Blacker is the New Black

Blacker is the New Black

Father Mullen

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The disappearing diamond: The Redemption of Vanity by Diemut Strebe, with technical expertise by MIT

In a board room on the sixth floor of the New York Stock Exchange there has recently been displayed a work of conceptual art that consists of a nearly 17-carat natural yellow diamond that you cannot see.  What you can see is a smallish blob of black material supported on a slender golden stand under a glass cloche.  The diamond has been treated by scientists at MIT, who covered its highly reflective, multi-faceted surface with a coating of minuscule carbon nanotubes, which are vastly skinnier than a human hair, and which absorb 99.965% of light, resulting in the blackest black you can find earth.*

Black, as you probably know, isn’t really a pigment, it is “the total absence of color due to the absence or  absorption of light.”**  The idea of the art installation was to produce a work “in which the most brilliant material on earth (a diamond) is covered with the most light-absorbing material (carbon nanotubes). Both are made of the same element, but with different atomic arrangements….”***  Writing about the piece, the NY Times coined the sly phrase, “blacker is the new black,”**** which, if we could be sure to leave aside any racist connotations, might be a motto for our times.

It certainly is a contrast to the message of the Gospel this morning: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.”  The “darkness” of which St. John speaks, may, of course, be literal, but more profoundly, the term is meant to account for all manner of absences of light - literally and figuratively - including the darkest darkness, the blackest black.

While there is nothing sinister happening at the MIT lab that produced the blackest black, on the figurative side, I find it hard to avoid the observation that we live in a world that is busy perfecting the absence of light.  Ironically, you can see the deepening darkness all around us.  Poverty.  Warfare.  Addiction.  Greed.  Violence.  Selfishness.  Exploitation.  Of course there is more.  With all our cultural advances, we continue to live in a deeply unfair and profoundly unjust society.  How can this be?  Light is absorbed ever more effectively.  Blacker is the new black. 

A little later in John’s Gospel, just a few lines after John 3:16, John says, “…the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light….”  I always find myself flinching a little when I read those words, because they seem to me to be so true.

There is a parable being told in a board room on the sixth floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  I’m sure that parable can be told in a number of ways.  In one form it goes something like this: God can give us something of incredible beauty and value, and we can make it disappear; we can wring the light out of it; we can make it dark, then we can take that darkness and make it darker.

If the disappearing diamond is a parable, then what does the diamond stand for?  Do we miss the diamond when we can’t see it?  Can we remember what color it was?  Are we able to restore it to its former luster?

Maybe the parable is teaching us that the diamond is God, and asks us to consider what it’s like to live in a world in which God has been obscured, eclipsed, rendered undetectable.  Is God still present or powerful when 99.965% of the light has been absorbed into the blackest black?  There are places in our world where this is timely question.

The Times tells us that “the key to true ultra-blackness is creating a material that absorbs light across the electromagnetic spectrum — not just visible light, but out to the far infrared, too.”****  I worry that as a society we are getting too good at absorbing light across the whole spectrum, and not just the visible light, but out to the far reaches of the spectrum, too.  And when I hear the prologue of John’s Gospel, I think that this is exactly what God did not intend for us.  God did not intend all this darkness that persists in the world.  God intended light.

One character in the parable being told in the board room on the sixth floor of the New York Stock Exchange is an armed security guard.   The artist called for the presence of this person not only to protect the diamond, but also to add meaning to the experience of gazing at a very large diamond that has been rendered  more or less invisible before your eyes, by providing a reminder of the diamond’s value.  After all, it’s hard to conceive of a 17-carat yellow diamond that you can’t see.  All of the light that should pass through it, and around it, and bounce off of it has been swallowed up, and the diamond, which is is still there, is nowhere to be seen.

I wish that we could borrow this exhibit when its run ends at the Stock Exchange.    And I wish we could display the disappeared diamond here at Saint Mark’s.  The Lady Chapel would be a good place for it.  And instead of a security guard - or maybe in addition to one - I wish we could station a priest, or a deacon, or anyone from the congregation who would stand there and read from the Gospel of John, the first eighteen verses that we read this morning.  You could sign up on clipboards; the Verger would manage the sign-up sheets.  And for, maybe, a week during regular business hours - or let’s say from 9:30 to 4, Monday to Friday, the same hours as the NYSE - someone would stand there in the Lady Chapel and read the prologue of John’s Gospel, standing in front of the altar, proclaiming the Gospel directly over the darkened diamond the way we proclaim the Good News over a casket or an urn at a funeral, when we are afraid that the darkness deepens, and we ask where God is to be found.

There would be the diamond, cloaked in its blacker new black: invisible but still there, every bit as brilliant, radiant, and light as it was when it was pried from the earth and cut to make it gleam, until we engineered a way to make it disappear.

The volunteer priest, or deacon, or lay person would stand there in front of the priceless altar of the Lady Chapel, the security guard not far away, the diamond, blackest black, perched on its little golden stand, under its glass cloche, and over and over again we’d read: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…. the true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.  He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth….  From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace….  No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known.”

How many other diamonds might there be that we can no longer see, having rendered them invisible with the blackest black?  What does the diamond stand for?  Do we miss it when we can’t see it?  Can we remember what color it was?  Can we ever restore it to its former luster?

If it’s accurate that blacker is the new black, then we need more than ever to remind ourselves as often as possible that what has come into being in Christ was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There is one light that the darkness will never overcome.  And we have received grace upon grace.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not, will not, and cannot not overcome it.

Thanks be to God.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street
29 December 2019

*information on the installation is from www.the-redemption-of-vanity.com, the author of the concept is artist Diemut Strebe, collaborating with the MIT Center for Art, Science, & Technology

**Oxford English Dictionary entry for “black”

*** “How to Make a Diamond Disappear” by Tyler Foggatt, in The New Yorker, 4 Nov 2019 issue

**** Natalie Angier, “Ultra-black Is the New Black,” NY Times, 11 November 2019

How Can We Keep from Singing?

In the beginning, there was sound. Amid the vast void of the darkness and chaos in the beginning, all the elements for physically realized vibration—for pitch and for tone—were there, but they weren’t audible. The math and the physics, the frequencies and the wavelengths, they were all there. The numbers and the ratios existed and theoretically could be assembled into pitches, but there was no coherence, and there was no order. Sounds had not yet been voiced.

When the wind of God blew through that void of nothingness in the beginning, the mathematical relations that had heretofore existed in concept only began to organize slowly into the stirrings of discernible sound. It was no more than a hiss. There was no pitch to it. Physics and math were being shaped into something that could be heard. But as of yet, there was still no one to hear the sound.

As God separated the waters from the dome of the sky, and as God created the dry land, the hiss of the wind that God breathed over the formerly disordered abyss gradually morphed into a low hum. The vibrations of water molecules rushing together in varying configurations stirred perceptibly in the slowly forming created order. And as the first plants began to appear and vegetation sprang up from the firm earth, a keen ear might have been able to detect a whisper of the excruciatingly slow process of seeds bearing fruit. But as of yet, there were no ears to hear these sounds.

The earliest microorganisms that evolved into swimming fish and slithering snakes and flying birds, they all uttered their primitive sounds. The pitches were not especially well arranged, but it was a joyful chaos of life buzzing on the planet. Some of these creatures could hear the tone of life bubbling around them, though as of yet, there were no human ears to hear these voiced sounds.

But soon, an image of God began to form in the more sophisticated animals, and these humans, with their funny-looking ears began to hear the waters of the sea and the birds squawking in the sky, and they began to hear each other. The vibrations of cords of tissue in human larynges organized themselves into sounds worthy of communication. The sounds that had existed before only in theory and in a disorganized fashion now took on concrete meaning, a strange new thing. And those who could hear began to understand and communicate with one another.

Over the millennia, the uttered sounds from human voices that were acquiring greater and greater intelligibility were sadly entangled with the sounds of human-made weapons clanging against each other. In addition to tender words of love, there were cries of bitter pain and frustration and anger. Conflict and meanness and all manner of ugly sounds emerged from the human voice. It was terrible confusion.

But then new voices emerged from the recycled chaos. The concepts of sound—the math and the physics of wavelengths and frequencies—that before had been vocalized into cries of war and murder now started to crystallize into sweet utterances of beautiful things. The random assortment of pitches and tones, through trial and error, were refined into consonant sounds, pure and delightful.

Voices serenaded across the landscape that had previously been marred by human strife and sin, and these voices were elongated into delectable songs. These songs were about an incredible future, beyond the scratchy furor of bitterness and strife. These voices of the prophets pointed ahead, looking to an anticipated time of peace and joy and happiness. They sang of God and of salvation and of hope.

But still, so many human ears did not hear these musical prophets. Or if they heard them, they chose to ignore them. Sometimes the din of human pride and achievement simply covered up those isolated but exquisite melodies of the peaceful messengers.

You see, there were also voices that were so brutish and bold and arrogant that they bellowed unmusically over the tunes of God’s messengers. The songs of the prophets had no place in a world that was losing the art of song, and the prophets’ music seemed feeble and trite, and their words of hope never seemed to come true. . . until that glorious day dawned.

On that day, in the midst of the grunts of empire, greed, and usurped authority, a new voice began to speak in a clear tone. This voice had been present from the beginning but had not been vocalized. It had been there abstractly as sound in the math and physics of wavelengths and frequencies. And although it was active in the emerging variety of melodies over the years and had inspired the songs of prophets and peaceful messengers, like the first word of a baby, this unique, special sound had not yet been uttered as it would now be uttered.

Until this point in time, the atonality of the world had triumphed. Even as consonance was being discovered and appreciated and as dissonance was being rejected, at the end of the day, dissonance always seemed to win the upper hand. But that was then. And this was now. In a cave in a quiet village in the Middle East, this voice that had existed from the beginning but not been spoken in the flesh erupted into the world in the startling cry of a Baby, echoing off the cold, hard walls of the cave.

As this Baby grew and unintelligible murmurs were distilled into recognizable tunes, this Word, existing from the beginning, rang out from the vocal cords of human tissue. And now, from what had previously been theoretical and conceptual, God sang in solfeggio to a world that needed to hear the tonic note, do.

Until this point, that initial do—that ur, foundational note—of the universe had been echoed in the overtones of creation and the songs of prophets, but the aleatoric confusion and darkness of human sin had drowned out God’s eternal do. And now, in the key of human life, God established in audible pitch the tonic note of his salvation.

Although it is often difficult to hear amid the clangor of new forms of atonality, this tonic note of salvation’s musical key is still available for us to hear. God in his marvelous Word made flesh established the key of salvation for us, but we through the years have wandered prodigally far away from that do of God’s truth and grace.

In every age and especially in our own, our ears are needlessly distracted by noises that tear us away from God’s home key. The organization of consonant sound is diffused into a proliferation of strident cries from out of the depths of pain and suffering. Voices screech to bolster self-importance. And at times, the hollow clang of money being exchanged covers over the timeless do whose pedal point grounds the entire universe.

Raucous, totalitarian voices scream their way above hopeful songs of peace and joy. These godless voices deliberately sing out of tune against God’s key of life, and after enough time, we find ourselves forgetting where do is because the key of salvation has been refracted into bedlam. The root note of God’s eternal Word is rejected for the dazzle of empty notes that make no difference in the scale of life.

Look around on our city streets. Turn on the television, or crack open a newspaper. Scroll through social media. You will see. Competing, false dos have butted their way into God’s exquisite key of salvation that was uttered in the Word made flesh. The functional harmony that God intends for his beautiful creation has been rent asunder. In God’s solfeggio, do is often unrecognizable because the notes of the scale have ceased to relate to one another. And the notes have lost their meaning.

But on this holy day, we pause to recognize that this disordered state of affairs is not the end of the song cycle. For you and I still have a song to sing. It is welling up in our hearts. That is why we are here today. We have come together to sing it. We can do nothing else. We are God’s troubadours, and our song is grounded firmly in the key of salvation.

It’s true that this music may be gentle and unassuming. It may have difficulty rising above the unceasing, shallow musak of the world. But whatever form it takes, our song is an echo of the ballad of the angels heard by the shepherds in that field watching over their flocks by night. Our song is that great hymn of the host of heaven, resounding, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God of hosts.” Our song is Mary’s as our souls magnify the Lord. Our song finds its tonic note in that key established in a cave in Bethlehem two thousand years ago when a baby uttered its first cry.

And even when our hearts are broken with sadness and we are grieving loss, even when we are consumed by fear and anxiety and are singing all by ourselves, we will still be able to sing faithfully in God’s key of salvation, because God’s do sings in minor keys, too. After all, God’s song was sung in both Bethlehem and on Calvary. God only asks that we keep singing.

There will be plenty of people who try to silence your song. There will be others who make you feel silly for singing in public or who tell you to sing only in the shower. Some will criticize the quality of your voice, and others will lead you to believe that you are unmusical and can’t sing, or that no one wants to hear your song. Don’t listen to them.

There is only one thing for us to listen to and it is God’s command to sing. And if you listen carefully, you will hear that do of salvation, sometimes pitched low and sometimes octaves above, echoing gently from beyond the walls of the Bethlehem cave, waiting for us to join in and match its pitch. And how can we keep from singing?

Preached by Father Kyle Babin
Christmas Day 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia

Regina Saltans

Pope Francis with Pope Benedict XVI in 2019

Early on in the lovely new film, “The Two Popes” we see cardinals Joseph Ratzinger and Jorge Bergoglio (played by two fine actors) encounter one another before either one of them has become pope.  They are at a sink, washing their hands, in a men’s room in the Vatican, at the outset of the conclave to elect a new pope, following the death of John Paul II.  Bergoglio is humming a tune that is familiar to many of us.  Ratzinger turns to the Argentinian cardinal and asks him in Latin, “Quid est nomen carminis quod cantas?”  (“What is the name of the song you are singing?”)

In Latin, Bergoglio responds, “Regina Saltans.”*

Sub-titles provide the interpretation, but most viewers will not have needed any translation at all, since we knew all along what the tune was.  The subtitle informs us: “Dancing Queen.”

In the screenplay, the directions read that “Ratzinger looks slightly puzzled.  Bergoglio goes into detail.”

“Cantant Abba,” Bergoglio says.  (By Abba.)  But this additional information does not prove to be clarifying for Cardinal Ratzinger.  The directions continue, “As Ratzinger leaves, Bergoglio carries on whistling.”

The film, which in my opinion is warmly sympathetic to both men, albeit in different ways, explores, among other things, the question of whether or not God can change; or at least whether or not the church can change.  These are really two different questions, but the way the film wraps them up together is not troubling.

Ratzinger, the guardian of the old ways, insists on the very ancient and orthodox theological assumption that God is changeless.  “We need… one unchanging truth,” he declares.  “Without God, humanity has no agreed reference point, no axis mundi.”  Later on, when he has become Benedict XVI, he argues with Bergoglio, insisting that “God does not change!”

“Yes he does,” the Argentinian retorts.  “He is evolving.  He moves towards us as we…”

But the pope interrupts him: “I am the way!  The truth!  And the life! [Jesus said,]  Where should we find him if he is always moving?”

In a way, this tension between the way things used to be and the way things will be from now on lurks beneath the surface of Christmas.  The Incarnation of Jesus looks discontinuous to us, as though God has adopted a new strategy in dealing with his wayward creatures on earth, as though God has moved to a new place, a new method, a new mode, a new personality.  The grumpy old man in the sky, or on the mountain, has been replaced with the sweet, newborn baby.  We tend to over-simplify things this way, imagining that before Jesus was born, God was a stern and chilly father, a cold-hearted school master, a Rottweiler.  But Jesus comes to us like a Labrador puppy at Christmas: small, and warm, and cuddly, very much in need of us to take care of him, making no more demands of us than a puppy does.  

Delightful though it is to welcome a puppy at Christmas, we might ask ourselves whether or not the implications of this holy night go deeper, and demand more of us than the eleven-week-old puppy that is snoozing next door in the Rectory tonight.  I know how Benedict XVI would answer that question.  Of course, Christ demands more of us than a puppy does!  Everybody loves a puppy.  But not everyone is so crazy about Jesus.   Every pope, like every parish priest these days, is aware that across much of the globe, fewer and fewer people have time for the Baby of Bethlehem, let alone the Man on the Cross.  And Jesus is not simply the puppy-version of God, made for a new demographic.  He is the Word of God made flesh.  He was there in the beginning of all things and will be there at the end of all time.  He is God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.  He is neither the way things used to be, nor the way they are now; he is the Way that things have always been, and the Way they will always be.

In the film, the two popes serve as stand-ins for the way things used to be and the way might be from now on.  And in a sense it is the tension that exists between a puppy and a Rottweiler.  They can both happily co-exist, but some people are always going to be more attracted to one than the other.

As the film continues, Benedict, toward the end of his papacy, asks Bergoglio to visit him at Castel Gondolfo, where the genial cardinal quickly and easily wins the affection of the staff.  Noticing how easily people take to Bergoglio, Benedict says to him, “It must be very useful, this popularity of yours.  Is there a trick to it?”

Bergoglio replies, “I try to be myself.”

Hmm,” says Benedict, “when I try to be myself, people don’t seem to like me very much.”  You can almost hear the bearded figure of God painted on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel saying the very same thing, wrapped in his cloak, surrounded by angelic attendants, deigning to reach out one solitary finger toward Adam, who will have to contend with all kinds of challenges that he is not really ready for.  But no one ever has a harsh word to say about the Baby Jesus: he’s easy to like.  

We sometimes talk as though Christmas definitively resolves the tension between the way things used to be with the way things will be.  Which is to say that we sometimes talk as though the puppy has triumphed, and the Rottweiler has been banished to go sleep under a rock somewhere.  We present Christmas as a cuddlier portrait of God, and we invite everyone to snuggle up to it.  But of course, this way of seeing things is a bit misguided, and not what the scriptures tell us.  More likely, we are told, Christmas shows us precisely the thing that Benedict found so hard, but at which his successor is more adept.  Christmas shows us God being God’s self: powerful yet fragile; endearing yet infuriating; tender yet strong; loving yet demanding; changeless yet new.

God carries all these paradoxes within God’s self without any confusion or conflict, in the heights of heaven, as well as in the manger in Bethlehem, and on the Cross at Calvary.  God is just being God’s self; and we are sometimes confused.  But on Christmas it would be nice to be not so confused.

And although I have no idea how likely it is to be the case, having seen “The Two Popes,” I find myself sort of wishing that Benedict XVI and Francis might be spending a part of this Christmas Eve together.  Benedict is, of course, significantly older and more frail these days.  He has become forgetful, and a little hard of hearing, I expect.  The tension between the way things used to be and the way things will be, has not been resolved in their lives, in the church, or in the world.

But there must be someplace in the precincts of the Vatican where these two popes could get together on Christmas Eve to share a glass of wine, and maybe to exchange gifts.  The Vatican, being the Vatican, there is surely a choir singing somewhere nearby or an organ playing within earshot of the two popes as they sit beside each other, in the glow of a Christmas tree.  Francis has a way, I expect, of humming along as the choir and the organ run through the carols that are being sung tonight.  Benedict can no longer sit comfortably at the piano, though he used to play quite well.  He is listening, to the choir, the organ, and to Francis, sometimes joining in on the familiar old carols, especially the ones with old Latin words, like Adeste fideles.  As the evening draws on, and Francis has to prepare for Midnight Mass, it’s clear that he is taking his leave from the older pope, but before he (Francis) goes, Benedict takes him by the hand, looks him in the eye, and asks him, with all earnestness, and in Latin, “Nam mihi cantare Regina Saltans.”  (Sing Dancing Queen for me.)

Tonight, God is being God’s self.  Small yet great; helpless yet omnipotent; adorable yet fearful; all-merciful yet destined to be our judge.  Even on Christmas it can be very difficult to know what to make of God, except that God very clearly wants to be here among us.  And so he sent us his Son, to be born for us, with us, one of us.  Strange though it may seem, it amounts to nothing more or less than God being God’s self; which is to say that it amounts to love being love.  And the more we can accept God being God’s self, chances are, the better we will get at allowing our own selves to be our own selves: beloved children of an infant king, who wants us by his cradle, and by his Cross.

By now, you’d think we’d have learned that if Christmas seems discontinuous - breaking into our lives and bringing a strong but rare dose of peace and love, for instance - then we misunderstand what God has been doing all along, which is love being love.  God has been loving us and giving us every opportunity to love him, and to love one another, since the beginning of time.  Maybe we should remind ourselves more often of how God loves us, and wants us to love each other.  To jog our memories, we could sing Christmas carols all year long.

Or, when we feel we especially need to be reminded of God’s love, we could just sing Regina Saltans, and think of two popes.

Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Christmas Eve 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia

*All quotations are from “The Two Popes”, 2019 , by Anthony McCarten