December 29, 2013

Gospel Commentary from the Irish Dominicans

François Mauriac (1885 – 1970), the French novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote the following: “The open door through which, on the paternal side, a torrent of heredities submerges us, opens for this child upon infinite Being: upon the Father. From this source he inherits an ocean of divinity while we sinners reap the hidden passions of the dead of our race: a sinister torchlight procession in which each man leaves after him the torches that will consume his descendants and whose flames will end by setting fire to a world vowed to murder and to abominable vices. O Lord who have escaped this heritage under which we groan and weep… have mercy upon the madness of those who sometimes awaken in an abyss into which they fell long before their birth. To be near you I will become a child. There is neither death nor old age for those who love you….”-- Today’s Good News, the website of the Dominicans of Ireland

By your miraculous birth of the Virgin you have fulfilled the scriptures: Like a gentle rain falling upon the earth you have come down to save your people. O God, we praise you. – Liturgy of the Hours, Roman rite

Child of Bethlehem –

house of bread;

Man of Jerusalem –

city of peace;

you have loved us

without limit or condition;

in our greatness and in our misery,

in our folly and in our virtue;

may your hand be always upon us

and may your heart be within us

so that we too

may become bread and peace

for one another.

– John Hammond, OSB

COVENTRY CAROL

Lully, lullay, Thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Lullay, thou little tiny Child,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do,

For to preserve this day

This poor youngling for whom we do sing

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Herod, the king, in his raging,

Charged he hath this day

His men of might, in his owne sight,

All young children to slay.

That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!

And ever mourn and sigh,

For thy parting neither say nor sing,

Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

The Coventry Carol is an English Christmas carol dating from the 16th century, traditionally performed in Coventry in England as part of a mystery play that depicts the Christmas story from Matthew. The carol recalls the Massacre of the Innocents, in which Herod ordered all male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem to be killed, and it takes the form of a heartbreaking lullaby, sung by the mothers of the doomed children. There are records of the pageants being performed as early as 1392; the lyrics we know were written down by a man named Robert Croo in 1534. The “mystery plays” and many of the songs and traditions associated with them were suppressed during the Protestant Reformation, but the carol was rediscovered and republished in the early 19^th century. It was brought to the attention of a wider audience after it was featured in a special BBC broadcast at Christmas 1940, shortly after the bombing of Coventry during World War II. The broadcast concluded with the singing of the carol in the bombed-out ruins of the Cathedral; its haunting words and melody are a vivid reminder of the tragedy of war, and of how the innocent suffer most in the world we have created. – Diane Sylvain, using information adapted from Wikipedia & other sources

Reflection for December 29, 2013: The Holy Family

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family. It’s hard for me to get into the mood, honestly, because I can’t help noticing, as I look around, that my own wonderful but not necessarily holy family appears to be shriveling away, evaporating even as I watch. I read Sirach’s words about honoring one’s father, and they bring tears to my eyes. I’m just not very good at being an orphan, I guess; I can’t get used to the fact that I’ve lost, not one, but both of my parents now.

I’ve always hated that phrasing, by the way; to say you’ve “lost” a loved one sounds like you’ve misplaced them somehow, like maybe they’re in the back of the closet somewhere or in a drawer with all your unpaid bills or mismatched socks. In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being of Earnest, the fiercely aristocratic Lady Bracknell chastises the hero by saying: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” That quote came into my memory just now, as I was about to start weeping sloppily all over this keyboard, and I started laughing out loud, even as I was crying. Because if there’s one thing life in my family has taught me and all the rest of us, it is how to keep laughing through your tears, and even, if necessary, how to weep through your laughter.

Many years ago, I saw a card that said “A family is a school for love.” “Gosh, isn’t that sweet,” I thought, dismissing the words as one of those Hallmark-style sayings that are usually accompanied by little pink flowers and perhaps a balloon or two and some bright dancing bunnies. There’s a lot of confusion in our culture between sentimentality and real love, but the difference between them is huge. Sentimentality doesn’t have a price tag, for one thing; it’s there simply to make you feel good inside, and it asks nothing hard in return. Love, however, always comes with a cost. And sometimes the price is a whole lot higher than you ever expected to pay.

In today’s second reading, Paul tells us to “put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.” But what does Paul mean by love? He explains in another reading – a famous one that is often used at weddings (and is also the one that we read at my father’s funeral) – Love is patient, love is kind. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. He goes on in a similar vein in today’s reading – and yes, I know, later on in the chapter he falls prey to the custom and culture of his time and gives us 1st century-style advice about wives being submissive and slaves being obedient. I don’t remember who it was who said that a man’s faults are those of his time but his virtues are his own, but I agree with it. (It’s true of women as well, obviously.) Sometimes, however, that virtue is not just a person’s own but a gift of the Holy Spirit. You can hear the Real Thing ringing through if you pay close attention. As it does sometimes to what seems like Paul’s own amazement, when the old curmudgeon suddenly steps out of his culture and is overcome by the kind of courageous loving merciful tenderness that is always rare and wonderful, whenever it appears. And that is what is happening today when he begs us to Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another … as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.

Last year, around this time, my younger brother was still lost in the mazes of Medical-Land, in and out of the hospital, getting carved up like a turkey by unnervingly eager vampire surgeons and their Igor-like assistants. And he’s still dealing with health issues, having to undergo periodic tests, coping with worsening emphysema on top of everything else. Meanwhile, our sister-in-law Amy jokes in her hilarious Christmas letter about how she is continuing her MS-inspired experiments “trying to overcome the law of gravity. These have been a dismal failure and gravity remains triumphant.” Being Amy, she adds that she is grateful to still be ambulatory, “albeit lacking any measure of physical grace.” I’m not particularly spry myself at the moment, although I feel pretty darn lucky; I can honestly sing along with the old group “Little Feat” that I’m “still on my feet, still willin’ … and in a whole lotta trouble.” But all this was pretty much true last year as well, with one major difference: Last year, we still had our Dad to call and complain to, our Dad who could make us laugh despite our troubles, yet who was never too macho to cry when tears were needed, our Dad who would cheerfully play the harmonica over the phone if you asked him to and physically, fearlessly intervene if he saw people being mean to children and animals, our Dad who called me on the very last morning of his life to announce joyfully that he and my stepmother Dawn had decided to move back to Colorado, to be closer to us. Our Dad, whom we saw as a Perma-Daddy, whom we thought would stick around forever, even though we always knew that it wasn’t true. The head of our not-quite-holy family is now gone. The fact that it happens to everyone doesn’t help in the least; in fact, it just makes it all worse.

We aren’t given scripts to study beforehand for the hard things in life. Instead, we simply muddle along, doing the best we can. Even the most dramatic events never happen like in the movies. Ordinary life is so abrupt, and ill-mannered, and exhausting. One day, you’re trundling along as usual, worried about work and bills and laundry and dinner. The next day, you’re crouched at your brother’s bedside, say, trying to locate his hand through the macramé tangles of wire and tubes in the ICU. You don’t know what to do or say, but you do and say it anyway. Or maybe you’re remembering, with painful vividness, those long days and nights when your mother was dying and you camped out by her bedside, singing lullabies and silly songs, and gently combing her hair, and always, always, heartbreakingly aware that most of the time, she had no idea who you were. Or perhaps you’re answering the phone in the middle of the night -- never a good idea, by the way; as the Cowboy Junkies warned in another classic song: “The telephone rings, but I don’t answer it, because everybody knows that good news always sleeps till noon.” You stare blearily at the clock: It’s 2 in the morning, and you’re trying to figure out what your stepmother is trying to tell you through exhausted tears: “Your father is dead,” she says. It can’t be true, you think. But it is. And then, because there is nothing else you can do, you say what people have said for thousands of years when a dear one is sick or someone you love has just died. You say, “I love you” to the person you’re talking to. You say, “I’m here, and I love you, and we will get through this together somehow.” You put your arms around your dear ones, and you laugh and you weep together.

A classic cartoon shows the ADULT CHILDREN OF NORMAL PARENTS meeting: A huge auditorium, completely empty except for two or three blissfully smiling people. I don’t know anyone from a “normal,” simple, well-adjusted family – the kind we more or less invented for 1950s TV. We don’t get to pick our families, and they seldom get to pick us, either. We are more or less all drafted, enrolled in our lives with no say-so, and so I guess you could agree that the Hallmark Card saying is true – our families are, or become, the schools in which we learn love – and everything else.

Me, I have not been a perfect sister or daughter or friend or churchgoer or employee or anything else; I can be angry and bossy and whingy and lazy and frustrated and easily hurt; sometimes when I’m trying to be nice, I just end up being a nuisance. Ultimately, I guess I’m just an average person – not at all the glorious heroine of life that I wanted to be, the Sylvain Family’s version of Joan of Arc (minus the being burned at the stake, of course). So it goes.

Everyone who reads this has been through family crises -- some of you through ones much worse than mine -- so you know the strange, surrealistic feeling of a year as crazy as this last one has been for my family -- the long and anxious sleepless nights, the telephones ringing, the sudden urgent emotional swings from despair into hope, from sorrow to joy, and then back again. Sometimes it all seems like a dream– and yet I don’t think life gets more real than this. Love never fails, Paul says. At my Dad’s funeral, with my arms around my two extraordinary brothers, with my sister-in-law who is my true heart’s sister, with a nephew who is the finest human being on the planet, with a stepmother who is as brave as a bull and fragile as a lily, with her wonderful children and with all my friends around me – what can a person say but, “I love you all so much.” And then wait – and hope – that you’ll get to hear their voices for years to come, and feel their loving arms around you, as they say, if you’re lucky: “I love you, too.” So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love. Amen. – Diane Sylvain