by Father Richard G. Cipolla
From the second chapter of the First Letter of Paul to the
Corinithians.
“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified…that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of man but in the power of God”.
The contrast is quite stark.
There is the beautifully tanned news anchor with the most beautifully
coiffed white hair to be seen anywhere, opening the mainstream news with his
solemn face. There are various
faces: the smiley face that introduces
some heartwarming story, the knowing face that introduces a story that only a
non-thinking person would believe, the serious yet knowing face that introduces
a story that only he really understands and pity the poor slobs who do not
understand what this is really about. But
Thursday evening there was the solemn face in Dallas. The solemnity is enhanced
by the anchor’s being there at the scene, as if the first class flight to this
place had anything to do with the reality of his being there at all. But the alternative is no better. The strident so called conservative who
thinks that shouting is proof of the truth of what he or she is saying, the
women in lacquered hair so stiff that a hurricane would not bend this
cement.
But back to the contrast.
The tanned, oh so cool anchor—why are they called anchors, because they
belong at the bottom of the sea?—What a week! What a week indeed. The killing
in Baton Rouge, sigh, to be expected, the South is a different place. But the killing in Minnesota, so different a
scene up there, no whiff of the Southern thing, too cold, too Midwestern. But once again, and this time with a video
that captured what is called the incident but in fact was a killing: someone
died because of what happened, he was not gathered, he did not go quietly into
that good night, he was shot four times and died in sight of his girlfriend and
her daughter, and she captured that moment and posted it, the moment was posted,
on that invention that is the mark of our age, the invention of a skinny guy
who dropped out of Harvard, and the world saw on Facebook what happened. But they saw what happened in the context of
a medium that is the apotheosis of the self-reference that marks our time,
where any sense of objectivity is at best blurred and at worst blotted out by
the medium of chatter. The medium is the message. But even Facebook cannot mitigate, distort,
deny the reality of a man’s death.
But why was the anchor in Dallas, not so far from Baton
Rouge, but very far from Minnesota?
Because of the killing, again killing, of the killing of five police
officers assigned to keep the peace at a rally to protest the killings in Baton
Rouge and Minnesota. Dallas, in many
ways the quintessential American city, the venue, as they now say, of another
horrific killing many years ago of a President of the United States. Too much, everyone says, with that solemn
face. And yet, between the solemnity,
there were ads, there were advertisements. Let us pause for a few minutes, take
off the solemn face, and talk about drugs.
Oh, no, not heroin or cocaine or marijuana. But drugs that can enhance
one’s life in ways that one cannot even dream about. Drugs that can help cure
diseases whose names very few have ever heard of, with the disclaimer, said very
rapidly, that taking this drug may cause headache, nausea or death. But in these breaks also drugs that can
enhance one’s sexual prowess and happiness even at an age when great minds of
the past thought that one’s main pursuits at a certain age should be more
philosophical. What kind of a culture
puts advertisements between matters of life and death, advertisements for drugs
and worse between scenes of inexpressible grief and sorrow?
Then the news returns and the solemn anchor is speaking to a
father of one of the dead policemen. And
this guy has no tan, he is not sleek, he is not cool, but he is talking about
his son in a way that dares to border on reality whose foundation is love,
without a shred of sentimentality(his son was shot only the day before),
exhorting, understanding, and with an absence of any recrimination and hatred, a regular guy,
who loved his son deeply, someone you would never notice in the supermarket or
in the bank or anywhere., but someone who recognized deep inside himself the
tears of things, the valley of tears, and somehow all this as a real, oh, so
real part of what human existence is all about.
The President is said to have said after the killings in
Baton Rouge and Minnesota: this is an
American issue. And he is right—at least
on one level. But he thinks that it is
just the result of race prejudice that is somehow still ingrained in the
American scene. On this he is right in a real sense. Of
course there is racial prejudice. But he also thinks that somehow we will
outgrow it as we advance to the golden age of toleration for all things. But he does not understand that what this is--
is poison. This is the result of the poison
of the terrible sin of slavery in this country’s past that cannot be washed
away by any natural means, certainly not by some liberal notion of finally
putting it to rest by getting beyond it.
The poison of sin in any form is deep and its noxious effects are all
pervading. But this is why all of this
that is happening is a mystery to the anchor and to the president and to the
editorial page of the New York Times, and, mirabile
dictu, to many of our bishops.
Because they all live in a world in which sin is not really present, in
which the power of sin is not real, in which the power of sin to kill is not
admitted. They cannot admit that there
are good black people and bad black people, good white people and bad white
people, good cops and bad cops, and everything in between and that the answer
is not to demonize anyone or any group in the name of a cause but rather to
face together the reality of the human condition and ask whether there is any
way out of this cycle of sin and death.
And these people have never read and accepted the terrible
book of Job, terrible in its refusal to back down before the inscrutability of
God. Job is a good man and he
suffers. That is it. His friends who try
to explain his situation are wrong. There is no explanation that can explain or
mitigate the situation. The arguments of Job’s friends are logical and
persuasive,--you must have done something wrong in the eyes of God-- but they
are absolutely wrong, for they refuse to accept that they cannot figure out the
ways of God, especially within the context of suffering and evil.
And the same is true in our own time. But in a different
way. We always assume that human tragedy of any sort can be ultimately
explained by man’s refusal to let the other "be", by man’s refusal to accept the
other as he is without any moral judgment, to adopt the new golden rule: let others be as they want to be and be happy
about yourself and about them. But
closer to home: how can the contemporary
Catholic confront Baton Rouge or Minnesota or Dallas or 9/11 or Newtown? Or how can they confront physical disasters
that cause suffering and death? They are powerless before human tragedy because
they have forgotten what is the heart of the matter, what is the heart of the
Mass, which is the terrible sacrifice of the God in the flesh to his
Father. They are the product of years of
the reduction of the Mass as a dialogue between Father as Sister Mary Principal
and the smiling flock, the priest who lulls them to sleep by avoiding the
terrible challenges of the very gospel readings that he reads at Mass, those
readings, those words of Christ that tear apart any attempt to tame the terrible
force of sin and death. Father helps them to forget, to forget Jesus’ terrible
shudder at the tomb of Lazarus, and instead indulges in sanctimonious and
sentimental feelings, slipping into the role of the sleek anchor: why, oh why, why?.. there is no explanation
for this, for this carnage, for this hatred, for this death, all we can do is
to somehow hug each other and move on. All
this because they have forgotten the terrible reality of the Cross of Jesus
Christ, the God-man who suffered infinitely and who died a terrible death on
that Cross precisely because of the human condition that is held in bondage by
the power of sin that leads to death.
It is there that we encounter the heart of human reality;
there is the deepest heart of the darkness of the human condition, and it is
the Cross that is the only answer to the tragedy of the human condition, but it
is an answer that the world has always and will always reject, because the
mystery of evil and the mystery of love cannot be separated, and it is only
love, even and especially within the darkness of evil, that can make sense of
the human condition, from the garden of Eden to Baton Rouge and Minnesota and
Dallas. And it is not love in general,
it is not exhortations from well meaning people to love each other, it is not
those in the Church who would deny the real tragedy of the human condition in
the name of mercy: it is only and
singularly the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ that is the answer to
the ultimate mystery of evil and death.
But this is not an easy answer.
It is does not give us a quick high.
But it gives us an access to a
depth that is infinite and yet accessible.
And it is precisely here at this Mass that the ultimate mystery of the
sacrifice and death of God and the offering of the Son to the Father within the
inexpressible beauty of this Mass makes sense and touches us in places that we
never even knew existed within us.
For Catholics the first real step in the recovery of the
meaning of the Mass took place just a few days ago when Cardinal Sarah gave a
major address at a conference in England and exhorted all priests to return to
the traditional posture at Mass, that is, facing liturgical East with and for
his people. He also spoke about the necessity
of receiving Holy Communion kneeling and on the tongue. He also spoke about the
necessity for the Traditional Mass to be much more widespread in the
Church. Cardinal Sarah is the Prefect,
the Head, of the Congregation for Divine Worship. And he did not offer his remarks as mere
suggestions but rather gave a timetable for catechesis during the summer and
then the implementation of the eastward position beginning the First Sunday in
Advent. .... I know I will be accused of bringing a sermon
about the recent tragedies in this country and our problems down to speaking
about the liturgy. But I insist that
they are linked in the deepest possible way.
Because to participate in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is to encounter
the terrible reality of the human situation within the only answer to that situation: which is the answer of the Cross. May we all
have the courage to participate in this mystery and may that mystery encompass
and change our lives so that we may be living examples of the great and
infinite Yes of God in Jesus Christ.
