Containment Considerations 8: I Need Cash Now

A couple of weeks have transpired since my last isolation reflection, and this is the eighth of that unspecified series. Both of these facts suggest it has been going on far too long. It promises to continue, at least in this part of Pennsylvania.

For many people, the containment doesn’t seem to have been going on at all, whether that’s because their usual business hasn’t involved much physical contact to begin with, their business has become unusually affected with the result of more contact (such as our noble first responders), or simply because they have been flouting the governmental directives.

As a parish priest, the core dimension of my ministry has not changed in the sense that I have not stopped offering daily the holy Mysteries entrusted to me by my bishop nearly 17 years ago. I have not stopped celebrating the Sacraments, proclaiming the Gospel, or caring for souls. I’ve just had to do it differently.

The World Online, like every novelty, has intrigued me since I first laid eyes on it. Here’s another shiny boulevard of Evangelization and self-expression! Which of those two purposes I have appreciated and enlisted more, varies depending on when you ask me what I’ve done with it today. I’m nothing if not inconsistent!

Sometimes those purposes look and sound rather similar. To this point, following up on an earlier post in which I laid out my ecclesiastical heraldry, I’ve actually changed a major component: my motto. It’s my expectation that you don’t fool with this stuff once it’s in print, but I do nothing if I don’t defy expectations, alone or with others.

My previous sacred slogan was Matthew 13:52, in which, after Jesus laid out a series of teachings on the kingdom of heaven in the form of parables, He closed out with a simple simile as the last parable in that series (like this episode, the 8th).

Ever the teacher, Jesus asked His followers, “Do you understand these things?” Upon their affirmative response, Jesus said, “then every scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven is like the head of a household who brings forth from his storeroom both the new and the old” (profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera).

For my purposes (and those of the kingdom of heaven, I dare say), as a "scribe" I start off—and end up—both a recorder and an interpreter. That’s always the case whether the writings are sacred or secular. Traditore, tradutore: The one who hands things on for posterity, hands them over for betrayal. Not to say the original meaning is entirely lost, but like the genetic phenomenon of microchimerism, someone else gets handed on as well: something old, something new.

In jettisoning the phrase profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera, I am not altogether parting with it. Even though it will not appear below the crest, it still shows up in my thoughts, words, and actions. That’s how my new motto was germinating while I was working with the old one, and not surprisingly, that’s how the old one has been working since I’ve started with the new one. The more I cling to either of them, the more I suspect I am doing so in error: No rest for the wary.

I have turned my mind, for now, to chapter two of Saint Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians. He goes to some length and depth to make clear the purity of his ministerial motives. When it comes to human praise, he is not in it to win it. In verse seven, he compares the apostolic labors of his coterie to a nursing mother; in verse eleven, he compares it to a father's exhortation and insistence. There is something poignant to his inclusion of both parents in his comparison.

But the phrase that pays here is verse eight, where Saint Paul relays: "with such affection for you, we were determined to share with you not only the Gospel of God, but our very selves as well, so dearly beloved had you become to us" (non solum evangelium Dei, sed etiam animas nostras). When it comes to mottos, either one is somewhat large. Normally I don't see many over five words. So this is par for my course: why say in 500 words what you can say in 1000?

Speaking of which: This post had a main point, and I'm just getting to it. In an effort to convey "our very selves" as sometimes I do more than the Gospel of God as such, I sneaked up to the choir loft before my Zoom Pastoral Council meeting last night to record myself playing on the organ the operatic theme for the cash advance company J. G. Wentworth.

My only intention, to line the collective pockets with a little levity. That said, if they wanted to send cash now for a new Allen organ, I wouldn't refuse it.

The video has garnered a generous response from my friends on both the Facebook and the Twitter. I'm certainly humbled and grateful. It goes to show the solidarity of people in crazy times. We're all going through it.

As for my talent: Knowing the caliber of musicians alongside whom I've been playing in concert bands for thirty years, I make no claims at proficiency. What I lack in talent, I compensate for in willingness and schmaltz.

I just spied a quote from St. Jane Frances de Chantal: "Hell is full of the talented; heaven of the energetic." If I can bring the two together, following the "both/and" principle of Catholicism evident in both of my motto selections, I might hit the middle ground of Purgatory--and even that is temporary in favor of heaven.

Moving back to the Gospel of God, I include here my homily from this morning, in which I tried to tie together the readings and saints of the day to my exploits from last night. If we can't view current events--especially music and other cultural expressions--in light of the Gospel, why do we even culture?