The day before the Thanksgiving…. the City is quiet. Most people in San Francisco have “gone home” for the holiday, while those who are at home in the City of St. Francis are off work because everyone else is off work. I love this city when it is quiet, but “quiet” and “city” are by definition oxymoronic. Cities are places of great activity, and that can be a very good thing.
 
This morning I read Genesis 11, the story of Babel. I have always thought of Babel as a tower, but actually it was an entire city. “Come,” the people said, “let us build ourselves a town….” Within that town was a tower, “reaching to heaven,” by which, the people said, “let us make a name for ourselves.” Most of us want to live in cities because cities give us an identity and a status above “flyover state” people. A certain amount of pride motivated me to move back to San Francisco from a country parish.
 
Genesis 11 continues: “Now Yahweh came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built.” You can picture Father Yahweh walking the streets of Babel, humming to himself, looking into alleyways and up at the great towers, shielding his eyes against the glare. And you know the story: God humbles the pride of this city by confusing their language. Ever since Babel, we have been struggling to communicate between over 7000 global languages.
 
A few decades ago some clever people invented One Language to Bind them All. They called it “Esperanto,” but it never caught on. In San Francisco we all speak English, more or less. But we don’t really speak the same language. Those of us who studied “logic” and “grammar” and “history” in school can’t really communicate with those who never learned these basic tools of human discourse. The language I learned in college uses the concepts of “true” and “false,” “right” and “wrong,” but these words don’t translate for folks who went to college after the 90’s, when relativism became the in-thing. We speak different languages.
 
I went into Target yesterday to buy some socks. Most of the clothing in the store was locked behind glass cabinets because in San Francisco you can steal up to $1000 and the City does not define "stealing" as a crime. Because of the increased cost of all those cabinets, and the extra employees needed to continually unlock them for customers, and because of the beefy security guards needed at all the doors, and because of the vast sums lost through legalized shoplifting, the price of socks has doubled. And it takes me twice as long to get them from behind those locked cabinets.
 
If I say to the younger generation who are running our city, “stealing is wrong,” I will be met with a blank stare. “Stealing,” I will be told, is merely a culturally-conditioned concept, probably invented by a colonial patriarchy. “Stealing” is only wrong for certain races of people, at certain times in history. “This is what we were taught in university,” they will tell me, “and it is certain.” But of course, we are told further, there is nothing absolutely "certain" in life. There is only ‘my truth’ and ‘your truth.’ Which means, in the end, there is only “power.”
 
In the current dictatorship of relativism, we all speak different languages, with mutually-exclusive concepts and lots of self-contradiction. There is no such thing as biological gender, we are told, unless of course you need sex-specific medical treatment or belong to the #MeeToo movement. We have been confused in our speech and in our thought patterns. The City, and its bright tower, will never “reach up to heaven” under these circumstances....
 
But today is also the Feast of the Miraculous Medal. Our Lady appeared to St. Catherine Laboure on Rue du Bac in Paris on this day in 1830, and she gave her a medal to wear. My mother put a sterling silver copy of that medal on me in 1968, and I’ve never taken it off. And I’m hoping it will lead me all the way to heaven, where I will live in a bright and beautiful city forever!

Seven years ago my spiritual director suggested I read a chapter of the Bible every morning, and I’ve been doing that. Six months ago, however, I finished the Bible (for the third time!) and began reading other things in the morning. I read a spiritual biography of St. John of the Cross, and a commentary on St. John’s Gospel—all good spiritual reading, but there is nothing to compare with the Good Book itself. So last week I opened the large Bible that I keep open on my mantlepiece. I had purchased this Bible in 1983 from the Daughters of St. Paul when they had a store on Geary at Market, just down from Macy’s. I bought it for ten dollars, and I’ve read it cover to cover four times now. After purchasing it, I would pour through the words, chapter by chapter, every day after work. I would read every footnote and  make  my own marginal notes, I would study the introductions to each of its 63 books, and I took delight in gazing over the colored maps in the appendix, dreaming of one day exploring the Holy Land myself. I’ve taken this Bible with me to Oxford, Rome, and New York as a student of theology. I’ve carried it with me to every one of my seven priestly assignments, from Stockton to Los Angeles to San Francisco and had it rebound twice with leather reinforcements. When I first began reading it at age 22, I felt like I was falling in love. I declared: “I am going to marry the Bible!” This Bible and I have been with each other for 41 years now, and I’ve just returned to my daily morning reading, a chapter a day. There is no reading like the Scriptures, truly our “daily bread.”

Last week I began again with Genesis, Chapter One. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth….” Those words declare the fullness of our joy, our faith, our wonderous beauty. We did not make ourselves, and we do not have to save ourselves. We have been fearfully, wonderfully made, and we are saved at every moment by a loving God who dwells beyond the heavens. There have been many attempts at atheism over the centuries. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, is attempting to build a society on absolute “faith” in the Chinese Communist Party. Russia tried to build a society on a similar “atheism,” and when the first Soviet cosmonaut rocketed past earth’s atmosphere into outer space, he reported (apparently seriously) that he had gone to heaven and did not see God there. Our country is tending toward a similar kind of mentality, wanting to expunge “in God we trust” from our dollar bills in favor of “in the government we trust” or “in technology we trust.” It’s hard to say where American society will be in fifty years, but one thing is historically certain: every society that has traded faith in God for faith in anything less has ended badly.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but He Himself dwells beyond the heavens. He created the heavens and the earth in six days (so to speak) and on the seventh day he rested. He declared the seventh day “holy,” a day to gaze on all the good that He had created and to “rest.” That Seventh Day is heaven itself, to which Sunday points. All our political unrest, and our personal anxieties, will someday come to an end, either by the end of the World or by our own death, whichever comes sooner. In this holy month of November, we think on the death of this world, and we fix our sights on the Seventh Day, now the “Eighth Day,” when the dead shall rise, and we will enter into that perfect rest with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Fr. Joseph Illo

 ​Welcome to November, and a blessed feast of All Saints! November is becoming my favorite month because of the feasts of All Saints and All Souls. The older I get, the more clearly I perceive the Life of the World to Come, and the more I long to join the vast numbers who have crossed over the waters of death ahead of me. They now live within a joy we cannot possibly imagine.
 
But, truth to tell, we have “miles to go before we sleep” (Robert Frost, despite his human limitations, is still one of my favorite poets). We still have work here on earth, among which is ordering our lives together. We must work to be “united states,” which is working against a strong headwind these days. That which unites people is a power higher than themselves, and Americans have come to imagine we are the work of our own hands. Left to ourselves, we will destroy each other. Only if we understand ourselves as children of a beneficent Father in Heaven can we stop bickering and attacking each other.
 
I want to vote for Jesus Christ for president, but alas He didn’t make it past the primaries. I want to vote for the saints: Teresa of Avila for Mayor of San Francisco, Elizabeth Seton for President of San Francisco Unified School District, Pier Giorgio Frassati for Governor of California, and Gregory the Great for President of the United States. Alas, none of them has thrown in their hats. We must, tragically, vote for lesser leaders. But those we vote for must be in some measure “saints”—those most likely to acknowledge “the laws of nature and of Nature’s God” (from the first lines of our Declaration of Independence).
 
If you haven’t voted yet, I remind you that voting is a Catholic duty, and voting for the candidate most likely to promote Gospel principles is also a Catholic duty. I hear from many people their anxiety and depression, even their panic, at our steeply worsening political situation. I give the same advice to everyone: stop watching the news. It’s designed by very smart individuals to keep us in fear. Of course, the media industry sensationalizes everything as clickbait, to make money on our “fear of missing out.” But keeping people in fear is easily used by darker intentions to keep us securely within their control. Terror has always been the weapon of choice for totalitarian power, from Nazis to Soviets to Islamicists. If I can keep you in fear, I can keep you in my control, especially if you believe that “only I can save you.”
 
We Catholics certainly do believe that “only I can save you,” but that “I” is not CNN or the federal government or the tech industry. Only God can save us, and the farther we walk from God the worse it gets for all of us. Only Jesus Christ can save us, and he does so not through terror, but through love. So, dear people, do not be afraid. Only He can save us, and He will! No political collapse can undo His will. In the end, the most powerful on earth will die, but the Word of God will remain.
 
So stop watching “the news,” and keep your eyes on the Good News. Read the Scriptures, and read the lives of the saints, and read good classic literature, not the scare tactics of the enemy. Not even Kamala Harris, not even Donald Trump, and not even George Soros or Bill Gates is stronger than God. We are in the almighty and loving hands of God, so let’s stay there, and refuse to be frightened.