Chris Anderson's Blog, page 21

Decide

If you wake up very early it’s like traveling.

The darkness and the stillness.

The few friendly lights.

 

All the trees along the highway

are holy

and all the people in the sleeping houses

are holy

 

because where you are traveling

is to the center

of your own pierced heart.

The post Decide appeared first on A WordPress Site.

The Cafeteria at the Museum

for Anthony Bourdain

 

I was so sad and tired and lonely once,

at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City,

I wanted to cry.  Everything was made of stone.

A serpent.  A warrior.  At the end of one dark corridor

there was a great circle of stone, with all the seasons

and the centuries, the sun in the center, sticking out its tongue.

I didn’t know what to do.  But then we came

to the museum cafeteria, and the food was steaming

 

beneath the warming lights, just like at Woolworth’s

when I was a kid, and there was Swiss steak and spaghetti

and mashed potatoes, and the air smelled of garlic

and the air smelled of coffee, and we sat and we ate, and ate,

laughing and talking, even happier than we’d been

at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe when Mary came

and gave us all roses.  At least I was.  I was joyous.

Tony, I think I may know what you were hungering for.

 

The post The Cafeteria at the Museum appeared first on A WordPress Site.

The Grace of Being Criticized

Wednesday July 18, 2018

Isaiah 10:5-16

 

This is one of those days when the mass gives us a reading I at least haven’t read before, this striking passage from Isaiah, and it seems wonderfully strange. Isaiah is talking about how God is using the conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians to punish the people of Israel for their iniquities.  The Assyrians just want to conquer, but God is directing this violence towards a higher end.

But it’s the language that draws me in.

Will the axe boast against him who hews with it?

            Will the saw exalt itself above him who wields it?

That’s just powerful as poetry, as language, and it’s powerful, too, as idea—that we are all sometimes axes and all sometimes saws, used by God.

 

Or we are the ones who are struck. The ones who are cut.

The spiritual life isn’t always a matter of joy and peace.  Sometimes it involves violence and destruction.

 

A very small example.

A few weeks ago someone I respect criticized something I had written and said. He told me that he thought parts of it were unclear and parts of it were wrong, and my first reaction was I think like the first reaction most of us have.  I felt cut, I felt hurt, and then angry, anxious to strike back.

But this is a person I respect, as I said, and I know his motive wasn’t to hurt me, that he was acting in friendship, and so after I calmed down a little, I started rethinking what I had said, and doing some more reading, and gradually I realized that my friend was partly right, I did need to be clearer, and that his criticism had been good thing in the end, that it had forced me to a deeper understanding of the issue.  He has been the axe, hewn by God, in this one small case.

Now, I’m a fine one to talk.  I’m terrible at taking criticism, and I’m getting worse at it as I get older, not better. But on the other hand maybe that kind of qualifies me to suggest that the rest of this week you, too, be on the lookout for some criticism you might be needing.  Not all criticism comes from God, of course, but it just might be that someone in the next few days will call you to account on some issue or problem, and that no matter how hard it is to hear that, you should try to be open to it, try to hear it.

Who knows, it could be the Lord, trying to help you overcome your own pride and your own stubbornness of heart—trying to bring you back to him.

The post The Grace of Being Criticized appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Summer Day

My phone keeps changing Ignatian Spirituality

to Ignition Spiritualty.  

 

Every moment sparks

some unimaginable engine, is a tiny explosion,

one after the other—

 

I believe in God the Father Almighty,

maker of Heaven and Earth,

 

of all things visible and invisible–

though really what’s the difference?  All I do

 

when I pray is fall asleep.  Breathing.

 

There’s a cemetery in my neighborhood I never knew

existed.  You just turn right

on a gravel road and drive up a hill into a grove of trees.

 

Several giant fir.

Several stones so smooth you can’t read them anymore.

 

One says

A Kind and Gentle Man

The post Summer Day appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Gracious Acts

July 1, 2018

13thSunday of Ordinary Time

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

 

When our little therapy dog comes home from a visit to a school or a nursing home, he curls up on the couch and sleeps for hours.  It really takes it out of him—he’s only 9 pounds, 6 ounces.

I’ve seen it for myself during Dead Week, when Counseling and Psychological Services invites Welcome Waggers to campus and students line up at the MU to pet the dogs.   It’s remarkable:  these very sharp kids, these adults, kneeling on the floor and petting a dog, and how it calms them and settles them.

 

I think we all have that healing power in us.  Even we human beings.  We all have something inside of us that can flow out to others, as the power flows out of the body of Jesus today when the hemorrhaging woman reaches out and touches him. It’s an arresting detail:  Jesus is aware “that power has gone out of him”; the woman feels it “in her body.”  And I think the love and the compassion we sometimes feel in ourselves is that same power, too, the power of Christ, is Christ working through us, and we have to live our lives in such way that we can release this power.  “For God formed us,” as the Book of Wisdom says today, “to be imperishable; / the image of his own nature he made us.”

 

We’ve all known people we just want to be around. I remember Father Jac Campbell, a Paulist priest we met after he was sent to the Newman Center at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where I first taught years ago.  He was a tall man with slicked-back black hair, Boston Catholic, Boston Irish, not the kind of guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley. In fact, he’d been exiled to Greensboro in a way, after he went into recovery for his alcoholism.

He was wonderful priest.  He understood weakness, he understood people, and there was an authority in him, a power, and I know that power and that authority came from his faith.  You can just tell, can’t you, when you’re around someone who really believes?  It’s like we’re all the hemorrhaging woman and we’re all drawn, instinctively, towards the Christ we sense in certain people.

That’s how Jac was.  He had the magnetism of the true person of faith.  It wasn’t because of the things he said, though he said many wise and good things. It was because of who he was.

 

And this is why we come to mass, why we are Catholic, not because we’re attracted to ideas, not because we’re attracted to theories, but because we’re attracted to a person, and to the power of that person.  The Person himself.  The Lord himself.

This is all the archbishop is trying to do, in the small changes he has made in the way we celebrate the mass:  to remind us that the Lord is here.  Jesusis here.

In the early 1960s a college student wrote Flannery O’Connor, the great Catholic writer, an anguished letter about faith.  He was struggling with doubt but longed to believe.  O’Connor didn’t mince words.  The effect of much of the thinking and writing in the twentieth century, she says, “has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative . . .and gradually we come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.”   That’s your problem, O’Connor told this student. This is the structure of your thought.

But “I’m Catholic,” O’Connor says, “and I believe the opposite of all this.  I believe what the Church teaches . . . that God has revealed himself to us in history and continues to do so through the Church, and that he is present (not just symbolically) in the Eucharist on our altars.”

 

A few weeks ago one of the Eucharistic Ministers told me that when she was holding the ciborium on the way to the altar it felt so heavy in her hands she was trembling. It felt, she said, like she was carrying a sleeping baby.

We can be too simple-minded about the Real Presence, we can be superstitious, we can see it as magic, not mystery, and that’s wrong.  But we can also be too sophisticated, too nuanced, too casual.   If Christ isn’t really present in the Eucharist we might as well just take a yoga class.  If Christ isn’t really present in the Eucharist we might as well just join a book club or a political party.

 

And I don’t mean to limit that sense of the power of Christ in the Eucharist to the Eucharist understood narrowly, because we are the Body of Christ, too, Paul says, and he means it.  Receive who you are, Augustine says.  And then we go out in the world, and we behold the world and all that is in it, and we know that it, too, is filled with the presence of Christ, in the rocks and the trees and the little dogs—God “fashioned all things that they might have being,” in the words of the Book of Wisdom–and that next to the Blessed Sacrament the tall man with the slick-backed hair or the woman standing next to us at the crosswalk or even our own worst enemy, as C.S. Lewis would say, is the holiest thing we will ever see.   We reverence the Eucharist here, wholly and completely, so that we can reverence the Eucharist everywhere else, in all things, wholly and completely, from the unborn child to the child at the border to the old and the lost and the infirmed.

 

Jesus comes to the home of Jairus, and that house becomes a tabernacle.  And Jairus asks him to come not to deliver a sermon or debate a doctrine but to heal his child, to touch her, and Jesus in his great mercy does come and he does heal her.  He takes her by the hand.  “For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul says, “that though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”  This was the gracious act of Jesus, on the cross and here in the house of Jairus and everywhere and always, to let his power flow out of him and into all of us.  Ignoring all the commotion at the door, ignoring all the fruitless arguing, Jesus comes, and he takes the girl by the hand, and he says to her, rise, little girl, rise,and she does, she rises, and this, to go back to Paul, is what we should do.  We should “excel,” he says, “in this gracious act” ourselves.   We should give ourselves away.

You will soon receive his Body again—you will take it into yourbody, into your bloodstream.

Go, then. Go and bewhat you have received.

Take someone by the hand.  Lift them up.

 

 

 

The post Gracious Acts appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Mr. B

When I asked Mr. B about solar wind, he said it didn’t exist.

In front of the whole class.  There was no such thing.

But I was pretty sure he was wrong, and he was:

solar wind is a stream of charged particles, mostly protons,

 

released from the upper atmosphere of the sun

and permeating the whole solar system.  It’s like the Holy Spirit.

You can sail on it, the way these kids did in a story

I’d read about a regatta in space, from Mercury to the Moon.

 

Their ship was like a sailboat, snug and tight,

but its wings were enormous, half a mile wide on each side,

and tissue-thin.  Entirely silver.  And they won, finally,

against all odds.  They answered every challenge, and they won.

 

But I don’t blame Mr. B.  You don’t have to be

completely right to be right.  There are things we all know.

I won the Madison Elementary School Science Fair

for a solar house that didn’t work.  It was just a plywood box,

 

cut on the diagonal, with ordinary glass on the slant

and two thermometers, one on the inside, one on the outside.

I couldn’t figure out how to store the heat or how

to focus it.  I couldn’t boil water and I couldn’t make steam.

 

All that happened was that the box got warmer

when the sun came out.  Cooled when the sun went down.

What wouldn’t?  But isn’t that the point?  We have to be

where we’re at.  The forces that sustain us can’t be seen.

The post Mr. B appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Holier Than Thou

Annual Appreciation Dinner

June 6, 2018

Philippians 2:1-11; Psalm 86:1-11; Matthew 25:31-46

 

Deacons, as you know, are very holy people.  Sisters are very holy people.  Even priests are very holy people.  But we’re not holier than you are.

We’re not holier than thou.

You are the body of Christ, as Paul says, and I take that literally.  You are.  You are the Church, and I’m always amazed by your faith and your service and your wisdom. I really am.  People are always talking about how corrupt the Church is or how dogmatic the Church is but what I see day after day are all these quiet acts of heroism and sacrifice and practical problem-solving, most of them behind the scenes, where you can’t get credit for them or acknowledgement or reward—and I don’t know how many times you’ve bucked me up and given me hope, and I know Father Ignacio and Father Maximo and every priest we’ve ever had would say the same.

Deacons come and deacons go and priests come and priests go but the Knights of Columbus remain, and the Catholic Daughters remain, and St. Vincent de Paul remains, and all the faithful people doing the work, enduring our homilies and putting up with our failings and acting with such charity and good humor and good will.

And realism, too.  Dorothy Day famously said that the problem with the poor is that they’re ungrateful and they smell bad—Dorothy Day, who worked with the poor and for the poor every day of her adult life, unfailingly.  But she was a realist, and she knew it was hard, and she knew that it would often seem fruitless–that many days there’d be no chance for the gratification of

our ego but rather repeated opportunities for the mortification of it.  That’s just the way service is.

The projector doesn’t work.  Only three people show up—for something you’ve worked and worked on.   The kids are running down the halls at religious ed and you can’t seem to get them under control.

Welcome to the Church.  Welcome to ministry.

In a famous letter Thomas Merton cautions us against trying to “build an identity for ourselves” out of our work in the Church, trying to create an image of ourselves as good people.  “That is not the right use of your work,” he says.

All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love.  Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

“Without you knowing,” Merton says, and that makes me think of this parable from Matthew.  When did we feed you, when did we shelter you, the people want to know, because they don’t know, and we can never know.  The real good we do is always invisible to us, because finally we are the “least ones” ourselves, we the servants.  God works through our limitations and our mixed motives as he works through all things, and if the projector doesn’t work or no one shows up, that’s the least of it, too, and the grace, because what matters to God and what matters in the life of the spirit can’t be measured or counted up or proven by numbers.

And I know you know this, all of you.  You’ve shown me the truth of this again and again, by your faithfulness and in your actions. The hungry are fed and the grieving consoled and the inquiring introduced to the truth, year after year, and of course there’s great, great joy in this, too, great satisfaction, great reward.  Sometimes it’s just fun.  It’s just deeply satisfying, which is really why we do it in the end.  It’s for us.  We do it because it makes us happy, because it gives us joy.

“Do whatever most kindles love in you,” St. Teresa of Avila says, and this is why we are here.  We love God, we love the Church, we love the people we serve, and I want to thank you for this service, and praise you for this service, and ask God to continue to bless you in this service.

Give joy to your servants, Lord, for in you we have put our trust.

Give joy to your servants, Lord, for without you there is nothing.

Give joy to your servants, Lord, for to you we have given our lives.

 

 

 

 

The post Holier Than Thou appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Delphinium

Barb on the deck,

tying up the towering Delphinium,

which has fallen over

during the night

under the weight of its deep blue flowers.

An early summer morning.

A blue jay behind this,

busy at the suet.

All the trees.

What work it would be

if Christ were really present

in the Eucharist!

The world!

The post Delphinium appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Mary, the Mother of the Church

Monday, May 21, 2018

The Feast of Mary, the Mother of the Church

Acts 1:12-14; John 19:25-34

 

What does it mean to say that Mary is the Mother of the Church?

It means that she was in the Upper Room when the apostles returned from the Ascension.  She was there with them.  She was waiting for them.  She inspired them and guided them.  She told them her stories.

It means that the Church is always trying to do what Mary does:  say yes to the Spirit, allow the Spirit to come into us, humble ourselves before what we cannot understand.

It means that the Church is always living with contradiction, with paradox, as Mary did and Mary does:  the life and the death of her son, the joy and the grief, Jesus the little boy and Jesus the son of God through whom the whole universe was created and is always being created.

Sumballo is the word that Luke uses in his infancy narratives when he says Mary “pondered” these things in her heart and “treasured” these things in her heart.  Sumballo:  to throw together, to juggle, to balance.  To keep things up in the air.

The Church comes from Jesus and Jesus comes from Mary, from out of her body.  Of course, she is the Mother of the Church.

Mary is always depicted reading a book when the angel comes to her:  she is the figure of the reader, of the thinker, of the one who prays and reflects. So the Church reads, the Church thinks, the Church prays and reflects.

Mary wasn’t expecting the Angel but she welcomed him.  We, too, have to be open to surprises.

Mary wasn’t expecting the Angel–she was confused–and so she asked questions.  How can this be?

We should ask questions.

Mary obeyed.  She said yes.

Adam blames Eve—and even God himself, indirectly—“the woman whom you put here with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.”  Eve blames the serpent.  But Mary takes responsibility.  She doesn’t hide, she doesn’t run away.  She stands up.

Adam and Eve are ashamed to be naked, ashamed to be who they really are.  Mary isn’t.  She knows who she is and she accepts who she is and she knows she is loved by God for who she is, as we all are.

So the Church:  we must be bold.  We must be confident.  Unashamed.

Mary came into the home of the disciple John, she became his mother, at her son’s command.

And she is our mother, too, and she comes into our homes—and so the Church isn’t patriarchal, whatever people say, it is framed by Mary, it takes her tone and her attitude, and it isn’t just stained glass and incense. It’s the kitchen and the kitchen sink. It’s the living room and the books in the living room and the pictures on the wall.

It’s the world.

 

O Mary, Mother of the Church, we praise you and we thank you.

O Mary, Mother of the Church, we ask for your humility.

We ask for your alertness.

We ask for your ability to concentrate, to see,

to stay calm and stay focused, even when we don’t understand.

We ask for your gentleness and we ask for your strength.

We ask for your wisdom and your joy.

We ask to remember, as you always remember, as you call us to remember,

that your Son is the One Who Matters,

that all is grace and that this grace flows from Him,

that we must always look at Him, pay attention to Him,

that we must do whatever He tells us.

We ask your aid, O Lady,

to remember and to rejoice

that the rain falls and the sun shines

and the vines grow–

that water is always being turned into wine.

The post Mary, the Mother of the Church appeared first on A WordPress Site.

Beauty Calls US

I hear the MacGillivary’s singing

on all the edges of the trees,

their lazy, slurring sequence,

and I know if I stopped and waited

I would see them in the branches,

their dusky blue.  But I don’t.

I keep plodding up the hill.

The spring sun comes through

the scattering leaves.  The valley

spreads out below me, soft

and green.  But I don’t want it,

I don’t want any of it, not today.

I’m too weary.  Too ashamed.

 

The post Beauty Calls US appeared first on A WordPress Site.