Chris Anderson's Blog, page 2
March 13, 2025
What We Can Do
Everybody I talk to is worried about what they can do. Everybody wants to take some kind of action. What’s happening in the country and the world has so rattled us that we’re desperate to make a difference and we don’t know how.
But I don’t think that’s the real question. I think it’s obvious what we can do, because it’s what we’ve always done. We can give money. We can write letters. We can protest, vote, run for office, create new programs. There are only so many options.
I don’t think this is the real question. I think the real question is our despair. I think we keep worrying about what we can do because deep down we’re afraid there’s nothing we can do. We have this sense of helplessness and despair, about the dying of the planet. about the starving of the children—and then of course there was COVID and that panic and fear–and now, yet again, we’re overwhelmed.
We’re afraid: for others, absolutely. We feel great compassion. But we’re afraid, too, for ourselves. For a moment we’re experiencing just the tiniest hint of what most of the people in the world suffer in fact every day. Nothing has even happened yet, not to most of us, those of us who white and comfortably secure, but we’re afraid it will.
And under the pressure of this new anxiety we’ve temporarily lost our perspective and lost our faith, as we often do in a personal crisis, as if this moment is the only moment, this thing is the only thing, and we’re the only ones who can do anything about it, and we’re powerless. We’re being swept away.
And this is the call. Maybe the good thing about what’s happening now is that it’s calling us back, as all moments call us back. It’s calling us back to our faith: that crucifixion is inevitable and resurrection real. That we can’t put our faith in institutions, however hard we need to work for them. That not everything is up to us. That there’s a love and a tenderness and a goodness in the world beyond all our crudeness and stupidity. That nothing can separate us from the love of Christ, not dictators or presidents or even the end of the world.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they have faced the truth. Their illusions have been stripped away. Blessed are they, for they shall be comforted, for death is not the worst thing or the only thing or the last thing, and to say this isn’t to make an excuse for not acting but to explain why we are. Believing this is what gives us strength and our actions purpose.
Maybe the most important thing we can do is believe.
The great social activist Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker’s movement, kept a journal over those many years, and what she says there has such resonance for us, it means more to us, because of who she was and what she did.
What strikes me most in her journals is her humility and her realism. You see this again and again. “I need to overcome a sense of my own impotence,” she wrote once, after struggling for years to make a difference—struggling with the recalcitrance and lack of gratitude in the poor she also loved, struggling with the indifference and bias of the politicians and church leaders who refused to help:
I need to overcome a sense of my own failure, and an impatience at others that goes with it. Such a sense of defeat comes from expecting too much of one’s self, also from a sense of pride. More and more I realize how good God is to me to send me discouragements, failures, antagonisms. The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways. To bear our own burdens, do our work as best we can, and not fret because we cannot do more or do another’s work.
What should we do? Bear our own burdens. Do the work we’ve been given day to day, the best we can. Not fret because we can’t do more. Let go.
What should we do? Recognize that our discouragements and failures are in their own way a terrible grace, continual lessons in our own limitations, in our need for God, for grace. “The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways.” The only way. If we trust only in ourselves, we will end up in despair.
“Have no anxiety at all,” as St. Paul says in the magnificent passage in Philippians:
but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard you hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
And Paul says this in prison. Later he was beheaded, the tradition tells us. Do what you can. Say what you think. Be willing to go to prison. And pray, pray always—and things will still be as messy and heartbreaking and unfair as they’ve always been. You won’t necessarily get what you pray for. You’ll have to suffer. But “the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts in minds in Christ Jesus.” Peace: deeper than what we can explain, deeper than governments, deeper even than the death of the world, the death of the galaxies.
Years later, on Easter Sunday, when she was 71, Day describes another moment in her life, a moment of dying and rising again.
Always when I awaken in the morning it is to a half-dead condition, a groaning in every bone, a lifelessness, a foretaste of death, a sense of quiet terror, which hangs over us all. I turn desperately to pray. “O God make haste to help me,” and there are always those magnificent psalms, the official prayer of the church. And I am saved.
We never escape from the terror, we are never free of the ache in our bones, especially as we grow older, and we have to face that and acknowledge that, because it’s only then that we can do what we most have to do, and that’s turn to God. We can reach out then for the strength and hope we need—through the psalms, for Day, these magnificent poems, with their cries of joy and grief.
And then the entry continues:
This consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day. I am turned around, away from the world of sin and death to the reality of God, our loving father. In those moments “all the way to heaven is heaven” to me, as St. Catherine of Siena said. The sun has risen, the air is warmed, the birds are singing outside, and I go outside to sit by the dead-calm river, which flows by. The testimony of our hearts shows the truth. We experience, no matter how briefly, the sense of salvation.
The testimony of our hearts shows us the truth that must be the basis of all our actions, these quiet moments, these moments in our own given lives, when, however briefly, we experience the reality of our salvation.
What do we do if we want to attempt anything like the work that Dorothy Day undertook? How can we serve the poor? How can we fight against the lies and stupidities of our leaders?
We have to go down to the river. The dead-calm river, always flowing by.
Be not afraid, Jesus tells us his disciples, and us. They wanted to make him into a political leader. They wanted him to end the violence and oppression in their own political system, and he refused. He said, my kingdom is not of this world. He said he must die, he must be powerless, and we must take up our cross, too, and follow him, and apparently he really meant that. Maybe we’ve been taking this less literally than we should, less physically than we should. Sometimes something really happens to us, and to others, in our bodies, in the world. In the end, after all, we die.
Is this what we most fear? Is this what we keep blocking out of our minds? Death? But death is inevitable. We’re right: there’s nothing we can do in the end but believe, or not.
There’s nothing new here, now. We’re only being reminded.
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete,” Jesus says, and this is on the night before the crucifixion, and what he’s told them is that he will die. He will die on a cross. Imagine the fear in that upper room. Imagine the faces of the disciples in their anxiety and astonishment. And yet Jesus says, joy. Joy.
“Put no trust in princes”, Psalm 146 says, “in mortals in whom there is no help. / Take their breath, they return to clay / and their plans that day come to nothing.” We all return to clay, our plans come to nothing, and that’s a good thing, that’s good news, because God remains. Because our “hope is in the Lord,” “who alone made heaven and earth.” Because this isn’t all up to us. It’s the Lord who “is just to those who are oppressed.” It is the Lord “who gives bread to the hungry” and the Lord “who sets prisoners free,” and the Lord “will reign forever,” “from age to age.”
This is the faith we are called to come back to, every day, in every crisis, and even when there isn’t crisis, when there is just the day.
Even the post-resurrection experiences are fleeting, local, homey. Jesus doesn’t come back and establish a new government devoted to freedom and justice forevermore. He broils fish on the shore of the morning lake. He falls in beside them on the road. On the day of the Resurrection Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. Then he vanishes. He’s gone. We can’t hold onto him.
Is this what we are afraid of? That we just have to live with uncertainty? That we just have to live with the way things are? That we just have to live with our own mixed up and conflicting feelings?
Are we afraid of our joy? We can’t control it. It’s always a surprise. It’s fleeting. It doesn’t make sense. We can’t be sure of it.
But this is what we’ve been given, these quiet moments, these ordinary moments, even these moments of anxiety and despair, and the call is to accept them, trust in them, be grateful for them, stake our lives on them, because the peace of God surpasses all understanding. The river is always flowing.
Is it wrong to talk of heaven? Of the life to come? Isn’t that an excuse not to fight here and now?
Something there is that remains. Something vast, and something right in front of us. Something miraculous, and something perfectly ordinary, plain as day. We can’t prove that the Resurrection really happened or even know what the Resurrection really was, but we know that the early Christians were remarkably courageous and optimistic. Many ancient historians, many who were not Christian, recount stories of their joy. Something happened, and it’s always happening. All the way to heaven is heaven, and to say this isn’t to evade political and social action but to justify it. Heaven is the reason we act. Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven: heaven is our justification, heaven here and now and heaven in some unimaginable future. Be not afraid. I am with you always.
A hundred years from now it won’t make any difference anyway, as my dad used to say. In 10,000 years we’ll still be shining like the sun.
When in 1980, at the age of 83, Dorothy Day died alone in her room, this simple, traditional prayer from St. Ephrem was found next to her bed, tucked into her final journal.
Lord and master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust of power, and idle talk. Give rather to your servant a spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love. Yes, oh Lord and King, grant that I may see my own faults and not to judge my brothers and sisters, for Thou art blest from all ages to ages.
It’s remarkable to me, and encouraging, that this wise and holy and courageous woman would feel the need to pray this simple prayer even after all she had done. She was still struggling. This is never easy. Our hearts are always broken. All we can do at the end of the day, and the beginning, is turn to God.
Dorothy Day is our model, among many others. She shows us the way, as many others do. There’s nothing new here. It has always been so. What the Israelites professed came out of centuries of injustice. Jesus was a political martyr among all the other things he was, and he says, my peace I give you, my peace I leave you.
What can we do? What should we do? Pray for chastity, humility, patience and love. See our own faults. Not judge others. Give praise to the Lord of all the ages. What can we do? Rejoice and be glad, for this is our duty, the hardest thing of all, to rejoice in the face of all that we see, to stand fast, to keep remembering who we really are. This is our vocation and our disciple, this is our duty, what Dorothy Day called the duty of delight.
The post What We Can Do appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
February 2, 2025
The Button in the Room
We have all admired the sermon of Bishop Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C., her simple words about the teaching of Christ, spoken to people of power. The president was sitting right there in front of her, in the National Cathedral of Washington, and what she said was courageous and true.
Words matter. Words are actions. The American Catholic bishops have issued a fine statement making it clear that as followers of Christ we have to protect the poor and the migrant and the vulnerable. It makes me proud to be Catholic.
Many people are speaking the truth, with eloquence and conviction and sincerity, and I admire them for that.
But I wonder, too, for at least some of us some of the time, how much our anxiety and anger and our continual announcing of it, our daily displaying of it, has more to do with making sure we’re seen as one of the good guys, as people on the right side, than of wanting to do real good. Public outrage can give us status, as Musa Al-Gharbi says in a remarkable new book I’m reading, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite. Expressions of what many call “wokeness,” Al-Gharbi says, “have come to serve as signs that someone is of an elite background.” They are “increasingly a means of identifying who is part of the club”–and of who isn’t, who is “unworthy.”
It’s not as if most of us are at risk personally, Al-Ghabri says. It’s not as if those of us in the elite—educated, more or less comfortable financially, politically progressive—it’s not as if most of us are in any real way threatened, at least immediately, though we act as if we are. Al-Gharbi saw this when he was a graduate student at Columbia the day after the 2016 election, when elite students and elite faculty at an elite institution were walking around in tears, as if their world had been shattered, their lives ruined, while all the time ignoring the poor and the people of color all around them, the people working as landscapers and janitors and cooks to keep that campus up and running every day, people far more vulnerable to the new politics.
Al-Gharbi is exaggerating, and he knows he is. I know many people who are doing real, practical things for the poor and the threatened, and have been for a long time, who are walking the talk, but I still think there’s a danger here—for me and for all of us who are so anxious and afraid—of wanting to be outraged every day, of being addicted to the triggering that happens when we scroll the news sites—of liking that excitement, that charge, and liking, too, the feeling we get when we join with all the others who are expressing their indignation, are one with them–of liking that sense of rightness, of righteousness, and certainly of finding solace and support in the community of others like us, which of course isn’t a bad thing in itself.
Things have shifted. Al-Gharbi’s book just came out, and yet in the last few months the situation has gotten still more serious. Shock. Disgust. Moral indignation. These are appropriate responses, necessary responses, and more and more I think they come out of genuine conviction and genuine compassion, out of a deep sense of something being wrong.
And yet even so the interior dangers remain. Our addictions persist.
Look at how in the intensity of our political commitments we can become just as judgmental as any judge in any witch trial—condemning the other without qualms, and enjoying it. This is a great temptation, a temptation that in my own anger I have felt many times.
Look at the internet itself, at how in its speed and its brightness it stimulates the very pleasure centers of the brain.
In Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked—another brilliant book—Adam Alter describes an experiment designed by psychologists in 2014. People were asked to sit alone in a room for ten to twenty minutes without any stimulus or distraction except for a button they could push if they wanted to. That’s all. A quiet, empty room. And a button.
What the button did was transmit a brief electric shock. A quick charge. It zapped people, and the people in the experiment knew that, and they did it anyway, almost all of them. They could have just sat there, just been there for a while, but most of the people in that room pressed that button at least a few times, and many pressed it more than a few times. One young man pressed it 190 times.
190 times. In 20 minutes. That’s an electric shock every six seconds.
We’d rather do anything than sit alone with our own thoughts and feelings. We’d rather do anything than sit alone facing our own anger and sadness and fear. We’d rather do anything, Jung said, than “face our own souls.”
We’d rather be zapped.
What is it that we are trying to avoid? Is raging about the injustice in the world a way of facing the facts or of evading them? Is joining in the common outrage a way of avoiding the hard, inner work we first have to do?
It’s not either/or—we need to face both the inner and the outer worlds—but I do think it’s sequential.
If we don’t first face who we really are, if we are not first grounded in a healthy self-awareness, how can we keep our actions and protests from simply projecting our own violence and will to power?
The post The Button in the Room appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
February 1, 2025
I Get All the News I Need from the Weather Report
February 2, 2025
I’ve been struggling lately with what to listen to and what not to listen to. What to pay attention to and what to ignore.
Last week in the Liturgy of the Hours this passage jumped out at me, from Isaiah. Who can live with “the consuming fire?” the speaker asks, and then answers:
He who practices virtue and speaks honestly,
who spurns what is gained by oppression,
stopping his ears lest he hear of bloodshed,
closing his eyes lest he look on evil . . .
He shall dwell on the heights,
his stronghold shall be a rocky fastness. (Isaiah 33:13-16)
Stopping my ears. Closing my eyes. That’s what I’ve been doing the last few months, like quite a few others I know: not reading the news, not watching the news, not listening to any news. Not paying attention.
I just can’t handle the constant jolts of it anymore, the shots of adrenaline whenever I see a headline. I can only take so much of my own outrage. “I get all the news I need from the weather report,” as Paul Simon sang years ago.
Sometimes it’s been sunny. More often it’s rained. It’s been quiet. Winter has been proceeding. Spring is not far away.
And yet one of the biggest problems we have right now is people who don’t know the facts and don’t want to know, or who have the wrong facts and are fine with that, or who don’t know what’s going on and don’t think we can know. That’s one of the reasons we’ve ended up in the situation we’re in. How can we act rightly when we practice willful ignorance?
Is that what I’m doing? When is silence and withdrawal a good and proper thing, a way of praying, of following where the Spirit is leading us, and when is it refusing to face reality?
Am I dwelling on the heights, in a rocky fastness, or am I sticking my head in the sand?
I know that sooner or later I’m going to have to come out of the woods and click on the news and decide what I will say and how I will act. “Whatever you do for the least of these,” Jesus says in Matthew, “you do for me” (25:40). It couldn’t be clearer.
But I wonder, too, how much difference it’s made for me not to know what’s been going on. What has been the detriment? What have I lost? What have I failed to do?
I know the gain: a greater centeredness. A sense of ordinariness. Of presence.
Is there someone I could have helped and didn’t? I’m not sure.
When Jesus approaches the house where a young girl has died, he ignores all the “commotion,” Mark says, and goes in, quietly, and heals her. He raises her up. “Rise, little girl,” he says. “Rise.” (Mark 5:21-43)
Isn’t prayer itself an act? Isn’t silence? “With every creative thought or action,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “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.” Doesn’t prayer make a difference, too, however invisible? However small?
Satan tempts Jesus in the desert by saying three times it’s not good enough to be in the desert, not good enough just to be walking around for forty days all alone. He has to make stuff happen: turn rocks into bread. Stand on top of the parapet and make his power known to the world.
Jesus says no. Rocks are enough. Wind is enough. The stars in the night sky.
The post I Get All the News I Need from the Weather Report appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
December 30, 2024
On Being Spiritual but Not Religious
January 5, 2025
The Epiphany: Matthew 2: 1-12
They were overjoyed when they saw the star. (2:10)
I’ve always resisted the idea that we can be “spiritual but not religious,” it’s always seemed too easy to me, but after reading The Afternoon of Christianity, by the Czech priest and theologian, Tomas Halik, I’m starting to change my mind.
I think I’m spiritual but not religious, too, and always have been.
Everyone seems to be spiritual but not religious now—everyone seems to be saying this—it’s a meme—and Halik agrees that it’s often superficial, just an excuse for not doing the hard work that every spiritual practice demands. But it’s not only that. It reflects something deep in our culture, he believes, something we have to take seriously, as many people are. Many, many of the people who have left the Church or never joined are doing the hard work, they are thoughtful and sincere, and they’re facing in their own way the problems we all have to face in the Church as an institution. They’re following their consciences. They’re trying to go where they believe the Spirit is leading them.
God isn’t dead anymore. There’s a deep, spiritual longing in the world, and the traditional religions are not meeting that need, and what Halik argues is that the Spirit is trying to speak to all of us through this crisis, calling the whole Church to be spiritual but not religious, too.
A few weeks ago I did a memorial in a small town up the valley for the family of an old man who had died. A friend asked me to help them. There were just a few people there, working class people, hardworking people, none of them practicing Christians or with any religious background at all, and I had to be careful to adapt the prayers to respect that. I wore a dress shirt and my good jeans. I couldn’t fall back on the usual things. It was tricky.
One young man was in his early thirties maybe, well over six feet tall, with a big bushy black beard, and he really intimidated me at first. But he sat down next to his grandmother, and he held her hand, the whole time, and after a while the tears began to flow. His voice broke as he talked about the kindness of the man who had died. Everyone there was emotional, they were all good, loving people, you could feel it in the air of that funeral home, and I thought, God, you are here. Whatever name they call you, you are here. Whether I wear a collar or not, whatever words I say, you are here.
It was a humbling moment. A gift.
“Religion” in the sense of institution and of organization isn’t bad. We need it. It just has to come later, in second place, and as a way of helping us enter more deeply into the mystery. The Church has to focus first on the experience of God, focus first on prayer, not on dogma and institutional practice.
This what I was being taught that day in that little town, and what I’ve been taught every day I’ve served as a deacon: “divine love meets us in the real world and nowhere else,” as Ruth Burrows says: “in this moment, in this person.”
What Halik argues is that the Church must “transcend” itself–and not just the Catholic Church but all the churches, and not just Christianity but all the major world religions. The call is for the great traditions to come together, and with mutual respect, each in its own way, offer the world the spiritual resources it desperately needs, teaching us how to separate the valid and good from the kooky and crackpot, how not to read literally, how not to oversimplify, how not to fear the darkness and the complexity of things but to face it.
This is what Jesus does: he teaches us how to pray: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . . This is what Jesus does: he teaches us how to be: Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . blessed are the meek. . . This is the great treasure of the Catholic Church. Its great gift is the gift of prayer, of the long practice of being in the presence of God–or of recognizing that we’re not, that we are all in constant need of grace.
And since a church like this won’t come into being anytime soon, or ever—since there has never been a perfect church, free of human distortions—we have to make peace with the way things are, if we can, or if we can’t, find spiritual strength in other ways, in alternate communities, often on the margins and in the cracks.
“If Christianity wants to help foster a global society,” Halik says: “it will have to be a ‘kenotic’ Christianity, free of any claims to power and free of clerical narrow-mindedness.” It will have to be “a Christianity that is ecumenically open and ready to serve all those in need.”
Self-emptying: kenosis. Have in you the “same mind” as Christ Jesus, St. Paul says in Philippians, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something be grasped, but rather emptied himself.”
The Church is being called to grow up, in short, to enter into what Halik, borrowing a term from Carl Jung, calls the “afternoon” or the maturity of faith: “if the Church today can attest to this trust in a God who is greater than all our ideas, definitions and institutions, something new and significant happens: we enter the afternoon of faith.”
In many ways Halik is simply saying that the Church needs to fulfill the promise of Vatican II.
The Wise Men didn’t belong to the established community, they came from somewhere else, and they didn’t follow an idea. They followed a star.
When they found the child, they didn’t stop to debate. They didn’t try to capture him and take him away. They knelt. They gave him all they had, all their gifts.
They weren’t angry and they weren’t afraid.
They were overjoyed.
The post On Being Spiritual but Not Religious appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
December 19, 2024
The Feminization of the Church
Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 22, 2204
Apparently, some people are worried about “the feminization” of the Church. I came across this phrase just the other day. Apparently, there are Catholics in this country who want the Church to be more “manly”—who want it to be “hard,” not “soft.”
I guess this is a thing, and I think it’s crazy. It’s wrong. It’s completely contrary to the gospels and certainly contrary to Luke, who frames his account of the life of Jesus with the stories of Mary–today, of Mary and Elizabeth, in this beautiful scene we call the Visitation. Luke wants us to see Jesus through the eyes of women.
For one thing, Mary hastens to the hill country, hurries up and down the rocky hills, and that requires a strength, a “hardness,” of muscle and of will. Elizabeth lives in those hills, and every day they both do the backbreaking work all women did in that time before electricity and running water, and still do in many places—not to mention the fact that they are both pregnant, and will both endure the pain of childbirth, one of the most painful things a human being can endure.
And what of their spiritual hardness, their spiritual strength, to believe in the face of the disapproval of all those around them, to trust when there is only hardship, only the desert?
But let’s accept the stereotypes for a moment: that women are weak and men are strong. That women are soft and men are hard.
Who could be more womanly, then, than Jesus himself, who did not deem equality with God something to be grasped but rather emptied himself? Who said blessed are the meek? Who never once in all the gospels clenched his fist or raised his hand? Who died, and let himself die, and called us to die, too?
Who could be softer than Paul, who boasted of his weakness?
Or like Sarah Coakley in The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God, let’s accept for a moment the biological difference between male and female and use that as the metaphor: that the male givesand the female receives.
In the story of the Visitation there’s all kinds of giving and receiving, and the women are doing both. They keep exchanging roles. Mary has received the Spirit and become the mother of the Lord, just as Elizabeth has received from her husband and become the mother of John the Baptist. But isn’t giving birth a giving, too, a producing? And Mary gives Elizabeth a greeting, and Elizabeth receives it—and then Elizabeth gives Mary a greeting in return, “Hail Mary, full of Grace,” and Mary receives it—and then Mary responds again, with the great poem of the Magnificat, and we all receive it: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” It’s a festival of giving and receiving. A cycle. An ecology.
Here’s Blessed Isaac of Stella, from the 12th century:
Every Christian is also believed to be a bride of God’s Word, a mother of Christ, his daughter and sister, at once virginal and fruitful. These words are used in a universal sense of the Church, in a special sense of Mary, in a particular sense of the individual Christian. They are used by God’s Wisdom in person, the Word of the Father.
The Church has always thought of Mary as the icon of the Church. The metaphor has always been of the wedding, with Christ as the groom and the Church as the bride. And we are all like Mary, we are all the Church, “every Christian,” the ordained and the lay, all “virginal and fruitful.” Both. At the same time.
God is beyond all sexuality and gender, as the Catechism makes clear–there are images in the scriptures and the tradition of God as mother, too–but an image has some meaning, it points to something, and the dominant image in the tradition is of God as father, and that image suggests something very important, however partial, something that shouldn’t be erased or explained away: that salvation is a gift. We receive it. It’s given.
Without God we are lost.
The solution to the problem of exclusive language isn’t to make everything so general that it doesn’t mean anything. Jesus was a man, he was our brother, and we would never want to do away with his blessed masculinity, his dear manliness, exactly because it’s the opposite of the kind of masculinity we see all the time in popular culture.
It’s true that there are many images in the psalms and the prophets of God as powerful king and warrior, images that are sometimes used in the New Testament to describe Jesus, and these images are important, too, because they assure us again and again of God’s power, however things seem, that the darkness will not overwhelm the light.
We don’t want just one image of who Jesus is. We want all the images we can get.
But Jesus is the only man we are called to imitate, all of us, whatever our gender, and always in his gentleness, his compassion.
And always and again: God is beyond all gender, God is beyond all metaphor, and the worst thing we can do is take any one image and freeze it, think of it as fixed, exhaustive.
Think of the Trinity: the Father gives to the Son and the Son gives to the Spirit—and both the Son and the Spirit give to the Father—the masculine roles and the feminine roles are continually shifting, joyously.
Think of the image of the “persons” in the Trinity, as Tomas Halik does in I Want You to Be. It’s terribly important. It suggests that whatever we sense when we pray isn’t just an impersonal force but a love, a tenderness. Somehow, Someone.
But at the same time “persons” is only an image. It only suggests, and it only suggests that God is like this, which is to say, also unlike this. God is always beyond. Always other.
The Greek word for “person,” in fact, is persona–literally, mask.
All language is mask.
As Coakley points out, this is exactly like the dynamism and fluidity of the role of the priest in the mass, who in the Eucharistic Prayer first receives the action of the Holy Spirit (and so is feminine) which then, through him, makes holy the bread and the wine (and so is productive, is masculine).
But then it shifts again. The priest, after all, receives the Eucharist, too.
And then we all receive the sacrament, as a woman receives, and then we all go out to love and serve the Lord, which is to say, we create. We give. It’s wonderfully blurry and circular: in the Eucharist, as St. Augustine says in fifth century, “we receive who we are.”
What is it that Elizabeth proclaims in the Magnificat? That all the binaries are reversed, turned upside down: the mighty are cast down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up; the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.
This is how the Lord speaks to us every day. He greets us—softly, quietly, in everything that happens, in the things we see, in a memory, in a song we hear, a child we love, in the rain, the trees—and sometimes, if we’re paying attention, if we’re listening, our hearts leap up. We feel this quiet joy. Our breath catches. And then we ring out our praise, as Mary does. We sing our song. We proclaim our faith.
Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband, is taking his turn serving as a priest in the temple, and the angel comes to him, too, and says these wonderful things are going to happen, and unlike Mary when the angel comes to her, Zechariah questions the angel, he wants proof–hard proof, nothing soft or fuzzy or touchy-feely–he wants to nail things down once and for all, and the angel does what angels do in these situations: he strikes the man dumb.
It’s only later, when his son John the Baptist is born, that Zechariah is able to open his mouth again, and what he proclaims is the Benedictus, is praise: Blessed be the Lord.
This is what Zechariah finally understands. This is what we all need to understand this Advent and Christmas–particularly this Advent and Christmas.
Jesus doesn’t come into the world as a soldier or an athlete or a hero or a president or a king. He comes as a little boy, rocked in his mother’s arms.
The post The Feminization of the Church appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
December 6, 2024
Revising the Tree
The man in the cherry picker won’t stop at first.
He idles only long enough to shout no, then gooses
his chainsaw and starts it screaming again,
biting into the bare, twisting branches of an oak
in someone’s front yard. He’s middle-aged, and worn,
hardhat dented, and he has a schedule to keep.
But by the time I cross the street to the cemetery
where the family waits, it’s suddenly quiet again.
The shrieking has died. The woodchipper has ceased.
We are able to stand by the grave and grieve.
You can’t get there all at once. Everything takes time.
I say the prayers and we lay the body to rest,
and when I walk back to my car and open the door,
the man in the bucket looks down at me for
one long beat, then yanking on his chainsaw,
turns and resumes his deafening work.
The post Revising the Tree appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
November 22, 2024
This World
November 24, 2024
Solemnity of Christ the King
“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord,
“the one who is and who was and who is to come.” Revelation 1: 5-8
Pilate said to Jesus, “are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, ““my kingdom is not of this world.” John 18:33-37
Every day since our shattering election, the leaves have fallen from our tree.
Every day since the wars began in Gaza and Ukraine,
the steam has risen from my coffee cup.
Bumble has slept at my feet.
Sunrises. Sunsets.
My four-year-old grandson made this joke: do you know
what would be funny? A baby with glasses on!
Jesus says his kingdom is not of this world: not the world of the bombs
and the lies and the things that governments do or try to do,
that all the Pilates do or try to do,
but this world: the world of the sleeping dog.
The world of the steaming cup.
The psalms and the gospels are full of images of destruction
and apocalypse and lamentation and grief: full of them.
When we lament we are with God.
When we grieve we are with God.
When we are afraid, we are feeling one of the sacred emotions.
But of course this isn’t all, because without promising
that the destruction will cease, or all the sinfulness will disappear,
the Lord proclaims his constancy, his unending presence,
underneath, this love that flows.
The existence of love isn’t proven or disproven
by the state of the world but in spite of it,
beneath it, above it, outside it.
In us.
The promise isn’t that everything will be alright
but that the Lord will be with us always
even when everything isn’t right.
The promise isn’t that everything will be alright this minute
but in the end.
Maybe thousands of years from now. Eons.
The vast galaxies spin.
The scale is different: unbelievably vast
and yet breathtakingly small.
The Alpha and the Omega.
The One who is and who was and who is to come.
We must act.
Protest.
Stand at the barricades.
Stand in the gaps.
Face the truth.
Tell the truth.
Give money.
Work for systems, structures, justice.
Lift up the poor.
Heal the suffering.
Weep. Cry out. Rage.
Jesus was crucified: he lost: he failed: he died:
he was lied to, he was tortured, he was used for show.
Governments used and betrayed him, and they still are.
And yet he stood fast. He held his ground.
He said: my kingdom is not of this world.
Do you think that Jesus didn’t weep?
He didn’t grieve? He didn’t question? He didn’t doubt?
He was like us in all things except sin,
and weeping isn’t a sin. Grieving isn’t a sin.
Fear and doubt and righteous anger: they are not sins.
Don’t despair: Jesus is with the little boy in the rubble.
Jesus is with the little girl on the border.
Jesus is with the woman dying all alone.
Do you know what would be funny?
A baby with glasses on!
Do you know what would be amazing?
Jesus rising from the dead.
Do you know what is beautiful?
What is unending?
The leaves that fall from the tree.
The steam that rises from the cup.
This moment.
Every moment.
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton
The post This World appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
November 6, 2024
You Can’t Get There All at Once
Sometimes the only thing to do is keep writing poems.
I’ve been working on this poem for several years, and after the results of last Tuesday’s election, in my shock and dismay, I got it out and revised it again.
I think of the second letter of Peter, the idea that “God’s patience is directed towards our salvation” (3:15). I think of a term I read somewhere, “eschatological patience,” the idea that we must all wait for completion and fulfillment in a distant future. I think of “the whole of creation groaning” as it evolves ever closer to God (Romans 8:23).
You Can’t Get There All at Once
The man in the bucket says he won’t stop.
He idles only long enough to shout no, then gooses
his chainsaw and starts screaming again, biting
into the bare and twisting branches of a tree
in someone’s front yard. He is young and strong,
hardhat dented. But when I cross the street to
the cemetery where the family waits, it’s suddenly
quiet—the shrieking has ceased—we can
stand by the grave and grieve. You can’t get
there all at once. Everything takes time. We say
the prayers we need to say and lay the body
to rest, and when I get back to my car and open
the door, the man in the bucket looks down
for just a beat, face blank, then turns and yanks
on his chainsaw, resuming his terrible work,
lopping and shaping, revising the tree.
November 5, 2024
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Teilhard de Chardin
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October 25, 2024
The Scary Tedium of Prayer
Sunday October 27, 2024
Mark 10: 46-52
The scary tedium and emptiness of trying to live a life of prayer. The return, of course, of all your habits, bad and otherwise. How hard it is to wake up when the alarm goes off. Reading the NYT on the toilet. All day the sense of having failed at some duty.
But there is no duty. There is no way. To live a life of prayer is live a life.
It’s easy to feel that calling your life “a life of prayer” or a “contemplative life” is to dignify it or to be pretentious, holier-than-thou, but that’s to misunderstand the ordinariness of prayer.
It’s to misunderstand the Incarnation: God is here, now. In him all things continue into being.
We can’t think about God all the time. God isn’t something we can think about because God isn’t something. God is force, energy, person, the general and the particular, love and detachment, silence and speech, so deeply interfused that we can’t know him except fleetingly or cumulatively, the way we can’t see the air we breathe except from orbit, where the thin layer of the atmosphere becomes obvious. Or God is the light of the sun that allows us to see, and each ray, each particle and wave, is meant for me in particular, and for you. Is intended. Day and night. The planet turning. Day after day after day. Breathe in. Breath out. Jes-us. Jes-us. Have mercy on us.
Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!
The post The Scary Tedium of Prayer appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
September 8, 2024
Be Opened
September 8, 2024
James 2:1-5; Mark 7:11-37
One day I get a call to drive over to Lebanon to visit a woman who is dying. It’s a gray, overcast day and the house is dark and dirty. A little dog barks at my feet. The woman is leaning back in a bulging recliner held together by duct tape.
But then we start praying the Rosary. Hail Mary, I say, full of grace, and the woman answers me each bead, Holy Mary, Mother of God, back and forth, and she has this beautiful voice, deep and silky, like a contralto.
God is always speaking to us, and sometimes his voice is a deep contralto, but our ears are closed and our hearts are closed and he must reach out first and touch us: Ephphetha. Be opened.
God shows no partiality, as the Letter of James says. The poor person in shabby clothes is just as beloved to him as the rich man with golden rings.
The Ephphetha is built into the Baptismal rite. It’s part of our lives from the beginning. The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak, the priest or deacon prays, and then, as we sign the baby’s ears and mouth: may he soon touch your ears to receive his word and your mouth to proclaim his praise.
This is what we try to teach our children and what we keep trying to teach ourselves: how to hear the Word of God. How to listen to our lives.
There are so many other voices in the world, voices of hatred and judgment and condemnation, and they can drown out the goodness in a child. They can overwhelm us all. There are so many other voices within us, voices of anger and violence and self-loathing–they just seem to be a part of who we are, they might be underneath what we call Original Sin–and we have to learn what they are and separate them out. Whatever leads to freedom, whatever leads to peace, whatever makes us feel loved and able then to love others: that’s the voice of God.
This what we have to teach our children, and we have to make sure that our own voices don’t add to the clamor, don’t add to the vitriol and the lies, because whatever comes out of our mouths goes into the ears of our children and into the ears of many, many others, and then it comes out of their mouths, too, again and again, in an endless cycle.
We’re all so closed off. We’re afraid to the face the facts, because sometimes they’re complicated and hard and they might force us to change our minds. We’re afraid to face the tensions inside of us, the ambiguities and the sadness, and so we blame others and cling to false, easy answers, to oversimplifications that free of us from thinking for ourselves, free us from taking responsibility. We eat too much, drink too much, buy too much. We’ll do anything to distract ourselves from what’s going on in our own souls.
Ephphetha, Jesus says. Be opened. Be not afraid. Trust in me. Risk believing. Today, listen to the voice of the lord. Do not grow stubborn as your forbearers did in the wilderness when at Meribah and Massah they challenged me and provoked me, although they had seen all of my works.
I’m walking back to my car after another thesis defense, and a homeless man in the parking lot asks me what time it is. Bearded. Gap-toothed, wearing an old bomber jacket and black watch cap. I don’t believe in time anymore, he says, and now I’m always late.
And I laughed. I thought that was a profound thing to say, and told him I did. Was that man’s voice the voice of the Lord? What was God telling me? What did God want me to hear?
Ephphetha: be opened.
Think of the ripple effect of our words. How what this man said stayed with me, and I told Barb about it, and she told others, and they told others. How what I said might have stayed with him, and how he might have told others, and they told others. With every creative thought and action, Teilhard de Chardin says, a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to think, to act, and to judge.
O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.
Sometimes there’s only silence, only emptiness. No birds sing. No children play. We are desolate, we are in desolation, and we have to learn hear those moments, too. God is present even when we don’t feel that he is. Desolation is just part of the process, just part of the journey. However terrible it is, however long it lasts, it doesn’t mean that God is a lie. It doesn’t mean that joy is a delusion. Hold on.
We must be ready to believe that nothingness is the presence of divine reality, Ruth Burrows says, that emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling.
Hold on.
I once married two people in their mid-seventies, Patty and Joe.
Both had lost their spouses, and in their loneliness they’d become friends. Joe had worked for the Forest Service and been a cook and done odd jobs. He’d had a hard life, and Patty had, too. They were wonderful people, generous and kind. Neither had very much money–they were both just getting by.
I’ll never forget the moment of their wedding. This was when the tabernacle was still over on the side of the church, and we just stood there, the three of us, and a couple of Patty and Joe’s children. Patty wore a simple print dress, Joe a straw cowboy hat with a feather in the band. It was quiet. I was saying the words of the marriage liturgy.
And then, out of the blue, Joe interrupted and asked if he could say something. He just stopped the flow of the rite. And taking Patty’s hand, and looking into her eyes, he said, haltingly:
ain’t no mountain high enough aint no valley low enough
aint no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you
I wasn’t expecting this. It embarrassed me at first. But then I realized, what a minute, this is beautiful, this is important—this is the voice of the Lord.
Ephphetha. Be opened.
God is always speaking to us, in time and out of time, whatever time it is.
Last week a man wrote in an email that when he went out in the morning to listen, there were so many Swainson’s Thrushes calling and flying overhead it was like a “river of thrushes.”
Weep weep weep. That’s the flight call of the thrushes as they fly home to the Amazon every fall. But we have to listen for it. We have to get up early. It’s still dark. The stars are out. We have to stand on the porch and strain to hear it, above the sounds of the semis going down the road.
weep weep weep
Hail Mary, full of grace
Be opened: aint no mountain high enough aint no valley low enough
aint no river wide enough
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