Darmok and Jalod Ad Orientem

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 3 December 2016. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra

 I recently re-published a post called “Star Trek, Secularism, and Christian Faith”. It had originally been posted on my first blog, Principium et Finis, where it garnered more page views than anything else on the blog – more than anything else I’ve ever published online, in fact.  There seems to be something about imaginative stories (Star Trek is just one example) that captures our attention, and has done so since our far-distant ancestors gathered around campfires to hear story-tellers recount the communal tales that defined them as a people.

Tamarian Captain and Captain Jean-Luc Picard

     In my earlier post I was somewhat critical of the creators of the television science-fiction franchise on the grounds that they didn’t really understand what religious believers mean by "faith", which was supposed to be a major theme in episode I was discussing.  They are on much firmer ground in the episode called “Darmok”, from the fourth season of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Not only that, I think that this particular story throws an interesting light on some current issues in the Catholic Church.

      In “Darmok” the (mostly human) crew of the starship Enterprise encounters an alien race called the Tamarians, with whom humans have previously had several frustratingly unsuccessful attempts at communication.  It seems that the Earthling’s Universal Translators (ah, the wonders of science fiction!) are able to discover the meaning of the Tamarians’ words, but can’t figure out how the words combine to express meaning.  What is one to make, for instance, of utterances such as “Shaka, when the walls fell”, or “The river Tamarc, in winter”? The aliens seem to be talking in metaphors and allusions drawn from stories known to them and to nobody else.

Data and Troi explain Tamarian Language

     Jean-Luc Picard, the Enterprise’s captain (played by Patrick Stuart) experiences the same frustration as his predecessors in his attempts to communicate with the commander of a Tamarian ship, a frustration clearly shared by his alien counterpart.  Finally, the Tamarian captain holds up two daggers and declares “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!”, at which both he and Picard are transported (more sci-fi wizardry) down to the surface of a planet below.  Picard soon learns that the captain is not challenging him to a duel as he at first supposes, but what he does intend, or what he means by his insistent repetition of “Darmok and Jalod at Tanagra!” remains a mystery.

     Finally, after the two captains together encounter a deadly creature (which mortally wounds Picard’s Tamarian counterpart), Picard puts the puzzle together.  Darmok and Jalod were two heroes, perhaps rivals or enemies, who together fought a beast on an island called Tanagra, and formed a bond of friendship.  The alien captain had hoped that, by putting himself and Picard in a similar situation, they might likewise achieve through shared experience what they couldn't find through mere words.  Understanding too late his counterpart's intent, Picard is able at least to comfort the dying Tamarian by recounting to him the ancient epic of Gil-Gamesh.

We Are Formed by Experience

    The Tamarians, as are all Star Trek aliens, are really humans in disguise (literally, of course, but figuratively as well).  In this particular story the creators of the television show have put their finger on something that goes to the very heart of what it is to be human: we are formed by our experiences, not only as individuals but as peoples.  The “aliens” they have created here view the world only through the lens of the stories that have been passed down about the history of their people, and in their everyday experiences they consciously relive the experiences of their forebears. Their only way to communicate abstractions is through the concrete: people, places, and events.

Picard tells Tamarians about death of their captain

    Now, we Earth-dwellers may not look very much like them at first.  We have a wealth of language that communicates abstractions and ideas . . . and yet we are more Tamarian than we might appear at first glance.  Notice how easily, for example, the name of the Nazi’s hand-picked Norwegian puppet Vidkun Quisling has become the common noun “quisling”, a synonym for “traitor” . . . or how easily we use a metaphorical term such as “puppet”, as I did just now. Often,  we quickly forget that the expressions we are using are metaphors at all.  I remember, for instance during the 1992 presidential campaign when former (and future) California governor Jerry Brown was asked about the “anointed front-runner” Bill Clinton.  Brown asked whether he was running for president, or running for pope. Some allusions are even more deeply buried: how many people even know when they use the word “mentor” they are alluding to Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Athena, in the guise of a wise old man named Mentor, accompanies Odysseus’s son Telemachus to provide guidance (or, to speak metaphorically, “show him the ropes”).  

It's a Mystery to Me

    There’s even more going on here than the use of language.  The Tamarian captain understands that actions, experiences, can communicate in ways that words cannot (a point I also discuss in a post I republished this week, “Christ, or Anti-Christ? Art & the Power of Imagination”), which is of course true of human beings as much as it is of the fictional “Children of Tamar”.  This is a large part of why so many religions rely on ritual and formal rites: the actions communicate to us much more deeply than mere words, because we are actually living out what they want to convey.  The true meaning of the term “mystery” (from the Greek μυστήριον) in fact, is not something unknowable, but something that can only be known experientially, through doing. Traditional Christianity tells us that God uses these mysteries as a means not only of imparting His Grace, but of revealing himself to us. Once we understand that, we can more easily see why μυστήριον translates into Latin as sacramentum, because sacraments involve not only knowing or thinking, but acting.

The Mystery of the Eucharist

     Most religions rely, to some degree or other, on mystery.  At the very core of Christianity we find the Profoundest Mystery, the Supreme Sacrament: The Infinite God become Man in order to experience our humanity, and to invite us, in turn, to share in His Divinity.  We live out this mystery concretely when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist which is, as the Second Vatican Council reminds us, the summit and source of the Christian life.  While Catholic Christianity includes countless lesser ways of living out spiritual realities as well, including the other Sacraments, sacramentals, devotions, and so on, the Eucharist, and the Sacrifice of the Mass in which we receive it, is the most important thing we do.

Turning Toward The Lord

    It can be helpful, I think, to bear these considerations in mind when we look at the suggestion recently made [5 July 2016] by Cardinal Sarah, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, that priests start re-introducing the practice of saying the Mass ad orientem, “toward the rising sun”, which is to say facing the altar rather than the congregation.  The Cardinal made the suggestion in a talk delivered at a liturgical conference in London this past summer (full text here).   Cardinal Sarah asked his fellow shepherds in the episcopy to support him in this matter, saying:

I very humbly and fraternally would like to appeal also to my brother bishops: please lead your priests and people towards the Lord in this way, particularly at large celebrations in your dioceses and in your cathedral. Please form your seminarians in the reality that we are not called to the priesthood to be at the centre of liturgical worship ourselves, but to lead Christ’s faithful to him as fellow worshippers united in the one same act of adoration.

Implicit in the part of the quote I have italicized above is the idea that what we do, and what the priest does, during the Mass is a part of the message.

Ad Orientem: facing The Lord Together

    I first came across a similar suggestion in regard to ad orientem worship some years ago in an article by Fr. Joseph Fessio called “The Mass of Vatican II”. In his essay Fr. Fessio explains what the documents of Vatican II actually say about the Mass; for instance, that it should remain mostly in Latin, and that Gregorian Chant “should be given pride of place in liturgical services", and various other directives that appear not to have much influenced the post-conciliar revision of the liturgy. Fr. Fessio points out that one thing that was done does not appear, anywhere, in the Council’s documents, just as it had never been part of the tradition of the Church over the previous 18 centuries: turning the priest at Mass around to face the congregation, rather than having him face the altar, the liturgical East, along with the people he is leading in prayer.  In defending the traditional practice Fr. Fessio more explicitly makes some of the same points that Cardinal Sarah does in his London talk:

It's true that when the priest faces the people for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, there may be a sense of greater unity as a community. But there is also a danger of the priest being the performer and you being the spectator - precisely what the Council did not want: priest performers and congregational spectators. But there is something more problematic. You can see it, perhaps, by contrasting Mass facing the people with Mass facing East or facing the Lord. I don't say Mass "with my back to the people" anymore than Patton went through Germany with his "back to the soldiers." Patton led the Third Army across Germany and they followed him to achieve a goal. The Mass is part of the Pilgrim Church on the way to our goal, our heavenly homeland. This world is not our heavenly homeland. We don't sit around in a circle and look at each other. We want to look with each other and with the priest towards the rising sun, the rays of grace, where the Son will come again in glory on the clouds.

The Medium is the Message

    Marshall McLuhan famously said of television that “the medium is the message”.  The same can be said of all media, including sacred media.  How we celebrate the Mass sends a message.  The symbolic “message” of the ad orientem Mass is clear: that all of us together, priest and people, are making an offering to God; we all face our Lord together.  When priest and people face each other, who is offering what to whom? The message seems to be that we are there to see each other, not to turn to Our Lord. The little cartoon to the left (which, I confess, I stole from Fr. Z’s blog) gives a good illustration of the problem. Cardinal Sarah himself recently made the same point in a talk delivered to the bishops of Sri Lanka,

In recent decades in some countries the Sacred Liturgy has become too anthropocentric; man not Almighty God has often become its focus.

But that’s not how it’s supposed to be.  Instead,

In every Catholic liturgy, the Church, made up of both minister and faithful, gives her complete focus – body, heart and mind – to God who is the centre of our lives and the origin of every blessing and grace.

    That’s the beauty of the traditional ad orientem celebration of the Mass: we don’t merely read or hear but experience for ourselves the Truth that God is the center of our lives, and our in our worship we all turn to Him together.

It's Greek to Me

    Which brings me to one of my few real quibbles with “Darmok”. In the final scene of the episode we see Captain Picard reading a book when his first officer, Commander Riker, enters the room.  Riker looks at the book curiously, and says, “Greek, sir?” (did I mention that Captain Picard is the consummate Renaissance man? Starship captain, interstellar warrior, student of Latin and Greek, etc.), which leads to this exchange:

PICARD: Oh, the Homeric Hymns. One of the root metaphors of our own culture.

RIKER: For the next time we encounter the Tamarians?

PICARD: More familiarity with our own mythology might help us to relate to theirs. The Tamarian was willing to risk all of us just for the hope of communication, connection. Now the door is open between our peoples. That commitment meant more to him than his own life. Thank you, Number One.

Now, the Homeric Hymns is not a bad place to start, as far as it goes, but if Picard really wants to get at the “root” of what it is to be human, I have a better suggestion for him, one that goes like this:

Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with God, and The Word was God (John 1:1)

Mother Angelica and Brother Joe

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 10 April 2016 on the blog Principium et Finis. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com. 

    A couple weeks ago this world lost two prominent Catholics, both Italian-Americans well-known for their involvement in broadcasting, and both with Franciscan connections. The first, of course, is EWTN founder and Franciscan nun Mother Angelica [died 27 March 2016].  Few Catholics below the rank of Pope have had quite so profound a impact in the Catholic world over the past century. Her influence has spread in ever-expanding ripples since the founding of her Catholic television station in 1981.  Thanks to Mother Angelica there are people who have been brought into the Church or back to the practice of the Faith through EWTN; there are Catholics formed by watching, listening to, or working for EWTN who have gone on to people the amazing evangelization and apologetics industry that has sprouted up over the past four decades, and has become something of a movement; there are all the people, Catholic or not, affected by the witness of those whose faith has been nourished by that movement, and . . . well, it goes on and on.

Mother Angelica

         Mother’s life story is an inspiration all its own.  One can’t help but admire her determination to rise above a troubled childhood, and after that a debilitating injury as a young religious sister, to establish a convent in the deep south, and to create a vibrant Catholic media empire, sustained throughout by an unfailing love for Jesus Christ. In her last years she offered another, deeper, kind of witness when, like St. John Paul II, she was a living reflection of Christ’s Paschal suffering (interesting that Mother died on Easter Sunday, and John Paul the Great on the Second Sunday of the Octave of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday).  She suffered intensely after a pair of strokes fifteen years ago, with very limited powers of speech and a host of other related ailments.  She did not, however, let her increasing pain and discomfort discourage her.  Instead, according to EWTN chaplain Joseph Wolfe:

Mother Angelica had instructed her nuns to do everything to keep her alive, no matter how much she suffered, because every day she suffered, she suffered for God. [full article here]

I expect that there will be a cause for her canonization opened soon, and it will not be surprising if Saint Angelica of Irondale finds her way onto the Liturgical Calendar in due time.

A young Joe Garaglio (r.), with childhood neighbor
and life-long friend friend Yogi Berra (l.)

         We will probably never see a cause for the canonization of long-time sports announcer Joe Garagiola, however, who died four days before Mother Angelica, on the Wednesday of Holy Week [27 March 2016].  Joe was not a Catholic broadcaster, like Mother Angelica, but a broadcaster who happened to be Catholic. In fact, although he was a lifelong, faithful Catholic, he would probably be intensely embarrassed by any discussion of his personal sanctity.   Despite his celebrity he was a humble man, always speaking very dismissively, for instance, about his tenure as a catcher in major league baseball.  The truth is that, although he wasn’t a Hall of Fame player, his career wasn’t without its highlights: he batted .257 in 676 games over eight seasons, which is quite respectable for a catcher, and in 1946, his rookie season, outhit the great Ted Williams in the World Series (the only Series for both of them).

         It wasn’t until his playing days were over that Joe Garagiola really made a name for himself, as a talker (which did get him into the Hall of Fame).  He was a five-tool player in the broadcast booth: he started with an extensive knowledge of the game, experience playing at the highest level, and a knack for telling a story; in addition to those, his personal warmth and generous spirit kept him on the air for more than half a century, mostly in sports, but also for stints on various talk programs and game shows.

         As it turns out, that warmth and generosity welled up from a deep source: Garagiola was a man of deep faith, as detailed [here] in a recent story at CatholicPhilly.com. He always carried a rosary in his pocket, had a deep devotion to the Blessed Mother and, for the last quarter century of his life, poured a veritable flood of time, money, and love into the St. Peter Mission School in the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix, Arizona.  The Franciscan nuns who run the school are among his most fervent fans:

“He was one of the best people I have ever met. There was no limit to his generosity,” said its principal, Sister Martha Mary Carpenter, who estimates that Garagiola was responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school.

     Indeed, Garagiola was a tireless fundraiser for St. Peter's, and was instrumental in financing and promoting a long list of improvements and additions to the school’s facilities. He did more for St. Peter’s than just give money, however: he gave himself.  The former Major League catcher and broadcaster was constantly promoting the school.  According to Sister Martha Mary, “Joe couldn’t talk to people for more than five minutes without talking about the mission. … He will be with us in spirit for a very long time.”  A frequent visitor to St. Peter’s, he had often been with them in more than spirit, taking an intense interest not just in the institution, but in the children it serves.  Sr. Martha Mary is proud to point out that

St. Peter’s schoolchildren still recite “Joe’s Prayer” twice each day. Garagiola himself taught them the short invocation: “Teach us O Lord, that every day, down every street, come chances to be God’s hands and feet.”

Garagiola at St. Peter Mission School in 2005 (photo: The Republic)

    Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I am not advocating a cause for the canonization of Joe Garagiola, nor putting his personal sanctity on a par with Mother Angelica’s, or anyone else’s.  The spiritual superstars who join the official canon will always be a very small and select group. At the same time, all believing Christians hope to spend their eternity in Heaven, in the Presence of God, which is precisely to become a saint.  I suspect that, celebrity notwithstanding, most of us are more like Joe Garagiola than we are like Mother Angelica. Like most of us, Garagiola spent most of his time and effort on things that had little explicit connection to the Catholic Faith.  As he was living out in The World, however, he was always open, “every day, down every street”, to the possibility of living out Christ’s love. The Great Saints show us how far we fallible creatures can rise, the little saints (a loving grandmother, a supportive coach or teacher, or a kind and generous old sportscaster) can teach us some of the first steps on the way.  I’m adding “Joe’s Prayer” to my store of devotions.
     It's fitting that we pray for the souls of these two Catholics who have come into our homes so often through television, along with the souls of others who have died.  Who knows? Some day, maybe soon, Mother Angelica and Brother Joe may be praying for us before the Throne of God.

(See also "Feed My Sheep" at Principium Et Finis)

Life Sells Chips (or, Chips Sell Life)

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post first appeared on 8 February 2016 on the blog Principium et Finis. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers please see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Alison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

If you want to sell something, what better place than the most-watched television program of the year?  That, as those who follow American football and/or American pop culture could tell you, would be the Super Bowl, the National Football League’s annual championship game. Small wonder that advertisers spend millions of dollars for a single 30 second ad during the broadcast. Most often these ads are for things like beer, cell phones, cars, insurance, etc., but sometimes something a little different shows up.  Six years ago, for instance, Focus on the Family ran a pro-life ad featuring the mother of college football star Tim Tebow, which created a lot of discussion about the cause of life and, as I detailed in this post last week, saved at least one life.

Freddy Carstairs appearing in Doritos Super Bowl Ad (image from youTube)

    A Super Bowl ad promoting human life made waves again last night [7 Feb 2016] . . . but not in quite the same way as the Tebow ad did.  The commercial in question was advertising Doritos tortilla chips.  In this one, we see a mother happily looking at an ultrasound image of her late-stage unborn baby on a monitor; the mother then turns to her husband, who is contentedly munching on Doritos.  To the mother’s increasing annoyance, the father waves one of the salty snacks in front of the screen, where we can see the unborn baby reaching for the chip.  Finally, the exasperated mother grabs the chip from her husband’s hand and hurls it at her feet, at which point the unborn baby on the monitor, apparently eager to eat the chip, appears to dive for the “exit”, at which point the mother goes into labor.

    First of all, it’s a pretty sure bet that this ad is not intended (certainly not by Frito-Lay, the producer of Doritos) to make a pro-life statement.  According to an article at lifesitenews.com, the creator of the ad, an Australian filmmaker named Peter Carstairs, came up with the idea when he saw ultrasound images of his unborn son Freddy (who was born last year), and thought it would be a funny and (most importantly) an effective way to sell chips.  Frito-Lay chose Carstairs’ ad because it tested well and was unusual enough to stand out from the the welter of weird and ridiculous ads striving to make an impression upon Super Bowl viewers.

Ultrasound baby reaching for chip (image from Youtube)

    And make an impression it did, in some cases positive, in some, well, less so.  Apparently, NARAL Pro-Choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League) found this tortilla-affirming commercial to be guilty of the shameful “antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses” (see article here), demonstrating yet again that pro-abortion fanatics cannot abide any suggestion that unborn humans are, well, human.  That’s why they insist on using dehumanizing terms like “fetus”.  That is also why they despise ultrasound, because sonograms make unavoidably obvious the already irrefutable scientific fact that unborn babies are not just “clumps of cells”, but little people.  Their objection to this particular commercial is not so much that the “fetus” is doing things that an unborn baby can’t do (which everybody watching knows: that's what makes it funny), but that the ultrasound image is being shown at all.  That’s why they fight tooth and nail against laws mandating that women seeking abortion first be shown an ultrasound of the “product of conception” in their womb, because ultrasound,  even ordinary ultrasound images of unborn humans doing ordinary things, changes minds.  As I detail in my post "The Truth Is Pro Life":

    The abortion providers can only argue that simply requiring them to show truthful, unaltered pictures of what (or more accurately, as the images show, who) is being aborted will dissuade some of their customers.  A federal court, in striking down one of these laws in North Carolina, said in its decision [according to pro-life attorney Howard Slugh] that the law “explicitly promotes a pro-life message by demanding the provision of facts that all fall on one side of the abortion debate.”  Notice that the law does not require the suppression of “facts” that fall on the other side of the debate: it simply requires that the mother know all the facts before undergoing abortion, and the facts happen to be pro-life.  And so the abortionists are reduced to asking the court to help them hide the plain, incontrovertible truth.  As Slugh notes:

All these sources agree that the more a mother knows about her child, the less likely she is to abort him.  This is not because ultrasound images are misleading or politicized; it is because they supply a mother with truthful information necessary for making an informed choice.

Champion of Human Life?

    Last night’s silly little Doritos ad, has (most likely unintentionally) reminded millions of people about the truth of human life in the womb. Again, I doubt very much that Frito-Lay was trying to make a pro-life statement with their ad: they probably saw it as just a funny take on an everyday experience that would make people laugh and, consequently, help sell their product.  It’s quite possible that, if they determine that the unfavorable attention from abortion promoters is hurting the bottom line, they may issue an apology and pull the ad from the internet (if YouTube doesn’t do it first).*  Let’s hope not; we shouldn’t allow the abortion industry and its apologists to silence the Truth.  Who knows? It might even be worth buying a bag of chips . . .   

*A year later, the ad is still there:

Life Sells

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post first appeared as a part of my Sunday Snippets post on 1 February 2015 on the blog Principium et Finis. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers please see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Alison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

Tim Tebow

      This coming Sunday, as Americans and those who follow American football will know, is “Super Bowl Sunday”, when the National Football League has its annual championship game.  Since this sporting event typically has a larger television audience than any other program throughout the year, advertisers pay enormous amounts of money for advertising time during the game. Over the years they have concocted increasingly bizarre commercials in order to catch the attention of that massive audience: twenty years ago an ad featuring an alligator and some frogs stealing a case of beer to the tune of Bob Marley's "Jammin'" [here] was a big hit; this year [2015] there will be an ad for ketchup and mustard [here] featuring dachshunds running around wearing hot dog buns (I'm not sure how appetizing most people will find it); over the past few decades there have been countless commercials that have gone as far as possible to employ the old advertising maxim, "sex sells" (sorry, no link to those).  The curious result has been, at least in years when the action on the field hasn't been particularly arresting, most of the chatter the next day is about the ads and not the game itself.
     Interestingly, the most discussed commercial seven years ago was not bizarre at all: it simply showed a mother talking about her son [here] (o.k., he does appear to tackle her at the end, but that’s pretty tame for a Superbowl commercial).  The mother was Pam Tebow and her son, Tim, had just compiled one of the most spectacular college football records in memory (which, unfortunately, would not translate into comparable success as a professional).  The reason why this ad was more controversial than all those others ones filled with innuendo and grotesquery is that it was a pro-life ad.  Mrs. Tebow was talking about why she did not follow doctors’ advice and abort the baby who later became one of the most celebrated college athletes ever.  That, apparently, was shocking.

Avita Grace Wood

    

     Now, a few years later, comes the story of another child, Avita Grace Wood, whose life was saved by the same commercial.  Her mother, Susan Wood, had agreed to abort the unborn Avita, at the insistence of her boyfriend, the child’s father.  After seeing the Pam Tebow commercial, however, Susan changed her mind and chose life (full story here). As in the case of the numerous accounts of women who chose not to abort because of 40 Days for Life and other pro-life efforts, we are reminded that our faith, prayer, and witness can change hearts and save lives.  We just need to keep moving the ball down to the field.