Chris Anderson's Blog, page 22

What Moves Between

Now that they’ve notched these patchcuts

up and down the hillside

you can hear as you’re climbing the trail

the songs of two completely different kinds of birds

at the same time, overlapping:

on one side a bird of the forest, of the trees,

a Black-headed Grosbeak,

chirping and improvising in the canopy;

and on the other a bird of the field,

of the open meadows,

a White-Crowned Sparrow,

deeeee-dee-dee-deeing from among the stumps

in the new, raw clearings.

Parable, from the Greek paraballo,

to throw together, or to cross over.

The open and the closed,

the sunny and the dark.

It’s the path that moves between them.

 

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Some Thoughts on a Few New Rules

The Solemnity of the Ascension, May 13, 2018

 

    The Archdiocese of Portland has instituted a few new rules for giving and receiving communion, effective the feast of Corpus Christi, next month.

https://archdpdx.org/divine-worship

I’ve been reflecting on these changes lately, and I want to suggest that they are a call to holiness, for all of us, even those of us who think they’re unnecessary and problematic—and especially for us.

Let me just list a few ideas.

 

–The call is to decide to think of these changes in their best light, as motivated by a real desire to deepen reverence for the presence of Christ in the Eucharist–without at the same time abandoning our doubts or our critical thinking.

–The call is to enter into these changes with an attitude of joy and inclusiveness and with the hope that this generous attitude will spread.  To try to transform these changes from the inside out.

–The call is to keep remembering that the theology behind these changes isn’t based on the idea that the priest is holier than we are but on the idea that whoever the priest is he is a sacrament, a conduit, a broken vessel as we are all broken vessels.  It’s to not be literal:  to insist on seeing the renewed emphasis on the actions of the priest (and the deacon) at mass as a re-emphasis on Christ, on his astonishing gift, his overflowing grace.

–The call is to take our uneasiness with these changes as an invitation to give up our own fastidiousness about liturgy, our own rigorism, because we can all be inflexible about style and method, whatever our tastes and preferences.

–The call is to not be distracted.  To get to the center.  To see through the clutter, including our own clutter, to the light at the heart of things, to the love at the heart of things, to Christ blessed, broken, and given every mass and every moment, however many obstacles we put in the way–and we are always putting obstacles in the way, not just in liturgy but in our own daily lives.

–The call is not to sweat the small stuff.

–Even if the mass were perfect by our own standards, even if it fit our style exactly, we’d still have to get up in the morning and look at ourselves in the mirror and face our own sinfulness, our own limitations.  In fact, maybe that’s the problem, that thinking about these changes and resisting them is a lot easier than sitting with our own emptiness, or our own need.

–Augustine used the image of the finger pointing at the moon.  It’s the moon we should be looking at.

–At the heart of the teaching of the Church is a belief in the dignity of each human person and the sanctity of individual conscience.  We have to think.  We have to enter in.  The Church is us and the Church is the hierarchy, back and forth over time, in conversation.  We take turns correcting each other.

–But that means that those of us who tend to emphasize the role of the people in the mass, sacramentally and theologically, need to be corrected now and then, too.

–Maybe some of these changes can help us counter any inner laziness that may have settled in as we’ve been going through the mass in our usual ways.

 

In the end, I think, all of these issues and problems–how many Eucharistic ministers there are, or whether or not we should dip our fingers in a little bowl of water after we give communion, or what the inside of a pyx should be made of–all of these things and the feelings they invoke in us are a great gift, really, because whenever something in the liturgy or in the Church bothers and irritates and disappoints us, Christ is trying to get our attention.  He’s saying:  no,I’m right here.  I’m standing right next to you.

Or to use the imagery of today’s feast, of the Ascension:  Why do we have our heads in the clouds? 

    Jesus has ascended into heaven, he has gone away, but he’s coming back and he’s already here, this has already happened and is always happening, Jesus is always leaving and he is always coming, and the Spirit is coming, too, Pentecost is near, the Spirit is about to whoosh in and fill us with language and hope, and that Spirit is inside of us, is always inside, and that Spirit is Christ, too, in all his reality, and so he is in us, wherever else he is, he is in all of us.

So we need to stop looking at the wrong things.  We need to stop trying to rise into heaven ourselves, above the messiness of our everyday lives in the world and in the Church.

We have to get back to work.

With joy. Always with joy.  With humility and joy.

 

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We Are Always Forgetting

May 7, 2018

Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter

John 15:26-16:4

 

We are always forgetting.  We are always falling away.

Yesterday morning I walked up the driveway for the paper and there was a beautiful rain falling on the new green leaves and everything smelled fresh and clean and there was this lovely coolness in the air.  Then I came back in and started reading an article praising a couple of writers I know and I was filled with envy.  Stabbed by it.  This resentment rose in me.  This wounded pride.

Just a few seconds after the rain.

This happens all the time.  “I have told you this,” Jesus says in the gospel today, “so that when [the] hour comes you may remember.”  But we don’t. It’s not that God doesn’t exist and the Spirit doesn’t move but that the Spirit moves again and again, and for brief moments we feel it moving and we believe, and then we immediately let the moment slip away.  We don’t think about it again.

“Do this in memory of me,” Jesus said at the Last Supper, and we hear the priest say again every mass, and that’s why we come.  We come to remember:  the beautiful rain, the new green leaves.

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Thesis

Not everything is socially constructed.

Gravity isn’t racist:  we are all pulled down.

The clouds form and the clouds pass,

casting their giant shadows,

I don’t care what you say,

and when the rain falls it falls on everyone.

Luke Skywalker is an old man now,

haggard and gray—

we weren’t expecting this—it can’t be true—

and he is forever the beautiful boy,

looking out at the setting suns,

the wind ruffling his sandy hair.

He is both.

This is the adventure we are all called to.

The homeless man in the parking lot

asks me what time it is.

I don’t believe in time anymore,

he says,

and now I’m always late.

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Rejoice and Be Glad

April 29, 2018

Fifth Sunday of Easter

1 John 3:18-24; John 15:1-8

 

A couple of weeks ago there was this very nice celebration over at the Newman Center on Monroe of 100 years of campus ministry at OSU.  There were all these people in the courtyard, students and alums, laughing and talking, and standing there I looked up and saw a drone, a small one with four propellers, buzzing above us, taking video for the website.

I thought it was pretty cool–and I thought, if we could send a drone back in time and have it hover over the tomb on the morning of the resurrection, on the morning when Jesus really rose from the dead, it would see the same thing:  the tops of people’s heads, Mary Magdalene’s, John’s, Peter’s.

The gardener’s.

None of the gospels describe the resurrection itself–all we have is the empty tomb–and in all the post-resurrection stories Jesus appears only to his friends and followers, and he’s never recognized at first, and when he is, he disappears.

 

Jesus hasn’t gone away, he “remains,” as John says in the Gospel today, and where he remains isn’t just in his body, his true and resurrected body, but “in us,” where no one can ever see him.  “We remain in him” and “he remains inus,” in our hearts, our minds, and in that sense faith can never be seen, only the people who have faith, only the faithful, laughing and talking in the courtyard, here in Corvallis or long ago in Jerusalem.

“The way we know that he remains in us,” the first letter of John says, “is from the Spirit he gave us.”

Again that word, remains, and again, in us, and always in us, and that’s the Good News, and the reason for our faith and the reason for our joy, because it means that the resurrection is happening everywhere and in every moment.

 

In his remarks at the end of the anniversary mass Father Maximo graciously acknowledged all the people who have gone before at the Newman Center and all who will come after.  We’ve only been here ten of those hundred years, he said, 10% of that time, and I was thinking it really goes a lot further back still, billions and billions of years, to the very beginning of things, when the whole universe was created, through Christ and in Christ, all the planets and stars, and how as the great hymn in Colossians puts it, all things “continue in him.”  Christ is the motive force of reality itself, far more real and profound than anything we can measure or see or put under a microscope.

The Cosmic Christ.  The Quantum Christ.

He is the vine, and everything is the branches.

I was remembering the late Sue Gifford, who was the director of the Newman Center for many years, and how one evening in the old house before they tore it down, our Bible Study was sitting on that mismatched furniture we used to have talking about the Gospel for that Sunday, and looking out into the little kitchen, I saw a mouse pop up on the stovetop.  Then another, then another, like soldiers in the trenches.  They’d poke their little heads up through the elements on the stove and look around, first left, then right, then quick, pop back down again.  All evening, again and again.

 

Rejoice and be glad, Pope Francis tells us in his latest apostolic exhortation, just out this month, Gaudete et Exsultate.    It’s a wonderful document, I think, really wonderful.  Rejoice and be glad, Francis says, because what we have here isn’t just history but mystery, and the way we experience this mystery isn’t just in the big things but in the little things, in a kindness to a neighbor, a quiet moment at prayer:

When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign that they are not on the right road. They may well be false prophets, who use religion for their own purposes, to promote their own psychological or intellectual theories. God infinitely transcends us; he is full of surprises. We are not the ones to determine when and how we will encounter him; the exact times and places of that encounter are not up to us. Someone who wants everything to be clear and sure presumes to control God’s transcendence.

This is why we rejoice:  because the very uncertainties and struggles and lack of clarity in our lives are themselves sure and infallible signs of the presence of God.  Life reminds us again and again, as the first letter of John puts it, that “God is greater than our hearts and knows everything,” and that we don’t.

 

A parishioner I know was accosted by a scientist the other day, at a party.  He came up and asked, do you really believe that Jesus rose from the dead? and then challenged her to prove it, empirically, right there in the kitchen, by the clam dip. As of course she couldn’t.  No one can, certainly not in a situation like that. All she could do is what we should do, too:  she said yes, I believe–she testified–and when that wasn’t enough, as of course it wouldn’t be, this rude and ignorant man just snorted and walked away.

Rejoice and be glad!  That the God we believe in is so much greater and more beautiful than the cartoon version so many people seem to have in their heads.

 

Over Easter weekend I visited a parishioner who is dying—a scientist, too, in fact.   He’s in bed now.  He can barely lift his head.  It’s an effort for him to speak.  But when I read the Easter Gospel to him and asked what the Resurrection means to him now, just a few days from his death, this is what he said–haltingly, between breaths:

I’m just amazed by the love of God.   I’m just amazed by love.

This would sound pious coming from you or from me, and I couldn’t say it to the man at the party, or wouldn’t have the courage to.  But this man is dying, he is on the frontier, and what he says carries weight, and what he says has authority, and it inspires me, and I believe him, and I rejoice and am glad—I am amazed by love.

Rejoice and be glad.   This isn’t a metaphor.  This isn’t an idea.  The resurrection is the realest thing that ever happened–it changed the very nature of reality, or fully revealed it–and it’s bigger than mere metaphor and bigger than mere science but transcends them both entirely.  “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb,” Clarence Jordan says, “but the full hearts of his transformed disciples . . . not a rolled away stone, but a carried-away church.”  This is real, this is true, and this, the first letter of John says, “is how we shall know that we belong to the truth, and reassure our hearts before him”:  by looking inward, at how the Spirit moves within us, and by looking outward, at the beauty and complexity of the world, and none of this can ever be pinned down, and none of this can ever be fully accounted for.

And that’sit.  That’s what we believe, and why we believe it.   The very distance between what we know and feel and what we can ever put into words is exactly the measure of Christ.

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Alleluia, Alleluia

If we could send a drone back through time

to hover above the tomb

the way it hovers now above the courtyard

at the Newman Center

where the students have gathered to pray,

a small drone, with four propellers,

taking b-roll for the website,

it would film what it’s filming now,

the tops of heads,

Mary Magdalene’s, Peter’s, John’s,

the gardener with his floppy hat.

I remember, too, one evening in the old house

before they tore it down

when as we sat on that funny orange couch

and those old thrift store chairs

talking about the way

the Gospel for that Sunday spoke to us

about our lives, I could look

through the doorway into the little kitchen

where now and then the mice

would pop up on the stove top

and look around, like soldiers in the trenches,

first to the left, then to the right,

then quick, back down.

All night long they kept poking up

through the elements.

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Doctrine is Not a Closed System

from Gaudete et Exsultate, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” the latest apostolic exhortation from Pope Francis

When somebody has an answer for every question, it is a sign that they are not on the right road. They may well be false prophets, who use religion for their own purposes, to promote their own psychological or intellectual theories. God infinitely transcends us; he is full of surprises. We are not the ones to determine when and how we will encounter him; the exact times and places of that encounter are not up to us. Someone who wants everything to be clear and sure presumes to control God’s transcendence.

Nor can we claim to say where God is not, because God is mysteriously present in the life of every person, in a way that he himself chooses, and we cannot exclude this by our presumed certainties. Even when someone’s life appears completely wrecked, even when we see it devastated by vices or addictions, God is present there. If we let ourselves be guided by the Spirit rather than our own preconceptions, we can and must try to find the Lord in every human life. This is part of the mystery that a gnostic mentality cannot accept, since it is beyond its control.

It is not easy to grasp the truth that we have received from the Lord. And it is even more difficult to express it. So we cannot claim that our way of understanding this truth authorizes us to exercise a strict supervision over others’ lives. Here I would note that in the Church there legitimately coexist different ways of interpreting many aspects of doctrine and Christian life; in their variety, they “help to express more clearly the immense riches of God’s word”. It is true that “for those who long for a monolithic body of doctrine guarded by all and leaving no room for nuance, this might appear as undesirable and leading to confusion”Indeed, some currents of gnosticism scorned the concrete simplicity of the Gospel and attempted to replace the trinitarian and incarnate God with a superior Unity, wherein the rich diversity of our history disappeared.

In effect, doctrine, or better, our understanding and expression of it, “is not a closed system, devoid of the dynamic capacity to pose questions, doubts, inquiries… The questions of our people, their suffering, their struggles, their dreams, their trials and their worries, all possess an interpretational value that we cannot ignore if we want to take the principle of the incarnation seriously. Their wondering helps us to wonder, their questions question us”

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A Passage I Love from the Pope’s New Apostolic Exhortation, Gaudete Et Exsultate

from an article in America on the new encyclical from Pope Francis, Rejoice and Be Glad

“We cannot claim that our way of understanding this truth authorizes us to exercise a strict supervision over others’ lives,” he writes, reminding believers that “in the Church there legitimately coexist different ways of interpreting many aspects of doctrine and Christian life; in their variety, they ‘help to express more clearly the immense riches of God’s word.’”

“For those who long for a monolithic body of doctrine guarded by all and leaving no room for nuance,” he says, “this might appear as undesirable and leading to confusion.”

He insists, however, that “doctrine, or better, our understanding and expression of it, is not a closed system, devoid of the dynamic capacity to pose questions, doubts, inquiries… The questions of our people, their suffering, their struggles, their dreams, their trials, and their worries, all possess an interpretational value that we cannot ignore if we want to take the principle of the incarnation seriously.”

 

 

 

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The Man Who Picked Up the Bobcat: An Easter Meditation

He saw it crumpled on the side of the road and thought at first it was a dog.  But when he stopped and took a closer look, he saw the tufted ears and the broad, flat nose, the dusty, spotted fur, and he knew it was a bobcat, and he knew it wasn’t dead, it was battered and bloody, but it wasn’t dead, it was breathing, the flanks heaving up and down.

So he got to his knees, and he took the bobcat in his arms—it was smaller than he thought it would be, and lighter—it was panting, and rank, and warm—and he gently laid it on the backseat of his car.  Wrapping it in a towel, maybe.  Putting his hands, for a moment, in the dusty fur.

Then he slipped behind the wheel and drove—to where?  A clinic?  A shelter?  I’m not sure—I don’t know what was in his mind—and I don’t remember what happened next, as he was driving, when he looked into his mirror and saw the bobcat beginning to stir, opening one yellow eye, flexing one velvet paw, whether he stepped on the accelerator and drove faster, or pulled over again and opened the back door and crouched behind it, waiting for the bobcat to slink away.

I don’t remember now how the story ended, and I don’t think it matters.  I don’t think this is a funny story.

A bobcat lay on the side of the road, battered and panting and warm, and it was splendid.  It was wild.

And he stopped.  He knelt before it.  He took it in his arms.

 

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All the Narrow Gates

             Enter through the narrow gate.  Matthew 7:13

 

I’ve been thinking about all the narrow paths

we walked on the pilgrimage in Rome and Florence and Assisi,

down the alleys and crooked streets and up the many steps and stairways.

I’ve been thinking about all the narrow gates,

through the security checkpoints and into the churches and museums,

and about the Holy Doors, at St. Peters and St. Paul Outside the Walls

and all the others, which were narrow, too, massive and high but narrow.

All the lines we stood in. All the squeezing to a point.

I’ve been thinking about the tight schedule we were on, the narrow margins

of time we were given, and necessarily—all of this was necessary.

If we didn’t come back on time, we missed the bus.

If we didn’t stay on the narrow route, we didn’t get where we were going.

 

I’ve been thinking about the eyes of the David, in Florence,

of their great intensity, and focus, and determination—and of the intensity

and balance and poise of his whole magnificent body,

and how it’s only this focus and this narrowing, this great coming to a point,

that makes it possible for him to kill Goliath with his single stone–

and of the intensity of Michelangelo in his making of this glorious thing,

his great single-mindedness, blow by blow and cut by cut, over years.

 

We are all wandering and lost, as Dante was wandering and lost

in the dark wood in Florence, when he was exiled,

and it’s because we are too open-minded,

are listening to too many other voices, are taking too much in–

fiddling with our cell phones beneath that great luminous form,

who is David, who is Christ–and we have to stop

and raise our heads, we have to stop and make a choice,

decide on a way,

decide who to trust and who to follow, again and again.

 

Then everything opens up again.

We come through the narrow door and suddenly we’re inside

a magnificent church, a vast, echoing nave.

God narrowed himself down so radically he became a man,

a baby in a manger,

a criminal on a cross, a body in a tomb,

and through that narrow wooden box comes a whole universe—

on that narrow wooden cross everything

was ripped open and sanctified—

the stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty

and a Spirit who is love and a Spirit who is hope

suffuses every molecule and every quark

and all the trillion trillion cells.

We make this choice and we eat this one small circle of bread

and the whole Parousia is ours,

the end of the old world, and the beginning of the new.

 

This is what we find when we get through the narrow gate.

This is what we get to:  to glory, to beauty.

 

And all the while, whether we are lost or found, scattered or focused,

God himself is looking at us the way

David is looking out at Goliath.  But to save us.  To love us.

 

God himself is narrowing his focus, to you and to me.

Each one of us, somehow,

in his marvelous grace, is the point He comes to.

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