Come, Holy Spirit! Get Us Out of This Box!

Tomorrow we celebrate Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, huddled in fear in the upper room.

It's traditionally known as the birthday of the Church, though it was a Jewish holiday first. The reason all those polyglot crowds were present in Jerusalem in the first place to miraculously hear and understand the Good News was to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, Shavuot--which might, in turn, be thought of as the birthday of Judaism. Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Law on Sinai, in thunder, fire, and wind. That wind, that fire, that thunder were present at Pentecost, too.

God knows we could use a birthday party about now. I date myself (and make enemies, but so it goes) by confessing that the most joyful celebration of Pentecost I ever participated in was a Mass ending a Pentecost weekend retreat of the Los Angeles Women's Ordination Conference in the early 1980s. Relax. It wasn't the wiccan bacchanalia you're imagining. The celebrant was a Franciscan priest in good standing, and though the liturgy included some of the theatrical touches everybody pooh poohs these days--banners and streamers, wind chimes, the blowing of bubbles to accompany the recessional--it was quite tame for its time. The electricity in the air, the fire and wind and deeply stirring presence of the Holy Spirit, came from our shared belief that we were hearing the Spirit's call to the Church to move out of the stifling upper room of males-only ministry. We sang the chorus to Tom Conry's "Anthem" with the fervor of people afire:

We are called, we are chosen.

We are Christ for one another.

We are promised to tomorrow,

while we are for him today.

We are sign, we are wonder.

We are sower, we are seed.

We are harvest, we are hunger.

We are question, we are creed.

We were, of course, wrong. (You can decide for yourself in what ways, though it's significant that when the celebrant was called on the carpet, as he knew he would be, by the bishop chancellor, the worst we were charged with was "Bubbles?")

Today, a long way from then, the Church finds itself under siege, locked in a series of nested upper rooms like Chinese boxes and defensive against secularism, assaults on religious freedom, attacks from within from my Vatican II cohort, evidence of abuse and financial mismanagement, and the whole Women Thing we thought we had overcome. It's pretty grim all around. Not a wind chime or a bubble in sight. The Church seems to be facing this birthday with all the enthusiasm (literally, "God within") of Eeyore.

"You seem so sad, Eeyore."

"Sad? Why should I be sad? It's my birthday. The happiest day of the year."

"Your birthday?" said Pooh in great surprise.

"Oh! Well, Many happy returns of the day, Eeyore."

"And many happy returns to you, Pooh Bear."

"But it isn't my birthday."

"No, it's mine."

"But you said 'Many happy returns'--"

"Well, why not? You don't always want to be miserable on my birthday, do you?"

"Oh, I see," said Pooh.

"It's bad enough." said Eeyore, almost breaking down, "being miserable myself, what with no presents and no cake and no candles, and no proper notice taken of me at all, but if everybody else is going to be miserable too . . ."

So my prayer is the Church's prayer this weekend, in the words of the Golden Sequence. Veni, Sancte Spiritus! Come, Holy Spirit!

Illuminate us. Infuse us with courage, but joyful courage. If the doomsayers are right and we are headed for the catacombs, remind us that martyrs have always gone to their deaths singing. And if the doomsayers are wrong--because You have the last word--let our courage to be joyful be the witness that wins hearts.

Intoxicate us, so that the world of folks who dismiss us at first as drunken fools will be charmed at last by Your words spoken through us.

Unify us, as on Pentecost You unified the Apostles and those to whom they were sent by overturning the chaos of Babel.

And for God's sake and the world's, get us out of this box, this darkness, this airlessness, this crippling fear, this upper room, this coffin, even if You have to set our heads as well as our hearts on fire to do it.

Pray with me, friends, by singing along with this most moving setting of the Golden Sequence by the Taize community. And if you want to blow a few bubbles while you're at it, I won't tell.

Consider the Source

As we continue the skirmish known variously as The Battle for Religious Freedom and The War on Women, I continue to be fascinated by the underlying assumptions and agendas behind the contested portion of the HHS mandate. To repeat what often gets lost, Catholic leaders are not taking issue with the President's health care plan--indeed, Catholics were strongly in favor of broadening access to healthcare--or even with many of the other women's health initiatives among which the disputed regulation is included. We're all for equalizing access to screening for diabetes and heart disease, among a number of other areas in which coverage for women's health care lagged behind that for men. The piece that we object to, on grounds that have been well spelled out in recent lawsuits, is the mandate that requires employers to provide a full range of contraceptive services (including those the Church, which teaches that life begins at conception and not at implantation, defines as abortifacients) and sterilization at no cost to their female employees as part of covered preventive care.

The administration believes it has made a compelling case for overriding conscience concerns. This case draws on recommendations made by the National Institute of Medicine in a July 2011 white paper. This outlines in detail the "public health emergency" upon which the case for the mandate has been made, but here is a quick summary, as objectively worded as I can manage:

• US women are at risk of unintended pregnancy. This risk is heightened among young, poor, uneducated, nonwhite women.
• Unintended pregnancy is a health risk to both women and their children because unwanted pregnancies lead directly to higher rates of depression, drug abuse, child abuse, and stress. All unintended pregnancies are unwanted pregnancies. These risks are in addition to the risks that come from pregnancy; women who are not pregnant are healthier than women who are.
• Unintended pregnancies have economic consequences for society. Pregnancies cost society more than population control.
• The chief contributing factor for the public health emergency of unintended pregnancy is lack of access to reliable forms of contraception. This lack of access is chiefly economic.
• The types of contraception most effective against unintended pregnancy are those that remove the need for user compliance (sterilization, IUDs, and implants); this is particularly true among young, poor, and uneducated women who are not reliable when having to use methods that make them have to make a decision at the time of intercourse. The most effective methods, however, are the most expensive.
• Women would choose these more effective methods in much higher numbers than they do now if cost were not an object.

My mother always used to tell me to "consider the source," so I read the NIM study and checked the research on which it (and the subsequent HHS mandate) was based. It was not surprising that every single premise drew on research from the Guttmacher Institute of Planned Parenthood. Nor was it surprising that President Obama, to whom Planned Parenthood is a key donor, would be adamant about enforcing directives based on its agenda.

When this first emerged, I began tracking what I knew would follow: a flurry of MSM op-ed pieces, health blogs, and new studies reinforcing the notion that longterm, compliance-light methods of contraception are the solution to women's health and the country's progress. Another one hit today, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Based on studies conducted in St Louis, it repeats the claim that IUDs and implants are highly effective in preventing the "disease" of pregnancy, and glosses over the very real health risks associated with these methods. The study was funded by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (started by Warren Buffett and named for his wife), a major funder of and recipient of donations from--surprise! surprise!--Planned Parenthood. Two of the study's authors are quite forthcoming about being in the pay of the companies that manufacture IUDs and implantables. Ho hum.

But another study is also making news today--one I only learned about from attempts to refute it because it turns the party line on its head. In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine ask "Why is the teen birthrate in the United States so high and why does it matter?" In their extensive review of studies (which include, but are not limited to, some conducted by Guttmacher Institute researchers) Kearney and Levine refute nearly every premise behind the HHS mandate. They present a persuasive case for looking at teen and young adult pregnancy not as a disease, but as a symptom of poverty and lack of alternatives. Among their findings:

• Unintended pregnancy rarely correlates with unwanted pregnancy or unhappiness, even when women note that their pregnancies resulted from contraceptive failure.
• Only 2% of young sexually active poor women who were not using contraception cited the cost of contraception as prohibitive. 
• Women in the NIM's "high risk" category become pregnant and remain pregnant by choice in much higher numbers than Planned Parenthood's studies reflect.
• Pregnancy is not a statistical factor in women's ability to escape poverty. There is no economic difference between poor women who have had children as teenagers or young adults and poor women who have not.
• Factors that do make a difference include access to education, employment, reliable child care--and marriage.

These unpopular premises have little to do with preventive health care and women's rights, and more to do with making our society one more supportive of families at all economic levels. (In other words, it's the economy, stupid.) They counteract the Prevailing Myth, so it's no wonder there's a rush to refute them. No one's yet accused Kearney and Levine of being sock puppets for Cardinal Dolan (though there's much in their study that the Church has been saying all along), though I'm sure that shoe will drop soon.

Meanwhile, check all this out for yourself. Think. And consider the source.

The Love That Impels

A personal note about a bright spot in today's onslaught of spin and viciousness regarding Catholics and our role in American life: Today the generosity of the Catholics of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati took the annual Catholic Ministries Appeal, still underway, to its $4 million goal. It's a personal note (and a disclaimer of sorts) because I am blessed to be an occasional part of the team that promotes the Appeal in our archdiocese, but the important part is that bright spot: the light of God's grace working through the six shared ministries the CMA supports.

Year in, year out, no matter what the headlines or the politics, the Catholic Ministries Appeal helps thousands of people of all faith backgrounds (or none at all--we don't ask) in 19 counties put food on the family table, find jobs, turn crisis pregnancies into new lives, adopt and foster children, settle into freedom after fleeing war and oppression, have their hands held and their spirits healed as they face surgery or pace an ER waiting room, find God and community on college campuses, communicate with their children and grandchildren who had been locked into silence by hearing and speech disorders, know that they are not forgotten in prison. Catholics hear and answer the call to priesthood, the diaconate, and lay ministry. Beyond the costs of promoting the Appeal, every dollar goes to support the six identified ministries.

The Catholics of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati are unfailingly generous, but this is the first year in a long stretch that the Appeal has reached its goal. This year, when according to the mainstream media Catholics are frightened, insular, hate-filled, cowed robots duped by medieval bureaucrats bent on enslaving women and turning all men into fat-cat Republicans, folks here don't seem to be buying the spin. They're too busy loving one another, and putting their money where their faith is to widen that embrace in a time when too many of our sisters and brothers are living on the edge. Because that's what Catholics do in real life.

In his motu proprio announcing the upcoming Year of Faith, Pope Benedict XVI put it this way:

Through faith, we can recognize the face of the risen Lord in those who ask for our love. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). These words are a warning that must not be forgotten and a perennial invitation to return the love by which he takes care of us. It is faith that enables us to recognize Christ and it is his love that impels us to assist him whenever he becomes our neighbour along the journey of life. Supported by faith, let us look with hope at our commitment in the world, as we await “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet 3:13; cf. Rev 21:1).

Haters gotta hate, I guess. But tonight I give thanks to and for the loving hearts and generous faith of the folks whose pew I have never been happier to return to and share. GOOOOOOOAAL!!!

Judged and Found Wanting

While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven."
~ Acts of the Apostles 1:10-11

This morning, as I was leaving to run an errand or two before Mass, I met Jesus. And as he did with the Samaritan woman at the well, or with any of us, he "showed me everything I've ever done."

I was already in a weepy place, waking up. Yesterday, someone I love very much told me she thought we might not be able to be friends anymore, because I am so judgmental. She's going through a tough time, and wanted to talk about it with me. But I didn't stop at listening. I told her I thought part of the problem might be hers. And I didn't sugarcoat it. "I trusted you," she said. "And I feel judged and found wanting."

I would like to be able to say that this kind of behavior is an exception on my part, but it's not. I would like to be able to claim Asperger's or some other autism spectrum disorder as the explanation for my scrupulous obsession with rules and my tin ear for social cues, but in fact it is just that I am a staggeringly bad friend. I would like to say it's just being a Libra that compels me to play the devil's advocate and always take the other side, but the fault is not in my stars but in myself: I am always too busy working out a theoretical argument to notice the hand that simply needs holding.

So I required church, badly, this morning. Got in the car, turned the key, and a horrific clattering, shrieking, no-good-will-come-of-this noise emerged. The Check Engine light--the automotive equivalent of the Seventh Seal--began flashing wildly. The car (Bernadette Subaru) jitterbugged in place maniacally. I turned off the ignition and looked intently at the sky.

Suddenly, two men were standing beside me. They were not dressed in white garments, unless you count the grubby undershirts that topped the sweatpants. They were not, in my experience, angels. They were, in fact, two of the guys who live across the street from me in a halfway house for former offenders run by a notorious neighborhood slumlord

They were precisely the two guys with whom I'd had a World War III level run-in two Sundays ago, when my request that they turn down the arena-level ACDC they were pumping out to accompany their front-porch beer binge was met with, well, some comments about my age, size, and the kind of sexual practice I should feel free to indulge in with myself. I responded by citing city noise laws. The resulting shoutfest ended up involving the inhabitants of 5 houses on the block, my landlady, and the police. A negotiated ceasefire resulted in the lowering of the music level from them, and an admission from me that Yes, I do come across as a stuck-up, cranky old rhymes-with-witch.

Come across, nothing. I am.

So this morning, I was in full judgment mode, afraid they were going to give me trouble. Instead, they--Webb and Donnie, now that we've finally exchanged names--got under the hood, diagnosed the problem as one I already knew I had ("Ain't no woman in the world remembers to keep the oil level up," Webb said. "Meaning no insult, ma'am"), and offered to drive me to the gas station to buy oil. I clambered into the truck with Donnie (they were right about my age and my size), and he chatted away about his job as a landscaper and his brother-in-law's cancer.

We got the oil, and on the way back, Donnie asked what I do. I told him I wrote about religion and helped raise money for nonprofits. "Huh," he said thoughtfully, looking straight ahead. "Then you do some good in the world." He paused, and grinned. "Who'd have thought it? Guess it just goes to show you shouldn't judge."

They got the car running and extracted a promise from me to Go, and avoid a tune-up no more. They weren't angels. They were the best of Samaritans, stopping to help not some anonymous robbery victim but the very priest-and-Levite who would have passed them by if the case were reversed, probably quoting every jot and tittle of the noise ordinances as she did so. And they were more. Not judgmental, but just: the kind of just men Gerard Manley Hopkins says reveal the unexpected face of the Risen Lord:

. . . the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

On this Ascension morning, I had been judged, and found wanting. I was looking at the sky, when I should have been looking next door.

As I left for Mass (which I made on time), I shook Donnie's hand, and went to shake Webb's. "Uh-uh," he said. "We're at hug level now." So I gave him a hug, and as deeply felt an apology as I know how. I pray my friend will let me do the same.

Freezing the Kool Aid

Bad enough I'm always torn between explaining to my artist friends that being a faithful Catholic is not drinking the Kool-Aid and explaining to my faithful Catholic friends that it's not worth sweating over "art" that challenges Catholic piety. Now artist Sebastian Errazuriz has to go and put the whole business on ice:

At a party this weekend celebrating New York Design Week, which begins today, the Chilean-born artist plans to hand out 100 "Christian Popsicles" made of "frozen holy wine transformed into the blood of Christ" and featuring a crucifix instead the tongue depressor that typically hosts the frozen treats, he said. 

An image of Jesus Christ positioned traditionally on the cross is visible once the ice pop is consumed. As for the frozen wine, Errazuriz said, he concealed it in a cooler and took it into a church, where it was "inadvertently blessed by the priest while turning wine into the blood of Christ during the Eucharist."

Read the whole thing. But only if you promise not to punch me for linking to it.

The Kool Aid drinker in me feels the need to clarify that Errazuriz's cooler of wine was not "inadvertently blessed" by the priest at the Mass into which he smuggled it. Still less has it been transformed into the Blood of Christ. Consecration is not some kind of magic juju that seeps into anything within the sound of the celebrant's voice, or those bottles of Night Train in the coat pockets of homeless guys who sleep in the back pews of downtown churches all over America would be providing communion of a deeper kind than it does. Your wine's just wine, dude--or winesicle, anyway.

The part of me (well, it's all of me, actually) that isn't Bill "Make-Fun-of-Catholics-and-I'll-Go-All-Chuck-Norris-on-Your-Impious-Posterior" Donohue admits to a certain fondness for the crucifix popsicle sticks. They're no tackier than those Jesus on velvet paintings they sell at LA gas stations, or New TestaMints, for that matter. In fact, rather than "signifying the relationship between fanaticism and historic religious violence," as the artist intends--what a buzzkill!--the Jesus Popsicles might just be a refreshing way to remind an unlikely audience of NY Design Week partygoers just how cool religion can be.

Or maybe I just think that because it's 89 degrees (in May!) in Dayton, and a popsicle sounds really good right now. Lord, help me.

Ascension Thursday: Never on Sunday!

It's Ascension Thursday. Or at least it is if you live in the US ecclesiastical provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, or the state of Nebraska. For the rest of us, by vote of our bishops, Ascension Thursday doesn't arrive until Sunday.

That fries me. The Feast of the Ascension is one of my favorite holy days, one which I am obliged to keep by nothing more than happiness. So I was mightily disappointed, upon my reversion, to find that my bishops think they're making things easier for me by transferring the liturgical celebration to the following Sunday. Or Saturday evening, even.

To which I say, Dudes! . . . I mean, Your Excellencies! Does the weighty significance of the number 40, as in "40 days after Easter," elude you? What are we, the federal government, ignoring actual commemorative anniversaries in favor of three-day weekends? It is bad enough that we're now allowed to squeeze beef gravy, chicken broth, and bacon dressing in under the wire of Friday abstinence, but reducing the holy days of obligation to a paltry three a year (in Ohio, anyway)? You've gone soft. Next thing you know, we'll be celebrating Christmas the day after Black Friday. Slackers, as my friend The Hermit (whose hermitage is in Maine, in the ecclesiastical province of Boston, where they still know how to count) says.

My level of liturgical dudgeon (and envy of the Real Ascension Thursday celebrators) is high enough that I can't  summon any lofty theological reflections on this beloved feast. For those, I send you to

• Robert Imbelli quoting Hans Urs von Balthasar at dot.commonweal
• Deacon Greg Kandra's homily
• Fr Jim Martin's Facebook reflection illustrated by Salvador Dali's Ascension

I'll just say again how disappointed I am by the fact that I can't celebrate Ascension Thursday without crossing several state lines. And that I couldn't incorporate into an Ascension Thursday reflection footage from this morning's TODAY Show battle between two brothers vying for one spot on the US Olympic trampoline team. I will leave leave you instead with a couple of examples of my favorite genre of Ascension depictions, popular particularly in the English illuminated manuscript tradition. They show only the feet of the Risen Lord as the rest of him vanishes into that other dimension that is the Kingdom, which--like Ascension Thursday in much of these United States--is both here and yet to come.

Angels in the Fields

Out here in the fields
I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living . . .
~ The Who, "Teenage Wasteland"

Today is the feast day of the man usually known in English as St Isidore the Farmer.

I don't know much about farming, even though I've lived my life in two major agricultural states. Growing up in California, what I saw of farming was the view out the station wagon windows driving north on 101, El Camino Real, from Los Angeles to San Francisco for family vacations. In the 1950s, that view grew rural right outside the city limits, with fields of lettuce and strawberries, soybeans and rapeseed (canola) stretching wide from the highway to the distant, crouching mountains. There's little of that view left today, with housing tracts and roadside development now making that part of the state one megacity from north to south, but the fields are still there behind it all. For sustenance, they draw on two perpetual streams: water channeled from the lakes and snowmelt of the north, workers from Mexico to the south. Both are problematic and endangered.

When I made the decision to move to Ohio in 1996, one of the tipping points was the ability to be surrounded by green and subject to the turning of the seasons. Nowhere in Dayton is further than a 15-minute drive from farms and fields and orchards full of seasonal bounty. I saw my first Swiss-roll hay bales in the fields between Dayton and Yellow Springs. For the first time, I worked with people whose kids raised pigs and meat rabbits for 4-H. In late summer, I can walk across the downtown street from my house to the Montgomery County Fairgrounds and see the results for myself. Farming in this part of Ohio is still very much a family affair, as opposed to the agribusiness machine that California has become, but there's one thing the two states have in common, the reason that Dayton now has real Mexican food: dependence on migrant labor, mostly from Mexico.

St Isidore is the patron of farmers, but he was not a farmer. He was a day laborer, a desperately poor peasant who eked out a living selling his muscle and sweat to his patron in 12th-century Madrid. In Spanish, that fact is recognized: he is San Ysidro Labrador, St Isidore the Laborer. Isidore's reputation for sanctity is rooted in his essential goodheartedness and love for God's creation. Pious legends tell of his kneeling in the fields while angels did his plowing for him, or of angels' plowing side by side with him so that he did the work of three men. Isidore was married. His wife is also a saint, known as Santa Maria de la Cabeza, St Mary of the Head, because her preserved head is carried in procession as a remedy against drought.

Today, when the plight of migrant workers continues to be as perilous as it was in Isidore's day, or in the days of our own American Dust Bowl, or when Mexican migrant workers were killed in the plane crash at Los Gatos immortalized by Woody Guthrie's "Deportees," or when Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez fought for the rights of grape and lettuce workers, I ask Isidore's intercession for those who put their backs into our living.

Today, when immigration, illegal or legal--especially from Mexico--is such a divisive issue, I remember that the busiest border crossing in the world is south of San Diego, CA, in the little community known as San Ysidro, and I ask for some of the saint's compassion and humility to inform our continuing conversation.

Today, when I look forward to the taste of summer tomatoes and sweet corn, and savor the slow food and locovore movements with their attention to fresh food, locally grown, in season, with attention to the health of all who grow and consume it, I ask God's blessing on the farms and the fields and those who own and work them.

And while we're at it, Santa Maria de la Cabeza, preserve us from drought: of water, of mercy, of health, of concern for all God's creatures.

If you have a chance today, get out to a farm or field, and give thanks for the angels God sends to plow them.