As I threatened, I am digging into the past for some homilies that might be worth re-exhibiting. This one is from this day in 1999 and uses one of my favourites, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to reflect on the readings for that Sunday (Year A week 16): Wis 12:13-19; Rom 8:26-27; Matt 13:24-43. You will have to get to the end to see what it all has to do with the gospel!
It was written for the Sunday mass with the ‘cathedral’ community in Oakland. It also alludes to the shootings at Columbine High School, Littleton which had occurred a few months earlier.
As it happens, before I moved this last time, a friend lent me the full box set of Buffy and I am slowly savouring each episode once again.
Someone famous—whose name of course escapes me at the moment—someone once said that you should pray with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Apart from the problem of not having enough hands to turn over the pages there’s something missing from that advice. No one ever says where in either publication you’re supposed to start.
I’m thinking of making my fortune by developing a personality test based on just that, because you sure can tell a lot about a person based on which page they first turn to in the morning paper. I have a friend who would sit at breakfast joyfully sad each morning reading the New York Times obituaries. All those obscure people, nothing to me, for him cast a light of celebrity and fame that warmed his day. You’d think he was on first-name terms with the famous dead—”oh, he was the leading Broadway choreographer of the 30s.” Many in my all-male household turn first to the sports pages. One guy goes for the op-ed page, another for the local news, yet another for the food section. It is left to me to go first to the pages for which the newspaper was invented: the TV listings!
Part II of my proposed personality test would have you list your top three TV shows. And then, when you’ve got the lies over with, to list your real favourites—cheesy and embarrassing though they may be. Hands up guilty admirers of “Days of Our Lives.” “Xena, Warrior Princess”? “Celebrity Death Match”? “Touched by an Angel”?
Well, this week saw a treat for we “turn-first-to-the-TV-guys.” In the middle of an ocean of re-runs there arose an island of originality—long awaited, unjustly delayed—the season (3) finale of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”! Buffy is undoubtedly the best thing on TV—at least from a theological point of view. OK, the dialogue is as sharp and witty as you’ll find anywhere, the plots handle the serious stuff of life, from running away from home, or loving someone violent, to coming out to family and friends, or the difficult task of getting demon blood out of your new frock.
For those of you ignorant enough to know nothing about Buffy let me fill you in. Buffy Somers lives in Sunnydale, California, which just happens to be at the mouth of Hell, and as such has a higher than usual population of vampires, demons, and other nasties. Though she is still a high school student, Buffy has a vocation, she is The Slayer, the one called from her generation to fight evil. So each week she faces a new threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness aided only by her friends, who happen to include a seriously cool werewolf, a brooding hunk of a vampire, and a witch in training. The season finale should have shown in the weeks after the Littleton massacre but was thought to be inappropriate. Now I ask you, just because the student body turns against the town’s mayor on graduation day and in the ensuing bloodbath the school gets blown to pieces. But, hey, the mayor had just turned into an enormous demon, eaten the school principal, and was about to snack on the new graduates.
Now there’s a question: is the high-school violence of Buffy related in any way to the real-world horrors of life? Does one cause the other, or what? But you’ve heard those questions before and are probably tired of them so let’s ask a theological question. The world Buffy lives in has two faces. On the surface it is bright and beautiful—this is Sunnydale, this is California—the lawns are neat, the PTA is active, and what families may lack friendship seems to supply. But when night falls all hell breaks loose: vampires rise for their graves, monsters roam and only Buffy is there to save the world for daylight. Buffy’s world, maybe the world of all young Americans, is like that. It is two-faced, prosperity built over violence. The richest nation in all history, at the peak of its cultural ascendance, but built on a hellmouth. If God made the world and God is all good then how come the world isn’t all good? How come there is poverty and pain and violence and betrayal? How come the rich oppress the poor? How come disease and death claim our lives? Theological questions.
And Buffy seems to offer both a diagnosis and a treatment. Let your eyes be freed from the illusion of ordinariness to see the unnatural enemies ruining our lives. Let your eyes be opened to see the violence on which our civilisation is built and hear your call to fight with your life. And there she is right and she is wrong. Right, because the world is stranger than we care to believe by daylight. Right, because we are called to take sides. Right, because the kingdom of heaven is built here … or nowhere. But wrong too. For Buffy’s world pits good against evil as though they were equals, as though the outcome were in the balance, and neither is true. And wrong because in Buffy’s world the vampire wears a nasty face and can be reduced to dust with a quick thrust from “Mr. Pointy,” as Buffy calls her favourite wooden stake. But in our real world the weeds among the wheat are pretty much hidden and modest. Hell! … half the time they look better than the wheat! Only time will tell them apart. Only the harvest.
And God gives this advice to would-be Buffys. “I know the pain, the violence, the heartache, yes and the sheer evil that hides in the heart. But I am not willing to risk a single good seedling to root out any number of weeds. Not one!” To which I say “stupid!” and God agrees … but adds, “trust me.”