Graduation Day

 I am writing this not because it is my graduation day - I have already had four of those, and have a high school diploma and three degrees to testify to that fact - but rather it is graduation for the seniors at the high school I teach at.  Many of those seniors were kids I taught as juniors last year, so I know them.  Today was not their official graduation - that comes Saturday - but it was what is called a Baccalaureate Mass for them.  This particular Mass is a tradition for Catholic schools from preschool level to graduate school, and I attended my own when I got my Master's back in 2018.  It is a sort of moment for them in which the Church gives its blessing to a group of graduates about to embark on their next chapter of life, and it is actually a nice thing.  The Mass today was actually very nice too, and overall I was impressed with it.  I also got to present awards to students who had achievements in my department, and for that I represented all grade levels as the acting department chair for my area.  There is something quite gratifying in seeing students you helped shape getting these achievements, and it both makes you proud for them but also sentimental for the time you sat in that audience in a cap and gown too.  Graduation at any level is a traditional rite of passage that deserves to be celebrated, and I genuinely pray the best for all the seniors who are making that step in a couple of days.

Graduation also means an end to the school year is close, as just beyond graduation is finals week for the underclassmen as well as close-out procedures for those of us who are faculty and will not be returning.  I guess in a way it is a sort of a graduation for some of us too, a graduation into a new chapter in another way.  I will more than likely go on soon to another school and have a whole new group of kids to teach, and by this time next year I will be witnessing this same round of festivities in another location with a completely different group of seniors.  This is now essentially the rhythm of my life.  To finish out my week this week, we have a graduation rehearsal tomorrow and then the actual graduation on Saturday at the Cathedral of Our Lady here in Baltimore.  There are many feelings going on at once  - the relief of a rough year finally wrapping up, some uncertainties about the future, and also just being tired; I have been very exhausted lately and all I have wanted to do is sleep a lot.  That is why after finals I plan on just taking a couple of weeks to decompress, get my bearings, and then move on with life.  This is where we are right now.

Graduations have been very romanticized over the decades, as there are fond memories created with them.  In the mid-1950s, two of my favorite vocal groups recorded songs about that.  One was called "Graduation Day" and it was a hit record for the Four Freshmen in 1956.  The second was titled "Moments to Remember" which was a hit record for the Four Lads a year earlier in 1955.  Both of these songs denote a sentimental nostalgia we all feel during important times in our lives, and the lyrics of the latter, as penned by its composers Al Stillman and Robert Allen, say it best in the closing stanza:

When other nights and other days

May find us gone our separate ways

We will have these moments to remember

Nostalgia is integral to the human experience, but it also should be a fertile soil for development, as Anthony Esolen notes in his book Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2018).  This development, he says referencing Newman on pages 137-139, encompasses three integral things:

1. It preserves the type - This is where tradition is important, as like a family recipe an ingredient can be added here or there, but the fundamental recipe remains the same.

2. True development preserves a continuity of principles - In other words, it cannot forget where it comes from.

3. It allows the power of assimilation - This one can be tricky, but what it essentially means goes back to #1.  While taking on some new developments in technology, etc., the underlying thing is not eliminated, but there is room for growth. 

Looking at it from that perspective, it means that we have the basic common sense it takes to maintain a structure in prime condition.   If we don't do anything with it, in time decay, rust, and deterioration will take over and what once was ceases to be.  However, if we can do some restoration work to the structure - like maybe upgrading the electrical and plumbing, adding a coat of new paint periodically to the exterior, and replacing worn boards and beams - it will preserve it to be appreciated for generations to come.  Nostalgia should work toward that end - we don't live in the past, but we bring the past alive in a new way to the future while still keeping the integrity of the original.  Participating in graduations with my students now as the guy on the stage giving the diploma rather than being the kid receiving it is a restoration of tradition - as a diploma was passed to me, now it is passed to a younger generation.  We have arrived in a different place ourselves, but the same tradition and the same importance of a ceremony is carried on in a reverent, respectful way.  It is the reason why I became Catholic in the first place, and let me tie a few ends together now on that one.

For the iconoclastic modernist, be it the Emerging Church Evangelical or the radical Antifa terrorist, there is one word that they hate more than anything, and it is tradition.  To people like that the "T word" might as well be the "F bomb."  Of course, what that means is that some who label themselves as "Fundamentalists" or "Bible Christians" may actually be more modernist than they care to admit, because what they have done is replace an established tradition with a new one - the tradition of anti-tradition.  It is not a hard or long rock to throw from the screaming Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preacher to the skinny jeans-clad rock-and-roll contemporary Evangelical megachurch pastor who many congregants often only know through a large flat screen in a "satellite campus."  When both are honest, they sound exactly the same as they have the same enemy - "traditional church."  It is the tradition of anti-traditionalism, and it is correctly described in Scripture as a "tradition of men" which is to be actually rejected.  However, many on both ends of that aforementioned spectrum not only spout the rhetoric, but their anti-traditionalism becomes an idol to them - they become more entangled in preaching against tradition than they do preaching the Cross of Christ, and everyone loses as a result (including both types of Protestant preachers).  The idolatry of anti-traditionalism has even reached some progressive Catholics ironically, the people who actually should appreciate Tradition but often try to dismantle it instead in the name of "synodality" or "inclusion."  I mentioned a couple of weeks ago about how the CFO of the school I teach at professes to be a Catholic yet he denies essential sacramental theology because he has become an adherent of his view of faith - people like that think they know more than a Church that is 2000 years old, and our CFO is so off that even some Evangelicals would have issues with him (he is actually fairly leftist politically, so he is not fond of Evangelicals either).  Thankfully for me, I learned how to appreciate authentic Tradition before being exposed to people like our CFO, and although that man now looks at me like I am from the planet Romulak, I know I am actually standing on the side of orthodoxy without trying to rewrite it, to redefine it, and to just cherry-pick what and what not I choose to believe.  It is one reason why in many cases converts to the Church have a fuller appreciation for its rich traditions than do many people who were born and raised Catholic.  After all, for many of us it was a very challenging journey, and we had to learn to accept things we were taught as wrong, and it took many agonizing moments of struggle to come to terms with the acceptance of authentic Church teaching.   And, it cost a lot for some of my colleagues too who have made the same journey - they were disowned by their families, attacked verbally for their new faith, and there have been some who have been victims of violence even for standing up for the truth.  The Catholic convert, I am convinced, is today's true "white martyr," because people don't know what we give up to seek the truth.  There are things that need to be rethought, and you have to assess what is salvageable from your former religious tradition and can still be held without conflict with Magisterial teachings.  Then, when many of us come into the Church, we see things that are not consistent with the rich tradition the Church has, and that becomes a source of pain and anguish as well.  So, it will be asked then - I am talking about preserving traditions of one's heritage, but isn't embracing a new church doing just the opposite?  I will say no on that, so now let me explain why. 

If one is a convert from an Evangelical, Fundamentalist, or Pentecostal background and you decide you want to come home to the Church Catholic, there is one fundamental fact underlying this one must understand to make the journey somewhat easier -  you are already a Christian, and by coming into the Church, you are not renouncing your faith heritage, but rather you are completing it.   The problem was never whether you loved Jesus or believed him, nor was it that you didn't have an authentic faith, because you did.  Rather, it was just an incomplete faith, and the reason you started that journey was that you saw something missing that seemed like the old Peggy Lee song question "Is that all there is?"  If you grew up in a typical Southern Baptist or Pentecostal church as a kid, you know exactly what I am talking about.  You go to a Sunday morning service - maybe Sunday School too (do churches still have that BTW?) and it seemed OK - the music somehow was heavenly, and the sermon was inspirational, and you felt like it was the best day of your week, right?  But, if it is like the old days, then you have a Sunday night service too, and when you arrive, the pastor looks tired, there may only be a handful of people, and your music minister is more or less singing hymns his thumb lands on in the hymnal (if your church has hymnals - otherwise, it is just putting up a random chorus on an overhead).  This is made more depressing if it is a small church - the church itself has no art, only bare walls, and perhaps the only musical instrument is a beat-up old upright piano that was probably new when your great-grandparents were alive.  The piano plays out of tune, and the people are not really singing but making a not-so-joyful noise, and in one hour it's over - the pastor may have given some devotional talk he threw together after his Sunday afternoon nap, and no one will remember it.  The end of such a service is unremarkable - someone says a winded prayer in archaic English because those "thees" and "thous" sound holier for some reason, and then everyone shakes hands and leaves.  Usually, most people are thinking about how late Cracker Barrel will be open so they can grab a quick dinner before going home and retiring before the week's routine starts.   I lost count of how many church services like that I attended back in my Protestant days, and for me they were depressing but you were too busy trying to "follow the Lord" that you didn't want to commit sacrilege against your pastor for saying his sermon was dry and he looked tired.   But then one day, you decide you are going to check out either a Catholic parish or a Greek church in your town, and so you research their Mass times.  The next Sunday you go, and what you find is a rich symbolism of living faith as each part of the Mass has a meaning to it, a meaning it has had for over two millennia.  It strikes a big nerve inside you, and you know you have come onto something you didn't expect but you may be too afraid to tell some of your friends at church about for fear of being accused of consorting with the "whore of Babylon" or something.  But your curiosity grows - you discovered living Tradition, and it resonated with you.  If you continue to explore this, you are going to find yourself reading Scripture a different way soon, and things will start to come together that never did before.  You are like a 21st-century explorer going into 2nd-century Rome, and now you understand something that has been missing, a consistency you longed for but didn't even know existed.  That is your journey.   In time, you too may have a "graduation day" of your own when on a dark night before Easter, you receive the Body and Blood of Christ for the first time, and it ain't your old Baptist church's grape juice and crackers you get every three months!  This is different, a new beginning.  But, as in every covenant relationship, your new marriage to Christ in his Church brings with it complimentary things, as you too have something from your experience you can contribute.  Let me explain.

Evangelicals and Pentecostals may have an incomplete Christianity, but it is still Christian nonetheless which means it has good attributes.  When you become Catholic, you don't necessarily throw those away, as they are part of the journey God brought you on to get you here.  So, you then begin what is called the mystagogy stage of your faith - you begin to see what you can bring to the Church, what you can salvage from your own Christian roots, and how to see that it fits into your newfound Catholic faith.  It can be a struggle, and some of the worst opposition you might find is within Catholic parishes themselves - these are concupiscent human beings, so they are not perfect, and many of them have about as skewered versions of Protestants as you did of them when you were one.  Working through that takes time, a lot of prayer, and hopefully the guidance of a good priest who can act as confessor as well as help you sort out things.  Like the high school graduate who enters college the following year, you have graduated into a new set of challenges and need help navigating them.  Some of us were fortunate to have that, but others did not.  And, you know what that is called?  We call it convergence - taking the best of two traditions and making them a fuller expression of faith.  It is an intricate process, and no one has it completely down yet (not even my friends in the CEC or other Convergence groups) but it is a work in progress.  Which leads to some concluding thoughts.

The major conviction of many Christians of all traditions is trying to either re-create or approximate the ancient New Testament Church.  Whole books of theory have been written on this, and some Christian traditions are closer than others - the Roman Catholic Church, and even more so the various Eastern and Oriental Orthodox communions, all probably come the closest.  It is a deep and murky stream to wade through to try to chronicle all the theories, the experiments, and the testimonials of what people think the "ancient New Testament Church" is, but this is where Esolen's ideas on development and nostalgia come into the equation.  The form is there, and the ancient liturgies have that, and some of the spirit is there in regard to things like Biblical inerrancy and spiritual gifts, but as for a definitive version of what that all looks like together, well, we may never get an exact duplicate.  And, maybe we are not supposed to - we live in the 21st century now, and we can never be exactly like the first-century Church in every detail - it would not be feasible nor would it be practical.  The first century did not have things such as technology or even the more elaborate and beautiful physical infrastructure of many large cathedrals.  While we can all appreciate things such as the great Ruffati organ in the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, or the heavenly imagery in the domes of my own Catholic parish in Baltimore - Saints Philip and James - the earliest Christians didn't have that.  We are really blessed now if we think about it.  There is nothing wrong with great pipe organs and beautiful iconography in churches - I myself love them!  But, we might really want to reconsider how much we would really like to be exactly like first-century Christians - they were being martyred, and many of them had to meet in much humbler places than either Coral Ridge or St. Peter's in the Vatican for their own survival.  If it wasn't Jewish Sadducees trying to arrest them in Judea, then later it was the Roman emperors trying to burn them alive because they didn't believe in worshipping a man who promoted his own divinity like Caligula and some of those emperors did.  A large elaborate edifice would have been like a bulls-eye on the struggling Christian communities then.  However, the roots of liturgy, theology, and spirituality were there from the beginning, and that is what we have preserved in various places.  As long as we value the roots, then it is OK to build upon them - the recipe is the same, but successive generations have just added a few ingredients for flavor and also have refined the preparation some without compromising the recipe itself.  That is how living tradition works - it is eternal, but it also speaks to newer generations.  

This was longer and rambling than I had planned, but I feel that some of this needed to be said, and it is also a way for me to understand and learn even as I discuss things too.  Thank you for staying with me here, and will see you next time.