From Christmas to Epiphany II: From the Pieta to the Manger to the Pieta

Midnight Mass in St. Peter’s.  Our sweet human new Pope cradles the “Gesu Bambino” in his arms, walking with his wobbling gait to the recessional hymn of the same name.  In front of him are eight young children, just waist-high to him, in brightly colored clothes of their various cultures.  At the elaborate Manger scene, Francis places the baby Jesus in the manger, blesses and thanks the little children one by one, even giving one of them a zucchetto (the papal skullcap) that he had momentarily placed on his own head, in a smiling, mute blessing.   

Was it merely coincidence that Pope Francis and the procession to the altar for Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s passed the Pieta on the way, and again at the end of Mass, the recessional, “Gesu Bambino” with full choir, orchestra and organ vibrating the incense-smoky air?  Here the stiff plaster Gesu Bambino in the soft arms of the smiling old Shepherd of Rome and there in Ferrara marble the flaccid corpse of the King of Heaven in the arms of his grieving Mother….

Yesterday we considered the caveat from Fr. Delp in Nazi prison on the eve of Christmas 1944, on the way to the Nazi gallows himself the day after Epiphany.  Fr. Delp warned us: “One must take care to celebrate Christmas with a great realism.  Otherwise, the emotions expect transformations the intellect cannot substantiate.  Then the outcome of this most comforting of all holidays can be a bitter disappointment and paralyzing weariness….”

For me, validity of the symbol of the journey to the Manger by way of the Pieta was reinforced on the recessional, the strains of the sweet Gesu Bambino hymn still reverberating in Brunelleschi’s grand dome in clear D major, but bent to an ominous minor key in passing the Pieta a second time.

The reality is that the story of salvation is not accomplished at Christmas; the stage is merely set.  Delp’s warning is that we look at the baby in the manger not merely with emotions that warm our hearts with joy, but with our intellect as well, that notices once, then twice that the joyful throng passes by the Pieta once, and then twice.

We are called not to joy but through joy, transformed to hope that just as the story does not end at the manger, it does not end at the cross.

Tomorrow:  It’s a boy; He’s YOURS.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Who are we never without?

With the loss of a friend to glioblastoma I reflect on Mary’s pregnancy with a son who will be sacrificed.  Both bring to me the foolishness that we can "get over" losing someone.


And both bring me hope.

A now-cancelled series entitled “A Gifted Man” involved an individualistic, insensitive but brilliant neurosurgeon who was regularly visited by the spirit of his recently departed ex-wife, who was, as you might suspect, brilliant but compassionate and altruistic.  The nuance and effectiveness of the show came through in an episode in which what seemed to be a brain tumor in a patient turned out to be a chimera, cells of the undeveloped attached twin.  This chimera is a rare form of something we can all recall. 

When I was a boy, there was a story on TV about Siamese twins, and the dilemma of separation surgery.  Would the attempt to separate them, allowing them to live a normal life, be worth the risks of surgery?  I recall being struck (as a boy in a large family) that they could not get away from each other, that they were without the freedom to go on with their individual lives.  How often in our lifelong marriage have Kathy and I freed each other to do things without each other by saying that after all, “we’re not joined at the hip”.

The surface issue of the cancelled series was the visits by his wife, who completed him.  The deeper layer in this episode was the reality of the connectedness of the “other”; removal of the chimeric “tumor” was seen as a dilemma.  The young boy, even as he was besieged by the “voice” in his head as the tumor pressed on the hearing centers of his brain, mourned for the loss of his twin that surgery would require. 

A friend reminded me yesterday that the priest who presided at his father’s funeral had said in his homily “God so respects relationships that when we lose someone we love, he never fills the hole.”

Authentic life includes these holes, the places once inhabited by the physical presence of another.  In the mystery of life as this priest, Fr. Norm Dickson, S.J., proposed, grieving is not a matter of going on with our individual lives severed from their memory, but of embracing the gift that they remain to us, even as a hole.

Are we ever alone, really?  The word alone is from the Old English words alla ana…all one.  We can be lonely, focusing on our sense of alone-ness, but that is a dangerous delusion. 

We are not alone.  Going on is not a matter of going alone.  We are joined at the heart. 

Here is a reminder from e.e cummings – thanks to Bill Hickey for inhabiting me with this.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

by e.e.cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Entertaining Doubt

Waddyathink?  Did Jesus rise from the dead?  Too flippant a way of asking the question?  How dare one even ask; people have been burned at the stake for even speaking of such…DOUBT.

Some walk right past the tomb, never entering.  Mystery has a way of troubling us, so most of our society doesn’t even spend time thinking about this.  For them, Easter is about clothing sales and candy.  But those of us who have listened to the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the tomb, I think of three ways of living with it.

Faith

Some consider it true and live believing, considering the resurrection a tenet of their faith, something that makes them who they are.  I can’t write much about this without study; I’m not one of these.  I think of the Crusades, of the holocaust, of ways this kind of certainty can decompose into dehumanizing exclusiveness and elitism.  The image above of Meryl Steep in the Film Doubt reminds us of this example of the devil in certainty.  

Hope

I suspect that many apparently untroubled by doubt might more honestly rely on hope.  Accepting unknowing and uncertainty, a lot of us, if we were to speak honestly, consider the resurrection a possibility, and perhaps even long for it to be true.  Or we might long for what seems to us to be an untroubled, unquestioning faith.

Love

Some who have entered the tomb have walked so far away from it or are so wearied by considering its truth choose not even to spend time thinking about it.  The pious believers might consider them heathens.  But these, and I know so many of them, who spend no time considering the validity of such dogma, occupy their lime by simply loving.

Struggling with Dogma and Doubt can distract us from loving lives lived in real moments.  On the other hand, letting in the twilight of mystery can guide us in uncertain steps of toddlers’ feet to the truth that resides in our humanity, in our deepest center of meaning.

I pray not that we invite Jesus into our hearts these days after Easter, but that we entertain doubt.  

It’s in season.  All that Jesus does in Scripture these next weeks helps us to respect the truth of this so that we may step beyond it in a direction toward our truth, our best reckoning of Truth that is God.  And that God is Love.