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I had the grace this past Sunday morning of participating in a (mostly old) men’s zoom group at our church. The topic was, no surprise, fathers and being a father and grandfather and so on. And, no coincidence, about mothers and daughters and children generally.

For me, both as a father and grandfather, but also as a sometime theologian, the event was graced in many ways. Let me try to count some of them.

(This is one of the things that preachy old teachers do: we try to put into words the mystery of grace, or said differently, to surround the mystery with words which might help us to be more open to the experience of grace — or something like that. And we tend to be wordy.)

Talking with my peers in fatherhood, I was struck over and over again by the power of the family, both for wounding and for healing – and more generally the fundamental importance of the Catholic teaching and the universal cultural belief in the centrality of the family for all human life. Most folks reading this essay may agree with me in disagreeing with very much about present Catholic teachings on gender-sexuality-family issues. Yet I want to say (very much, again, in the spirit of my fathers/grandfathers discussion this morning), that such “catholic” teaching about the fundamental good and sacredness of the family needs to be reaffirmed as it is reappropriated or developed in response to the divisive issues and deep concerns we face – concerns about pre-marital sex and the hook-up culture, about abortion, about divorce and remarriage, about gay-lesbian-trans-bi children or students or colleagues. My point is that we and our children and grandchildren are already engaged in the very difficult (and often mistake-ridden) business of re-imagining and re-shaping that fundamental vision of the sacredness of the family as we struggle through struggle through these crises and challenges.

My second reflection during and since this “Father’s Day” zoom concerns G.d or YHWH or Ultimate Ground and the like. “God-talk” as the discussion was named back in the day. How to name the NAMELESS. At any rate, I experienced during our conversation the deep importance of “joinin’ Jesus” in calling G.d his “Father.” I’ve personally been attempting pray to the Great Mother, She Who Is. And I find this way of praying most meaningful when I’m close to nature. Yet I also believe that it’s more than OK to pray to “Our Father in Heaven” and to reverence the name of Father.

I suspect there is a deep hunger for a return of a more authoritative father figure in our conservative religious and cultural circles. And while I would probably disagree with them on many of the ways in which they want such a patriarch to rule, I suspect we’re all in need of newer and better forms of paternal or father’s authority. And, by the way, if my morning zoom group is any indication, the old patriarchy is not so much crumbling as being transformed in hopefully better ways.

My final reflection takes me back (as always, it seems) to my mentor William Lynch, SJ. His thinking stresses that we humans are creatures of time, limited by it, pushed by it, fearful or hopeful because of it…and that the spiritual journey of each of our lives is a matter of living through time, through its stages and phases, not seeking to avoid its challenges and sufferings, and its many ironic turns. Not seeking to escape time by various forms of fantasy and flight.

In this journey through the joys and sorrows of time, for Lynch and many of us, the model and guide we need is given in the life of that man Jesus whom we rightly call our Lord and Savior. This model and guide is found less in the Christ of dogmatic formulations (however important they are) than the Jesus of the Gospels. And for Lynch, as a Jesuit, it is the life of Jesus as understood and re-experienced through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. This, at any rate, is how Fr. Lynch understands time.

Those previous sentences probably need lots of explanation but let me return to my men’s zoom session.

We talked about our fathers and grandfathers, and about growing up with different kinds of fathers — close and distant, strict and easy-going — and then about becoming fathers and often grandfathers. We talked about playing sports, pursuing careers, experiencing loss and death. Try for a moment to imagine the scene and the many experiences of this group of older men. Imagine but for a moment the many different stories told. We were making clear (even to ourselves) the many ways we’ve moved through time’s invitations and challenges and sufferings and “dramas”.

I put quotes around the word “drama” because we tend not to use it much since its meaning has been so reduced by our media. Lynch, on the other hand, thought the word “drama” one of the most important in our language since it articulates and embodies images of the many, many ways we move through time, the many stories (great or small) we tell about the times of our lives. Lynch urges us to learn the classical Greek understanding of drama: first we act (drama), and then we experience or “suffer” (pathos) the world’s response or the inevitable reaction to our action, and then (hopefully) we learn (mathos) from such experience how better to move through time, even unto death. It’s a simple formula — act and suffer and learn — which can help us to understand the many dramas, daily and momentous, which characterize our life in time.

And here I add a note of faith which I believe is shared (each in his own way) by the members of this zoom group. In the Gospel story, having met the resurrected Jesus on road to Emmaus, the disciples remember how “our hearts were burning within us.” I felt that way this morning. I believe that the Spirit of God (however named or imagined) was moving through our “zoom room.” I believe that Spirit guides all fathers and mothers and all their familial relations. Until death do us part. I also believe that Our Good Father reaches out to heal the wounds experienced by so many fathers and sons, and the wounds inflicted by so many fathers and sons.

Amen. Allelluia.

I know that my title words are no longer the preferred usage on Ash Wednesday.  Yet since Ash Wednesday this year I’ve been both cursed and blessed with the death of close relatives and with notices of death among a wider circle of friends and acquaintances.   Cursed, blessed, and reminded that “unto dust we shall return.”

Cursed because death is the ultimate curse cast upon humanity as we were expelled from the garden.  (For the skeptical among us, I believe and assert that such ancient, biblical accounts of original curses and blessings are quite simply speaking obvious truths about our human condition.) Cursed by the loss of family and friends. Cursed with the sadness of mourning, as it comes to expression in our bodies and spirits. Of if you don’t like the idea of being cursed, then think of it as living under the shadow of that ancient curse, or as living with the consequences of that curse.

Yet the curse is also a blessing. I’m blessed by these recent deaths and not only because I affirm the crazy belief that death is indeed a portal to fuller life.  “We proclaim the mystery of death and resurrection.” We find the reality of death and resurrection in nature’s seasons as also in the life of Christ, and in the seasons of our own lives.  I believe in this mystery without much understanding and in ways I don’t try to imagine. Though I do believe that those who have died, recently and not so recently, are still with us.  A belief called the communion of saints in the Catholic lexicon.

But also blessed in a more immediate way, blessed with wakes and services that bring family and friends together to mourn and celebrate, to remember and in our different ways to hope.  Such death-occasioned forms of community are a great blessing which I’ve experienced this Lent.

Of course, my recent awareness of the death of others is also a function of my age. We octogenarians do talk about death, on zoom sessions or at a small breakfast table or….  We remember our dead and we share hopes for the kind of dying we ourselves will have.

Yet many commentators have expressed the idea that we progressive Americans don’t want to talk or think about death.  One astute critic called it our cultural “denial of death.”  This may of course be another of those half-truths espoused by intellectual elites who are out of touch with the beliefs and practices of us ordinary folk. (Think again of real Irish wakes and parish rosaries and funeral masses, and the many similar practices of other religious and non-religious communities.)  Yet I nonetheless think these commentators are onto something. There is among us a taboo on thinking and talking about death. A taboo that hurts us by causing us not to think realistically about death. Though I also think that of late this taboo, such as it ever was, seems to have been broken a bit.

I’m launched on a meandering reflection death, so let me continue to meander.

There are many memorable quotes about death which are worth recovering and pondering:  Death be not proud.  Dying he destroyed death.  Do not go gently into that sweet night, rage against the dying of the light.  Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. May the angels lead the into paradise.  These are some that remain lodged in my head.

And then there is Memento Mori, the command to be mindful of death. I just learned, by googling, that currently popular skull tattoos, rings, and other skull insignia are called “memento mories,” though I don’t know what they actually mean for those who sport them.

There are endless resources online for quotes about death (some significant, others less so), mostly supplied by the funeral industry for words to accompany their services.  Unfortunately, as I’ve scanned such sayings and received devotional cards, it seems that too many of them continue the past taboo by humming sweet nothings about the way beyond.

Let me counter such sweetness and light with the assertion argued by my mentor Lynch in an article he titled “Death and Nothingness.”  There really is, he argues, not much we can say about death with any clarity since death (this is his point), is a great form of nothing.  Death means the hospital facts, and beyond that nothing more can be known.  Freud and others have said that this ignorance is the origin of religious illusions.  Yet Lynch argues that authentic Christianity must accept the reality of death as a nothingness.  In the end, there are no special lights at the end of some tunnel, nor moments of a great re-counting of one’s life, not even some final decision for good or evil.  People may well have such experiences, but it only means that they are not really dead.  Yet we believe that Jesus really died.  Else he was not really human, but some sort of demigod. And we certainly are – despite endless heroic pretensions – really human and we really will die. 

Which brings me happily to the hospice movement.  It was once opined, and my father shared this idea, that for the most part you only go to hospitals to die.  So avoid them like hell.  (My father and most of my predecessors had few doubts about the reality of either death or hell.)  I also seem to remember reading that the rhetorical norm in hospitals was not to talk about death – be upbeat; we’re all about healing people.  Yet in fact most in the end still came to the hospital to die.  And now, thankfully, we have the possibility of hospice care in special hospital units and in most facilities for the aged, and at home.  So we do talk about death, about meds to mitigate its suffering, and so on.   

Which somehow takes me to the treatment of death in our arts and fictions.  Where, it seems to me, death is at once almost omni-present and still largely avoided.  I think of the recent and award nominated re-do of All Quiet on the Western Front.  Supposedly an even better depiction of wartime death than the French original.  Indeed, the very long film is filled with depictions of dead soldier’s faces, of bodies falling and flying, of explosions and gunfire, and (if I remember) of both urgent rescues and tearful dying scenes. Yet I honestly believe that the whole extravaganza constitutes an artistic avoidance of the actualities of death and dying.  And I also think that this film exemplifies the treatment of death in much/most popular cinema and TV.  There is a sensational amount of death, all presented sensationally, and thereby constituting a denial of death.

Yet there are, thankfully, better dramatic depictions of death.  See, for instance, Terrance Mallik’s The Thin Line and A Hidden Life (both war stories), or the recent Irish film Calvary.  And many other good films and dramatic tragedies and fiction.  Yet little from television comes to mind.

I assume, dear reader, that you have many more examples and wider reflections to add should you wish to continue to reflect on death during the remainder of Lent.

I end with recalling a practice of Memento Mori.  In my early years in religious life, before the reforms of Vatican II began to kick in, we had a communal prayer practice called “Preparation for Death”.  As I remember it (incorrectly no doubt), the community gathered in a prayerful silence for a guided meditation on various aspects of the reality of death, my own death. How should I live as a preparation for death?  Years later we’ve joked about the usefulness of this ritual for young men in their late teens and early-20’s.  For us, the exercise, whatever the guiding questions, probably led much more to mental dozing and distraction. Few at that age can think seriously about death.  And yet….  The ritual marked my memory in a way that helps me now, in my 80’s.

I hope that in some way this writing may contribute to your reflections about “returning to dust” during the remainder of this Lent. 

I have not blogged for some time and I start again by robbing a title from Dorothy Day’s “On Pilgrimage” column in The Catholic Worker. I make no claim to her prophetic power. And urge readers to pray for her official canonization. Yet the title allows me to wander. So Feel free to take a rain check from this walkabout.

Holy Communion is the first topic from my pilgrim notebook.

On MLK Day last, Denver celebrated its annual “Marade” (reputed to be the largest MLK event in the nation).

Jeanie and I took the two oldest grandkids – 5 and 7 yrs. Our assembly point (we marched with The Presbytery of Denver) was a large statue of Lady Liberty just across the street from East High School whence their mother graduated. There we stood for more than an hour waiting for the parade to start. A quiet hour viewing and hearing, greeting and occasionally talking with the other groups gathered around the statue. For me this waiting period was the best part of the event because I was more aware of experiencing communion with these groups while we stood waiting than while actually walking.

I was certainly more aware of the diversity and diverse beauties of the individuals and groups we waited with. Turns out we stood with our signs right next to a group of Denver Bronco junior cheerleaders, with their cheerleader mentors and families. Many family groups waited around us, young and older families, of all skin colors and varied costumes. And the costuming for the day was really wonderful – not just the uniforms of the bands and veteran’s groups and police security, but the uniforms folks choose to wear for identification and beauty – hair styles beyond belief, to say nothing of shoes and boots, jeans and skirts, and colorful hats along with club jackets of all sorts.

The whole event was a “holy” communion. Experienced as holy, as somehow embodying Jesus’ Holy Spirit. And we greeted with or sang “praise the Lord.”

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Here I pause to invoke the idea of analogy or “analogica entis”. (Those not in a philosophical mood are hereby excused.) The analogy of being means that all realities, all existents, are both very much the same and yet each quite different. A reality like holy communion is realized (exists) in many different but analogous forms. Holy communion at Catholic Mass is analogous to the service of bread and wine in all Christian forms of worship, and to varied forms of holy communion practices in other religions. It was also a real though analogous presence at our Marade. Indeed, there are so many experiences of real and holy communion in our lives — in sexual intercourse, on a mountain top or when swept along by crashing rhythm of waves. I experience holy communion often with my grandchildren, and with classmates and their parents when we drop the kids at school.

It’s crucial to remember that we’re talking about the analogy of being or of reality. Not “just some symbol.” These really are forms of holy communion.

And one final note about analogy. In the classical metaphysics of analogy, there is a “prime analogue.” A primary or fundamental or ultimate Reality (the capitol letter is justified here) in which all other existents participate – with which they are at once the same (or unified) and different. Being Itself is the prime analogue for all beings. God is the prime analogue for all of creation. The Good (yep, an ultimate Reality) is the prime analogue for all real existent goods (of which, thankfully, there are so many). And Jesus habit of having meals with all types of folks, and with his close friends on the night before he died is (at least for most Christians) the prime analogue of all holy communions.

Go figure. Most contemporary philosophers consider this a bunch of nonsense. I don’t

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So back to some other Holy Communions.

On a recent Sunday my lay-led Catholic community had no priest available to say Mass. Rather, following the really imaginative suggestion of one of our members, we gathered in the church basement and loaded 15,000 lbs. of rice and pinto beans into smallish plastic bags for distribution by Metro Caring (which distributes 10, 000 lbs. bagged and fresh food every day). Helping were members of our church’s three communities (lay Catholics, gay Catholics, and Presbyterians) as well as 10-15 honors students from one of the local high schools. We were done with the work in a half-hour or so and then spent a goodly time talking in groups with coffee and goodies. It was, for me and I suspect for most, a very real experience of Holy Communion.

Sadly and yet happily my January list includes an afternoon wake for a long-time friend, with her family and many other friends – kids and elders, Hispanic and Anglo, wonderful women and men of all ages. Communion with much good wine, beer, and other drinks, cheese and crackers and meats and cookies. Yet most of all communion through words and smiles, tears and touches.

Then, just the other day, a former student invited me to join the team she leads in the church basement to prepare food for the mid-day soup line behind the church. This happens, with many different teams of volunteers, seven days a week. The team goes through a well-practiced routine: check the fridges and supplies, make the sandwiches, meat and cheese, p b & j. Then fill the lunch bags with sandwiches and chips and desert bar as well as spoon for the soup and a napkin or two. That day our team had seven members, mostly retired folks, both women and men, some younger and stronger, others getting on. We prepared for over 50 homeless folks and served just 40. Sometimes it’s as many as 75-80, but it was 5-below in the alley that day. So, yes, again, Holy Communion with the Real Presence of Christ in so many different ways.

Then there are the regular zoom sessions I have with a number of different fellow-travelers. Each in its way a holy communion.

So, dear reader, what’s your experiences of Holy Communion during your pilgrimage of late.

Please consider sharing your reflections on this topic through the response mechanism on this site.

I’m fairly certain that I’ve written about this topic previously, but since I can’t find that essay, you will be spared my re-posting it with new introductory commentary.

I want my title to say it all. Without a basic body of trust — a fundamentally shared sense that we are one people, somehow all in this together, the kind of spirit we experience in response to tragedies and tornadoes — without this fundamental trust, it becomes impossible to sustain a civil society, with civilized rules governing even our deepest conflicts. Which is why we hear so many say today expressing fear for the future of our democracy.

I still believe that a deeper shared trust prevails and will continue to prevail despite all the efforts of those stoking the fires of division.

Obvious case in point, the barrage of media advertising and commentary which floods every possible channel of communication — from TV and Cinema to still strong talk-show radio and all the new social media. Ads and commentary which express stunningly opposed and deeply polarizing views. Etc. As we all already know….

I hope to have my ballot in the drop box soon. Somehow, irrationally, this is for me a sort of magical rite which allows me to turn off the ads (for me mostly even more fully.

Yet I have another thought, that I shouldn’t mute such ads or channel surf them away. Rather I should gather with friends to laugh at them, even the simplistic and polarizing ads by folks we may be voting for.

Ridicule is perhaps second only to reverence in importance, and they are compatible virtues.

I repost this essay every year since I believe in its importance — not the importance ofmy writing, but the importance of this Festival Day. So here ’tis again, with minor uptates.

As I live through 80th year, I am much aware of death. Many friends and colleagues have died recently, and I can feel “the sting of death” in my body’s decline. I do hope to live longer and to prosper. Yet most of my friends live with a growing awareness of death. St. Paul claims that, with Jesus’ resurrection, death has lost its sting. Wonder if he still thought that as he first felt the bite of the executioner’s axe.

At any rate today is the celebration of Mary’s “dormition” as the Orthodox put it. It concerns death and transformation, body and soul, into a new form of life — “in heaven” we typically say. This reflection was first published in “Hark,” The Denver Post‘s then still extant religion blog .

On August 15, Catholics around the world celebrate “The Assumption of Mary” into heaven. More typically referred to simply as “The Assumption,” to distinguish it from Jesus’ resurrection and “ascension” into heaven, the holy day celebrates Catholic teaching that Jesus’s mother, after the course of her natural life, was taken body and soul into heavenly glory. There is no formal Catholic teaching about whether Mary, like her son Jesus, actually died. Though I assume that she, like all humanity, really did die.

This belief about Mary’s assumption is a stumbling block for most Protestant Christians. My wife, for instance, is a good Presbyterian. We met in a small and entirely Catholic town in Bavaria while studying the German language. The course ran through Aug. 15, a town holiday because it was a Catholic holy day, Maria Himmelfahrt. For my wife, and probably for most of our fellow students, it was simply a day off from school and occasion for a bit of a joke about the word “himmelfahrt.” We knew it meant “journey to heaven,” but the English resonance of the sound “fahrt” was unavoidable. Beyond that, it has remained for her a matter of indifference in our otherwise ecumenically active marriage.

So for her and many others, I offer (again) the following comments and reflections.

The Scripture readings for the feast begin with the description of the pregnant women in the heavens “clothed with the Sun,” from Revelations 12. They then move to Paul’s discussion of Christ “conquering death” by his resurrection and so becoming “the firstborn of many” (1 Corinthians 15). And finally to the Gospel narrative traditionally referred to as “the Visitation” (Luke 1:39) — the young and pregnant Mary’s visit to her older, about-to-give-birth cousin Elizabeth.

Elizabeth greets Mary as “full of grace” and then hears in Mary’s response the poetic canticle still widely referred to as “The Magnificat” (from the first word of the older Latin text). Mary proclaims that her soul glorifies God (“magnificat anima mea Dominum”), who has thrown down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the poor and lowly, has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

As liturgical readings — as poetry and proclamation for the feast of the Assumption — these texts are rich in suggestion about the meaning of Catholic belief. I am struck above all by how physical, bodily and worldly is their content. Yes, they celebrate a move beyond the present world, beyond death; yet, they do so in remarkably earthly terms. A heavenly woman gives birth in pain, yet stands as sign of “a new heaven and a new earth.” Jesus really dies, but by his resurrection is proclaimed firstborn of a new creation (a “new world ‘a comin”). Above all, two pregnant women proclaim God’s presence and grace, active then and there, and His work of overturning the rich and powerful of this world and exalting the poor and hungry.

Mary’s story is not about escaping this world, however much Christian teaching and Marian devotion may have been understood in such “spiritualist” terms. Rather it’s about the transformation of the world. And if Jesus by his resurrection is “the firstborn” in this new world, then Mary’s bodily assumption makes her the second-born.

Mary’s Assumption is, in other words, one part of the larger Christian belief about a kingdom that will and does transform this real physical world — where women get pregnant, suffer childbirth, and are so often terribly treated; where the poor are still with us, suffering and oppressed; where the rich and powerful glory in their excess and use terrible brutality to defend their kingdom.

The Assumption is part of that larger, though too easily dismissed, Christian teaching about “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Now about belief in a new creation, a new kingdom coming, I must admit that I’m among the first to doubt — to find such ideas hard to accept, even at times fantastical.

As I write I have a friend who is dying. [True again in 2022, though a different friend.]  Most of us know death, often close up, and know its terrible finality. Just as we daily witness power and wealth increasing their death grip on our national dreams of equality and justice, to say nothing of the dreams of the vast majority of our world’s population. So I’m often not sure what to make of talk about defeating death and some new world ‘a comin’ — perhaps it is just opium.

What I do know, however, and am called to celebrate, is that Catholic teaching about Mary and Jesus — regardless of what some preachers and even some bishops and popes have made of it — is not about fantastical dreams of someplace else. It’s essentially incarnational — bodily, physical, worldly, human, political. It’s about this world and about the hope for its transformation, in God’s good time (which is both now and to come).

Perhaps hard to believe, but that’s what it’s about. And it challenges many, many of our assumptions.

So let me end with Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and writer. He tells of a moment when, on a street corner in Louisville, where he’d gone for a doctor visit, he had this experience of seeing all the people on the street “shining like the sun.” He says that he wanted to shout to them, call to them to see how they really were “clothed with the sun.” Instead he gave his life to writing about how all of us, in our deeper and more real selves, are indeed “full of grace” and “clothed with the sun,” even in the midst of our daily busy-ness, our greeds and lusts and angers, our wars and crimes.

Pay attention to those moments, glimpses, when we notice ourselves or others “clothed with the sun.” Maybe if we did it more, paid greater attention to such deeper presence, we too would occasionally see a new world ‘a comin’ even now. It might even change some of our assumptions.

The short answer is “yes,” as long as I also add that I must fear her as well. So let me here count some of the ways and whys for that continuing love and fear.

My purpose in writing now about Russia is to help myself and possibly others remember the messy humanity of Russia and Russians at a time when our media wants us to see “them” only as demonized or demonic.

In service to this purpose, allow me a bit of a ramble that begins with my early education and ends with Pope Francis’ distinction between “a people” and “a nation.” Yet the constant background for these ramblings is Putin and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Feel free to delete or skip around. And, as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in response to my writing and, even more generally, your thoughts about this war.

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I read both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky during high school and this awakened in me a fairly deep emotional response to many things about Mother Russia. Their books had been urged upon me by a very wise teacher. I see now that there was so much, especially in War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, that I did not understand even as my interests were aroused my affections stirred.

Many events since then — travels and teaching and much more reading — have both increased my understanding of and my love for Russian culture, as well as my deep wariness of Tsars and Commissars and sacred myths about Russian nationalism.

I was dusting some shelves the other day and came across a basket made of thick twisted vine branches. I had bought it from the old peasant with unbelievably gnarled hands who sat on the sidewalk someplace in Moscow in 1993. I am soon to record other such incidents and accidents which still contribute to my admiration to so many things Russian. And my continuing fears.

I do, then, continue to love Russia, even as I pray for the end of Putin’s tyranny. Even as I pray for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, though it will mean serious defeat for many Ukrainians and a subsequent white-washing of Russian war crimes. And probably a renewed cold war.

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Here are some of the incidents and accidents leading to both the love and the fear — in no particular order.

My son did a “senior year abroad” high school exchange year in Moscow in 1993/4. It was a very tough year for him and for Moscow. He witnessed the circle of tanks surrounding Russia’s White House (Parliament) where soldiers loyal to the old communism had attempted a coup and where they were then surrounded (and eventually ousted) by the army of the new regime. He made close friends with other study-abroad students who formed a sort of survivors’ group to deal not only with the harsh Moscow winter, but also with the breakdown of the schools where they were supposed to be students, and with the more general socio-economic breakdowns evident in long lines, widespread alcoholism, much petty theft, and the emergence of the mafias as the new form of party membership. We visited him there in warmer times at the end of his exchange year (more below), yet the best hotel he could find for us was mafia-run.

St. Petersburg (and its environs) is, I seem to remember, the primary setting for much of Tolstoy’s great fiction and even more for Dostoevsky’s intricate criminal, political, psychiatric, and religious novels. When we visited our son at the end of his year, we travelled with him to St. Petersburg where he and his friends were going to party through the night during the city’s “White Nights Festival.” Even though we stayed in a somewhat rundown and noisy student hostel, I have fond memories of standing before the large bust of Dostoevsky enshrined over his gravesite, and later visiting the small home/office where he wrote most of his later novels. I’ve since not only studied Dostoevsky’s great novels in new translations, but read some major studies of his life and fiction – including one Russian language (with subtitles) film version of his life available on Netflix which I highly recommend – titled simply, if I remember, Dostoevsky.

The second time my wife and I visited St. Petersberg, some 20 years later, we were living high on the hog as part of a prize won at some fundraiser. We stayed at one of the best hotels in downtown, on one of the city’s many elegant squares. We admired Catherine’s great Hermitage museums, and sipped vodka at a small canal-side venue appropriately named “The Idiot” (after Dostoevsky’s novel). We were blessed to celebrate our Western Easter at an Orthodox “Palm Sunday” service in a restored cathedrals (previously used as a museum of atheism!). We were surprised to see so many young professional people coming to church, lighting candles before different icons, attending to the beautiful acapella polyphony which accompanied the richly clothed priests and deacons who paraded, swinging bowls of smoking incense, around iconostasis and altar. Surprised because during our first trip to Russia the only faithful in the few dark but open churches were the old babushkas. Surprised too that on this Palm Sunday it was those babushkas who sat at the Cathedral entrances selling not palm but pussy willow branches – the earliest sign of spring that far north.

Yet whenever I think of St. Petersburg, I cannot but remember that Peter the Great who built his great city to connect Russia and Europe. He was a man of great and passionate vision who did not hesitate to use the labor and the lives of so many tens-of-thousands of slaves and peasants to raise his much-canalled city from the site’s original (and in summer malarial) swamplands. Of course, he was but one of many Tsars (a predecessor even named Ivan the Terrible) who oppressed and murdered to achieve or restore their imperial power. Which eventually led to the great Russian Revolution’s long trail of bloodshed ended only by the terrible new Tsars: first Lenin, then especially Stalin, then a series of successors, and now Putin.

For some reason I have long been enchanted by Tchaikovsky’s 1st piano concerto, especially with its dramatic opening section. I also love what little I know of Tchaikovsky’s other creations – concertos, ballets, symphonies. In Moscow we went to a ballet in one hall that was part of the vast Kremlin complex. It may have been Tshaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Yet the Swan Lake performance could have been later in St. Petersburg where we attended both a classical Russian orchestra concert and a ballet at the famed Mariinsky Ballet. I seem also to remember attending choral performances of Orthodox chant and polyphony at several Cathedrals, in addition to the liturgical “performance” at that Palm Sunday mass. And then an evening of folk music and dance at a museum in St. Petersburg.

There is a wonderful scene in the BBC’s 1972 version of War and Peace (still the best) where young Natasha performs such a traditional peasant dance. Which brings back memories of our first visit to St. Petersberg during the White Nights Festival where song and dance continue to express the exuberant festivity of Russian culture.

In addition to the literary greats, I’ve also enjoyed other serious writings by and about Russia. One is a fictional sketch, epoch by epoch, of the span of Russian history named Russka (2005) by the British novelist Edward Rutherfurd. Then there’s Lenin’s Tomb (1993) by David Remnick, with its detailed account of the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire. And I have also dipped into books about the Russian Revolution as well as biographies of Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and even Yeltsin. And the immensely important writings of Nobel Prize winner, novelist and historian and exiled mystic, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn – most remembered for his multi-volume exposé of The Gulag Archipelago.

Solzhenitsyn’s account reminds me again of Dostoevsky – who had himself suffered and written about his years in a former era’s gulag. Dostoevsky remains for me one of the few great Christian thinkers of our epoch. Which then raises the crucial question of whether his literary achievements, and those of others like Solzhenitsyn, might still nourish (“from under the rubble” as Solzhenitsyn once put it) the re-emergence of a great Orthodox Russian culture now living fruitfully together with Russian Muslims and Jews and Western Christians. (Of course, I ask the same question about so-called American Christian culture, especially in view of the increasingly violent emergence of an intolerant Christian nationalism.)

Russia has been living with Christianity, with brutal tyranny and occasional enlightened leadership, with economic and social unrest, with mystics and artists – living through all this far longer than we in these United States. There is in that history both much beauty and much misery. Only God might weigh the balance. I study the misery in some (probably vain) hope of avoiding it in the future, in Russia but even more here at home. Yet I choose above all to love the beauty and aspiration. To love the literary and musical greats. To draw, as Dorothy Day regularly did, from the fonts of their suffering and wisdom and joy.

In Basel Switzerland, while pursuing my doctoral research, I was gifted by the presence of a Czech theologian, Jan Milíč Lochman. (He had a position in Basel because he had been exiled from his homeland by the Soviet takeover. in 1968.) He hosted an occasional English-language seminar at one of the local taverns on Christian/Marxist dialogue. I read and still have several of his books (in English translation) on that topic — a hot topic. Something Pope Francis has been trying to continue in his outreach to Russia before and since the start of the present war on Ukraine.

***

Just as a final reminder, I repeat my purpose in rehearsing these many memories in this writing. It is far better to light one candle than curse the darkness. In this case, better to seek a fuller and thus more human image of Russia and its people than to be lost in the demonic and demonizing images produced by the present fog of war.

***

I end, as promised, with Pope Francis‘ crucial distinction (in the third part of his great 2020 book Let Us Dream) between a nation-state and a people. Francis is convinced that we cannot respond to our many very real crises if we do not recover (throughout the nations and states of the world) a sense of being a people — with shared roots across many differences, and a shared sense of being God’s people or, much better said, a people who know at some level that they have been “chosen” by God. (The Hebrew-Jewish people are for Francis the model for such a covenantal sense of being a people, but a model that he finds replicated in its own way at the origin of every people.)

Key for Francis is that we – Russians and Germans, Americans North and South – we have all been such “peoples” in our origins and still are in many ways. We have also experienced episodes when that sense of being a people has been reduced to tyrannical nationalism. Yet Francis is especially concerned that today the sense of being a people (locally and globally) has been threatened and weakened by the global economic forces which increasingly structure daily life. Thus he challenges all of us to find ways, locally and nationally and internationally, of recovering and developing the sense of being a people and thence of being part of a global community of peoples.

What we see today in Russia is a terrible abuse of this notion of Russia as a sacred and bonded people. But analogous reductions of are happening with many other forms of “nationalism” or “populism” across the globe and in our country.

It is my hope that the fundamentals of Dostoevsky’s vision for Russia — and yes, I know, he was a terrible antisemite and that aspects of his nationalism have laid the ground for Putin’s — will again emerge in redemptive (and non-semitic and non-nationalistic) ways. That a traditional and very Christian Russian populism will emerge once again “from under the rubble” as the most recent form of Russian tyranny begins its brutalizing and long demise.

I end with the reminder that “we” are not that different – whomever the reader’s “we” happens to be. Our various versions of being a special people – whatever it’s progressive or conservative forms – will inevitably have to be purified by suffering before they recover some of the original sense of being a people.

I first posted this essay in 2013 on the Denver Post’s religion blogsite “Hark.”  I then posted it (with minor corrections and additions) on this blogsite in in 2017 when we as a people were again in a seemingly fruitless discussion about gun control.  I posted it again in 2021 and again today because of the recent killing of little children at a school in Uvalde, Texas. Please make replies below (on this site) and feel free to share with others if you find it helpful.  John

First, a short version:

In trying to understand the passionate outrage of some folks at efforts to pass gun-control legislation, I have come to think of “the gun” as an “anti-sacrament” – not so much the actual gun one might possess or want to buy, but the symbolic gun that pervades thinking and provokes passions.  (Yet we should not underestimate the significance of holding the actual weapon, of its sense of weight and power for the owner and user.) For Christians, sacraments are ritual actions involving physical things like water, bread and wine – actions which evoke a sense of safety and salvation because they embody a narrative about what really hurts us (evil and sin) and what really heals (God’s love, grace, and assurance). Their ritualized repetition, in other words, enacts a story about what we should fear and resist, and also about what we most need for help and hope. In the contemporary gun debate, it often seems that those resisting any infringement on gun rights are held captive by a different story about fear and hope – fear of governments and other threatening powers, of criminals and intruders and strangers, of the dangerous and unexpected; and hope in self-reliance and self-defense, in “our way of life” and the possession of guns. In this latter narrative, perhaps especially by ritualized repetition at rallies and protests, the gun becomes a kind of sacrament – a symbolic or sacred object that embodies a pervasive sense of what threatens and what protects and saves. I call it an “anti-sacrament” because its narrative distorts realistic fears and hopes to such a degree that it produces an illusory but absolute sense of both evil and salvation – and thereby contributes to even more real evil and much less actual safety.

Now a longer, more nuanced version:

I am writing this essay in an effort to understand the passions of many gun-rights folks in this country – passions I find quite terrifying.

I write as someone who has never owned a gun, but once had a typical American boy’s fascination with them. (I allowed my son to indulge that fascination at age 13 with a pellet gun – something he himself chose never to touch again after he killed a chipmunk with a lucky shot.)  Thus I write from ignorance about the hunting culture which grew from the necessity of food to become today an ecological necessity. I admit as well to some ignorance about our cultures of security – the world of police and military and others recruited to “serve and protect.” I have no insider understanding of these cultures. I accept their necessity, yet view them with wariness and studied skepticism.

I write as someone who thinks that most proposed gun control legislation simply makes common sense, that the 2nd Amendment’s meaning has been distorted beyond recognition by its supposed defenders, and that the most powerful opposition to gun control comes from those who profit most – manufacturers and dealers and the propaganda they hire.

I have little interest in these contemporary gun-runners other than to expose the deceit of their proclamation of principle which really serves to mask their far more fundamental pursuit of profit. Yet I do want to try to understand the ordinary folks – a term I intend here as a title of respect – those who are whipped into fury by the NRA and other propagandists. I want to understand their fear and resentment, as well as their anger and righteousness.

My title’s description of the gun as an “anti-sacrament” tries to suggest both the roots of such fear and the dangers of such anger.

The idea of a “sacrament” is, of course, a traditional Christian one, especially favored by Roman Catholics and Orthodox, but also affirmed by Protestants, and found as well in different ways in most other religions. At root it expresses the belief that certain rituals (like baptism and communion) are sacred ways whereby we are opened to God’s healing presence. More specifically, it is the belief that life-sustaining material things like water and wine, bread and bodily touch, can become vehicles for such opening and healing. In traditional language, sacraments are earthen vessels that mediate God’s grace, assurance and salvation.

By extension, sacraments are found widely in human experience – in special places (like holy mountains or sacred springs) or in special moments when the ordinary (like a glass of wine, a sunset, or a song) becomes extraordinary. Writers of good fiction of have helped us imagine such extensions of the sacred into everyday experience. Admirers of Andre Dubus, for instance, know not only his stunning reflection on the sacramental peanut butter sandwich infused with parental love, but his even more remarkable ability to evoke sacred presence (without naming it as such) in his stories about ordinary and mundane events. The same, of course, can be said about many other good writers. It can also be said about much good cinema and television, where writers and actors, cinematographers and directors, at times conspire to evoke the sacred in secular settings and stories.

Yet it is also painfully evident to most of us that contemporary cinema and television, as well as much fiction, is filled with repeated and ritualized presentation of what I am calling “anti-sacraments.” For if sacraments are objects and actions that evoke real healing and protection, anti-sacraments are objects and actions which, while pretending to protect and heal, actually achieve the opposite. They mislead our fears, misdirect our hopes, and actually increase our hurt and insecurity.

What, then, does understanding the gun as an anti-sacrament tell us about the passions manifest in the present gun-control debate?

It tells us that people have important fears about real dangers – the danger of crime and violence; the danger of strangers in our midst; the danger of political and economic systems over which we have little control; the danger of change happening too fast and also beyond control. It tells us that people rightly resent forces that intrude with great power, yet with too little care. It tells us, most fundamentally, that we fear hurt and death.

Yet the idea of “gun as anti-sacrament” also reminds us that legitimate fears and resentments too often grow beyond all relation to reality. Fear alone can do this, but the disproportionate and illusory effect happens mostly when our imaginations are manipulated – by sensational news and propaganda, by deliberately distorted and exaggerated stories and cinema and television.

And the idea of “gun as anti-sacrament” should remind us that thus-distorted imaginations and fears have real and very dangerous effects, in individual lives and in the shared life of society. They are anti-life, not protective of life. They drive us into defensive postures that cut off healing contact with others, and with the real. They drive us to anger and violence both in imagination and, too often, in reality. They thus pollute our lives and our politics.

Of course, in saying these things, I may be indulging my own distortion and exaggeration. Yet I actually fear that, if anything, I err on the side of understatement. For the narrative embodied in the gun as anti-sacrament is today pervasive in our culture and our politics. It has, for too many hearts and minds, replaced not only the once honored (even if only rhetorically) religious narrative about evil and safety, but also the kind of common sense reasonableness we used to count on finding among ordinary folk – in our towns and neighborhoods, among parents and elders.

And, to repeat, this replacement and pollution of once sane and shared stories has not happened by fate or accident. It has happened because of the power of money – that most fundamental anti-sacrament we are forced to live with these days.

Of course we need money for all sorts of exchanges, just as some need guns for various legitimate purposes (from hunting to policing).  Yet like guns, money so easily becomes “sacramental,” part of a narrative about security and power, and “anti-sacramental” when that narrative nurtures illusory fears and hopes.  The result, in the case of guns and even more in the case of money, is a culture and society dominated by illusion and violence.

Which, I submit and urge, is very much where we are today in this country and around the world.

I am writing about “Nature” and more specifically about “natural law” since the topic came up in one of my recent zoom sessions. It’s a topic I’ve been interested in for years, have a number of books about, and have always thought made sense. Which led to the following ramblings. Please feel free to delete 🙂

I will begin with and gradually introduce broader concepts and analysis. At least I hope so to proceed.

Weather permitting, I often sit on our porch in Grand Lake – coffee or scotch in hand, themselves wonderful products of nature.  I talk to the trees and wild grasses, to the birds (crows and jays, ducks and geese, hawks and the occasional eagles) and animals (from squirrels and chipmunks to deer and moose –of late we’ve actually had a young moose nosing around our back yard, with big mother never far away).  I do talk (internally) but more often it’s non-verbal communing, and sometimes I’ll even break into (mile-hi) song.  Right now, with several feet of compacted snow gradually beginning to melt, I welcome nature’s awakening from winter slumber – the trees and grasses and flowers, but also the migratory birds.  Spring will really be here when the nesting Osprey return as the ice melts on our lakes.

I grew up on the Atlantic shore and still return whenever I get a chance to walk sandy beaches (Summer or Winter), picking up shells and driftwood, feeling engulfed by the roar of the surf.  Same when last we were in Costa Rica.

I also find myself doing similar listening and watching in Denver.  I sit with our dog (a wonderful link to the animal world) on the plaza outside Union Station and watch the parade of people.  I call it the greatest show on earth, and with the coming of Spring the clothes come off – lots of skin, and not just the women.  There are the tatted toughs of all races and genders, and the dandies, male and female.  There are the elders, some with walkers or canes.  Towards evening one sees and hears the stumbling drunks, and at any time of day the doped and their dealers.  (City’s cleaning up the Station area but it’ll just push this savage world elsewhere.)

In Denver more than in the mountains I admire (and occasionally despise) the many works of “man” – much marvelous architecture (old and new) and significant public art, as well as the terribly noisy Harleys and low-riders. Mile-Hi Stadium (Broncos), Ball Arena (Nuggets and Avalanche), and Coors Field (Rockies) are all within walking distance. As are the many moving tent-cities of homeless folk.

I mention these since it seems to be human nature to build things for shelter and business, for eating and drinking — though we typically refer to such building as culture rather than nature, that’s often a distinction without a difference.  My one significant book is titled “Building the Human City” and that’s something I feel very called to.  One of my colleagues at Regis (a photographer of the American West) is currently doing a series about Mormon tabernacles in Wyoming – from large to storefront churches and very small meetings in very small towns.

I’m still a firm believer in “natural law,” though I know the very idea is much disputed and has often been much abused, by Catholic bishops as much as racists.  And here the nature-culture distinction takes on some significance.  My wife and I have been blessed with many opportunities to travel – to Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Zanzibar) and to Latin America (Belize, Costa Rica, and Argentina) and Asia (China, Viet Nam, the Philippines), and much of Europe (from Ireland and Spain and France to Hungary and Poland and Russia).  We’ve been even more blessed with opportunities to live abroad – a sabbatical in Australia, seminary (for me) in Switzerland, language study (for both of us) in Germany.

I mention these many places not to brag but to indicate my experience of the way that nature comes to different expressions in different cultures.  When my son was tutoring in South Africa, his students would often ask how he could manage to sleep without a two-eyed pillow (a woman), this while he was helping the high school students develop skits about AIDS and condoms for younger kids.  Feminine modesty was the rule in Viet Nam until the recently pervasive assault of Western advertising.  I also vividly remember attempting to shake hands with one of my female Muslim students at the graduation ceremony only to have her quickly withdraw because I, while a good friend, was not family. 

I’m one of the fighting Irish with deep anger inherited from my family, an anger rooted in 500 years under the British boot.  Yet there is also so much I admire and enjoy about British culture. 

It’s largely considered “natural” in this country to make as much money as you can in almost any way you can (or can get away with).  Yet what’s “natural” for liberal and neo-con economics is “unnatural” and deeply sinful for Catholic Social Teaching.  And then what many of us are coming to consider natural because of LGBTQ activism and education is still considered unnatural by Catholic and much Christian teaching.

I continue to believe in and to try to understand the idea of natural law, manifesting or expressing itself through different cultures, and terribly abused by different ideologies. It’s a challenge. As I’ve said, I have come to see “queer” folk as quite “natural,” I nonetheless find much tragedy in their struggles, and continue to believe that our media have taken up their cause because it implicitly affirms the media’s money-grubbing embrace of promiscuity.

Nature means, literally, that which is born.  And, as a consequence, that which dies.  For nature lives according to the rhythms of time In fields and forests, among all creatures great and small. 

Of course, with mention of “creatures” I have introduced what is probably the most foundational of my beliefs — that God is Creator and all of nature is Her endlessly-fruitful creation, and that is good. (We humans, and at least some animals, and mother nature herself are creative only in a secondary and derivative sense.)  Spinoza’s suggestion that nature is God loses, for me, the crucial distinction between creature and Creator and thereby (or so it seems to me) the crucial distinction between good and evil.

That which is natural is deeply good.  The anti-natural is evil, or perhaps better put, evil is that which is anti-natural. That’s one simple way of summarizing Francis’ magnificent Laudato Si’ as well as his constant condemnation not just of the arms trade but of all supposedly “liberal” (or throw-away) economics.  The contemporary destruction of nature is predicated on a supposedly scientific (Newtonian) or enlightened separation of the human from nature — a separation driven more likely by power lust and greed, a separation reducing nature to resource.  (My good and too early deceased friend Dave Toolan, SJ, wrote a wonderful book about all of this before he died:  At Home in the Cosmos, Orbis 2003.)

Let me try to tie these ramblings together by urging that through our different cultures we must continually struggle to both recover and discover the good of nature, of our human nature and of the natural world.  I reject the radical separation of natural facts and values or ideals.  It’s a tempting way to think, but quite wrong-headed.  For facts involve both is and ought, both what we discover about the natural and what the natural claims of us. 

Love to hear more about all this from any who’ve read this far. John

This, I promise, will be a short read!

I’ve always been intrigued by the Buddhist practice, at least in some parts of Buddhism, of allowing lay folks to spend some time living as a monk or nun. I think I read that the King of Thailand spent some of his formative years in this way.

I myself took temporary vows as a young Marianist, but such vows in Christian religious orders are simply a step towards final (life-long) vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience (and for Marianists also a vow of stability).

So too, of course, marriage vows – until death.

Yet, starting with the latter, I believe that many, perhaps most young folks these days take temporary vows on the way to marriage vows or as an alternative to them. Serial monogamy or something like that. An understanding to be faithful or exclusive for as long as both parties want that.

And I suspect there is something similar going on in Catholic religious orders – women and men joining to try it out, perhaps only with the intention of trying it out for a while.

At any rate, I know that my years as a professed member of the Society of Mary — which I intended to be my permanent calling but soon enough realized was not to be – were for me an invaluable period of training in prayer, in learning, in vocational practice. I do not any longer practice poverty or chastity or obedience (except in my marriage – to “she who must be obeyed” as one wag put it), yet I sense that I do continue to live the vow of stability as I understand it. I still consider my life as a teacher and writer (and husband) a continuation of vocation as a Marianist.

So why not officially endorse and support this idea as Buddhism seems to?

Take the idea of “temporary fidelity” before or in place of marriage. It’s a reality which ain’t goin’ away soon. And far better than hook-up promiscuity. Etc.

And, my real point here, why not make this an official (canonical) category for Catholic religious orders and even for diocesan priests?

I’m not sure what the economics of this arrangement would be (though I suspect that many older women and men might readily help pay for the cost of their years in the monastery). But I suspect the richness such folks would bring to the monastery would only be exceeded by the benefits to the temporary member – and to the larger society to which they would return.

I also believe that the “thou art a priest forever” is both nonsense and true.

All of the men I know who were ordained as Catholic priests and then left the priesthood have continued to be priests in many ways – as priests in Episcopal or Lutheran denominations, as good priestly doctors and lawyers, judges and business leaders. (And for most Protestant denominations there seems a regular pattern of ordained ministers serving in other ways after leaving a position as pastor.) So in a real sense they remain “priests forever.”

But the idea is also nonsense. With too many men locked into positions for which they are no-longer (or never were) suited. Or shunned for leaving the priesthood. Why not understand (canonically, again) that the training they’ve received and the ordination given may serve greater good outside the church, or even for other forms of service within the church?

Maybe this is an idea which needs to be floated in Francis’ synodal process?

Just a thought. 😊