Feeling the need for a “Shot of Love,” as Bob Dylan titled one of his so-called “Christian albums” viewed so skeptically by the critics (though how anyone could be skeptical of “Every Grain of Sand” is a puzzlement), in the midst of chores Saturday eve I ducked into the South Fork’s most beautiful edifice.
Those were some skilled Irish who built the Basilica of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary over Southampton way. My grandmother Mary Catherine Clune of Springfield, Mass., ancestrally by way of County Clare, would have been proud. It’s never anything other than rejuvenating.
Sitting there inconspicuously in a rear pew, before the priest leads the processional to the sanctuary and then takes the Presider’s Chair, may also bring the modern human up short, thrust as he is into a rare state of quiet group reflection. Thoughts come unbidden, like a recollection of astonishment upon completion of what has got to be among the greatest novels ever written by an American, Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” in particular a passage in which a young French priest has to choose between a comfortable appointment in Europe and an arduous assignment in a new diocese far off in the badlands of late-1800s New Mexico, a decision that nearly rends him at the seams.
He chooses the hard way.
This was the last Sunday in Ordinary Time, in the church’s evocative phrasing, the last before Advent. And this day celebrating the King of the Universe conjured for me, someone not fully informed, a recent headline, “What Would Extraterrestrial Life Mean for Jesus?” But literalism only goes so far.
In my limited experience, what travels well are the words of the Rev. Donald Baier, weekend assistant at the basilica. The congregants, who seemed to be thirsting for wisdom in troubled times, sat rapt through a homily that at one point communicated that “a king is not someone who fills up on the praise of others,” but someone who empties himself in their service.
When it came to the crux of the matter, the ultimate sacrifice upon a brutal instrument of state-sponsored torture, the thief hanging to the right of Jesus pronounces himself not worthy of redemption, but simply asks Jesus to think of him on his next stop, in essence. The response: “With me, this day, paradise.”
I’d like to thank Father Baier for the food for thought this Thanksgiving.