Sunday/The Baptist

On this day:
1287
St. Lucia’s flood: The Zuider Zee sea wall in the Netherlands collapses, killing over 50,000 people.
1542
Princess Mary Stuart becomes Mary, Queen of Scots.1812
The French invasion of Russia comes to an end as the remnants of the Grande Armée are expelled from Russia.
1900
Quantum Mechanics: Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.
1911
Roald Amundsen’s team, comprising himself, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, becomes the first to reach the South Pole.
1939
Winter War: The Soviet Union is expelled from the League of Nations for invading Finland
1962
NASA’s Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.
1972
Apollo program: Eugene Cernan is the last person to walk on the moon, after he and Harrison Schmitt complete the third and final Extra-vehicular activity (EVA) of the Apollo 17 mission. To date this is the last manned mission to the moon.
1999
Torrential rains cause flash floods in Vargas, Venezuela, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the complete collapse of the state’s infrastructure.

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The worst public health crisis in 100 years became arguably the worst public policy failure in U.S. history because of social pathologies that the pathogen triggered. The coronavirus pandemic is over. What it revealed lingers: intellectual malpractice and authoritarian impulses infecting governmental, scientific, academic and media institutions.--Will

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After nearly 40 years in business, Murray Avenue Grill, on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, is about to shutter its doors for good.

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George Mason University economist Tim Groseclose established in his 2011 book, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, that WSJ reporters are among the most left-wing of all reporters for the major media.

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Sunday/The Baptist  

In today's gospel, the Baptist sends messengers from prison to ask Christ if he is The One, or should they wait for another? This has been one of those long-debated events in the New Testament. Is John unsure? Are his men unsure? Does John want to show his followers that Christ is indeed The One? The implication has always been that this is one of the defining moments dividing the Old Testament from the New. John is the last of the Old Testament prophets, a hard-bitten man of the desert, describing a more physical deity, a God of smiting and war. The New Testament is completely different. As Christ ascends, John declines and sets.

Today's reading is dominated by the "What did you go out to the desert to see?" question. It is a harsh, realistic, and desolate picture of a single intense man and his thoughts. But there is a significant contrasting image in the epistle sent by James, focusing on a completely different aspect of man: the patience of the farmer. The farmer and planting are recurring symbols in the gospels. Certainly, in the relatively nontechnical world of the time, it is reasonable. But there is more, especially here, opposed to the world of the visionary John the Baptist. The rural world is more than familiar; it makes sense to humans. It is very like us.

In truth, John the Baptist is not like us. He is a firebrand, not a neighbor; he is an element, not a friend. But his community is a farming one. And that is what we make up; we are a communal beast. We benefit from work. We benefit from the comfort of our neighbors. As competitive as we are, the competition and success motive has limits.

Christ is offering the universal to beings whose individual success depends upon local, controlled achievement. This dichotomy must be resolved by every individual at some point in their lives, religious or not.

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The Quickening of John the Baptist
(On the Contemplative Vocation)

Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The winesmelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?
Why do you fly those markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?

You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes.
You have drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?

The day Our Lady, full of Christ,
Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?
Did not her eyes as grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon
miraculous Elizabeth?

Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother’s body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.

Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!

What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered Christ?

You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
Exulting in your hermitage.
Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.
Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church’s hidden children -
Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;
The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of
contemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.

Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.

But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous world
Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild baby,
The unborn John who could not see a thing
We wake and know the Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into our night
With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.

Cooled in the flame of God’s dark fire
Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness
And bound and bounce with happiness,
Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.

Thomas Merton