The Eighth Day and Calvary

This week many Christians will observe Eighth Day services, or The Octave of Christmas. The Eighth Day signifies the dawning of the New Creation of Christ's reign. It is fitting that we celebrate a new year during this time and plan our fresh starts. Eight is the number of new beginnings in Hebrew numerology. God made eight covenants with the children of Abraham. There were eight people on Noah's Ark (2 Peter 2:5) and Jewish boys were circumcised on eighth day from their birth (Genesis 17:10). Luke 2:21 is where we see the rites of the eighth day celebrated in Jesus' life and is the primary reason for its observance. And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus... In the style of a royal birth announcement, Luke foreshadows who the boy will become. In the child's name, he will be Savior, and in the shedding of innocent blood he will be the perfect atonement.

There is a culturally persistent notion that something is wrong and that blood must be shed—that someone must pay. In history, human and animal sacrifice and the penal system all stem from this moral dilemma. It is a subject of great works such as Atonement, The Dead, and Wuthering Heights. Pernicious and unrelenting, it stalks us now in the black and white of the daily news. Its accusations drown our cries for justice. No matter our plans or successes, despite our rituals and good works, it remains. It waits at every door. It says that things can only be made right with restitution of the greatest treasure and with the penalty of a life. And we wonder who will pay? Who can pay?

In Calvary, writer/director John Michael McDonagh wastes no time plunging us into this desperate world. The movie opens with Father James Lavelle dressed in an old-fashioned black soutane and white collar reading Moby Dick in his confessional booth. Someone steps into the adjoining booth and confesses that at the age of seven he was raped every other day for five years by a Catholic priest. “There was a lot of blood,” he said.

LAVELLE:

I don’t know what to say to you. I have no answer for you, I’m sorry.

MAN’S VOICE:

What good would it do anyway, if he were still alive? What’d be the point in killing the bastard? That’d be no news. There’s no point in killing a bad priest. But killing a good one? That’d be a shock, now. They wouldn’t know what to make of that. (pause) I’m going to kill you, Father. I’m going to kill you ‘cause you’ve done nothing wrong. I’m going to kill you ‘cause you’re innocent. (pause) Not right now, though. I’ll give you enough time to put your house in order. Make your peace with God. Sunday week, let’s say. I’ll meet you down on the beach there. Down by the water there. (with a laugh) Killing a priest on a Sunday. That’ll be a good one.

Against the beauty of an Irish seaside village, McDonagh gives us eight days with Father James as he ministers to a cynical, flattened human universe where escape is distraction and suicide is made rational. His aloof invulnerability masks the gross presence of mortality as he gently serves a flock too self-absorbed to desire it until the end when he decides what must be done.

This movie is appropriately rated R for giving a real and frightening look at ourselves and providing the dark background for the light of hope that ought shine in us. I do not agree with the movie's tragic outcome, but it, too, is a common falsity prevalent in the world. We can no more author our own salvation than be the atonement for the sin of another. But the movie's hard questions are a good place to start the year. I'll make my resolutions with them in mind toward preparing myself to give a hope-filled answer.

On Balance

Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.

—Rumi 

I teach literature and writing to students at a modern Orthodox Jewish high school. In a school where students take as many Judaic Studies classes as General Studies classes, they are regularly pulled from class for assemblies that have to do with holidays I am only beginning to learn about, even in my third year of teaching at the school—Sukkot, Purim, the Fast of Esther, Shavuot.

Parents enroll their students in our academy because the school mission proposes a balance between religious studies and academics. In fact, Modern Orthodox Judaism itself invites a balance between the life of the Jewish community and the life of the secular world; between religious observance and modernity (which includes academic studies); and between strictures and leniencies.

In terms of definition, “balance” is the result of two equal weights offsetting one another. Any extra weight added to one side disturbs the equilibrium. So the task to find harmony between religion and academics is necessarily delicate. Often General Studies teachers, myself included, proclaim frustration at the lack of time to teach a college preparatory curriculum to our busy students. Yet I know that my students will matriculate into colleges and universities based on their academic strengths; their Judaic classes “out there” in the secular world will be evaluated as “electives.” And so we have this argument always in play at the school—especially when students are pulled from class for assemblies—as to whether or not Judaic Studies are being privileged over General Studies and vice versa. All teachers, whether academic or Judaic, are constantly working to persuade the other “side” as to the value of our classes.

And yet I have to admire my students and colleagues who seek to weigh religious life with secular life. If pressed, I would say that I am a modern, progressive Christian. Lately, I have been seeking equilibrium in life similar to the Modern Orthodox Jews. Being a teacher at this academy has made me aware that while “balance” may look static, it is an active state. In contrast to Modern Orthodox Jews, I am coming at the problem from a decidedly different perspective because my life frequently feels defined by heavy engagement in the secular world, with a little spiritual activity on the side.

Not long ago, several friends introduced me to the work of the Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr. He advocates finding balance by setting aside time for contemplative practice daily, either early in the morning “before your brain has a chance to begin its list-making and judgments,” or in the evening, when you might examine the “God-encounters during your day.” This is the sacrament of Sabbath, which, he tells us, is “offered by the Jewish people as a gift for all humanity.” The sacrament of the Sabbath means surrendering one-seventh of your life to resting in awareness of a sacred presence. This practice makes sense to me, a way to give symmetry to my spiritual and secular lives. While I am usually averse to New Year’s resolutions, I am going to try to incorporate more contemplation into my life this year, an offset to my daily concerns.

What the Rich Need from the Poor

I was talking to a guy at church a while ago and he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I worked with homeless men and women and his immediate response was, “They’re all drunk, right? On drugs?” I came to find out he owned his own construction business and had, in the past, employed a few homeless people to do general labor on his construction sites. He’d been burned. “They’re never on time. They don’t work hard.” That kind of stuff. This guy was wealthy. He’d built the construction business from the ground up and put a lot of hard work into it over many years. He’d seen hard times, no doubt, but now lived in a palace off Lake Shore Drive.

At the very least, he had a logic problem—extrapolating an ironclad belief about an entire demographic from the behaviors of a small percentage of that demographic. On a grander scale, what he didn’t realize is just how closely linked the rich and the poor are meant to be. The poor see this need for connection more clearly than the rich see it. At the very least, the poor are typically much more aware of what they need from the rich. But Dorothy Day went so far as to say, “I firmly believe that our salvation depends on the poor.” If this is true, then a positive outcome in terms of heaven or hell necessitates an intimacy between the rich and the poor. It has to go both ways. But there’s a tragic affection common only to the rich that prevents this intimacy from forming. An affection not for stuff, like the big TVs, summerhouses and all the rest, but for privilege. Privilege allows for the unfair expectation that the poor should act like the rich if they are ever to become un-poor. It also allows for the notion that help without strings from the rich to the poor will only produce a sense of entitlement in the poor. What’s swept under the rug, in that case, is the enormous sense of entitlement possessed by the rich. The rich perceive irreversible failure in the lives of the poor but if they, the rich, are to lend their help, privilege expects conformity from the poor to an impossible standard.

By the way, I only know the guy lived in a palace off Lake Shore Drive because I ended up in a Bible study with him. Sometimes we met there. How ironic and personally irksome. Over the Word of God, I had to figure out if I could love this guy like he was my brother, if I could stand being linked to him for the sake of my own soul. I’m not rich. I’m not poor either, but my sentiments obviously favor the poor. I often wondered what he thought about my job. He and I never talked about homeless people again.