Funeral Mass of Michael Novak\u00a0(1933-2017),
\nBasilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
\nWashington, D.C
\n25 February 2017<\/p>\n
Homilist: Fr Derek Cross, of the Toronto Oratory<\/p>\n
Isaiah 53:1-6
\nPsalm 104
\n1 John 4:7-12, 15-20
\nJohn 14:15-31<\/p>\n
Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, \u201cLord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?\u201d<\/i>\u2014words from St John\u2019s Gospel<\/p>\n
\u2720<\/p>\n
Reverend Fathers, dear relatives, friends, and colleagues of Michael Novak:<\/p>\n
The prolific Thomas Aquinas mysteriously fell silent during his final days. \u201cReginalde, mihi videtur ut palea<\/i>,\u201d he said, not entirely perspicuously, to his secretary, and all further dictation ceased. \u201cBrother Reginald, it seems to me like straw.\u201d St Thomas\u2019s masterful writing: dried grass! Michael Novak, a wordsmith if ever there was one, also felt the weakness of words most sharply. Day by day he sat down at his desk to negotiate the silent chasm between insight and articulation, at irregular intervals his pen poised and hesitant before resuming its sure way across the page. Once when we were both working late at AEI, unbeknownst to each other, I happened to pass his office on the way to the coffee machine. Michael was staring at the shelves that housed his own publications protesting, \u201cMichael, it is not good enough.\u201d Far from causing him to lapse into silence, though, his salutary fear of falling short stimulated the flow of more books and articles.<\/p>\n
\u201cCreativity,\u201d he once wrote. \u201cIt is a mystery. So much inside me dies, is twisted, turns barren, groans. Yet there is need to face that emptiness. Always worried, too, that what results is poor. It is, to be sure, like Genesis. The troubled waters roll. Without form, and void. And one must find it in oneself to enter the dark, not knowing what will come of it. The scent of death is never far away.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd death,\u201d Michael Novak continues, \u201cHow hard it is to speak of death. Not even the dying may. The doctors won\u2019t. The families can\u2019t. Death! So clear, simple, inevitable, natural, so beautiful, so full. Ripeness ready to rush forth. For what has one lived but death? Preparing for it every day, each of which may be the last. Death is to life what sugaring is to fruit: the quintessential self, everything subsumed and gathered up, in last, climactic taste.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael breaks into song at the prospect, \u201cEat! Drink! Dance the dance! Let the music play. Hear, the steps do come, begun at birth and nearer now: bridegroom, bride, sister-brother of my soul. As if for every infant beginning the hourglass journey, another child begins an opposite trek: child of life, meet child of death. When one has finished, the other has arrived. They kiss.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps Michael\u2019s daily struggle with that little death preceding the birth of speech, twigged the surmise that even on this occasion, when pen would be stopped and tongue silenced, Resources still remained. God, theologians say, is the principal author of the Scriptures. That, we hope, is so. However, the particular texts of this Mass were carefully selected by another author, Michael Novak\u2014lending his own accent to the divine message, not by violently wresting it from its source, but by way of abbreviation and therefore emphasis. Mr Novak\u2019s selection of these Mass texts underlines three essential themes that never ceased to solicit his attention: the experience of nothingness, the poetics of creation, and the vision of caritas<\/i>. Moreover, as he confessed, more intimately, \u201cThese are also the deepest ties between my wife Karen and myself, as we discovered even on our first blind date in March of 1962.\u201d<\/p>\n
\uf09a<\/p>\n
In the first reading, from the ancient Jewish prophet Isaiah, Christians daringly hail a prophecy of the Passion of Christ. As such, it delineates the essential conditions of any divine manifestation. \u201cTo whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?\u201d Isaiah asks. The answer is paradoxical, and brutally realistic. One who has become like a dry withered root without water, undesirable, unattractive, and therefore despised and rejected, one who knows suffering and pain: here is the privileged receiver of God\u2019s word! Emptiness is what God confronts when he reveals himself, because lodged deep within the heart of man is the anguish of nothingness. In the dark, with weakened eyes, no path lies blazed before him.<\/p>\n
As a Holy Cross seminarian, the young Michael Novak studied the mystics of the faith for whom all lights go out, in a dark night of the soul. And Br. Michael suffered his own interior struggles, eventually acknowledging signs of a secular vocation that countermanded ordination. But no textbook chart could anticipate the blow of his beloved priest-brother\u2019s murder in the Muslim-Hindu riots of East Pakistan in 1964, brutally cut down by river pirates while on an errand of mercy. Fr Richard Novak\u2019s death was an unvarnished affliction; for a long time afterwards, the Novaks lived the deprival of all stereotyped consolation. Today we offer the Holy Sacrifice using Fr Richard\u2019s chalice.<\/p>\n
Michael\u2019s theological lore thus acquired a dark patina of verisimilitude. His book, The Experience of Nothingness, <\/i>was, he confessed, a Jugendschrift. <\/i>Nevertheless, in his latter years he still made recourse to this early work in discussion with students. His late book, No One Sees God, <\/i>revisited many of the same themes, now with the sensibility of a tribal elder. <\/i>Mr Novak proposed that through encounters with irrationality, terror, oppression, lack of faith, and emptiness of heart, one can ultimately verify that moral sense is not founded on illusions, but is able to absorb every experience of darkness that is likely to be posed. As Mr Novak insisted, \u201cThis effort is the main moral and intellectual task of our time: to absorb the lessons of the experience of nothingness and, on those grounds, build a new civilization. \u2026 We are not fated to nihilism. If we choose it, we do so in self-mutilation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michael traversed the modern documents of nihilism, assisted at first especially by Camus, but in the background, half-hidden, was the saint of nothingness, the little Th\u00e9r\u00e8se: \u201cTherese,\u201d he tells us, \u201csaw nature intact and whole, and she rejoiced in every aspect of it, even its broken and incomplete and distorted parts, because she saw it suffused<\/i> with the solicitations of God\u2019s love. \u2026 Still to say \u2018saw\u2019 of Therese risks falsifying Therese\u2019s witness. Often, for years on end, she saw<\/i> nothing. She looked for her Beloved, and no one appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is an oddity,\u201d Mr Novak wrote, \u201cthat those who seek God become quite familiar with the experience of nothingness. It isn\u2019t new to them. They have, in a way, more to say about it than the innocent atheist, who seems surprised by the night and sometimes rages, rages against it, and sometimes marches around it with empty boasts of defiance. Nothingness is familiar terrain to the believer in a transcendent God. It is terrain traversed in great inner pain.\u201d<\/p>\n
So the life of St Therese interprets the difficult Suffering Servant passage of our First Reading. We, Isaiah says, hide our faces and consider him<\/i> the punished and afflicted one. We take refuge in our own ways. But he<\/i>, the Blessed One, the only one who remains open to God, meanwhile sustains the human burden of pain and suffering in naked love, turning aside neither in avoidance nor in accusation. The Servant\u2019s embrace of the full extent of the human condition, if only we knew it, is healing for man\u2019s wounds.<\/p>\n
\uf09a<\/p>\n
The Responsorial Psalm initially strikes a different note, celebrating the poetry of creation. God covers himself with light as with a garment. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain. He makes the clouds his chariot. He walks on the wings of the wind. Nature\u2019s shining shows forth the gestures of the Lord.<\/p>\n
Michael Novak called his slim book of collected verse All Nature is a Sacramental Fire. <\/i>Introducing his poetry, he says, \u201cThe Lord God Creator has given us five openings to the physical world around us, that sacramental world in which we swim: hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell. \u2018All Nature is a Heraclitean Fire\u2019, a real poet wrote.\u201d\u2014he refers to Gerard Manley Hopkins, an early love. Michael continues: \u201cI am an amateur. But one who believes that everybody should write poetry, or reach for it. It is the language of our soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Book of Elements, <\/i>an early book of prose-poems, also invokes the latent sacramental sense of the philosopher Heraclitus: \u201cFire. Which all nature is, a Heraclitean fire: mud that stiffens, cakes, is swept by wind, erodes, and shifts; leaves that yellow, redden, spangle, twist, release, blow and rot, to push up jonquils near the wall \u2026 Passion and war, love and leaping hatred, violence and dedication. Build and burn. Shifting as the shadows of a giant cloud upon the waving wheat.\u201d<\/p>\n
But our Responsorial Psalm is more than a paean to intimations of divine immanence in the shimmer of nature. Given nature\u2019s proximity to the divine, the psalmist proceeds to draw out some consequences for human life. First of all, darkness visits us anew. We still approach God himself in obscurity, and even as we decipher his action in nature\u2019s shining we recognize, as well, a portion of darkness. \u201cYou make the darkness, and it is night, in which all the beasts of the forest creep about.\u201d Sheathed within the splendour of nature are sharp and lacerating fangs: \u201cThe young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God.\u201d However, the terror of the night falls under the law of an inscrutable mercy. \u201cWhen the sun rises, they gather together and lie down in their dens.\u201d While the desert sleeps, man comes into his own as what St John Paul II did not hesitate to call a \u201cco-creator\u201d: \u201cMan goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here we recognize the site of the most familiar portion of Michael Novak\u2019s oeuvre<\/i>\u2014we might call them the poetics of the Acting Person\u2014the writings on the economy, labor, creativity, and enterprise. Here belong as well the studies of ethnicity, mediating institutions, labor history, and The Joy of Sports<\/i>. The books of Michael Novak\u2019s maturity are not without context; they stand on the footing of his struggle with darkness and exemplify his lyrical poetics of creation. A recent book on economics by John McNerney, appreciatively notes that Novak \u201cmoves beyond any notion of the human person as understood solely as a \u2018self-maximizing\u2019 agent in economic life. Novak explains how openness to the truth of human action propels us toward understanding the human person also as a \u2018self-transcender\u2019,\u201d which is crucial to an honest postmodern analysis of the Acting Person.<\/p>\n
But, for all this, the Responsorial Psalm sounds again the same note as the First Reading: darkness as trouble, death, and dissolution. \u201dYou hide your face, they are troubled; you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.\u201d Having briefly evoked this tenebrous eventuality, the psalm concludes on a note of promise: \u201cYou send forth your Spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\uf09a<\/p>\n
The Second Reading and the Gospel, both by the Apostle John, the \u201cone whom Jesus loved,\u201d develop this redemptive theme in terms of the vision of caritas<\/i>, not the modern charity but the ancient caritas,<\/i> with its unique meaning, the love proper only to God, shared with us by participation.<\/i> \u201cIt is not charity to believe that men are good,\u201d Novak wrote. \u201cIt is a form of blindness. Charity is compassionate. It suffers-with. It loves men as they are: of ambivalent heart and free. \u2026 Beware of those who love men because men are good. If on so fundamental a point they see so foggily, the future toward which they speed us bears promise not of compassion but of elimination. When they have cut out all that is wrong with the human race, in accordance with the pattern laid up in their heads, only the mutilated will survive. It is no sign of compassion to trust in human goodness. Self-betrayal and betrayal of those one loves are ever-present possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
In today\u2019s Gospel, only one question is raised during the Lord\u2019s discourse on caritas<\/i>. Judas (that is, Thaddeus, not <\/i>the Iscariot, as the evangelist explicitly warns, lest we confuse him with the Betrayer) asks, \u201cLord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?\u201d It is fitting that the theme of manifesting and hiding worries the apostle who shares his name with another. The common name \u2018Judas\u2019 does not readily convey which of the two Judases is meant. Michael Novak learned this, to his inconvenience, when he was once arrested abroad because his passport bore the same name as a local involved in corrupt financial practices. The false Judas, as we may call him, using the arts of dissimulation, hid his intentions from public view, nourishing evil purpose in his heart. The true Judas wants to know how it is that while Christ manifests himself to his friends, he still remains hidden to the world? Together the two Judases point to the reign of darkness and the apparent feebleness of the light. The true Judas, according to tradition, bore two gifts from Jesus to Abgar the Toparch, a personal letter and an image of his Holy Face; both display this Judas\u2019s involvement with communication and manifestation. On the other hand, the false Judas, we learn from the gospels, appropriated the common purse to serve his private greed and delivered his Lord to the temple police at the price of thirty pieces of silver, ironically betraying him with a kiss. The ordinary signs of exchange (money) and of affection (a kiss) are easily perverted, just because they are signs, not the things themselves.<\/p>\n
To Judas\u2019 question, \u201cLord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?\u201d the answer is that the Lord\u2019s manifestation is in the order of charity, God\u2019s infinite love poured out upon creation. The \u201cworld\u201d defines its boundaries by entrenching itself increasingly in a mass of finite goods and by the desire for fleshly self-sufficiency. Caritas<\/i> would restore human wealth to the order of God\u2019s bounty. Caritas<\/i> would elevate human signs of affection and recognition to their original meaning as God\u2019s gifts. Disregarding the generous order of caritas<\/i>, one squints and blinds oneself to the Lord\u2019s manifestation. Only by participation in caritas<\/i> does one truly see. Whoever fails to love does not know God, because God is love.<\/p>\n
We hear in Judas\u2019 question the same frustration that stalks John throughout the prologue of his gospel: \u201cand the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. \u2026 He was the true light, which illumines every man coming into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came to his own, and his own received him not.\u201d Ultimately, caritas<\/i> is the only thing that comprehends both<\/i> the darkness and the shining, the miseries of human frailty and the poetry of creation.<\/p>\n
More and more, as he grew older, Michael gravitated to the theme of caritas. <\/i>In the Free Society Seminar at Bratislava, he developed a contemporary version of St Augustine\u2019s City of God<\/i> he called Caritapolis<\/i>. Later, he included a chapter on Caritapolis <\/i>in The Universal Hunger for Liberty. <\/i>He introduced the song \u201cUbi Caritas et Amor\u201d to the daily Masses of the Free Society Seminar. It was his only musical request for today\u2019s Mass, but he asked that it be sung twice, in English and in Latin. \u201cLittle children, love one another,\u201d was said to be the aged Apostle John\u2019s single and constant homily: a simple and profound wisdom that Michael made his own. To those who came to bid farewell before he died, he said repeatedly, \u201cGod loves you and you must love one another, that is all that matters.\u201d<\/p>\n
\uf09a<\/p>\n
He is closer now, than we are, to his Caritapolis. And maybe he always desired it more than we poor sinners have done. We can imagine him approaching the Divine Presence. \u201cIt isn\u2019t good enough,\u201d he confesses, anxiously summing up his life.<\/p>\n
\u201cSuff\u00edcit, etiam bene<\/i>\u201d (God often speaks Latin). \u201cIt suffices, even admirably. Caritas mea suff\u00edcit tibi.<\/i> My own love is sufficient for you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two figures from Michael\u2019s earthly life flash across the aether. The first is charming indeed, but, as the Lord acidly remarks, \u201ca little baroque, don\u2019t you think?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEtiam Domine<\/i>\u201d (Michael begins to speak Latin, as well).<\/p>\n
Behold an image Caravaggio might have painted. A bitter winter day, and Michael has spotted his adopted beggar at Farragut North Metro stop, a countryman of his forebears, a Slovak. Michael\u2019s entourage grinds to a halt, his briefcases and papers are thrust into his assistants\u2019 arms. Michael unwinds a long wool scarf, tosses open his greatcoat and at last extracts the coinage for his client. Some words in a Slavic tongue are exchanged, and there we have it: a full-length portrait of \u201cMichael Novak Giving Charity to a Beggar.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is what I required of you,\u201d the Lord admits: \u201cInasmuch as you have done it unto\u00a0one of the\u00a0least\u00a0of these my brethren,\u00a0you have done it unto\u00a0me. To imitate my caritas<\/i> is no small thing. It will shine in the heavens. \u2026 But consider, if you will,\u201d the Lord continues, after a pause, \u201canother vignette, where the darkness, the shining, and the caritas <\/i>you sought flow artlessly, unself-consciously, without measure from your heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cVideo, Domine. <\/i>I am looking, Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n
March, gritty, still pre-Spring. Michael has decided he and staff will attend Ash Wednesday Mass at St Matthew\u2019s Cathedral. Before it sets out, the little procession is heaped with stacks of Crisis <\/i>magazines\u2014back issues. They are to be strategically deposited in the church, available gratis to the uncommon crowd of worshippers in pursuit of Lenten ashes. The throng is now spilling out onto the steps of the church, but the procession bearing gifts of Catholic journalism makes its way into the cathedral. They look for places to deposit their burdens, scanning at the same time for empty seats. Then Michael suddenly breaks formation and dashes down the aisle. Calling out the name of someone he has identified from afar, he trips and sends a stack of journals scudding across the floor. In a flash, he realizes his mistake. No one acknowledges his call.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know what this is, my son?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe end of an aging man\u2019s illusion that he can still play football?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA hope for ready reconciliation come to nothing \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou thought your offended friend was in my house that day, and that there would be words of peace spoken between you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEtiam, Domine<\/i>. But I\u2019m afraid I only made a fool of myself. A mess, nothing lovely.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the same, I love it even more than the other. Maybe\u2014just maybe\u2014that first act of charity was not<\/i> good enough, Michael. But the second was sublime. Didn\u2019t I once tell of a Father who, while his son was a long way off, shedding dignity and measure, ran out to meet him? (It was I, thinly disguised, as usual.) At that crucial moment, splayed across the Cathedral carpet, your writings scattered and jumbled, the secret of your heart was on naked display. Not just like<\/i> mine but in <\/i>mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the Lord will manifest himself to him, but not the world. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.<\/i><\/p>\n
May those who struggled with his positions, those who were enlightened by his writings, those who loved him discover also the secret that he knew in his bones. Et laetitiam exultabunt ossa humiliata. <\/i>And the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice. \u2720<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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