Chris Anderson's Blog, page 18

Visiting the Monastery

I stop by Father Paschal’s grave to pay my respects.

One stone cross in a row of stone crosses,

still clean and white.  Unweathered.

 

All the books in the bookstore,

all the many spines.  All my resentments.

 

The monks stand in their wooden stalls,

row by row,

someone else in Paschal’s now, and they chant

the psalms they chanted before.

 

How their voices echo in that empty space,

how they rise and fall,

 

how Paschal wept when he gave me

his old copy of the Paradiso,

the tears ran down his face, it was so beautiful.

 

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Temptations

First Sunday of Lent

Luke 4:1-13

The other day I was at the First Alternative Co-op doing some shopping, and I could feel the carrot cake calling me from the cold case.  I’ve given up desserts for Lent—I’ve given up all sugar—but the co-op has the best cake in town, and I really wanted some.

And the devil came up behind me, and he whispered in my ear: “Oh come on.  Giving up sugar for Lent?  That’s so old-fashioned.  So conventional.  Why don’t you give up a feeling instead, or an attitude?  Go ahead.  You know you want it.”

And I hesitated.  I reached out my hand.

But then I stopped.  I pulled back.  I thought, “no.  Scripture says that one does not live by bread alone.”

 

A day or so later I got an email from a student complaining about my comments on a paper.  He was questioning my judgment and my authority, in no uncertain terms, and I could feel myself getting angry.

And the devil came up behind me, and he whispered in my ear.  “Go ahead. You know what you want to say. Say it.  Say, ‘who do you think you are?  I was teaching before you were even born.’  Go ahead.  You’re the one with the power here.  Let him have it.”

And I reached out.  My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

But then I pulled back.  I thought, no.  Jesus didn’t call us to power and authority in this sense, and certainly not to cruelty, especially with those who are weaker than we are and more vulnerable.  “Scripture says you shall worship the Lord, your God,”not position, not prestige.

 

The next day the devil came to me a third time.

I was walking in the woods, and it was gray and muddy and wet.  I was slogging up the trail, as I’d been slogging through the days.  I was exhausted.  Irritable.

And the devil came up behind me, and he whispered in my ear, “how can there be a God when life is so tedious and hard? How can there be a God when life is so empty?”

“Make him prove that he exists. Tell him that he has to give you a sign, right now, or you won’t believe in him anymore.  Maybe an angel.  Maybe a burning bush.  A flower, at least. The sun through the clouds.  Something.”

And he had a point.  I walked with that for a while.

But then I stopped.  I thought, “scripture says, you shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”  There are miracles enough, every day.  They’re small.  They’re fleeting.  But who are we to ask for more?  Who are we to demand that God give us something obvious, something easy?

And the devil departed from me, for a time.

 

Of course, too often I do get the cake, and pay it for it afterwards, with the sugar-high and the sugar-crash.  I do send the email, and spend days trying to undo the damage.  I do begin to doubt, to long for the verifiable, and so ignore all the beauty around me.  Without Jesus, without his grace, I can do nothing, and part of the point of Lent is not just for us to make our resolutions and to try our hardest to keep them but to become more aware of how often we fail, how easily we are caught up and misdirected, again and again.

 

And let me say this, too.

I think there’s a version of the three temptations besieging us all now, or a lot of us, one that’s not hard to understand.

In a way the Church is in the wilderness, and we have to face that.  We have to face the recent scandals, the terrible scandals, and we have to stand for the victims, and we have to work for real, substantial change.  But the temptation is to think about these things so much, to get so caught up in our anger and our shame, that we fail to see all the ways that God is still present in the Church and in our lives.  The temptation is to get lost in abstractions.

A friend of mine, a wise and spiritual man, told me recently that he only wants to talk about the scandals and the Church in the abstract, the Church structurally, about ten per cent of the time.  We could talk about the scandals for hours, he says, and everything we said would be true. But where would that get us?

What he really wants to talk about is grace.

Tell me, he says, what’s one sweet thing that God has done for you this month, this week, this moment?

 

That’s when the devil goes away from me, when I ask this question, and when I answer it.  Because I can, when I really stop and think:  I felt the presence of God when I reading a novel, I felt the presence of God when I was watching a movie, I felt the presence of God when I was talking on the phone—and this is just in the last few days.

And I’m no mystic.  I’m as thick-headed as anybody else, and God still gets through to me now and then.  He’s always trying to.  He’s always reaching out to us, to all of us.

 

One afternoon I was sitting in the living room, and I could feel a kind of quiet, a kind of peace, in the air of the room, and I knew what it was.  I knew who it was.

And I just sat there for a few minutes, letting it seep into me.  I was just there.

 

This is the point of our Lenten practices, not to make us suffer but to sharpen our awareness.  When we empty ourselves, we can be filled.  When we can die to ourselves, we can serve others.  When we spend time in silence, when we just stop, we can hear the Lord speaking.

This is what Jesus understands in the wilderness:  that the wilderness itself is grace.  All is grace.  The devil can’t offer him anything:  he has it all.  There’s nothing more he needs.

 

     My dear souls, says the seventeenth 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.

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Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Those winter mornings in grad school

when we sat around drinking coffee and talking

about Derrida, I’d never actually read him.

What I loved was the brightness.  The warmth.

 

Even when I used to drive my little brother

to Mrs. Winkie’s for his piano lessons,

and I’d wait in the car, listening to Elton John

on the radio, I never really paid attention.

 

Snow was falling.  It was dark.

I couldn’t have told you any of the words.

 

I didn’t even have snow tires on that Chevy.

I was always slipping and sliding

my way home.  The idea just never occurred

to me that anything could really happen.

 

 

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The Stars in the Maple Tree

February 12, 2019

Fifth Tuesday of Ordinary Time

Genesis 1:20-2:4; Psalm 8; Mark 7:1-13

 

Early in the mornings when it’s still dark I’ve been sitting by the window looking at the stars.  They seem to hang in the branches of our maple tree, and seeing them I sometimes have this sense of how vast and beautiful creation is, and how petty my little problems are.  How I keep worrying about kettles and jugs.  How I keep mistaking human traditions for God’s commandment.

“When I behold your heavens,” O Lord, “the moon and the stars which you set in place,” I feel so small.  So insignificant.

But if I sit by the window long enough, if I can start to settle down, if I can hear myself think, I also have this sense now and then that there’s something vast and beautiful inside of me, too, and inside of all us.  We are made in the image and likeness of God, Genesis tells us. The Imago Dei.  We are infinitely small and yet infinitely precious in the eyes of God, because deep inside, underneath the pettiness and the distractions, we are made by Him.

The phrase “original sin” isn’t in the Genesis story or anywhere else in the Bible, and it doesn’t mean what we think it means anyway, that human beings are somehow originally or fundamentally sinful.  We’re not.  We’re originally blessed, we’re originally holy.  “Original sin” describes this mysterious way we have of messing that up, this mysterious way we all have of ruining our Edens and walking away, out of orneriness or selfishness or pride.

This is why we have to commit ourselves to the dignity of all life, from the baby to the bumblebee, from the poor and the vulnerable to all the little live things of the earth and all the systems and ecologies that preserve and maintain them, because this is the world as God intended it, this is Eden, not wrecked by our greed and rapaciousness, not made ugly and desolate.

And this is why we have to keep careful track in those quiet moments of prayer to the other voice that lurks inside of us and that is always trying to tempt us away, that voice that says we’re not good enough, that voice that’s always whispering that we need to have this or do that or no one will love us.  That’s never the voice of God.  Never.  That’s the voice that’s calling us away from the Divine Image we all carry within, or trying to, and it’s blasphemous.  It’s wrong.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.  Be our defense against this voice, this wickedness, this snare.

Or in the words of this prayer from Pope Francis—a good prayer to bring to confession, a good prayer to pray every day:

 

Lord, I have let myself be deceived.

In a thousand ways I have shunned your love.

Yet here I am once more,

to renew my covenant with you.

I need you–save me once again, Lord.

Take me once more

into your redeeming embrace.

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Grief

Through the window the tree

hung with stars

but also another tree behind it

shaggy and dark.

 

When I want to I can feel it

looming.

 

There is a canyon

I used to think about

all the time,

very deep.

 

Sometimes I go back

and press my cheek

against the rough

sheer wall

just to remind myself

how I will never

move it.

 

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Fulfilled

FJanuary 27, 2019

Third Sunday of Ordinary Time

Nehemiah 8:2-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-30; Luke 1:1-4 and 4:14-21

This is the homily I preached at the conclusion of the 37th Annual St. Rita’s Men’s Gathering in Central Point, Oregon.

     “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

     In your hearing.

    There were no printing presses in the ancient world. A book was a very rare and expensive thing, worth the equivalent of man’s wages for a year, because that’s about how long it took to copy out by hand onto a scroll.  And so the reading of the Bible was a communal event, a matter of people coming to the synagogue or some other place and hearing the scriptures proclaimed, as Jesus proclaims Isaiah in the Gospel today and Ezra proclaims the Torah in the Book of Nehemiah.  That’s what the word read means in both Hebrew and Greek, to proclaim aloud.

     And the mass preserves this sense of reading.  We have all kinds of books now and paper and pens and laptops and I-Pads, and that’s great, that’s a blessing, but it can also lead to a sense of the Biblical stories as static or distant or abstract, just something to analyze.  But through the Eucharist the scriptures are fulfilled in our hearing at every mass, are made present, and not just at mass but in our lives.  “The Gospel of the Lord,” the priest or deacon says, and he doesn’t lift up the book when he says it.  It’s not the book that’s the Gospel.  It’s the words of the Gospel spoken into the air in that moment and taken into the ears and minds and hearts of the people in the congregation and then out into the world.  “You are the Body of Christ,” St. Paul says today, and I don’t think that’s a metaphor. I think it’s literally true.  It’s not Christ then and Christ therebut Christ now, Christ here, in our bloodstreams, our breathing.  Today, Jesus says.  Today.

     The bread and the wine that are brought up are symbols of our work and of our messy, ordinary lives, and these are taken to the altar and made holy, and in that act we realize that everything we do is holy, if we offer it to God, if we act in his presence.

     When the priest holds up the consecrated host he doesn’t say, “this wasBody of Christ.”  He says, “it is.”

     All the little moments of our lives.  All the little moments of light and of darkness and even of stumbling.  The scripture is fulfilled in our sight and in our touch and we are freed of our prisons, healed of our wounds.  The Red Sea is parted.  The dove comes down.

    I’ve been to the Holy Land, and I’ve looked out at the Sea of Galilee, and it was beautiful and I was moved.  But these hills are beautiful, too, and these trees, these lakes.  This sky.  It’s blasphemous to say that any place is holier than any other.  Jesus didn’t just die, he lived; and he didn’t just rise, he ascended; and when he ascended he sent the Spirit to fill all the world. And in another way and from another perspective he has always been present and always diffused, always distributed, as Colossians says and the great Prologue to the Gospel of John. All were created through him and all were created for him and in him everything continues in being.  He is in our DNA, in our molecules, our quarks.

     “A thought,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance, all these new beauties that appear for the first time, in me or around me, on the human face of the earth—the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it.”  

     We don’t just pray when we pray.  We pray when we fix a faucet or mow the lawn or make dinner for our kids.  We pray when we write or walk or have coffee with a friend. 

Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things is translated into some increase in my power to love and some progress in God’s blessed hold on the universe.  With every creative thought or action, a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.  We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands.

So we can rejoice, and look, and see. Listen.  Hear.  Touch. In Christ and through Christ our lives are holy and everything about our lives.  Our work is holy, if we do it with integrity and do it well.  Fixing an engine.  Programming a computer.  Writing a poem.

     A friend of mine died the other day.  He was a professor of biological and ecological engineering—one of his specialties was waste management and water quality—and I keep thinking of this conversation we had on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome.  He and his wife were part of our pilgrimage group, and we’d just had mass in the basilica, beneath those high vaulting arches.  

    We were all moved–I know Jim was–but what he was talking about on the steps of the church were the glories of the Roman water system, that great network of channels and pipes spread out beneath the city, engineered 2,000 years ago and still in use, still running.  You can drink the water that pours from the fountains, it’s still pure, and Jim just really admired that, and he was right to.  

     What’s beneath the basilica is just as precious as what’s in it.  That moment was holy and all the moments.  Jim didn’t talk a lot about his faith, he didn’t say churchy things, but he was faithful, the Lord in his love flowed through him, in his kindness and his generosity, in all that he knew about pipes and waste and systems of purification and exchange, and it flows through us, too, all of us.  If we let it. If we let it.

     Jesus isn’t just on a page.  He didn’t just live long ago.  

     The words he spoke are being spoken still, in the words of a friend or the song of a bird or in the light that shines in the mornings.  On the steps of the basilica.  On our own front porch.

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Just an Inch

JDecember 30, 2018–The Holy Family

Luke 2:41-52

    My kids used to go into the living room and move things around a little.  They’d move a vase an inch to the left.  A photograph an inch to the right.  Then they’d wait for me to come into the room and put everything back.  I’d move the vase back to where it belonged.  The photo back to where it belonged.  I didn’t even know I was doing this.  It was unconscious.  I didn’t know the kids were tricking me—they just told me recently. 

     They laughed and laughed.

     Just an inch.

     I’m a little OCD, a bit of a perfectionist, as a lot of us are, I think.

     It’s interesting to track that word—perfection or imperfection, perfect or imperfect—in the writing of Pope Francis.  It’s really his central theme, that we have to accept the fact that we’re imperfect and forgive others for their imperfections–especially, he says in The Joy of Love, in our families.  “At times,” he says, “we have proposed a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families.” “Our excessive idealization,” Francis says, “especially when we have failed to inspire trust in God’s grace, has not helped to make marriage more desirable and attractive but quite the opposite.”

     The Pope isn’t on the side of perfection, he’s on the side of imperfection, and in a way this is the teaching of the gospel today, on the Feast of the Holy Family. Mary was made immaculate from birth, not from anything she achieved herself.  Her achievement was to be true to this gift, radically open.  Joseph was given the gift of a dream, and he honored it. He answered it.  In this sense both Mary and Joseph are exactly like us, completely dependent on grace, completely in need of Christ—they are saved by their son even before he came into the world–and their family life day-to-day was just as full of “anxiety” as ours is, just as full of struggle and stress, as Luke makes clear in this story of the Finding in the Temple.  Even Jesus had to slog through the days.  He was fully human, too, not just fully divine, and so he, too, must have been anxious sometimes, and distracted, and disappointed. 

     The point of taking the Holy Family as our model isn’t to make us rigid and self-righteous but to teach us humility and teach us compassion and most of all to teach us patience, the capacity to live with people the way they really are.

     I’ve just finally read Father Gregory Boyle’s, Tattoos on the Heart, the famous story of his work with gangs in Los Angeles, and what’s most remarkable about this work isn’t his success but his repeated, constant failure.  Father Boyle started Homeboy Industries, and he’s made a big difference in the lives of many people, but he doesn’t like to talk about success and he resists measuring success, because to talk about success is to obscure the fact that this is all up to God, who loves us first, tattoos and all, addictions and all.   Boyle’s theme is the “no-matter-whatness” of God.  His motto, he says, should be “You Can Never Disappoint Us Enough,” because people do, again and again.  He keeps saying mass in prison because his gang members keep going to prison, and going back to prison, making the same mistakes over and over.  He’s buried hundreds of people, teenagers, most of them, victims of shootings or overdoses.  But he never stops loving them, or trying to.

     At the funeral of a gang member named Jason, Boyle preaches this:

Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” He doesn’t say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.”  He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No.  He says, straight out, “You are light.”  It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.  Jason was who he was.  He made a lot of mistakes, he was not perfect.  And he was the light of the world.

God’s love is first, and it’s endless.  This is what Boyle tries to get the gang members to understand, their own goodness, and this is what they just can’t believe, they’ve been so abused and tortured and neglected by their addicted parents.   

     And abuse like this is different from imperfection—let me be clear about this.  It’s sin, deep sin, it has to change, and it’s not something limited to the ganglands of LA.  It’s right here, in Corvallis, behind the closed doors of our nice, middle-class houses.  You have no idea, the spousal abuse and the elder abuse and the child abuse, and for this there can be no tolerance.  Forgiveness, but no tolerance.  This is not the Gospel.  This is fundamentally wrong.

     But for everything else:  patience. Compassion.

     As parents so many of us are saddened that our kids don’t go to mass—I am—I feel it very deeply—but I take heart from Boyle.  If he can keep loving those gang members, not lecturing, not preaching, just being with them, we can love our kids anyway and believe in them and in the infinite love of God.  “We encounter problems,” Pope Francis says inThe Joy of the Family, “whenever we think that relationships or people ought to be perfect . . . . Other people also have a right to live in this world, just as they are.”  

     All we can do is pray, and not just for the conversion of our children or even mostly for that but for our own conversion.  We have to be selfish in a way.  Nothing is as persuasive as joy, and we can’t have joy unless we pray, unless we put ourselves in contact with God, and when we are, when we are in relationship with Jesus, our kids will feel it, they will know it, whatever we say.  We keep inviting them to Church, gently, and then we let it go.  If we have to suffer in the meantime, in a smaller church, a misunderstood church, that’s a small price to pay, and it shouldn’t bother us anyway.  The Lord is here, among us, and he’ll take care of the rest.  Let us do him the courtesy of actually believing in him.

     We wait.  We trust.  And we do the best we can.  

     The biggest problem with trying to be perfect is that we can’t be.  So we give up.  We don’t do anything.  But that’s arrogant on the one hand and lazy on the other.  It lets us off the hook when the challenge, and the achievable challenge, it to respond to what comes to us each day.  We have to strive to be saints and we have to strive to be heroes and we can do that right now.  By holding our temper.  By saying, “I love you.”  By laughing.   By trying to be a little less focused on whatever we’re too focused on.

     It’s what Pope Francis calls “the miracle of being a little bit better.”  

     We don’t have to move very far, and we can’t.  We just have to move an inch.  

     Just an inch.

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Just an Inch

JDecember 30, 2018–The Holy Family

Luke 2:41-52

    My kids used to go into the living room and move things around a little.  They’d move a vase an inch to the left.  A photograph an inch to the right.  Then they’d wait for me to come into the room and put everything back.  I’d move the vase back to where it belonged.  The photo back to where it belonged.  I didn’t even know I was doing this.  It was unconscious.  I didn’t know the kids were tricking me—they just told me recently. 

     They laughed and laughed.

     Just an inch.

     I’m a little OCD, a bit of a perfectionist, as a lot of us are, I think.

     It’s interesting to track that word—perfection or imperfection, perfect or imperfect—in the writing of Pope Francis.  It’s really his central theme, that we have to accept the fact that we’re imperfect and forgive others for their imperfections–especially, he says in The Joy of Love, in our families.  “At times,” he says, “we have proposed a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families.” “Our excessive idealization,” Francis says, “especially when we have failed to inspire trust in God’s grace, has not helped to make marriage more desirable and attractive but quite the opposite.”

     The Pope isn’t on the side of perfection, he’s on the side of imperfection, and this is exactly the teaching of the gospel today.  The Holy Family is ideal, the Holy Family is holy, but not through any merit of Joseph’s or even of Mary’s, who was made immaculate at her birth, not because of anything she achieved herself.  She was saved by her son before he even came into the world, and in that sense she is exactly like all of us, as Joseph is, completely dependent on grace, completely in need of Christ, and their family life is just as full of “anxiety” as ours is, as Luke’s gospel today makes clear, just as full of struggle and stress. Even Jesus had to slog through the days. He was fully human, too, not just fully divine, and so he, too, must have been anxious sometimes, and distracted, and disappointed.  

     The point of taking the Holy Family as our model isn’t to make us rigid and self-righteous but just the opposite.  It’s to teach us humility and teach us compassion and most of all to teach us patience, the capacity to live with people the way they really are.

     I’ve just gotten around to reading Father Gregory Boyle’s, Tattoos on the Heart, the story of his work with gangs in Los Angeles, and what’s most remarkable about this work isn’t his success but his repeated, constant failure.  Father Boyle started Homeboy Industries, and he’s had a fair amount of success, but he doesn’t like to talk about success and he resists measuring success, because to talk about success is to obscure the fact that this is all up to God who loves us first, tattoos and all, addictions and all.   Boyle’s theme is the “no-matter-whatness” of God.  His motto, he says, should be “You Can Never Disappoint Us Enough,” because people do, again and again.  He keeps saying mass in prison because his gang members keep going to prison, and going back to prison, making the same mistakes again and again.  He’s buried hundreds of people, teenagers, most of them, victims of shootings or overdoses.  But he never stops loving them, or trying to.

     At the funeral of a gang member named Jason, Boyle preaches this:

Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” He doesn’t say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.”  He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No.  He says, straight out, “You are light.”  It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.  Jason was who he was.  He made a lot of mistakes, he was not perfect.  And he was the light of the world.

God’s love is first, and it’s endless.  This is what Boyle tries to get the gang members to understand, their own goodness, and this is what they just can’t believe, they’ve been so abused and tortured and neglected by their addicted parents.   

     And this is different from imperfection—let me be clear about this.  It’s sin, deep sin, it has to change, and it’s not something limited to the ganglands of LA.  It’s right here, in Corvallis, behind the closed doors of our nice, middle-class houses.  You have no idea, the spousal abuse and the elder abuse and the child abuse, and for this there can be no tolerance.  Forgiveness, but no tolerance.  This is not the Gospel.  This is fundamentally wrong.

     But for everything else:  patience. Compassion.

     As parents so many of us are saddened that our kids don’t go to mass, but I take heart from Boyle.  If he can keep loving those gang members, not lecturing, not preaching, just being with them, we can love our kids anyway and believe in them and in the infinite love of God.  “We encounter problems,” Pope Francis says inThe Joy of the Family, “whenever we think that relationships or people ought to be perfect . . . . Other people also have a right to live in this world, just as they are.”  

     All we can do is pray, and not just for the conversion of our children or even mostly for that but for our own conversion.  We have to be selfish in a way.  Nothing is as persuasive as joy, and we can’t have joy unless we pray, unless we put ourselves in contact with God, and when we are, when we are in relationship with Jesus, our kids will feel it, they will know it, whatever we say.  If we have to suffer in the meantime, in a smaller church, a misunderstood church, that’s a small price to pay, and it shouldn’t bother us anyway.  The Lord is here, among us, and he’ll take care of the rest.  Let us do him the courtesy of actually believing in him.

    So we wait. We trust.  And we do the best we can.  The biggest problem with expecting to be perfect is that we can’t be.  So we give up.  We don’t do anything.  But that’s arrogant on the one hand and lazy on the other.  It lets us off the hook when the challenge, and the achievable challenge, it to respond to what comes to us each day.  Nothing grand.  Not ending world hunger.  Not solving the homeless problem, once and for all, singlehandedly.  Just holding our temper.  Just trying to be less focused on whatever we’re too focused on. 

     It’s what Pope Francis calls “the miracle of being a little bit better.”  

     We don’t have to move very far, and we can’t.  We just have to move an inch.  

     Just an inch.

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So Vitally Intense and Alert

 

December 21, 2018

Advent, and the Solstice

Zephaniah 3:14-18; Psalm 33; Luke 1:39-45

     On this memorial of St. Peter Canisius, a sixteenth century German Jesuit who helped promote the teachings of the Council of Trent, I think of another German Jesuit, a twentieth century Jesuit, Alfred Delp, who was executed by the Nazis in 1945 for resisting Hitler and the Nazi regime.

     Delp was young when he died, only 35—in fact, he said his final vows as a Jesuit in prison.      

     He celebrated mass in prison, with his hands bound, and he saw his hands as an image of how we are all bound, by our sins.  We are all in prison.

     And I think of him because he wrote a remarkable series of meditations while he was in prison, in the last few months of life, and in particular a series of meditations he wrote during his last Advent on earth.  “Never,” he said, “have I entered on Advent so vitally and intensely alert as I am now.”

     This was in part because the state of the world and his own imprisonment made him intensely aware of how all of life is, “fundamentally, a continuous Advent,” “a hunger and thirst and awareness of lack,” a waiting in darkness for what only God can give us.  “Unless we have been shocked to our depths at ourselves and the things we are capable of,” he says, “we cannot possibly understand the full import of Advent.”  Life is empty and meaningless without God, we are incapable of producing anything of last value, on our own, through our own effort, and we have to experience that, directly, we have to face that, before we can understand Christmas, before we can anticipate, in joy, the One-Who-Will come. 

     In God alone do our hearts rejoice, as the Psalmist says today.  “In His holy name we trust.”

     Even at the end, after he had been condemned to death and was struggling with his own fear, he was sure.  “One thing is gradually becoming clear,” Delp wrote in his diary, “I must surrender myself completely,” and it’s in this sense, too, that he venerates our Lady in the stories of Advent.  “Today,” he wrote, “we must have the courage to look on our Lady as a symbolic figure”—a symbol of trust, of obedience in the face of violence and oppression.

     “Most blessed are you among women,” Elizabeth cries out.

     “Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged,” Zephaniah says.  “The LORD, your God, is in your midst,” even in a prison cell, even in the execution chamber.

     “The LORD has removed the judgment against you,” whatever the judgment of any false court or human institution.

     So, this remarkable courage, this remarkable steadfastness, in the darkest time of the year, in one of the darkest times of history.

     But not just courage.  Not just steadfastness.

     As Elizabeth feels her baby leap for joy in her womb, Delp in his prison cell again and again felt joy:

Every now and then my whole being is flooded with pulsating life and my heart can scarcely contain the delirious joy there is in it.  Suddenly, without any cause that I can perceive, without knowing why or by what right, my spirits soar again and there is not a doubt in my mind that all the promises hold good.

Delp wasn’t crazy.  He wasn’t a fanatic.  He was as frightened as we would be in that situation.  But that wasn’t all he was.  He has joyous.  He was free in a way far more profound than his captors could ever understand because the Lord was with him, and he felt it, he knew it.  The light was shining through the bars, and inside him, and it always is.

     His impending execution was the Advent of something tender and loving beyond all telling.

     Joy. Always joy.  Consolation without cause.  A kingdom not of this world but of the stable.  Of the manger.  Of the child.

     I don’t know what binds your hands.  I don’t know what imprisons you.  I know what imprisons me, what frightens me, but today, on the Solstice, when all the natural world around us is dead, when the darkness comes so early, when all the social and political structures around us are full of violence and hatred and stupidity and greed, Alfred Delp and St. Peter Canisius and St. Elizabeth and our Lady and the Christ Child are all calling us to a joy we can only glimpse, to what Delp calls “a sense of inner exaltation and comfort,” an exaltation and a comfort that are always being offered to us, always given, always available, however deep the darkness.

     We are loved by God, and nothing can hurt us.

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When in Rome

December 7, 2018

St. Ambrose

Psalm 27; Matthew 9:27-34

 

Today on the memorial of St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, I think of his reputation for flexibility when it came to the liturgy.

You know the old joke.  “What’s the difference between a terrorist and liturgist?  You can negotiate with a terrorist.”

But St. Ambrose wasn’t that way.  He refused to give in to the demand that the liturgy be made the same in every parish and every church.   As he told his protégé, St. Augustine, “When I am at Rome, I fast on a Saturday; when I am at Milan, I do not.  Follow the custom of the church where you are.”

In fact, a version of this advice has come down to us in English in the famous saying, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

The fundamentals of the mass must remain the same, of course:  the structure of the Eucharistic Prayer, the words of consecration, the overall logic and sequence of the celebration.  But as for styles of music, St. Ambrose taught, or vestments, or certain liturgical gestures:  it doesn’t matter.  Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees.  The mass must be reverent.  The mass must be in keeping with the tradition. But there are lots of ways of doing that.

“One thing I ask of the LORD,” as the Psalmist says today.  “This I seek:  to dwell in the house of the LORD / all the days of my life, / That I may gaze on the loveliness of the LORD / and contemplate his temple.”  And we cangaze on his loveliness.  We are, right now, as we reflect on the scriptures–and we will be again in a few minutes, when Father elevates the host.

We dothe dwell in the house of the Lord.  This is it.

Today let us pray for the intercession of St. Ambrose to help rescue us from our petty concerns—all of us, whatever our preferred styles and ways of going about things.   Let us not be blind to what really matters, and not just with the liturgy but with the way our neighbors do things or our kids or our coworkers, however much it might irritate or offend us.  The Lord is present in the scriptures, the Lord is present in the Eucharist, the Lord is present in the faith and the actions of the people.  He is here, in this place, and he is here in our lives, and nothing any of us can ever do can change that or diminish that or dilute that even one degree.  His grace is pouring down on us, and it always will be.  He will be with us always, even unto the end of time.

 

 

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