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VIEW FROM THE PEW
Is everyone out there recycling cartoons and photos of comic or caustic signs that are commentaries on life in these perilous times? I get a daily dose of stuff in the email box. I guess some are hilarious but I am overdosed. Not much to laugh at in this country, or the whole world. I designate them as “spam” and don’t know what I’m missing. Then from the opposite perspective, there’s a cousin I dearly love who sends dire words from the brilliant and revered Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The poem “The Second Coming” is like Irish scriptures; it’s been quoted and analyzed since it was published 100 years ago.
Yeats’ reflections on the times right after World War I have been seen by generations since as prophecy of their own era’s chaos and meaninglessness. Surely this was written for the year 2020: “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Add that to the grim words from biblical prophets which have shown up in daily Mass readings recently, and it’s quite a headful to take to bed at night. The folks who put the liturgical calendar together did it years in advance, but it sure plays like the rant of a televangelist with a message ripped from the headlines.
I must confess that I usually don’t give deepest thought to the first scriptural reading at Mass — except when it’s from Proverbs where wisdom is referred to as female; that makes me smile. I wait for the Gospel reading to give me the takeaway message of the day.
Those passages from the Old Testament always seem so disheartening: God’s chosen people getting into endless wars, conquered by one set of bad guys after another, forced to flee their homelands, or choosing to go astray making idols. Then come the warnings and dire predictions by prophets herding the people yet again onto the straight and narrow path.
The bigger picture
Back in my Jesuit college theology classes, we aimed at absorbing the bigger picture, that understanding what Jesus preached and taught requires knowing the back story of his Jewish faith and history. The people who were there to hear him knew it, but the people who put the Bible together collected written accounts from ages past to inform people distant in place and time.
So, while I may be tuned in to hear a familiar or famous quote, I admit if I had to retain the historical details of who did what to whom and when, I wouldn’t pass the test. But then that’s true about my memory bank of European wars down through the ages which could make history classes so brain-numbing.
But back to reading in current times. My daily prayer routine is to read the liturgy of the day from “The Word Among Us.” Okay, actually hearing it read in church at Mass would be better; I might do that if it were at 10 a.m. instead of 7!
For the past month or so, the Old Testament readings seemed to take hold of my brain. I got in the habit of jotting down the discouraging words of the day. I’m not in a cloister, so every message I absorb from ancient scriptures comes in context of the world around us — danger from COVID, violence in cities, relentless political nastiness. In the July 11 passage from the prophet Isaiah, it was about his own glorious vision of the Lord. He said “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among people of unclean lips. Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts. Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar. He touched my tongue with it and said, ‘See, now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin.’”
That stimulated some mental script-writing of a scenario in modern times with at least one particular set of unclean lips in mind.
‘My staff is wrath’
On July 15, here’s Isaiah again with: “Thus says the Lord … my rod is anger, my staff is wrath. Against an impious nation I send him … It is in his heart to destroy, to make an end of nations not a few … I have moved the boundaries of peoples, their treasures I have pillaged and, like a giant, I have put down the enthroned. The Lord of Hosts will send among his fat ones leanness, and instead of his glory there will be kindling like the kindling of fire.”
Oh my, how different is that from those cartoon commentaries.
The next day, Isaiah addressed the Lord with a plea, “My heart yearns for you in the night, yes, my spirit within me keeps vigil for you. When your judgment dawns upon the earth, the world’s inhabitants learn justice.”
There’s a lot to ponder these days about justice, who needs to learn it, who needs to receive it, who has the power to impose and withhold it.
On July 18, the prophet Micah said, “Woe to those who plan iniquity and work out evil on their couches. In the morning light they accomplish it when it lies within their power. They covet fields and seize them; houses, and they take them … Therefore, thus says the Lord, I am planning against this race an evil from which you shall not withdraw your necks.” Same day, Psalm 10: “Proudly the wicked harass the afflicted who are caught in the traces the wicked have contrived. For the wicked man glories in his greed … ‘There is no God’ sums up his thoughts. His mouth is full of cursing, guile and deceit; under his tongue are mischief and iniquity. He lurks in ambush near the villages, in hiding he murders the innocent, his eyes spy upon the unfortunate.”
A July 19 excerpt from Wisdom praising God carries a nugget of wisdom that would fit in a tweet, “Those who are just must be kind.” There’s been a whole lot of Jeremiah, who is known as the prophet of doom. In literature of several countries, his name defines the characteristic of doomsayer. Just another version of the midday television commentary.
On Aug. 7, the reading is from Nahum, a pretty obscure prophet saying, “Woe to the bloody city, all lies, full of plunder, whose looting never stops. The crack of the whip, the rumbling sounds of wheels … cavalry charging, the flame of the sword, the flash of the spear, the many slain, the heaping corpses …”
Out of context
How dreadful is that? But now I have to confess that picking a dark quote out of context is as bad as regurgitating fake news. That reading started out “See, upon the mountains there advances the bearer of good news, announcing peace.” Nahum was writing about victory over the Assyrian conquerors of the Jews. Actually, the theme of those Old Testament versions of news commentators is that good things are ahead if people turn away from sin and bad choices and turn back to God. Too bad that spiritual dimension is missing from so much of the narrative of our own times.
I’ll just stop with quotes from the dark side. Time to crawl out of the mental, spiritual pit I wandered into. Luckily I didn’t get into a daily sharing on social media. Sorry, I saved it all up and unloaded on you.
Last Sunday, Aug. 2, the first reading was very much on the bright side. “All you who are thirsty, come to the water … hear me and you shall eat well. Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life.”
Even better than that word from Isaiah, is the second reading from St. Paul cheering his Roman flock with words very familiar: “What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Paul was talking to a flock of new Christians who were being persecuted by the forces of Roman emperor Nero and put to death because of their beliefs. Soon after he wrote it, Paul was killed. What he said still resounds for us facing our own anguish and distress with a fearful virus, lost jobs, insufficient food, closed businesses, separation from loved ones.
Coming up Sunday is my absolute favorite Bible sound bite. What a religious experience for me to find its timely appearance in the liturgical cycle of readings. Down through the years, I’ve clipped it and copied it and taped it so many times into notebooks and onto flyleaves.
It is for me an antidote to all the imagery of chaos, earplugs against the clashing cymbals of free speech gone wild and hate speech expanding. It’s my guide to finding peace of mind which I really, really need. It is poetic spiritual advice to just shush, and listen.
From the 1st book of Kings, it’s just a snippet of the longer story of the prophet Elijah whose effort to escape from a difficult assignment from God didn’t work.
“At the mountain of God, Horeb, Elijah came to a cave where he took shelter. Then the Lord said to him, go and stand on the mountain before the Lord; the Lord will be passing by.
“A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crashing rocks before the Lord — but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake — but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire — but the Lord was not in the fire.
“After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.”
