#387: When Hope Is In Season

The last week has brought several important turning points, and each of them gives reason for hope.

In swift succession we observed the inauguration of a new pope, the first day of spring, the 10^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and the beginning of Holy Week 2013.  For me, each of these has been food for thought.

The very phrase “first day of spring” can draw laughs from New Englanders, who have seen snow as late as May, yet I have come to see the vernal equinox as a genuine marker of life’s passages in our local four-season climate.

Living in New England has turned out to be problematic within my family.  Simply put, my kids hate winter, and have fled for warmer climes--as have millions of Americans fleeing from the northeast.  So until recently we’ve seen our kids mainly during summer vacations when they’ve ventured back to Boston, or for brief shivering stays to observe Thanksgiving or Christmas with us.

But this year we took a more radical turn, when our sons invited us to visit them in California for Christmas and our daughter agreed to join us from Miami.

I was willing to try out this kind of holiday experience, but was dubious: would Christmas Eve feel like Christmas amid west coast warmth?

I admit that winter has never been my favorite season, and in recent years it has become harder and harder to tolerate the long stretch between autumn’s brilliant foliage and spring’s blooms.  In New England, that gap can stretch to seven months. But my response has not been to migrate away.  I chose instead to hone my coping skills, and by now I’m pretty adept at making winter seem shorter than ever. 

Some of this is a matter of psychological tricks.  My birthday, for example (which just happens to be the same as Pope Francis’ birthday) is in mid-December, and at some point I decreed to myself that I was born during autumn--which automatically banished winter from my mind before that date. No matter how dark or cold or wet the days in November and early December, I keep telling myself, “it’s late fall weather.”

Other coping tricks are more objective, rooted in nature itself.  I remind myself that all during fall the days grow shorter, but that the winter solstice starts the turnaround of longer days.  So now I think of winter as the season when each day is always longer than the last, and I watch for the changes that brings.  From my front porch, I note that the sun, which dips behind the neighbor’s fir trees around 2:00 PM in early January, moves later and higher almost daily until, by the end of January, it passes over the trees and shines on the porch all afternoon.

In short, I focus on the subtle realities of seasonal change; I notice morning’s light coming earlier; I feel the heat of the sun and the rising average temperatures and the faster melting of the snow; I even see the reddish tree buds that become visible when viewed in-depth along a highway.

All this helps me convince myself that our seemingly endless winter is largely a myth.  The reality is a season that passes all too fast, just like all the others.  Despite the continued cold and snow, spring arrives every year, just as it did last week, with days overtaking night and the imminent prospect of Easter and Opening Day and the gradual succession of buds from crocuses to forsythia to daffodils to dogwoods magnolias and pear trees and lilacs and finally roses and full-leaf trees.  In the coastal forest that is New England, this bursting forth can feel explosive and sudden, but in fact it is already a discernible in March.

In hindsight, however, I realized that Christmas is another matter entirely. I can dispel the myths of our seasons by attending to the real facts of nature itself, but both Christmas and Easter are by their very nature tied to symbol and myth. And I am very attached to Christmas as a winter event.

We are raised to connect Christmas to cold, to winter, to sleighs and snow and warming fireplaces and roasting chestnuts.  This is true even though we know that such things are not a common part of the climate where Jesus was born.  We simply accept the images of shepherds and sheep in snowy fields.  It is no accident, of course, that Christmas comes during our winter.  The choice of December 25 had nothing to do with any historical record of Jesus’ birth.  It was, rather, a deliberate decision to counter the Roman Empire’s celebration of the winter solstice.  In that sense, Christmas is rooted, both historically and culturally, in the climate of the northern hemisphere.  Rome, after all, is on roughly the same latitude as Providence, Rhode Island, and Jerusalem occupies nearly the same latitude as Savannah, Georgia.

It is easy for us to forget that these Christian roots are not universal.  I often remind my parish audiences that, for my brother-in-law and niece living in Australia, Christmas comes during summer vacation--the very season when most parishes here are relatively dormant.  So for Christians of the southern hemisphere (who now represent the majority of Catholics in the world), the original meaning of “the Christmas season” is, if not altogether lost, at least rather abstract.  In Australia, Christmas comes at the summer solstice, so days turn shorter rather than longer. In Costa Rica and other equatorial regions, the very idea of changing daylight is alien, since their days are 12 hours long year-round. 

The same paradox applies to Easter, of course: our notion of Easter, associated with springtime’s return to life from the death of winter, and even our use of Easter eggs to represent that life, all depend on the framework of the northern hemisphere, since in the southern half of the world Easter comes around harvest time just as everything is dying. 

So Americans might reflect on this: the idea of our “white Christmas” may not be alien to the origins of the holyday, but it is alien to the life of most Christians today.  This means that, if Christianity is for the entire world, then these seasonal connotations cannot be the essence of either Christmas or Easter.

With this in mind back in December, I was willing to try a Christmas in sunny California, almost as an experiment in sensibility.

Even before we left, this required some adjustments.  We could not abandon the custom of having a Christmas tree in the house, but we could neither leave one there during our absence nor buy one after our return.  So we finally conceded to the option I have long resisted, and bought ourselves what I insisted on calling a “permanent” (read: artificial) tree.  And we abandoned most Christmas shopping in order to pay for the trip.

My first surprise on arriving in Los Angeles was that it was not really warm.  It was when I would call “sweater weather,” and for our whole stay I was amused to see that locals bundled up in winter coats while tourists wore only light jackets, or sweaters, or even shorts and T-shirts.  Nights were chilly enough to know that it was the off-season, but while cycling the beach from Hermosa to Palos Verdes, the sun was warm enough to be happy to be outdoors.

There was of course no snow, and despite the lights and decorations everywhere I struggled for any sense of the season.  Clearly people reside in warmer climates have adapted their sensibilities so that the phrase “Christmas season” feels appropriate no matter what the weather. Christmas trees were everywhere, ironic “evergreen” symbols among the ever-blooming local flora.   Ironically too, the days around the holiday were full of TV weather forecasts reminding us of the travel woes of those caught in the big snow storm “back east.” In California, I learned, the phrase “back east” referred, not to the Christmas Star, but the people unlucky enough to be carrying shovels rather than surfboards.

Something similar applies to Easter.  As a kid I heard a lot about “the Easter parade,” yet often it was too cold on Easter to strut out one’s new holiday outfit.  This is especially true in 2013 (which brought more snow as spring began), since Easter is so early.  It takes a bit of struggle in these parts to feel that life is already returning, but a sharp eye can spot the buds beginning, a sharp ear notes the arrival of birds, and the days have already gained nearly an hour over the nights.

So the symbolism of Easter, like the symbolism of Christmas, works well enough in our region even if the weather does not always cooperate.  But that is only because we’re lucky enough to inhabit a part of the globe with seasons that roughly resembles places of our faith’s origins. For people living in other parts of the world these symbols may still be meaningful, but they are not natural.  They are cultural constructs that come from another culture.

Happily the Christian tradition, as rich as it is in symbols, is not really about anything symbolic.  It is a historic religion, and we put our faith not in those symbols but in the facts of our past. 

Those facts contain the key promises on which we depend.  For as we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus at Easter, we are remembering the very past events that promise new life for all our futures. 

And it is this promise, and not any symbol, that gives us our hope—even as one season gives way to another, as one pope gives way to another, as we turn from invasion to withdrawal, and as Lent turns into Easter.   
     That is why, no matter where we live, hope is in season this week.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

 

#386: "Habemus Papam": Back to a Relevant Church?

White Smoke = "Habemus Papam"-- But Who?

 As the media continues to analyze the election of Pope Francis I, I am offering some historical perspective:

It took less than 10 minutes for Pope Francis to win over the hearts of millions watching his first appearance on the balconies Saint Peter’s Basilica.  He greeted the crowd with “Buona sera,” invited them to join him in prayer for Benedict XVI, joked about arriving as pope from “the end of the world,” and asked the crowd the favor of praying for him in silence before he blessed them.

Pope Francis I Bows after asking the people to bless him.

 He left smiling, only to come back, and grabbed the microphone again to thank the crowd for coming, and bid them to go home and get some rest, promising he would see them again soon.

We realize how difficult the current moment is for the Catholic Church when we see the way such simple gestures triggered wild and enthusiastic optimism that Francis would bring genuine reform to Catholicism and new hope to the world.

The Argentines unfurled their flag and led the cheers

 Given the crises and divisions within the Catholic world, and the deeper challenges this pope faces (see CrossCurrents #385, The New Pope’s Challenges) it is remarkable yet perhaps also understandable how little it takes to create a sense that this is a turning point.  That is probably because, in matters of faith, style can be just as important as substance.  And this pope has already demonstrated a different style of papacy from his immediate predecessors.

Yes, this pope is a conservative (like virtually all the other cardinals in the conclave.)  But that simply means he is not interested in rewriting or revising church doctrines.  It does not mean that nothing will change.

After all, Blessed Pope John XXIII, perhaps the most beloved pope of the last 100 years, was also doctrinal conservative.  And the council he called, Vatican II, did not even have doctrine on its agenda.  It was a resolutely “pastoral council,” meaning it was more concerned with the way the Church operated in the world, and how it expressed its message, then in any corrections or developments of the message itself.

John was beloved not because he changed church teachings but because he combined a vision for how the Catholic Church could thrive in the modern world with a personal style that made his vision credible, persuasive, attractive, and thus relevant to millions of people around the world.

It is no accident, I think, that three commentators on the PBS coverage following the election of Pope Francis, when asked to compare him to another pope, immediately chose, not Benedict, not John-Paul II, not Paul VI, but John XXIII.

Like John, Francis has been elected at an advanced age, and presumably will serve as a “transition pope” who offers not a long papacy but rather the possibility of a significant shift.  Like John, his bearing is strikingly different from his predecessors, and he already shows an uncanny gift for establishing rapport with ordinary people.

Immediately after his first appearance, media reports had him declining the private car back to his hotel to join the other cardinals on the shuttle bus, and packing his bags and paying his bills by himself “to set a good example.”

My betting is there are many more good examples to come.  And they will not go unnoticed, especially by young people.

Even this early, it does not appear that the shift in style is unintentional.  As many commentators have noted, by choosing to be the first pope called “Francis” this man aligns himself with the popular “grassroots” saints of the Church’s history rather than with its towering hierarchical powers.  Everything we know about his lifestyle and his work with the poor suggests that the conclave chose this Jesuit as pope knowing full well that this would shift the focus of Catholic life almost overnight.

My daughter once told me “Dad, when you say ‘Catholic’ you mean social justice; that’s not what ‘Catholic’ means to most people.” I suspect my two sons would agree with her, and they would all be right on both counts.  I do mean social justice when I say “Catholic,” and I have found, in more than 40 years of parish work, that social justice still remains on the margins of most people’s Catholic identity.  For most, it has yet to become a core element in their faith.

But my three kids are all graduates of Jesuit institutions, and from the beginning to the end of their days in those schools they repeatedly heard the phrase “educating men and women for others,” and they also heard about the “preferential option for the poor.” They knew that, in theory at least, the Jesuits and the institutions they ran stood for a tradition of public and social service designed to build the solidarity of the human family and even peace in the world.

None of this represents anything new in Catholic doctrine.  But with this Jesuit pope it could represent something new in the way the Catholic Church styles itself before the rest of the world.

CrossCurrents readers are familiar with two themes in my recent work.  First: the papacy itself has been in transition ever since the election of John XXIII.  Second: too often in recent years the hierarchy has created the public impression of being obsessed with matters sexual.

Pope Francis can act on both these fronts to dramatic effect.  His personal behavior, manner, and style can further transform the papacy from the stern imperial monarchy of the early 20^th century to the new mold of the public servant of all peoples everywhere—a people’s papacy. 

And his actions and teachings can shift our focus away from a preoccupation with sex to a focus on the true joys and sorrows of a world struggling to overcome injustice and groping blindly for peace.

Liberal Catholics remember with great fondness the euphoria about Catholic renewal that followed Vatican II in 1965, but they often forget that this had nothing to do with dramatic changes in official teachings.  It had to do with (1) the retrieval of many ancient values and concepts that had been lost along the way, and with (2) the suddenly extroverted style of a papacy and a Church that for too long had been closeted behind the Vatican walls.  These two shifts--a mining of ancient resources and an opening of church windows to modern life--enabled the Church to begin a new kind of dialogue with contemporary life and build bridges to people well beyond the boundaries of the Catholic population.

That began again last night when the pope stressed that his blessing was not just for the people in Saint Peter’s Square and not even only for the planet’s 1.2 billion Catholics; instead he offered his blessing to “All people of goodwill everywhere.”

It may be too early to predict, yet it is high time for the hope, that this pope will complete the transformations begun by John XXIII, put a renewed partnership of Church and world back on the map of Catholic action, and show the way for our Church to reach out to all people of goodwill and once again make the Catholic Church what its mission calls it to be: a global force for good in the world.

If that happens, Pope Francis may take us back to the future that we believed in, once upon a time, a time when the Church was still relevant.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#385: The New Pope's Challenges

Some thoughts on the as-yet unfinished papal election: 

Black Smoke From Ballot #1

       The conclave’s first day has produced only black smoke.  Wall-to-wall coverage will continue, and millions will watch, until white smoke announces the election of the new pope and he appears before the masses in Saint Peter’s Square and the world’s TV screens.

If nothing else, the Catholic Church is good theater, and the conclave’s very secrecy generates the ironic suspense that comes when the players know more than the audience.

Some alienated Catholics, especially in North America, remain immune to a spectacle that offers no choice of movement on issues like contraception, same-sex marriage, or women priests.  For them, the whole papal election--indeed the papacy itself--is largely irrelevant.  That cuts both ways, of course: their concerns are largely irrelevant to judging what difference the new pope might make.

Since all 115 electors were handpicked by either John-Paul II or Benedict XVI, we know in advance that on major church teachings, as well as on the most controversial minor ones (mostly about sex and gender), the next pope, no matter who he is, will bring continuity rather than change.

But within the mainstream of that continuity are several challenges facing whoever is elected, and we will measure his success based on (1) how he sets his priorities and (2) how the engages them.

CrossCurrents readers know my take on this: the new pope inherits a 50-year process that has transformed the papacy itself, and our current challenges call for further transformation.  For me, this means taking action on several fronts:

Corruption and hypocrisy.  The fallout of the sex-abuse scandal is a widespread (and still spreading) perception of the Catholic Church is an institution steeped in malfeasance and cover-ups.  We cannot expect the next generation to invest themselves or their children in the Church unless that perception changes.  This will take visible action at all levels, and could take an entire papacy—or more—to accomplish.  So from the start, the new pope must bring a forthright and upright presence to his role by establishing accountability at all levels of the hierarchy.

Housecleaning.  Fifty years ago John XXIII hung the renewal of Catholicism on three things: Vatican Council II (1962-1965), the revision of canon law (moderately revised in 1983), and the reform of the curia (Vatican bureaucracy).  Since then, the curia is more international and has fewer minor clerics holding too much authority, but it remains an isolated bureaucracy.  Too many of its bishops are too far (in place or time or both) from the experience of day-to-day church life.

At Vatican II the curia’s scheme for a quick, do-nothing rubber stamp council exploded when the world’s bishops balked at being bossed by bureaucrats and recreated a meaningful council agenda.  The result: Vatican II was truly the product of the Church’s shepherds, not its bureaucrats.

But 50 years later the bureaucrats are back in charge (and often committing grievous errors of governance).

The last two popes not only allowed the world’s bishops to languish (the occasionally convened Synod of Bishops became increasingly toothless under John-Paul II and Benedict XVI), they also neglected their own responsibility to manage the curia.

The new pope will need to reassert the right order of things: his place as the leader of all bishops, with the curia under their direction.

On pilgrimage.  Since Paul VI, the papacy has become a pilgrim post, no longer secluded away in the Vatican but traveling the world’s continents to make the Church’s presence and mission visible in human form. His successors followed his example, but lost control of day-to-day management.

 The challenge facing the new pope: how can he continue this global presence but keep control of what goes on in Rome?  It will help if he is truly a man of the world, a people’s pope, rather than a closeted cleric.

Evangelizing.  Worldwide Catholicism continues to grow, but not everywhere: it is losing relative ground in Latin America, it is losing absolute numbers in North America (and only avoids shrinking thanks to millions of immigrants), and is nearly moribund in much of Europe.

Vatican II aimed to enrich the secular the world with gospel values by reaching out, by engaging in what Paul VI called “a conversation with the entire world.” But in many places that conversation has broken down even among our own members.

My view is simple: since Vatican II, secular culture has outrun Catholic renewal, and we risk falling further behind unless the new pope can preserve and rekindle the flame of renewal.  If Vatican II sought to assert Catholicism as a world church, the new pope must solidify the papacy’s role in world leadership.

These four challenges are central to the new pope’s success.  My own conviction is that such challenges are too big for one man to tackle solo.  Upon his own election in 1958, John XXIII knew he needed help to face post-war modernity, so he called the world’s bishops to convene in council.  In so doing he dispelled a century-old myth that the pope could lead the church alone.  We should hope and pray that the new man thinks like John, and mobilizes his bishops to join him in leading the way ahead.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013

#384: The Pope, the Bible, and the Drones

As we wait for the conclave to begin the election of a new pope, three small random observations:

RECUSED: Cardinal O’Brien of Scotland has recused himself from the conclave after allegations of personal sexual misconduct surfaced last month. But Los Angeles’ Cardinal Roger Mahony is in Rome, still determined to participate in the voting despite revelations of (and his apologies for) covering up priestly sexual abuse during his time as Archbishop of LA. This has sparked widespread protests by Catholics who regard his participation as scandalous. But Mahoney’s participation pales next to the truly horrific irony from the last conclave, which elected Benedict XVI. At the time (2005), Sean O’Malley had become Archbishop of Boston but was not yet made a cardinal. Meanwhile Bernard Law, despite his resignation in disgrace from Boston (epicenter of the sex abuse crisis) in 2002, retained his red hat and resided in Rome. So it was that Bernard Law, despite being the scandal's cover-up poster boy, participated and voted in the 2005 conclave--but Boston (the #4 Diocese in the US) had NO VOTE OR VOICE in choosing the next pope! At least this time that is rectified: Law is too old to vote this time, and Cardinal O'Malley will able cast his vote in Boston’s behalf.

BIBLICAL PROPORTIONS: The History Channel has been running a multi-part Lenten series on the Bible, but it took only 5 minutes (on the destruction of Sodom and the fate of Lot’s wife) to form my reaction. Aside from the arch acting style and the surfeit of special effects, the movie most resembles the sand-and-sandal sagas from 1950s Hollywood (see Cecil B. DeMille's “The Ten Commandments”) in portraying Bible narratives as literal events—as “history.” This plays neatly into the rising dominance of evangelical Christianity’s belief in literal interpretation of the bible. Unfortunately, surveys show that the majority of Catholics (and an even larger percentage of regular Mass-goers)  go right along with biblical literalism, even though Catholic teaching has made plain since at least the 5^th century that, with much of the bible, interpreting literally yields distortion of the text and its meaning. Let’s hope most Catholics skip this sort of fundamentalist propaganda.

ANTI-WAR GOP? With Sen.  Rand Paul's filibuster against the use of drones to kill US Citizens, the GOP may have begun re-branding itself on foreign and military policy. Instead of being merely the party that never met a war it didn’t like, growing numbers of party leaders see the risks militarism is posing to both human rights and the constitutional balance of power. For Catholics, this can only be welcome: since most drone use is almost certainly a violation of the Catholic Just War Theory, and since the Obama administration is, if anything, even more aggressive in promoting the use of drones to kill, opposition from the other side of the aisle may compensate for the fact that Democrats, even of the “left,” have been largely silent about the possible breach of international law, violations of humans rights, and even constitutional abuse of presidential power.

©Bernard F. Swain 2013