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AriasSeptember 6, 2020Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95; Romans ...

Arias

September 6, 2020

Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

 

Not long ago I got an email from an old high school friend I’d not heard from in years.  He was in a dark place, he said, and he wanted some spiritual advice.  And I was stunned.  We were on the debate team together—he was a year ahead of me—and I’d never known anyone so brilliant, with such verbal facility and intellectual quickness, and I still haven’t.  It was like listening to Pavarotti sing.  He was a virtuoso.

And he wanted my advice?

What I was being asked to do was not to confront my friend in his wickedness, as Ezekiel is asked to confront the nation of Israel, but to speak to him of my faith, to try to say what I believe is true—and that’s hard enough, especially with someone you’ve always looked up to, someone so smart and justifiably skeptical about churches.  I was afraid he’d think I was being naïve or preachy—he’d think, “oh, that’s just something Christians always say.”  Or, “he’s just one of those Christians.”

But I am just one of those Christians, at least on my good days, through grace.  The only wisdom I have is from the scriptures, is from Christ, and though I had to approach this indirectly, had to avoid the kind of churchy language I knew would turn him off, I had to try to share what I believe as best I could.

I had to try to say:  be not afraid.  The Lord is with you.

Not in ways we can prove.  Not in ways we always notice.  “If today you hear his voice, harden not your heart,” the psalmist says, because this is how God speaks, quietly and day to day.  In the roses on the deck.  In a passage in a book.  “Wherever two or three are gathered together” he is present, Jesus tells us, even over the internet, even in an email from a friend—but always, and quietly, and tenderly, in ordinary things.

 

“The Church has left the building,” a parishioner wrote in another email, when I asked how he was doing in the pandemic—“the Church has left the building, and we are being called to love the people he puts in front of us.”  I think that’s a wonderful statement.  I think that’s a theologically profound statement.  The Church has left the building—and love, love, another one of those words that Christians always use.  But that’s because it’s the right word, the true word, however soft or fuzzy or irrelevant it might seem in our violent and anxious times.

I notice that Jesus says “every fact should be established”; we shouldn’t just fly off our various handles before we even know what’s actually true.  We should be rational, he’s saying.  We should wait and consider the evidence.

But even more than that, we should treat our neighbors as ourselves, with respect, as St. Paul says today, even when we confront them with what we think is true or know is false—not call them names, not tweet insults or post further lies. Not shoot them.  This person we believe is wrong is loved by God, is no more sinful than we are, however wrong or misguided he or she might be.

 

In fact I don’t think these passages are really about what we say.  I think they’re about what we don’t say.  I think they’re about listening.

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but last winter, before the pandemic, I was talking with a friend who was having a serious crisis of faith.  He was really struggling, and we talked and talked, and I said things, and then more things, until I ran out of things to say.  And for a moment I just sat there.  I just stayed, in silence.  It wasn’t a strategy—I didn’t know what else to do—but it was the turning the point.   Gradually I began to feel something changing in the air of the room.  Everything grew still.  And then out of that silence something beautiful and gentle started happening, my friend started saying what was really in his heart, honestly and without filtering or performing, and I could feel the Spirit rising up, I could hear the voice of the Spirit, and there was nothing more I needed to say.  It wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about him.

In a way it was very difficult, just to stay there.  Just to not turn away.  It was a kind of confrontation.  It wasn’t a saying of the truth, it was a waiting for the truth, but a hard waiting—and then it came.  It was there, deeper than words, deeper than tears.

 

A sequence of cartoons:  a woman is being burned at the stake and another woman says to her, “maybe you should take up yoga.”   A woman is drowning and another woman looks down from a dock and says, “focus on the positive in this situation.”  A woman is falling off a cliff and a man who is standing on the edge calls after her: “You need to speak goodness into existence.”

Maybe.  Maybe what I’m suggesting is naïve.  Is too fuzzy and intangible.

Jesus died for the truth—he died for who he was.

 

But there’s also this, this wonderful video I also saw the other day, on YouTube.  We’re in a busy shopping mall in Leeds, England, very crowded—this was before the virus—and an ordinary-looking man walks out of the crowd into the center of the atrium.  He’s middle-aged, wearing a leather jacket, hands in his pockets.  And he starts to sing.  He opens his mouth and starts to sing, loudly and clearly.  At first you think he’s crazy, he’s some kind of crank, but then you realize, wait a minute.  His voice is beautiful, it’s powerful—he’s singing a famous aria—he’s singing Nessun Dorma, from Puccini—this guy’s a tenor.  This ordinary man who has emerged from the crowd is a tenor, and he’s a great tenor, and his voice is building and rising, and people are stopping and looking, the expressions on their faces are changing, people who would never be caught dead at an opera, who don’t have any idea what opera is, they’re stopped in their tracks.  One little girl turns around and looks up at her mother, an expression of amazement on her face.  O look at the stars, he sings, that tremble of love and hope, and his voice builds and builds, it rises to its climax, and he hits that final, high note, and he holds it, holds it until it’s ringing in the air of that crowded mall, and something transcendent has happened, something wonderful has risen up out of that ordinary gray day, something excellent and pure, and everyone knows it, they can feel it, and they burst into applause.  They clap and clap.

And the tenor smiles, and looks around, then puts his hands in his pockets and walks back into the crowd.  He disappears.

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

 

 

 

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How Diagramming a Sentence Can Help You Pray A few year...

How Diagramming a Sentence Can Help You Pray

 

A few years ago, before I retired, I took over an advanced grammar course at OSU, a course that involved sentence diagramming.  I’d never diagrammed a sentence in my life.  Grammar was “a piano I played by ear,” as Joan Didion put it, and I’d done just fine.  I’d written essays and poems and books.

But I was game, and I had a good book, Martha Kolln’s Understanding English Grammar, with all the answers in the back, and I found that I really loved sentence diagramming.  I just loved it.  I’d go down to the New Morning Bakery and have lunch and spend hours lost in the structures of sentences, trying to figure out how the pieces fit and checking my diagrams against the correct ones in the back.  It was great fun.  “Nothing is more exciting than a diagramming sentence,” Gertrude Stein said, and she was right.

In a way what I loved the most was that there were right answers.  This is a rare thing for an English Professor.  Grading an essay is a more subjective thing, and various interpretations of a piece of literature can be valid and worthwhile.  But a verb is a verb.  A noun is a noun.  “I felt this was an infinitive phrase,” a student tells me after an exam.  “Too bad,” I say, “it isn’t.”

I felt like a scientist!  I had authority!

But I don’t think sentence diagramming really had any practical benefit, to be honest.  Students sign up for a course like this—it’s very popular—because they want a magic bullet, they want a device they can use to produce good writing anytime they want, but that’s not how it works.  Study after study has failed to show any correlation between knowledge of formal grammar and the ability to write well and without error.  I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true, and my own experience confirms it.  Some of my best diagrammers couldn’t write a good sentence to save their lives, and some of my best writers couldn’t diagram sentences worth a darn.

For one thing, grammar isn’t the same as usage, and it’s usage people worry about.  Grammar as Kolln defines it is descriptive, not prescriptive, and what it describes is the underlying structure of a sentence, its bare bones, not whether this or that word or phrase meets the superficial requirements of what’s called “Standard Written English.”  Look at the two sentences in the picture above.  “Brung” is the problem from one point of view, but as a verb it works just fine, and the sentence it’s in is exactly the same at the level of structure as the one with “brought.”  Really, it’s hard to write a completely incoherent sentence at that level.  Even Jabberwocky can be diagrammed.

The “grammar” of the “brung” sentence isn’t “bad,” and sentence diagramming doesn’t judge it in any event.  It just diagrams it, and it can be diagrammed just fine.

For another thing, and again the studies show this, the only way to learn to write well and to write without error is to read a lot over years and to write a lot over years and to revise a lot, to revise all the time, and to take a few basic terms from formal grammar to help in the revising and proofreading of actual sentences in actual pieces of discourse, again, and again, and again.

But I still loved sentence diagramming and I still thought it was great and I still thought it should be taught, that it was a good thing, not because it gives us mastery over language but because it gives us the experience of its mystery.  Not mastery.  Mystery.  We can all say really complicated things, from an early age.  We all play the piano by ear, every day, and the sentences we produce have all kinds of branches and tributaries, and often when I was sitting at the New Morning Bakery trying to figure out a correct diagram I just marveled at that.  How do we do it?  How can we produce strings of words so subtle and intricate and wonderfully rich without evening know we are?

And it was still deeper, because what happened at the New Morning for me and what I think happened for some of my students at least is that we all spent an hour or so isolating a single sentence out of all the torrent of words we hear and read and produce each day and froze it, fixed on the page, and really looked at it, really studied it, really honored it.  Its music.  Its poetry.  Its nuances.  And in the course of studying it we lost ourselves for a while.  We forgot ourselves for a while.  We looked up after an hour or so and people were standing in line ordering a piece of pie and spoons were clattering and reality was going on, and had been the whole time.  We’d just been somewhere else.

It’s in this sense that diagramming a sentence prepares us to pray and is even a form a prayer itself, as anything that takes us out of ourselves is prayer, quilting or cooking or gardening or shoeing a horse, anything that is real and objective and true and that we have to conform to, engage with, try to understand, try to get right—and the more objective, even the “dryer,” the better, as the great French philosopher Simon Weil put it.

“The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost sole interest of studies,” she says, in a really fascinating essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”  Most school tasks have “a certain intrinsic interest” as well, of course, but, Weil says, “such an interest is secondary”:

 

If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry, this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem.  On the contrary, it is almost an advantage.  It does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. 

For:

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension.  Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.  The result will one day be discovered in prayer. . . .

What Latin or Geometry or sentence-diagramming do is teach us a certain “way of looking” and this way of looking is first of all “attentive.”  The “soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he or she is, in all their truth,” and this self-emptying—which of course should call to mind St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians and the “self-emptying “of Christ into the world, the “kenosis”—this self-emptying can even teach us or at least prepare us to pay attention to the needs of others, to be compassionate.

What Latin or Geometry or sentence-diagramming can do is teach us humility, “a far more precious treasure than all academic progress,” and so, in that way, and in their focus on what is real, and true, and outside of us, what is true regardless of what we think, true in a way above all our ego and self-centeredness and petty preoccupations—in this way, ordinary old-fashioned “school subjects” can prepare us to focus on the Truth that is truer than all other truths, the reality that saves us, the reality of God.

For me the best thing about sentence diagramming is that I wasn’t good at it.  I kept failing.  Joyously.  Because even as I was failing, I was entering into the mystery, not just of language but of the Word itself, the Word Made Flesh, and it was entering into me.

In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it.  There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution, or to the words of a Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting . . . .

 

Prayer isn’t just something we do in a church or a mountain top, and it isn’t something that makes us feel a certain way.  Prayer is anything we do with integrity and anything we do with concentration and anything we do right, or fail to do right and know that we haven’t, anything that puts us into contact with what is intricate and beautiful and true. Because what is true, whatever is beautiful, if there is any excellence, that is God.

And if it’s tedious, as sometimes the mass is, if it’s exhausting, as sometimes prayer is, all praise.  Because it’s not about us.  It’s not about what God can give us, though he gives us everything.  It’s about our hope and our love and our own insufficiency, and the great, the endless mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

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Rock, Paper, Scissors

So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, and Matthias.     Then they prayed . . . and they cast lots for them, and the lot fell    on Mattias, and he was added to the eleven apostles.   Acts 1:21-26

 

     In the last two newsletters I’ve been talking about the role of chance or randomness in the work of grace, first from the perspective of the new ecological theology, and then from the perspective of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

     Today I want to reflect on this idea from a third perspective:  the perspective of Matthias, who was chosen after the Ascension to replace Judas, the betrayer, as one of the twelve apostles.

What I love is that the other eleven apostles chose him over Barsabbas by “casting lots.”

He was chosen by a roll of the dice.  By the short straw.  By “rock, paper, scissors.”

There must have been something good about Matthias to be one of the two proposed for admission in the first place.  He must have had a good character at least, and been a person of faith.  And he did something crucial on his own accord: he showed up, he was there, he made the effort to be present, and that’s not nothing—and he had accompanied the twelve before that, was with Jesus on the way, and so had earned the right to be considered.

But still, in the end, he was chosen not necessarily because he was better than Barsabbas but almost by chance, by luck—or by the Holy Spirit operating through luck, or by the Holy Spirit operating on the basis of some criteria for selection not visible to the people at the time or to us now.

And that’s the crucial thing.

I think of all the many good things in my life and how few of them have to do with me or my own efforts.  I was born in America.  I had two parents.  I never went hungry.  I went to good public schools and could afford to go to college and to graduate school, and then I was lucky enough to get a teaching job in North Carolina, when teaching jobs were hard to find, and then lucky enough to be able to come back to the Northwest and to teach at Oregon State.  I worked hard, of course, and I have abilities, but lots of people work hard and have abilities who don’t get to make a living teaching and writing and who aren’t able to live near a forest in Oregon, beautiful Oregon, sixty miles from the beach.

I have my health, so far.  I have healthcare.  And lots of people don’t–don’t have either–people who are just as capable and deserving as I am.

I don’t mean that life is random and I don’t mean that God doesn’t have plan for me as he has a plan for all of us and I don’t mean that he hasn’t called me to be a deacon, and to become a Catholic in the first place.  I don’t mean to dishonor the tremendous gift of that call but in fact to do the opposite, to acknowledge it as a gift, a wonderful gift, not something I feel entitled to but something I feel enormously blessed by.

If my ministry as a deacon depended on my inner virtues, on my personal holiness, I wouldn’t be a deacon.  Nobody would.

All I’m suggesting is that we be mindful of how blessed we are.  That we watch for the little gifts we are given every day, a look, a glance, a kind word, a laugh, a conversation, an unexpected email, an unexpected encounter.  What moves us and matters to us at the end of each day is hardly ever what we planned for or could have planned for.  It’s always something given to us from God, who is continually surprising us.

“God is always a surprise,” Pope Francis says.  “You never know where and how you will find him.  You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him.”

And when in those encounters we meet someone who is less fortunate than we are, who is down on her luck, or who has just gotten some bad news, or is struggling in whatever way, let’s not even secretly assume that it’s because they deserve it, that they haven’t earned any better, whatever their mistakes and their failings.  We all make mistakes and we all have failings.  Let’s instead continually call to mind the astonishing generosity of God, the astonishing and ever flowing grace of God, the loving and tender work of Christ, who is always present in our lives, who is always calling us, to our own task, our own ministry, our own mission.

 

 

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Wheel of Fortune

 

In my last newsletter I talked about the idea in contemporary theology that creation itself has a kind of freedom, that even quarks have free will.

What’s interesting, too, is that this is also a Medieval idea.  We can find it Dante’s Divine Comedy, the great poem of the Middle Ages.

Early on in their journey through the afterlife Virgil, Dante’s guide, explains the role of “Dame Fortune” in the heavenly scheme and her great wheel—the wheel of fortune.  She spins it, and wherever it happens to stop, that person is rich.  She spins it again, and wherever it stops, that person is poor.  It’s entirely random, and that’s the point:

All earth’s gear

            she changes from nation to nation, from house to house,

            in changeless change through every turning year.  (Inferno VII.79-81)

Dame Fortune is “the Lady of Permutations,” of “changeless change.”  “She passes and things pass,” Dante says, and it has nothing to do with us.  The rich don’t earn their riches and the poor don’t deserve their poverty and so we need to be humble.  We need to be compassionate.

What’s so surprising is that Dame Fortune, according to Virgil and according to the whole Middle Ages, has a privileged place among the heavenly spheres.  She is one of the angelic presences.

Paradise in Dante is a series of ever larger, nesting spheres—the spheres of the Moon, of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, of Jupiter, and of Saturn, and then of the realm of the Fixed Stars and finally the Empyrean, the mystical realm of God, and all these wheels are turning and all of them are related and the whole system, the whole ecology, is filled with beauty and purpose and love.  Space is not a void.  It’s not a blackness.  It’s a place of joy and music and light, divinely and intricately ordered, and somehow Dame Fortune has a special place inside this structure. Somehow her wheels spins within an order and goodness we can’t see or understand.  Randomness is contained in and made sense of, ultimately, in the highest heavenly spheres.

That king whose perfect wisdom transcends all

            made the heavens and posted angels on them

            to guide the eternal light that it might fall

                 from every sphere to every sphere the same.

            He made earth’s splendors by a like decree

            and posted as their minister this high Dame . . . .  

                the Lady of Permutations.               (Inferno VII.74-79)

Dante explains this as best he can, and many other things, too, again and again, then repeatedly falls back on the cliché that this is all a mystery.  This is all beyond words.   But in Dante this isn’t just a cliché.   In Dante this is always dramatized, with vividness and sharpness—and with joy, with love, with delight.  The mystery doesn’t depress him and it shouldn’t depress us.  It should inspire us.

At one point, Dante has climbed nearly to the top of the spheres, and he looks down from this great height, as if he is looking down from a great, impossibly tall building, and he sees the earth far below, in the center—all the other planets revolve around it—but not in the sense that the earth is more important or somehow greater.  It’s at the bottom of the great system, and it’s small, it’s tiny, not unlike the tiny blue dot of the earth as seen by the Voyager when it left the solar system and turned around one last time to see where it had come from.  The earth is “the threshing floor”—this is another very common image in the Middle Ages—and from his new perspective Dante now sees how petty our struggles are in the great scheme things.  How small we all are.

My eyes went back through the seven spheres below

and I saw this globe, so small, so lost in space,

            I had to smile at such a sorry show.  (Paradiso XXII.133-135)

Maybe my favorite cantos in the whole Comedy are earlier, when Dante reaches the Sphere of the Sun and encounters St. Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher on whose great Summa the whole structure of the Comedy depends, and St. Thomas isn’t discoursing.  He’s not chopping things up into little logical pieces.  He’s dancing, in a circle of light, he’s dancing with all the other doctors of the church, round and round the heavens in all pleasure and joy, and though in his courtesy he stops and goes to talk with Dante, it’s clearly a courtesy.  He clearly wants to get back to the dance as soon as he can.

When, so singing, those Sun-surpassing souls

            had three times turned their blazing circuit round us

            like stars that circle close to the fixed poles,

                 they stood like dancers still caught in the pleasure

            of the last round, who pause in place and listen

            till they have caught the beat of the new measure.  (Paradiso X.76-81)

It’s such a lovely image.  You can almost see their flushed and joyous faces.

 

And the point of all this?  The message Thomas gives him, the great champion of reason:  not to put too much faith in our reason!

O senseless strivings of the mortal round!

            how worthless is that exercise of reason

            that makes you beat your wings into the ground!  (Paradiso XI.1-3)

Reason is a wonderful thing.  We need it.  It can take us very far, right to the very edge of things, but ultimately God is much greater, love is much greater, joy is much greater.  “I have seen things,” Thomas is reported to have said on his deathbed, “that make all my ideas seem like straw.”

 

We don’t understand, we can’t understand, and that’s even a pleasure in itself, Dante suggests.  The souls in heaven take pleasure in not knowing all the mystery because it gives them the chance to obey the Lord and to trust in the Lord with greater love and devotion.  “Sweet it is”, the Eagle says, in the Sphere of Jupiter, “to lack this knowledge still / for in this good is our own good refined, / willing whatever God himself may will” (Paradiso XX.136-138)  All we need to know is that the whole universe is charged with beauty and with grandeur.  All we need to know is that God in his great mercy and creativity and love fills us each to our capacity and that in each of our places all is given, all is overflowing, all is beauty—”every nature moves across the tide / of the great sea of being” (Paradiso I.112-133)—and even with our knowledge of what the galaxies really look like, of the vast distances in space, of what seems like a void, we can take solace in this.  We can believe this.  Not all matter is dark, and even dark matter has substance and texture.  It’s a net.  A web.  Be not afraid.  There is life and meaning and purpose awaiting us beyond what only seems random to us now, what only seems pointless to us now, what only seems harsh and arbitrary and cruel.  There is music and dancing.  There is unimaginable light.

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Even Quarks Have Free Will: A Theological Reflection on Covid-19

This is a pretty long post (over 1600 words!) in which I try to do some theological reasoning about the pandemic, based on last Sunday readings.  But it’s not my reasoning, really, but the reasoning of the contemporary Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson, and she’s great.  I’m just quoting her and trying to explain her as best I can

 

 Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time:

Psalm 65; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

 

The other day someone posted this on Facebook: “I’m just wondering why none of these televangelists have been showing up at hospitals and performing miracles on all these Coronavirus patients.”

It really struck me, and I want to think aloud about it for a while, because I think it both raises a really important theological question and at the same reduces that question to something magical and absurd.  The meme is targeting televangelists, of course, not all Christians, but I think that we all have a tendency to fall back on magical thinking when we’re anxious and afraid.

And there’s a much more profound way of thinking about this: even quarks have free will.

—-

I first came across this different way of thinking in the work of the great contemporary Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson, who summarizes the thinking of what she calls the new “ecological theologians”:

They shun an explicitly interventionist model of divine activity.  They seek to make intelligible the idea that the Creator Spirit, as ground, sustaining power, and goal of the evolving world, acts by empowering the process from within.  They see divine creativity active in, with, and under cosmic processes.  God makes the world, in other words, by empowering the world to make itself. 

(All these quotes are from Quest for the Living God.)

It’s not magic, it’s love.  God isn’t some wish-granter and favor-giver, Johnson is saying, but a loving creator who so loves his creation he dies into it and rises with it, every second.

Another quote:

Relating this insight to the indwelling Spirit of God, ecological theology proposes that as boundless love at work in the ongoing evolution of the universe, divine creativity is the source not just of cosmic order but also of the chance that allows novelty to appear. . . Unpredictable upheavals might be destructive, but they have the potential to lead to richer forms of order.  In the emergent evolutionary universe, we should not be surprised to find divine creativity close to turbulence. 

I find this really exciting.  It’s not that God is a clockmaker God who winds things up and just walks away.  He’s present in every moment and in every thing but with tremendous tact.  He allows things to happen, to take their own way, and he doesn’t intervene to change them—though he certainly could—he is omnipotent—but he stays out of it, he restricts his own power, and he does this out of a desire to share in the real, day-to-day vulnerabilities of the creatures he’s created, right down to rocks and birds and trees.

—-

This really isn’t a new idea, in fact.  It’s classic Thomism, which teaches that there are primary causes and secondary causes.  God is the primary cause.  He makes everything happen.  But he also in his mystery and his greatness allows all kinds of secondary causes to cause all kinds of things:  wind, rain, the shifting of tectonic plates–whatever we choose to do any given morning:  to do this or to do that.

It’s in this sense that the new ecological theologians suggest that even subatomic particles have a kind of free will, at least infinitesimally, that even quarks have a kind of subatomic choice.  It’s as if God’s relationship to the whole of creation, to all matter and energy and living things, is exactly like his relationship with human beings.  God gives us as human beings free will so that we can choose to freely love him.  In the same way

the ever-faithful God is graciously courteous toward the freedom of the natural order.  Rather than intervening from the outside, the Creator Spirit enables ongoing creation from within by endowing the universe with the capacity to transcend itself toward ever forms.

With nature, with forces, with particles, this power of “choice” is apparently related to randomness or chance.  A particle could have moved there, or there, or somewhere else.  It could have moved anywhere.  But it didn’t.  It moved here.

I love that clause: God is graciously courteous toward the freedom of the natural order.

—-

And here’s the really exciting thing to me, the really mysterious, hard-to-grasp thing, the thing that makes me trust this and think of this as authentically and fundamentally Christian:  all of this flows from and is the inevitable consequence of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.  As with human beings, God gives himself away.  He is the all-powerful God who chooses out of love, an infinite and unjustified love, a purely gratuitous love, to give that power up:

Rather than acting like Caesar write large, Jesus did not cling to godly dignity but “emptied himself out,” foolishly, thereby opening up new life for others (Phil 2:5-11).  This enacts a kenotic form of divine power. . . .   [In other words] As on the cross, so too in the universe:  ecological theology proposes that divine kenosis did not happen only once at Jesus’ death but instead is typical of God’s gracious action in the world from the beginning.  Allowing the christic pattern of self-giving to interpret the Spirit’s creative action within the evolving universe means that divine agency does not have the character of determining, even dictating, all occurrences. Rather, divine kenosis opens up space for the genuine integrity of finite systems, allowing chance its truly random appearance. 

 I’m not sure I understand all of this—how, for example, we can account for miracles in this, for the specific interventions of God into our lives; how, in the same way, we can account for the validity of personal, petitionary prayer, for the clear instruction in scripture that we should pray for what we need and that God will give it to us.  But intuitively at least, and to some degree intellectually, I find this so exciting and so freeing.

It exactly solves the problem that the Facebook post both raises and reduces, which is the central problem in all of religious thought:  if there is a God, why does he allow suffering and death?

—-

And if you’ve stayed with me this far, let me make the final connection I have to make, because all of this—the Facebook post, Elizabeth Johnson, the new ecology—all of this flashed through my mind as I was reading Paul’s letter to the Romans this Sunday.  I thought:  Paul is talking about exactly the same thing the ecological theologians are talking about, but in his own, first century Greek terms.  I thought:  he’s intuited, through grace, exactly this insight.

Paul says that “the sufferings of this present time are nothing compared with the glory to be revealed to for us”—that there is some larger purpose and end to what we’re experiencing now, some great goal that makes sense of it in some way we can’t understand now, that our suffering and dying and even our experience of Covid-19 in particular are part of some larger evolution towards Christ, towards fulfillment.

And, Paul says, this isn’t just a question for us as human beings but even for nature, for the created world: “for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.”  This a puzzling, knotty, difficult sentence, but I think the Christian ecologists maybe give us a way to understand it.

Isn’t Paul saying, when he says that creation was “made subject to futility,” that God in his love lets all things live and die without interfering in that process but at the same time participating in it, being present to it, from within?  That he lets “corruption” happen, for some larger purpose, so that we can “share in the glorious freedom of the children of God”?  And note especially the word “freedom” here:  that it seems to apply to creation itself, not just to us as human beings.

Stars live and die so that other stars may live and die.  Flowers live and die so that other flowers may live. Labradoodles.  Whales.

Why does God allow the virus?  Because he loves us.

I know this a long and abstract post, but maybe that in itself is a way of saying that Christian faith is much more interesting and complex than a bumpersticker or a meme.

Though in another way, it’s really very simple, and foolish, and wonderful.  It’s what Psalm 65 proclaimed last Sunday: “rejoicing clothes the hills.”  The fields and the valleys “shout and sing for joy.”  They really do.

Or it’s the gospel for last Sunday, this wonderful gospel from Matthew, the Parable of the Sower.  The sower goes out and throws the seeds, wildly, indiscriminately—it’s a terrible agricultural practice—and the seeds fall wherever they will, on all kinds of different rocks and soil.  Some are choked and some thrive, and the sower doesn’t intervene.  He could.  He could plant in straight rows.   He could tend the seeds every hour.  But he doesn’t.  He doesn’t!  In his great graciousness and courtesy and good will he gives even the seeds the dignity of growing as they will or dying as they will, and all for a greater, glorious end—for in the end, in the end, some of that seed falls on rich soil, and produces fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

All praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.   “You have crowned the year with your bounty”!

 

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Easy

July 5, 2020

Matthew 11:25-30

 

We’re all feeling burdened right now.  We’re all feeling the weight of the world—of the pandemic and of the economic crisis and of the racism that’s been exposed once again, in our country and in our lives, this deep American sin.

And as Christians we have a duty to act—we have to act.  But how, exactly?  What are we supposed to do?  It feels so overwhelming.  So impossible.

 

And today, in the Gospel, Jesus says: “my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

All our problems?  They’re easy.  All our burdens?  They’re light.

 

I don’t mean how easy it is to wear a mask or maintain social distance, as both the governor and the archbishop have asked us to do—how really absurd it is to resist this and complain about this when we think about the real sacrifices, the truly heroic sacrifices that people have made in wars and famines and earthquakes and fires, and are still making, now, in the pandemic.

I mean that for us as Christians even real suffering and real loss are bearable, are easy, in some deep and fundamental sense, however hard they obviously are in other ways.

 

Almost exactly five years ago, on June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, took out his gun, and shot and killed nine black parishioners who had been praying and studying the Bible, including the pastor.

A few months later the new pastor, the Reverend Norvel Goff, climbed into the pulpit and preached about joy.

“I’m a little weary and worn,” he said, but “with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.”  With God there is joy, there is always joy—not just happiness.  There is no happiness in moments like this.  But happiness is finally trivial, happiness is finally fleeting.  Joy is deep and joy is enduring.  “Even in the midst of trials and tribulations,” Goff proclaimed, “we still have joy.”

We have joy because we have God.  We have joy because we believe in a love and a power greater than all our violence and all our hate.

 

This weekend we celebrate American independence and the great spirit of independence that has defined our country.  But as Christians we celebrate independence every day—our freedom from fear, our freedom from the false demands of the world, our freedom from all that makes us question our worth as human beings.

 

Or really, what we celebrate is our dependence, what we celebrate is our need:  our need for God, our need for grace.  Our yoke is easy and our burden is light because we don’t bear it alone.  Christ bears it for us and with us.  Christ gives us rest, Christ lightens our load, and so strengthened and so restored we can go out in his name and face what we must face, and not just that, not just endure, but work in the ways we’ve been given to work to ease the burden of others.

As Abbot Jeremy puts it in his latest newsletter and video, our best and first response to all that’s happening now should be “silence”—not the silence of indifference or inaction, but the silence of prayer, first and always—”prayer as the place,” Abbot Jeremy says, “where we let the work of God radiate outward into the world.”

This whole series of the Abbot’s newsletters is wonderful, I think.  You can find it on the Mount Angel Abbey website, and it’s life-giving.  Indispensable.  I can’t recommend it enough.

 

The meekness of Christ is a radical meekness.  The humility of Christ is a radical humility.  They might seem to have been defeated, these Christian virtues, by stupidity and ignorance and brutishness.  We might seem to be have been deluded, if we try to follow our Lord’s example.  God who is love is always being put to death.  But we know that his death is never the end.  We know that through his dying an even greater love is being released into the world.  It’s filling the world.  It’s the force that created the world, before time began, and it’s only when we let it come into us and let it flow through us that we can make the difference we are each called to make until the Lord comes again in his glory.

 

The burdens of poverty and injustice are too great to bear, and we are called to change that.  They’re crushing, they’re soul-numbing, and we are called to lighten the load and restore what is fair.  Christ gives us rest so that we can take his yoke upon us.

But first he gives us rest.  First he gives us strength.

It’s all grace.  Without him, we are nothing.

 

Last weekend Barb and I met our daughter and son-in-law at the Oregon Gardens, outside of Salem.  We’ve not seen them in person for a long time, and it was so good to walk with them through the roses and the Day Lilies and all the summer flowers.

Our son-in-law is Chinese-Indonesian-American–his parents immigrated from Jakarta when he was a little boy–and he’s grown up in Oregon with different skin and different eyes.  I love and respect him, and he’s Catholic, too, a deep and thoughtful Catholic, and so we have our faith to share.

But I don’t know what it’s like to be the only person of color in a room.  I don’t know what it’s like to be stopped by the police when you don’t look like everyone else.  I can only imagine, and I can only ask questions and listen.

 

And so we talked, and we listened, and we ate lunch together—we each brought our own.

We kept six feet apart, and we had our masks if we needed them.  It was the very least we could do—it’s what we had to do—and we did it not for ourselves, but for each other.

But we weren’t really at a distance.  We weren’t really far apart.  For a moment we were carrying the burden together, the four of us.  For a moment, together, we could feel the presence of Christ.  We were free.

 

As Archbishop Sample said last week in The Sentinel, there are vast structural changes that need to be made, there are systemic problems requiring systemic solutions, and as Christians we need to work to find them.  “It’s undeniable,” the archbishop says, “that there are still injustices that sicken segments of our society.”

But it’s to moments like this that all the changes lead and it’s for moments like this that we try to make them.  We work so that everyone has the capacity and the security and the opportunity to visit their families, or to eat a quiet lunch, or to walk in a garden on a morning in June.

And it’s from these moments that all our actions should proceed.  It’s where they should all begin.  Because this is where God is.  This is where he can be found:  when we are at peace.  When through him and with him we are free—when we are all free.

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Another Word for Father

       from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans, 2016)

 

When my oldest son was sixteen we drove to Spokane to pick up an old car my dad was giving him, a 69 Mercury Bobcat, rusted along the doors.

The next morning John got into the driver’s seat, backed out, grinning, and disappeared down the street on his long way home, 400 miles, by himself, through the desert and the mountains.

All I could do was stand there and watch him go.

“Another word for father,” says the poet Li-Young Li, is “worry.”

 

When I think of the image of God the Father, God the Father of Us All, I think of his sadness.  I think of him standing in the driveway, watching his son disappear.

God is not an all-powerful God who ignores the suffering of others.  He is an all-powerful God who by his very nature gives all his power away.  He is Absolute, and He chooses to empty Himself out, absolutely.

 

I think of the day Maggie and I were walking by the track at the middle school—she was four–and before I knew it she was running.  She had decided to take off.  When I looked up I saw her in the distance, rounding the curve, her little arms pumping, her wispy hair floating behind her.

 

There is light and there is darkness and we can’t reduce one to the other or see for ourselves how they are held together, what larger movement reconciles their tensions, or if the tension itself is the order, or the plan.  For us it must be and, this and that.  To try to rise above the and, to turn it into a thus or therefore, is arrogant.  It’s impossible.

At the Sea of Galilee I looked out over the waters, to the hills, and the sky, and I saw what our Lord himself must have seen, the same topography, the same rises and falls.

And in Nazareth I saw this:  a middle-aged man walking with his son.  The son was 15 or 16, with wild eyes and a wild smile, neck straining, head at a crooked angle, stumbling and twitching down the sidewalk.  Flapping his arms.

I looked away, as we do.  I didn’t want to see it—not there, in Nazareth.

But later I remembered.  I remembered how patiently the father managed to get the boy into a car.  I remembered how heroic the father seemed, and how terribly burdened.

 

And I believe in the dove, too, descending from the sky.  I believe in the wind blowing against the door.  I believe the man who wept over Jerusalem entered into it, and let it enter into him, and we must, too, and when we do, when we feel what we must feel, we will rise with him and we will live with him and somehow, in the midst of this sadness and loss, there is joy, too, joy we can’t explain and don’t have to because it’s real, it exists, it’s true.

All of it.  All at once.

 

 

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The Alphabet of Grace

This is also the title of a wonderful book by Frederick Buechner,

a book that changed my life.   I can’t recommend it enough.

 

Last week I finally retired from Oregon State, fully and officially, and I’ve been organizing the books I brought home from my office.  It’s a useful thing emotionally, a way of starting to sort through my thoughts and feelings now that I’m really done.  And one of the things I’ve discovered is the spiritual power of the alphabet.

I have a lot of poetry books, and I was going to rank them, my favorites first, but somehow I found myself putting them in alphabetical order, the great next to the not-so-great, the famous with the obscure.  There was a wonderful randomness about it, a democracy, and yet at the same time a clear, useful order.  It was oddly exhilarating.

 

I thought of the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus tells us not to sit first at the table but last and not to invite the rich to the banquet but the poor and the outcast.  “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” he says, which is to say, we’re all in this together.  The earthly hierarchies no longer apply.

 

Another useful thing about reorganizing my library is that I’ve found all the duplicates, all the multiple copies of the same book—in one case, four—of Margaret Ralph’s great book on how to read the Bible, And God Said What?  I depend on that book, I need it, and over the years when I haven’t been able to find it, between my office and home, I’ve just gotten another one.

And God said what?

That the first shall be last.

That there is order and purpose but an order and a purpose not based on power or prestige.

That we all have a place on the shelf.

That we all die—and we all live.  Blessed be the Lord!

 

 

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All the Way to Heaven

 

How quietly hard faith can be sometimes.

A friend of mine has been struggling.  She has this feeling of futility, as if nothing she’s done really matters, and now the pandemic is hanging over all of us and everything seems suspended.  No one knows what the future will be.

And I thought of Dorothy Day, the great American Catholic and founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, and of her wonderful diaries.

Day is always so realistic in her diaries, and yet, for just that reason, so encouraging:

Today I thought of a title for my book, “The Duty of Delight.”  I was thinking, how as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on earth, the suffering, the Cross.  And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy which goes with loving.

This is from February 24, 1961, when Day was 64.

And this is from seven years later, Easter Sunday, April 14, 1968, when she was 71

Always when I awaken in the morning it is to a half-dead condition, a groaning in every bone, a lifelessness, a foretaste of death, a sense of “quiet terror,” which hangs over us all.  A sense of the futility of life and the worthlessness of all our efforts. . . .

I turn desperately to prayer.  “O God make haste to help me.”  And those magnificent psalms, and the prayer of the church, prayers which thousands, tens of thousands, are saying each morning all over the world, and I am saved.

This consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day.  I am turned around, away from the contemplation of the world of sin and death to the reality of God. . . .

Through this turning away, “all the way to heaven is heaven” to me, as St. Catherine of Siena said.  The sun has risen, the air is warmed, the birds are singing outside . . . .

     All the way to heaven is heaven, Dorothy Day believed, or tried to believe.  Hoped.  Prayed for.  This is the move, the turning around, we all called to make, every day of our lives, and the move that with grace we can always make, to turn from the world to God, and so to see God in the world, where he has always been.

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Zooming Emmaus

April 26, 2020

Third Sunday of Easter

1 Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35

 

Like everyone else on the planet I’ve been spending a lot of time on Zoom.  I teach my classes on Zoom, I meet my friends on Zoom, I see my kids on Zoom.  I spend so much time on Zoom that when I look out the window I expect to see faces in the sky, laid out in a grid.

I miss touching people.  I miss smelling people.  I miss the bodies of people.

I miss the the Body of Christ–the knowing of Jesus in the breaking of the bread.  Not the seeing of an image of the bread.  Not the live-streaming of the bread.  The touching of it.  The swallowing of it.

 

But in another way our virtual lives this last month might be teaching us something about the Risen Christ.  They might be giving us insight into the Resurrection, and the Incarnation.

Our Lord isn’t virtual.  Our Lord isn’t just a shadowy square.  He’s real, completely real.

But he is real in a radically new way.

Abbot Jeremy talked about this in one of a lovely series of YouTube videos posted on the Mount Angel website during the Octave of Easter.  Again, he was broadcasting.  He was on a screen.  But he was talking about Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John mistaking Jesus for the gardener—and how Jesus tells her not to touch him when she finally recognizes who he really is:

     It’s as though [Abbot Jeremy says] they, too, were taking the COVID-19 precautions that prevent human touch today!  But that is not what his words mean.  He is telling her that they are now in a whole new realm.  It’s not like it was before—it’s more.  Jesus is no longer one among many material things.  His resurrected life is now invading us and the universe, entirely!

My heart burned when I heard this.  It leapt.  It’s true that Jesus allows Thomas to touch his wounds.  It’s true that Jesus eats in the presence of his disciples.  But he can also come through walls, and no one seems to recognize him at first, and he’s never present for very long.   Soon he vanishes, he disappears, he isn’t even a face on a screen, and that’s because he is now more fully and completely present in the world than he ever was in his one, historical body.  He is no longer obvious.  He is everywhere:

     Dear brothers and sisters [Abbot Jeremy continues], our Lord is living his risen life within us.  He is the hidden living force in    everything alive.  He is the secret life within every person who has ever lived, is alive today, and who ever will live. 

 

Or as the first Letter of Peter puts it,

     He was known before the foundation of the world, but revealed in the final time for you, who through him believe in God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.

 

Maybe this is what we are being called to see in our present crisis:  Christ in the trees and Christ in the rain and Christ in the people we love, however far away they are.

 

On Holy Saturday a dear friend of mine died, Father Peter Ely, a Jesuit and one of my teachers at Gonzaga years ago.  He walked out into the garden of the Jesuit residence at Seattle University, where he had gone on to teach and serve for many years, and died, of a heart attack.  When they found him, they thought at first that he was just lying down on his side.

Peter was the one I went to when I realized that I wanted to become Catholic, and I’ll never forget his kindness and his generosity as he sat with me in the living room of the old house we were renting near campus and talked with me every week about the history and the teachings of the Church.  I’ll never forget my first communion, at a home mass where Peter presided, in that same old house, on Pentecost, 1977—he was the first person ever to give me the Body of Christ.  Later he baptized two of our three children.  He was the sort of friend you don’t think about very often but who is very, very important—the sort of friend you don’t really recognize, not fully, until he vanishes—vanishes into a new and fuller life—as Father Sundborg, the president of Seattle University, put it at Peter’s memorial, where the Emmaus story was also the gospel reading.

 

The memorial, too, was online, on Zoom—Peter had just learned how to use it himself, for a class he was teaching this spring—but it was very moving.

In the beginning there was a picture of the spot in the garden where he fell.  There were already flowers and cards and a cross there, a kind of shrine.  And there was also a picture of the last thing Peter may have seen in this life, given the way he was facing:  a cherry tree, in blossom, and the sky behind it.

Various people gave testimonials to Peter’s friendship and teaching and influence, one after the other, lay people and priests, and in all of them there was this strong Ignatian conviction that Christ is present everywhere in the world, that as the Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin once put it, “everything that happens is adorable.”

And near the end of the memorial, one of the older Jesuits read a poem by another Jesuit writer, the nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.  It’s called “When Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and when I heard this old friend of Peter’s read the last few lines, in his strong, gravelly voice, the tears came into my eyes:

     For Christ plays in ten thousand places, 

     Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 

     To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 We couldn’t gather around a coffee table in an old house near campus, we couldn’t stand together in a great cathedral, we couldn’t share in the breaking of the bread, the bread that Peter broke again and again in his fifty years as a priest.

But Christ was present in that moment.  I know he was.  All our hearts were burning.

     Even now, in the pandemic, even now, Christ plays in ten thousand places.  He is lovely in limbs and in the features of our faces, even in the faces we can only see on a screen, as he was lovely in Peter’s face, and still is, as he is lovely in yours, and in mine, and in all the faces in the world, now and forevermore.

 

 

 

 

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