Chris Anderson's Blog, page 20

Recognition

October 21, 2018

Twenty Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 53:10-11; Psalm 33; Mark 10:35-45

 

A few weeks ago I was at an all-day English Department meeting at OSU.  We were making plans for the new school year and everyone was talking and sharing their news.  And I was just besieged with envy and jealousy, like the disciples today, who resent James and John for receiving what they think are special favors.  It really surprised me.  My colleagues were getting all these grants and winning all these awards, and I was just sitting in the back, green with envy.  I wanted to win the awards.  I wanted recognition.

I felt this so strongly it confused me.  It wasn’t until several days later that I realized my sin wasn’t just the sin of envy but the sin of not wanting to admit it.  This the greatest sin of all:  to not want to be a sinner.  I keep thinking I’m beyond this.  I pray and go to mass, and I’m getting older and should be getting wiser, and yet again and again, I find that I’m a sinner after all and it embarrasses and humbles me.

Good.

To be a servant, to wantto be a servant, to have the love and the compassion that Jesus calls us to today, we first have to accept the fact that we can’t make ourselves feel that way.  Love like that is a gift, and we can only receive it when we realize we need it.

And the funny thing is that as soon as I did admit this to myself, after several days of being confused and depressed, did admit I was envious and lacking in love at that meeting–at the very minute I said yes, that’s true–I was released from that envy.  It dropped away, or it lightened at least, and I was able to go back in my mind and think about how talented those people are and how good they are and to rejoice in that.

 

This last summer I was going through a box of things from my childhood, and I found “A Certificate of Recognition” from a Vacation Bible School class I attended at a Lutheran church in Malta, Montana.  It reads: in recognition of faithful attendance and creditable work, signed Velma Sutton and the Reverend James Proffitt, June 30, 1961.

There’s an award, there’s recognition, and we can all receive it.  It’s an award for attendance, and we can all attend.

On the left of the certificate there’s a picture of Jesus the Good Shepherd coming towards us with a small flock of sheep.  It’s the kind of picture I’m sure you’ve seen before in Sunday School or a children’s Bible.  Jesus is soft focus, with long brown hair and soft eyes, and the sheep are fluffy and white, and Jesus just seems so strong and kind—he’s holding a little a lamb in his arms–and looking at it I felt a pang of longing for that feeling I had when I was kid and thought of him, that trust and happiness.  And why not?  Isn’t that what we’re called to?  To humble ourselves, to let ourselves be sheep, so that we can have a shepherd?  We have to come to God as little children, the gospel said last week, and isn’t that maybe especially important for those of us who think we’re so sophisticated and mature?

Yes, to follow Jesus means that we have to drink from his cup, and his cup is a cup of suffering, it’s an entering into the suffering and complexity and incompleteness of the world, and ourselves, and that’s terribly hard, that means letting go of all our childish fantasies of glory.  But that’s not all there is.  That’s not the end.  It’s a means to an end and the end is joy.  The crucifixion leads to the resurrection–it’s through “affliction,” Isaiah says today, that we “see the light in fullness of days.”  The purpose of voluntary poverty isn’t to make ourselves miserable.  It’s to create a space in which there is room for everything.

 

And just last week, in Rome, the Church canonized seven people, including Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Oscar Romero.  The Church recognized them, made them saints, but not because they’d published a lot of books or made a lot of money but because they all served God and served others–Paul VI because, as Pope Francis emphasized in his homily, he promoted the “preferential option for the poor,” one of the most important ideas in our tradition–and Archbishop Romeo, of El Salvador, because over time he came to identify with the poor and oppressed people of his country and to resist the tyranny of the Salvadoran government, to the point that finally he was assassinated, at mass, as he finished his homily and was walking towards the altar.

At the canonization mass Pope Francis wore both the vestments of St. Paul VI and the bloody cincture of St. Oscar Romero, the rope he was wearing around his waist when he was gunned down.

I have a special admiration for Oscar Romero, I guess because I don’t think I could ever be like him, have that kind of courage.  But then, I don’t think Romero would say that he had that kind of courage either.  I think he would say it was given to him.  It was grace.

In fact, for years I’ve carried around this Oscar Romero quote.  It means a lot to me.  I love it for its spirit of humility, for its challenge and yet its feeling of reassurance:

We cannot do everything [Romero says] and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.  This enables us to do something and do it very well.  It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the workers.  We are workers, not master builders; ministers, no messiahs.  We are prophets of a future not our own.

If we are called in our joy to serve the homeless, we should serve the homeless.  If we are called in our joy to pray, we should pray.  If we are called to write or to quilt or to program computers, that’s what we should do.  We don’t have to do everything, and we can’t.

We are the workers, not the master builder; the sheep, not the shepherd.  We are all known, we are all loved for who we really are, and we have only to recognize this ourselves to be liberated, to be freed, walking with the rest of the flock in that children’s book picture, Jesus before us, young and strong and smiling, the grass beneath our feet and the trees behind us, the sky full of pure white clouds. “Of the kindness of the Lord the earth is full,” the psalmist says today: “See, the eyes of the Lord are upon those who fear him, / upon those who hope for his kindness.”

The eyes of the Lord are upon us—Jesus recognizes us—he turns his loving gaze on us.  All of us.

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Walking with my Brothers to Lookout Point on Our Father’s Birthday

My head cold only makes me feel slightly more

detached than usual.

I often feel like a camera, observing:

vine maple above a stream, red against the green;

oysters and eggs and sourdough bread;

my two younger brothers, gray-bearded,

looking out from the point, and the ocean curving

and the sun shining and the surface swelling.

I know that within me there is a great love, and all

around me.  Everywhere.

Driving through the desert at night on the way

to Spokane and seeing the stadium

in a little town and the lights of the stadium

shining out into the darkness.

I am passing by.

I know they are cheering.

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Not the Immediate Presence of God

October 19, 2018

Galatians 2:1-14; Luke 11:1-4

 

Most of us panic when problems develop in the church, as they have now, with the current crisis.  People are angry and people are disagreeing and of course there’s something terrible going on and we have to get to the bottom of it.

But in another way this is old news, it has always been so, even in the very early Church, as Paul makes clear in Galatians when he says that he “opposed Peter to his face,” or maybe more accurately, stood before him “toe to toe,” accusing him of hypocrisy in his attitude towards the Gentiles.  And this is sacred scripture, this is the Bible, and I think what that suggests is that in some way the very conflict is God’s will, is inspired, is something we should learn from:  it tells us:  the church is never perfect in its human dimension and there is always conflict and this conflict can have great spiritual value, itself.

This is Peter after all, who is not only the first Pope but the one who denied Jesus three times.  Who jumps out on the water and sinks.

Here’s how the contemporary Trappist monk Michael Casey puts it:

     Spiritual experience is so deeply satisfying that many who taste it wish to experience it more fully.  And so they enter a monastery.  The honeymoon may continue for a time as they adapt to a new mode of living, but eventually the waves of consolation cease and the novice is left with the monotony of daily chores, the ambiguities of community living, and a persistent dryness in prayer.  To fill this emptiness, temptations of various kinds begin to intrude upon awareness which, even if they are successfully repelled, cumulatively cause weariness and discouragement.

     So what does the fervent seeker after God discover in the monastery?  Not the immediate presence of God, but the absence of God. . . .  A monastery exists to guide us into the realization that our desire for God will be satisfied only in eternity.

Substitute “church” or “parish” for monastery and we’ve got it.  The Church as human institution is full of good things, too, is wonderful too—I’m so tired of people who stereotype it as completely corrupt and terrible, because it isn’t–but whenever the Church does let us down, whenever it does fail to live up to some childish, immature image we still carry around with us, rejoice, be glad, because we are being called in those moments to look beyond the human to God himself.

When someone points at the moon, Augustine says, we should look at the moon, not at the finger that’s doing the pointing.

     When we go to a restaurant, we don’t eat the menu.

Or as I heard Pope Francis once say when he came into a room and everyone was shouting Papa! Papa!: no, no!  Jesus!  Jesus!

This isn’t to undermine anybody’s faith but just the opposite, to bolster it, to strengthen it.  The biggest threat to belief is the low that always follows the high, the coming-back-down-to-earth that always follows from a retreat or an intense, spiritual experience.  We can think we were being foolish when we felt such joy and such faith.  It’s the desolation that’s real.  The depression.  But no: the joy is real, the high is real, the dove doescome down from heaven. Believe that.  And the desolation is real, too, the temptation in the desert, because it humbles us and tests us and calls us to trust in what we can never achieve on our own, however deep our devotion.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name; thykingdom come.

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Packing

September 26, 2018

Wednesday, the 25thweek of Ordinary Time

Luke 9:1-6

 

I’ve had the chance to be in the Church of Cosmas and Damien in Rome, and to serve as a deacon there and to preach there, twice, and both times it’s been a wonderful thing.  The thing that struck me both times is how the great mosaic above the altar and the gold figures of Jesus and the apostles and the angels are so bold and bright they seem brand new, though the mosaic was made in the eighth nor ninth centuries—and also how at the bottom of that mosaic, there’s this row of sheep being separated from the goats, and shorn, and how one of the sheep, half-shorn, looks right at us with this almost cartoon look on its face, as if to say, what’s happening?

That’s me. I’m that sheep.  As always with the gospel, the gospel today convicts and indicts me.

Because unlike the disciples, I don’t travel light, not to Rome or anywhere else. I keep over-packing.  I keep taking all kinds of things on my journey, my pride and my assumptions and my grievances, like the man in Thoreau’s Waldenwho walks down the street carrying all his possessions on his back, all his furniture and his pots and pans.  Thoreau says that’s all of us, that’s a metaphor for who we all are, weighed down by all the things we think we need, and for me it’s not just my stuff but my envy and jealousy and pride, and maybe most of all my desire to be in control.

I’m one of those travelers who wants everything worked out in advance, the itinerary figured out down the minute.  I don’t want to just go somewhere and see what happens.  I don’t want to experience any kind of embarrassment or discomfort or uncertainty.  I don’t want to have to ask directions.  I want my bed ready and waiting at the end of the day.

But what if today I trusted in Jesus instead of myself, really believed, through grace, and set out on my journey ready for whatever comes, whatever question a student might ask, whoever might show up at my office, whatever real and good and surprising thought or feeling or impulse might surface in my mind and my heart?  What if I just came to today as I am, without all my armor, my layers of protection?

Like Cosmas and Damien, doctors, tradition says, but doctors who gave themselves away, who made themselves available for whatever the community needed. Who were ready.  Who served.

This is the prayer of Franciscan Friar Mychal Judge, who woke up on September 11, 2001, not knowing that he would die that day—and die trying to save others, so unburdened and open to what would happen that he could run into that burning tower, could see in the moment what needed to be done and react, respond, give himself away:

    Lord, take me where you want me to go.

    Let me meet the people you want me to meet.

    Tell me what to say,

    and keep me out of your way. Amen.

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Misreading Darwin

(This is a new poem sequence of mine just accepted for publication by Rattle.)

 

     He lived not only his own life, he lived also in the lives of others.

            Janet Browne, Charles Darwin

 

 Chemistry, the Cultural Approach

 

We didn’t have to do experiments, we just had to think about them,

and that’s my method still.

I don’t like specimens.  I like shelving.  Not collecting but collections.

The way Darwin said he abhorred the sea, every wave and slap,

the whole five years, but loved his tiny cabin beneath the poop deck,

with its nooks

and crannies and clever drawers, though of course

he was really out there, too, scrambling over rocks and skinning iguanas.

He could do it all:  geology, zoology, botany.

Back home in County Kent he spent the mornings in his study

surrounded by his books and instruments.

He loved to write on foolscap.  Sometimes a sentence.  Sometimes a word.

He wasn’t an atheist.  He was just very, very slow.

He was polite.

I am the vine, you are the branches, as Buzz Aldrin said from the moon,

after the Eagle landed.

But this was off-mic, of course.  He was quoting Jesus.

 

2.  Cartoon Eyes     

 

Darwin wrote sitting on a chair

with a board spread across his lap.

 

He was always sending his children out

to collect beetles and report on the pigeons,

and he was always asking farmers

what they had seen and what they knew,

and shopkeepers, and the postman.

 

Anybody.  He was interested.

 

I have a laptop, of course,

and so I often write in chairs.

 

Yesterday what I saw was a bushtit

fluttering in the ivy,

and when I went to investigate

I saw that it couldn’t fly anymore.

It was injured and hiding.

 

It looked right at me, blinking

the two black dots of its eyes,

and as it blinked

nothing else on its body moved.

It was otherwise still.

 

I think it knew me.

I think it knew it was dying.

 

 

3.  Addendum to my First Poem about Darwin

 

When I say that Darwin wasn’t an atheist

I just mean that he seems like such a nice man.

He was shy.  He was sad.  He was flatulent—

that’s why he always excused himself after dinner.

He spent eight years studying barnacles,

everything about them, until he was the world’s expert

on barnacles, all the different kinds,

with all their hard shells and their soft, creamy bodies.

He loved to walk in his garden,

admiring the trees, but only at the appointed time.

His house was the ship and his wife

was the captain and he was the voyager,

alone with his thoughts every day, filling page after page.

The children told time by the creak of his door—

though they were always racing in, too,

stealing a rock or a feather, and he let them,

and sometimes he played with them or took them

in his arms and kissed them on the ears,

and when his little Annie died he so forgot himself

in a letter to a friend he called her a little angel.

An angel.  He just couldn’t believe

she was gone.  He just wasn’t thinking.

 

 

4.  On the Surface

 

Darwin married his cousin, Emma,

and later came to love her dearly.

 

I met Barb in the band—she played the drums

and I played the clarinet—

and I loved her from the start.

 

After their second child died, the youngest,

a boy, Darwin bought a billiard table.

He researched it thoroughly first

and bought the best, and he liked to play

as he was thinking,

banking shots off the soft, velvet edges.

 

My brother and I used to play pool

down at Gazebos, in a shadowy corner

beneath a big hanging light,

the felt a brilliant, emerald green,

but I never sat at the bar until a week

after Barb and I were married.

 

I’d just turned twenty-one and Dad

bought me a beer

and we sat and talked.  It was surreal.

It just didn’t seem possible.

Everything was still on the surface.

 

 

5.  My Mystery Bird

 

At Nestucca once I saw a Swainson’s Thrush sing,

but I had to live there first, for a month, in the alder above the bay.

It was chilly and damp in the morning, and I was very lonely,

but I had my little coffee pot, and my post it notes

flew like flags, and finally I saw it happening, early one evening,

lit by the sun, the way they tip back their heads

and let the song pour forth, their soft throats bubbling.

Now there’s this mystery bird in my neighbor’s yard across the street,

singing in the blackberries.  It could be

a Black-throated Gray Warbler, or a Hermit Warbler, or even

a Townsend’s, but there’s no way to know unless I actually see it,

unless I can stand on the road and wait,

looking into the thorns, while the cars drive by and the world goes on,

and I do.  Minutes at a time.  I want to see this one, too.

The way my brother says he feels the wine slide down his throat

when he drinks from the cup at mass.

The way he says he can feel it:  that warmth.  That burning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Surprise

A few days ago I was leading a Rosary after daily mass for a small group of parishioners, mostly older.  They were sitting in the pews on the far side, near the tabernacle, and as I stood in front in my alb and stole, joining in the back-and-forth of the Hail Mary’s, I began to feel a love rising up in me for those people.  An admiration.

And I was grateful for this feeling–it was a gift–because I haven’t always felt this way.

I think that as deacons we are all tempted by what Pope Francis, in the second chapter of Gaudete et Exsultate: Rejoice and Be Glad, callsthe “two subtle enemies of holiness”: Gnosticism and Pelagianism.

Particularly when we are first ordained we are often so excited by the intellectual beauty of Catholic theology that all we want to do is talk about it, and that’s fine, except when we begin to promote certain ideas over others or become so abstract that we lose track of the real world of our parish.  We get caught up in ecological theology or the theology of the body, the primacy of the pope or the faith of the people, the idea of Biblical forms or the fact of the historical Jesus.  And not just caught up but convinced.  We have the answers and other people need to be educated.

This is what Pope Francis calls “Gnosticism,” a faith of pure ideas.  “Gnostics think that their explanation can make the entirety of the faith and the Gospel perfectly comprehensible,” he says, and more, “they absolutize their own theories and force others to submit to their way of thinking.”  Reason is necessary and reason is good but it can only go so far.  “God infinitely transcends us,” the Pope says, “he is full of surprises,” and those surprises aren’t reserved for the smart and the educated. The Rosary may seem too simple, but it isn’t.  The people may seem too pious, but they aren’t.  Beneath these simple, pious acts there is often a genuine and abiding faith, a real experience of God, too deep for words.

Particularly when we’re first ordained we can be so excited about wearing an alb and a stole we begin to think we’re pretty special.  We’re pretty advanced.  This is the second evil, of Pelagianism, and for deacons it often comes in the form of clericalism.  We’re servants, but we want people to see us being servants.  We preach that all depends on the mercy of God but deep down we don’t believe it at first.  And “ultimately,” as the Pope puts it, this “lack of a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgement of our limitations prevents grace from working more effectively within us.”

Time of course usually takes care of this.  We fail too often.  We’re humbled by some quiet act of self-sacrifice on the part of someone we looked down on.  But pride always lurks.  Without quite knowing it, for example, we let ourselves be politicized, becoming the “conservative” deacon or the “liberal” deacon, proud of the purity of our convictions. We become attached to a particular form of liturgy, or offended by a particular form of liturgy, and that justifies our righteousness.  We criticize our pastor, behind his back.  We criticize our bishop.  We criticize whatever group we don’t like, in or out of the parish.

No. The grace of this small moment after daily mass, in the give-and-take of the Rosary, is the grace of so many small moments in our ministries as deacons, when the eyes of the people are not on us, when the words we speak are not our own.  It’s a grace—we don’t earn this either, this temporary reprieve from our egos–but it keeps coming to us, and it changes us over time, or can, so that now and then for just a moment Mary truly is our model.

And she doesn’t ask us to look at her.  She asks us to look at her son.

   Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

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I Think I Hear the Cry of Geese

I keep thinking I’ll get over these feelings,

my anger, my fear.  How sitting around a table

I don’t really love anyone.  But no.

 

These are the feelings I am called to have,

all of them.  This is what I am being given to feel.

 

Stepping out on the porch I think I hear

the cry of geese in the morning sky.  But it’s

just my neighbor up the hill, calling in her dogs,

softly, babytalking.  Winter.  Cold and dark.

 

What I don’t understand at first

is her babbling.  Her quiet voice, like a mother’s.

 

from YOU NEVER KNOW, just released from Stephen F. Austin State University Press

 

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The Mercy Seat

I don’t think I can explain this very well.

But on either end of the lid that covers the Ark of the Covenant described in the Old Testament, in Exodus (25:17-22), there is a golden cherub spreading out its wings, and beneath those wings and above the lid there is an empty space.  A gap.

And the Jews called this lid “The Mercy Seat,” because it was there, in the space beneath the wings, in the gap above the ark itself, that the Lord God of Israel promised to appear and deliver all this commands.

“There I will come and meet you,” the Lord says in Exodus.

The Mercy Seat.

It was more like a window, really.  A framed opening.

And this is how God comes into our lives, too, in the gaps, in the spaces: those moments of silence, those moments when we look up from our work, those moments when we stop and think, those moments when something interrupts us, snaps us out of whatever trance we’re in,those moments often of tragedy and sorrow and grief.

“If God is here at all,” Abbott Jeremy writes in A Monk’s Alphabet, “then it would have to be in the quality of something like ‘between the lines’ of things and persons, of something like the desire that others awaken in us but never satisfy, of something like a hidden radiance that we are longing to see, whose presence we sometimes suspect, but never see.”

Our lives seem empty sometimes. There seems to be an emptiness in our hearts–in another passage in A Monk’s Alphabet Jeremy talks about sometimes feeling as if there’s a “black hole” inside him–but this is a place of mercy, this an opening into mercy, into love, because it’s here, when we are emptied out, when we are the most unsure, the most in need, that Jesus comes and Jesus speaks and Jesus heals us.

Jesus is the source of all mercy, he is mercy itself, and he comes to us and he touches us, and we touch him, exactly in these gaps, in this emptiness.

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The Miracle of Making Us a Little Bit Better

Once a week I get up early and drive to church for an hour of Eucharistic Adoration. And promptly fall asleep.  Nod off, before the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes I wake myself up with my snoring.

And what Pope Francis says in the first chapter of his most recent apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” is that I’m on the path of holiness.  I don’t have to be perfect, and I can’t be.  I just have to do the best I can and trust in God, because it’s not we who are ever holy.  It’s Christ in us. “When you feel the temptation to dwell on your own weakness,” the Pope says, “raise your eyes to Christ crucified and say: ‘Lord, I am a poor sinner, but you can work the miracle of making me a little bit better.”

This is freeing advice, wonderfully freeing, but it’s also very challenging.  For one thing, I don’t have any excuses anymore. I have to get going.  And for another, to be holy doesn’t mean doing grand and noble things that will get me a lot of attention.  It means slogging along in my ordinary life day to day, and not just at church but at home and in my job and in my own heart.

The Pope talks about the holiness of our next-door neighbors, of the woman, for example, who refuses to gossip in the checkout line, who cares for her family even when she’s completely worn out, and as deacons we all know women like this. The Church is always being attacked for its hypocrisy and rigidity, but when I think of the Church I think of all the people I know who are building wheelchair ramps, or stocking shelves at St. Vincent de Paul, or caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s or a disabled child. I think of countless, quiet acts of heroism.  Of self-sacrifice.

The path is different for each of us.  The Pope stresses this again and again: “each in his or own way.”  I know a writer who makes the sign of cross before she opens her laptop.  I know a woodworker who makes the sign of the cross as he enters his shop.  All work done with integrity and skill is holy, because Christ is present in all that is good.  Just being patient is an act of holiness, one of the hardest of all—with the telemarketer, with the tailgater, with the homeless person sleeping in the passageway.   “We are all called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves,” and this is a call that as deacons we are in special position to celebrate, as we are men who often have families and ordinary jobs and so know firsthand that prayer isn’t just kneeling in a shaft of stained-glass light, that we are always deacons, or are supposed to be, even when we’re not wearing our albs and stoles.

And so, still groggy, I stop for two Americanos with cream on the way home from Adoration, and when I walk through the door my wife is on the deck, watering the marigolds and the delphiniums.  It’s a cool, summer morning, and suddenly I’m filled with joy, a quiet joy, because this is the point:  that God exists, the Resurrection is real, here and now, and holiness is the stumbling, human effort simply to be aware of that, to glimpse that, if even for just a moment.  Your life is a “mission,” the Pope says, the entirety of it, and “the Lord will bring it to fulfilment despite your mistakes and missteps.”   We just have to try to stay awake a little bit longer each week, before the Blessed Sacrament.  We just have to rejoice and be glad, for the marigolds and the delphiniums and all the things in our lives.

We are only the farmer, and the seeds we plant grow in the night, in the darkness, we know not how.

We are not the source of holiness or of grace, God is, and He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

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The Dogma of the Garden

The dogma of the garden is growing.

 

See?  The Morning Glory

twining around the Sunflower?

 

and now the Hummingbird,

buzzing before the great gold face!

 

This is the dogma

of the Hummingbird:  beating.

 

The fantastic beating of its wings.

The furious beating of its heart.

 

It’s almost impossible to believe.

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