Chris Anderson's Blog, page 15
January 27, 2020
What He Meant
When I drove to Spokane to see my dad
the smoke from the wildfires
was as acrid and thick as the clouds
the Angry make on the third
cornice of Purgatory. I couldn’t see
a thing until I drove away,
back down the gorge and along the river,
where the air was fresh
and the leaves barely turning.
I will never forgive you, he said as I left,
in his dementia. He was
hugging me in the carport. I could hear
his hearing aid trilling.
But I knew what he meant: forget you.
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Whatever Makes Us Dance
January 28, 2020
Memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas
Second Samuel 6:12-19
Then David, girt with a linen apron, came dancing before the LORD
with abandon, as he and all the house of Israel were bringing up the ark
of the LORD with shouts of joy and to the sound of the horn.
David dances before the ark of God “with abandon,” second Samuel says, and he shouts with joy, with all the others, and I think that’s an image of who we should be and of how we know that God is with us: when we feel joy, when we abandon ourselves to him, when we dance and play and sing.
With abandon: when we’re not self-conscious, when we’re not doubting ourselves, when we trust that what makes us most deeply happy is what makes God most deeply happy.
When we let go of the outcome. When we just are.
“We only offend God when we do something contrary to our own good,” St. Thomas Aquinas said, the great Doctor of the Church, whose feast day is today.
Contrary to what is right and healthy and true. Contrary to our true self. Contrary to our true heart’s desires.
In The Paradiso Dante encounters St. Thomas in the Sphere of the Sun, dancing with the other Doctors of the Church in a great circle of light. Around and around. Dancing and singing.
And when they stop, Dante says, in a wonderful image,
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.78-80
Whatever makes us feel the joy that David feels, whatever makes us feel the joy that St. Thomas feels, that is Christ in us. That is how God is calling us.
What are we supposed to do with our lives? Whatever makes us dance.
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The Embassy to the Water
Reading my journal from ten years ago.
How I was struggling then with all the same things.
The darkness. The heaviness.
Sometimes grace breaking through. Sometimes not.
At the pond my puppy barks at the water,
bouncing back and forth on shore.
Nervous. Excited. As if the pond has a body, too.
Is some heavy, indefinite animal.
All the leaves have settled on the bottom
and the water is dark. All you can see are the circles
the rain makes and a few bare branches
breaking the surface, reaching up from below.
I know the water is calling him.
I know soon he’ll jump in.
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January 14, 2020
Backwards
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
1 Samuel 2:1-8
God does everything backwards. He reverses everything.
When Mary in the Magnificat says “the rich he has sent away empty, and the hungry he has filled with good things,” or “he has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly,” she is really quoting and adapting the Song of Hannah from today: “the bows of the mighty are broken, / while the tottering gird on strength. / The well fed hire themselves out for bread / while the hungry batten on spoil.”
Both these wonderful women are using the rhetorical strategy of reversal, of antithesis. The high is low and the low is high. Nothing is what we expect it to be.
So today maybe God is calling us to think about our lives in reverse. If we’re really certain about something, maybe we should question it a little. If we’re really satisfied with something, maybe we should think again.
If we’re judging somebody today, if we’re criticizing someone in our minds, maybe we should give up that judgment.
But even more with our sadness and our loneliness and our despair. With our barrenness. That’s what we should really turn upside down. Maybe what seems empty today is really a call. Maybe it’s only in our emptiness that we can be filled. Maybe our desolation is just as revelatory as our consolation, and what is being revealed is God’s great and abiding grace.
Maybe we’ve got it all wrong, and it’s exactly when God doesn’t seem to be speaking to us, that he is. He’s just saying: I am in the quiet. I am in the humble. I am in the small.
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January 10, 2020
Love is Proof
January 7, 2020
1 John 4:7-10
We’re always worrying about whether God exists and how to prove it.
But it’s simple. We don’t need science. We don’t need history. We don’t need archaeology. “God is love,” the first letter of John says, and he really means it.
Love isn’t locked in the past. It’s subjective but it’s completely real. We feel it, we know it: when we look at someone’s face, when we shake someone’s hand, when we admire something outside us and see its beauty and rightness.
This isn’t easy. There’s a discipline to this, a command to a new way of seeing.
Weeks go by and finally I become aware that I’ve been judging people again and disliking people and feeling angry at people, without even knowing it.
Weeks go by and finally I become aware again of how selfish I really am. I only pray for what I want and what I need. I only think about what I’m feeling.
No wonder I don’t feel the presence of God. I’ve been blocking it.
If God is love I need to change my whole orientation. I need to be the camera, not what’s being photographed. I need to find windows, not mirrors. I need to look out.
And when through grace I do, there He is! God is here!
And notice, too. The key thing isn’t what I think and what I feel and what I do. The initiative comes from God. “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he has loved us.”
The way to prove the existence of God is by not trying to.
God doesn’t need to prove himself to us. We need to prove ourselves to him.
Or no, that’s not right. Not prove. Not strive and struggle and earn.
We need to let ourselves be loved by God.
We need to let ourselves be loved, and then that love flows through us, out into the world.
That’s the proof.
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December 29, 2019
Waves
The first sneaker wave only caught me.
I was looking away, and the next
thing I knew I was soaked to the shins.
With the second you shouted,
and I ran as fast I could, arms pumping,
and when I looked back you had
fallen to your knees, and the water was
streaming around you, the way it
streams around the rocks when
the tide recedes, and you were smiling,
you were smiling a sweet, shocked
smile, and I realized again how much
I love you, and I thought, this is how
it is, and this is how it will be.
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December 13, 2019
Advent II: God’s Calculus
Tuesday, December 10, 2019
Isaiah 40:1-11; Matthew 18:12-14
If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave
the ninety-nine in the hills and go in search of the stray?
God tells Isaiah to comfort his frightened people. To be tender to them. To reassure them.
But then what is Isaiah instructed to say, in the reading for today? That the valleys shall be filled in and the mountains brought low.
That doesn’t sound very reassuring to me. It sounds cataclysmic. Terrible.
And then the Lord tells Isaiah to cry this out, that “all flesh is grass,” that our beauty is fleeting and our lives just a moment. That we wither. That we wilt.
That doesn’t sound comforting to me. It sounds depressing. It sounds morbid.
But no, not really. It’s reassuring after all.
When I was really worried about something, really worked up, my dad used to say “in a hundred years, it won’t make any difference.” And he was right. What I was so worked up about wasn’t all that important, and it helped to hear that. I felt better.
Think of all the things you’re worried about–from the perspective of the stars. Think of all the problems you have to solve–from the standpoint of geologic time.
If you took a roll of toilet paper and rolled it out to its full length, the amount of time human beings have been alive on earth would amount to a tiny corner of the last square.
It’s humbling to think this way but it’s also freeing. All the little things that preoccupy us are really even littler even than we imagine. We’re little. We’re infinitesimal.
Relax. Let it go.
And yet here’s the paradox. Here’s the saving insight: God remains, and he loves us. “The word of our God stands forever,” Isaiah says, the Word that created the stars, the Word that created the earth, the Word that created time and exceeds it, and that Word is here now, too, is with us in this moment and the next, is never not with us.
The other day I went to a retirement party for a colleague, and I came away feeling sad and empty and ignored. I felt sad the whole rest of the day.
But God never ignores us. His calculus doesn’t work like ours: all of us count.
We are just one of a hundred–we are just one of a hundred billion–but somehow to God we are infinitely precious, we are precious beyond price, and none of us is ever lost. None of us is ever cast aside. God always finds us. God always carries us home.
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December 3, 2019
The Peaceable Kingdom
Isaiah 11:1-10; Luke 10:21-24
And the lion will lay down with the lamb.
What if we could live without fear?
What if we could live without ever being afraid?
Afraid of being judged.
Afraid of making mistakes.
Afraid of not being good enough.
Afraid of what other people think.
Afraid of being alone.
Afraid of growing old.
Afraid of dying.
Afraid the lion is always about to attack.
Afraid the lion is always lying in wait.
What if we didn’t have to be the lion?
Didn’t have to spend our lives stalking? Didn’t have
to spend our lives trying to kill someone else?
But we can, we can. This is the life
that is promised us
and this is the life we can have, today.
We can be the lamb, we can be happy and free,
because the Lamb has become us,
the Lamb is with us,
the Lamb of God, who came into the world.
Who is with us always.
What if we could be like a child again?
What if we could be innocent again?
What if we could trust again?
What if we could just be again?
We can. This the life we are promised
and that is ours even now.
We can be a child again
because the Child has become us.
The Child has come.
The Child is born into the world.
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Everybody’s High
In my prayer group they always want
to talk about the Big Bang, about the galaxies
and the gasses. I want to talk about
the light in the trees. A smile. A glance.
They always want to talk about the saints
and the martyrs. I want to say
I was happy. I was sad. I had come home late,
and Dad was watching Johnny Carson,
and John Denver was singing, flickering
in the dark. No, Dad! He’s not talking about
drugs. He had seen it raining fire
in the sky. His life was full of wonder
but his heart still knew some fear—friends
around a campfire and everybody’s high.
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November 12, 2019
Their Vast, Windswept Array
This morning as I looked at the morning stars,
their vast, windswept array,
I remembered I had seen a shooting star
days before, streaking across the sky,
then disappearing. I had forgotten. Leaves
scuttled across the driveway. No lights were on
in the sleeping houses. And then, at just
that moment—the moment of remembering—
another! Flashing above the trees!
Like that. I’m not saying those two objects
were related, with their brilliant white
tails. No metaphysics is revealed. I’m saying
to believe is to remember, and what
we remember is gone. And never gone.
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