Friday, April 1, 2022 (today’s lectionary)
Let us (not) now praise famous men
Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he sets himself against our doings. He styles himself a child of the Lord, but to us he is the censure of our thoughts, and merely to see him is a hardship for us.
In his talks about ascetism and gluttony, Thomas Merton described barely conscious images that cause untold trouble.
The monastic life breeds that sort of stuff. You have in your mind a storm of potentially threatening situations. These flash on before you even know it. You come around a corner, there’s a certain person walking towad you and right away, bang, you foresee all kinds of things before you reach the end of the cloister. Of course nothing ever happens.
GK Chesterton wrote in a slightly different context, “One foolish word from inside does more harm than a hundred thousand words from outside.” I am fascinated by people in history or in the present who seem bothered by neither (Elon Musk comes to mind). What we call “trolling” goes nowhere with these people, for better or for worse. I think this was true of Jesus …
Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.
Yesterday, March 31 on the historical timeline, catches four big fish:
1515: Pope Leo X was in the middle of constructing St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, which is still today perhaps the most beautiful church in the world.
1631: John Dunne died. He had written “Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful … one short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more: death, thou shalt die.” He also wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself … each man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
1782: On Easter Sunday Friar Junipero Serra founded his ninth and last California mission. Two years earlier, on June 29, 1776 (five days before the American Declaration of Independence) he had founded the Mission San Francisco de Asis, near the Golden Gate harbor from the Pacific Ocean.
1927: Cesar Chavez was born into a migrant farm working family in Yuma, Arizona. He began the United Farm Workers and changed the course of California history.
Revisionist historians have “cancelled” all these famous folks.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. He watches over all his bones. Not one of them shall be broken.
Pope Leo constructed much of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican and paved a path for the Council of Trent, a reformation within the Catholic church rather than through a schism. BUT he presided over chaos, destruction and war after March 31, when he announced an eight-year sale of indulgences, which resulted in Luther’s 95 theses, which resulted in the Reformation and the Peasant Wars.
John Donne was dean of St. Paul’s cathedral and the most celebrated cleric of his age, as well as the pre-eminent metaphysical poet in history. BUT in Holy Sonnet XI he denigrated Jews and in Metempsychosis he ridiculed black people.
Juniper Serra was one of the essential creators of California, with his nine missions and the first Mission grape vineyard, which dominated California winemaking through the end of the nineteenth century. BUT he also managed the Spanish Inquisition in California and ran his missions very strictly. When Pope Francis visited the US in 2015, he canonized Fr. Serra, the first saint named on American soil. That week his statue in Monterey was decapitated. In 2020 his statue in San Francisco was spray painted with phrases like “Stolen Land,” and “Decolonize.”
Cesar Chavez established the United Farm Workers and brought reform and higher wages to farm workers all around the United States. His office walls were lined with portraits of his heroes: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. He was a devout Catholic who attended mass nearly every day. BUT he was authoritarian, participated in Synanon “games,” and supported Filipino tyrant and dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Jesus cried out in the temple area, “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own, but the who sent me, whom you do not know, is true.” And they tried to arrest him.
Jesus was “cancelled” too. Sometimes that kind of revisionist cultural condemnation is a mark of deeper authenticity. Can I reserve judgment and keep my mind and eyes open, listen and pray, wait, and keep my mouth closed? Not join the mob?
No one laid a hand upon him, because his hour had not yet come.
(Wisdom 2, Psalm 34, Matthew 4, John 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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