Chris Anderson's Blog, page 12

A Clean, Gray Light Last week I had the honor of saying t...

A Clean, Gray Light

 

Last week I had the honor of saying the Prayers for the Commendation of the Dying over the body of a good friend.  His wife had arranged for a hospital bed to be set up in the pleasant living room of their house and a clean, gray light shone through their picture window.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Everything depends on whether we believe in the reality of that light, as Pope Francis says in Fratelli Tutti, and whether we believe that that light is eternal.  Everything depends on whether we believe a body is just a body, death just death.

If we believe in nothing but matter, all we can do is consume.  If we believe in nothing but the body, the body becomes disposable.  If we believe in nothing but profit and gain, the person is no longer a person but a commodity:

A kind of ‘deconstructionism,’ [the pope says] whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero, is making headway in today’s culture.  The one thing it leaves in its wake is the drive to limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism.

According to this logic, my friend was only important when he was important, when he was a distinguished scientist and academic, doing research and bringing in money and publishing papers in prestigious journals.  He was nothing at all as he slowly lost his mind and then faded away.  He was just a burden—as an unborn child is a burden, as the poor are a burden, as the foreign are a burden:

Some parts of our human family, it appears, can be readily sacrificed for the sake of others considered worthy of a carefree existence.  Ultimately, persons are no longer seen as a paramount value to be cared for and respected, especially when they are poor and disabled, not yet useful—like the unborn—or no longer needed—like the elderly. 

     Our many political and social and economic problems require political and social and economic solutions, but if we see them as just political, just economic, even the best intended approaches lead to reductionism and despair.  Even the problem of racism can’t be solved if we think that race is the central thing and the most important thing rather than a symptom of something far deeper.

As Christians we make a radically different assumption.  We believe in the light.  We believe in the fundamental dignity of the human person as created in the image of likeness of God, of all people and ultimately of all things, rocks and trees and birds and all the animals, because all the created world is created, is made, out of a wasteful and profligate love, out of tenderness and play, out of a hugely creative impulse, the creative impulse of God, his whim, his joy, and this impulse is eternal.  It never ends.   It’s the living water.  It’s eternal life—and not just later, in heaven, but here and now.

The spiritual stature of a person’s life is measured by love, the pope says, which in the end remains the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life’s worth or lack thereof.  This is the simple and radical logic of Christian faith.  Everything flows from it.  Social friendship and universal fraternity necessarily call for an acknowledgment of the worth of every human person, always and everywhere:

If each individual is of such great worth, it must be stated clearly and firmly that the mere fact that people are born in places with fewer resources or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity.

I would put the stress on the word “necessarily” and the “if/then” structure of these sentences.  If we call ourselves Christians, and we demonize migrants or the homeless or Muslims or Democrats or Republicans, then we are simply being inconsistent.  We are simply not being Christians.  To be a Christian, we must, necessarily, begin with the assumption of dignity.  The assumption of worth.  The assumption of value.  Then love follows, logically, inexorably, however hard that love is to carry out—love not as a feeling but as an action.

But not just a logic.  Not just an action.

Because there is feeling, too, now and then, there is experience, there is this light we know and feel in this life, too, the clean, gray light coming the window of that pleasant living room where my friend’s body lay, quiet, at peace.

And from where his soul had risen, from where his spirit had been raised up and is now forever bathed in that light and that goodness and that love, the light that shines in all of us, all of us, however darkened or obscured.  All of us.

 

 

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

A Clean, Gray Light Last week I had the honor of saying...

A Clean, Gray Light

 

Last week I had the honor of saying the Prayers for the Commendation of the Dying over the body of a good friend.  His wife had arranged for a hospital bed to be set up in the pleasant living room of their house and a clean, gray light shone through their picture window.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.

Everything depends on whether we believe in the reality of that light, as Pope Francis says in Fratelli Tutti, and whether we believe that that light is eternal.  Everything depends on whether we believe a body is just a body, death just death.

If we believe in nothing but matter, all we can do is consume.  If we believe in nothing but the body, the body becomes disposable.  If we believe in nothing but profit and gain, the person is no longer a person but a commodity:

A kind of ‘deconstructionism,’ [the pope says] whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero, is making headway in today’s culture.  The one thing it leaves in its wake is the drive to limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism.

According to this logic, my friend was only important when he was important, when he was a distinguished scientist and academic, doing research and bringing in money and publishing papers in prestigious journals.  He was nothing at all as he slowly lost his mind and then faded away.  He was just a burden—as an unborn child is a burden, as the poor are a burden, as the foreign are a burden:

Some parts of our human family, it appears, can be readily sacrificed for the sake of others considered worthy of a carefree existence.  Ultimately, persons are no longer seen as a paramount value to be cared for and respected, especially when they are poor and disabled, not yet useful—like the unborn—or no longer needed—like the elderly. 

     Our many political and social and economic problems require political and social and economic solutions, but if we see them as just political, just economic, even the best intended approaches lead to reductionism and despair.  Even the problem of racism can’t be solved if we think that race is the central thing and the most important thing rather than a symptom of something far deeper.

As Christians we make a radically different assumption.  We believe in the light.  We believe in the fundamental dignity of the human person as created in the image of likeness of God, of all people and ultimately of all things, rocks and trees and birds and all the animals, because all the created world is created, is made, out of a wasteful and profligate love, out of tenderness and play, out of a hugely creative impulse, the creative impulse of God, his whim, his joy, and this impulse is eternal.  It never ends.   It’s the living water.  It’s eternal life—and not just later, in heaven, but here and now.

The spiritual stature of a person’s life is measured by love, the pope says, which in the end remains the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life’s worth or lack thereof.  This is the simple and radical logic of Christian faith.  Everything flows from it.  Social friendship and universal fraternity necessarily call for an acknowledgment of the worth of every human person, always and everywhere:

If each individual is of such great worth, it must be stated clearly and firmly that the mere fact that people are born in places with fewer resources or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity.

I would put the stress on the word “necessarily” and the “if/then” structure of these sentences.  If we call ourselves Christians, and we demonize migrants or the homeless or Muslims or Democrats or Republicans, then we are simply being inconsistent.  We are simply not being Christians.  To be a Christian, we must, necessarily, begin with the assumption of dignity.  The assumption of worth.  The assumption of value.  Then love follows, logically, inexorably, however hard that love is to carry out—love not as a feeling but as an action.

But not just a logic.  Not just an action.

Because there is feeling, too, now and then, there is experience, there is this light we know and feel in this life, too, the clean, gray light coming the window of that pleasant living room where my friend’s body lay, quiet, at peace.

And from where his soul had risen, from where his spirit had been raised up and is now forever bathed in that light and that goodness and that love, the light that shines in all of us, all of us, however darkened or obscured.  All of us.

 

 

The post appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Being DogmaticIn the 12th century, in the time of the Cru...

Being Dogmatic

In the 12th century, in the time of the Crusades, St. Francis went to Egypt to visit the Sultan Malik-el-Kamil.  It was a hard and dangerous journey, but St. Francis undertook it anyway, for the sake of love.  He told his disciples:

if they found themselves “among the Saracens and other nonbelievers,” without renouncing their own identity they were not to “engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake.”  In the context of the times, this was an extraordinary recommendation.

I’m quoting here from the latest encyclical by Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti:  On Fraternity and Social Friendship.  He’s quoting from from St. Francis.  It’s a remarkable, a wonderful document, issued in Assisi on October 3rd of this year, on the Vigil of the Feast of St. Francis, and though it’s been lost sight of in all the feeling and stress of our election, it has everything to say about the election.  It’s a guide to our response to it as Christians.

“We are impressed,” the pope says, “that some eight hundred years ago Saint Francis urged that all forms of hostility or conflict be avoided and that a humble and fraternal ‘subjection’ be shown to those who did not share his faith.”

This is the call:  to humility.

 

In fact, the pope tells us that he was particularly encouraged in his thinking for the encyclical by the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, whom he met in Abu Dhabi, where together they declared that “God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters.”

This is the call:  to live together.

Even with the 73 million people who voted for President Trump.

Even with the 79 million people who voted for Joe Biden.

 

The other day I was Zooming with a friend, a good and faithful man, and he was saying that the consolation he’s been feeling in prayer lately starts to dissolve whenever he thinks about all the many people in the country who voted for candidate he believes was the wrong one.  He’s just really disturbed—as I know many of us are, as I am—by the idea that so many people could make the wrong choice.  He just doesn’t understand it.

But first, I think it’s always dangerous in our prayer life to move too quickly from the concrete to the abstract, from the personal to the political or the intellectual—and then to assume as we always do that the concrete and the personal are less important, that the moment is less real than the grand forces that move us, too.  No.  Stay in the moment.  Trust the moment.  Don’t believe that the outer life is more important than the inner life—watch for that slide, that shift, in your thinking, and pull back from it in prayer.

 

We still need to think, of course, and reason, and abstract, but that’s for later, and it’s important always to see it as secondary, as in support of the moment, not an exceeding of it.  We reason so that we can return to Joy.

What the angels announced above the stable in Bethlehem, as George Dennis O’Brien puts it, was not a “topic for conversation”—and in fact this is what doctrine and dogma really are—a proclaiming of something beyond them, a singing with the angels above that miraculous stable.

“Dogma” has come to stand for all inflexible thinking, for all black and white thinking, for all judgmentalism, but really, it means exactly the opposite.

“Dogma is a gateway to mystery,” Flannery O’Connor says.

 

So how should we respond to the people we don’t agree with?  Dogmatically, which is to say, as Christians, which is to say as followers of Christ, which is to say in the way of St. Francis on his journey to the Sultan, which is to say in the way of Pope Francis as he kneeled in the chapel of the Tomb of St. Francis at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi on October 3rd, 2020, in the midst of all the vitriol, in the midst of all the violence and injustice, in the midst of the pandemic.

The mystery is within us, too, within all of us.  We don’t know what was in the hears of people when they voted.  To be a Christian is to be nuanced.  To be a Christian is to embrace reality, the bad with the good but also the good with the bad.  To be a Christian is to leave the judgments to God anyway.  To be a Christian is to assume that the moments we feel in prayer are the moments others feel, too, even Republicans.   Even Democrats.  To be a Christian is to always keep in mind that we are not the only people loved by God.

 

“Francis did not wage a war of words aimed at impossible doctrines,” Pope Francis says; “he simply spread the love of God.”

He understood that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God” (1 John 4:16).

 

This isn’t soft.  This isn’t fuzzy.  It’s a discipline, and it’s ours.

Our dogma is love.

 

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Being DogmaticIn the 12th century, in the time of the Cr...

Being Dogmatic

In the 12th century, in the time of the Crusades, St. Francis went to Egypt to visit the Sultan Malik-el-Kamil.  It was a hard and dangerous journey, but St. Francis undertook it anyway, for the sake of love.  He told his disciples:

if they found themselves “among the Saracens and other nonbelievers,” without renouncing their own identity they were not to “engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake.”  In the context of the times, this was an extraordinary recommendation.

I’m quoting here from the latest encyclical by Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti:  On Fraternity and Social Friendship.  He’s quoting from from St. Francis.  It’s a remarkable, a wonderful document, issued in Assisi on October 3rd of this year, on the Vigil of the Feast of St. Francis, and though it’s been lost sight of in all the feeling and stress of our election, it has everything to say about the election.  It’s a guide to our response to it as Christians.

“We are impressed,” the pope says, “that some eight hundred years ago Saint Francis urged that all forms of hostility or conflict be avoided and that a humble and fraternal ‘subjection’ be shown to those who did not share his faith.”

This is the call:  to humility.

 

In fact, the pope tells us that he was particularly encouraged in his thinking for the encyclical by the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, whom he met in Abu Dhabi, where together they declared that “God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters.”

This is the call:  to live together.

Even with the 73 million people who voted for President Trump.

Even with the 79 million people who voted for Joe Biden.

 

The other day I was Zooming with a friend, a good and faithful man, and he was saying that the consolation he’s been feeling in prayer lately starts to dissolve whenever he thinks about all the many people in the country who voted for candidate he believes was the wrong one.  He’s just really disturbed—as I know many of us are, as I am—by the idea that so many people could make the wrong choice.  He just doesn’t understand it.

But first, I think it’s always dangerous in our prayer life to move too quickly from the concrete to the abstract, from the personal to the political or the intellectual—and then to assume as we always do that the concrete and the personal are less important, that the moment is less real than the grand forces that move us, too.  No.  Stay in the moment.  Trust the moment.  Don’t believe that the outer life is more important than the inner life—watch for that slide, that shift, in your thinking, and pull back from it in prayer.

 

We still need to think, of course, and reason, and abstract, but that’s for later, and it’s important always to see it as secondary, as in support of the moment, not an exceeding of it.  We reason so that we can return to Joy.

What the angels announced above the stable in Bethlehem, as George Dennis O’Brien puts it, was not a “topic for conversation”—and in fact this is what doctrine and dogma really are—a proclaiming of something beyond them, a singing with the angels above that miraculous stable.

“Dogma” has come to stand for all inflexible thinking, for all black and white thinking, for all judgmentalism, but really, it means exactly the opposite.

“Dogma is a gateway to mystery,” Flannery O’Connor says.

 

So how should we respond to the people we don’t agree with?  Dogmatically, which is to say, as Christians, which is to say as followers of Christ, which is to say in the way of St. Francis on his journey to the Sultan, which is to say in the way of Pope Francis as he kneeled in the chapel of the Tomb of St. Francis at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi on October 3rd, 2020, in the midst of all the vitriol, in the midst of all the violence and injustice, in the midst of the pandemic.

The mystery is within us, too, within all of us.  We don’t know what was in the hears of people when they voted.  To be a Christian is to be nuanced.  To be a Christian is to embrace reality, the bad with the good but also the good with the bad.  To be a Christian is to leave the judgments to God anyway.  To be a Christian is to assume that the moments we feel in prayer are the moments others feel, too, even Republicans.   Even Democrats.  To be a Christian is to always keep in mind that we are not the only people loved by God.

 

“Francis did not wage a war of words aimed at impossible doctrines,” Pope Francis says; “he simply spread the love of God.”

He understood that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God” (1 John 4:16).

 

This isn’t soft.  This isn’t fuzzy.  It’s a discipline, and it’s ours.

Our dogma is love.

 

The post appeared first on A WordPress Site.

A Map of Our Lives This is the third in a series of refle...

A Map of Our Lives

 

This is the third in a series of reflections on the idea of the hero.

 

The map above is from Richard Rohr’s From Wild Man to Wiseman:  Reflections on Male Spirituality.

The title of it worries me a little, that this is the “male” spiritual journey and maybe implicitly the journey of white men.  I don’t know how to deal with that problem except to admit it—it may be, for example, that the main theme of the chart, that we have to give up our power in order to grow in faith, doesn’t apply to people who don’t have the power to begin with.

But I’ll just say that in some way I can’t be completely sure of I think there’s still something true and maybe universal here, something we really need, terribly, at this moment.

 

Because this chart suggests that to become a hero, to become mature and whole, we have to give up our dreams of power and our dreams of certainty and our dreams of glory and surrender to the mystery of the way things really are.  We have to move through disillusionment, to humility, to joy.

 

The key thing is how the line goes up steadily in youth as the young person works to establish an identity and gain a foothold in the world—and then is blocked, shuts down, when he or she experiences failure, enters into the crisis, as all young people do.  Reality hits.  Then the key is how to react, either by holding onto the illusion even into old age or by accepting reality and so gaining the freedom to be, just to be.

It’s a deeply Christian progression.  It’s the Christian story and the Christian pattern.  Rohr is a Franciscan after all.  We must die to ourselves, we must take up our cross, and that means moving from an obsession with rules and a black and white view of the world to compassion and flexibility and good humor.

It means moving to what Rohr calls “mellowness,” which sometimes comes in old age, though of course a young person can attain to this wisdom in youth and an old man can fail attain it at all.  I move up and down the chart every day, sometimes old and wise and sometimes young and foolish and often just in the middle of still another crisis of limitation, whether I know it or not.  I fluctuate, as we all do.

It means discovering, Rohr says, that we need “spiritual guidance because the rules no longer work in their old form.”  It means working on “letting go, trust, patience, surrender, holy abandonment, compassion.”  It means that we finally become “secure enough to be insecure.”

 

This is where the Lord calls us, to the present moment.  To here.  To now.  We not only have to observe the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.  We have to be like them.  Wild.  Entirely dependent on the sun and the rain.

This is the story of all the great heroes, Achilles and Odysseus and Aeneas and Dante—all middle-aged when they finally start doing the real work, when they hit the wall, when they crash and burn.  They have to break down in order to break through.

It’s the key to the story Augustine tells in his great autobiography, the first autobiography in Western culture, The Confessions, which really should be called the “Testimonies,” because that’s what the word “confessions” really suggests in Latin, not just Augustine telling us his sins but Augustine testifying to how the Lord was speaking to him in what he calls “drops of time,” in these key moments, in time, when he is called by the timeless love of God.

Augustine is in his thirties.  He is a great orator and a famous professor of rhetoric, as accomplished and well-known as a movie star.  But however much he has risen in the eyes of the world, interiorly the line is going down, interiorly he is falling, he is sad and lost and desolate.  And he walks out in the street one day, full of this secret misery, and sees a beggar by the side of the road, and one of these “drops of time” occurs, a startling, unexpected moment of grace, of terrible grace.  Because he realizes all at once that the beggar is happier than he is, far happier, even if that happiness is the result of dissipation or drink and isn’t finally deep and lasting.  But it’s there.  This man is happy, Augustine realizes, is free, and he, Augustine, is not:

 

I thought of how I was toiling away, spurred on by my desires and dragging after me the load of my unhappiness and making it all the heavier by dragging it, and it seemed to me that the goal of this and all such endeavors was simply to reach a state of happiness in which we are free from care; the beggar had reached this state before us, and we, perhaps, might never reach it at all.

 

It takes Augustine several more years to work out the implications of this and other moments, but ultimately, through grace, he does, breaking down in a garden in Milan and surrendering himself to the love of God and entering into the great freedom that comes through surrender.  And when he does, he gives up all his fame and all the worldly trappings of success and gives himself to prayer and good works—going down in the eyes of the world but rising in his soul–  becoming invisible to the world, but visible to God in his love, as he always was and didn’t know it.  “For you were with me, and I was not with you.”

 

I think of two images.  The first is of the late representative John Lewis, as a young man, being mowed down by the police on the William Pettis Bridge outside of Selma, Alabama in 1967, and letting himself be mowed down.  Standing in front of the line and letting himself be struck, and tumbling on the ground with all the others, in the screaming and the confusion.

And I think of the iconic image of Dorothy Day as an old woman, sitting in her faded print dress in the midst of a protest against nuclear power, the protesters standing all around her.  She is wearing a straw hat.  She is looking up.

Are these images of surrender or of proclamation?  Of failing to stand up or of witnessing?

 

For when we are weak, St. Paul says, then we are strong.

 

The call for us is to read our own drops of time, to pray our lives as the sacred texts they are.  The call is to face our limitations.  The call is to humility.  The call is to the courage to accept who we really are and so enter into real life.

The call is to stand up and face oppression, to resist injustice, for ourselves and for others.

The call is to doubt any of the bitter men and the deluded men and the arrogant men who are continually trying to sell us another myth entirely, the myth of acquisition and power, the myth of exploitation and extraction, a myth that can only leave us empty and alone, shells of who we are really called to be.

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

A Map of Our Lives This is the third in a series of ref...

A Map of Our Lives

 

This is the third in a series of reflections on the idea of the hero.

 

The map above is from Richard Rohr’s From Wild Man to Wiseman:  Reflections on Male Spirituality.

The title of it worries me a little, that this is the “male” spiritual journey and maybe implicitly the journey of white men.  I don’t know how to deal with that problem except to admit it—it may be, for example, that the main theme of the chart, that we have to give up our power in order to grow in faith, doesn’t apply to people who don’t have the power to begin with.

But I’ll just say that in some way I can’t be completely sure of I think there’s still something true and maybe universal here, something we really need, terribly, at this moment.

 

Because this chart suggests that to become a hero, to become mature and whole, we have to give up our dreams of power and our dreams of certainty and our dreams of glory and surrender to the mystery of the way things really are.  We have to move through disillusionment, to humility, to joy.

 

The key thing is how the line goes up steadily in youth as the young person works to establish an identity and gain a foothold in the world—and then is blocked, shuts down, when he or she experiences failure, enters into the crisis, as all young people do.  Reality hits.  Then the key is how to react, either by holding onto the illusion even into old age or by accepting reality and so gaining the freedom to be, just to be.

It’s a deeply Christian progression.  It’s the Christian story and the Christian pattern.  Rohr is a Franciscan after all.  We must die to ourselves, we must take up our cross, and that means moving from an obsession with rules and a black and white view of the world to compassion and flexibility and good humor.

It means moving to what Rohr calls “mellowness,” which sometimes comes in old age, though of course a young person can attain to this wisdom in youth and an old man can fail attain it at all.  I move up and down the chart every day, sometimes old and wise and sometimes young and foolish and often just in the middle of still another crisis of limitation, whether I know it or not.  I fluctuate, as we all do.

It means discovering, Rohr says, that we need “spiritual guidance because the rules no longer work in their old form.”  It means working on “letting go, trust, patience, surrender, holy abandonment, compassion.”  It means that we finally become “secure enough to be insecure.”

 

This is where the Lord calls us, to the present moment.  To here.  To now.  We not only have to observe the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.  We have to be like them.  Wild.  Entirely dependent on the sun and the rain.

This is the story of all the great heroes, Achilles and Odysseus and Aeneas and Dante—all middle-aged when they finally start doing the real work, when they hit the wall, when they crash and burn.  They have to break down in order to break through.

It’s the key to the story Augustine tells in his great autobiography, the first autobiography in Western culture, The Confessions, which really should be called the “Testimonies,” because that’s what the word “confessions” really suggests in Latin, not just Augustine telling us his sins but Augustine testifying to how the Lord was speaking to him in what he calls “drops of time,” in these key moments, in time, when he is called by the timeless love of God.

Augustine is in his thirties.  He is a great orator and a famous professor of rhetoric, as accomplished and well-known as a movie star.  But however much he has risen in the eyes of the world, interiorly the line is going down, interiorly he is falling, he is sad and lost and desolate.  And he walks out in the street one day, full of this secret misery, and sees a beggar by the side of the road, and one of these “drops of time” occurs, a startling, unexpected moment of grace, of terrible grace.  Because he realizes all at once that the beggar is happier than he is, far happier, even if that happiness is the result of dissipation or drink and isn’t finally deep and lasting.  But it’s there.  This man is happy, Augustine realizes, is free, and he, Augustine, is not:

 

I thought of how I was toiling away, spurred on by my desires and dragging after me the load of my unhappiness and making it all the heavier by dragging it, and it seemed to me that the goal of this and all such endeavors was simply to reach a state of happiness in which we are free from care; the beggar had reached this state before us, and we, perhaps, might never reach it at all.

 

It takes Augustine several more years to work out the implications of this and other moments, but ultimately, through grace, he does, breaking down in a garden in Milan and surrendering himself to the love of God and entering into the great freedom that comes through surrender.  And when he does, he gives up all his fame and all the worldly trappings of success and gives himself to prayer and good works—going down in the eyes of the world but rising in his soul–  becoming invisible to the world, but visible to God in his love, as he always was and didn’t know it.  “For you were with me, and I was not with you.”

 

I think of two images.  The first is of the late representative John Lewis, as a young man, being mowed down by the police on the William Pettis Bridge outside of Selma, Alabama in 1967, and letting himself be mowed down.  Standing in front of the line and letting himself be struck, and tumbling on the ground with all the others, in the screaming and the confusion.

And I think of the iconic image of Dorothy Day as an old woman, sitting in her faded print dress in the midst of a protest against nuclear power, the protesters standing all around her.  She is wearing a straw hat.  She is looking up.

Are these images of surrender or of proclamation?  Of failing to stand up or of witnessing?

 

For when we are weak, St. Paul says, then we are strong.

 

The call for us is to read our own drops of time, to pray our lives as the sacred texts they are.  The call is to face our limitations.  The call is to humility.  The call is to the courage to accept who we really are and so enter into real life.

The call is to stand up and face oppression, to resist injustice, for ourselves and for others.

The call is to doubt any of the bitter men and the deluded men and the arrogant men who are continually trying to sell us another myth entirely, the myth of acquisition and power, the myth of exploitation and extraction, a myth that can only leave us empty and alone, shells of who we are really called to be.

The post appeared first on A WordPress Site.

The Nothing Man In 2002 Bruce Springsteen released a wo...

The Nothing Man

 

In 2002 Bruce Springsteen released a wonderful album, The Rising, with a wonderful song on it, “The Nothing Man,” that illustrates exactly the idea of heroism I talked about in my last post.

The album is a response to the events of 9/11, each song directly or indirectly in the voice of someone affected by what happened.  In “The Nothing Man” the speaker is a first-responder who went into the fire and smoke to rescue those who could be rescued and who comes back to see his name in the paper describing him as hero in a way that he knows is sentimental and simplistic.  The paper uses clichés talking about his “brave young life” and his great sacrifice, but the speaker knows that what he experienced was too terrible and chaotic to fit into the easy and reassuring stories we try to tell ourselves.  “You can call me Joe,” he says—not a hero—and you can buy me a drink, but really what he knows is that he is “the nothing man.”  He is nobody.

Darlin’ give me your kiss

                        only understand

                        I am nothing man

We are all nothing men and nothing women, we all nobodies, and we have to accept that, even though we don’t want to.  Everyone “acts the same,” the speaker says, as if nothing has happened—down at “Al’s barbeque” on Friday nights, people are eating and drinking just like the suitors eating and drinking in Odysseus’s home, in Ithaca, when he returns disguised as a beggar.  “The sky is the same unbelievable blue”—a wonderful, wonderful line.

It’s not that the speaker’s act of sacrifice is meaningless or unimportant.  Again and again in the songs on this album Springsteen celebrates the selfless acts of the police and the fire department and all those who put the lives of others before their own.  It’s that this courage and this virtue and this self-sacrifice exist in the face of the smoke and the fire and don’t cancel it out.  The darkness and the light exist in tension with each other, the horror and the virtue, as does what may be the speaker’s suicidal thoughts in the final ambiguous lines and his earlier self-control in the face of danger.  “I pray that I’m able,” he says, thinking about the pistol on his night table—able to kill himself, or able to resist the urge to kill himself?  The song doesn’t say, and that’s its greatness.  That’s the greatness of all great poetry:  that it describes the way things really are.

This the hero’s journey.  It’s circular.  The hero is called out of his or her ordinary life, the way both the speaker in the song and Odysseus are, and he or she experiences something hard and frightening and overwhelming, and then comes back to try to tell everyone they need to know this and so be humble and compassionate.

This is the story of Jesus, who is called out into the wilderness for forty days, and then returns, and is killed for saying that we, too, must go out into the unknown, we all must leave behind what we thought we knew.

There’s another interesting little connection to the Odyssey.  Early in the story, when Odysseus and his men encounter the Cyclops and are trapped in his cave, Odysseus tricks him and blinds him in his one eye and he and his men escape.  When the Cyclops asks him what his name is, Odysseus says, “I’m nobody”—I’m the nothing man.  But there’s a pun here, and it shows that Odysseus isn’t really ready to accept what he later comes to accept.  He’s foreshadowing his final awareness but he’s not there yet, because the word for “nobody” in Greek is outis, which means not just “nothing” or “no one” but also, depending on the emphasis, “crafty” or “clever,” and that’s exactly what Odysseus is being here.  He’s being crafty.  He’s setting the giant up.  When he later asks the giant who blinded him, as he and his men are escaping, the giant has to cry out “nobody blinded me!  nobody blinded me!” Odysseus is taunting him, it’s a grand gotcha, a joke, and it almost swamps their ship as they pull away, it almost kills them, as Cyclops in his frustration and his rage throws huge boulders after them and they crash in the water around the ship.  Even in his blindness, he almost smashes the ship to pieces.

Odysseus’s pride, his hubris, has almost gotten his men killed.  And later it does.  He loses them all.

It’s only at the end, when like the Springsteen hero he goes into the fire and goes into the smoke and sees face-to-face the chaos and the horror, it’s only then that Odysseus becomes a hero.  When he knows he’s not.

Whoever loses his life will save it, Jesus teaches us, and whoever holds onto his life will lose it.  We have to face the fire.  We have to go into the fire.  We have to realize that the great buildings that have fallen down around us, the great temples, will not be rebuilt without enormous sacrifice and creativity and even then we will never be completely safe.  We will never understand:  why some people died and some people didn’t, what all this finally means.

And there’s joy in this, when we accept this, when we acknowledge this, a joy deeper than sadness and pain, underneath and all around us and greater than us, the joy that Jesus talks about in his “Farewell Discourse” in the Gospel of John, on the night before the crucifixion.  Jesus is the ultimate Nothing Man, the Man Who Emptied Himself Out, the Man Who Did Not Come Down from the Cross, and then Who Rose.  Who Rose.  In the great Farewell Discourse he is talking with his disciples on the eve of his death, he is about to be killed by the Romans and Jews, and everyone knows it, they can feel it, they’re terrified, and yet Jesus says: “I have told you this so that my joy will be in you and my joy may be complete” (John 15:11).

This is why we must acknowledge that we are nothing.  This is what comes of it:  a joy that doesn’t deny the crucifixion but that at the same time looks beyond it, looks through it, to the resurrection—a resurrection that we don’t always see, a resurrection that we don’t always feel, a resurrection that we will only fully enjoy when we too rise into the enduring life and joy of Jesus, but a resurrection that we can glimpse every day, even in the fire, even through the smoke:  in a word, a smile, a memory.  A cup of coffee.  A crossword.  The single yellow rose.

 

 

“Nothing Man”

I don’t remember how I felt

I never thought I’d live

To read about myself

In my hometown paper

How my brave young life

Was forever changed

In a misty cloud of pink vapor

Darlin’ give me your kiss

Only understand

I am the nothing man

Around here everybody acts the same

Around here everybody acts like nothing’s changed

Friday night club meets at Al’s Barbecue

The sky is still the same unbelievable blue

Darlin’ give me your kiss

Come and take my hand

I am the nothing man

You can call me Joe

Buy me a drink and shake my hand

You want courage

I’ll show you courage you can understand

Pearl and silver

Restin’ on my night table

It’s just me Lord, pray I’m able

Darlin’ with this kiss

Say you understand

I am the nothing man

I am the nothing man

 

 

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The Generation of Leaves: What Heroism Really MeansOne ...

The Generation of Leaves:  What Heroism Really Means

One of the things that’s surprised me as I approach the first fall of my retirement is how much I miss the books I taught, especially for some reason the books in a course that no longer exists, “The Literature of Western Civilization.”  In the first part I always taught excerpts from Homer, from The Iliad and The Odyssey, and I always liked The Iliad the best.  It always gave me a sharp and surprising joy.

One of my favorite passages was a passage in the middle of the battle when a Greek soldier and a Trojan soldier stop and greet each other before they resume fighting.  They recognize each other, and one, the Trojan, says to the Greek that the human generations are like the leaves, that we all “come and go, just like the leaves in their seasons” (VI.150).  And as the trees outside my classroom window turned red and yellow each fall term, when I usually taught this course, and a new crop of students appeared in my classroom, with their fresh, young faces, I thought of them and of all the generations of students I’ve taught over the years.

 

Achilles is the hero of The Iliad, and the image of the generation of leaves is the key to understanding his dawning self-awareness and so to what makes him a hero, his growing awareness that we are all leaves and all of the generation of leaves.  We all fall.  There’s a point in the story when he’s refusing to fight because his honor has been offended, and what he says seems selfish at first, and maybe it is in part, but he’s also starting to rise above the easy story his culture had taught him, the story of heroism as a matter of strength and of victory, and he is starting to recognize that, that the old story is false, that we are not all powerful, that we all die, whether we’re a famous warrior or some ordinary soldier or a sheepherder in the pastures—we all die, and so what’s the point of it all?  “A man’s life cannot be gained again or recovered,” he says, “once it has flown from his mouth” (IX.110).

     That’s the moment, David Denby says, the literary critic and New Yorker film critic, that’s the moment Achilles is really heroic, or starting to be:  when he starts to think.

He does go back into battle, and he does kill, with great precision and arete—with great excellence—and that’s a part of his heroism, too, that strength, but it’s the sadness that really makes him a hero, at least for a moment, and it’s the sadness that shows up again, when Priam, the King of Troy, comes to claim the body of his son, Hector, the greatest of his warriors.  Achilles has killed Hector in his anger and his rage and then has not only refused to release Hector’s body but dishonored it, dragging it behind his chariot again and again.  It’s a moment–this moment when Priam pleads with Achilles–beautifully captured in Troy, Wolfgang Peterson’s movie version of The Iliad, from the 2004, with Brad Pitt, perfectly cast as Achilles, and the great Peter O’Toole, in his last role, as Priam.  Achilles, the great warrior, the great athlete, begins to cry as the aged king begs him for mercy.  Achilles cries, and relents, and returns the body, but not before he kneels by it and cries again and says something like “soon, I will be with you brother,” as the waves crash on the shore.

It’s the word “brother” that moves me.  It’s Achille’s grief.

It’s such a beautiful scene, and I always showed it in class—it clarifies something in the story we might not see otherwise—and I always said:  this is true heroism.

Odysseus in The Odyssey models the same thing.  It’s at the end, when he’s escaped from Calypso and been bobbing in the sea, his raft destroyed, all his men long dead, years before, and he’s being tossed in the waves, thrown around in a tremendous storm, close to drowning—that’s the moment when he becomes a hero, when he recognizes his powerlessness, that he is just one of the drops in the sea, that he is just one of the leaves on the tree, and that we all are.  And then, when he’s cast up on shore, saved with the help of a couple of goddesses, he buries himself in the leaves of an olive tree—a tree, with leaves, generations of leaves–and he hears the next morning the beautiful young princess of that kingdom playing in the stream with her handmaids as they wash their clothes, and he rises up, he rises up from the dead, the leaves pouring off his battered, naked body, and he begs the princess for hospitality, begs her to help him.  He doesn’t overpower her, he doesn’t assert his male privilege, he falls at her feet, maybe in a calculating way, in part, because Odysseus is always calculating, but sincerely, too, I think.  He says:  help me!  And she does, and this is heroism, when the middle-aged man—and the great heroes are always middle-aged—the battered man, the frightened man, begs for grace.

And when Odysseus returns to Ithaca finally, where the suitors are eating him out of house and home, and hitting on his wife, and trying to seize power and generally failing to show proper courtesy and self-control, he disguises himself as beggar.  This is partly a strategy, too.  It’s for reconnaissance, to see what is what, and when the time comes, he and his son, Telemachus, who has joined him, kill everyone, with great skill and without mercy.  So there’s that.  But until that point he is a beggar, and he is abused by the suitors and taunted and made fun of, and he says to them, look, I know—speaking then in his disguise—I’m trying to tell you something, that we are all beggars, that we are all weak, and I think that’s the whole point of the story and of all the great stories, the point we always miss:

Listen closely:  Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth,

            our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man.  (XVIII.150-52)

This is what my students always needed to know and what I needed to know and still do, that the hero, however we use that word in the press—to assuage our doubts and oversimplify our terrors and tamp down our panic, that whatever Walt Disney version is out there, whatever the internet says and the browsers—that the hero is the one who saves the day and solves the problem so that we don’t have to worry anymore, don’t have to face the reality and the chaos—none of that is true.  The hero in fact is the one who realizes that the problem can’t be solved, and certainly not by strength, that life is a mystery, it’s a vast storm at sea, the waves are higher than we can see, and all we can do is pray for mercy.

 

As Christians we know this story, too, though we add to it.  As Christians we know that Jesus as the true hero became a hero when he didn’t come down from the cross, when he allowed himself to die, to be killed.  It was only by dying that he could rise, only by entering into our weakness—by not being the sort of messiah, the sort of hero, people thought he should be, someone who would do all the work for them, who would resolve all the problems forevermore—it’s only by dying that he became the messiah and saved us.  He saves us by telling us we have to take up our cross, we have to empty ourselves out, have the same mind as Christ Jesus, Paul says, who, “though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at but emptied himself”—kenosis, self-emptying.  That’s what we know.  Jesus was crucified on a tree, the tree of the cross, of the generation of leaves and of all the generations, but in our story the ending isn’t tragic.  It’s comic—not in the sense that it’s funny, though it’s full of laughter, too, but in the sense that in the end there is joy beyond all telling.  The Resurrection follows, not just Odysseus rising up from his grave of leaves but a rising into eternal life, for all of us—not a dying into the vague underworld the Greeks imagined, where Odysseus meets the dead Achilles, who says it’s better to serve on earth than rule in hell.  That’s not the afterlife for us and it’s not even just the afterlife.  It’s this life, or the one we can have through grace, if we choose.  It’s the life of joy.

 

We’re all heroes in that sense—when we realize we’re not.  We’re all saints, when we realize we can’t be.  When we let ourselves go.  There’s a higher, childlike innocence as we age, or can be.  We forget our illusions, or try to, rise above the false self the culture tries to sell us—or try to.  Or we don’t try.  We stop trying.  We surrender.  Because we realize finally that it’s only through grace that we can rise.

Yes, we are all the leaves in the generation of leaves, but each one of us is precious in the sight of God and loved by God.  We are nothing and we are everything, and there is spring, there is always spring, and there is that wonderful man, the Risen One, the one who is mistaken for the gardener, mistaken for a beggar, walking in the garden of the tombs in the cool of the day, and who redeems that garden, who makes it, through his gentleness and his powerlessness, O who makes it the Garden of Eden once again.

 

 

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On Not Going to Mass for a While To my friends in the p...

On Not Going to Mass for a While

 

To my friends in the parish:

 

     After this newsletter I’m going back to my every other week schedule—this is my third newsletter in three weeks—but I wanted to let you know that I’ve decided not to go to mass or serve at mass for the new few months.

     I’m not retiring from being deacon.  I’ll be back.  I’ve talked this over with Father Matias and he supports me completely.  I’ve just gotten more and more concerned about my risk of exposure to the virus and the effects this could have on my soon-to-be-born grandchild, due in October, and Barb’s frail and aging parents, who also live close by.  Even if the risk is small, I don’t want to endanger my family.

     The archbishop made provision for this from the beginning when he gave us a general dispensation from our Sunday obligation and encouraged us to stay home if we thought we should.  I guess I just assumed that this didn’t apply to me as a deacon, but now that the summer is over and the infection rate hasn’t leveled off, and winter is coming, when the experts expect the situation to get worse, I realize I need to join those of you who are already staying away.

     It will be a chance for me, too, to experience more deeply what the Church has always called “spiritual communion,” the idea that if we are unable to come to mass but sincerely desire it, we will receive the spiritual benefits of the Eucharist—an idea even more powerful when you consider the fact that the mass is being celebrated somewhere on this planet every minute of every day.  Every second, somewhere in the world.  It’s never not being celebrated.

     “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins said.  Or I think of this beautiful and famous passage from Augustine’s Confessions, celebrated in Abbot Jeremy’s recent video in his series from Mount Angel:Late it was I loved you, beauty so ancient and so new, late I loved you!  And look, you were within me and I was outside . . .  you were with me, and I was not with you!

The Lord is with us in our everyday lives.  Everything that happens to us speaks of him.  This is Augustine’s central insight, as it is St. Paul’s: “it’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  This is our faith.  This is who we are.

     “I will be with you always,” Jesus says at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, “even unto the end of time.

     In the meantime I’ll continue doing the online ministries I’ve already been doing, including this newsletter, and I’m glad to talk or correspond with you if you ever want to talk or correspond with me:  deaconcanderson@gmail.com.  

     I very much look forward to the time when we can all gather together again, in our bodies, with our actual faces.

     All is well and all shall be well.  Peace to you in Our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

     Chris

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Footnote: Voting this Election YearArchbishop Sample, i...

Footnote:  Voting this Election Year

Archbishop Sample, in his latest email, has asked us all to read the new version of Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship issued by the US Bishops this election year, and I urge you to read it, too.  It’s been a controversial document this year, but I think if you read it closely you’ll be both challenged and encouraged, whatever your political affiliations.  It doesn’t tell you how to vote.  It gives you a detailed and nuanced way of thinking about the choices we each of us have to make according to our own consciences and in light of the full range of Catholic social teaching.  I think it’s a very good document.

The archbishop has also asked us to read, and I also want to recommend, very strongly, another document the bishops have put out this year, reflecting these same ideas, Civilize It: Dignity Beyond the Debate, a document about “making room in your heart for those with whom you may disagree,” as the bishops put it, a document about “recognizing that each one of us is a beloved child of God and to respond in love to that reality,” and not just in the abstract but by taking this particular three-part pledge:

Civility: to recognize the human dignity of those with whom I disagree, treat others with respect, and rise above attacks when directed at me.
Clarity: to root my political viewpoints in the Gospel and a well-formed conscience, which involves prayer, conversation, study and listening. I will stand up for my convictions and speak out when I witness language that disparages others’ dignity, while also listening and seeking to understand others’ experiences.
Compassion: to encounter others with a tone and posture which affirms that I honor the dignity of others and invites others to do the same.  I will presume others’ best intentions and listen to their stories with empathy.  I will strive to understand before seeking to be understood.

 

As a deacon, and as your brother in Christ, I urge you all to make this pledge.

Peace to you, in Our Lord Jesus Christ

************

Quotes from Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, 2020

            US Catholic Bishops

In this statement, we bishops do not intend to tell Catholics for whom or against whom to vote. Our purpose is to help Catholics form their consciences in accordance with God’s truth. We recognize that the responsibility to make choices in political life rests with each individual in light of a properly formed conscience, and that participation goes well beyond casting a vote in a particular election.

The Church’s teaching is clear that a good end does not justify an immoral means. As we all seek to advance the common good—by defending the inviolable sanctity of human life from the moment of conception until natural death, by promoting religious freedom, by defending marriage, by feeding the hungry and housing the homeless, by welcoming the immigrant and protecting the environment— it is important to recognize that not all possible courses of action are morally acceptable. We have a responsibility to discern carefully which public policies are morally sound. Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems, but we cannot differ on our moral obligation to help build a more just and peaceful world through morally acceptable means, so that the weak and vulnerable are protected and human rights and dignity are defended.

Sometimes morally flawed laws already exist. In this situation, the process of framing legislation to protect life is subject to prudential judgment and “the art of the possible.” At times this process may restore justice only partially or gradually.

There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral evil.

In making these decisions, it is essential for Catholics to be guided by a well-formed conscience

that recognizes that all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose policies promoting intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions. These decisions should take into account a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue. In the end, this is a decision to be made by each Catholic guided by a conscience formed by Catholic moral teaching.

As Catholics we are not single-issue voters. A candidate’s position on a single issue is not sufficient to guarantee a voter’s support. Yet if a candidate’s position on a single issue promotes an intrinsically evil act, such as legal abortion, redefining marriage in a way that denies its essential meaning, or racist behavior, a voter may legitimately disqualify a candidate from receiving support.

 

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