourself understood and, even more importantly, understanding yourself.

I once knew someone, advanced in years and, though highly intelligent, had received little education. When confronted with the necessity of receiving a blood donation because of her medical condition, she was genuinely intrigued, and not a little worried that, with the donated blood, she would also inherit the attributes of the donor. She wondered out loud, half-jokingly, if her skin would change color because of her donor’s race or if she would be physically stronger if her donor was male.

Perhaps human nature can be understood in the way we now view race – more as social construct than a biological one. Biologists insist we humans possess an animal nature; theologians claim we are made to receive a divine one, fitting like hand-in-glove, mirroring the mystery of Jesus’ unique identity as both human and divine. In the old days liturgists would spend a lot of time arguing about the proper mixture of water and wine the priest placed in the chalice at Mass, because it would represent the mixture of the divine and human in Christ - as if anyone could really know.

Pentecost, with its admixture of elements, admits us into that discussion about animal, human and divine natures. If language represents our capacity to make ourselves understood and, in turn, understand ourselves, then the gifts of the Spirit can lead us to better express who and what we are as human beings. Remember, though, that the Spirit chose to come to the apostles as a dove: God, as it were, using animal nature to convey a divine reality - perhaps because our human nature is so bound up with the animal world. What Pentecost reveals is that we human beings aren’t just the sum of our parts, that there’s an essential but ineffable reality we are drawn to – call it the divine. But it comes to us through our relationship to the animal kingdom and reminds us how essential that relationship remains in our pursuit of self awareness. An awareness that reveals what we are and what we would want to be.

05-23-2010: Pentecost

Pentecost

Actis of the Apostles 2:1-11 / Psalm 104 / 1 Corinthians 12:3-7,12-13 / John 20:19-23

A few years back a woman needed a kidney transplant. In testing her sons as prospective donors, researchers discovered that the woman seemed genetically unrelated to either of her sons. It was eventually determined that the woman was a human “chimera,” possessing two different strands of DNA. Researchers concluded that the woman, while in utero, had absorbed into her body, the body of her dead fraternal twin.

Anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are currently debating how humans and Neanderthals might have related. Did they interbreed? Did Neanderthals possess language capacity?

Back in the 1950s Jean Bruller, under the pseudonym of Vercors, wrote a little known novel You Shall Know Them about the offspring of a human being and a monkey, an intriguing way of exploring what it means to be human. “All men’s troubles arise,” Vercors wrote, “from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be.”

Pentecost is about many things. It’s about big things: like providing the legend to explain the phenomenal growth of an obscure Jewish sect into a religion which today claims more than a billion adherents. And it’s about small things: like breath. Breath, so subtle a thing, that it’s at one and the same time absolutely essential for human life yet continually being taken for granted by all of us until something threatens to take it away. Breath, in its pushing out and sucking in, is also the fuel that propels human sound which, when passed through larynx and palate and tongue and teeth, forms a most remarkable thing – human speech expressed in a particular language. The story of Pentecost is bound up with human speech, its origin and its immense diversity through time and space. Which is to say that Pentecost is about one of the greatest of human endeavors: making yourself understood and, even more importantly, understanding yourself.

I once knew someone, advanced in years, and though highly intelligent, had received little education. When confronted with the necessity of receiving a blood donation because of her medical condition, she was genuinely intrigued, and not a little worried that, with the donated blood, she would also inherit the attributes of the donor. She wondered out loud, half-jokingly, if her skin would change color because of her donor’s race or if she would be physically stronger if her donor was male.

Perhaps human nature can be understood in the way we now view race – more as social construct than a biological one. Biologists insist we humans possess an animal nature; theologians claim we are made to receive a divine one, fitting like hand-in-glove, mirroring the mystery of Jesus’ unique identity as both human and divine. In the old days liturgists would spend a lot of time arguing about the proper mixture of water and wine the priest placed in the chalice at Mass, because it would represent the mixture of the divine and human in Christ - as if anyone could really know.

Pentecost, with its admixture of elements, admits us into that discussion about animal, human and divine natures. If language represents our capacity to make ourselves understood and, in turn, understand ourselves, then the gifts of the Spirit can lead us to better express who and what we are as human beings. Remember, though, that the Spirit chose to come to the apostles as a dove: God, as it were, using animal nature to convey a divine reality - perhaps because our human nature is so bound up with the animal world. What Pentecost reveals is that we human beings aren’t just the sum of our parts, that there’s an essential but ineffable reality we are drawn to – call it the divine. But it comes to us through our relationship to the animal kingdom and reminds us how essential that relationship remains in our pursuit of self awareness. An awareness that reveals what we are and what we would want to be.

05-16-2010: Seventh Sunday of Easter

Seventh Sunday of Easter

Acts of the Apostles 7:55-60 / Psalm 97 / Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20 / John 17:20-26

One of the great things about fiction is its ability to focus exclusively on one particular trait found in any given character; something we can’t do in “real” life, simply because we are too harried by its haphazard complexities. In some works of fiction that particular trait can, itself, take on characterization. So it happens in the recently released film, Mother and Child, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia.

The plot is a simple one: a fourteen year old girl gets pregnant by her boyfriend and must relinquish her daughter to a closed adoption. The film explores how that one particular experience affects the interconnecting lives of others in the near four decades that follow. The story explores how this one act is the abiding thread in the life of that birthmother who admits to a persistent suitor that everything she has done over the course of forty years always leads her back to that unalterable decision. We are taken into the fast-lane life of the adoptee, a high-powered lawyer, who uses sex as an instrument of power and an expression of anger. We enter the lives of an infertile couple seeking to adopt a child but who must swallow their pride and woo the prospective birthmother to choose them as the prospective parents of her unborn child. But none of these players is the protagonist of the story. The central character is not a person but an experience. And the experience is not one easily defined, but nonetheless concretized in the characters’ actions. Actions, not pleasant to witness, and ones we might determine selfish, cruel and downright ugly. Actions, and reactions, we might judge, at best, pathetic.

Pathetic is a word that possesses a sufficiently pejorative connotation to account for our negative judgments but still retains a sense of profound sadness that belies our rush to such a judgment. Although not cognate, the Greek word pathos is akin to pothos and gives an insight into its complex meaning. Pothos connotes desire, yearning. It’s used in ancient texts to describe the feeling Alexander the Great experienced which sent him halfway round the world in a kind of restless quest, resulting in conquest. Pothos has an erotic side, possessing a sense of yearning that could be translated as a “crying out for" or “pining for,” as when a young man cries out for his beloved to pine for him in return. Seen in this way, we might understand why the fifty-something birthmother in the film has hardened her heart over the years; or why the adoptee is so seemingly cruel and contradictory in using intimate things to avoid intimacy; or the apparent madness overcoming an infertile woman desperate to become a mother. Pathetic actions are understood in a different light when we see that anger is not so much an expression of hatred but of sadness, the reaction to a wound that never quite heals, a hurt that can never be totally locked away.

Perhaps that’s what we “celebrate” on this pivotal Sunday in the liturgical calendar, this Sunday between the Ascension of the Lord and Pentecost, when the Lord has vanished, physically disappeared from the lives of those who loved him and who are left with a rather vague promise of return sometime in the undisclosed future. In the last lines of the Bible, in St. John’s Revelation, the feeling is described as a thirst: a shared human experience that informs all truly religious experience.

Mother and Child doesn’t have a classic happy Hollywood ending, but it’s fundamentally positive in its resolution. While none of the characters gets what he initially thinks she wants, the film reveals to us by very graphic depictions, that there are certain things we have no control over - we cannot alter the past no matter how hard we try. The pathetic actions of each character remind us that, although absence might make the heart grow fonder, it often makes the heart grow cold as well, and bitter to its very core. But this pathos and pothos is the beginning of redemption. Realizing that something is missing from deep inside, that we all have a hole in our heart, that there’s a sadness at the very core of human experience is the first step in turning bitterness into something life-affirming; that, despite the vagaries of life - the cards we seem to have been randomly dealt - we ultimately do have a choice.

05-09-2010: Sixth Sunday of Easter

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts of the Apostles 15:1-2,22-29 / Psalm 67 / Revelation 21:10-14,22-23 / John 14:23-29

A cultural trait that seems universal in practice is the taboo of talking about sex and motherhood at the same time, even though (up until quite recently) there couldn’t be the latter without the former. The taboo carries over when (up until quite recently) the conversation turns to sex and the Church which, as metaphor would have it, is often called our mother. This Mother’s Day that taboo will be discarded, to a degree, as the revelations of sex abuse and cover-up continue to emerge from beneath the very tight lid imposed by that taboo, through the imposition of secrecy, on the recent history of Holy Mother Church.

The story of the founder of the Legion of Christ, Father Marcial Maciel, which has now been corroborated beyond dispute, is perhaps the most illustrative of how secrecy motivated by shame produces a far worse scandal than that which sought to be avoided in the first place. Father Maciel sexually abused underage seminarians for decades. He also fathered several children by different women and used his Order’s financial resources (some say the Legion has more than one hundred billion dollars in assets although its actual worth remains a secret as well) to support those families in Europe and Latin America. Father Maciel escaped being brought to task for decades because of his tremendous influence (read: financial) over high Vatican officials, including the former Secretary of State and current Dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Cardinal Sodano. It was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, however, who pressed for action against Maciel but was prevented, as has been alleged, by the intervention of Pope John Paul II himself. When Ratzinger ascended to the papacy, one of the first acts of his pontificate was to formally remove Maciel from any active ministry and consign him to a monastery. But secrecy, no doubt born of shame, continued to dominate the agenda right up until last week when the accusations against Maciel were finally acknowledged. One of the damaging effects of secrecy in this particular case was bringing into question the reputations and the veracity of those who brought the accusations. These priests and professional men had brought their concerns to the proper authorities decades ago, but their petitions to Rome, as well as the petitions of the bishops through whom they were brought, went unanswered - save for vehement denials and the slander against them made by members of the Legion of Christ. One might understandably ask why the good reputation of many were sacrificed – through the practice of secrecy - to protect the criminal behavior of one man now acknowledged as guilty of even more than of what he was initially accused.

Simone Weil may offer an insight: “Secrecy,” she wrote, “is everywhere the soul of bureaucracy. It is the condition of all privilege and of all oppression.”

A few years ago I earned the ire of our diocesan bishop by publishing an op-ed piece making an analogy between the secrecy employed by bishops in their handling of priest sex abusers and the secrecy employed by bishops as they falsified baptismal records of adopted persons. In both situations illicit sex resulted in a perceived shame which, if exposed, would result in scandal. Secrecy, it was thought, would save the birthmother the stigma of shame and the child the stigma of illegitimacy; while, in the case of sex abuse, secrecy would save holy mother church the shame of acknowledging the criminal sex committed by some priests and would thus prevent the loss of faith on the part of many. But secrecy always, without exception, necessitates the telling of lies and ultimately destroys the trust on which families, both nuclear and ecclesial, need to be based.

The right to truth should trump the need to avoid scandal. Certainly there is a need and a right to confidentiality: birth mothers have the right to privacy from strangers, but they do not have the right to privacy from the children they bore. Likewise confidentiality regarding accusers and accused should be employed at every opportunity but that right does not trump the right of innocent children to be protected from those already accused of sex abuse.

When my mother became pregnant with me in 1952 she told no one but came to a maternity home here in New York City where she gave birth and relinquished me to adoption with the guarantee of secrecy. The taboo about illicit sex and motherhood was at its peak back then. Sex and shame comingled and found a solution to the problem under the umbrella of secrecy. The need for secrecy, then as now, was confused with the right to confidentiality resulting in the rather offensive belief that a mother has a right to privacy from her own child and that right trumps the right of the child to know his/her own parents. The Church was, and remains, complicit in this deception in so far as bishops continue to permit falsified baptismal certificates to be issued. In fairness, bishops now insist that baptisms cannot be performed until adoptions are finalized so the certificate can reflect the legal reality if not the biological one. Yet it seems another scandal is looming if the Vatican eventually agrees with some bishops who insist that even after adoptions are finalized the adopted parents may not be placed on the baptismal certificate - if they are gay or lesbian. Wait till that gets out!

Secrecy is everywhere the soul of bureaucracy…the condition of all privilege and of all oppression. The desire to avoid what is perceived to be scandalous at the expense of truth seems inevitably to lead down a path that dead-ends in far greater scandal. The imposition of secrecy always, without exception, results in the telling of lies. And the telling of lies, according to St. Thomas, is nothing less than an act of violence committed toward the person about whom the lie is told.

05-02-2010: Fifth Sunday of Easter

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts of the Apostles 14:21-27 / Psalm 145 / Revelation 21:1-5 / John 13:31-35

St. John waxes poetic, and prophetic, in his Book of Revelation. Today he’s telling of his vision of a new Jerusalem, a holy city, coming down out of heaven. When I think of Jerusalem, though, I don’t think of it as new, but quite old. In 1983 I volunteered to work on an archaeological dig at the City of David, the area in Jerusalem that borders the Kidron Valley as it slopes downhill from the Temple Mount. The excavation unearthed some important finds over the years and I happened to be there when they discovered a stash of ancient bullae that may have been made by the prophet Jeremiah himself at the time of the Babylonian invasion in 587BC. Just recently archaeologists found underground passageways beneath this section of the city that they believe served as hiding places for the Jewish populace as the Romans destroyed the Temple and most of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Jerusalem may be very old (at least 3,000 years old) but discovering its past makes things seem new all the time.

The Book of Revelation has long been the watering-hole for those anxious to make predictions about the future, especially as to when the end of the world will occur. One evangelical group that broadcasts on FM radio has recently been publicizing the date of the end – in just about a year - May, 2011 (sorry I can’t remember the exact date). Others, relying on the ancient Mayan calendar, have set the easy-to-remember date of 12/12/12 as doomsday. At the other end of the prophecy-spectrum I heard that some climate-change enthusiasts are now buying real estate in Greenland, so that when global warming really kicks in - they’ll make a killing.

It seems those that predict the end of the world as immanent always see themselves as crucial, essential to the prediction, the indispensable element in the history of a dispensable world. Old time religionists cite humanity’s terrible sinfulness (read: sexual immorality), as the cause for a violent end-of-the-world scenario. New greener religionists claim that, although earth is some four billion years old, we moderns of the last two centuries, because of our terrible sinfulness (now read: environmental rape), are therefore responsible for the soon-to-be-death of the planet. Talk about seeing yourself as absolutely essential…

Yet, prophecies can come true: they can be “self-fulfilling.” Like the Christian fundamentalists who have allied themselves to the State of Israel, provoking tensions between Israelis and Palestinians (and pushing for the building of a Third Temple) so as to ignite a conflagration in Jerusalem itself - a prerequisite, as they see it, for the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world.

For all the foreboding that many attach to the Book of Revelation, it seems to me an essentially upbeat text. Beneath the doom and gloom lay the experience of beauty and fulfillment, joy and splendor. Its outlook is bright not dark and, far from the destruction of creation, St. John sees its splendor and fulfillment as the dwelling place of God. For God makes all things new, opening up history as an exciting adventure: sort of like imagining Greenland as the new Bermuda, though one might wonder why it was named Greenland to begin with. Could it be that the obscure future is mirrored, always, in the mysterious distant past? We humans are bound by tense and time: past, present and future. But God dwells in the eternal, making all things new, making all things present.