For many years people flooded into California but the now the population is receding. My doctor, a most Catholic physician that brings his family every Sunday to an eastern-Catholic parish, told me last week that about half the people in his small church have left California. Two years ago my parish had an active Mother’s Group, but since then every one of those good women have left with their husbands and children. The wealthy in San Francisco continue to grow exponentially wealthier, the poor have become vastly more dependent on the government, and the middle class is disappearing. Small stores and Mom-and-Pop restaurants have been shut down by Amazon Prime and Uber Eats, and every third storefront in my neighborhood is boarded up.
 
That’s the bad news, but the good news is that some folks are committed to staying here. Two from our Young Adults Group married each other last year and moved into an apartment a block from the parish (their first baby is due in May). They love San Francisco, for all its current dysfunction, and have started a marriage and family apostolate. Another couple who also work in the software industry sold their suburban home, bought a large house a few blocks from the parish, and are raising their growing family here, in the heart of the city. My very Catholic doctor friend regularly argues with members of his own parish to stay here. He is committed to keeping his small offices (a “boutique doctor,” he limits his practice to about 400 patients) open to those who seek not just an online drug prescription but a physician who takes the time to understand and treat the whole person. (It’s wonderful: we have his cell number and can make an appointment within 24 hours. We talk as much about philosophy and theology as about cholesterol and back problems during appointments!)
 
My doctor argues for a “theology of place:” stability in a local community is a good and holy thing, worth certain sacrifices. Stay with me the Lord Jesus told his disciples. “Come and see where I live,” he invited Peter and Andrew, and they stayed with him the whole day.  “Remain here,” he told Peter, James, and John, “while I go over yonder and pray.” Christianity is a religion of Presence, of staying with God in silence and staying with the community in fellowship. As many seek to escape California’s excessive taxes, its bloated administrative state, and the consequent social disintegration, my doctor argues for staying put. God Almighty came to one place on earth, and He stayed there for 33 years.
 
Last month my Archbishop asked me to stay in my parish for another 6-year term, until 2030. I felt affirmed but, at the same time, tempted to feel confined. Despite my stated preference to stay for another term, I was secretly hoping for an escape hatch after ten years in one place. As a rule, however, I think we diocesan priests should stay with our parishes for longer than the usual 3-6 years. It takes a pastor at least five years to gain a deep knowledge of his flock and to win the people’s trust. It takes many years beyond that to build up a stable and supportive community. People call priests “father,” and rightly so, but a father needs to spend many years with his children to understand them. People frequently tell me that Star of the Sea has that “family feel,” which is what attracts many to our parish. We are only one of two parishes in San Francisco that have grown during the pandemic, but building this community has taken many years of living and worshipping and struggling together. The many priests who are frequently moved between parishes could say, with Bilbo Baggins, “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” The patron saint and model for parish priests, St. John Vianney, stayed with his parish of St. John the Baptist in Ars, France, until he died at age 73. He was an associate pastor for two years, and then spent the rest of his life in one parish. Personnel Boards move most priests every three or four years, and I think this is very bad for the Church.
 
Bilbo Baggins (with whom I have renewed a friendship over the last few weeks) spent most of his life in The Shire, at Bag End. He went on one Adventure, and after 111 years, he went on a final journey that would take him to the Grey Havens. I think it’s best not to panic when cultures decline, but to stay in one place as much as one can. Like a seasoned marriage that has known wealth and poverty, health and sickness, good times and bad times, we gain a deep peace and joy by staying put, getting to know and love both the people and the very rocks and trees of the place in which God has placed us. 

A blessed St. Valentine’s Day to you all. This morning I will vest in red at my Mass for the “red sisters” (the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, who wear large red scapulars). I will vest in red because I have the Mass of St. Valentine, who died a martyr’s death on this day in 269 in Rome, for the love of Jesus. The Adoration Sisters dress in red because they watch day and night before the Blessed Sacrament, the Sacrament of Love given to us in blood, as the soldier thrust for the heart of Jesus on the Cross. Let’s all try to show a bit of true love today to those we love most, offering our hearts and our sacrifices for them.
 
I wish to comment on a book that almost never speaks the word “love” but which portrays love through the fellowship and deeds of its characters: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I first read this book while suffering from a most uncomfortable virus known as “chickenpox.” I was nine years old, highly contagious, and locked in my room when I found a book on the shelf called The Hobbit. An oft-repeated phrase from the book has remained with me over the years: “tightening one’s belt.” Bilbo Baggins and the 13 dwarves often ran low on food during their long journey, but they simply said “let us tighten our belts and carry on.” Many a time over the last fifty years I have repeated those words to myself in tight spots. I didn’t know the way forward, and didn’t know how I could press on, but I knew that I could “tighten my belt” and carry on, because there’s always a way.
 
I reread The Hobbit last week in three days, while at a remote monastery a thousand feet above a rugged stretch of the Pacific coast. It’s the first time I’ve read it since watching Peter Jackson’s movie versions of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. All my Tolkien fan friends disparaged Peter Jackson’s movies, but I still enjoyed them immensely at the time. Rereading The Hobbit, however, I realize how comparatively flat and dull the movies are compared to the book. Rereading The Hobbit at age 60, I discovered again, as did the boy in bed with chickenpox, the wonderful depths and brilliant colors of Middle Earth.
 
If you know Hobbiton only through Peter Jackson’s movies, I encourage you to read Tolkien himself. The movies really do distort Tolkien’s characters. Take the elves, for instance. We first meet them in Chapter 3 where they are singing and laughing, poking good-natured fun at the dwarves’ long beards as they stump into Rivendell. Tolkien’s elves are merry, full of innocence and trust. In the movie version, the elves are dark and dour, frowning and boorish fellows. He gets the dwarves wrong too. In the movie they are snarky Celtic badboys, covered with tats and body piercings and dreadlocks, but in Tolkien they bear the innocence of children, almost always honest and good-natured.
 
Why are Peter Jackson’s movies so dang serious, and why do they try so hard to be dark? I suppose because darkness sells movies for us who have never experienced the cataclysm of war. We try to experience war vicariously through dark movies, but Tolkien actually fought in the First World War. Most of his university mates perished in mud-clogged trenches or in furious yellow clouds of mustard gas. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in 1937 as all of Europe watched Germany rearming for a second, worse war. Tolkien portrays the darkness of Mordor, the despair of Gollum, and the massive Orc wars, but not as the essential story. His books maintain a lightness of spirit, an assurance that Bilbo and Frodo and Sam will eventually return to Hobbiton and “scour” the Shire of any remaining darkness. While Peter Jackson and associates attempt to portray war with CGI, Tolkien describes the battles between light and darkness from experience. And in his experience, the sun always rises after a dark night. A luminous assurance that “where sin abounds grace abounds all the more” undergirds Tolkien’s stories.
 
We know that Tolkien held a strong belief in God, but I’m not sure about Peter Jackson, or the hundreds of Hollywood professionals that produced the Lord of the Rings movies. I’m pretty sure their faith in Divine Providence is less than Tolkien’s, for whom the end of the story is certainly heaven. The end of the story in the movies is … hard to say. Probably just another lucrative sequel.
 
I am grateful to Peter Jackson and his many associates for producing the Lord of the Rings movies (much better, in my opinion, than the three later Hobbit movies). The movies afford glimpses of goodness and truth and beauty in Middle Earth, and perhaps in our own earth too. I hope the movies lead many to Tolkien’s books themselves. I am asking myself why it took me 20 years to reread The Hobbit, but I am certainly glad that I did. ​