Chris Anderson's Blog, page 11

The Dewfall

Divine Mercy Sunday

1 John 5:1-6; John 20:19-31

I have never seen Jesus the way Thomas does in the Gospel today and the way the other disciples do.  But he has come through my walls.  He has stood in my midst.   I have felt a peace.  A breath.

I have never seen Jesus the way St. Faustina did in her beautiful vision, love raying out from his heart like light.  But I have felt that light within me.  I have felt my own heart swell.

I think this is the way it is for most of us.  All praise for all the visions and appearances down through the ages.  They are great gifts.  But I think that for most of us our experience of Christ is much subtler, much more diffuse, and nothing is more important than realizing this and accepting this, because otherwise we’ll think this is all made up, it’s not true, at least for us.  We’ll think that God isn’t here when he’s everywhere—he’s not obvious but he’s everywhere—and blessed are we when we finally know this and feel this.

 

It’s deep in our tradition, this sense of the presence of Jesus.  In the twelfth century St. Bernard wrote that in his own experience of Jesus in prayer, there was, as he put it,

nothing sensational.  I don’t see anything, I don’t hear voices.  I suddenly feel a warmth and glow in my heart and I know that the bridegroom is there.

A warmth.  A glow.  In the sixteenth century St. Ignatius describes a moment when he “seemed to see something white, from which rays were coming”—a vision a little like Faustina’s, in fact, but much less clearly defined.  It’s a “something” he sees.  It’s vaguely, if brightly, white, and even this is more specific than Ignatius usually is.  For him the experience of Jesus is much more a matter of feeling and intuition, he can never pin it down or put it into words, and like William Barry, a modern Jesuit thinker, I find this very consoling.  Very freeing.  “I have no idea how to describe the Jesus I contemplate,” Barry says, “yet I, too, believe that I have encountered him and gained some interior knowledge of him.”

Images like this keep coming up again and again, of a light, a fragrance, a stream.   A sense.

 

I used to think that it was easier to understand God from the perspective of the Holy Spirit than from the perspective of the Son, but I was wrong.  Because the Spirit is the Son.  The Father and the Son and the Spirit are one, and they are always coming into our lives and taking us up into theirs.   It’s the Spirit that “testifies,” the Letter of John tells us today, and “the Spirit is Truth.”

 

I have never felt the wounds of Jesus.  I have never touched the holes in his hands.  But I have felt my own wounds.  I have felt the wounds of others, and we have to feel them.   Blessed are those who mourn, Jesus says, because unless we acknowledge our grief, it consumes us.  Blessed are those who weep, because there is reason to weep and to deny that is to reduce the faith to something childish and false.

Recently I wrote a friend that all would be well.  She’s been struggling with health problems and problems at her job.  I knew that sounded too pious in a way, but I believe it, and when she wrote back she said something really profound, really insightful, and when I asked her she said I could share it.

“All will be well,” she wrote,

but I think that statement hinges on what we place within the word ‘all.’  If by ‘all’ we mean that our relationship to Christ cannot be broken by anything outside of us in and of itself—anything!—then yes, all shall be well.

And then she goes on,

‘All’ doesn’t mean that the pain caused by our sins and faults isn’t real.  It doesn’t negate the pain and upheaval brought to us by the decisions of others.  ‘All’ also does not mean that the events of this life will turn out in a way that is okay for us.

Our work is to hold the light and hold the darkness and not reduce the one to the other—or not to hold them ourselves, because we can’t, but to trust God to hold them, to make sense of them, to reconcile them, because in him all things hold together.  How, we don’t know.  That’s the mystery.  That’s what we must surrender to.

 

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t exist.  It’s that he is always and everywhere present in a way we never expected.  He is far more pervasive.  He is woven into the fabric of our lives, what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, calls a “steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the center of everything that is,” and this comes close to it for me, too, when I look back on a day or a week and realize that God was always there, just beneath the surface, all around me.  In me.

This is the Divine Mercy: “a steady swell of loving presence.”

This is the Divine Mercy, and we feel it in our chest and behind our eyes, like the beginning of tears.

I sensed it between the lines of my friend’s email.  Underneath every word.

 

Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall. 

We may hear these words in a few minutes.  They’re from the second Eucharistic Prayer, at just the moment of the consecration.

The Eucharist is unique, it’s the source and summit, and yet somehow at the same time it’s like the morning dew.

 

I can’t explain it.  I can’t put it into words.

 

The dewfall.  Ordinary.  Beautiful.  On every blade of grass.

 

 

 

The post The Dewfall appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

For Someone Who Believes in the Mystery

For someone who believes in the mystery, I sure spend a lot of time trying to understand everything.

For someone who believes in complexity, I sure do a lot of black and white thinking.

For someone who believes in living in the moment, I sure spend a lot of time trying to determine the future.

 

Let’s give up all this investigating, as St. Ephrem the Deacon puts it.

He’s talking about the Eucharist:

Our Lord has become our living bread,

and we shall delight in our new cup.

Come, let us then eat it without investigation,

and without scrutiny let us drink his cup.

Who disdains blessings and fruits

and sits down to investigate their nature?

A human being needs to live.

Come, let us live and not die in

the depth of investigation.

 

Walking through the house I slam into a corner of the wall.

That corner was always there.

But now I know it.

 

The coal used to slide down a chute into a bin in the basement and now and then Dad would shovel it into the glowing furnace.  When he opened the hatch we could see into the fire.

It’s like that.

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Something Far More Deeply Interfused

I wanted to say that I’ll be returning to serve at Sunday masses, after a five-month absence, starting March 21st, the Fifth Sunday of Lent.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been staying away from mass this Covid winter to minimize the risk to my new grandson and my mother and father-in-law.  I know many of you have been staying away, too.  But Barb and I have just gotten the second dose of the vaccine and are now waiting the two weeks for it take full effect, and then, though I’ll keep masking and social-distancing, I’ll feel safe coming back.

 

We were able to get the vaccine so early, in fact, because we’re taking care of our now five-month-old grandson during the week, now that our son and his wife have gone back to work.

We qualify as childcare providers!

 

I urge all of you to get vaccinated as soon as you’re eligible, for your own sake and the sake of others.  My experience getting it was really quite good.  It was an experience of democracy, of all these people coming together, and of the skill and generosity of doctors and nurses, and of organization and good planning and efficiency.  I’m very grateful for it, and I pray that soon everyone will get vaccinated and we can all turn the corner on the pandemic.

 

I also wanted to share something else.

In these several months away from mass, a phrase has been coming into my head, again and again, a phrase from one of my favorite poems, Wordsworth’s great Tintern Abbey.  It just keeps occurring to me:

 

and I have felt a presence . . .  a sense sublime

of something far more deeply interfused,

whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

and the round ocean, and the living air,

and the blue sky, and the mind of man,

a motion and a spirit that . . .

rolls through all things.

 

 Something far more deeply interfused.

 

My sense of this has been much quieter than Wordsworth’s, and only off and on.  It’s like a warmth sometimes.  A glow.  But it’s there, and it’s real, and as a Christian I believe it’s a sign not of something but of someone, a sign of the presence of Christ himself, in whom “we live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul says in Acts—in whom “everything continues in being,” as Colossians puts it, in that great hymn:

 

All were created through him;

all were created for him.

He is before all that is.

In him everything continues in being.

 

This has been the gift of these last several months for me, this sense of Christ present in all things, in every moment, this sense of a love that binds all things together, rocks and birds and trees, and you and me and my new grandson, and all who have died and all who are living.

This is what the Eucharist celebrates and this is what happens through the Eucharist and what spreads out from the Eucharist, this creativity and this power and this love, and this is why we all long to return to mass, why we all long to join in the liturgy again, where we can enter into the very heart of this.

 

In the words of the preface to the second Eucharistic Prayer, “it is truly right and just . . . always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy, through your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, your Word through whom you created all things.”

 

And then the Sanctus follows, right after this: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory!”

 

We all proclaim this, the sacramentary says, “with one voice.”

 

 

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In God There is No Shame

A friend of mine told me that he’s been thinking a lot about his past lately and what he feels more than anything else is shame.  Not guilt.  Shame.

I’ve fallen in love with the psalms again this winter, and I’ve been noticing how the word “shame” often appears and how it’s never seen as coming from God—how God is always taking our shame away:

 

     O my God, in you I trust; / do not let me put to shame.  25:3

     In your O Lord, I seek refuge, / do not let me ever be put to shame; / in your righteousness    deliver me.  31:1

     Look to him and be radiant, / so your faces will never be ashamed.  34:5

            (these are all from the New Revised Standard Version)

 

Somewhere I read that guilt is when we’re sorry for what we’ve done but shame is when we’re sorry for who we are, and shame in that sense is never right, is blasphemy, for we are made in the image and likeness of God and God loves us, with all tenderness and joy.  When in the psalms the speaker confesses his sins, admits his guilt, God doesn’t say, “you’re a terrible person, you’re awful, go away.”  God always welcomes us.  God always frees us:

 

I said, ‘I confess my faults to the Lord,’ / and you took away the guilt of my sin. /

            Be glad in the Lord and rejoice!    32:11

 

We are glad in the Lord, we rejoice in the Lord, because we know that he really knows us, the true us, the true self.

Shame is never the voice of God.  Never.  We can take that as a rule for the spiritual life.  Whenever we become aware that shame has been working in us again, we should name it and then reject it.  We need to notice it, we need to acknowledge it, but we should try never to give in to it.

“Be strong,” Psalm 31 concludes, and “let your heart take courage.”

This is when we know that we are being led by the Spirit.  When we take heart.  When we feel our strength.  Our joy.

 

Sin is not the deepest layer in us, however deep it is.

Beneath it there is a mystery far greater still.

There is beauty, there is freedom, there is love.

 

There is Christ.

 

The post In God There is No Shame appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Secret

I have a strong desire to express myself.  If I’m walking down a road above the ocean and I have an idea, I want to share that idea, and the road, and the waves.  That’s where God is for me, in the moments, and by writing them down or talking about them I become more aware of them, I begin to pray them, and maybe if someone else hears about them or reads about them they too might feel God’s presence.

But there’s a counterforce in the spiritual life:  the need for “hiddenness.”  For “secrecy.”  This keeps coming up in the scriptures, again and again

 

Indeed you love truth in the heart,

            then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom.   Psalm 51

               When you pray, go into your room

            and pray, and God who is hidden, will reward you.   Matthew 6:6

               For I have died, and I am hidden now in Christ.   Colossians 3:3

 

I find this both frightening and deeply attractive.

Keeping secrets can be a bad thing, of course.  It often is.  But this is something else.  This has to do with the danger of spiritual pride.  We don’t want to be in relation with God—we want other people to see us being in relation with God.  We want to be admired.

This has to do with the danger of not really believing in God and so it’s as if we’re speaking into a void, emptying ourselves out for nothing.

 

In this sense to let go of our need for recognition is an act of faith, it’s a spiritual practice, and it’s not even letting go of recognition finally.  It’s believing that God knows us and sees us.  God loves our poems.  God loves our journal entries.  Imagine how freeing that would be, to really believe that God is with us!

 

But there’s something even deeper.  We all accept that there’s a subconscious, a realm where psychological forces determine our actions in ways we are never aware of.  That’s why they call it the subconscious:  it’s below our awareness.  But lately I’ve started to realize that there’s also something like a spiritual subconscious, a level deep inside of us where God is operating and shaping and transforming us even if on the surface we feel flat and dry and even desolate.  How can there not be?  God is a mystery, beyond all language, and that mystery includes us, too, inside and out.  We are made in his own mysterious image.

It’s not just that God’s action in our hearts is hidden from the world:  it’s hidden from us.  Even we don’t know our own secret.

 

St. Augustine talks about the great “cavern of memory,” which he imagines as bottomless.

Gerard Manley Hopkins says the mind has “cliffs of fall, sheer, no-man-fathomed.”

Thomas Merton says “without a secret there is no contemplation.”

 

We are the secret.  You are.  I am.

And the road, and the waves.  The memory.  The idea.

The post The Secret appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Social Consolation

I’ve just read a book that helps clarify something I’ve been struggling with.

We all know what “desolation” feels like in our personal lives, William Barry says in Finding God in All Things, the desolation that results from our sinfulness and selfishness and addiction.  But there’s also what Barry calls “social desolation,” the desolation caused by the public corruption and hypocrisy that seem to surround us. “Many people now find themselves unable to pray,” Barry says, “because they have lost hope in the institutions in which they participate.”

Now, desolation can be a spiritual gift.  It can teach us what is true.

But here’s the thing.

Like personal desolation, social desolation doesn’t come from God when it only leads us to anger and frustration, not to conversion and then to freedom:

Thus social desolation shows itself in a feeling of futility before what seems like the intractable problems of our complex world.  Those who find themselves in such a state, a gnawing sense of futility about the world in general and about the particular institutions to which they belong, need to be freed by the Lord just as much as an addict or habitual sinner needs to be freed by the Lord.  The gnawing feeling saps life and vitality from them and keeps them from the freedom of the sons and daughters of God.

It’s not that we shouldn’t care about politics and social issues.  Quite the contrary.  It’s that we should do with these issues what we do with our private concerns in prayer:  try to discern where our feelings are coming from.

How do we know a feeling comes from God?  When it leads to hope.

When we feel hope for ourselves and hope for our world, when we know that in spite of all the problems God has not abandoned us, when we realize that whatever happens a deep goodness remains—this is when we can trust what we’re feeling.  This is when we can believe that whatever else our motives might be, God is somehow in them.

Just as with our personal sinfulness, the point of facing the sins of our institutions is not to paralyze but to free us.  It’s not to take away our confidence but to restore it—to energize us once again, in God, with trust in his great and abiding dreams for us.

     How do we know that we have a healthy attitude about politics?

When it doesn’t keep us from praying.  When it calls us deeper in.

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The Chase

The Chase

By the time I walked into the backyard Bumble had already raced down the ravine and up the other side and was streaking after a deer on the ridge, right to left—I could see him—then across the road and into the further woods, and so I hurried after him, running along a grassy ledge through the trees and around the edge of a small pond I hadn’t known was there, until finally I saw them, not six inches apart, the deer and the dog, lunging at each other and taking turns trying to bump each other with their heads, Bumble wild and barking, the doe leaning against a tree, sick, it seemed to me, or starving, too exhausted to run.

Piper says I shouldn’t clench my fists when I tell this story, I shouldn’t be afraid, but when I grabbed for Bumble and the doe skittered away, brushing against my arm as it jumped, and Bumble bounded after her, whirling, knocking me backwards onto the soft, forgiving ground, and the doe dove into the pond and started swimming, breasting the thick green layer of algae, and Bumble leapt in after her, paddling furiously and bumping against her with his shoulder,and the doe bumping against his with hers, the two of them veering in circles in the water, left, then right, until Bumble started to struggle, until he seemed to panic, looking up at me with wide, frightened eyes, drenched and bedraggled, trying, frantically, to make for shore, and reaching it finally, and trying to scrabble up the muddy bank, and falling back, again and again, and me pulling and pulling him by his collar, his fur, trying to heave him up and out, trying not to tumble in myself, trying not to get pulled under—I wasn’t roaring anymore.  I was trembling.  I was holding him in my arms.  Gasping.  Soaked with mud.  The both of us.

Where the doe went I don’t know, whether she managed to clamber out of the pond and slip away into the trees again, or even if she drowned, in her weakness and her panic.   I’ve worried about her since.  But I wasn’t panicked anymore and I wasn’t afraid.  I was amazed.

At how close we’d all been.

 

The post The Chase appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The ChaseBy the time I walked into the backyard Bumble h...

The Chase

By the time I walked into the backyard Bumble had already raced down the ravine and up the other side and was streaking after a deer on the ridge, right to left—I could see him—then across the road and into the further woods, and so I hurried after him, running along a grassy ledge through the trees and around the edge of a small pond I hadn’t known was there, until finally I saw them, not six inches apart, the deer and the dog, lunging at each other and taking turns trying to bump each other with their heads, Bumble wild and barking, the doe leaning against a tree, sick, it seemed to me, or starving, too exhausted to run.

Piper says I shouldn’t clench my fists when I tell this story, I shouldn’t be afraid, but when I grabbed for Bumble and the doe skittered away, brushing against my arm as it jumped, and Bumble bounded after her, whirling, knocking me backwards onto the soft, forgiving ground, and the doe dove into the pond and started swimming, breasting the thick green layer of algae, and Bumble leapt in after her, paddling furiously and bumping against her with his shoulder,and the doe bumping against his with hers, the two of them veering in circles in the water, left, then right, until Bumble started to struggle, until he seemed to panic, looking up at me with wide, frightened eyes, drenched and bedraggled, trying, frantically, to make for shore, and reaching it finally, and trying to scrabble up the muddy bank, and falling back, again and again, and me pulling and pulling him by his collar, his fur, trying to heave him up and out, trying not to tumble in myself, trying not to get pulled under—I wasn’t roaring anymore.  I was trembling.  I was holding him in my arms.  Gasping.  Soaked with mud.  The both of us.

Where the doe went I don’t know, whether she managed to clamber out of the pond and slip away into the trees again, or even if she drowned, in her weakness and her panic.   I’ve worried about her since.  But I wasn’t panicked anymore and I wasn’t afraid.  I was amazed.

At how close we’d all been.

 

The post appeared first on A WordPress Site.

The Man in the BucketThe man in the bucket only idled his...

The Man in the Bucket

The man in the bucket only idled his chainsaw long enough to snap, no, he couldn’t stop, and wave me away.  But when I walked the half block back to the cemetery and up the hill to where the family waited, the great whining died and the woodchipper ceased and we stood by the grave and grieved.

It was quiet.

The only problem was that the sun was in my eyes and I couldn’t see.  It just kept shining and shining.

 

     Still, there are those who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia, and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different.  Faith, and the humanism it inspires, must maintain a critical sense in the face of these tendencies, and prompt an immediate response whenever they rear their head.  For this reason, it is important that catechesis and preaching speak more directly and clearly about the social meaning of existence, the fraternal dimension of spirituality, our conviction of the inalienable dignity of each person, and our reasons for loving and accepting all our brothers and sisters. 

        Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti

 

And I’m not talking about this man’s attitude towards me.  I’m talking about my attitude towards him—a man working hard for a living, not his own boss and not on his own schedule, with who knows what experience of churches and religion.

God is bigger than both of us!  All of us!

We are all the man in the bucket, and we all must come down.

 

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Man in the BucketThe man in the bucket only idled hi...

The Man in the Bucket

The man in the bucket only idled his chainsaw long enough to snap, no, he couldn’t stop, and wave me away.  But when I walked the half block back to the cemetery and up the hill to where the family waited, the great whining died and the woodchipper ceased and we stood by the grave and grieved.

It was quiet.

The only problem was that the sun was in my eyes and I couldn’t see.  It just kept shining and shining.

 

     Still, there are those who appear to feel encouraged or at least permitted by their faith to support varieties of narrow and violent nationalism, xenophobia, and contempt, and even the mistreatment of those who are different.  Faith, and the humanism it inspires, must maintain a critical sense in the face of these tendencies, and prompt an immediate response whenever they rear their head.  For this reason, it is important that catechesis and preaching speak more directly and clearly about the social meaning of existence, the fraternal dimension of spirituality, our conviction of the inalienable dignity of each person, and our reasons for loving and accepting all our brothers and sisters. 

        Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti

 

And I’m not talking about this man’s attitude towards me.  I’m talking about my attitude towards him—a man working hard for a living, not his own boss and not on his own schedule, with who knows what experience of churches and religion.

God is bigger than both of us!  All of us!

We are all the man in the bucket, and we all must come down.

 

The post appeared first on A WordPress Site.