I was in the neighborhood, so what the hell, on Sunday I stopped in at the most beautiful granite pile east of the outer boroughs, the Sacred Hearts Basilica in Southampton Village.
Inside, the dark-wood arches and ceiling panels, the glowing Austrian stained glass, the series of wrought-iron chandeliers, and the 400-year-old French pulpit may well leave you pondering the sinfulness of attending a house of worship from which you draw inordinate visual and atmospheric pleasure. As contrasted, that is, with the hard crux of the matter, that you don't need a dedicated structure at all: "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."
A good homily will banish any doubts. Jesus, at first unrecognized following the Resurrection, hectors Peter three times with "Do you love me?" after having guided him and a handful of other fishermen in successfully casting their nets. Then as now, a typically needy leader?
No. The priest put a finer point on it. To those who say yes, "Words are easy." What are you going to do to follow through in actuality?
"Feed my lambs," Jesus tells Peter. "Tend my sheep. . . . Feed my sheep."
"All right already!" he might have answered.
Anyway, the message — "So what are you gonna do?" — is a tough one for modern Americans to hear, whether distracted or stressed, and thus few heed it, just like way back when at the Sea of Galilee.
"Tend to humanity," was how the Rev. Donald Baier, a weekend assistant at the basilica, interpreted the passage, before invoking Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., who gently upbraided President Trump in defense of migrants and the marginalized at the inaugural prayer service in January.
He linked her piercing courage to that of Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 "Letter From Birmingham Jail," a document worth revisiting for its scholarly references alone, as it touches on Reinhold Niebuhr ("groups tend to be more immoral than individuals," in King's paraphrase), Socrates (on the need to slip the bonds of myth and half-truths), T.S. Eliot ("The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason"), St. Augustine ("an unjust law is no law at all"), Paul Tillich (separation, read: segregation, is sin), and Martin Buber (on segregation's relegation of people to things).
King's "regrettable conclusion" was that the greatest obstacle in the civil rights movement may have been not members of the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens Council but the "white moderate" who privileged "order" over justice, who disagreed with the "methods of direct action."
"Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection," he wrote.
The homily Sunday was far more oblique in how it considered King's letter, but the central message about the current lack of moral authority landed like a hammerblow.