Seasons

I always become a little melancholy this time of year. Summer is turning to autumn which means the long winter lies ahead. Baseball season will soon be over (the Red Sox seem determined to end it early this year), and while we will have football to get us through half the winter, it will end in the numbing cold of late January leaving us several weeks before spring training and the boys of summer arrive once more.

But why be so blue? After all, it is among the prettiest times of year. Leaves are turning, there is a clean crispness in the air, and if one is lucky they can catch whiffs of hearth fires burning. I grew up knowing there were four seasons in a year, but really just believed in three: baseball season, football season and (to a lesser extent) basketball season. After becoming a Catholic I learned about another calendar: The Liturgical Year. And, in the Church’s liturgy, it’s the second round of Ordinary Time.

Turning to the sports calendar it’s playoff time and the World Series is on deck. Whether your team is alive or not it is the most exciting time of the baseball season. And the young college football season has kicked off, too. But one can’t ignore the specter of the winter that lies ahead.

Or that’s how I used to be. And that’s why I embraced the liturgical calendar so much. Sure, Ordinary Time sounds well…ordinary. But it’s anything but ordinary. It, and winter, is a time of preparation before the new year, Advent followed by Christmas, will soon arrive.

“We are an Easter people, and alleluia is our song.” – Pope John Paul II

Regarded as the “bleakest” of the seasons, winter serves essentially as the adagio of the calendar year. It stands in much the same place as does the Third Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Far from being weak, it prepares us, through sorrow, for glory. I no longer find it to be so bleak.

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This second period of Ordinary Time (the first part of Ordinary Time is sandwiched between Christmas and Lent) focuses on the importance of the Christ event for the life of the believing community. It celebrates the presence of Christ’s Spirit in the members of his body and looks to the fulfillment of the kingdom that is to come. This period of Ordinary Time not only ends the Church’s liturgical year but also heralds in the new. It shares with Advent a deep concern for the final (The Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell) nature of the Christ event and helps us to view all that happens to us with the eyes of faith. It is in this season that we look back (Pentecost), look around (the continuation of Christ’s mission on earth, the Sacraments, and grace), and look forward (the four last things). By using this approach to examine our lives during this period of Ordinary Time, we uncover a call to urgent living. We come face to face with our own mortality. Seeing that we have only one life to live and that we have no idea when our own final hour will come, a sense of urgency to live our life the best way we know how gradually arises in our hearts. It reminds us that where our treasure is, there also we will find our hearts. (Matthew 6:19-21).

This call is not a call to compulsive living. It does not mean busying ourselves with our work and leaving no time for our relationships with ourselves, others, and God. Living life with urgency does not mean fitting more and more into less and less increments of time. It asks us only to allow God to accompany us in our daily tasks. The call to urgency means that we take a good look inside our hearts and ask ourselves what matters most to us in life.

And here’s where at long last I’ll get to my point.

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together…” – Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

While I can safely be accused of reflecting on events throughout the year, it is without a doubt during autumn that I do it the most. I don’t know why, but it’s always been that way. And even moreso since I became Catholic over eighteen years ago and began to follow the readings from Scripture at daily Mass. This year is shaping up to be no different. Every year on earth brings more exposure to saying goodbye it seems. I suppose this makes sense as I am getting older. Whether by indifference or due to death, the parting of ways is increasingly prevalent. We grow up, grow old and grow apart. The embers of friendship cool and grow cold, much as the temperatures do outside. Good friends are diagnosed with illnesses that are unpredictable at best.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” (The Four Quartets)

Facing this reality we may find ourselves reflecting upon our own lives. Of things we did do or should have done. I don’t do this to endlessly beat myself up, but this self-examination is important to assist one in accepting God’s grace, forgiving oneself (often the hardest person in the world to forgive) and moving forward with life. These are “lessons in humility” as Don Henley sang in “The Genie” in 2001 that help us to go forward and answer that call to urgent living that I mentioned earlier.

And the past comes back to smack you around
For all the things you thought you got for free
For the arrogance to think that you could somehow
Defy the laws of gravity
These are lessons in humility
Penitence for past offenses
Consequences, consequences

That is always the part no one likes to think about. Not just judgment from God or from others, but having to judge ourselves. It’s not often pretty, but in the end it bears fruit because we dare to look at that man or woman in the mirror with intensity and honesty.

“I should have gone to confession before driving class tonight. You never know the date or the hour,” my oldest son quipped this week, paraphrasing St. Matthew when describing the capabilities of the other person he was partnered with in his weekly driver’s education lesson on the streets of our town. Apparently she’s more than a little erratic.

Life is often erratic. It’s not all smooth sailing. In the end we make most of our own waves that crash into the boats of other lives and sometimes bounce back harder into our own. Or sometimes they happen for reasons not known to us, but we still have a choice as to how we’ll react to them.

This week I received an email from a dear friend of mine that confirmed she had been diagnosed with cancer. Without giving her away I will quote something she wrote because I found a deep strength within it:

I am past the panic and pity party. I really and truly have turned it all over to God. I have many wonderful friends and family that are praying. And so am I. … My heart and soul are in a better place. I do have cancer. I will have to have surgery. Anything beyond that isn’t certain. … Decisions to be made after we get all the data we need. Plus side, it is early…you can’t even feel the mass. Caught on mammogram. Make your wife stay current with hers. … Also on the plus side, I have some of the most amazing friends. Angels disguised as humans. Anyway, one can never ever get too many prayers so keep them flowing, please.

As Eliot continued in East Coker:

Old men ought to be explorers*
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

(*I would change the first line to read “Older men and women ought to be explorers.”)

My friend is an explorer. She is a prime example of one who is being still while still moving.

This represents one of the paradoxes of the liturgical calendar. For those of us who utilize it, our experience is, at one and the same time, both forward moving and cyclical, an image of an upward spiral. We are journeying upwards towards God through a series of cleansing, transformative and unitive experiences. We are reminded that our journey to God is not merely an individual venture, but one of an entire people: explorers finding their end in their beginning. And that’s nothing to be melancholy about.

*****

Note: There Is a Season: Living the Liturgical Year, by Dennis J. Billy and published by Liguori Publications was used while researching portions of this post.

“The Way” to good films

After this year I can no longer say emphatically that good movies are not made anymore. I’ve ranted and railed against Hollywood for the past few years about the dearth of great movies. Can you blame me? Endless sequels, comic book movies filled with noise and CGI, or stupid comedies involving mall cops or the Fokkers. The only movies I’ve gone to with any regularity and interest are the Narnia films, the Harry Potter series (which ended this year), or the occasional Pixar film with my younger children (Get Low, released a year ago, was very good). I got so desperate to see something a year ago that I went to my first action movie in ages. Yes…I went to The A-Team. For two hours I had my senses assaulted and tucked my intelligence away, but I admit I had a good time. It was mindless fun and I was familiar with the characters having grown up watching the original television series in the early 80s. But day-umm that movie was LOUD.*

*(I realize that I am beginning to resemble Abe Simpson in my mannerisms. I can assure you I enjoy a movie that’s well done, including action films. Most of the public I suspect goes to the theater to escape the drama of real life. I go to the theater seeking a little more.)

The past year, however, has seen the release of movies that are much, much better.

• The 5^th Quarter
• Of Gods and Men
• The Tree of Life
• There Be Dragons
• Life In A Day

Sadly, nary a one of them came to a movie theater within 50 miles of me, some coming no nearer than an art house theater in Kansas City. If you missed them, you may want to catch them on DVD/Blu-Ray/Netflix. They are based upon true stories (The 5th Quarter, Of Gods and Men); real people (There Be Dragons, Life In A Day); or upon themes that transcend our every day lives and stretch the philosopher in all of us (The Tree of Life).

Of the following, I have the first two on DVD. So far I’ve only had time to watch Of Gods and Men. It is without a doubt one of the most poignant and beautiful movies I’ve ever seen. It is the anti-action film, which is probably why no one saw it. I plan to write more about it soon but I want to watch it at least one more time before I do. I’m very much anticipating the release of The Tree of Life on Oct. 11. Few movies have intrigued me more than this film by Terrence Malick.

Another that caught my eye was Life In A Day, which arrives on DVD on November 8. A unique film put together by Ridley Scott in partnership with YouTube, this film is a representation of what all of “us” were doing on one day, July 24, 2010. Judging from the reactions of those who saw it, especially the naysayers, I will have more to say about this film once I see it.

I await word of the DVD-release date for There Be Dragons, released in May 2011.

This leaves the final release for theaters this year: The Way. This film project is a labor of love between real life father and son Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Tom (Sheen) is an American doctor who goes to France following the death of his adult son (Estevez), killed in the Pyrenees during a storm while walking the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage route to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, also known as the Way of St. James. Tom’s purpose is initially to retrieve his son’s body. However, in a combination of grief and homage to his son, Tom decides to walk the same ancient spiritual trail where his son died in order to understand his son better. While walking The Camino, Tom meets others from around the world (three in particular), all broken and looking for greater meaning in their lives.

During his travels, Tom discovers the meaning of one of the last things his son said (in a flashback) to his father: that there is a difference between “the life we live and the life we choose.”

Recently both men sat down with Tim Drake of The National Catholic Register for a brief interview and talked about the film and their faith.

Was it difficult to do a movie that looks favorably on God?
Emilio: It wasn’t, for me. For others, it was. When we pitched it to studio representatives, you could see their eyes glaze over. They’d say, “It’s about spirituality.” So we decided to shoot it digitally and independently. I believe this movie plays between Glenwood and Newark. Beverly Hills and New York can take a walk. Hollywood makes a lot of garbage. We know because we’ve been in some of it. There are less and less movies to go to — films without overt sexuality and language that won’t make me blush. We’re all tired of what’s coming out of Hollywood. Word of mouth will help this film make it.

What was the genesis of your reversion to the Catholic faith, Martin?
Martin: It began after my illness in the Philippines while filming Apocalypse Now. I began going to church because I was afraid of dying. Then I stopped going for a long time. My eyes were first reopened when I was in India filming Gandhi. Then, in 1981, while in Paris, I read the book The Brothers Karamazov. I had been given the book by director Terrence Malick. The book kept me up. After reading it, I went to see a priest and told him I wanted to come home. He looked at me with eyes that said, “This is what I do.” He told me to return the next day at 4pm, as he had a wedding at 4:30pm. He told me not to be late. I went to confession with him and wept. I came back to a Church that was very different. I left a Church of fear and returned to a Church of love.

What do you see as the film’s key message?
Emilio: We live in a culture that’s dominated by a media which tells us we need to be richer, thinner and prettier. What I love about this film is that these characters reach land’s end, and they are fine being who they are. They are imperfect and broken, but God loves them exactly as they are.

Martin: The genius of God is to dwell in the deepest recesses of our being. When we realize that we are loved and belong to this community and understand that we are truly loved exactly as we are, then we’ll discover fire the second time — only we’ll own the fire.

I guess I need to amend my original statement. After this year I can no longer say emphatically that good movies are not being made. They just aren’t shown in theaters anymore.

Another movie to watch for: The Way

I’ve sent out more than one email to friends regarding new movies being released lately, such as Of Gods and Men, There Be Dragons and Cristiada. It seems that the editors at Mere Comments have noticed the same trend and pointed one out today that I hadn’t heard about before: The Way. It’s being released in the US in September 2011 and looks pretty darned good.

Worthy of note, also, is the current run of the film Of Gods and Men about the Trappist Monks of Algeria who were slain not so long ago, the coming release of There Be Dragons, about Christians in the Spanish Civil War (including the priest-founder of Opus Dei) and Cristiada, a film about the persecution of the Catholic Church by the government of Mexico in the 1920s. And, also, a recent film by Emilio Estevez starring Martin Sheen called The Way, about a father who takes up the pilgrimage on Camino de Santiago, The Way of St. James, across northern Spain when his son dies there on the pilgrimage. I do not know the spiritual content or “message” of each film, but do suspect that they at least take faith very seriously. Many are wondering if they know The Way.

The movie’s site also has a bunch of links regarding the Way of Saint James (The Camino de Santiago).

A film review by the online journal of the British Jesuits.