Chris Anderson's Blog, page 10

Robert’s Inurnment

Mount Union Cemetery, August 13, 2021

 

It’s odd and sad that we are here today, over two years later,

long after Robert’s funeral mass.

I’ve never had this experience before.

It’s as if we have to bury this man we all loved

not just once but twice.

We have to face the grief again and the loss.

But I’ve been thinking about this,

and more and more I think it’s also a great gift.

Because it reminds us of what a good, good man he was.

It reminds us that our sadness is always with us

and so he is always us.  He is never gone.

Our sadness is sacred.  It’s a sign.

And if in committing his ashes to the ground

we renew our grief,

we also renew our hope.  Our faith.

Today we have been given a chance to feel more

deeply, in a new, quieter, steadier way,

what he most deeply believed,

that God is always with us

and all, all, shall be well.

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I Shall Not Want

I Shall Not Want

 

I look at the weather report and see another 100 degree day in the forecast and I feel the dread rise up in me again.

I read about the drought.  I feel how tinder dry the woods are.

I read about the fires.  All the fires.

I see pictures of the flames.

I read about the spread of the Delta variant and the anxiety of public health officials, and I think of all the people in the country and in the world who are not vaccinated.

And I feel the dread flow into me again, and deepen.  The fear.  Into my bones.

I keep thinking of the 23rd Psalm—the Psalm for mass last week:   the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

But this feels different to me.  It feels bigger, much bigger.  Entirely beyond my control.  And structural, fundamental, in the nature of things, and in the case of the weather, not a series of single events or unusual events but omens, harbingers, the beginning of something permanent.

Inexorable.

This isn’t something we can allegorize, make into a symbol of our own inner dryness or private desolation.  This is outside.  It’s external.  Stubbornly physical.

I just feel helpless sometimes.  It just hangs over me:  this sense of not being in control all, of anything.  Of something terrible about to happen.

What does it mean to say that the Lord is my shepherd in the summer of the virus and the fires and the heat dome?  What does it mean to say that I shall not want when the weather itself is forever changing, the clouds and the rain and the seasons?

It means just what it’s always meant.

Yes, this feels different, and it is different.  But God isn’t different.  God isn’t engulfed in flames, God isn’t uncaring, God isn’t parched and empty and dry.  God is God, and he loves us as he has always loved us, he is real as he has always been real, and the call now is to still deeper faith, to renewed commitment, if not as a matter of feeling as matter of choice, a matter of thought and of discipline:  when we feel the dread spreading through us again, we remind ourselves:  yes, this is true, it’s all true, but in God we are safe, in God all is well, though the mountains may fall and the hills turn to dust.

And since we can’t do this on our own, since our faith is so weak and so small, we pray for the grace of faith.  We ask for the grace to see these moments of dread as moments to recognize our weakness and recognize our dryness and to call out to God for the hope only he can give us, the confidence and the courage only possible in him and through him and with him.

And we pray, too, for the grace of perspective:  that this is not the only world, that this is not the only time, that this is not the only life.  We are part of vast processes, we are a speck in the universe, and there is an afterlife, too.  There is eternal life.  Death is not the only thing and death is not the last thing.

And we pray, too, for the grace of the present moment.  We pray to be here, now.  To notice.  To see.  The roses even in the drought.  The sky.  The stars.

 

 

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Woe to the Shepherds

July 18, 2021

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

 

“Woe to the shepherds who mislead the flock,” says the Lord through Jeremiah.  “You have scattered my sheep and driven them away,” and we know these shepherds ourselves.  They’re all over the internet, all over twitter, and too often we’ve let them mislead and scatter us, too.

God doesn’t want us to be afraid, but these false prophets do.  They feed on it.

God leads us beside the still waters, the psalmist says in Psalm 23, maybe the most beautiful psalm of all.  We know he is present when we feel this peace, when we feel goodness and kindness within us, but the false shepherds want us to doubt this joy and doubt this peace.

 

There’s a beautiful moment in the baptismal rite when you anoint the baby on the head with the oil of chrism in the same way a king was anointed in the Old Testament, the way King David was anointed.  “You anoint my head with oil,” the psalmist says–some scholars think in the voice of David–and in fact this is what the Hebrew word “messiah” means. It means “the anointed one.”  In Greek that word is translated as “Christ.”

This is the amazing thing about baptism.  In the baptismal rite we are saying, “you, child, you are good, you are made in God’s image. Listen to yourself, trust yourself–listen to God, trust in God.”  The oil of chrism is the oil a priest is anointed with at his ordination, on the palms, and in this sense, through our baptism, we are all priests, we are all prophets and kings, or prophetesses and queens, and through our baptism, too, our families commit themselves and the community commits itself to protecting and nourishing that spirit, that goodness, within us.

 

So what happens?  All those sad faces we see every day, all those angry faces, all those lost and lonely and suffering people all around us?  They were all once children, too, and they still are, underneath, but they’ve let themselves be led astray.  As we all have.  We all have, all our lives.  It’s always a struggle.  Even the people in AARP magazine are all thin and good looking.  They’re always laughing.  They’re always running marathons or curing cancer and I think, really?  I’m finally retired, I’ve finally walked away from all those false pressures at OSU, as at any workplace, and now there are these new pressures?  I have to be the perfect old person?  The perfect grandfather?  And I fall for it.  I fall for it.

“O Lord, I have let myself be deceived,” Pope Francis prays.  “In a thousand ways I have shunned your love.”  Because of course these false shepherds are inside us, too.  They wouldn’t trigger us if there wasn’t something in us waiting to be triggered.   There are all kinds of voices inside us, and not all of them are from God.  The challenge is to learn how to distinguish our true inner shepherd from our false ones—the challenge is discernment.  And we have to try to surround ourselves with what is good and right and real, with the scriptures, with the Eucharist, with good friends and good food and literature and art and good things on our screens and good things on our phones, and we have to try to get away, too, now and then, come away to “a deserted place” and rest a while, as Jesus says to the disciples today when they’re so busy and beset they don’t even have time to eat.

It’s wonderful that the pandemic seems to be easing, at least for now, at least in this country, but I hope that we don’t just add back in all the stresses and pressures and false ambitions and empty busyness the pandemic forced us to give up.

 

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the psalmist says.  There’s nothing here about weight loss.  There’s nothing here about making a lot of money or impressing people.

“Live in the present,” Pope Francis said in his homily on Pentecost this year.  The Spirit, he says, “affirms the primacy of today against the temptation to let ourselves be paralyzed by rancor or memories of the past or by uncertainty or fear about the feature.”  The Spirit “reminds us of the grace of the present moment.  There is no better time for us.”  We don’t need anything else.  We don’t need all the stuff we buy and all the trouble we borrow.  And all the things we worry about?  Even theological issues, however important, even issues of social justice and action in the world for the poor and the oppressed–and these are crucial, these are essential–all these things however real and necessary are not the most important things and can even be temptations, away from the grace of the present moment and into abstractions.  Ideas can be false prophets.  Causes can be false shepherds.  Unless our engagement with these larger issues proceeds from the peace of the still waters, from the cup that overflows, they are dangerous.  They work against the Spirit.

“If we listen to the Spirit, we will not be concerned with conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left,” Pope Francis says.  “When those become our criteria, then the Church has forgotten the Spirit.”

 

Or as Ephesians puts it today, “brothers and sisters, in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near.”  The author is talking here about Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians and how they’ve been battling each other, though he could be talking about warring factions in any time.  In ours.  “Christ came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” Ephesians says, “for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

 

I think of another moment in the baptismal rite, when one of the godparents lights a candle from the Easter Candle.   This light, we say to the parents, is “entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly,” because that light is Christ.  That light is the goodness burning in that child, and it’s such a touching thing, to see the godmother or the godfather walking back, cupping a hand to protect that little flame.  It’s so easily snuffed out.

This why we need the deserted places.  This is why I do.  This why I need community.  This is why I need to try to pray and pray, to try to keep myself as best I can in alignment with the force of Christ within me.  Only then, though I walk in the dark valley, will I fear no evil.

Only when we dwell in the house of the Lord.  Only when our cup first overflows.

 

O Lord, I have let myself be deceived;

            in a thousand ways I have shunned your love,

            yet here I am once more,

            to renew my covenant with you.

            I need you.  Save me once again, Lord,

           take me once more

          into your redeeming embrace.

 

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10 Things About Mary

       Saturday I will preside at my first ever Quinceanera, the traditional Mexican liturgy at which young women dedicate their lives for Mary.  This is my brief homily.

 I’ve been thinking what a good thing it is to dedicate yourself to Mary and what that might mean—and not just for you but for all of us.  We should all dedicate ourselves to Mary!

Ten things about her come to mind, ten things we should try to emulate.

Mary uses her head. She asks questions.  She thinks.

“How can this be?”  she asks the angel who comes to her (Luke 1:34), and later, Luke tells us, she “reflects” on all these things in her heart (Luke 2:18).  She “ponders” (Luke 2:51).  In many of the paintings of the Annunciation she is holding a book.  She is the figure of the reader, the thinker, the ponderer.

She doesn’t define herself by wealth or status or prestige.

She calls herself a “lowly servant” in her great prayer, the “Magnificat,” and she was.  She wasn’t of a noble family.  She wasn’t famous.  Foreshadowing her son’s teachings in the Beatitudes, she proclaims that to God prestige and status and power are entirely unimportant.  In Christ, all the old hierarchies have been reversed, and now it’s the weak who are “lifted up” and the hungry who are “filled” (1:47-55).

She doesn’t define herself by how she looks.

There are so many paintings and statues of Mary that when we think of her we have a kind of standard image of what she looks like.  But the scriptures don’t describe her appearance at all.  We have no idea whether she was tall or short, pretty or plain, and it’s clear in any event that this isn’t what matters to her, as it doesn’t matter to the angel who comes to her.  What Gabriel says isn’t that she’s pretty or slim.  It’s that she is “full of grace” (Luke 1:28).

Her identity doesn’t depend on her relationship to a man.

This is one of the great insights of recent theology, that in being called a “virgin,” Mary is presented as a woman in her own right, a woman with value of her own apart from whatever prestige or authority her husband might confer on her.  Of course, she is married to Joseph, and that certainly matters, and her most important relationship is to the man her son grows up to be.  But that’s just the point:  she is defined first and most of all by her relationship to God, and in that sense, contrary to all the assumptions of her own time and still, unfortunately ours, she is free.  She is herself.

She understands that life isn’t easy, that it’s full of challenges and even suffering.

She knows that “a sword will pierce” her side (Luke 2:35), and it does, in her sorrow and her grief.  She and her family have to flee from Herod and go to Egypt, and then back, and they come back into the hardship of an ordinary life in poor first century village.  At the end, she must witness the Crucifixion, the public execution of her son by the state.  And she doesn’t run from this.  She doesn’t try hide from the truth of hard things can be, as we so often do.

She is strong and courageous.

She doesn’t hesitate to obey God, even in the face of persecution or social stigma or violence.  She doesn’t let others push her around.

She cares about others.

She “hastens to the hills” (Luke 1:39-45) to visit her pregnant kinswoman, Elizabeth.  At the wedding in Cana she sees that “they have no more wine” and asks her son to help them (John 2:3).

She is a leader.

“Do whatever he tells you,” she tells the waiters in Cana (John 2:5), as she tells us, and they obey.  In Acts we are told that she is with the disciples after the Ascension (1:14), and tradition tells us that she was one of the leaders of the early Christian community.

She is willing to live with unresolved questions—is willing to live with complexity—doesn’t think she has to have everything figured out.

“How can this be?” she asks the angel, and yet she decides to say yes anyway. She takes the leap.  Twelve years later, the little boy Jesus is lost for three days, discoursing with the rabbis in the temple (Luke 2:41-52).  When Mary and Joseph finally find him, he says, “do you not know that I must be in my father’s house?” and they’re stunned.  “They didn’t understand what he said to them,” Luke tells us, and yet they remain committed anyway.  They love him.  They care for him.

In all this Mary trusts in God. She surrenders to God.  She is open to grace—“may it be done,” she says to the Angel (Luke1:38).

She is no doormat. She is no weak and retiring girl.  But her whole life is oriented towards God—her whole life is oriented towards her son—not towards anything else, not towards the trivial and the material and the merely social.  That’s what gives her her strength and her courage:  her faith.

What does it mean to be like Mary?  To be brave.  To be kind.  To read and to think.  To love.  To give.  To lead.

To believe.

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Enormous Roommates

June 20, 2021

Second Corinthians 4:14-17; Mark 4:35-41

I want to ask a blessing on all fathers today.  Ours is a vocation as solemn and important as any other.  Through us our children get their first experience of who God the Father is, and that’s an awesome responsibility, at which we often fail.  May God forgive us our failures and give us the grace to keep doing the best we can.

*

     Years ago Barb and I spent a weekend on the coast.  Our room jutted out over a deep, rocky cove, and there, underneath us and in front of us and all around us, gray whales were rising and diving.  We could look down and see them swimming underwater, and from the kitchen table we’d see tail flukes flipping up and over as a whale surfaced and then curved back down.

They were huge.  They were whales.  And yet this was all very peaceful.  Very quiet.  It was like the whales were just staying with us.  It was like we had these enormous roommates.

 

You know, some people argue that the miracles described in the gospels are just metaphors, just symbols, and other people argue no, they really happened, and the Church teaches both things are true and yet there’s a deeper mystery still. The people saw what they saw and they believed, they were changed, and these stories were then handed down, and a generation later the gospel writers wove them together with great literary skill to help us experience this mystery, too, a mystery greater than the merely symbolic and greater than the merely physical.

But what has always struck me is that within these stories Jesus really walks on water, he really calms the storm, he really blesses and heals, and the people are impressed, they’re amazed, and in the end they kill him anyway.  They kill him.  The miracles don’t settle anything, the miracles don’t prove anything, except that something remarkable is going on.  The miracles don’t persuade even the eye witnesses that Jesus is the Son of God.

“Who is this?” the disciples say today.  Jesus stills the wind itself and all that does is confuse the disciples, is frighten them, because they’re too thickheaded and full of doubt to surrender to the moment.  And we are, too.  If we could go back in time, if we could see for ourselves what the Gospel describes today, I don’t think it would really change us for very long.  I think we’d be amazed for a while, we’d be impressed, and then we’d go back to our ordinary, workaday lives.  We’d forget.

I lived for a weekend with whales, I knew them, and I hadn’t remembered that weekend at all, for years, until I started reflecting on this gospel.

 

The gospel brought it back.  The gospel triggered the memory.  I felt the joy again.

 

I’m still struggling with this, with this paradox.  I touched on it the last time I preached.  I don’t know if it bothers you at all but it’s really bugging me.

OK, so Christ was present from the beginning of time, is the force, as Colossians tells us, through which all things were created and all things continue in being.  So.  The Cosmic Christ.  Christ in the storm itself and in the waves.  In the whales outside the window.

So far so good.  As 21st century Christians we can sort of handle that.

But then there’s the historical Jesus, the Jesus in a particular place in time, a human being in whom the Spirit was so strong, who was so open to the miraculous, that he could perform miracles, who was the miracle, and that, I think is harder for us.  That arouses our skepticism.

How do we put these two things together, how do we understand both the horizontal and the vertical, the cosmic Christ and the historical Jesus?

 

I don’t know, except maybe to realize that God transcends all time, that God isn’t trapped in linear time as we are, that all kinds of things are true in God at once, simultaneously?

 

Or as Paul says today, the people of his time knew Jesus “in the flesh,” but now that he has died and risen, we can’t know him that way anymore.  We only know him through the Spirit, at work in the world.

 

Or is it that God is present in nature and through the laws of nature but sometimes violates those laws—does something new?  Or is he giving us in those moments a glimpse into the still deeper laws of nature, the laws of his love, of his heart?

 

I don’t know.

Everything is true.  All of it.  Continuously.

 

Here’s how the great Catholic biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it.

     For believers the truth is that the living God will continue to manifest his presence and his power within creation.  The issue is not that truth.  The issue is whether humans will have ears to hear the word that God seeks to express or eyes to perceive the signs and wonders that God uses to draw attention to the truth about humans and their world.

We can’t drain the miracle stories of their power by being all intellectual and literary about them.  We need to get beyond all these questions and just surrender to the stories, just believe in them.  But at the same time we can’t let ourselves think about them as just things that happened in the past in this one miraculous age through the powers of one miraculous man.  That man has risen and that man is here and now and has always been here and now, and the point is to see him, to know him for ourselves.

The roses blooming on the deck.  The baby sleeping in our arms.  The passage in a book that just stays with us, that won’t go away, or the scene in a movie, or the conversation with a friend.

Or the way sometimes when we’re thinking or praying something will come into our heads, like a sentence almost, and it seems to be in quotation marks, it seems to have an extra resonance or power, as if it’s not just our own thought, not just our own voice, because it isn’t.  That’s the Spirit, in us.  That’s the miracle now, whatever happened long ago, as something assuredly did.

We all have enormous roommates, rising and submerging all around us.  We can all glimpse them from the couch, see the great flukes over the rims of our coffee cups, and we can all be moved, if we let ourselves be, we can all learn to remember these moments, through grace, not to doubt them, not to let them go.

God is with us.  He is always rising up before us, then diving back down again.

 

 

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No Conservatives, No Progressives

A few weeks ago I was asked to do a graveside south of Monroe.  It was a beautiful drive on a beautiful day, through the trees and fields, and when I got to the cemetery the people were driving up and gathering around the grave, old farmers in their Sunday best and their children and their grandchildren.  The man we were burying had died at 90 after a life of farming beans and corn and table beets.  He was born on the farm he worked, and he worked it until he was in his eighties, when he could no longer walk through the fields, and as we waited everyone talked of his kindness and his gentleness.  He worked hard, he was always working, but he was never too busy to stop and help someone else.  Several people said this to me.

“Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies,” I read from the Gospel of John, “it remains just a seed, but if it dies it produces much fruit,” and this kind and hardworking man was the seed, and now he had gone into the earth, and now he was rising again into Christ, forever.

And the sun was shining, and the old people were gathered with their frank and weathered faces, and the young people, and the babies, and nothing else mattered, everything else fell away, and we were all together, and we were all rising, and we were all for moment really there, in that place, in that air, which is where Christ always is, where his endless grace is always pouring down on us, always pouring down.

 

     If we listen to the Spirit, we will be not be concerned with conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left.  When those become our criteria, then the Church has forgotten the Spirit.

     Let us live in the present!  

     The Spirit affirms the primacy of today against the temptation to let ourselves be paralyzed by rancor or memories of the past, or by uncertainty or fear about the future.  The Spirit reminds us of the grace of the present moment.  There is no better time for us:  now, here and now, is the one and only time to do good, to make our life a gift.

Pope Francis, Pentecost, 5/16/2021

 

 

 

 

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You Reading This, Be ReadyOne of the wonderful and puzzli...

You Reading This, Be Ready

One of the wonderful and puzzling things about the Ascension is that it’s about both heaven and earth, at the same time.  Both rising up and looking down.

We don’t want to ignore the fact that Jesus rises up into heaven, that he is taken into another, higher real.  We don’t want to empty that moment of its mystery or flatten it out, because heaven is our destination, too, and this moment is not the only moment and time isn’t linear anyway.  This is a big deal.  We should all be looking up.

And yet at the same time the angels come up to the disciples and ask them, “why are you looking up in the sky,” as in, “why do you have your head in the clouds,” why aren’t you paying attention to the here and now, because every moment is eternal, every moment is sacred, and time isn’t linear anyway?  In Christ everything comes together, is fused and opened up.  At the same time.

As soon as Jesus disappears from sight he fills the whole world with his presence in a profoundly new way.  And he has always been filling the world, and always will be.  I can’t figure that out, how the horizontal and the vertical somehow come together, the in-time and the out-of-time, except that I know they do.  They form a cross.

And I know that the week after the Ascension we celebrate Pentecost.  This week.  Pentecost:  when without question the Holy Spirit comes and charges every heart and every mind and shines through all things forevermore.  (And always has:  again:  that mystery of time and timelessness.  The linear and the nonlinear.)

All of which leads somehow to this wonderful poem by William Stafford, a poem that doesn’t use any religious language at all, doesn’t seem to be about the Ascension (though notice the idea of “lifting up” the moment) or about Pentecost (though of course the whole point is that every moment is precious, is mysterious, is beyond all value).  It’s just a wonderful poem.  In some way I can’t quite figure out or explain, it’s about heaven and it’s about earth. About rising and entering in.  About looking up and looking around—looking in, looking deeper.

We should be genuflecting all over the place.

 

You Reading This, Be Ready – William Stafford[image error]

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

 

 

 

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How to be a Christian on Campus

Last month I revised and updated this website.  It still has the same great design my daughter created five years ago, but it’s streamlined now to reflect the fact of my retirement and how things have shifted for me, and I’m really pleased with the results.

All I’m trying to say on my website and in my blogging and my preaching and in everything else is that God is with us.

There’s a beautiful prayer I get to say as I prepare the altar during mass that I think has meaning not just for deacons or for Catholics.  I pour a little water into the pitcher of wine and I say to myself, “by the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

I’ve always thought these words were powerful, but until the other day I hadn’t thought about the meaning of the water and wine themselves, how, as Deacon James Keating says, the water so mingles with the wine that you can’t tell one from the other.

This is how it is.  For all of us.  Christ is everywhere in our lives.

 

Recently I had a conversation with a young faculty member who had asked my advice about how to be a person of faith on a university campus.  It was a good conversation—I really admire this woman’s faith and commitment—but as usual I stumbled around and wasn’t clear.  I said too much and not enough.

When I mentioned this conversation to a wise and experienced friend, he said the way to be a Christian on campus or anywhere else is this:  spend the first five years loving everyone you meet unconditionally, as Christ did, accepting everyone without judgment.  Then, when that five years is over, see what else you are called to do.

Though of course, those five years are never over, because we can never love others unconditionally, not on our own.  All we can do is pray for the grace to love, pray to be open enough that now and then God’s love and God’s joy can flow through us despite all our baffles and walls.

 

In The Joy of the Gospel Pope Francis puts it this way, that other people should know we are Christians by our joy.  It’s joy that persuades.  It’s joy that converts.  It should shine out of us.  People should see it in us.

How to be a Christian on campus?  Be joyful.

 

Or I think of this, of Teilhard de Chardin on the value of all our small acts—a conversation, a website, a kind word, a silent prayer.

I’ve blended this together from several passages from The Divine Milieu:

     A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance, all these new beauties that appear for the first time, in me or around me, on the human face of the earth—the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it. 

     Our smallest tasks contribute infinitesimally, at least indirectly, to the building of something definitive.

     That, ultimately, is the meaning and value of our acts.

     Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things is translated into some increase

in my power to love and some progress in God’s blessed hold on the universe. 

     With every creative thought or action, a little more health is being spread in the human mass,

and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.

     We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands.

 

     WordPress and Facebook and Mailchimp want to track how many clicks we get.  The world wants to monetize us.  It wants us to be continually in the act of presenting ourselves.  But this is the world of the flesh, this is the culture of death, this is the world we are called to resist:  by believing in the small.  By believing in the hidden.  By believing in the gentle.

By believing in Christ—no, by knowing Christ.

 

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The Way We Must Go

    This is my homily for the funeral mass of my father-in-law, Franz Schneider, my mentor and my model.

 

A few years ago I drove to the Mennonite Village to take Ann and Franz to our annual fall festival.  It was a beautiful sunny day in late September.  I was a little early, so I walked into the living room to wait, and there on the table was a book, lying open.

I went over to see what it was, and it was the poems of T.S. Eliot, and it was open to a page of The Four Quartets—a poem I first read in one of Franz’s classes almost fifty years ago and never really understood at all.  It’s a great poem.  A holy poem.

I’ll never forget sitting in that class in the early evenings in the admin building at Gonzaga and how inspired I was by Franz, by all of his learning, and his energy, and his presence.

And there on that page, in Franz and Ann’s living room, at the Mennonite Village, in Franz’s quick, bold hand, was this passage:

 

It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,

Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity

And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,

Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders? . . .

Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.

 

I don’t think Franz meant me to see this.  I think he’d been reading the poem again, had marked that passage, and then had just left the book on the table.  But somehow the words seemed intended for me, too.  I could feel them going right through me.

     “You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy,” Eliot says—this is the rest of the passage Franz marked—

 

In order to arrive at what you do not know

            You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess,

            You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

             You must go by the way in which you are not.

 

And I straightened up, and I went to the window, and I thought, OK.  Maybe now, after fifty years, I’m finally starting to understand this poem a little better.

 

Franz was my role model and my mentor.  I loved him and admired him and I owe him more than I can say.  He was a remarkable man, a man of force:  force of will, force of intellect, force of personality.  And I believe as he did that all this, all that is good in us, all that makes us who we really are, is never lost but is taken up and gathered into God forever.

But we are all so weighed down, by our histories and our hurts.  We are all trapped, by our anger, our fear.  All of us.  And we spend our whole lives trying to die to that false self, we spend our whole lives trying to free ourselves, and we never quite do.  None of us.  However hard we try we are still flawed human beings, and sometimes we can see that and admit that, and then for a moment the freedom comes.  We can say, I’m no different than anyone else, I’m just here, I’m just a person, and that’s wonderful, that’s enough, because I am loved by God as we are all loved by God.

But moments like this are rare, they don’t happen very often, and maybe the gift of growing old, maybe the terrible grace of dying, is that it can help us with this other, spiritual dying, too.  Maybe our bodies can help us accomplish what we can never accomplish through will.  Maybe in our fading away we are finally all transfigured.  We are all freed.

 

The last words I heard Franz say were first, “amen,” again and again—he kept pausing and saying it, he was straining to say it, almost barking it out, five, six times—amen, amen, amen—and then at the end of that, “alleluia.”   Just once.

That was the last word.  Alleluia.

 

Death, Teilhard de Chardin says, is the force that “parts the very molecules of our being” so that the “divine fire can penetrate into us.”  It accomplishes the “necessary dissolution.”

“Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies” Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “it remains just a seed.  But if it dies, it produces much fruit.”

 

I think of Franz near the end, his body bruised and wasting away, and how he could barely speak, could barely move, every breath was an effort, and I think of how he was loved by God in that moment every bit as much as he was when he was standing in front of a class and lecturing with such confidence and authority.

I think of a picture many of us know, a black and white picture of Franz as a little boy of six or seven, taken in Germany in the thirties, before the war, before all the suffering.  He is standing with three of his brothers, all of them wearing dark sailor suits, and his parents are standing behind them in their Sunday best, and they all have that serious, posing-for-a picture look.

Except for little Franz.  He is looking right into the camera and he is smiling, a big, all-out, mischievous smile.

And in our end is our beginning, Eliot says, “and the end of all our exploring / will to be to arrive where we started /and know the place for the first time.”  And now that little boy has been taken up into a love beyond all imagining, and now that little boy is with his parents again and he is with his brothers and he is smiling that smile again.  Now that old man is free, he has been taken up, and he is smiling, too, he is delighted, and he is waiting for us to join him.  He is waiting for us, and the sun is shining, and again it is festival—it is all festival—

“through the unknown, remembered gate,” Eliot says, at the end of The Four Quartets—

           

When the last of the earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning:

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything.)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

The post The Way We Must Go appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

A Quick Word for Catholics About the Vaccine

The Church has raised concerns about the morality of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, but the Vatican and the US Bishops and our own Archbishop Sample have all said very clearly that the other vaccines are fine and that even the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is permissible if there’s no other choice.  The Pope has been vaccinated.  Archbishop Sample has been vaccinated.

In fact, the Church has said that getting vaccinated can be understood as moral act itself.  Here’s how the US Bishops put it:

While we should continue to insist that pharmaceutical companies stop using abortion-derived cell lines, given the world-wide suffering that this pandemic is causing, we affirm again that being vaccinated can be an act of charity that serves the common good.

      In any event, I’m very grateful that I was able to get the vaccine, and that so many people are getting it now, and I pray that soon all of us will be able to gather together again.

 

The post A Quick Word for Catholics About the Vaccine appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.