Chris Anderson's Blog, page 23

Handiwork

March 11, 2018

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21

 

Earlier this term I was having trouble with one of my classes.  I just couldn’t seem to get in sync with the students, to connect with them, no matter how hard I tried.

Then one day one of those silences opened up in the room, one of those gaps, and for once I didn’t try to fill it, to talk into it.  I was talked out.

A few seconds went by.  Then a student made a comment, a good one, an insightful one.  Then another student, and another, and after a while they weren’t talking to me, they were talking to each other, and for about twenty minutes I just sat back and enjoyed, deeply enjoyed, one of the best discussions I’ve had in all my years of teaching.

And I hadn’t had it.  They were having it.

All I’d done is run out of things to say.

 

For by grace you have been saved through faith [Ephesians says], and this is not from you; it is the gift of God.

 

Through a friend of a friend I got a call to visit a woman in Lebanon who is chronically ill and unable to leave the house.  I was busy, and it was a little bit of a drive, but I was asked and so I went.  And it turned out to be a lovely afternoon.  The sun was shining as I drove down.  I could feel myself relax.  And the woman I met was so thoughtful, and prayerful, and deeply Catholic: longing for the sacraments, longing for the Eucharist.  She sat in this big easy chair and I sat across from her, her little dog on my lap, licking my hand, and I could feel the Spirit moving in that room—I could feel the Real Presence of Christ.

 

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.

 

Jesus doesn’t say today in this great passage today from John that God will love the world if we first believe in him.  He says, “God so loved world he gave his only son.”

Later in the gospel of John Jesus doesn’t say, love one another and then I will love you.  He says, “love one another as I have loved you.”

 

There’s nothing here about fasting or alms-giving or what we should do with our bodies or how we should vote or even what Church we should belong to or doctrines we should believe in.

Fasting is necessary, and important, and good—all the spiritual practices of Lent are necessary and important and good—but we don’t do these things to earn God’s love.   We do them to honor this love.  We do them to show our gratitude.

 

I’m really good at not emptying the dishwasher.  A genius, really.

The key is timing:  if you get it right you can avoid emptying the dishwasher for weeks at a time.  Months.

But the reason I’m trying this Lent to break this habit isn’t to make Barb love me more but because I know she already does.  Because I want to show her that I love her, too.  Because I want to make her smile.

 

Fasting and praying and alms-giving are ways we try to clear our minds and clear our hearts so we can see what is always already true–and the best thing about them is that we always fail.  The best thing about our Lenten resolutions is that we can’t keep them.  They show us again and again how hungry we are and irritable and proud and so how very much we need the grace of God.

And then they teach us freedom, they teach us joy, because God never stops loving us.  Beauty and justice and grace are always and always pouring down on us.  It’s we, in our ignorance and our smallness, it’s we who turn away.  God doesn’t “condemn” us, to use the language of John’s gospel:  we condemn ourselves.  We “prefer the darkness to the light,” the shoddy to the real, but that’s our choice, that’s our doing, not God’s, and that’s really good news, the best news of all.   For we are his handiwork.  We didn’t make him, he made us, and he is always making us, lovingly, unceasingly.

 

A couple of weeks ago Barb and I went to the American Kennel Club dog show, over in Albany, at the Linn County Fairgrounds.   We were sitting in folding chairs watching the terrier group being judged when I felt this presence over my shoulder.  I turned, and there wasn’t a person standing there, there was a dog, lying down–a brindled mastiff, so big her head came up to my shoulder.  Lying down.  And she was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, with this wonderful black and caramel fur, 175 pounds of her, and when I asked permission and started to pet her, she got up and lumbered over and put her enormous head with her enormous jowls right up against my chest and began to nuzzle and sniff me, up and down.  Very slowly.  Very softly.

I swear, that head was as big as my torso, big as a carry on, and yet there was this sweetness about her, this gentleness.  I just fell in love.

 

So many people I know and care about are suffering.  Every day someone I love seems to get a blood test back, or a rejection letter, or divorce papers.  I look around and I know how anxious we all are, and grieving, and afraid, and that’s all true, that’s all real, and in some way I can’t prove or explain I believe that Christ is present in that sadness and present in that grief, though I know it doesn’t help to hear that.  It’s just a thing to say.

But there are brindled mastiffs, too, and sunny drives to Lebanon, and twenty minute discussions that just seem to happen, miraculously, if only we can get out of the way.  Everything is true, the darkness and the light, the sadness and the joy.

“Tell me about despair,” Mary Oliver says in her great poem, “Wild Geese.”

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

            Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

            are moving across the landscapes,

            over the prairies and the deep trees,

            the mountains and the rivers.

            Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

            are heading home again.

We don’t have to earn this, this beauty, and we can’t.  “You do not have to be good,” Oliver says in the first stanza of the poem.  “You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting,” and that’s really right, that’s really sound Catholic doctrine, too.  That’s the whole, astounding point of what Jesus is saying today:  that love comes first, God’s love, and that everything else is our response, or our failure to respond.

 

This is the last stanza of the poem:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

            the world offers itself to your imagination,

            calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

            over and over announcing your place

            in the family of things.

     Announcing your place in the Kingdom of God, we would say.  And not just the world offering itself, but God offering himself, through the world.

This is why we fast, and should fast–this is why we pray, and should pray–this is why we give alms and should give alms–because Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior is present in the world and present in our lives whether we believe in him or not, whether we deserve him or not–and we can never deserve him, we can never be worthy of him–but he’s here, high in the clean blue air, or leaning back in an easy chair, in a little house in Lebanon–and sometimes we know this, and sometimes we believe this, and then we are saved.

This is why we fast:  out of joy.

 

 

 

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My Heart is Like a Shallow Ford

My heart is like a shallow ford,

and on either side of the road that leads

to it there is a chain link fence,

 

razor wire on top, and on the side

of the fence there are signs, at intervals,

warning of unexploded bombs.

 

My heart is like a shallow ford

and when you finally reach it, the water

flows creamy brown, and reeds

 

wave on the bank, and on the other shore

there is another country, with fig trees

and palms.  Just a few steps away.

 

My heart is like a shallow ford

where Jesus may have come, and may

have knelt, and may have risen up,

 

streaming, though there are other

bends in the Jordan where he could have

entered, too, and seen the dove,

 

and heard the voice.  No one knows.

My heart is like a shallow ford.

 

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That’s All

February 19, 2018

First Monday of Lent

Matthew 25:31-46

 

It’s worthwhile thinking about what Jesus doesn’t say in this great parable in Matthew.

Of course, this isn’t the only thing Jesus ever says or the only parable he ever tells or the only gospel, and we have to take all of it into account, and the tradition of interpretations, and the teachings of the Church which are drawn from these texts and drawn from these traditions.

But still, it’s worth noticing what Jesus doesn’t say we have to do to get to heaven.

He doesn’t say what we have to believe, what doctrines we have to adhere to, what dogmas we have to understand and argue for.   Nothing about that.

He doesn’t say anything about what we’re supposed to feel, in prayer or at mass, or about other people, or about ourselves.

He doesn’t say anything about what Church we have to belong to or what school of thought within the Church we should adopt as our own.

He doesn’t say what political party we should join.

He doesn’t say anything about the way the liturgy should be celebrated or what music should be played or how the communion lines should flow or whether we should receive in the hand or on the tongue.

He doesn’t say we have to be smart.  Apparently, we don’t need Ph.D.s.

He doesn’t say we should be married or celibate.  Nothing about sexual behavior at all.

He doesn’t say we have to go someplace far away and do something heroic for him or spectacular for him.  Nothing about adventures.  Grand gestures.  Public displays of piety.

He doesn’t say how much money we should make or what kind of house we should live in or car we should drive or clothes we should wear.  Whether we should be rich or poor, famous or obscure.

He doesn’t say anything about what men should do and what women should do.  Nothing about gender, one way or the other.

He doesn’t anything about a lot of things we’re always talking about and worrying about and arguing about and texting about and tweeting about and posting about and losing sleep about.

All of us.  All the time.

He says something radically simple, something completely challenging, something any one of us here can do and have done but that seems so small and ordinary and mundane we just can’t believe that’s all there is to it, something so small we make excuses and let it go, something so simple we stop thinking about it, something that doesn’t necessarily make us feel good, something that doesn’t necessarily make us look good, something that doesn’t necessarily score any points with the people we want to score points with.

He says:  feed the hungry.  Give drink to the thirsty.  Welcome the stranger.  Clothe the naked.  Visit the imprisoned.

That’s it.  That’s all.

And then:  Come!  Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world!

 

 

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What We Weigh

There was a man who thought

the soul had weight,

 

so he put dying people on a scale and weighed them,

just before and after they died,

 

and what he found is that the instant people die

they are 21 grams lighter than they were before.

 

Exactly.  Every time.

 

An enormous scale, a body on one side,

weights on the other.

 

Even a breeze could cause a wobble.

 

A mere breath, the man who stood so firm,

a mere shadow, the man passing by.

 

When the researchers set up the nets

between the trees, and caught the birds they caught,

behind us, in our forest,

they untangled each one, carefully, making sure

not to damage the wings—warblers and chickadees

and thrushes—they were wearing gloves as they did this,

but even then they could feel the beating

of those tiny hearts, and the warmth of those feathery bodies—

and then they weighed each bird, hanging it

by the feet from a small scale before letting it go.

 

The one I remember is a Wilson’s Warbler,

a lovely pale yellow, with a jaunty black cap.

 

I closed it in my fist, but gently, hardly

crushing the feathers.

 

Then I opened my fist and it shot away,

a yellowy flash, back into the trees.

 

.27 ounces.

 

 

f rom You Never Know,  my new book of poetry

forthcoming, this fall, from Stephen F. Austin State University Press

 

 

 

 

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Prayer

Praying Evening Prayer

in the showroom of the Honda Dealership.

Clean and bright.  Nearly empty,

just me and the secretary and a new SUV,

gleaming white.  Outside the evening

has begun to descend on the Taco Bell,

the Adult Video Store.  The cars

streaming home on 9th have all turned on

their lights.  Only in God is my soul

at rest, he only is my rock and my refuge.

How bare the bright walls.

The empty cubicles.

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Marriage as Spiritual Exercise

January 28, 2018

1 Corinthians 7:32-35; Mark 1:21-28

 

As someone who has been married a long time, I can certainly agree with Paul today that wives are a big distraction.  And I’m sure Barb could agree, too:  that husbands are.  All of us who are married can agree.  The people we live with can drive us crazy, and in our reactions to them we allow ourselves to be distracted from what’s really important and who’s really important:  God.

But then I know monks and sisters who struggle with distraction, too, even in a monastery.  To be human is to be distracted.  I’d be distracted if I were alone on a desert island, because distraction is in me, not outside of me.  I carry my compulsions and preoccupations with me wherever I go, and in that sense the point isn’t marriage at all but what we do in marriage; not a life of celibacy but what we do with celibacy.

The unclean spirit is in the demoniac, and Jesus has to call it out:  quiet!  Come out of him! And then it’s gone.

Besides, this passage in first Corinthians is one of those passages where the context is crucially important—where it’s important to realize that Paul is writing at a time when the second coming of Christ is expected any moment, where the end of the world is really about to happen.   If that were true, literally, we should be getting ready.

The Carmelite writer Ruth Burrows talks about the difference between physical virginity and what she calls “spiritual virginity.”

Physical virginity of itself means nothing, what matters is spiritual virginity, this wholeness and totality.  Now every Christian is called to this spiritual virginity, implied in his baptismal consecration.  He has to belong to God body and soul.  Some are called to reach this in marriage, others in a single life in the world, others in a state of consecrated celibacy.  The means are different, the end is the same.  Indeed only certain of the means are different, most are identical.  No one can attain it save by the constant effort to love at the expense of self, a constant disregard of self for the sake of others.  Marriage and sexual love do not automatically lead to maturity and neither does abstention.  Only love brings to maturity.

So I think the call here for those of us who are married is to work at not being distracted by our own selfishness—to look beyond whatever it is that irritates or worries us in the person we love to the soul beneath, to the one who is loved by God wholly and completely—and in fact to see God himself in that person, to see God incarnate in our husband or wife.

After the death of his wife C. S. Lewis looked back with joy on their marriage.  We “feasted on love,” he says, “every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic.”  But at the same time, he says, he and his wife both knew that they “wanted something besides one another—quite a different kind of something, a quite different kind of want,” and they glimpsed this something else exactly in their married life day to day.  It’s not an accident that the scriptures use the image of married love as an image of Christ and God’s love for his Church because that’s the intensity of God’s love for us, and the ordinariness, and the beauty of it.  And yet, however much we satisfy each other in marriage, however wonderful a marriage is, we’re always longing, too, for this something other, this something greater.  We’re always longing for what only God can fulfill.

We’re always longing for Christ.  This is why marriage is a sacrament, both because Christ is present in it and because he isn’t.  There’s a gap, a seam, and through it we are being called.

 

 

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You Never Know

All those countless centuries

before I was born it wasn’t so bad.

I didn’t feel a thing.

Is this what it’s like when we die?

Do we just cease to exist?

Or do the angels fly out to greet us,

skimming over the bright green fields?

You never know.

When I had breakfast

at the Senior Living Center,

the women all around us

in their flowery blouses,

and the men in their motorized chairs,

chatted and laughed at their little tables

like kids in a school cafeteria,

and the sun streaked through the windows,

and the oatmeal steamed in our bowls,

and even my hunched and befuddled father

was smiling for a moment,

almost coherent.

I couldn’t have been

more surprised:  how happy I was.

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The Bluebird on the Barbwire

January 21, 2018:  Third Sunday of Ordinary Time

1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

 

Not long ago Barb and I took a hike on Bald Hill with some friends.  It was a cold winter day and we were all feeling a little sad and depressed.  But at the end, as we came into the big meadow before the parking lot, the woman who was with us suddenly stopped and pointed.

“Behold the Lamb of God!” John the Baptist cries out in last week’s gospel, John’s version of the call of the first disciples.

Our friend just said “Look!” and handed us the binoculars, and there it was, perched on the barbwire:  a bluebird—not bright, not obvious, just an ordinary little bird, with a dusting of blue on its head and wings and a pale orange breast.

 

In today’s gospel, Mark’s version of the call of the first disciples, John the Baptist isn’t involved and Andrew doesn’t go and get his brother.  Mark pictures Andrew and Simon mending their nets along the shore.  But that’s OK.  In a way, that’s the point.  The gospel writers aren’t concerned with the facts—they’re concerned with the truth, the deeper truth—and there are always multiple perspectives on the truth—there have to be–and the truth in Mark is finally the same as in John anyway:  that “this is the time of fulfillment,” this present moment–that the Kingdom of God is “at hand” and is always at hand, if only we will “repent.”

Repent:  the root in Greek, metanoia: to change our minds.  To change our point of view.

 

“There are two ways to live your life,” Albert Einstein says.  “One is as though there are no miracles. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

We’re Christians.  We choose the second way, or try to.

But first we have to put down our nets—the nets of our simplistic notions about science, for one thing, our pre-quantum notions.

The nets of our pride, our greed, our fear.

 

This is the challenge for me in prayer and for all of us.  If I pray for twenty minutes, I must try to put down my nets a hundred times—try to call myself back to the present moment, try to control my monkey mind—back and forth, back forth, until half the time my twenty minutes of prayer is simply twenty minutes of realizing that I don’t know how to pray, that I can’t pray.

And that’s OK, too.  That is prayer.  Prayer isn’t what we do, it’s what God does, and God can’t work in us until we realize how much we need him.

I was talking to a young man the other day who is having a hard time letting go of the hurt and resentment he feels at the way a group of his friends have treated him—have excluded him, ignored him.  He knows it’s not good to hold a grudge but he just can’t seem to get past it.

When I asked him, so what do you do with this in prayer, how do you pray, he said, “I just sit there and realize how much I need Jesus.”

Behold the Lamb of God!  The bluebird on the barbwire!

 

It’s tricky.  It’s subtle.  It’s hard.

One of the things we were talking about on our hike the other day was the fires in Southern California, and the floods, and the terrible mudslides.  We couldn’t get that little girl out of our minds, the little two-year-old who is still missing.

Her grandfather and her father and her six-year-old brother have already been found–dead.

Only the mom survived.

What could we tell her—the mother of these children?  What difference could a bluebird make to her, in the midst of her suffering and her grief?  What does prayer really mean when rivers of mud are pouring through the front door and flooding the kitchen, higher than the granite countertops?

I don’t know.

That there are cycles in nature, maybe, of fire and flood, of life and death—that we are all part of much larger systems, and systems within systems, and that in some way it all makes sense?  Or maybe just that this is a mystery, a great, great mystery, and that things are always changing–that the “world in its present form is passing away,” as Paul puts it today–and time is always “running out,” and all we can do is pray, and all we ever learn in prayer is that we’re not in control and that we are not God.  Only God is God.

Not the facts, the truth.  The deeper truth.

 

As Wendell Berry puts it in one of his “Sabbath Poems,”

the incarnate Word is with us, / is still speaking, is present

always, yet leaves no sign / but everything that is. 

 

A few years ago when my mother died my brothers and I started going through her things, especially her journals, her crabbed and bitter journals.  You almost needed a magnifying glass to make out the words, her writing was so small and cramped.

But in the midst of those journals I found a card, a recipe card, 4 x 6, with the words of Amazing Grace written out in her own best hand: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, / that saved a wretch like me!”

It feels silly doesn’t it, to be so heartened by a little card, to see it as a sign that beneath my mother’s bitterness there was hope, and faith–and a sign intended for me, now, to give me hope.  It feels almost superstitious.

And yet that’s the call–not to magical thinking, but to faith–to a change of mind—a leap.

Think of all the people who saw Jesus walking by and never followed him, or never looked up at all.  Think of how everyone abandoned him in the end.  Think of how they killed him.   “There is one among you you don’t recognize,” John the Baptist tells the crowd earlier in the Gospel of John—because Jesus isn’t just God–he is a man–isn’t just on high, but here, hidden in the midst of things.

A bluebird, on the barbwire, on a cold winter day.

But a blue bird.  So lovely when you stop to look.  A little bird with a dusting of blue.  A pale orange breast.  Amazing grace, amazing grace, when you pick up the binoculars.  When you change your mind.

When you repent and believe in the Gospel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chihuahua!

Monday, January 15, 2018

Martin Luther King Day

 

My Christmas present to Barb this year was a DNA kit to help us figure out what kind of dog her little rescue dog is.  You have to swab the dog’s cheek two different times, for fifteen seconds, and I can tell you, Shy didn’t like that at all.  Then you send the swabs into a lab, in this special container, and wait a few weeks for the results.

And we were shocked.

Shy is a little dog, 9 pounds, 6 ounces, and we thought he was mostly Yorkshire Terrier.  He looks like a terrier, with terrier ears and scruffy terrier fur.

But he turns out to be Chihuahua—62.5% Chihuahua!  He’s 25% mixed breeds, too, including terriers, and 12.5% miniature poodle.  But Chihuahua?  62.5%?  We don’t like Chihuahuas!  We make fun of Chihuahuas!  If Shy had been called a Chihuahua on the website where we found him, we never would have clicked!

 

But now we’ve had him a year, and Barb has trained him to be a therapy dog and a Read Dog, and she’s nuts about him, she’s just nuts about him, and I am, too.  He’s the sweetest, quirkiest little dog you can imagine.

 

We have so many assumptions, don’t we—about color, about appearance, about breed—we put things in so many categories, give them so many labels.  But the facts almost always prove us wrong—the facts, the facts, the lovely facts–Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior shining in his love and good humor through everything in the universe, through all shapes and colors and kinds of people, through everything that lives and moves and has its being.

Even little dogs.  Even Chihuahuas!

Even you.  Even me.

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Struggle with the Church as Prayer

 

Ruth Burrows’s To Believe in Jesus is a book that will knock your socks off, written by a woman in her eighties who really knows what she’s talking about, a Carmelite, with long, long experience in the reality of prayer.  I’ve been quoting from this in my homilies lately, and I highly, highly recommend it.  It’s a short book, which I think is appealing, and simple, and direct, and yet at the same time, really, really powerful.

I want to quote from it again, a longer quote, in two parts.

 

*

 

The first part of the passage is a frank admission that prayer can be really hard–but in a good, even a necessary way:

     There is nothing in the gospels to suggest that prayer is going to be delightful and satisfying.  On the contrary, our Lord suggests the opposite.  It is going to be hard to persevere and easy to grow faint.

We go before God as we are.  This means we suffer ourselves.  We accept feeling our total inadequacy, that we ‘can’t pray’, that our thoughts wander, that we are earthy and unspiritual, more interested in the breakfast to come than in God.

     We thought we were doing well, we thought we were virtuous, we thought we were spiritual, and look at us now, after all these years.  Our minds wander at prayer, we have no light, no comforting, reassuring feelings which tell us that everything is well with us and that God is pleased.  On the contrary we feel the opposite.  Instead of going forward—our own idea of going forward—we seem to be going backwards. We are humbled to the dust and in danger of packing up unless we know what trust in God means.  And, of course, since this painful condition is the effect of God’s drawing near, faith and trust are infused.  We are able to trust him.

In other words, our very struggles in prayer are the point—are the way to humility.

Not that prayer can’t be joyous and easeful and nourishing!  Sometimes I think Burrows is too harsh, too strong, as if whenever I feel any satisfaction in my prayer life I must be wrong!  No.

She’s just saying, don’t be discouraged when you’re also discouraged.  That’s OK.  It’s supposed to happen, too.

 

*

 

And then Burrows makes this really surprising move, at least for me—she takes this same logic and applies it to our experience of the Church and of the liturgy as it’s usually practiced.  When I read this the first time I kind of gasped—I’d never thought of the Church like this before—I was taken aback–and I think of it this morning not to criticize or the embarrass the people who feel such dissatisfaction and even anguish when it comes to the the way the Church is, or to trivialize those feelings, or to say we have to stop having these feelings.  I’m sharing it because it convicts me, points to me, helps me, challenges me, and I know it points to and challenges many, many of us.

It’s not that we have to accept a lot of crap.  No.  But there’s a call here, a deep call.

Anyway, here it is, with all praise and respect and appreciation for the faith and maturity and goodwill of the people in our parish:

 

     If we really know what the mass is, we won’t be too disturbed when things are not to our liking.  Tastes differ and it will be impossible to please everyone.  After all, we are celebrating sacrifice and it would be rather odd if, in the name of offering sacrifice, we insisted on having things our way and showed annoyance and resentment when our wishes were not considered. It is of the essence of our surrender to God that we surrender to our neighbor too; it is largely, almost entirely in surrendering to our neighbor that we surrender to God. Therefore, at mass, consideration for our neighbor must have first place.  It is essentially a communal act in which we must express our love and respect for our neighbor.  The priest will have his idiosyncrasies, people will cough and blow their noses, children will fidget and cry, music, translations may be in poor taste.  This is a human situation, this is the place to sacrifice.

     The very annoyance of the communal celebration can become matter for self-sacrifice.  To spend the time at mass with our feelings outraged and yet to go on willing to be patient and loving so as to please God, can mean that we are closely united to our Lord.  We may feel must unsatisfactory, feel that we haven’t assisted well and been very distracted.  All that is seeming.  In God’s sight we have been there for him.

 

That phrase, “to spend the time at mass with our feelings outraged and yet to go on . . .,” applies to so many of you, and I admire that greatly.  That’s what you’re doing.  You’re sticking!

Am I even close to this level of detachment?  Acceptance?  Surrender?  No.  No.

I’m far, far away from it.

None of this is possible without grace, without Christ—the Christ who comes to us in the Eucharist, who is blessed, broken and given whatever the content of the homily or the style of worship, who humbled himself and entered into the messiness and tackiness of first century life and is present still, in ours, continually breaking through all our frustrations and anxieties and fears.  Again and again.  Nothing can change that, and nothing ever will.

 

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