Chris Anderson's Blog, page 16

Shelter

November 17, 2019

Second Thessalonians 3:7-12; Luke 21:5-19

Last week a friend of mine from the parish was working at the men’s homeless shelter, serving dinner, and a woman from another church was working beside her.

At one point the other woman turned to my friend and said, “why doesn’t St. Mary’s do . . . such and such?”  And a little later: “why doesn’t the Catholic church get involved in . . . such and such?”  And a little later: “why do Catholics always say . . . such and such?”  And the men kept coming up, in their tattered clothes, and the bread was served, and the lasagna, and the oranges.

My friend was a little upset by this woman, and I don’t blame her, but I really admire both of them, for being there, for serving—as so many, many of you in the parish do, quietly, tirelessly, behind the scenes.  In fact, I’d say that St. Mary’s is involved in everything in this community, through you.

But what I’d also say, to the woman from the other church, is what St. Paul says today in his second letter to the Thessalonians:  we hear that some among you are disrupting things, “minding the business of others.”  Such people “we instruct and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to work quietly and to eat their own food.”

 

The Christians of Paul’s time expected the Second Coming, the literal, the actual end of the world, and soon.  They thought the fire would come and they would be tortured and killed, any minute.  And yet Paul is constantly telling them and Jesus is constantly telling them, be not afraid.  Don’t worry about exactly when and how.  Stay in the present.  Be in the moment.   Sweep the garage.  Rake the leaves.

 

It’s very important for us as followers of Jesus to be informed, to get our news from multiple sources, to try to understand the facts, and to be upset about the facts when we do find them.  Nations are rising against nations.  Injustice is everywhere.  The whole planet is dying.  If we’re not outraged we’re not paying attention.

But there’s a danger here, too, a real spiritual danger.

It’s very important for us as followers of Jesus to work for systemic change, to try to make our institutions better—by voting as our conscience dictates, by giving money as our conscience dictates, by protesting as our conscience dictates—even by joining committees or running for office, if that’s our particular call, even leading the protests or trying to implement the changes, if that’s what God is calling us to do.

But there’s a danger here, too, a real spiritual danger, and the danger is this.  It’s a lot easier to be outraged by the wretchedness of the world than to be outraged by our own wretchedness.  It’s a lot easier to rail against what’s wrong with other people than to face what’s wrong with ourselves.  It’s a lot easier to be caught up in the abstract than to engage in the real, concrete work.  And it’s a lot more exciting.  Ordinary life is no fun at all.  It’s much better to imagine ourselves as heroes in some drama, to enter into some epic fantasy, at least in our own minds.

We complain about tyrants but are tyrants at home.  We argue for changes in governments and systems but don’t adjust our own schedules to spend time with our kids.  We call out others for their racism or sexism and then judge everyone around us, for how they look or what they wear.

 

The challenge is always to balance our inner and our outer lives—and always to start with the inner, to always start with prayer.  A friend of mine was a community organizer in the sixties, and he told me that in the beginning the group always prayed before they went out and knocked on doors.  But then things got so busy they skipped praying and just went out and knocked on doors.   Finally, after a while, they stopped knocking on doors.  They stopped doing anything.

Jesus is the source.  Without him, everything else collapses.

The challenge is to accept with humility the small work we each have been given to do.  “If we would aim at perfection,” our new saint St. John Henry Newman wrote, “we must perform well the duties of the day.”  This, he says, is the hardest work of all.  “I don’t know anything more difficult, more sobering, so strengthening,” he says, “than the constant aim to go through the ordinary day’s work well.”  It’s difficult work because it’s obscure work.  No one sees us.  It’s difficult work because it’s tedious work.  We’re just spooning out lasagna, half the time to people who don’t seem to care or don’t even thank us, and meanwhile the woman we’re standing next to is attacking our faith and assuming to know both who we are and who we should become.  It’s difficult work because when we’re standing next to someone like that, or encountering the poor, really encountering them, face-to-face, we have to confront our own anger, our own pride, our own spiritual poverty.

 

But this is what we need to do, first and most of all, because to work quietly and mind our own business requires us to trust in God’s judgment, not our own—to realize that we don’t have the power.  We don’t have the answers.

This is what we need to do, first and most of all, because to stop and live in the moment, to first be ourselves, where we are, is to find our hope, too.  Our joy.  It’s to realize that the end of the world is already here, in every minute, and that not a hair on our head has been harmed, even if we don’t have any hair, even if we’re homeless and haven’t washed our hair in weeks—that no matter how bad things get and how many empires fall, there lives a freshness and a goodness and a love deep down things, a love and a goodness we can’t understand and don’t need to, a love and a goodness we can’t explain and don’t need to.  It’s not up to us to account for all the grief and contradictions in the world.  It’s up to us to surrender to the One Who Can, the One who holds us in his arms and gives us our home, our true shelter, who loves us everywhere and always.  “The Christian has a deep, silent, hidden peace which the world sees not,” St. John Henry Newman says, “like some well in a retired and shady place, difficult of access,” and no matter what happens, no matter what world ends and what world begins, we know this peace and we have this peace.

And the stars shine down through the gaps in the clouds, even in South Corvallis, above the homeless shelter, and the homeless men finish their meals and lie down in their beds, and later we lie down in our beds, too, and we rest, we rest, we all rest in God.  We are not afraid.

“Go to bed in good time,” St. Newman says, “and you are already perfect.”

Protect us O Lord, as we stay awake, and watch over us as we sleep, that awake we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in his peace.

 

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Lord, I Am Grateful Before You

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Romans 1;16-25; Psalm 19; Luke 11:37-41

 

This morning when I let out my dog the moon was shining down and the stars were shining down and I thought of what Paul says today in Romans: “ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.”  In this vastness, this beauty.

“The heavens declare the glory of God,” the psalmist says today.  The moon declares and the stars declare.  Even my new puppy declares, sniffing around in the bushes.

Then the day goes on and we go to work and we get caught up in the things we get caught up in.  We start worrying about little things:  what people are wearing, how they talk, whether they wash their hands before meals in the prescribed way, as the Pharisees do in today’s gospel.  In the morning we are awed.  In the afternoon we are Pharisees, too.  The stars are always shining down, even during the day.  We just can’t see them.

There’s a beautiful Jewish prayer I came across the other day: “O Lord, I am grateful before you.”  This is the attitude we are called to.  This is the prayer we should pray.

When I walk out beneath the morning stars and feel my own smallness.  When I go back inside and see my wife’s face.  When I get down on the floor and play with my new puppy.

“O Lord, I am grateful before you.”

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Lord, Don’t You Care?

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Luke 10:38-42

 

Lord, don’t you care that I have to prepare for my class tomorrow?

Don’t you care that I have to reorganize my PowerPoints?

 

Lord, don’t you care that our stove stopped working and we have to get a new one?

Don’t you care that I’m covered with poison oak and itch all over?

Don’t you care that I have to drive up to Portland on Thursday and I don’t want to go?

 

Don’t you care that my father-in-law is on Hospice and that we’re so worried about him dying peacefully and without pain?

Don’t you care that my best friend died a few months ago?  How much I miss him?

 

Don’t you care that I’ve gained a couple of pounds?

Don’t you care that there are squirrels in the attic and they scratch and scratch at night and we can’t seem to get rid of them?

 

Don’t you care, don’t you care, don’t you care?

 

Chris, Chris!  You are worried about many things.  Too many things.

    Of course I care about the squirrels, of course I care about the stove, of course I care about your father-in-law dying peacefully and without pain.  I care about every part of your life.  Every hair on your head.

     But there is only thing to be anxious about, only one thing really to worry about, and that’s God, that’s the presence of the Father, in every moment.  That’s me, here and now.  Slow down.  Listen.  Be.  All those other things will take care of themselves, and they’re far less important than you think they are anyway.

     Breathe.  I am here.  I am here.  That’s all that really matters.  That’s all that counts.  That’s all.

     Let go.  Trust in me. 

 

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I Cannot Be Thrown Away

John Henry Newman is to become Saint John Henry Newman this October 13th, and I am very glad.  He is very important in my faith life, both for the clarity of his thinking but even more for the sweetness and sincerity and honesty of his spirit.  This is what comes through in this really remarkable prayer and reflection:

God was all-complete, all blessed in himself; but it was his will to create a world for his glory.  He is almighty, and might have done all things himself, but it has been his will to bring about his purposes by the things he has created.  We are all created for his glory–we are created to do his will.  I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; whether I be rich or poor, despised or esteemed by man, God knows me and calls me by name.

God has created me to do him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another.  I have my mission–I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  Somehow I am necessary for his purposes, as necessary in my place as an archangel in his–if, indeed, I fail, he can raise another, as he would make the stones children of Abraham.  Yet I have a part in his great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.  He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good.  I shall do his work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep his commandments and serve him in my calling.

Therefore I will trust him.  Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve him; in sorrow, my sorrow may serve him.  My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us.  He does nothing in vain; he may prolong my life, he may shorten it; he knows what he is about.  He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me–still he knows what he is about.

O Adonai, O Ruler of Israel, Thou that guides Joseph like a flock, O Emmanuel, O Sapientia, I give myself to Thee.  I trust Thee wholly.  Thou art wiser than I–more loving to me than I myself.  Deign to fulfill Thy high purposes in me whatever they may be–work in and through me.  I am born to serve Thee, to be Thine, to be Thy instrument.  Let me be Thy blind instrument.  I ask not to see–I ask not to know–I ask simply to be used.

St. John Henry Newman

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The Grand Canyon Compared to Bumble

The Grand Canyon is hard.  Bumble is soft.

The layers of the Grand Canyon

are made of rock and they are mostly horizontal.

Bumble’s layers are layers of fur,

 

long and creamy, and the locks curl and wave.

The Grand Canyon is vast.  Bumble is small.

The Grand Canyon has millions of visitors a year.

Bumble meets people when we’re walking

 

in the woods or go down to the coffee shop.

The way the Grand Canyon loves me

takes millions of years.  It happens in the rocks.

Bumble runs up wiggling, his eyes

 

warm and bright.  There is only this.  Only

me.  For him, too, there are no days.

 

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Mothers and Brothers

September 24, 2019

     He was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside and they wish to see you.”  He said to them in reply, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.”   ( Luke 8:19-21)

I remember a moment when my daughter Maggie was sixteen and stood in our kitchen and said no, Dad:  you’re wrong.  I was getting mad at her for something, and she was bravely standing up to me, and even in that moment I thought, she’s right. However good a parent is, however loving, a child finally needs to be her own self, to define herself not by her father’s expectations or by her mothers’s but by what’s best for her.

And I think maybe that’s what Jesus is talking about today, as he was a few weeks ago in the Sunday Gospel when he said we should “hate” our mothers and fathers. He’s being hyperbolic, of course. He’s not saying we should reject our mothers and fathers, or our mothers and our brothers.  He’s exaggerating.  He’s using mothers and brothers as symbols of the world, even the good things of the world, and how we have to ask for the grace of indifference, to use the Ignatian word, to love nothing more than God, to care about nothing more than God—exactly the theme of last Sunday’s Gospel, too, that “we can’t serve both God and mammon.”

Our mothers and our brothers are not Hewlett Packard.  Hewlett Packard doesn’t define us.  Our mothers and brothers are not OSU.  OSU doesn’t define us.  Our mothers and brothers are not Apple or Google or Amazon, or Fox News, or MSNBC.

Our home isn’t in the future and it’s not in the past.  It’s not in what has happened or what might.  Our home is here, now.  It’s in this particular moment, this particular day, in mid-September, when the leaves are starting to turn and the days are getting shorter.

Nothing is wanting to us, Ruth Burrows prays again.  All is given. 

    Strengthen us, O Given One, to be glad.

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Cutting Down the Paper Maple

If you plant a tree too close to the house

and it grows for several years, ten, fifteen feet,

but it’s not doing so well either—

the leaves are crinkly and thin—there are too

 

many bare twigs—the only thing you can do

is cut it down.  I never really liked it

anyway.  I tell my friend I want to grow closer

to You, to surrender to You, but dying

 

is too tedious in fact, morning after morning,

and sometimes I’m so afraid.

I’d much rather fire up the chainsaw and bite

into those branches, one by one.

 

Clear out the space.  Sawdust

flying.

 

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And God Said What?

Luke 14:1, 7-14

I’ve been reorganizing my books, and it’s been really useful emotionally, a way of sorting through my thoughts and feelings now that I’ve retired.  And one of the things I’ve discovered is the spiritual power of alphabetizing.

I have a lot of poetry books, and I was going to rank them, my favorites first, but somehow I found myself putting them all 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.

In the Gospel last Sunday Jesus says not to sit first at the table but last, and not to invite the rich to a meal but the poor and the outcast.  The first shall be last and the last shall be first, he says again, 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 book on how to read the Bible, And God Said What?  I really depend on that book, I really need it, and over the years when I haven’t been able find it, between my office and home, I’ve just gotten another one.

And God Said What?

That there is order and purpose, but an order and a purpose not based on power, not based on 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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Abraham, Augustine, and the Uber Driver

August 11, 2019

The Book of Wisdom 18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-19; Luke 12:32-48

 

When Abraham went on his journey, called by God, he didn’t worry about missing his flight or how to get from the airport to the hotel or what the hotel would look like. He went, in faith.  He didn’t even know where he was going, Hebrews says.

But I’m a nervous traveler, I worry about everything, more and more as I get older.

A few weeks ago I was at a deacon conference in Cincinnati, and my return flight left so early I had to leave from where I was staying at three in the morning to get to the airport in time.  And I was panicked.  I was using Uber, and I’m new to Uber, and I just couldn’t believe anyone would actually come.

So there I stood, on a dark, empty street, in a strange city, all alone, and I opened the app, and I called for a ride, and miracle of miracles, she came.  She actually came.  I was the master, contractually, and she was the servant, and she was ready when I knocked.  But she was more than that, too.  She was a thin, wrinkled black woman, in her seventies, I guess, with a calm, wise, steady way about her, and she seemed to sense how anxious I was.  When I told her I was a deacon and had been at a deacon conference, she said, ah, I have a holy man in my car!  God be praised.  Because she was a deacon, too, it turned out, in her own church, and she knew, she said, that Jesus is always with us, always by our side, no matter how far away from home we are.

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. You must, therefore, discern the encounter. 

I was the one who was surprised in this situation, and the Uber driver was the one who discerned:  my need, my faith.  The weakness of my faith.

You must be prepared, Jesus says, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.

 

Jesus is talking in part today about the end of the world, about his Second Coming, something the early Christians expected any minute.  But when the end of the world didn’t happen right away, didn’t come, they had to rethink what Jesus meant, to internalize it, too, see it as a matter of our inner lives, and that’s in part what gave rise to the gospels. The idea of an inner coming, of an inner conversion, is what all the gospels are trying to convey.

We can think of the Second Coming as our own deaths, for example, how we can’t predict them, how we can never know when they will happen, and so we have to be centered, grounded in God, every day.

But even more importantly, we can think of the Second Coming as happening every minute, as Christ always coming, in all that happens to us, knocking softly, quietly.

 

The most important moment in early Christian literature is the moment when St. Augustine breaks down in a garden and starts to cry.  This in The Confessions, written in 398.  Augustine has been struggling to understand God intellectually and struggling to master his own pride and lust.  He’s in his mid-thirties.  But it’s not working, he can’t figure things out, the strain of it is too much, and he comes to this walled garden and he throws himself down underneath a fig tree and he begins to cry.  He just sobs. It’s the end of his world.

But it’s also the beginning of a new world, of a new life, because beyond the walls of the garden he hears the voices of children. They seem to be playing some kind of game, chanting some kind of rhyme, and this catches his attention. It stops him.  It sounds like they’re saying, take and read, take and read.  He knows they’re not.  He knows he’s hearing this wrong, that there isn’t a nursery rhyme like that, and yet he feels a pull, a call—take and read—and he stops crying, and he gets up, and goes over to where he left his Bible.  He picks it up, and he begins to read, and the verse he happens to find seems addressed directly to him.  It’s what he needed.  It breaks the logjam.  It opens him. Frees him.

But here’s the thing.  Augustine didn’t hear the voice of God directly, as the patriarchs did, or as the prophets did, or as Jesus did, and some people still do.  He heard the voices of children, and he knew they were the voices of children.  But somehow he also knew that they were something more.  I checked the force of my tears, he writes,and rose to my feet, being quite certain that I must interpret thisas a divine command to me to open the book and read the first passage which I should come upon.

This is one of the great, defining moments in our tradition, and it hinges on a children’s game, it hinges on something small, fleeting, ordinary that Augustine is ready to respond to.

This is one of the great, defining moments in Christianity and it hinges on an act of interpretation.  He chose to interpret this, Augustine says.  This wasn’t obvious.  He had to read it.  He had to look beyond it.  He had to make a leap of faith.

God is always a surprise, and we must be ready to discern.

 

How many times have we heard the voices of children, beyond the wall, and walked away? How many times have we not heard the voices at all?  How many times have we failed to interpret what is always already true:  that God is with us?

 

But in Cincinnati, at three in the morning, my Uber driver the deacon was ready, she opened the door, and by the time we got to the airport, I was ready, too. I had experienced a Passover, to quote from the Book of Wisdom—I had passed over, from fear to trust.

And she turned around in her seat, and she asked me if I would pray for her, and she reached out her long, thin arms and took my hands in hers.

And I did, I blessed her.

She was the deacon, and she had called me to be a deacon again, she had given me the grace to be a deacon, or that grace had flowed through her, and when I had finished, she prayed for me, too, in her soft, smooth voice, with her rich Kentucky accent.

Lord Jesus, she said, be with my brother Chris and help him to catch his flight and get back to Or-E-gon.  Help him to not be afraid.  Help him to trust in you.  Help him to catch his flight to heaven, where one day we will all be rejoicing. 

    Praise you, Lord Jesus.  Praise You!

 

 

 

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When I Go Away I Am Afraid

In a tiny town on the plains I saw

a library nobody went to.  It was made of brick,

shaded by two big cottonwood trees.

A gabled roof.  A wooden door.  Inside

 

the books were waiting, row by row of stories

we once believed were true.

Then I journeyed to a great city, and when

I stole away in the middle

 

of the night I was so lonely I forgot

the thermos I’d left on the roof of the cab

when I threw in my bags.  I loved that

thermos, it was clever and sleek, and I heard it

 

fall as we pulled away, bouncing down

the street like an empty shell.

 

 

 

 

 

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