Chris Anderson's Blog, page 17

Letting Go of the Outcome

a homily for the deacons of Sacramento–and a homily I think applies to all of us

August 3, 2019, Sacramento, California

Matthew 14:1-12

 

Today is the anniversary of the death of one of my heroes, the great American Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor.  She died at the age of thirty-nine, of lupus, in Milledgeville, Georgia on August 3, 1964.

Her short stories are wonderful–challenging, but wonderful–but it wasn’t until her letters were published after her death that we realized how deeply Catholic she was in her thinking—and how she grew spiritually over the course of her life, through her suffering, how she became more and more compassionate, wiser.

In one of her letters she is giving advice to a young writer, and I think what she says is profound not just for writers but for all of us, and especially for those of us who are deacons.  Writing is just a metaphor, really, for what ministry is all about:

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment [she says]. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing. It is the same with Christian self-abandonment.

    The human comes before art.  You do not write the best you can for the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit.  Resignation to the will of God does not mean that you stop resisting evil or obstacles, it means that you leave the outcome out of your personal considerations. It is the most concern coupled with the least concern.

Letting go of the outcome—in our preaching, for example, not worrying what other people think about what we’re saying, or trying not to, not seeking praise or trying to avoid criticism, preaching the best we can with sincerity and directness and trusting God to do the rest, to take whatever words are flowing through us and use them for whatever someone in the congregation may need to hear, at that moment.

Letting go of the outcome in our counseling and our spiritual direction—not worrying about saying just the right thing, not worrying about being wise, not worrying about fixing whatever problem is being presented to us but listening, staying open, trusting God to enter in and do whatever needs to be done. Nothing we do or fail to do can keep the Holy Spirit from effecting its work of love, in that moment and in every moment.

It’s not we who love but God who loves through us, and He will make up for all our failings and limitations.

Look at the example of John the Baptist, so bold in his proclamation, loud and clear and unafraid, so willing to let go of the outcome that he is willing to die, to be killed, as Christ himself is willing to die, to surrender all his power and his glory and to let come what comes, in and through the Father.

Or letting go of the outcome in our prayer life, surrendering, because we never know what the outcome is.  Prayer might seem to be pointless, might seem to be useless–we might seem to be sitting alone in our cell not doing anything for anyone–but “for the most part the formative stream of the mystical life remains invisible,” as Pope Francis says, in Rejoice and Be Glad.  “Certainly the most decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions.”

For “we have died,” as Colossians says in the epistle for tomorrow’s mass, “and we are hidden now in Christ”–and in fact, Christ is also hidden in us, is at work in us in ways we are not conscious of and can’t be fully conscious of. We may sit in our cells and feel nothing but emptiness and loneliness, or boredom, or the desert.  Our prayer might not seem to be “working” at all, but of course that’s not what prayer is.  Prayer isn’t something we do, either poorly or well, it’s something God does, and what he does is deeper and subtler and more loving and more tender than simply granting our wishes.  He isn’t a genie.  He isn’t a magician.  He’s not a father who plays favorites.  He’s the Lord our God who empties himself out, who gives himself away, and all we can do is try to empty ourselves, too.  To stay in the chair, to stay in the room, as the feelings rise and fall in us, as the thoughts pass, like the clouds, like the weather.  All we can do is receive, and the rest is God, working mysteriously inside us, inside us all.

Who knows what effect this Eucharist will have on us, and on the world, what love and hope will flow out of it into all those who most desperately need it?  Who knows what leaven, what yeast, our inner work will be this weekend, what seeds will be planted and what will grow from those seeds?  We have no idea, and we may never know.

In the meantime let us try to completely forget ourselves the rest of this weekend, let us try to surrender ourselves, focusing on the work at hand, on the empty page, on the images in our minds, on the feelings in our hearts, on each other, on our words and our faces.  In dying to ourselves, we will rise.  In dying we will always rise, for we are hidden now in Christ, and Christ in us, and the work we do is in the service of a mystery greater and more intimate than we can ever imagine.

 

 

 

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Now I See

The man who had my office had it for thirty years,

but when I moved in thirty years ago,

all I thought about were the four high windows

and the trees beyond, which were red then,

 

and yellow, and gold.  Blazing.  Today

I was walking down some stairs, and an old woman

was walking in front of me, haltingly, one step

at a time, arm-in-arm with a younger woman,

 

a teenager, dark-haired and slim.  They were talking

in low voices, and I only saw them from behind,

so I assumed the girl was leading, helping

the old woman down.  But then they reached

 

the landing, and turned to leave, and I realized

I was wrong.  The slim young woman was blind.

 

 

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Pip and the Moon

    I don’t know why the death of a dog is so hard, but it is.  Last week we had to put our beloved Pip down, after fifteen years of love and loyalty and goofiness, and we miss him very much.

    This little prose poem, from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016), is partly in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing, but more in loving memory of this wonderful dog.

 

If there were an earthquake and you were on the moon looking down, you wouldn’t see any movement at all.  The earth would seem to just hang in space, seas a deep blue, clouds creamy white.

And it’s good to look at life like this, from a distance, because it humbles us and exalts us and it makes us aware of how fragile life is and interconnected, the way it did the astronauts, gazing homeward through their hatches.

But it’s good, too, to zoom in and keep on zooming, from high up all the way down to the very pixel you’re in, to the living room and to the couch in the living room and to little dog sleeping on top of the back cushions of the couch, his head and his front paws draped over your shoulder in such a way that one day during Holy Week, when in the scene from the Last Supper in the gospel that morning the Beloved Disciple leans back in his love and his sadness and his grief against the chest of Our Lord, your left ear is pressed against the chest of that little dog, and you hear through the layers of his fur and the muscle and the bone the steady beating of his little doggy heart.

You sit there a long time.  You hold very still.

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Beautiful Storm

July 2, 2019

Matthew 8:23-27

 

I sometimes feel like a little boat getting swamped by the waves–waves of anxiety, of sadness, of fear.

I sometimes feel like Jesus is asleep:  he doesn’t seem to be answering my prayers.  I don’t feel his presence.  He seems to be letting me sink.

It’s easy to believe when the sea is calm.  It’s easy when the sun is out and things are going our way.

It’s so hard in the storm, it’s so hard when we’re sinking, and what this little story is telling us is believe even then.  Have faith that Jesus can calm the storm and have faith that Jesus will never abandon us and have faith that Jesus is always with us, even in the storm–even when the storm overwhelms us.

Someone told me recently that she felt God’s presence when she was going through an intersection and for some reason, by instinct, put her foot on the brake and avoided getting T-boned by someone who had run the light–and I thought yes, of course.

But what about all the people who don’t make it through, who do get hit, who do die, as hundreds and thousands do every day, every hour?  Was Jesus not there for them?  Are we somehow more loved by God, somehow special?  No, of course not.  O we of little faith.  Jesus is there even in the terrible accident, Jesus is there even in our suffering, Jesus is there even when the winds are howling and the rain is pouring down.  God is not a genie who grants us wishes.  God is not a father who plays favorites.  Death is not the only thing and it’s not the worst thing and it’s not the last thing.  In every moment, in every calm and every storm, in every little boat, the Lord is with us.  That’s the challenge of faith.  That’s the gift of faith.

Even the storm is beautiful and right and true.  Even the endless sea.

I came across this prayer the other day in a book by the great Carmelite sister Ruth Burrows:

Nothing is wanting to us.  All is given. Strengthen us, O Given One, to Be Glad.

    All is given.  Everything.  In everything, we are to be glad, for the Lord our God is greater than anything we can imagine.

Nothing is wanting to us.  All is given.  Strengthen us, O Given One, to Be Glad.

 

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Jesus is Given as the Rain

Jesus is given as the rain is given

or the clouds.

Jesus is given as the rose is given,

the yellow ones I love,

 

about to bloom on the deck,

gold, then lemon,

then cream.  All has been given,

this moment and the next,

 

the sadness and the joy,

and there’s nothing

we can do but receive.  Our lives

are what happens—what is.

 

Strengthen us, O Given One,

to be glad.

 

   after a prayer by Ruth Burrows

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We Have Nothing to Do But Love

May 26, 2019

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 15:1-29; Revelation 21:10-23; John 14:23-29

 

Driving into Corvallis the other day I had a good view of the earthly city, and it wasn’t gleaming like a diamond or shining like a precious stone.  It was rainy and gray and the streets were made of asphalt and the buildings of wood and plaster and what was inscribed on the billboards were not the names of the twelve tribes but of all the fast food restaurants and car dealerships.

And yet God is here, too, even the splendor of God.  Just hidden.  Dialed down.

 

It’s easier to imagine Corvallis as Antioch or Jerusalem in the time of the apostles, a time of great dissension and debate.  The bars and the coffee shops are full of people “without any mandate” making their bitter arguments and upsetting the rest of us.

Yet God is here, too, in the midst of things, as he was then and always will be.  God is here.

 

I used to think my faith would be a 9 or 10 all the time and should be a 9 or a 10, but it’s just a 2 or a 3—pretty steadily, but just a 2 or a 3, and I’m starting to realize that’s OK, that’s good, that’s a grace in itself.  Jesus is speaking to his disciples in today’s Gospel on the night before the crucifixion, it’s his Farewell Discourse, and what he’s trying to say is that though he will be leaving them in the flesh, though they will no longer have the kind of intimacy they have now, they will have a new intimacy, a quieter, gentler intimacy—after the Resurrection, and the Ascension, when at Pentecost he sends the Holy Spirit into the world, to fill all things, to be everywhere, in every moment, subtly.  Pervasively.

PeaceI leave you, he says.  Not ecstasy.  Not visions.

PeaceI leave you.  Not absolute knowledge.  Not the obvious.  The easy.

 

Paul tells us in Galatians that when we feel peace, that quiet, inner sense, and when we feel joy and when we feel confidence and calm and love, we can trace those feelings, however weak or temporary they might be, back to the Holy Spirit and back to the Lord.  We just have to keep track of them.  Be alert to them.  Not forget them.  Remember them.  Trust them. Act on them.

My dear souls, says the eighteenth-century Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade,

you are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one:  making use of whatever he offers you.  Everything leads you to this union with him.  The blood flowing through your veins moves only by his will.  Every feeling and every thought you have, no matter how they arise, all come from God’s invisible hand.  You have nothing to do but love and cherish what each moment brings.

Let not your hearts be troubled or afraid.

 

Maybe you’re reading the scriptures and a line jumps out at you, tugs at you, seems to be written in boldface.  That’s the Lord.

Maybe you’re having a conversation with a friend and something shifts somehow, something opens up, and you know your friend is speaking from the heart and you can feel something extra, something else, in the air of the room.  That’s the Lord.

Maybe you’re standing at the window and you see a leaf jump in a tree and you think, that’s a bird, hopping around.  But then another leaf twitches and another and another, and you realize it’s the rain, it’s beginning to rain, there are not birds enough in the world.

That’s the Lord.  He has come to make his dwelling with us.

Every city is the heavenly city.

 

St. Ignatius says that when the Spirit is speaking to us truly it’s not like water striking a stone but like water being soaked up by a sponge.  It’s a matter of slow, quiet absorption, not of a big splash, and in fact, he says, we should doubt the big splashes, the sudden, violent impulses, question them, wait them out to see if they really are what they seem to be because often they’re not.  The work of the Lord is usually gentler, quieter.  Daily.  Hourly. Moment by moment.

 

And it’s a matter of love most of all, of keeping God’s word, as Jesus says today—whoever loves me will keep my word—and that word is always the word of Love, is always the word of gentleness and inclusion and welcoming—and not just as something we feel inside but as something we bring to others.

Last week I had the great honor of baptizing an elderly man over at the Caring Place.  He’s on Hospice now, he has just a little while longer to live, and he was ready, he was longing for Christ, and it was because of the love of a friend of his, a younger, former colleague who is Catholic and has been gently, quietly, steadily talking to him about Jesus and about the Church, and not just talking but bringing that love to him, showing him that love.  I really liked Father Maximo’s homily last week about spiritual friendships and how important they are, and this was exactly the kind of friendship he meant.

When I asked the man why he decided to become Catholic, he said, love.  The love of his friend.  The love of Christ.

    I feel, he said, like I’m being welcomed into a family of love.

    He didn’t have a bowl in his room, so we found a 16 inch clear plastic cup with “Human Bean” on the side, and I blessed the water, and I poured it on his head, three times, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and later, when I walked out into the parking lot, it had been raining again, and the asphalt was shining.  It was shining like a diamond.  Like a precious stone.

 

 

                        .

 

 

 

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How Jesus Isn’t Lazarus

Thoughts on the Resurrection II:

How Jesus Isn’t Lazarus

 

Resurrection can become for each of us a daily experience.

Every slight pain, every small anxiety, misunderstandings, disappointments,

and life’s contradictions—all of these are experiences of little deaths.

Our daily hurts, every one of them, have within them the joy of the resurrection.

–Cardinal Basil Hume

 

The raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45) prepares us for the raising of Jesus.  It is what John calls a “sign” or a symbol of the resurrection.  And yet what’s so important about the raising of Lazarus is how different it is from the resurrection itself.

We see Lazarus walk out of the tomb, but we don’t see Jesus.  Jesus is gone by the time we get there.  The tomb is empty.

When Lazarus walks out of the tomb we know it’s Lazarus.  It’s obvious.  It’s him. But when Jesus rises and appears to people, even people who knew him before, even his friends, they don’t recognize at first.  Mary Magdalene thinks he’s the gardener.  The disciples are fishing and see a figure by a fire on shore and that’s all they see at first.

Lazarus doesn’t come through locked doors.  He doesn’t come through walls.  He doesn’t appear and then vanish.

And he will die again.  Just like anyone else.

But not Jesus.  Not Jesus.  He will never die.  He will ascend.

This is the most important difference of all:  that the raising of Lazarus is good news only to him and to his family.  It doesn’t change anything except for him.  But what happens on the third day after the crucifixion of Jesus radically alters the very nature of reality for all of humanity forevermore.

“If in Jesus’ resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse,” Pope Benedict says, “it would ultimately be of no concern to us.”  “It would be,” he says, “no more important than the resuscitation of a clinically dead person through the art of doctors.”  This is from Benedict’s book Jesus of Nazarethand it echoes The Catechism in every detail.  “The New Testament testimonies,” as he puts it, “leave us in no doubt that what happened was utterly different.”  The Resurrection of Jesus–and I’m quoting here still–“was about breaking out into an entirely new form of life, into a life that is no longer subject to the law of dying and becoming but lies beyond it—a life that opens up a new dimension of human existence.”  It was not “an isolated event” but what the pope, in a really striking phrase, calls “an evolutionary leap.”

In the Resurrection “a new possibility of human existence is attained that affects everyone and that opens up a future, a new kind of future.”

Wow.  Powerful, striking stuff.   As my late friend and colleague Marc Borg often used to say, if we went back in a time machine, if we could actually stand before the tomb, we couldn’t really videotape the Resurrection, we couldn’t actually see it directly, and though as Catholics we disagree with some of Marc’s ideas and the ideas of the Jesus Seminar, I think this is exactly what Pope Benedict is saying, too, and what the Catechism tells us and what the raising of Lazarus tells us. This wasn’t just a physical event. The gospel accounts of the resurrection are a kind of literary shorthand for something far more profound.

 

But we have to be careful.  We have to immediately qualify this. Because as contemporary people we are so used to thinking in either/or terms that we immediately think, well then, the Resurrection was just an idea, it was just a feeling, it didn’t really happen. No.  No.  The gospel writers knew the difference between a dream or a vision and a real event and they don’t call the resurrection a dream or a vision, and we have to take them at their word.  When people did recognize Jesus they recognized him.  When the encountered him after the resurrection they could touch him. Thomas put his hands in the wounds. On the shore of the lake he made the fishermen breakfast.  No. This was real, absolutely real.

Indeed [Pope Benedict says] indeed, the apostolic preaching with all its boldness and passion would be unthinkable unless the witnesses had experienced a real encounter, coming to them from outside . . . Only a real event of a radically new quality could possibly have given rise to the apostolic preaching, which cannot be explained on the basis of speculations or inner, mystical experiences.

The Resurrection, in other words, was historical.  It happened.  The disciples aren’t making it up.  The Church in all its courage and conviction could never have come from a mere idea and it could never have lasted until now if all there was here was a metaphor.

What Pope Benedict is saying and what the Catechism is saying is that the Resurrection wasn’t just historical.  It was more than historical.  Again, I’m going to quote the Pope.  Just one more time.  I want to get this right:

Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data.  The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented—a new dimension of reality that is revealed.  What already exists is not called into question. Rather we are told that there is a further dimension, beyond what was previously known.  Does that contradict science?  Can there really only ever be what there has always been?  Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new?  If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?

Well, I know I’ve been risking your patience.  This is all pretty abstract and complicated.  But here at the end of this last quotation we get to the real point, to the wonderful implication, to the astonishingly good news:  something unexpected, something new has happened, and it’s happening in your life right now.  Something new has happened inside of you, too.

Because you, too, are making an evolutionary leap.  You, too, believe that there is more to life than biology, more than the merely physical, more than the digital and the industrial and the relentlessly commercial, more than your sins, more than doubt and anger and violence and greed. It’s happened in you, a new faith, a new hope, and it’s happened because of the Resurrection, because of what happened 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, because what happened then was real, more real than anything that has ever happened and ever will happen, and it is still real, it is still happening, in you and in me and in the Eucharist and in all of us here. We are the Body of Christ, we are the Risen Lord, He is in us and we are in Him, and like Mary and like Martha we know now, we really know, that we, too, will never die, that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, we will never die, we will live forever, we really know that, we really believe that, because we feel it now, it’s happening now, in this place.

We are already living forever, because the Lord who has risen is risen indeed, is truly risen, and his life and his goodness and his beauty fill all the universe, fill every atom, fill and overflow and transcend every quark, every Higgs-Boson, now and forevermore.

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The Resurrection Isn’t Just This Weird Thing

Thoughts on the Resurrection (I):

The Beauty and Open-Endedness of the Catechism

 

Resurrection can become for each of us a daily experience.

Every slight pain, every small anxiety, misunderstandings, disappointments,

and life’s contradictions—all of these are experiences of little deaths.

Our daily hurts, every one of them, have within them the joy of the resurrection.

–Cardinal Basil Hume

 

If the Resurrection is just this weird thing that happened a long time ago, I don’t care about it.  If the Resurrection is just this spooky, sort of supernatural thing involving this one man in the first century, what’s the point?

But the Resurrection isn’t just that. It’s far more profound and real than that.

I think too often people don’t know how beautiful and profound the Catechism really is, and what it says about the Resurrection is the best example of that.  The Church is always celebrating the mystery, not reducing it.

No one was an eyewitness to Christ’s resurrection and no evangelist describes it. No one can say how it came about physically.  Still less was its innermost essence, his passing over to another life, perceptible to the senses.  Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb . . .  still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history (647).

Let me try to unpack this a little.  There are three important things here and throughout what the Catechism teaches about the Resurrection.

First, the Resurrection was more than a physical event, more than a mere resuscitation.  Jesus can be touched sometimes.  Thomas touches his wounds—on his hands, in his side.  He is not a ghost, he is not a hallucination.  But there are also times when Jesus can’t be touched, when he comes through walls, as he does in both Luke and John, or when he vanishes, when he just disappears, as he does in the great story of the travelers to Emmaus, in Luke.  And even when Jesus is present in some kind of discernible way, it’s really significant that people don’t always recognize him, even people who knew him in his former life.  You have to be open to seeing him.  You have to have imagination and receptivity and faith.

Second, the Resurrection is not just a single event.  It didn’t just happen once.  The Church is open to the idea that the gospel accounts are a kind of literary shorthand for a realization and a joy and a faith that took several generations to unfold and that is still unfolding.  As the great Catholic scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, the Resurrection of Jesus was not “simply a matter of visions and appearances to selected individuals.  . . .  The experience cannot be confined to such sporadic events.”  In fact,

The Resurrection faith that gave birth to Christianity was rooted in a complex combination of experience and conviction.  The experience was that of transforming, transcendent, personal power, a power that altered not only the consciousness but the very status of those experiencing it.

Something happened inside the early Christians, something profound.  You can see it in the record of their courage and their joy, even in the face of great persecution, and you can see it still, in us, on our good days, at our best moments.

That’s the third and final point: that the Resurrection is not just outer but inner, not just something that happened long ago but something that is happening now, inside of all of us.  The scholars don’t have to dig up the tombs.  They just have to come here.  They just have to come to Church.  Because we are the body of Christ, we are the Resurrection, we are the living proof of it, no matter how weak and partial and stumbling our faith often is.  We’re here.  And we’re here because in some way we have felt joy.  We’re here because in some way at some point in our lives we have been moved, we have been given the peace that Jesus gives his frightened disciples today in Luke.

This is what the Churches teaches about the Resurrection.   That it’s not just a symbol, it’s not just an idea.  That it’s far more profound, far more real than that.  And that it’s far more profound than the merely physical, too, far more real than the merely scientific, the merely historical, the merely measurable.

Just as the cross is a lens, the Resurrection is a lens.  The Resurrection is a kind of logic.  A kind of discipline.

If we’ve lost our job, if we’ve lost our marriage, if we’ve lost our hope, yes, that suffering if real and we have to go through it.  But there’s more.  That’s not all there is.  There is also joy, there is also faith, there is also reason for happiness, and we have to hold ourselves to that, discipline ourselves to that:  not be downhearted, even now, not be devastated, even when life devastates us.  Why are we anxious, finally?  Why are we sad?  On what have we staked our hope and desire?  On what are we counting?

If we feel lost, if we feel ignored by God, we have to think again. God isn’t ignoring us, we’re ignoring him.  We’re looking in all the wrong places.  If we doubt the Resurrection, if we doubt the source of the disciples’ first joy, we have to think again.  We have look again, and in a new way.  The Resurrection is going on all around us, in the beauty of the spring, in the gift of our friends, in the smallest, simplest moments, the moments we overlook and discount because they’re not big enough for us, not good enough.   But no. These little moments are enough. They are beautiful and real and important, and they are here and they are all that’s here, just the present moment, just the present, and that’s everything, that’s the whole universe, that’s the whole cosmos, that’s Jesus Christ himself coming through the walls of our merely empirical minds, if only we will let him, if only we will surrender our stupid versions of things, if only we will die to our small and petty selves. He is risen.  He is here.  He is now.

 

 

 

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Assume Everything

Just for today assume everything is right.

Your pictures hang in the right corners.

The crumbling steps are supposed

to crumble.  The shadows in the woods

 

and the light in the woods.  You may think

about Montana, you may think about

your mother.  Whatever you think is what

you think.  Walk in the woods or don’t

 

walk in the woods.  Mow the lawn or don’t

mow the lawn.  Whatever you do

is what you do.  All Jesus wants is to give

you his peace.  All he wants is a little

 

fish.  He’s hungry. All he wants is

to come through the walls.

 

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Relinquishment: For Robert Iltis

It might seem ironic that a man of such eloquence would slowly lose his ability to speak.  That a professor of speech would be unable to speak, clearly and forcefully.

But what I witnessed in Robert in the process of his dying was a humility and a peace and a deep, generous, unselfconscious faith.  Robert loved the scriptures, he loved the Eucharist, he loved the tradition.  It’s just who he was.  He believed in God, and from the beginning he accepted even his dying as a gift, a grace.

This is easy to say but for Robert it was really true.  I saw it.  I felt it.

Near the end when he was struggling to make himself understood we were talking about the gospel, and when he reached the end of a long, scrambled sentence he finally got to the word “relinquishment,” and I knew what he meant, he was really being eloquent after all, because on one level he was punning.  We’d both just signed a form called “Voluntary Relinquishment of Tenure,” Robert because he was dying and me because I’m retiring, but what Robert was really talking about is how we all have to die to our false selves, how we all have to empty ourselves out, and how death was helping him do this, helping him complete this stripping away, this opening up.  Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, Jesus says, it remains just a seed.  But if it dies, it grows, it produces much fruit, and this is what Robert was trying to say and did say, this is what he was talking about, that we spend our whole lives trying to overcome our arrogance and our pride and our self-centeredness and now his body was finishing the task, his tumor was forcing him to give up even his words, even his syntax, and so to help him draw closer to God and to the love of God and the joy of God, a love and a joy he had always glimpsed and always known in part but was now about to know fully and completely.

I’m talking about the cross, of course, I’m talking about Christ, who for us is not just the model and not just the pattern but the source of all hope and the source of all joy.

.

There’s a beautiful prayer about this by Teilhard de Chardin, the twentieth century Jesuit scientist and theologian.  It’s a prayer for the grace to grow old and to die without fear:

 

When the signs of age begin to mark my body

(and still more when they touch my mind);

when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off

strikes from without or is born within me;

when the painful moment comes

in which I suddenly awaken

to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

and above all at that last moment

when I feel I am losing hold of myself

and am absolutely passive within the hands

of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

in all those dark moments, O God,

grant that I may understand that it is you

(provided only my faith is strong enough)

who are painfully parting the fibers of my being

in order to penetrate to the very marrow

of my substance and bear me away within yourself.

 

I don’t want to romanticize death, which is often so demeaning and so hard, as it sometimes was for Robert.  I know there’s always the danger for us as believers that we’re just explaining away what so mystifies and frightens us.  But Robert was on the frontier, he was ahead of us, and when he reported back this confidence and this peace, when I could feel it in him and see it him, week after week, I felt my own faith deepened.  I felt heartened and encouraged and blessed.

Or there’s a beautiful passage in a sermon by Robert’s beloved Augustine, that great rhetorician, that great professor of speech.  It’s about the voice of John the Baptist in relation to the Word, who is Christ.

“When I want to speak to you,” Augustine says, “I look for a way to share with your heart what is already in mine,” and it’s our voices we use to do this, it’s our voices that carry the meaning across the space between us: “The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away.  The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet is still in mine.”  This is who Robert was, as a teacher and writer, and also as a husband and father and friend.  It’s who we all are, people who try to share what is in our hearts.

Relinquishment, Robert said.  Relinquishment.

And then Augustine says this–he moves to a profound theology:

When the word has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say:  The word ought to grow, and I should diminish?  The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying:  my joy is complete.

Robert has died and he has risen, as he did again and again in his life, but this time it’s for good, it’s for all, and in his kindness and in his humility he is calling us to die, too, to our smallness, our selfishness, our pretentions.  Now Robert’s joy is complete.  He has conveyed what was in his heart and he has been taken up and borne away, into the Word itself.

 

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