Newspaper Page Text
Thursday, December 07, 2000
Coirmientsu'y
The Southern Cross, Page 5
Everyday Graces
Confessions of a
I am a reluctant shopper. The
older I get the less I enjoy
it. I now understand why
my grandmother, who
lived to be 99, rarely
shopped and never
seemed to care about
owning anything new. In
the 1970s, the last full
decade of her life, Granny
wore the same dress to
every family wedding. (We have
the photos.) The only store she had
any interest in was the grocery
store, and eventually she stopped
going there, choosing instead to
provide my parents a list of what
she needed. Granny was the only
person I’ve ever met who used the
word “trade” when referring to
shopping. She’d say, “We used to
trade at that hardware store.”
That word evoked images in my
mind of a trading post, Little House
on the Prairie style, where you just
go in and the proprietor takes your
list, brings the items down from the
shelf and wraps them in brown
paper. What an appealing concept.
Even from my own childhood I
have memories of “modem” ver
sions of such stores, Wilson’s Shoe
Store, the Toy Parade, Albertson’s
Dmg Store, all independently
owned, all managed by people who
actually knew their customers’
names and frequently knew
their needs.
Of course, in the years
since my grandmother
died, shopping has
become more compli
cated than ever. We’re
supposed to be better off
because we don’t have to
visit a variety of stores
to get what we want. We
can do everything, get a manicure,
deposit our paychecks, buy arti
chokes, and eat nachos all under
the same roof.
Even so, I would not describe
modem shopping as streamlined,
more convenient. Yes, we have all
the merchandise we could ever ask
for, most of it packed on shelves in
huge warehouses. The buildings are
so full of stuff in the aisles, two
carts can’t easily pass each other.
In such places, I have a hard time
finding what I need and an even
harder time finding someone to
help me find what I need.
Of course, I’m not a 90-year-old
widow like my grandmother, so I
have to shop. My children fre
quently remind me they need food
and clothing.
My 17-year-old daughter’s fanta
sy mom is a mom who actually
wakes her up one Saturday morn
ing and chirps, “Let’s go shopping!
Mary Hood Hart
reluctant shopper
Just for fun!” Katie dreams of hav
ing a mom who doesn’t demand
proof (“Your Honor, Exhibit A is
the tattered pair of Nikes, please
note the large rip near the toe.”),
before she’ll agree to a shopping
excursion. For the sake of my chil
dren, I make myself shop—even
this time of year, when for people
like me shopping becomes even
more frightening.
About a week before Advent I
went shopping. The trip was for
Katie. After appearing before Her
Honor the judge, Katie provided
sufficient evidence of a winter
clothing shortage and was granted
a half-day shopping excursion. I
was also searching for two items:
an Advent Calendar and Advent
candles for our wreath. In retro
spect, I should’ve looked for those
items earlier. I certainly would
have been able to order them from
a religious catalog. But since I had
to take Katie to the mall, I figured
one of the stores there would have
the Advent items I was looking for.
I was wrong. Every store I
entered was packed full of
Christmas items, ornaments, mugs,
ribbons, garland, singing Santas,
everything but an Advent calendar
and tapered candles, violet and
rose. When I asked one saleswom
an if they carried Advent calendars,
she pointed to a month of
December calendar made of felt,
decorated with a snowman and
said, “Just that Christmas one.”
It occurred to me finally that
most stores don’t really want us to
remember Advent, must less
observe it. Waiting is not a part of
the shopping experience—especial
ly in the days leading up to
Christmas. We’re made to feel as if
we are crazy if we aren’t in a mad
rush, foolish if we don’t start buy
ing up the Christmas items shortly
after Halloween. Even buying
something on layaway is no longer
a common practice, thanks to credit
cards, I’m sure. Actually, the con
cept of our waiting, prayerfully,
expectantly, and, God forbid, tem
perately is probably terrifying to
retailers. No wonder Advent items
are nowhere to be found.
I finally found candles in a drug
store...not with the Christmas stuff,
just in the candle section. I ended
up ordering the Advent calendar
from a religious catalog. It will be
arriving late, a few days after
Advent has begun. I can wait.
Mary Hood Hart Jives with
her husband and four children
in Sunset Beach, N.C.
Catholics and Jews today
Take care in presenting Christ’s Passion
By Father Michael J. Kavanaugh
void presenting the Passion in such a way
as to bring the odium of the killing of Jesus
upon all Jews or on Jews alone. It was only a
section of the Jews in Jerusalem who demanded
the death of Jesus, and the Christian message
has always been that it was the sins of
humankind which were exemplified by those
Jews and the sins in which all share that brought
Christ to the cross.
In 1959, shortly after he was elected to the
papacy, Pope John XXIII ordered that the prayer
for the Jews in the Good Friday liturgy be
changed. Until that time, the prayer had referred
to the “perfidious,” meaning “faithless” or
“treacherous,” Jews. In our Good Friday liturgy
today we pray “for the Jewish people, the first to
hear the word of God,” a far cry from the
polemics of the older prayer.
In 1960, when meeting with a delegation from
the United Jewish Appeal, this pope greeted his
visitors with the biblical phrase, “I am Joseph,
your brother” (He was bom Angelo Giuseppe—
Joseph—Roncalli).
Pope John’s own words and actions signaled a
dramatic change in the understanding our
Church has of the Jews and their place in salva
tion history, and toward our own Christian self
understanding as heirs to the Judeo-Christian
tradition.
“Neither all Jews indiscriminately
at that time, nor Jews today, can
be charged with the crimes com
mitted during his Passion... The
Jews should not be spoken of as
rejected or accursed as if this fol
lowed from holy Scripture”
—Vatican II, Nostra Aetate 4.
It is unjust to blame all Jewish people for the
death of Jesus. As the text above notes, Jesus was
crucified for our sins—the sins of the whole
world. To assign blame for the crucifixion exclu
sively or even primarily to the Jewish people is to
forget what we learned in the creation stories of
the book of Genesis; that is, that sin entered (and
enters) the world as a result of human choice and
that only God can bring about salvation.
Through the centuries, Catholic writers, the
ologians, preachers, and others have wrongly
tried to place responsibility for the death of
Christ on the Jews, rather than facing their own
sinfulness as a cause for personal and social ills,
as a means to justify anti-Semitic thought and
action. This scapegoating has a long history. If
we can just find some individual or group on
which we can place blame for the evils of our
society, and if we can destroy or drive out that
person or those people, then our problems will
be solved.
Unfortunately, this never has the desired effect
because it is a flawed and irresponsible way of
thinking and acting. As comforting as such
behavior may appear to be, blaming my/our sins
on someone else is never going to bring about
the conversion of heart we are invited to experi
ence as believers in the salvation that Christ has
won for us. Unless we humbly acknowledge that
our sins are the cause for Christ’s crucifixion,
and until we stop trying to place blame on some
one else, we will always be looking for scape
goats, rather than coming to know the healing
power that comes through the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Father Michael j. Kavanaugh is diocesan
director of Ecumenism. This is the fifth in
a series of articles on jewish-Christian
relations.