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By Root 780 0

nuclear warfare remains. His bleak image of death “cutting down the children in the street, young people in the squares, the corpses of the slain like dung on a field, like sheaves behind the harvester, with no one to harvest them” (9:20-21) could have come from a Newsweek story on Bosnia, or Rwanda, or inner-city America. Much as the people of Judah who worshiped at the temple, Americans tend to think of themselves as good, religious people, and their nation as morally superior. Yet child prostitution thrives, hunger and homelessness plague us, in many of our cities death by gunshot is the number-one cause of death for young men, and violent crime is such that people of all ages do not feel safe in their homes, or on neighborhood streets.

The contemporaneity of Jeremiah made me reflect on our need for prophets; I’d sit in the monks’ choir and let the naive thoughts come: it really is this bad, and if people heard it they would want to change; they’d have to change. Of course it was Jeremiah himself who’d bring me back to earth, to the bitterness of his call, when God tells him: “You shall speak to them and they will not listen; you shall call and they shall not answer” (7:27). Yet a prophet speaks out of hope and, like all the prophets, Jeremiah’s ultimate hope is for justice, a people made holy by “doing what is right and just in the land” (33:15). As the carriers of hope through disastrous times, prophets are a necessary other. And we reject them because they make us look at the way things really are; they don’t allow us to deny our pain.

In the Book of Jeremiah we encounter a very human prophet, and a God who is alarmingly alive. Jeremiah makes it clear that no one chooses to fall into the hands of such a God. You are chosen, you resist, you resort to rage and bitterness and, finally, you succumb to the God who has given you your identity in the first place. All that fall, when Jeremiah’s grief and my own impossible situation cast me into deep loneliness, I was grateful to be sustained by the liturgy that had brought me to Jeremiah and insisted that I listen to him.

And on the feast of St. John Lateran, in early November, a feast commemorating the dedication of a Roman basilica erected by the Emperor Constantine, and traditionally referred to as “the mother church of Christendom,” the words of Psalm 46—“God is within, it cannot be shaken”—suddenly revealed God to me as a place, both without and within. In my notebook I wrote: “In naming myself as a ‘necessary other,’ I finally accept the cross of myself, a burden I’ve carried ever since childhood, and felt so acutely in my teens. The cross of difference, of being outside, always other. But now, I am free to take it on. It seems appropriate, on this feast.”

At morning prayer, we heard these words from Ephesians 2: “So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone.” The altar gleamed, bone-white, before the dark wood of the monks’ choir, and I could dare to conceive of the Church as refuge, a place to find the divided self made whole, the voice of the mocker overcome by the voice of the advocate. It is still a sinful Church—how could it be otherwise?—but the words of its prophets and apostles had led me to this sanctuary, and I could dare to imagine it as home, a place where there is no “other.”

November 1 and 2

ALL SAINTS, ALL SOULS

The monks are decorating the church and baptistry with vigil lights and greenery. The two who’ve been assigned to place relics in the baptistry are engaged in a bidding war: “Trade you one Lucy for two Saint Ritas, one Bonaventure for three Peter Damians.” I pretend to be shocked. “You Catholics,” I say, as I pass by, and they glare at me, pretending to be offended.

Photismos is a word I’ve learned today, from Father Godfrey, an ancient word for baptism. I like the way it shares a root with photosynthesis, the way the saints might be said to have heeded the command