Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost - October 27, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Jeremiah 31:7-9 + Ps. 126 + Hebrews 7:23-28 + Mark 10:46-52
Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen!
In August of 2023 William Walther published an opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled, “The Ultimate Horror Movie Is Really About Heaven and Hell.” The piece was written to honor the recent passing of the Jewish film director, William Friedkin, best known for his 1973 signature film, The Exorcist, which itself was based on a novel written by William Peter Blatty in 1971. The idea for Blatty’s own novel was influenced by an article that had been published in The Washington Post about a supposedly real exorcism while he was a student in Georgetown in 1949. Like Friedkin, Blatty introduced the novel in response to the cultural landscape that had emerged in the late 1960’s in which the perennial questions about Good and Evil had become fractured and murky.
As Walther observes in his article, Friedkin likewise insisted upon the essentially religious nature of the film which was released just several years after the close of the Second Vatican Council; a time when the Catholic Church and Western society in general, were forced to acknowledge a growing tension between two rival conceptions of the Church.
Walther poses the question about these rival conceptions in this way: “Is [the Church] an expression of a transcendent moral and metaphysical order? Or, is it just another way of pursuing ideals of compassion and social justice, [as] many liberal theologians have popularly conceived it since at least the mid-to-late 1960s?”
With its tentative embrace of modernity, The Second Vatican Council most certainly transitioned the conception of the Roman Church from a more traditional “metaphysical order” to a modern justice oriented, sociological institution. As Walther explains: The tension between these two visions of the church is played out dramatically in The Exorcist when a desperate mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, solicits two priests to try to save her demonically possessed daughter, Regan, played famously by Linda Blair.
The first priest, Father Damien Karras, is a young disillusioned Jesuit from Georgetown, for whom his secular education and personal dedication to the local gym is more important to him than his dedication to a life of prayer. He is, at first, coldly dismissive of Burstyn’s request, suggesting that if she wanted an exorcism for her daughter, she would first have to go back several centuries in a time machine.
By contrast, the elderly Father Lankester Merrin, is a traditionally minded priest, an expert archeologist and scholar of Ancient Near Eastern Culture, who not only accepts the reality of the demonic, but fears it. He represents not the church of post-Vatican II modernity but that of a mystical, indeed metaphysical society who has not lost sight of the fact that behind the social movements and struggles of modern American culture lay a deeper primordial battle between good and evil, which the church must never flinch from fighting.
Ultimately the two priests – and with them, their respective visions of the church they personify – will ultimately come together to successfully exorcise the demon from the young girl, even as both priests will die in the process. An ending which, though tragic in itself, Blatty insisted, marked an ultimate triumph of good over evil. Blatty’s point: In the end, “God exists and the universe itself will have a happy ending.” Even, if perhaps, only after great sacrifice. Still, there is nothing ambiguous about Friedkin’s sense of which version of the church survives in the end: that of, the metaphysical society represented by the older Fr. Merrin. Thus, both Blatty and Friedkin want us to see in The Exorcist a kind of modern day parable which tells of a moral universe in which the stakes are not merely life and death, but heaven and hell. And this is precisely what makes The Exorcist a classic film and not just a teenage horror flick. It does indeed grapple with these two competing views of the church’s identity, views which in the intervening decades has only become more fractured, more bifurcated.
As someone who was born in 1967, just after the doors of the Second Vatican Council slammed shut, I have no conscious recollection of Father Merrin’s traditional vision of the church as “metaphysical society,” so eager were the Catholic bishops to usher in the proclaimed aggiornamento (or “updates” or “reforms”) that would finally allow the Roman church after changeless centuries to embrace the modern world in a new way.
With its new-found emphasis on ecumenism and, indeed, social justice; with its hasty transition from the ancient Latin Rite to the new vernacular, the unchanging church became almost unrecognizable. Welcomed by some, resented by others. This was the council that called for a newfound “noble simplicity” in the liturgy, which though well intended, often became short-hand in practice for liturgical laxity, so much so that what had once been a timeless entrance into transcendence felt like little more than attending a family picnic.
Gone were the smells and the bells, the vestments and Gregorian chants. In came the guitars and tambourines, the hap-clappy songs and priests stripping themselves of their chasubles, presided at the altar often donning nothing but their albs, stoles, and (I shudder even to say it…) tennis shoes! Anathema! If Christ had a grave to role in, he would have been doing summersaults.
Let me not be misunderstood to say that this was all bad. The church desperately needed to engage the modern era. Its greater emphasis on gospel justice and involvement in ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue was long overdue. And admittedly as a child I did, indeed, find much of the music both memorable and moving, even if as now an adult much of it feels a bit too saccharine. Looking back, it strikes me that the early post-Vatican II church was to 1970’s liturgy what bell bottoms were to fashion – novel at the time, but in hindsight an unmitigated travesty.
Even as a child it left me wanting. But at the time I could not identify “wanting for what?” Perhaps there was some distant body memory I held from the last throes of the Latin Mass I attended as an infant. Perhaps it is something we have often named here as “transcendence.” But in a book I have only just begun reading by Rod Dreher entitled, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, he offers a phrase that seems to name something even deeper or more all-encompassing than “transcendence” because it refers not merely to an experience of the liturgy as distinct from the secular world in which we come together to take refuge. He calls instead for us to see the world itself as enchanted. And if I understand him correctly, enchanted implies not only that we must reach up to transcendent God, but a vision of the world in which God has entered deeply, and fully. Where the church becomes once again, a metaphysical society, which not only sees it and celebrates the world as enchanted, but invites us to enter into it.
While Dreher and I may well disagree on a number of issues along the social and politic spectrum, many of his critiques of modern society are insightful and thought-provoking. And I believe he is certainly correct to name the fact that post-Enlightenment secular modernity has eviscerated our experience of the world as “enchanted” – as pregnant with a felt sense of the all-pervasive presence of the Divine; with the sacredness of all things.
As I have learned in my own experience, it takes but one momentary glimpse beyond the veil to make us see what a lifetime of theological study can never reveal to us: an experience of an enchanted world full of the “Mysterium Tremendum.” That “Great Mystery” that is so inconceivable; whose sheer size and magnitude is so all-pervasive and incomprehensible as to simultaneously provoke fear and fascination. Or what we might call in a word: Awe.
My current take-away from his book is that it isn’t enough that liturgy should temporarily raise us out of a disenchanted world by offering a momentary experience of transcendence, but rather that it should become the very leaven kneaded once again into the dough of a disenchanted culture, so that the world itself might reawaken to the enchanted beauty of a world now utterly lost to us in the rationalist, empiricist, and utilitarian excesses of the Enlightenment.
To be clear: the Tridentine – or Latin -- Rite of the Roman church was not a social or cultural anomaly of Medieval society, but a product of it. An expression of a world that was still very much enchanted: in which God, was perceived everywhere and in everything. In which angels fought against demons for the benefit of humanity, and the intercession of the saints was a felt power in the universe. In which the church was imbued with a sense of the holy, the other-worldly in our midst.
Certainly, I do not advocate the Church returning to (much less fetishizing) the Latin Rite (something which Anglicans figured out 500 years ago with the creation of the Book of Common Prayer and its celebration of the beauty of the English language). Nor do I propose any simplistic solution that would have us naively return to a presumed “golden past” that was, in fact, replete with its own abuses of power, entrenched prejudices, and human flaws.
But with due respect for the indispensable social-justice orientation of modern churches, the fact is, our congregations have become too much like the young Father Damien – secular, disillusioned, and dismissive of the spiritual, indeed metaphysical, nature of the church. Like Father Damien, we find ourselves exhausted, with little in the church or liturgy being offered to replenish us, transform us, invite us once again into an experience of the world as enchanted: a world in which the poets and bards, musicians and artists, the monks and contemplatives, and indeed, perhaps the exorcists, have become the blessed gate keepers.
The point then is not to choose between two visions of the church represented by Father Damien and Lankeseter. Rather to reclaim the more foundational of the two now lost to us. As Walther’s rightly concludes in his article, “Father [Damien’s] reluctance to accept the possibility of supernatural evil is [in fact] intimately bound up in his inability to see God in the face of the poor. It is only by finally acknowledging the reality of supernatural evil — and the all-pervading goodness of God, of which evil is merely a privation — that Father [Damien] is ultimately able to sacrifice his own life to save the girl.”
Let us not then throw out the baby with the baptismal water. Let us not too quickly let go of the past any more than we fetishize it. If the Latin Rite was a reflection of the enchantment of Medieval society, we need not mimic them, but rather do what they did: become a church that lives – and invites others to live – not only into a place of transcendence within our doors, but so too into a world of enchantment just outside them.
+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! Amen!
Source Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/12/opinion/exorcist-william-friedkin-catholicism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare