BaptizedPagan

Reflection from this past Sunday

2008-07-11T13:11:00.002-04:00

Here are some reflections I gave last Sunday, on the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time:

I hope that you all have had a wonderful holiday weekend so far. I was at a parade on Friday down in Norwood, and then went to the fireworks on Friday night downtown, and spent of the rest of the weekend relaxing, seeing friends, and getting some downtime in with my dogs. And I hope that you, like me, are grateful for this holiday, grateful for the fact that our country takes this holiday so seriously, this 4th of July, this feast of St. Elizabeth of Portugal. Known as “the Peacemaker” for the many wars she ended, mostly started by her husband and son, it’s fitting that our nation take time off to celebrate her memory every year, with fireworks in her honor, barbecues that recall her service of the poor, and domestic disagreements that remind us why she is the patron saint of difficult marriages.

Now, of course, I doubt that many of us spent too much time honoring Elizabeth of Portugal on Friday, and those of you visiting from out of town didn’t come to Boston to celebrate St. Elizabeth’s Day. But that gives me the opportunity on this Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary time to reflect a little bit on the calendars in our lives, civic, social, liturgical, and on the importance of knowing what calendar you’re on. Because a calendar isn’t just a neutral reckoning of days. In our first reading, the prophet Zechariah proclaims that the Lord’s “dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.” I want to reflect tonight with you upon God’s dominion as not only a reality in space, “to the ends of the earth”, but also a reality in time, “forever and ever.” Calendars are about dominion. Whose calendar, or calendars, are you on? The academic year? The fiscal year? Your child’s first year, or X years until retirement? An election year?

The striking proclamation of today’s readings is a proclamation reflected in the church’s calendar, in the very existence of this day called “Sunday”, the “first day of the week”, which used to be just another ordinary workday in the ancient world and particularly in the Jewish world of Jesus and the early church. Sunday used to be the equivalent of Monday morning. But now the resurrection of Christ on this first day of the week upends all that. This first day of creation has become the first day of a re-creation, a new creation, and we can no longer live as though God’s calendar had not erupted into our own calendars. And that’s why the holiday we celebrate today, even here in the United States, even here in the “cradle of liberty,” is not primarily the Fourth of July, but more humbly, more profoundly, the 14th Sunday of Ordinary Time.

So how do we live as Catholic Christians and as Americans? How do we put together our civic calendars, as well as all our other calendars, together with God’s time?

The key to that, I think, is in our second reading from St. Paul, whose life and witness to Christ we celebrate in this year of St. Paul: the indwelling Spirit of Christ in our lives. Saint Paul provides our earliest model of negotiating following Christ in a culture full of different calendars. Isaac Hecker, the founder of the Paulists, predicted “in the union of Catholic Faith and American civilization...a future for the Church brighter than any past.” We, in this Paulist Center and chapel of the Holy Spirit, keep turning back to the same mystery, the mystery of the Spirit of God’s real, active presence in us and through us.

“The Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you” Paul writes and Isaac Hecker repeats. “Dwells – in – you.” If we don’t talk about that as much as we could, it’s because we might be a little bit frightened by how close God really is to us.

This Spirit teaches us a thing or two about our calendars.

This Spirit teaches us that all of our other calendars are grounded by God’s calendar, grounded by this first day of the week that was the first day of creation and is the first day of re-creation. Notice I didn’t say that our other calendars are “trumped” by this calendar – if we think that God’s calendar is in competition with our other calendars, if we think of the relation between our work calendar or our family calendar and God’s calendar as an “either/or” proposition, then what happens to our belief in the goodness of creation, the goodness of our lives, even the goodness of our country and its accomplishments? Paul tells us not to live according to the flesh, by which he means not to live as though this creation was the Creator. But he doesn’t say that the flesh is bad – he’d be a very poor Apostle and a very bad Jew if he didn’t believe in the ultimate goodness of creation.

But the Spirit does teach us that we need to center our lives and our calendars on God’s time, and not on our own times. Even this 4th of July weekend, we’re led by the Spirit to see that as wonderful as the gifts of our country are, it is fundamentally God’s dominion that is from sea to shining sea and also from day to day and year to year. Our celebration of Independence Day on Friday, as well as the celebration of all our other important days – our own birthdays and anniversaries, our academic successes and professional accomplishments – you can name your own – all of these are grounded in God’s time by our bringing them together in our celebration of Christ’s resurrection, the 14th Sunday in the church year, the 14th Sunday in ordinary time.

Now, this is freedom, and this is why Paul uses the language of freedom and of debt. Living in God’s dominion in time frees us from the pressure, the anxiety of trying to make our smaller calendars bear the weight of being the center of our lives. It’s like enjoying ourselves at a really good dinner – good food, good company, maybe some good wine – and looking up to realize that hours have gone by – living according to God’s time frees us from our nervous clockwatching, and puts our busy-ness into proper perspective. And so it’s not incidental that each week when we celebrate our ordinary, extraordinary salvation, we share a really good meal together.

As we continue our prayer today, let us pray to be more conscious of the Spirit of God dwelling within us. Let us pray that we may celebrate a weekend of rest and relaxation by celebrating the gift of our rest in Christ and his calendar. Let us pray for a Spirit of discernment in loving God’s creation well, and of loving it as grounded in the new time opened up for us in Christ.

And my prayer for all of you is a blessed and relaxing St. Elizabeth of Portugal weekend.

Gopnik on Chesterton, "Conversion Sickness"

2008-07-11T13:09:00.004-04:00

There's a great essay (not available online, sadly) in the current issue of the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik on G.K. Chesterton entitled "The Back of the World: The troubling genius of G.K. Chesterton." It has a fabulous paragraph on conversion that I felt the need to reproduce in toto:

"In these books [his later Catholic non-fiction works] Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail."

Pentecost Reflections

2008-05-11T19:49:00.003-04:00

I had the privilege of reflecting on the readings for the Pentecost Vigil last evening, and wanted to share some of the thoughts I had with you. Happy Feast! Alleluia, alleluia!
(The readings for the Vigil were
Genesis 11:1-9
Ezechiel 13: 1-14
Romans 8:22-27
John 7:37-39
Full text on the U.S. Bishops' website)

The writer and non-traditional theologian Anne Lamott has said that she has two basic forms of prayer – “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I’d add at least one more variation on the first – one of the ways Christians say “help me, help me, help me” is by praying, asking, begging God to come and be present with us.
Come and save us.
Lord Jesus, come – Maranatha!
And, come, Holy Spirit, which is our prayer tonight at this Vigil of Pentecost. I’d like to focus on our prayer, “come, Holy Spirit” this evening.

Sometimes it can appear that we neglect the Holy Spirit in our prayer, but have you noticed how often we pray “come, Holy Spirit”? In our liturgy, the technical name for this is an “epiclesis” – there’s your SAT word for the evening. An “epiclesis” is a prayer of invocation, asking the Holy Spirit to come and sanctify us.
Whenever we bless holy water for baptism, we invoke the Holy Spirit.
When we celebrate the Eucharist together in a few minutes, we will pray, as we do at each Eucharist, “may the Holy Spirit sanctify these offerings. Let them become the body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord.”
And at every Eucharist, we also invoke the Holy Spirit upon us and upon our church – my Episcopalian friends take that so seriously that the routinely bless themselves when they pray, “by your Holy Spirit, gather all who share this one bread and one cup into the one body of Christ” or “Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may be filled with his Holy Spirit, and become one body, one spirit in Christ.” There are always at least two invocations specifically of the Holy Spirit in each eucharist, upon the bread and the wine, the body of Christ, and upon the gathered church, the body of Christ.

So we pray “come, Holy Spirit” a lot – but do we have any idea what we’re asking for on this night of Pentecost vigil when we can focus on the church’s “epicletic” existence?
I think we do know what we’re asking for – and that that is why we avoid thinking about it very often…
Let’s look at our scriptures tonight. Let’s look at these dry bones – “How dry they were!” How dry they are.
One way of hearing these texts is with deep joy, to receive the “springs of living water” Jesus promises in our Gospel tonight, to receive the “sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit.” Those of you a few years older than I probably could have rattled them off without having to look them up on wikipedia, like I did… wisdom, knowledge, judgment, courage, understanding, piety, and fear of the Lord. It can be a bit like the lion getting courage, the tin man getting a heart, and the scarecrow getting a brain – put yourself in whatever category you choose.
But while that joy at the Spirit’s gifts is crucial, I’m not sure rejoicing in the Spirit’s gifts is enough.

You see, here’s what I think.
Deep down, or if I’m honest with myself, some of the time, (most of the time?)
I kinda like being a dry bone.
I kinda like just lying there.
You see, dry bones don’t feel pain. They’re already dry – you need flesh for that.
And dry bones don’t have to get up in the morning – you need sinews and tendons for that.
And nobody expects anything of dry bones – how dry they are! – nobody expects dry bones to keep doing Christ’s ministry in the world, to “do Christ’s work and even greater things than he,” he tells us in John’s Gospel, to save and not simply to be saved – you need Spirit for that.
When we pray, “Come Holy Spirit”, do we really know what we’re asking?

There’s a communal dimension to this as well.
Deep down, if I’m honest with myself, some of the time, (most of the time?)
Do I really want to be united with those who are other than I?
You see, Pentecost is the opposite of Babel – the people that attempt to “make a name for themselves” are dispersed from Babel, while, at Pentecost, the people who glorify God’s name, ha-Shem – the Name – are re-united, speaking all tongues, gathering all people into one new family.

That sounds great – and at the Paulist Center, we do a pretty good job at praying, “Come, Holy Spirit, unite us all in Christ.”

But deep down, do I want the Holy Spirit to unite me with, say, our brother in Christ, Bernard Law?
As a gay man, do I want the Holy Spirit to unite me with my Christian sisters and brothers who think that my sexual orientation is a sin, a perversion? More frightening, do they really want to be united with me?
You can think of your own examples, not of the “easy other” who it’s socially acceptable to accept in your current location, but of the “hard other”, the one who speaks a totally different language than you do. I often want to be united to others with the clay and bricks of my own terms, that is, by proving them I’m right – not on God’s terms, which may or may not be the same. But it is on God’s terms that we who were no people are being made into God’s people.

There is good news in the church this night. It is a great and graced irony that Paul’s promise that “the Spirit will come to the aid of our weakness, because we do not know how to pray as we ought,” is fulfilled when we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit.” It is in asking for the Spirit that we most need the Spirit’s help in being courageous, wise, understanding, prudent… and it is in our confidence that “in hope we are saved” that we believe that our prayer will be answered, and that God will bring our dry bones to life again.

Come Holy Spirit, upon us and upon these gifts, upon these dry bones that are the body of Christ, that are waiting, hopefully, fearfully to walk again. As so often happens in the liturgical calendar, Pentecost ends one season not by coming full stop, but by beginning another – ordinary time, the “Sundays after Pentecost,” in the old language, the time to drink deeply of the Spirit’s living waters. These are the weeks to continue tonight’s celebration, to continue to ask for the grace to pray as we ought, for water to flow within us, for spirit to raise up these bones. Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.

Happy Patriots' Day

2008-04-21T15:10:00.004-04:00

So, in honor of Patriots' Day, I found this Family Guy tribute to the Spirit of Massachusetts:

But in my searching, I also found this 1982 ABC news report about beautiful Rhode Island, "The Biggest Little State in the Union."

These are a few of my favorite things...

2008-04-16T21:01:00.002-04:00

Alma Mater, Thee We Hail

2008-04-15T15:20:00.002-04:00

One other nice thing about the papal visit for me is that when people see me wearing my "Catholic University of America" sweatshirt, for a little while at least people might know what the heck it is...
(Worst incident:
Harvard Student: "Oh my God, that's totally funny, like a generic Catholic university, haha."
Me: "Well, actually, I received my B.A. from it."
HS: "Oh. Um, sorry.")

Venue profile of CUA here.
CUA's main website for the visit here.

Distinguishing gay men from pedophiles

2008-04-15T13:35:00.002-04:00

In almost a throwaway line from his remarks while on "Shepherd One" en route to the U.S. this afternoon, B16 distinguishes homosexuality from pedophilia. Not a big gay rights advance, but it will certainly (hopefully?) give pause to those who identified the presence of gay men in the clergy as the cause of the sexual abuse crisis.

“It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen,” he said. “As I read the histories of those victims it is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way. Their mission was to give healing, to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”

Apparently drawing a distinction between priests with homosexual tendencies and those inclined to molest children, the Pontiff said: “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia which is another thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”

Papal Visit Round-Up

2008-04-15T08:49:00.003-04:00

Just wanted to round-up a few of the best sources for reliable information as Benedict's visit to the U.S. begins today, and then add my own two cents...

Rocco at Whispers in the Loggia is obviously the norma non normata of Vaticana these days. Expect him to have the earliest scoops and the best inside information.

Another great source is David Gibson's blog on the papal visit entitled "Benedictions" and sponsored by Beliefnet. Where Rocco brings a heartwarming admiration to the table, Gibson also has the critical, sometimes cynical eye of a seasoned journalist, but with (shock) actual knowledge of the Catholic Church and an ability to distinguish big issues from side issues. And he's fun - check out his article in the Star-Ledger (yes, the New Jersey Star-Ledger) on papal fashion choices.

The New York Times has the fanciest pope visit page, combining some of this past weekend's journalism on the current state of the Catholic Church in the U.S. with live reports on everything that's happening. Expect them to have the best pictures. Crucially, they also have an updating schedule up, so if you've got a map of the eastern seaboard and a little yellow tack, you can follow the pope like a hurricane up the coast.

The Boston Globe also has a good page on the visit, and Michael Paulson is a long-standing, careful observer of things Catholic; though less flashy than the NY Times page, my money's on his analysis's being a bit more insightful.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has shown a good deal of media savvy for the trip, and has their own, high quality blog on the papal visit. It's almost entirely the official line-up of who's who and why they're important, but it will be a good source for photos as well.

If you're following the visit from home, most major television carriers will no doubt be carrying it. EWTN will be streaming it all (and smoke, drink, or donate some money to the Democratic Party at the same time, if you want to offset your possible support for their advertisers...). And you can follow along using the papal missal for the trip, released last week by the Vatican in pdf form.

So what am I thinking about all of this?

Well, I think it would be difficult to be a Roman Catholic Christian and not feel a great deal of excitement and pride about the visit of a pope. For someone raised within the church, the sheer visual and musical spectacle of it all hits all sorts of deep nerves within me. I'm particularly struck/excited by the proposal to ring bells in Catholic churches across the country at 4 pm today EDT, the time of Benedict's plane's arrival.

I respectfully disagree with some of what this particular pope has done, both as the prefect of the CDF where he hurt people who were close to me, and even now as pope. But on the other hand, this is one of those occasions, almost like a funeral or wedding, where one puts aside some of those differences. If he's truly functioning as a symbol not of his own sometimes poor, IMHO, choices, but as a symbol of the universal church and its presence with our own churches here in the United States, then a papal visit cannot but help remind us of that. Plus, B16 is simply a better theologian than JPII, so if John Paul's visits were focused on the question of what John Paul did, I'll be looking on this trip to see what Benedict says.

And yet I think that my experiences -- as a gay man, as a theologian, as a feminist, as an overly-educated academic -- will give me a sense of distance from some of the visit. I can't but approach this visit without some serious question, and while that might be dismissed as not "getting into the spirit of the thing," I think it's actually a saving grace in a quite literal sense. B16 knows (and, I think, knows better than his immediate predecessor) the danger of the pope-as-spectacle becoming a focus for a cult of personality, for an idolatry that places the pope in the place of Christ. After all, he was a child in Nazi Germany, he knows how easily this very human excitement at being fascinated by the spectacle, at being caught up in the moment and losing oneself in the crowd, can be turned, twisted, and misused for something grotesque. So, bottom line, I'll be watching for the next few days with real, unfeigned excitement, and yet with a bit of a critical eye. I think my own experiences, and my generational location, may have saved me from the untrammeled cynicism about all things papal that I find in some of my elders, as well as from some of the uncritical papolatry, in the strict sense, of some of my peers.

I'll be glued to the TV with the rest of America, and I'll be sincerely praying with and for the pope on this trip - but one of my students attending the Mass at Yankees Stadium has instructions to acquire a Benedict XVI popener for me (a papal-themed bottle opener....)

Viva il papa!

Gregory Douglass

2008-04-10T21:45:00.003-04:00

Heard a pretty good singer-songwriter tonight that Harvard's BGLTSA brought on campus named Gregory Douglass. Nice sound, going back and forth between piano and guitar. He did mention that with the exception of Peter Gabriel (and one other guy I can't remember) that he tended to listen primarily to female singer-songwriters like Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Sarah McLachlan, etc...and it shows. In a good way. Especially at the piano, where he used a lot of upper key tinkling to balance off his voice, and a few good Tori-esque slur/scream/growls, and then on the guitar where his strumming added a neat, Ani-like percussive feel. Like I said, good stuff...although there was a small crowd, he was pretty appreciative. I'll go find him next time he's at Passim.

Pope Videos

2008-04-09T11:11:00.004-04:00

Two fabulous videos:
1) The Holy Father's message about his visit to the United States next week:

2) And the D.C. Metro's ad (now yanked) for the day, featured B16 in bobblehead form (thanks to Whispers for the tip):

Opening Day, and a Chance to Pray

2008-04-08T10:53:00.002-04:00

It's Opening Day at Fenway Park. Game time at 2 pm. Ring time at 2 pm.
I'll be correcting papers while watching the Olde Town Team.
This might also be a chance to check out two of the sassiest Red Sox blogs on the block, Basegirl and Respect the Tek. Go Sox!

And, if you happen to be in the Boston area, I'm helping to plan an ecumenical service this evening at 7 pm at the Paulist Center celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Paulist Fathers. Entitled "Hearing Paul Together," it features three great preachers reflecting on St. Paul's writings: Fr. Antony Hughes of St. Mary's Antiochian Orthodox Church in Cambridge; Rev. Jep Streit, the Dean of St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Boston; and Ms. Laura Everett, the Associate Director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches and all-around-kick-ass church chica. (She doesn't put that title on her C.V., but it ought to be there.) If you're in town, come on by. More information at the Paulist Center's newly re-designed website.

PawSox Season Opener

2008-04-02T11:50:00.002-04:00

So I'm heading down to beautiful Pawtucket, Rhode Island, home to my paternal family, for the PawSox Season Opener tomorrow night. My wonderful friend Laura has organized quite the little road trip. Bartolo Colon will be on the mound. See you there! Go Sox!

Second Sunday of Easter

2008-03-29T22:32:00.001-04:00

Do you believe in the Resurrection?
If so, why?

Those are our Gospel’s questions for Thomas, and those are the questions for us, as we conclude our celebration of Easter Day – that’s right – the past eight days are considered by the church to be one day, the liturgical equivalent of a summer night in the arctic, where the sun never sets.

But I’m not going to spend lots of time talking about Thomas this evening. Rather, I want to look rather closely at something interesting – interesting to me, at least – about the scriptures the church links together for us on this Second Sunday of Easter, and particularly at this reading from the Acts of the Apostles. But keep my questions – do you believe in the Resurrection? Why? – firmly in mind.

Let me refresh you, in case your mind was wandering off earlier. “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common. […] And every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

The teaching of the apostles, the breaking of the bread, the prayers – those are relatively clear. “The communal life” – the Greek word that translates for us is the word “koinonia”, “communion”, the sharing of a common life of prayer, of service, of, as we see, material goods. It’s a typical way in the Scriptures and in theology of describing the difference that the Risen Christ makes in our lives together – we who were not a people, become a people; we who were as far apart as Jews and Greeks, as slaves and free persons, as women and men, as Yankees fans and Red Sox fans, are reconciled into one family. We are only Christians by being Christians together – the old Latin tag was “unus Christianus, nullus Christianus” – “a single Christian is not a Christian.”

And so, both for us and for these earliest Christians, the church is the proof of the resurrection, and that’s why we’re talking about it at the end of this Easter week. The church is the indication that the resurrection of Christ, God’s confirmation of Christ’s righteousness and the foretaste of what we can look forward to on the last day, is not a myth, not a pretty story, not a happy ending tacked on to the usual story of another Jewish rabbi killed by the Romans. It’s the existence of this community, devoted to the teaching of the apostles, to communion of minds and bodies, to the breaking of the bread, to the prayers, that confirms Mary Magadalene’s proclamation, “I have seen the Lord.”

Now, what you may be thinking, or perhaps, in my humble opinion, should be thinking is, that all sounds well and good, but hey, I live in Boston. After the events in the Roman Catholic church that have been revealed in the past seven years, how can the church help me to believe in the resurrection? Believing the truth of the resurrection – that’s easy-peasy, compared to believing in the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” Even here in this Paulist Center Community, we’ve had a rough couple of years, and we’ve had rough patches before, and we’ll have rough patches in the future. If you haven’t had the experience of having your faith shaken by the church that attempts to proclaim it, then, as the bumper sticker says, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s difficult to hear this story from Acts about the early Christian community and not think of it as a fantasy, as a story, or at least as a little bit naïve.

So why in the world would the church link this reading about the early church with the story of Thomas’ coming to faith? Because, I think, not despite the church’s failures, our failures, to be Christ-like, but in and through the church’s failures, our failures, to be Christ-like, we find our truest source for faith in Christ’s resurrection and hope for our own resurrections.

As some of you know, my partner and I live in an undergraduate dorm with about 400 students. Upon hearing how regularly I try to get to church, one of them once remarked to me, with wide-eyes, “You must be really holy.” I told him that calling someone who’s in church a lot holy is like calling someone who’s in the hospital a lot healthy. One of the indications we get that the church’s job is to carry on Christ’s ministry is in the passage of Acts immediately following this one, when Peter heals a man born disabled outside of the Temple. That’s right – Peter. You know, the not-so-bright fisherman with a tendency to exaggerate and/or deny Christ repeatedly. That is, the foundation of the church. We have met the healers, and they are us, the walking wounded, in an emergency room of a community where every doctor is hooked up to his or her own IV bag.

The description of the church as an ideal community in today’s reading from Acts isn’t, upon closer inspection, naïve; just a few chapters later, some of the first conflicts of the early church raise their heads. But in this community here, and in Christian churches across time and space, we find moments of communion, we find the prayers and the breaking of the bread, we find the teaching of the apostles, we find the resurrection of the Lord and the presence of his Spirit, breaking out in unforeseen, gracious ways. That is the difference between a pollyannish naiveté that pretends everything is perfect, and a Christian hope that knows that everything is not perfect – Christian hope holds together the crosses of our feeble, stumbly, dysfunctional community and the moments of grace, the moments of glory, moments made possible by the truth of Christ’s resurrection, that shine out in our world like supernovas. Like Thomas, the surest way for us to know, to believe in the resurrection, is by putting our hands in each other’s wounds, wounds caused by others and wounds we have caused ourselves in all variety of ways, and trying, however clumsily, to give each other comfort, to help each other walk again.

The craziest people I’ve met in my life have been in the church of God – some of you are here this evening. Some of the people who have most annoyed me and most hurt me have been in the church of God. Some of those I have most annoyed, that I have most hurt, have been here as well. But the surest experiences I’ve had that have convinced me of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and of his presence to the world through his Spirit, have been in this same church, not simply through words but through the reality of a new way of being human together that rings out, regularly if not constantly, in this body of Christ. In the stubborn persistence of this people who were once no people; who are now part of me, sometimes despite my preferences and theirs; who are, together, holding each other up as we pray to our father and walking together toward a communion that is real yet incomplete, I hear the reign of God echoing backwards into human history and I find my hope in God’s justice confirmed.

As we continue in this liturgy to devote ourselves to the teaching of the apostles and to koinonia, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers, look around you as we share the sacrament that we fittingly call “communion,” look around at the people who love you and the people who bug you.

Do you believe in the resurrection? Why?

Consistent Ethic of Life

2008-02-27T13:43:00.003-05:00

The late Cardinal Bernardin's consistent ethic of life has been on my mind a lot lately, not entirely through my own volition - I proofread and index books on the side, and just finished an index of a volume of Bernardin's speeches on the consistent ethic that will be published later this year.

Rocco has a round-up of some of the reporting on this week's Catholic Social Ministry gathering in Washington, D.C., and the lobbying effort that accompanied it, much of it focused on the U.S. Catholic bishops' document "Faithful Citizenship."

In the last interview, John Carr, the justice-and-peace director for the U.S. bishops had this line which struck me to the quick in its power and its challenge:

“Catholic progressives ought to be measured by how they stand up for human life,” he said, “and Catholic conservatives by how they defend human dignity.” The “consistent ethic of life,” Carr said, “doesn’t give any of us a free pass.”

Something to ponder on a cloudy Wednesday...

Election News

2008-02-26T10:03:00.001-05:00

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

Celebrity Face Recognition

2008-02-21T22:55:00.003-05:00

Look who I look like...

Oh, _That_ Andorra...

2008-02-18T20:02:00.001-05:00

Nation Of Andorra Not In Africa, Shocked U.S. State Dept. Reports

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

2008-01-28T11:14:00.000-05:00

Happy Feast of St. Thomas, patron of theologians and of the Paulist Fathers!

More on last week's ecumenical events and yesterday's opening of Isaac Hecker's cause in a little bit...

(Icon entitled "The Silence of St. Thomas" by Fr. William McNichols, S.J. More info and icons here.)

Which Church Father Are You?

2008-01-24T09:41:00.001-05:00

You are St. Justin Martyr!

You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers.

Check out St. Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies for more information on St. Justin Martyr.

Find out yourself at the quiz.

Dr. King

2008-01-21T10:24:00.000-05:00

So here's what we'll try for a bit...

2008-01-19T17:23:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I set up a tumblelog on tumblr.com, following the example of my older brother, who's always been the pathmaker for my technological journeys (in other words, he early adopts, and my dad and I tend to follow him...).

So I've re-vamped the format of BaptizedPagan with an emphasis on simplicity, and in the upper right hand corner, you'll notice a newsfeed entitled "Meanwhile, in other news..." That's where I'll be posting random news stories, short statements of my current state of being, etc., while I'll continue to use this mainspace for more substantial posts, images, commentary, etc. We'll see how this all goes.

Now I Really Want a MacBookAir

2008-01-19T16:59:00.000-05:00

The AirMail laptop sleeve.

Soon-to-be Blessed John Henry Newman

2008-01-18T17:57:00.001-05:00

Saintly, but very human

Just Sex?

2008-01-18T17:47:00.000-05:00

"Do my sexual choices demonstrate justice?"

Hitting the Reset Button

2008-01-18T17:43:00.000-05:00

I almost closed BaptizedPagan on Dec. 31st, and still might do so, but I'm giving it one more shot.
I realized over the break that while I don't have the time in my life these days to sit down and write a well-crafted, well-thought-out multi-paragraph post on a regular basis, I was feeling guilty for not doing so...and that the idea of having to put something witty down on here was keeping me from even starting to write.

So I'm going to be making BP a lot more like a Tumblelog...more random linking, less my direct voice. I'll still comment at greater length once in a while, but I'm more likely to point you toward something else that I've been reading, hearing, or doing, than to provide you with lots of original content. There's this whole teaching/researching/jobhunting thing that has taken up just an eensy-beensy bit of my time...

Let's talk of happier things...

2007-11-27T12:25:00.000-05:00

How much do coffins cost these days?

That was the phrase my best friend's friend and mentor Dr. Nicky used to use to change the topic of conversation when things got too dark...

Well, about $1,000 if you get them from the Trappists of New Melleray Abbey in Iowa. They make some lovely, simple wooden coffins ("blessed by an actual monk" - which seems to be the only aesthetically questionable part of their marketing strategy, in my humble opinion...) and urns, and deliver next day if needed - or you can pre-plan, which might be a nice final gift for your family.

Also, the simplicity of a wood coffin without lots of bells and whistles might help you in having an eco-friendly burial while maintaining some of the look of traditional Christian burial. But if you're looking for a less traditional option that is still pretty stylish, why not try the Eco-Pod, currently produced in Britain, entirely out of recycled paper, with or without an "Aztec Sun "design?

Not Dead Yet...

2007-11-25T11:08:00.000-05:00

Watch this space...I'm still kicking, still reading, just not been blogging as much. But still have some things to say here and there.

Here's one fun tidbit: an article from the theologian Donna Freitas on the deeply theological roots of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series from today's Globe.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

'Nuff said.

2007-10-25T10:48:00.000-04:00

April 13, 2008

2007-09-15T20:39:00.000-04:00

Set your calendars now...the Pope will be in Boston, likely celebrating Mass on the Common.

Jim Martin on Stephen Colbert

2007-09-15T09:31:00.000-04:00

And in addition, check out The Wørd: A Blog for Catholic It-Getters. Oh, and watch this space for something I've got up my sleeve.

Walter Update

2007-08-30T15:27:00.000-04:00

Thank you all for the prayers and good wishes, it's been a rocky week or so, but I wanted to give a quick Walter update.
He came home last saturday, looking a lot like a furry football due to the row of staples down the middle of the back.
He's now feeling a lot better, getting rest, going to the bathroom a little more easily and regularly. He still can't move his back legs, and we're a little concerned, as the doctors had hoped that he might have been moving a little more by now, but he is wagging his tail vigorously a little more often, so that gives us some continued hope. We're doing his physical therapy four times a day to keep his leg muscles in shape, and otherwise are keeping him rested and as calm as possible. As he's felt better, he's wanted to scooch around the room on his butt and has begun to despise the crate we need to put him to keep him from wandering about while his spine is recovering. But he's not in any pain any more, which is good, and is back to his happy, mischievous personality. Even if he doesn't really ever walk and we have to get one of those foolish little carts, he'll be happy and glad to be around, so imho, that's enough, but we're still hoping that his little nervous system is getting the rest it needs to rebuild itself.
Thanks again for all the prayers and good wishes.

Pray for Walter

2007-08-23T10:03:00.000-04:00

Hey all,
Somme of you know that my partner and I adopted a second dachshund last month to keep Russell company, named Walter, who has been a real joy in our life. The other day he woke up with some pain in his back legs, and then yesterday was having some early signs of neurological damage - which meant that a slipped disc was pressing against his spinal cord. So he's having surgery this morning to remove the disc material. We're a little scared, but he's at Angell Medical Center, which is the Mass General of veterinary hospitals, so we're confident he's in good hands. If you could keep Walter in your thoughts and prayers today and in the next few days, though, we'd appreciate it.

The Most Immature Montage Ever

2007-08-17T11:10:00.001-04:00

From the Daily Show, a report on the Democratic candidates debate on all things gay, concluding with "The Most Immature Montage Ever":

August Explained

2007-08-16T10:54:00.001-04:00

A cartoon from a few weeks back by Danziger.

Stanley Phished

2007-08-16T10:12:00.000-04:00

From Slate: The Worst Op-Ed Ever (and perhaps one of the best slice-and-dices, if not ever, that I've seen in a while...)

Addition, 8/16: A whole article on Starbucksiana on the Internet, also from Slate.

BaptizedPagan, Simpsonized

2007-08-07T15:27:00.000-04:00

So I know all the cool kids did this last week, but there were still some glitches on the Apple before...works fine now. See yourself Simpsonized! (BTW, the movie rocks, Spider Pig and all...)

That other motu proprio

2007-08-02T14:04:00.000-04:00

Faithful readers who survived the blogging drought that was most of this past year will remember another, less famous motu proprio on papal conclaves that came out in June. Sandro Magister has an illuminating article by, IMHO, one of the greatest living canon lawyers, Ladislas Örsy, S.J., on why such a seemingly small change by JPII, and its restoration by B16, makes such an important ecclesiological difference.

Ken Hackett, Catholic Relief Services

2007-08-02T11:52:00.000-04:00

There's a great article in the most recent issue of the Boston College Magazine (one of the few alumni magazines I've seen that consistently rises above a simple endowment-building vehicle) on Ken Hackett, the president of Catholic Relief Services. CRS has been rated the third most efficient worldwide charity (only 6% of their budget goes to administration and fundraising -- that's 94% of your contribution going directly to those in need), and has, since its inception, relied on Catholic funding to serve all people in need, without proselytization and without regard to the race, creed, or nationality of the people it serves. It's a great example of St. Francis's recommendation to "preach always, use words when necessary." You can make a donation at their website, and/or get information on their fair trade goods.

Vive le Québec!

2007-08-02T09:56:00.001-04:00

Un lanceur du Québec sur notre monticule! Bienvenue, Eric!

Oscar the Death Cat

2007-07-26T09:25:00.000-04:00

In the good ol' days we would have burned Oscar as a witch...now we write him up for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Today's Globe has a story on Oscar the Death Cat entitled "With a Purr, Death Comes on Little Cat Feet." He's a cat who comes and snuggles up with patients in an advanced care unit in Rhode Island who are about to die. And only when they are about to die. Some highlights:

When death is near, Oscar nearly always appears at the last hour or so. Yet he shows no special interest in patients who are simply in poor shape, or even patients who may be dying but who still have a few days.

In any event, when Oscar settles beside a patient on the bed, caregivers take it as sign that family members should be summoned immediately to bid their loved one farewell.

"Oscar is a normal cat with an extra-normal sense for death," [Dr. Joan Teno] said. "He is drawn to death. Either he wants to give comfort. Or he is just attracted to all the quiet activity that surrounds a patient close to dying.

Oscar makes regular "inspection" rounds of the unit, sauntering in and out of patient rooms -- as if checking on the condition of the occupants. But he never joins them for a snooze.
Until.
"He only shows great interest in individuals when they are about to die," said [Dr. David] Dosa.

But what's most interesting about the article is the way in which the writer doesn't seem to know what tone to take with the subject. It reads a little more like an Onion article than an actual newspaper story precisely because the tone is so cutesy -- as if a story about a little death cat wandering around your hospital and crawling into bed with you when you're about to die (to steal your soul?) were in the same genre as a puppy and a duckling who have become fast friends or a dog who knows when the train is going to pass by every day...

So disturbing...

2007-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

So, a story in today's NY Times on toy testing in China involves this nightmare-inducing photo: Chicken Dance Elmos being lined up to meet their doom or, as the caption says, "undergo tests." Who's giggling maniacally now?

Happy Feast of St. James

2007-07-25T09:41:00.001-04:00

Today is the Feast of St. James, and one of my great dreams has always been to walk the camino del Santiago, the historic pilgrimage route that ends at the shrine of St. James at Compostela in Spain. And I wouldn't be traveling simply for the weather, or even for the plenary indulgence, but also for the chance to see the botafumeiro live and in action. The largest censor in the world, I don't know exactly how fast it goes, but it goes pretty damn fast. And it did go through the window one year. So happy Feast of St. James! Next year in Compostela...

Oberlin Faith and Order Conference

2007-07-25T08:53:00.001-04:00

So I just got back on Monday night from the meeting of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches at Oberlin, celebrating 50 years since the inaugural meeting of Faith and Order at Oberlin in 1957. There were around 300 people there, a healthy mix of pastors, theologians, seminary students, theology students, assorted hangers-on (I count myself in that last category...). I'm currently trying to write something up about the experience, and if no one else wants to publish it (!), I'll be putting it on here. If you want to learn more about the Faith and Order movement in the U.S., or to look at some of their online journals, their website is here.

One of the smarter moves the planning committee made was to fund the travel and attendance of about 100 students and younger theologians, which was a good way of involving lots of us who are deeply concerned about ecumenism, but often find it hard to break into a conversation that has been going on for a long time, and some of whose leading lights are still with us, serving the cause. Plus, for many of us who sometimes find ourselves somewhat isolated from our colleagues -- either because our churches or departments think ecumenism is a betrayal of our identity, as happens in some cases, or because ecumenism seems passé and not as sexy as other work like interreligious dialogue, as in the case in other places -- it was a great chance to get some refreshment of soul and body, and geek out with some of our fellow ecumenists.

You can see from the schedule and the abstracts of papers just how interesting, powerful, and challenging many of our topics for discussion were, but the theme of the entire session was "Being Christian Together." For me, the highlight of this came in a strange place. The last night of our sessions together, after sitting around having a drink and, even after 4 days of talking, still talking about our lives, our churches, our hopes for the future, the bar closed down and we had a short walk across the common in downtown Oberlin to the dorms in which we were staying. An Episcopal postulant whom I'm now happy to call a friend pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and a group of us, mostly not regular smokers, suddenly felt the call of the Spirit. So there we were -- an Episcopalian, a Roman Catholic, a United Church of Christ ecumenist, an Orthodox theologian, and a Mennonite, heading across the common, sharing a smoke and a laugh at how unexpected the future of ecumenism might look to our ecumenical forebears, heading back for a night of rest. Being Christian together.

Summorum Pontificum

2007-07-06T09:00:00.000-04:00

As usual, Rocco has the scoop on the Latin Mass motu proprio over at Whispers in the Loggia -- and he's careful to point out that he didn't break any ecclesiastical laws by promulgating substantial parts of the document ahead of its, well, its promulgation...

That being said, I'm leaving this morning for a beach weekend down at Rehoboth in Delaware, thanks to one of my dearest friends in the world...

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2007-07-02T11:53:00.000-04:00

Some reflections I gave last night at church, focusing primarily upon the reading from Paul's Letter to the Galatians:

At every Mass we stand for the proclamation of the Gospel, because it’s the Gospel, the “good news” of who Jesus Christ proclaimed by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that is the source and the root of our faith. But on the weekend after the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, I think it’s legitimate, for a change, to spend some time reflecting on the good news as proclaimed by the apostle Paul to the church in Galatia, as proclaimed in our second reading tonight.

And what a reading it is: there’s nothing like a Saturday night in the middle of the summer to talk about the opposition of the Spirit and the flesh. Now, when we hear Paul talking about “the flesh” and “the Spirit,” the scripture scholars warn us to avoid understanding “the flesh” as “the body,” as anything “material”; rather, they explain, the flesh refers to our ways of living in opposition to God, in opposition to the Spirit Christ gives to us. But even those of us who might have read that before tend to carry around a lot of baggage around the idea of “the flesh,” myself included.

For many of us, when we hear Paul talking about not living according to the flesh, the synapses in our brains hear “the flesh” = sex. Or anything to do with sex. And ironically that shortcircuits our ability to hear Paul as good news, in a couple of ways. One way is to focus on all of our past or current errors that involve our sexuality, our mistakes, our anxieties, our failures to love, which for a variety of reasons resonate with a lot of our particular hang-ups as Christians in a historically Irish, quasi-Jansenist part of New England. Hearing Paul telling us not to live according to the flesh pushes us directly into that slightly neurotic, self-loathing place in which we secretly might wish that we weren’t sexual beings at all, that we didn’t have bodies that had desires, and in which living according to the Spirit might mean freedom as “leaving behind” all of that stuff.

A second place we tend to go, however – and most of us go in both of these directions at different times – is to take a look at ourselves and, by thinking of flesh only as sexual, let ourselves off the hook. After all, we’re good people who are here at church on a Saturday night, not on our way to a brothel or an orgy – most of us, at least. So we can smugly sit back and ignore Paul’s message to those people, you know, those other people.

In both cases, the result is the same: once we make the equation “the flesh” = sex, we zone out and miss what, I think, Paul is really trying to tell us about Christian life, about the journey Christ talks about in the Gospel. We miss his words about life in the Spirit as being, for us, not a place for condemnation and self-loathing, but a recipe for a different kind of living. And I’d like to spend the rest of our time exploring a way that might help us imagine that kind of life in the Spirit.

One of my partner Nathan and my favorite places to go out for dinner for a treat is Redbones Barbecue in Davis Square. If you haven’t been there, and you’re not a vegetarian, I would recommend it as one of the 5 best restaurants in the city. Our dog likes it too, because he usually gets some beef ribs out of the bargain. But you have to be willing to get a little dirty, and get a little animal, in order to really enjoy the food. Eating barbecue ribs is not like eating chicken mcnuggets; there’s no way to ignore the fact that a formerly living, breathing creature has become the source of your nourishment in such a meal. And there’s no delicate way of actually eating it; you need to get in touch with your inner carnivore, and tear the meat off the bone, rip some beef off a rib or some pork off a chop. Vegetarians, you’ll have to try imagine a really, really good ear of corn at this point.

But paying attention to something as mundane as how we eat barbecued ribs might be a way of breaking out of the flesh = sex shortcircuit. Paul warns the Galatians that “if you go on biting and devouring one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another.” Life “according to the flesh” isn’t only or even primarily life in bodies – we don’t have any way of imagining another kind of living. It’s a life in which we treat each other, in varied and numerous ways, as though we were just flesh to each other. When we bite each other, we tear each other, we devour each other – that in my opinion is what Paul is getting at when he warns against life according to the flesh.

In the lines following tonight’s passage, Paul writes that “the works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.” The beginning and the end of the list sound a lot like what we first think of as “the flesh” and there’s a good reason, namely that our sexuality is a particular place where we’re often tempted to devour each other. But think of the middle of the list: hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, fury, selfishness, dissensions, envy – these ways in which we devour each other, tear each other, consume each other – and ourselves – are far more subtle, and often have little to do with sex. But this, says Paul, is life “in the flesh” or “according to the flesh.”

So, given that Paul seems to be pointing out so many different kinds of ways in which we can treat each other according to the flesh, how can this word be good news for us? Well, the only reason Paul can talk about life according to the flesh is because he also knows, and we also know, what a life not according to the flesh can be like, what the life according to the Spirit to which we are called looks and feels like. The fruit of the Spirit, Paul writes, is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” It’s learning to treat each other as children of God, as temples of Christ’s Spirit, and not simply as flesh.

And if you think that my gastronomic comparison is entirely off base, then we might think about the fact that every week we enter more fully into that life in the Spirit by coming here, not to a cooking school, but an eating school. The fact that we are “liturgical vegetarians” – that we eat Christ’s flesh as bread and drink Christ’s blood as wine – is not accidental to learning how to eat with each other without eating each other. The fact that the bread we share is freely given and freely broken, that we line up to receive it, and not to take it – each time we return to this table, we are not only learning how Christ made himself food for others without devouring them, we are also learning how we can be food for others, without devouring them. In Paul’s words, we are practicing life together in the Spirit, and not in the flesh, so that, at the end of Mass, we can go back out into our world as bread for a hungry world.

Happy Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul

2007-06-29T14:21:00.000-04:00

Today is one of the major patronal feasts of Rome, and, in honor of the occasion, the famous statue of St. Peter at the Basilica gets dressed up...

But it is a joint feast, the idea being that the church at Rome is founded not on the witness, the martyrdom, of Peter alone but of Peter and Paul, two great apostles who, tradition suggests, both met their end in Rome. And last night at services at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, B16 announced that on June 29th, 2008, a Pauline year in celebration of the 2,000 anniversary of Paul's birth will begin.

Nicely coincidentally, next year will also be the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Paulist Fathers, founded by Isaac Hecker under the patronage of St. Paul. Exciting times!

BaptizedPagan, PhD

2007-06-28T09:16:00.001-04:00

So my defense went very well yesterday, and I'm now Dr. Brian.
Thank you to all of you who kept me in your prayers, I hope to live up to the vocation that this degree represents.

Keep an eye on this space...lots of stuff happening on the Rome front -- Latin masses, letters to Chinese Catholics, etc. -- there's a lot to squeeze in before Rome leaves on holiday.

And have a very happy feast of Irenaeus of Lyons, a great ecclesiologist and theologian of the reconciliation of all peoples!

Motu proprio

2007-06-26T08:56:00.000-04:00

Not _that_ motu proprio....but now that I've got your attention:

B16 released a motu proprio today re-establishing the previous practice of the conclave to elect a pope only by a 2/3 vote, rather than the scheme JPII instituted by which a deadlocked conclave would eventually switch over to a simple majority -- raising the specter of an intransigent minority that could hold out indefinitely until the 2/3 voting was over. It's another sign, in my opinion, of B16's desire to undue some of John Paul's more, um, creative innovations...maybe Divine Mercy Sunday is next??

In other news, I'm defending my dissertation tomorrow afternoon, so keep me in your prayers!

The God Machine Cometh

2007-06-20T18:43:00.000-04:00

So I'm doing my last preps for my dissertation defense next week, and then I can get back to the important work of this blog which some of you have been clamoring for (hi, Chris!).

But as a teaser, for those of you drooling over the future of the iPhone (hi, Dave!), here are a couple of fun pieces I've come across lately:

Rocco Palmo, of Whispers in the Loggia fame, has dedicated his column this week on Busted Halo to the theological implications of the God Machine.

Hilariously, a very bitter media reporter from Slate has a funny little piece on how the media responds to the Apple striptease entitled "Apple Suck-up Watch" (although watch for the lack of the subjunctive mood at a crucial point...).

Personally, I'm hoping that my partner will decide that now's the time to switch to Cingular/AT&T and get hisself an iPhone I can play with...it would also make a great dissertation completion present, hint hint...

Why Use Boring Stamps?

2007-05-22T09:05:00.000-04:00

So I'm rushing to finish my final draft this week (yes, Virginia, the _final_ draft) before heading west for a vacation and a retreat. But for your consideration today, I submit the new Jamestown stamps, available already in the 41-cent version, and the "Forever" stamp that everyone is talking about. The Forever stamp ain't bad...nice version of the liberty bell and all...but why would you send anything with a plain old boring square stamp when you could send these cool, well-designed, timely _triangular_ stamps?
Life is too short for boring stamps.

Happy Rhode Island Independence Day!

2007-05-04T16:07:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's amazing how fast the year flies by...time for another Rhode Island Independence Day!
From the Rhode Island civil code:

25-2-1 Rhode Island Independence Day. The fourth day of May in each and every year is established, in this state, as a day for celebration of Rhode Island independence, being a just tribute to the memory of the members of our general assembly, who, on the fourth day of May, 1776, in the State House at Providence, passed an act renouncing allegiance of the colony to the British crown and by the provisions of that act declared Rhode Island sovereign and independent, the first official act of its kind by any of the thirteen (13) American colonies.

So lift a pint of Gansett, pray for the release of Buddy, and, if you're in the area, come by my place where I'm making hot wieners.

Next Synod of Bishops, Upcoming Motu Proprio, Etc.

2007-05-01T08:14:00.000-04:00

Two upcoming items on the Vatican front.

The Next Synod of Bishops
So only Nixon can go to China. From Fr. Z, a priest and blogger from Rome who spends a lot of time talking about proper translations of liturgical texts from the Latin, as well as the return of the use of Latin in the Mass. The Lineamenta, the planning texts, for October's Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, have been published. The theme will be "The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church." The Synod was called for by Christus Dominus at Vatican II, and has functioned as an occasional advisory body to the Pope since then. But Fr. Z notes an important change that B16 has made to the juridical process of the synod, a change that furthers the pattern of slow, deliberate yet marked de-centralization that reflects a theology of the papacy as the primate among the bishops, rather than above the bishops. Fr. Z's text in full:

For a rigid backward looking conservative, Pope Benedict XVI sure does some progressive things.
The most recent surpise from His Holiness is a change to the Synod of Bishops.
Originally the Synod, called to meet occasionally to discuss questions put to them by the Pope, could before only offer observations and statements. Pope Benedict has now given them deliberative power concerning certain precise questions.
The new edition of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis indicates the changes in new statutes for the Synod.
The Synod will be able to vote on issues, but the vote must be ratified by the Pope. Thus, in certain specific questions, it seems the Synod will become a kind of micro-Council.
This move brings the Synod perhaps more in line with the way ancient Synods worked. It also resonates with the way the Orthodox bishops deliberate, though clearly they don’t have the Petrine dimension excercized by the Pope.
So, this Pope seems to be bent on loosening the vice clamping around some dimensions of the Church’s life since Pope Paul VI. He is exploiting the provisions in Canon Law about the Synod and relaxing artifical and harmful restrictions imposed on the Church’s liturgical life.

The Motu Proprio
And the next news that's likely to come from Rome is the upcoming motu proprio expected to allow a much wider use of the 1962 Missale Romanum (that's Mass in Latin, for my fellow post-conciliar Catholics). Expect lots and lots of people to freak out.

For all of your basic questions for information, Amy Wellborn has put together a "Motu Proprio Tip Sheet" that will, assumedly, receive further detail after the actual publication of the document.

Should those of us who aren't Latin Mass goers freak out? Not necessarily. I expect that the key to the interpretation of the document will be a clause or paragraph in which B16 will signal that a crucial aspect of the wider allowance of the Latin Mass cannot be understood in any way, by bishops, clergy, or laypeople, as suggesting the illegitimacy of the vernacular versions of the Mass. That's the rub that sparked the excommunications of the Lefebvrists back in the day; one cannot, in the Catholic church, promote the use of the Latin Mass because one understands the vernacular masses to be invalid. I expect that the motu proprio will make that clear.

Given that, I'm optimistic that the wider use of the Latin Mass won't make much difference to most people. Releasing a document like this in 2007 is a lot different than it would have been in 1978; there is no way of turning back the clock on the vernacular liturgy, and most clergy, laypeople, and bishops have little interest in returning to the old Mass. If it's strongly emphasized that a preference for the Latin Mass is just that, a preference, and not a matter of faith, then allowing a diversity of usage within the church seems a good move to meet people where they are.

At least two practical issues need to be addressed, however, that may get lost in the shuffle to re-publish 1962 Missals. First, there is the minor issue of a unified calendar; many people were expecting the publication of the document yesterday, on the feast of St. Pius V, the post-Tridentine pope whose publication of the Missale Romanum standardized Latin Catholic usage for the next 400 years. But it's just as possible that the document may be published
on May 5th, his feast day under the Latin Catholic calendar. This in itself signals the difficulty of allowing two distinct calendars within the Latin rite. Some sort of calendar reform within the Latin rite would both make sure that Roman Catholics are celebrating the same feasts on the same days, and would also show the relativity of the Latin Mass -- the Mass is under the regulation of the bishops, and not the reverse. Simply being old doesn't make it scripture.

The second, more substantive issue is the question of how the texts of the Latin Mass understand the relations between Jews and Christians. I have a 1962 Missale here in my library, and a quick leafing through can find those lovely Good Friday prayers for the "perfidious Jews." The Boston College Center for Christian-Jewish Learning has already raised these concerns and suggested some responses.

In both cases, the caveat seems to be that if greater re-introduction of the Latin missal is not going to undermine some of the other developments in post-conciliar Catholicism, it can't be introduced as a museum piece, but must be made a living part of the church, and that includes modifications that will upset true traditionalists by suggesting that there are other reasons for allowing Latin liturgy than a negative evaluation of the conciliar reforms. We'll see shortly, according to all the scuttlebutt, exactly what will happen next.

Project Bread Walk for Hunger!

2007-04-30T18:35:00.000-04:00

No pressure, because I know this is a busy time for everyone, but I'm going to be walking 20 miles this coming Sunday in Project Bread's Walk for Hunger. I'm proud to say that the Walk actually started 38 years ago as a way for my church, the Paulist Center downtown, to raise money for our own weekly meal for the needy and our food pantry; since then it's grown dramatically, and the funds from the Walk go to support 400 food pantries, soup kitchens, food banks and food salvage programs in Massachusetts. Project Bread still provides 83% of the operating budget for my church's outreach efforts to feed women, men, and children in Boston.
If you'd like to make a donation to support me, you can do so by credit card directly at my walk webpage.
And, if you'd like to come along on Sunday, there's still time to start asking for donations and to get your walking shoes ready!
Thanks for any support, material or spiritual!

BXVI Quote of the Day

2007-04-24T09:34:00.000-04:00

"It was easy to know the doctrine. It's much harder to help a billion people live it."

Technically, yesterday, from David Gibson's NY Times article on BXVI after two years.

Have a Gansett, Neighbor

2007-04-19T12:28:00.000-04:00

Blog friend and real-life church friend Panorama of the Mountains has a review of the revived Narragansett beer. I grew up about 2 miles from the old Narragansett Brewery in Cranston, Rhode Island. The old Gansett wasn't, shall we say, the champagne of beers, but it seems like the revival might have a little more potential. The Narragansett website has a good history of how, exactly, the original Narragansett went downhill financially in the mid-70s. Perhaps I'll order a keg for my Rhode Island Independence Day party at the beginning of next month.

Pimp your iBook

2007-04-18T21:13:00.000-04:00

Check out Mozaikits, and the special laptop Mozaikits with Apple logo cut-outs. Thanks to Cool Hunting for the link.

Happy Birthday, B16

2007-04-16T10:43:00.001-04:00

He celebrated with a cute new mitre and his new book on Jesus.

Soulforce at Gordon College

2007-04-16T10:24:00.000-04:00

Michael Paulson reports in today's Globe that Gordon College, an independent evangelical Christian college on the north shore (and alma mater to many, many illustrious graduates, including my friends Dan and Suzanne...) will be welcoming, rather than locking out, a group of Soulforce LGBT activists on their nationwide Equality Ride.

So what are we to make of this? Underhanded evangelical ploy to look nice while still hating on the gays? After all, the College is not renouncing its policy on homosexuality, and talks and presentations by the Soulforce riders will always be followed by presentations of the college's viewpoint by members of the Gordon community. Or is it a capitulation to the forces of sodomy, an endorsement of the gay lifestyle simply by allowing them to be on campus and (!) to share dinner?

Neither, IMHO. They're entering into explicit, polite, dialogue. Which is not easy to do, in a culture that doesn't promote talking with the people with whom you disagree, and on an issue which goes to the heart of peoples' lives. In the Globe story, the president of the student association, Josh Stoeckle, "said that he supports Gordon's policy against homosexual conduct, but that 'I find myself growing and realizing that the world is also a very complicated place, and we're often not really very good at loving people. We let beliefs become abstractions, and not people. And we have students at Gordon who are homosexual and really struggle with being here.'" Amen. The church's struggle with self-identified gay people is not going to end overnight, and inviting someone into a conversation, rather than shutting them out, is a good step to all of us being able to talk with each other and not about each other.

Jesuit Urban Center Closing

2007-04-15T13:41:00.000-04:00

Sad, rainy day here in Boston: it was announced at Mass this morning at the Jesuit Urban Center that the Jesuits will be closing the Center, possibly as early as this summer. It's a real punch in the gut that such a lively intentional community is going to be dispersed out of existence. I'm most concerned about the fact that the Urban Center has been a home for gay and lesbian Catholics for such a long time, and particularly for Catholics who already felt on the margins of their church. This is going to be the final push out of the Catholic church for large numbers of my brothers and sisters. Please keep them in your prayers.

This is the Day the Lord Has Made

2007-04-10T09:07:00.001-04:00

New York and Taxes

2007-04-02T13:39:00.000-04:00

Just back from a quick overnight jaunt down to Manhattan after a stressful-ish week that included a 36-hour job interview. Thanks to all for their thoughts and prayers on that front, I'll keep you posted.
New York was lovely; we did a tour of the Brooklyn Brewery, sampling some of their product, followed by an oh-so-fabelhaft evening in Astoria working on our French pronunciation and catching up. We eventually ended up at some less reputable establishments...Barricuda and then (gasp) Mr. Black's. Fun was had by all.

Mass the following morning at St. Francis Xavier parish at 6th Ave. and 16th St. Wonderful service, just the right mix, IMHO, of some Latin chanting and some good Gather hymnal standards to make me feel at home (despite the inclusion of one of my least favorite hymns that sounds like a song rejected from Les Miz: "Jerusalem, my dest-iny"). When in New York, I usually hit the jazz mass in the evening at the Church of the Ascension up on the upper West Side, but we were going to be leaving too early in the day for that; and I hadn't been over to St. Joseph's in the Village since Fr. Aldo Tos was pastor (before a whole bunch of Dominicans showed up...).

Then it was back to Boston; today was the first day back to class for Harvard after spring-break, and now we're in it for the long haul. I'm trying to get caught up on other things in order to be able to spend my time editing later in the month, and this morning also got my taxes done. Now, if you're a poor graduate student, say, and have an AGI under $28,500,
or qualify for the Earned Income Credit, or are active duty military with an AGI under $52,000, then you can use a version of TurboTax online for free. The one catch, as your correspondent discovered, is that you need to start filling out your information by going to that website; otherwise, you won't be able to get the free credit and will have to enter all your information in twice. If you're in Massachusetts and a number of other states, your state return will also be free. It's always helpful when the calendar works this way, and the government provides you with an opportunity for penance and almsgiving right in the middle of Holy Week...

Sor Juana de la Cruz, Prostitution, and Immigration

2007-03-26T09:28:00.000-04:00

First off, flying out for an on-campus interview tomorrow, so keep me in your prayers.

More interestingly, and importantly, I heard a wonderful homily last night at the Paulist Center by Fr. Rubén Patiño. The Gospel for the day was the story of the woman caught in adultery, when Christ asks the one without sin to cast the first stone. Now, I've heard many sermons about this that have simply repeated the normal bourgie ethos of "live and let live", of a privatizing tolerance that talks about the need not to judge other people. And, to some extent, that's all well and good. But Rubén brought this to a whole new level by connecting the story with the recent immigration raids in New Bedford, and the need for the church to speak as church for the dignity of immigrants, legal and illegal.

He quoted a poem about prostitution by the 17th century Mexican poet and mystic Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:

Quién será más de culpar
aunque cualquiera mal haga:
La que peca por la paga,
o el que paga por pecar

Roughly, who is more to blame, the one who sins for pay, or the one who pays for sin? Without denying the fact that illegal immigration is a problem, Rubén talked about how those who we, as a nation, are expelling and punishing, are here because of the poverty in their own countries, and also to maintain us in our cheap clothing, services, and other goods. It reminds me of the words of a confession of sin used in the episcopal church: "We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf." As an article in the Boston Globe points out today, the evil done on our behalf against immigrants and their families is part of a Homeland Security plan that will grow in strength and impact in the coming years. May God forgive us, and give us the strength to welcome the stranger and speak for her rights.

Notification on Sobrino

2007-03-14T10:17:00.000-04:00

is now available. I would comment, but I have a dissertation due...

Yes, I'm Alive; Sobrino in Trouble

2007-03-10T09:50:00.000-05:00

So I'm still here, barely...haven't posted in over a month, largely because I've been working my theological tuches off to get my dissertation completed. It looks likely that I'll be defending soon, I'll keep you posted.

But I'm coming out of a brief blog-sabbath because of some disturbing news out of the Vatican, Jon Sobrino, one of the most important liberation theologians from Latin America still writing and teaching today (I taught his book on theodicy in the context of the Salvadoran earthquakes, Where is God?, for class a few years back) is likely to be placed under censure by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to El Mundo. Just when BXVI and Levada were getting some kindler, gentler press....

Here's the story from Catholic World News.

Madrid, Mar. 9, 2007 (CWNews.com) - A Jesuit theologian who is a leading exponent of liberation theology will soon be disciplined by the Vatican, according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

Father Jon Sobrino will be barred from teaching in Catholic schools and instructed not to publish written works, El Mundo reports, citing informed sources at the Vatican. The newspaper claims that the disciplinary measures will be announced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith within the next two weeks.

Father Sobrino’s work was cited as distorting the role of Jesus in the plan of salvation, the Vatican sources said. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reportedly found that his theological works placed an undue emphasis on the figure of Jesus as a human actor involved in social causes, neglecting his divinity and his unique role in Redemption.

Father Sobrino, a Basque priest, became an influential leader in the school of liberation theology during his years in El Salvador. He taught at the University of Central America, an institution that was caught up in the civil war of the 1980s when 6 Jesuits and 2 staff members were killed by right-wing death squads in 1988.

Santa, Santa Hilarita

2007-02-03T09:19:00.000-05:00

So the AP presents the first of its Evita-like photos of Hillary Clinton. Expect many more in the coming year and half, my descamisados...

Ironing

2007-01-29T16:14:00.000-05:00

In a spirit of ecumenism, I wanted to point you to Peacebang's reflections on ironing.

One favorite: "There are thousands of garments made especially for the iron-averse. Those who hate to iron should stay away from cotton in their professional wardrobe, which is made to look crisp and put-together. Don't insult the integrity of cotton garments by donning them in wrinkly form." Well said, my dear. Respecting God's good creation and its integrity means treating cotton well. Oh, and being cautious around too many artificial fibers...

The Conversion of Saint Paul

2007-01-25T09:02:00.000-05:00

In addition to being the last day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, today is also the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. This is not coincidental - it used to span the time between the feast of the Chair of Peter and the Conversion of Paul, though in the Roman calendar the first of those has since been moved. (Thank you, Lorelei!) But it makes great sense still, because it reminds us that the real work of ecumenism isn't only or primarily one of producing one more joint statement, one more theological position paper, one more (dare I say it) dissertation. Ecumenism must above all be a movement of conversion, conversion of each of us as individuals to our fellow Christians, and conversion of our churches as wholes into communities more and more recognizable to each other as the one Church of Christ. "Spiritual ecumenism," as JPII and my own dissertation subject Jean Tillard often remarked, is crucial to all of our hopes for the future unity of the church. Spiritual ecumenism is what knocks us off our horses of self-righteousness, self-sufficiency, and reminds us of the great work of unity still yet to be completed, that we may be one, that the world will believe.

It's also the patronal feast of the Paulist community, both the Paulist priests and those of us lucky enough to be associated with their ministries, which is doubly appropriate, given the Paulists' longstanding commitment to ecumenism, including the witness of Fr. Thomas Ryan at the Paulist Office for Ecumenism and Interreligious Affairs. So as you remember the feast in your prayers today, think, "Have I hugged a Paulist today??"

Day 8, Week of Prayer of Christian Unity

2007-01-25T08:57:00.000-05:00

Day 8, Resurrection and glorification (Romans 8:31-39).

Scripture
Ezekiel 37: 1-14, The Lord will bring you up from your graves.
Psalm 150, Let every thing that breathes praise the Lord.
Roman 8:31-39, It is Christ Jesus, who died, who was raised, who intercedes for us!
Luke 24:44-52, The apostles were constantly in the temple praising God.

Meditation
South Africa is in torment, the victim of violence and disease. Unjust death knocks at the door of the poverty-stricken inhabitants of the townships and rural areas. Despite this, every Sunday people proclaim the Lord’s resurrection with confidence, often following upon funerals the day before. Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans speaks of the risen Christ seated at the right hand of God from where Christ announces that every human being has his or her place next to God; evidence of God’s reaching out to the world with an offer of reconciliation, consolation and mercy. Trust in the power of God’s love gives us confidence to face death and seemingly overwhelming situations. We can also be confident that if nothing can separate us from the love of God, then through the grace of God, nothing can ultimately separate us from one another. God brings life out of death. God whispers a word of hope in the ears of those in agony, in the ears of those who yearn for unity. It is a hope in that which God is bringing about, of which believers are barely conscious and which remains mysterious: the coming of the kingdom of God. It is the hope that all despairing silence and relentless division will one day give way, so that every tongue might declare with one voice the glory of God the Father.

Prayer
Lord God, whom we love, before the cross of your Son we contemplate the suffering of a world which longs for your saving help. Raise up in us a hymn of victory which proclaims that he has conquered death ‘by death’ and that the risen life which was made known on Easter morning offers us life and victory over death and the forces of evil. Amen.

Day 7, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2007-01-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

Don't forget, if you're in the Boston area, tonight's ecumenical service prayer service, with Cardinal O'Malley, Rev. Dianne Kessler, and Metropolitan Methodius, at St. John Chrysostom in West Roxbury at 7:30 pm.

Day 7, Forsakenness (Psalm 22: 1).

Scripture
Isaiah 53:1-5, Bearing our infirmities and carrying our diseases.
Psalm 22:1-5, Abandonment.
Roman 8:35-36, Separated from the love of Christ?
Matthew 27:57-61, Love entombed.

Meditation
Jesus’ cry of abandonment on the cross echoes the words of the psalmist and asks: ‘Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?’ Here the suffering servant bears the stigma of a common criminal’s execution. Then follows the total silence of death and of the tomb, closed by a great stone, with the two Marys sitting opposite, speechless. There are times in our lives when suffering exceeds all measures, when there are no words to express our grief, no cries, no tears, no gestures. We are there with the women at the tomb watching everything we had loved and hoped for being buried. Yet Christ’s suffering was redemptive. He bore the sorrows of all people and by his death redeemed us all. He was lifted up on the cross to draw all people to himself. In his suffering and desperation on the cross he shared and truly participated in the darkest and most fearful experience of pain that humankind can have. The closer we come to the cross of Christ, the closer we come to each other. Christ gave his life for all people and we discover an inherent, given unity when we acknowledge that we all depend equally on this one saving work. The life of the church must express this unity of indebtedness.

Prayer
Giver and sustainer of life, we thank you that you know and understand when we suffer. In Christ you have even taken our infirmities on yourself and by his wounds we are healed. Grant us faith and courage when we are overwhelmed. When life’s meaning disappears behind the cloud of suffering, may we focus our attention on Christ, who suffered and yet conquered and made us one redeemed people. In his name we pray. Amen.

Day 6, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2007-01-23T09:16:00.000-05:00

Day 6, Empowered to speak out (Mark 5: 33).

Scripture
Judges 6:11-16, I will be with you.
Psalm 50:1-15, Call on me.
Acts 5:26-32, Obeying God.
Mark 5:24-34, Telling the whole truth.

Meditation
There are topics one is not supposed to talk about : notably, sex, money and religion. For Jesus to deal with a woman with a hemorrhage was both amazing and groundbreaking. It was faith and confidence in Jesus which encouraged her to reach out to him knowing that healing would flow from him. Being touched, Jesus realized that power had gone out from him while the woman experienced healing and empowerment - the empowerment to speak out and to tell how her whole story of long silent suffering had come to an end. And it was only after she had told her story that Jesus could say: Be healed. The churches themselves need to be outspoken about issues that, for whatever reason, are difficult to talk about. These may include, beyond South Africa, issues of war and peace, the life-destroying effects of global capitalism, the tragedy of asylum seekers, or hidden child abuse. This is not a choice for the church but it points to the very center and reason for its existence. God has called the church to proclaim his Word to the world, to bring good news to those in need, and churches cannot remain silent when external forces hinder the ongoing incarnation of this Word. But at times, the churches themselves are an obstacle to this incarnation because of their divisions and disunity. The Word given to the church is one, and it is only when churches speak with one voice and act with a single compassion that they become true and credible witnesses to this Word. Therefore the churches have also to be prepared to speak about the shame of their own disunity. Only if we tell the painful truth of our disunity is our healing possible.

Prayer
Creator God, you spoke and made the world to be good; your risen Son intercedes on our behalf; your Spirit guides us into all truth. Forgive us for those times when our silence has damaged your world, hindered the ongoing work of Christ and muffled the truth. Give us courage, as individuals and as churches, to speak the truth in love with one voice, to embody your compassion for all who suffer, and to send out the good news of the gospel to all the world; in the name of him in whom the Word took flesh among us, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Day 5, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2007-01-22T09:06:00.000-05:00

Day 5, God’s judgment on our silence (Matthew 25: 45).

Scripture
Micah 6:6-8, What does the Lord require of us?
Psalms 31: 1-5, God, the refuge and faithful redeemer.
1 Peter 4:17, Judgment begins with the household of God.
Matthew 25:31-46, You did not do it to me.

Meditation
Those who suffer in silence – who have lost their voice, or had it taken from them – have their refuge and hope in God, who is faithful to redeem them. Yet they rightfully look for help, not only to God but to God’s servants, and not least to Christians and the churches. These are called to speak on behalf of those who cannot, or will not, lift their own voices; and to empower the powerless to speak for themselves: the Lord requires us to do justice first of all. Yet too often the hopes of those who suffer are met with silence. Christians and the churches do not always speak out when they should or work to empower the voiceless to find their own voice. Called to serve others, to do it unto the least of these; too often we do not. Even knowing that Jesus is present in the least of these, we do not always serve them as we ought. As Christians and churches – wherever we are – we must ask ourselves whether we are sometimes too silent, with questions such as these: Are we speaking out on behalf of others as best we can, and empowering them to speak for themselves? If not, is it a question of being able to hear the cries of those who suffer? Are individual churches sometimes so concerned with internal matters, that they are unable to hear the cries of those outside their own walls? Are the churches hampered by their divisions from hearing the cries of those who suffer? These are difficult questions, but by asking them together we may be able to break the silence and thus show our unity in service to those who suffer.

Prayer
God our refuge and redeemer, Hear the voices of those who have no voice; Open their mouths to speak, and grant them justice and healing, joy and peace at last. Open our ears to hear the cries of those who suffer; Open our mouths to speak out on their behalf; and Open our hearts that we may work to empower others to speak. Amen.

Day 4, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2007-01-21T15:12:00.000-05:00

Day 4, The silence of the forgotten and the cries of the suffering (1 Corinthians 12 : 26).

Scripture
Exodus 3:7-10, God heard the cry of the oppressed.
Psalm 28:1-8, O Lord be not silent.
1 Corinthians 12:19-26, Many members yet one body in Christ.
Mark 15:33-41, Jesus cried aloud: “My God why have you forsaken me?”

Meditation
The world in which we live is one in which many people are suffering. Almost everyday we see dramatic pictures in the media and read news about the great catastrophes people have experienced. But the suffering of many people is not acknowledged. They are forgotten. It seems that they suffer silently, but this is a fiction; the silence is more a sign of our ignorance and our egoism. God hears what we often do not want to hear. He hears the cries of the suffering and he sees their oppression. He does not ignore it (Ex 3). When the people in South Africa read the story of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt they remember their own way out of apartheid. Although the people were systematically silenced, their cries for freedom and justice were loud; the pain was deep, and it took a long time for their longing for liberation to be fulfilled. Nowadays many people in Africa are victims of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. No war in the world has ever taken more lives than AIDS. But the interest – especially in the western world – is not very great. A wall of silence divides the world. Psalm 28 shows us a suffering person, who is crying to God. It is to God that he addresses his misery and his hope. He prays in the trust that God will take notice of him because others do not see his pain. We are one body in this compassionate Christ. The misery of some members is not their trouble alone but is the responsibility of all. The cries of the infected cannot be ignored or hushed by saying that they are judged by God. We are bound together as one body in Christ. Together, we must take care of the marginalized and ignored. The great challenge of HIV/AIDS needs a united not a divided or segregated church. It needs a church which cooperates and builds a community of compassion and faith as the one body of Christ, a community where the silence of the forgotten is broken and the cries of the suffering are heard.

Prayer
Eternal God, you are the hope of those who have been omitted from the agenda of our world. You hear the cries of the wounded hearts and the voices of the despairing souls. Teach us in the power of your Spirit to hear with your ears and reach out through the silence to hear the voices of suffering and longing. As one body in Christ, make us more and more a communion of compassion and a prophetic sign of your incarnate grace and justice. Amen.

Day 3, Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2007-01-20T07:34:00.000-05:00

Day 3, The Holy Spirit gives us the Word (John 15: 26).

Scripture
Joel 2:26-29, I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.
Psalm 104, You renew the face of the earth.
1 Corinthians 12:1-4,12-13, No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
John 15:26-27,16: 12-13, The Spirit of truth will testify on my behalf.

Meditation
We are one in the Spirit. All have been nourished by the one Spirit. Is it in the same Spirit that we have been baptized into one body? It is the Holy Spirit who speaks and who gives us the crucial energy, the inner power to speak, to announce and proclaim together the good news of the kingdom of God. Our desire is to live in the Spirit, as a community on the pilgrimage towards unity. If we live according to the Spirit, we desire that which is of the Spirit. And the desire of the Spirit is life and peace. The Holy Spirit impels us to act. We must break the different forms of silence which get in our way and hold us back: chaotic situations, human division, all those things which offend the dignity of persons and of peoples. How can the word be freed? Where can we find the strength to sow a seed of life, of hope, of openness? How can we break away from all that closes us in and immobilizes us? The Spirit which is poured out upon all flesh drives us to prophesy. It is the Spirit which recreates us in renewing the face of the earth. It is the Spirit which makes us cry ‘Jesus is Lord’. It is the Spirit which witnesses to the Lord and enables us to become courageous witnesses. It is the Spirit whom God sends into our hearts, who makes us proclaim ‘Abba, Father’ and who thus reveals to us our true identity: we are no longer slaves but sons and daughters of God.

Prayer
Come Holy Spirit - may we know the gift of your presence on our pilgrimage towards unity. Give us the inner strength to become instruments of joy and hope in the world. May your spirit make us one. May your voice give us the appropriate words to confess together our God and Lord and to break the silence which destroys. Spirit of life and of love, renew us in unity. Amen.

Christian Unity, Day 2

2007-01-19T10:22:00.000-05:00

Day 2, The Saving Word of Christ (Mk 7: 31-37).

Scripture
Isaiah 50: 4-5, God has given me a tongue ... that I may know how to sustain the weary.
Psalm 34: 1-16, I will bless the Lord at all times.
Colossians 1:11-20, Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
Mark 7:31-37, Jesus makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.

Meditation
Isaiah realizes the cost of the gift that the Lord God has given. He has received the power of a word which can sustain the weary and broken hearted. For this to happen he needs ears with which to listen and learn as a disciple. Since the Lord God has called him, he cannot turn back.
Saint Paul understood that the definitive Word has been spoken in Jesus Christ. Paul portrays for us humanity in the unity of its relations with the Son of God, image of the invisible God in whose likeness we have been created. God has rescued us from the power of darkness and taken us into the kingdom of his Son in whom we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins. We are one through our baptism in Christ, for we are united to him and Jesus reconciles all things to God. Through the blood of his cross Jesus has given us lasting peace. The gospel passage illustrates how the power of Jesus enables the deaf to hear his saving word and then to proclaim it to others. Curiously, Jesus commanded those present to remain silent about what they had seen but, like all good news, this could not be contained. Those present became witnesses to the saving power of God’s chosen one. It is not only the healed person who proclaims the goodness of the Lord but all those who have witnessed it. Many people living under the conspiracy of silence surrounding such taboo issues as the abuse of women and children, crime in society and HIV/AIDS will step forward to break the silence which in turn will enable others to minister to those most in need. In this context we can see how God continues to open ears and free tongues to hear and then proclaim the saving Word of Christ. It is our common faith celebrated in baptism that enables us to proclaim together the compassion of Christ. In spite of suffering, we become one as we come nearer to Christ by recognizing that in Christ all things are reconciled and held together. This is rooted in the oneness of baptism and the subsequent obligation to glorify God in his work.

Prayer
God of compassion, you have spoken your saving Word in Jesus. Through his intercession, we pray that our ears may be open to the cry of people caught in the conspiracy of silence. May Jesus loosen our tongues, that together we may proclaim his healing love for those who suffer in silence. Strengthen us by the grace of our common baptism, that the unity we have in Christ may be our strength in bringing hope to those who despair. And together let us proclaim our deliverance through Christ our Lord. Amen

E pur si muove

2007-01-19T10:16:00.000-05:00

From the Italian magazine Panorama by way of Whispers in the Loggia, a whimsical map of curial influence, organized by nationalities. Of interest: note how close in some of the Americans are, and also note the strange Italian orbit, pitting B's close collaborator (and new Secretary of State) Tarcisio Bertone at one end vis-à-vis his predecessor Angelo Sodano. Way inside baseball, I know, but here we have a visual reminder of the danger of beginning any sentence "The Vatican teaches...", never mind "The church teaches..."

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

2007-01-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

"They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’ " (Mark 7: 31-37)

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity starts today. I'm going to be posting the daily scripture and prayer guide from the Graymoor Ecumenical Institute for our virtual prayer benefit. More resources for the Week can be found at Graymoor, where Week of Prayer started, at the World Council of Churches, and from the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity of the Vatican. And, if you're in the area, you can still come for the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Council of Churches on Saturday and hear your faithful blogger make some remarks about an ecumenical dialogue on theological anthropology, or to the area's Ecumenical Prayer service, with Cardinal O'Malley, Rev. Dianne Kessler, and Metropolitan Methodius on Wednesday, January 24th, at St. John Chrysostom in West Roxbury at 7:30 pm. Day 1, In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1-5).

Scripture
Genesis 1:2 -2: 4, By his word, God created the universe.
Psalm 104:1-9, The Lord of all creation.
Revelations 21:1-5a, God makes all things new.
John 1:1-5, In the beginning was the Word.

Meditation
In the beginning was the Word…on this first day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we want to contemplate the work of the Creator. In the silence of the void – the book of Genesis recounts – God created the world through his Word. “And God said…” In the very beginning, when there was nothing but chaos and confusion, the Word of God came to break through the silence to assign to each being its proper place. At the summit of creation it is one humanity which God creates, in the image of his oneness. The group which inspired this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity comes from South Africa. Its members have recounted how much the HIV/AIDS epidemic can throw human lives into distress. Often, we also have the impression that our world is in chaos: when the elements engulf us, when war plunges us into terror, when sickness or grief overcomes us. “And God said...” Confronted with so much suffering, all Christians want to believe that the work of the Creator continues. Despite their divisions, it is the same hope which fills the hearts of all Christ’s disciples: the Word of God continues to create today’s world by snatching it back from the void, in keeping humanity united. The chaos in which we live can be paralysing. However, the men and women of our world do not want to resign themselves to despair. Thus in South Africa a group of women (Kopanang) who have a family member infected with HIV, come together to weave magnificent cloth. Their creations allow them to provide for their families. Created in the image of God, we too – in our own way – can bring beauty out of chaos.

Prayer
God our Creator, we gaze at the splendor of your creation. It is your Word which created the universe. When our lives fall into ruin, we beg you to renew your marvelous works. Despite the scandal of our divisions, we can pray with one voice: that your Word never ceases to make all things new in the heart of our broken lives. Give us courage to be artisans of creation too. We pray that the unity we seek for our churches may be truly at the service of the unity of the whole human family. Amen.

Hope

2007-01-17T18:13:00.000-05:00

Russell inspires, thanks to the motivator engine.

I love my state: "Everyone needs a second chance..."

2007-01-13T11:08:00.000-05:00

From today's Providence Journal:

PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island taxpayers spent a reported $95,000 over the last year on renovations and fire-safety improvements to a state-owned building housing a strip club — known as Club Desire — whose owner had been convicted of attempted arson.

[background: earlier in the week, the ProJo reported on the state's involvement in the club:

The music is audible outside the club’s black doors. And there’s no sign of the security detail provided by the club “to keep parties away from DOT personnel from noon to 5 p.m. each afternoon.”

But make no mistake about it. This is a state-owned building with a strip club, known as Club Desire, on the first floor and two dozen or so state Department of Transportation employees on the second and third floors.]

Gerard C. DiSanto, of Johnston, was convicted by a federal jury in February 1995 of twice attempting to torch his Westport, Mass., restaurant, the Galleria II, “to collect insurance proceeds in order to finance renovations and improvements at the restaurant.”

The first time he tried to set a fire in the attic of the restaurant, it burned out.

The second time, he asked a manager at the restaurant to pour gasoline in the attic in early afternoon. He planned to “return later in the evening to ignite the gasoline. However, patrons and employees at the restaurant detected the gas smell, and an employee contacted the Westport Fire Department … [which] responded to the scene and discovered the poured gasoline in the attic,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.

[. . .]

In response to queries about these latest revelations about the state’s status as landlord to a strip club, a spokesman for Governor Carcieri said: “The governor would generally prefer that the state not lease property to strip clubs or individuals convicted of attempted arson."

[. . .]

“You look at [all] these things with an eye towards everyone needs a second chance … ” Providence Board of Licenses commissioner state Rep. Gordon D. Fox

Epiphany

2007-01-07T14:59:00.000-05:00

So once again I was given the privilege of giving some reflections this weekend for the Feast of the Epiphany. Readings are here.

Today we celebrate the epiphany, the “appearance” or the “showing forth” of God in Christ. Traditionally, “Twelfth Night” has always been a day for reversals, festivals in which a child was sat in the bishop’s chair, when servants were given the authority of their masters, when so-called “fools” were crowned kings for the day. I trust you will make no assumptions about the fact that I’m speaking right now.

But why do we have another feast of the incarnation right after, and part of, Christmas? Hasn’t Christ already appeared, to Mary and Joseph, to a motley crew of shepherds? God has become human in the baby Jesus, and we celebrated the incarnation on Christmas morning – what more do we need?

Our Gospel talks about the magi who come to worship the child, and there we get a clue about the showing forth of the light of Christ to all the world, Jews and Gentiles – this is what Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians. The “three wise men” – though if you listen closely, the text doesn’t say there are necessarily three of them, nor that they’re all men – represent those of us who come to the Word, searching from afar. But as important as that is, I think there’s something more going on here.

Historically, this wasn’t the only story Christians told about Epiphany; on the feast of the epiphanies they also told the story of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, which we celebrate tomorrow, and about the wedding at Cana where Jesus, at his mother’s prompting, performed his first miracle, a kind of miraculous beer run. The voice from heaven, “this is my son, listen to him,” was the showing forth of Christ’s special role as God’s servant; the miracle of Cana showed forth the beginnings of the reign of God in which all would share around a table with bread and wine in abundance.

But even though we celebrate Epiphany at the end of the Christmas season, these stories are all about beginnings, these stories all foreshadow, in big bright lights, HERE’S WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT. And what’s going to happen next, through Jesus’ life and ministry, is a life that culminates in the paschal mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. The epiphanies at Bethlehem, at the Jordan, at Cana, are all the starting points on the path that leads to Jerusalem – that is the place from which the light of God will truly shine forth, that is the place to which the nations of the world shall come in homage, that is the place which “in those days will be established as the highest mountain,” where Jesus will be “raised up.” That is the place where the story that begins with a baby in Bethlehem will end with a crucified criminal, a scared group of women and men, and a show-stopping ending when the glory of God is irrevocably shown forth.

As conditioned as we are to see the adoration of the magi as a colorful detail, giving us the chance to throw a camel into the crèche, but this is not only a cute story. The fact that Herod slaughters all of the children in the region just after the magi leave alerts us that this is not necessarily bedtime reading. Instead, this is the beginning of a story that is both dangerous and joyful, cross and resurrection.

Our scriptures and our rituals today give us all the hints we need to notice this, if our eyes are open. At the end of liturgy this evening, the date of Easter will be announced – when we are shown who Christ is at Epiphany, we begin walking with him toward Jerusalem. In a few moments, our catechumens will be anointed again with the Oil of Catechumens – when we are shown who Christ is at Epiphany, we, and they, in a special way, begin walking with him toward Jerusalem, toward baptism. Our reading from Isaiah mentions the gifts of gold and frankincense, the gifts for a king, but Matthew adds myrrh, the oil used to embalm a corpse – when we are shown who Christ is at Epiphany, we begin walking with him toward Jerusalem.

So how do we celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord? First, like the magi, the wise women and men throughout history, we need to keep our eyes open. We need to be ready to leave our homes and our comfort zones and follow the stars in our world: not TV stars with great skin and perfect hair, but the stars that look like crosses, the stars of children born in poverty, of goodness lying in a dirty room in a back alley. We need to stand along the River Jordan, watching for the forgotten ones to whom God announces “you are my daughter, you are my son.” We need to make all welcome at this table where the reign of God is celebrated and where Christ our light is present again in our midst.

And if we want to join the magi in paying homage, we begin to adore the Christ-child precisely as the one who will also be the suffering servant and the risen Lord. We begin to ask how we will walk with him towards Jerusalem, how we, right now, are on the lookout for the epiphanies of God’s light in the world. These epiphanies, like Christ’s, always demand a response; sometimes we see it and sometimes we don’t; that is a fact of our lives, and why we come back and look for the same thing every week. But when we do see it, when we do respond, when we start off towards Jerusalem and take the cross as our star, then we continue growing into the mystery of God made human, of God-with-us, Emmanuel; we begin the celebration of a God who is revealed at a wedding party, at a table of bread and wine, that doesn’t end.

Because the entire Earth is burning

2006-12-25T09:32:00.000-05:00

If you haven't yet heard John Adams's oratorio El Niño, run out to the store and get yourself a copy tomorrow. Or ask me nicely and I'll burn you some selections. The culmination of the first half is the celebration of the incarnation, featuring a poem by Gabriela Mistral, which I've put below for your Christmas meditations. Merry, merry Christmas!

The Christmas Star

A little girl
comes running,
she caught and carries a star.
She goes flying, making the plants
and animals she passes
bend with fire.

Her hands already sizzle,
she tires, wavers, stumbles,
and falls headlong,
but she gets right up with it again.

Her hands don't burn away,
nor does the star break apart,
although her face, arms,
chest and hair are on fire.

She burns down to her waist.
People shout at her
and she won't let it go;
her hands are covered with burns
but she won't release the star.

Oh how she sows its seeds
as it hums and flies.
They try to take it away --
but how can she live
without her star?

It didn't simply fall -- it didn't.
It remained without her,
and now she runs without a body,
changed, transformed into ashes.

The road catches fire
and our braids burn,
and now we all receive her
because the entire Earth is burning.

(Image from artwork by Fr. Bob Gilroy, S.J., available at Trinity Stores)

Paulist Center in the Globe

2006-12-23T09:07:00.000-05:00

So there's a long article on the front page of today's Globe entitled "Priests Campaign to Win Back Flock" on the Paulist Center's outreach effort. (While I think focusing on the "priests" doing this might be good in the long run politically, it is interesting that even in the Globe, the rivers of clericalism run deep...its not the Center or the Center staff (mixed clergy and lay) who are doing this, it's the priests, the guys who are really in charge...)
"We decided we could no longer hide a good thing," Fr. John said. Amen!
If you haven't been by, the Paulist Center is at 5 Park Street, right near the T. And our short video, "All Are Welcome", is also available to get a sense of the place.

Et perdicem in piro...

2006-12-22T13:15:00.000-05:00

So I found the Latin Christmas Carols page today, thanks to Gashwin, and they're _fabulous_. Enjoy!

Rudolphus, naso rubro,
naso nitidissimo,
si umquam eum spectes,
dicas eum fulgere.

Reliqui tum renones
deridebant ludentes,
semper vetabant eum
apud ludos ludere.

Deinde ante Natalem
Santa venit, et
"Tu, Rudolphe nitide,
traham meam duc nocte."

Dein, ut renones amant,
exclamantes hilare:
"Rudolphe, naso rubro,
in annalibus eris!"

And don't forget

Nives, glacies,
nox, puertia!
Risus decet nunc,
decent carmina!
Laetos iuvat nos
ire per agros!
Traha fert velociter,
et cachinemus nos!
CHORUS:
Tinniat, tinniat
tintinnabulum!
Labimur in glacie
post mulum curtum!
Tinniat, tinniat
tintinnabulum!
Labimur in glacie
post mulum curtum!

Me nuper miserum
temptavit lunae lux!
Mox assidebat mihi
puella facti dux!
Vecti subito
in nivis cumulos:
caballus est perterritus
et tunc eversi nos!
CHORUS.

Solum scintillat,
nive candidum.
Repetatur nunc
concentus carminum!
Canities absit,
morosa omnibus!
Puellulas cum pueris
delectat hic cursus.
CHORUS.

Yes, Russell, There Is a Santa Claus

2006-12-21T09:28:00.000-05:00

Primary Care Physicians (of Souls?)

2006-12-19T11:50:00.000-05:00

So I was at the doctor's office yesterday. Not fun, but nothing tragic either; one of the occupational hazards of living with 400 disease-riddled undergraduates. But my own primary care doctor couldn't see me until Wednesday, so I went to another physician on staff.

(BTW, can't recommend Fenway Community Health in Boston enough. Everyone on staff with whom I interacted yesterday was friendly, helpful, professional, caring, etc. If you live in the Boston area, particularly if you're looking for healthcare professionals aware of the concerns of lgbt people, check it out.)

The doctor, whom I didn't know before, was pleasant, answered my questions carefully, gave me a diagnosis and sent me on my way. I wish I could say that we formed a close, personal bond, but that didn't happen. Not that that's the case with my primary care physician either; I've seen him all of two times in the past three years or so, and I probably would walk right past him on the street without recognizing him -- never mind his recognizing me. I imagine that this is similar to the doctor-patient interaction of many people in the contemporary U.S.; don't know if it's an age-thing which will change when I'm 40, or simply a cultural shift, but at least for this point in my life, the phenomenon I remember from childhood of having a single doctor who had known me over the course of a decade and a half, and who could know and understand my health within a wider context than the immediate crisis, is gone. Is this the case because I'm pretty healthy and in my 20s, or is this a function of the way a crisis-based health care system works in the U.S.? It's a question, but not the subject of this post.

The spark of insight I had yesterday, which those of us who are in "the holy biz" probably need to be reminded of over and over again, is that the majority of the members of our congregations and communities don't know the priests in our parishes as "Joe" or "Fr. John", but simply as that most impersonal of ecclesial figures, "The Priest". The Priest is who you go to in crisis, who shows up when you're in the hospital, who you talk to when you want to get married, etc. And, as in my interactions with The Doctor yesterday, they're pretty much interchangeable, since what is important is not the relationship but their professional role and presumed theological skill set. You might actually talk to The Priest (or The Minister among other Christian churches, though I suspect there are some important differences here, and so most of this is directly primarily towards R.C.'s) once every few years, in your moments of crisis, but precisely to maintain the professionalism needed in those moments, other social interaction outside of a handshake at the end of Mass is curtailed.

This is problematic, for our medical health and for our spiritual health. But I think it's particularly difficult sometimes for those of us who are somehow involved in church life, either as theologians, or, more often, as lectors, eucharistic ministers, youth ministers, or any of the dozens of other people whose time and dedication make the church actually work, to realize that the guy we know as "Bob" is, to many of our fellow laypeople, this liminal/threatening figure called "The Priest". Some of us have experienced at secondhand the effects of this distancing; when someone finds out you're a theologian or lay minister and promptly apologizes for swearing or telling an off-color joke a few minutes earlier, we get a taste of what life is like for our pastors who go through the world being encountered only as an officer -- to be held at arms length and feared (resented?) -- and never as a person. This might have been less common when most Catholics had a family member, a brother, sister, aunt, or uncle, who was a priest or a member of a religious community, but this has changed dramatically in a generation or two.

Now, I'm not saying this is someone's fault, or particularly the fault of laypersons. One can easily find, among both seasoned clergy and some of our up-and-coming seminarians and priests, lots of men who find filling the role of The Priest a lot easier and more fulfilling than interacting with their parishioners as people. There's a prestige, a mystique, and a comfort in being an ecclesiastical specialist, called in during emergencies, brought on board at certain key moments, but otherwise left alone and unbothered. While no longer the sole source of authority in his parishioners' lives, as he was when they were immigrants, The Priest is still the unquestioned expert in all things spiritual, making his life, and that of his congregants, less messy. And there are, sadly, more than a few priests who are as megalomaniacal as the most egoist neurosurgeon.

But the problem is that this isn't a Christian understanding of ministry. Christian ministers aren't only or even primarily like pagan priests who do things on behalf of people, they're leaders who are called to do things with people: overseeing their communities, leading them in prayer and service, maintaining the bonds of relationship within a parish or diocese, etc. All of this requires that they be not only The Priest, but also "Fr. John" or "Jim", a Christian among Christians who brings his training, his experience, and his prayer to the service of his community as a part of that community, as an individual with needs, strengths, and weaknesses, and not as a catch-all presbyterus ex machina known as The Priest.

And not only is this not a particularly Christian understanding of ministry, it's also not a particularly good model for promoting spiritual health. Just as crisis-management only goes so far in actually promoting physical health (hence the arguments that for poverty programs increasing free wellness funding for things like physicals, regular checkups, etc., would actually save money when compared to the expense of emergency visits when crises demand immediate action), spiritual crisis management isn't going to do too much good in the long run either. Many of our priests are under the same pressures as doctors in this country -- too many patients and not enough support in their work. But a contributing factor is still a culture, held by some priests and by many laity, in which The Priest is not someone you know, over time, in a variety of contexts, but a professional to whom you go when you're having the spiritual equivalent of a heart attack, a bout of pneumonia, or a tumor. And, as in medicine, by that point small symptoms that could have been an opportunity for conversion towards fuller life have become malignant, aggressive, spiritually deadly. If ministry is going to truly be a cura animarum, a "care of souls" in the traditional phrase, then step one might be our communities, clergy and laity included, rethinking their relationship, and particularly how to make The Priest more than an interchangable guy in a funny outfit for many of our fellow Christians.

Not that I have many good answers on how to begin doing that -- this post is more about diagnosis than treatment.

Happy New Year

2006-12-05T21:20:00.000-05:00

So what's your New Year's resolution?

We celebrate lots of different new years in our world...the new calendar year, the new academic year...but this week we celebrate a new liturgical year with the beginning of Advent. Now, the beginning of Advent doesn't have any of the fun ritual flashiness as Lent...no ashes on foreheads, no "repent and turn away from the gospel", etc. Just some quiet and what one of my students referred to as "that Catholic menorah thing."

But, if this truly is a new year, and the point of Advent is preparation for Christmas, then importing the idea of "new year's resolutions" from the secular new year might be a good way of concretizing Advent in our culture today -- there's always a danger in creating spiritual checklists, but if despite many efforts we still think of Lent as a time to "give something up," we might re-claim Advent as a time to do something new, in preparation for the novum of the incarnation.

I'm trying to take this past sunday's Gospel instruction to "be vigilant at all times" as a jumpstart to making my meditation and morning prayer practice more regular in the next few weeks. What are you going to do?

Benedictus Discalceus

2006-11-30T13:27:00.000-05:00

This photo says it all: if B16 is willing to take off his red prada shoes for interreligious dialogue, then what more can we ask of him to show his commitment to peace and mutual respect? Hasn't he suffered enough?

Craaaanston!!!

2006-11-25T09:16:00.000-05:00

There's a fabulous article from last week's Globe defending my hometown, Cranston, Rhode Island, which apparently was rated one of the "Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America". Ahem. Love the Wein-o-Rama reference. I reproduce the article in full below:
"There's no place like home, especially Cranston, R.I."

By Tina Cassidy, Globe Correspondent | November 18, 2006

By Tina Cassidy, Globe Correspondent | November 18, 2006

CRANSTON, R.I. -- When the author of "The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America" placed this city on its list -- proclaiming Cranston an ideal location for "white trash, mall rats, mafia wannabes, ultra guidos, old-school metal heads, and paper clip company employees" -- I laughed.

Then an editor asked me to defend in print the quirky place where I grew up, and I choked. I have rarely asked for an extension on a deadline, but I had to this time. I needed time to reflect, and to do some additional reporting. On the one hand, this was a place that I -- and every one of my friends -- abandoned after graduating from Cranston High School West in 1987. But it is also a place that we look back on fondly and, sometimes, with warm bemusement.

We left for college, for bigger cities, for bigger dreams, for places that were more expensive, more pretentious -- places where you can't get a Del's Lemonade in July, or a heavenly slice of cold strip pizza from the aptly named Superior Bakery, or veal at the legendary Mike's Kitchen inside the Tabor - Franchi VFW Post, or a dog with everything from Wein-O-Rama , or anybody's grandmother's meatballs on a Sunday.

When my friends and I left for Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and even more-exclusive ZIP codes smattered around New England, we left behind the Falconettes, our high school's acclaimed half time high-kicking dance troupe. We left behind the Italian feast in Knightsville . And we left behind our tight-knit families. But we always come back.

And what we find when we get there is not white trash or mall rats (unless -- and I say this good-naturedly -- you count my sister-in-law, but she is originally from Boston). There might be some mafia wannabes, but there are just as many in Medford. There may be some ultra guidos, but what does that mean 20 years after the local Chess King closed? If you are looking for mullets, poke around in New Hampshire; you won't find any here in this fashion-conscious city. Old-school metal heads? They live in West Warwick, the next town over. Paper clip company employees? Now the authors are really stretching it. Just ask my mother, a bank executive who became president of the Chamber of Commerce, for real, after I accepted this assignment.

"We just made Money magazine's list of the Best Places to Live -- number 78," she said patiently, before e-mailing me a two-page love letter about Cranston, a place where she moved us 29 years ago. (I was born in Connecticut.) "We don't have a mall," she gushed. "We have Garden City." Garden City, for those of you who have never been, is an outdoor mall. She also ticked off other amenities, including its proximity to other places. There are local farms, she added, and yacht clubs sited on Narragansett Bay. The public schools, she noted, educated me and all my friends who have since moved on to become artists and law partners and advertising executives and PTO organizers.

Next I consulted the Money survey. The magazine cites Cranston's low crime, short commutes, and bevy of cultural attractions as merit-worthy highlights.

But, of course, there were some finer points that no survey could take into account.

"What about sledding at the ACI?" my Cranston-bred friend Beth, now living in Brooklyn, N.Y., said without any hint of irony. (ACI stands for the Adult Correctional Institution, one of several incarceration and justice facilities situated in a hilly section of the city.)

How could I forget?

Then Cheryl, in Connecticut, another classmate from West, piped in: "I agree with the mall rat thing, but white trash? Maybe I'm fuzzy on the definition, but I think of white trash as the illiterate, unwashed, and ignorant. People who don't mow their front lawns," she said.

And have you ever seen the front lawns in Cranston? Immaculately manicured, if frequently bracketed by a set of white concrete lions, freshly spray-painted white every spring.

"And mafia wannabes ?" Cheryl continued. "It's not like they're petty burglars. Maybe they sell stolen speakers out of the trunks of their [Chevy] IROCs , but they don't break into houses. And they'd kill anyone who broke into their mother's house."

Her comments made me think lovingly of my own brother, Jake, who, despite having a well-paying job in Boston, preferred to live in Cranston -- with my parents (and his wife) until recently, a few months shy of his 31st birthday.

It was not about money. It was about community. About my aunt and uncle and cousin across the street, another cousin and her family next door, my grandparents down the street, and friends from childhood all around. Cranston is a place that doesn't let you leave. It's sort of like the ACI, come to think of it. But with much better food.

Paulist Center - All Are Welcome DVD

2006-11-23T11:22:00.000-05:00

So in very exciting news, thePaulist Center has released its 15-minute promotional video, "All Are Welcome", as part of its ongoing outreach program. If you've never been to the Paulist Center, this might be a good way of getting a taste of what the community is like. And, if you stick around till around the 13th minute, some of you might see a familiar face...

Ecumenical Round-up

2006-11-23T10:14:00.000-05:00

So lots of ecumenical stuff happening these days.

Yesterday, despite a relative dearth of media coverage, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, had a short private meeting with B16 in Rome. You can hear his interview with Vatican Radio, and read his talk at San Anselmo here. (Thanks to open book for the links.)

And, in the buildup for the pope's visit to Turkey in a few days, lots of activity, ecclesiastical and political. Yesterday a group of Islamist protestors occupying Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, and had to be dispersed using tear gas. Expect a lot more along those lines in the days to come.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate has published the official papal visit website, which includes a podcast on Orthodox-Catholic relations. In many ways the lowkey nature of the Anglican primate's visit to Rome in contrast with B16's visit to Constantinople for the feast of St. Andrew, patron of the city, is a good signal of Benedict's priorities: the Anglican dialogue, while important, is not at the top of the Vatican's current priorities or hopes. B16 has long held a personal interest in Roman Catholic-Orthodox reconciliation. And, while B16 is not the showman that John Paul II was, I wouldn't be surprised if we see some sort of dramatic gesture, either symbolic or practical, during his visit to the Phanar.

Blogging at the AAR

2006-11-19T11:32:00.000-05:00

So I'm here in the main convention hall of the AAR, craziness is all around.

Most disturbing is the Employment Information Services center, where crowds of sweaty, stressed out graduate students are waiting for interviews. As if it wasn't bad enough that said students are all waiting in a large holding pen outside a hall outfitted with curtains to make some interview cubicles, the area itself is about four stories under the ground floor, requiring one to take a number of escalators down into the depths. I'm hoping to get a post-it note above one of the escalators soon reading "lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate."

There are tons of fashion mistakes, as well as the always surprisingly large cohort of snappily dressed postmodernists. (You can always tell by the chunky glasses.) Peacebang is likely having a field-day.

I have one interview this afternoon, and another today or tomorrow that is yet to be set up.

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine...

Don't have time to deal with this...

2006-11-15T09:26:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to finish a chapter before I head to the American Academy of Religion meeting tomorrow, and am preparing for some job interviews there.
I don't have the time, or the emotional energy, to start talking about the one-two punch of the U.S. bishops' statements on homosexuality or reception of communion, but I'm not very happy about them. Part of the strength of Catholic Christianity has been, IMO, its ability to say a lot but to leave a lot of middle ground unsaid, in order to give people room to live as best they can. These two documents say a lot, and get rid of a lot of the middle ground on which I've been standing for a while.

Loving God Perfectly

2006-11-05T15:35:00.000-05:00

Today's readings of the Shema Israel from Deuteronomy and the Gospel of Mark reminded me of a short, piercing, pregnant poem from Mary Oliver's latest book, Thirst, which includes many pieces reflecting on the death of her partner:

What I Said at Her Service

When we pray to love God perfectly,
surely we do not mean only.

(Lord, see how well I have done.)

Baltimore Basilica

2006-11-04T15:48:00.000-05:00

The Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore was rededicated today.

As America's mother church, where the plenary councils of the Catholic church in the U.S. were held in the 19th century, the Latrobe-designed basilica is an architectural masterpiece of inculturation: Roman Catholic Christianity in republican America. Rocco has a beautiful full report over at Whispers. If there's time to escape the AAR in D.C., I may have to head up to Baltimore for a day.

From Stephen Colbert

2006-11-04T09:48:00.000-05:00

"Senator Kerry does not support our troops. If he had won the election, there wouldn't be any troops left in Iraq. President Bush, on the other hand, has given our troops an opportunity to fight without end. That's creating jobs. In fact, the president's policies helped create 104 more job openings last month. Now who's stupid, Senator?"
STEPHEN COLBERT, host of "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central

With credits to the Globe.

All Souls' Day

2006-11-03T11:21:00.000-05:00

So I had the privilege again last night of preaching at the Paulist Center, for our All Souls Vespers Service. A day late and likely more than a dollar short, here's what I said:

The first thing I have to say is that I want to talk about death, but that I need to admit my utter lack of credentials to speak about it. I am a young man; my parents are still living, my friends and close family are still living – the great danger of my saying anything at all about death is that I’ll start off into heady abstractions, at best, or pious, unhelpful, uncomforting fluff at worst.

I do know a little bit about the Gospel, so that’s what I’ll be going on here, but I beg your forgiveness if what I have to say seems to float away from reality.

What is it with Catholics and death? Why is it that my family could refer to the obituaries as the “Irish sports page”? That my parish held its annual summer picnic in the adjacent cemetery without anyone batting an eye? That our Mexican sisters and brothers are celebrating today as el día de los muertos, full of decorated skeletons and, again, picnics in the cemeteries? Don’t we Catholics know that death is something really, really bad, something to be afraid of, something to struggle against, something to hide away, not something to joke about?

One of the worst things we Catholics can do to undermine faith in God is to ignore the reality, the uncompromising reality, of death in our lives and in the lives of those around us. The more I talk to people who can’t stand to be around Christians, the more I’m convinced of the immense harm that has been done by pollyannish platitudes about “God’s mysterious plan”, by attempting to gloss over the deep pain of loss with a cheerful recommendation to “buck up” and “have faith”, by the quite frankly crappy theologies of death as an instrument of divine intervention in which we’re told that “God never gives us more than we can handle”. God doesn’t “need another angel” – he already has plenty. And God is not consulting a list of “naughty” and “nice” to determine whom he’s going to whack next.

You’ll be happy to know that, in my opinion, these simply aren’t part of the Christian understanding of death. In case we forget, there’s a torture victim hanging in the front of our churches to show us again and again that death – in all its gruesome details, in its violence and despair in so many parts of our world, in the emptinesses which it leaves behind – is not something God wants. Like all of the results of evil in our world, all of the results of sin, death – or at least death as we cause, suffer, and experience it – is a mystery, a mystery the Gospel tells us we only begin to understand in part as we are being saved from death in Jesus.

But how does that happen? Our reading tonight gives us a starting point. Paul writes that he is convinced that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of Christ.” There’s our clue: “nor any other creature”. Do you see what category death falls into? God or not-God? Not God. Creator or creature? Creature.

Now, you see why my warning about being flippant about death comes into play was important; thinking of death as a “creature” can, and has, been read as legitimating exactly the sort of “death as how God micromanages the world” theology that tries to dismiss or ignore the painful reality of death. But I don’t think that is what Paul is up to here.

Instead, Paul is pointing out how, all appearances to the contrary, the things that seem most frightening to us, most threatening to us, including death itself, have no power, no chance of winning, no hold over us when compared to the love of God in Christ. The heights and depths which define our space, the future and present which define our time, the principalities and powers which define how our world works, even life and death itself – these are not even in the running when compared with God’s love. They are not God, they are creatures, and therefore, they aren’t in charge. God isn’t in competition in any way with death, and despite its apparent finality, death isn’t finally in charge. The resurrection of Christ, the “first fruits” of the bodily resurrection, is the real end for us and all the souls now asleep in Christ.

Every Sunday when we gather for Eucharist, we remember how in Jesus God entered into both parts of this complex relationship with death; how dying on the cross he cried out with the pain we know of death, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”; and yet how he died commending his spirit into God’s hands in love for God and for us. Paul knows that denying the reality of death would by lying about what it is to be a human being, for whom death is scary and painful in ways those words don’t begin to describe. But Paul also knows that it was because Christ trusted in God’s power over death that he was able to risk is life in an act of love for us. Every Sunday we make Christ’s act of love and of trust our own, we begin to see what life beyond – not without – death, looks like: it looks like the love of one who lays down her life for a friend.

So, this may all be well and good, but what does this have to do with our celebration of All Souls, with the picnics in the cemetery and all that?
Only this: I think that our prayer with and for our dead sisters and brothers awaiting, with us, the final resurrection of all, is one of the major ways we remind ourselves of the creatureliness of death, the relative – I use the term very cautiously – unimportance of death, of the fact that while death is often the deepest crisis of our personal and communal lives, it still falls into the category of “not God.” When we pray with and for our dead in a Christian way, we aren’t doing so with a vague hope that they may be ok “somewhere out there”; we’re reminding ourselves that not even death, the painful and tragic deaths that some of us have experienced, can separate them, or us, from the love of Christ. We’re getting into the habits of people for whom God is in charge of everything, even death, and who will raise us up on the last day, as Jesus was raised on the first day of the week. That’s why the practices, the habits, of living as if death were not – the relationships we continue through prayer, the remembrance of our dead brothers and sisters in our lives, even the picnics and the flowers – are far more important over a lifetime of faith than anything I can say to make this unbelievably good news real.

Habits of faith in God can be dangerous – faith in God’s power over death inevitably seems to flower into risky acts of love. Look up above this altar; look at the alcove for the martyrs of El Salvador, and you’ll see what believing love is stronger than death can lead to. But when we pray for and with our sisters and brothers “who have fallen asleep in Christ”, when we use those words not to hide their deaths in a euphemism but to claim God’s power over their deaths, we begin to be freed ourselves from the habits that scare us away from living lives of love. And today on this feast of all the souls, we can be comforted in practicing our faith, in loving as if death were not, by the presence of our sisters and brothers, alive in Christ, encouraging us to imagine our lives through and beyond our deaths.

Miscellany

2006-11-02T09:06:00.000-05:00

So typity typity typity - trying to bang out a chapter of the dissertation before the AAR (and hopefully some interviews???) in a few weeks.

But here are some varia to keep you busy.

- First, the title of this post is a shout out to Ben Schott (say that five times fast), author of Schott's Miscellanies; he was in town the other night to promote his new contribution to the worlds of learning and graphic design, Schott's Almanac. We chatted afterwards about the Vatican stamps honoring the 500th anniversary of the founding of the Swiss Guards.

- Second, fun op-ed in yesterday's New York Times by James Martin, S.J., author of My Life With the Saints, on recently canonized Mother Théodore Guérin, and her struggles with her local ordinary in the founding of St.-Mary-of-the-Woods in Indiana.

- Third, today's Boston Globe has another fun op-ed, "Blame It All on the Gay Agenda", in which author Steve Kluger has his tongue firmly in his cheek. A highlight:

What's there left to do but come clean? Although we've attempted to keep our covert ops cloaked in diverting sequins, there's no plugging the leaks that have revealed our subversive intentions. It's the Pentagon Papers all over again.
The truth began to emerge last week when a male couple was wed in Massachusetts. Twenty minutes later, three heterosexual marriages fell apart in Kansas City. Under ordinary circumstances, one of our operatives would have been present to hide the evidence under a stack of Liza Minnelli CDs, but he was watching an episode of "I Love Lucy" with his 9-year-old niece so that she could go forth and recruit her young friends in fourth grade.

- Fourth, the guiltiest pleasure in my life lately (the deepest pleasure being the anniversary I celebrated with the bf on Tuesday...4 years, 0 homicides = Success!), has been Boston's Weekly Dig. It's entirely surpassed, IMHO, the Phoenix in quality, insight, and overall wittiness. Plus, it's pages don't get your hands turning all black, and you don't feel after reading it that you ought to start growing out a really, really scraggly ponytail and wearing black all the time. Their gubernatorial election round-up is quite good, not least because of the fun cartoons. Highlights:

On Kerry Healy:

All this negativity—she’s run one of the filthiest campaigns the state has ever seen—caused Massachusetts citizens to collectively brand her a major bitch, and after closing to within 13 points in one poll, her campaign imploded. [...] Several million dollars and one shriveled conscience later, the Herald called Healey’s campaign “dead in the water.” Some belated advice from us to you, Muffy: Next time you want to trade your soul for something totally worthless, make it a candy bar or a stale donut.

And on Christy Mihos:

[...]but it’s clear that Christy doesn’t think he can be governor. Nor is he trying too hard. He’s sunk millions of dollars of his own money into his doomed campaign for the sole purpose, it appears, of exacting revenge on the state Republican apparatus that dicked him over during his battles with Jane Swift. He’ll probably pull down 10 percent on Election Day—not enough to say he single-handedly sunk Kerry Healey, but definitely enough to make the GOP regret punching a hole in his ball or peeing on his red wagon or whatever they did to him.

- Finally, watch out for squirrels today.

U2charist Tonight at EDS

2006-10-30T11:31:00.000-05:00

More info, and a legible copy of the info, at the EDS website.

And they're off...

2006-10-27T09:44:00.000-04:00

Off to chairs of search committees around the nation, that is. In Phase One of "Operation Tenure-Track Professor Baptized Pagan," I've sent out all of my applications for teaching positions to a variety of colleges, mostly Catholic, around the country. This is all in preparation for the American Academy of Religion meeting next month in Washington, D.C., where first-round interviews for many of these jobs will be held. In the exciting "Employment Information Services Center" (read: temporary cube farm created out of not-so-soundproof curtains, housing tired search committees and stressed-out, over-caffeinated hopefuls), applicants wend their way through a maze of departmental politics in the search for the ultimate cheeese, a tenure-track position.

But at this point, applications all sent and no interviews yet scheduled (still too early, I think...right?...RIGHT???), I can relax into the bliss of envelopes of C.V.'s, cover letters and statements of teaching philosophy wending their way across the country. Oh, and into finishing the dissertation. Right.

2007 Commemorative Stamps

2006-10-26T15:34:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought my combined interests in theology and revolutionary war re-enanctment made me geeky enough, I thought I would add to the overall dorkiness by coming out again: I, BaptizedPagan, am a philatelist. I've been one since I was younger, and though I managed to resist the lure of philately for some time in my adolescence, as I've gotten older it's become something that I can't and won't deny. I am what I am. I'm particularly fond of first day of issue commemorative cancellations, the often beautiful and historically significant connection of a new stamp with a place associated with its subject. And I have a whole lot of them these days, thanks in large part to inheriting a large part of my bf's late grandmother's _astounding_ collection.

In that theme, I thought I'd pass on the postal service's release of next year's commemorative stamp issues. Some of the best looking ones, this year's corporate-inspired "Love" stamp, the 400th anniversary of Jamestown triangular stamp, and the Tiffany window stamp, are displayed here. (If you're still looking for the best stamps available right now, for my money you can't go wrong with the Samuel de Champlain joint U.S.-Canadian issue, the (lovely) Judy Garland stamps released in June just in time for pride, or the Chacón Madonna and Child for Christmas this year.) I'm just waiting for the reaction against the fact that the postal service is promoting magic in its Disney stamps this year...pagans!

Philatelists of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our shame.

Weekly poem from slate

2006-10-24T10:03:00.000-04:00

To get you into the swing of the upcoming holidays, Slate's weekly poem, by Kathy Fagan.

" 'There's just one little thing: a ring. I don't mean on the phone.' -- Eartha Kitt"

In lieu of the latkes,
the usual caroling,
and adorable Kazakh
orphans, instead of the crèche
and, après ski,
the figgy pudding slash
kwanzaa stew,
the yuletide blogging,
the tinsel, the garland,
and eight maids eggnogging,
allow me to mince
neither word nor pie
and provide advice
and a list forthwith:
Do not buy and regret,
dear. A diamond
is what to get,
dear. Its extra weight
I'm built to carry.
The starboard lilt,
the opiate
drag on one knuckle,
I'm willing to accommodate
and promise not to buckle
under. Been bottom.
Done shouldered.
It's my time to
plunder, and have a little lovely
something, a nothing-too-modest
something, to set off
all this black
and dazzle the crosshatch
right out of my skin.
O halogen track,
O twinkling lights,
O shining star
upon the highest bough:
you'll soon learn how
to be the ladies in waiting,
stable pony to the thoroughbred,
Martin to a Lewis,
Cathy to a Patty,
mere vein to the carotid—
i.e., to be outwatted.
O Christmas
tree, dear dreidl,
could it be more plainly said?
Some demand the head
upon a platter, others lick
the silver off their spoon.
This childless mother
desires neither moon
nor man but the carat
dangled all this time.
So snare it,
Santa, from that other
sorry cow.
The Baby Jesus phoned,
says I should wear it now.