Chris Anderson's Blog, page 24

All We Can Do

Isaiah 40:25-31; Matthew 11:28-30

In a way we can see the reading from Isaiah as expressing a kind of youthful faith, a first-half-of-life faith, when we can run and not grow weary and we soar on eagle’s wings.  There are all these obstacles to get over and we glory in that.  We can jump tall buildings in a single bound and we must jump tall buildings in a single bound.

In a way we can see the reading from Matthew as expressing a mature faith, a second-half-of-life faith, when we can’t run anymore and we have grown weary and our wings are really tired and sore.

Isaiah is about effort and Matthew is about rest.  Isaiah is about what’s hard, Matthew about what’s easy.

But this is a false distinction finally, and it doesn’t matter.  Young men can “faint and grow weary, / and youths stagger and fall,” and it’s the Lord who renews their strength anyway, not anything they’ve done on their own or could ever do.  Their strength is from God as is the rest that Jesus promises.  The Lord gives us what is hard and enables us to bear it, and he takes away the burden when it grows too heavy.  All is from him and all is through him, at whatever times in our lives, and all we have to do is open ourselves up.

The life of faith is both terrifically hard and terrifically easy.  It’s both.

As Ruth Burrows puts it, “of ourselves we can do nothing at all.  All that we do, our very uttermost, which nevertheless we have to do, is merely a preparation for that direct intervention of God which alone can bring us to himself.”

 

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What Is It That You Do?

December 24, 2017

Fourth Sunday of Advent

Luke 1:26-38

 

A month or so ago I was sitting around a conference table at OSU with some other teachers.  We were talking about a program we wanted to start, and after a while I realized that no one seemed to know I was there.  No one had once asked me what I thought.  It was as if I’d become invisible.  After all these years I’ve achieved a sort of “senior” status, I guess, weirdly, but not in a good sense–in the sense of being seen as out-of-date, irrelevant.

At one point a new colleague, a young woman, turned to me and asked in a kind of puzzled voice, “and what is it that you do?” and I could feel my ears burning and the top of my head tingling, I was so mad, so embarrassed.

 

And this was a moment of grace, it was a kind of Annunciation, because I was being “overshadowed,” as Mary is in the gospel today–though unlike Mary, I didn’t accept it.  Not at all.

When Mary is told that she will be the mother of Jesus, that the Holy Spirit will “overshadow” her and come into her, she struggles, too, and she asks questions, but in the end, with a tremendous act of will and of faith, an act that makes the Incarnation possible, that saves us all, she says yes, let it be done.

I was saying: what?  Don’t you know I am?

And that was the gift of that moment:  that sudden, sharp awareness of how self-centered and egotistical I still am, deep down.

 

The word “overshadowed” is a really interesting word, really evocative, partly because it’s got the word “shadow” in it, and shadows are elusive, insubstantial, impossible to get a hold of.  We can see them but we can’t weigh them.  We can see them, but when they come over us we’re in the dark, and we can’t see what’s around us, nothing is clearly visible, and that’s how religious experience usually is for us, elusive, subtle, hard to pin down.

The word “shadow” also invokes the darkness that we all have to face in our lives, as Mary has to face the darkness in hers, darkness in the sense of the suffering she will have to endure at the foot of the cross, and before that, all through the growing up of her son and his public ministry, when she is often confused and unsure.

And she does face this, she does live with this, the uncertainty, the struggle, in ways we just don’t want to.

For us the word “shadow” suggests a sinfulness Mary didn’t have.  She was born without sin, while we are born into it, and we have to admit this and face this and deal with this every day.  What rose up in me at that meeting was my pride and my envy, those habitual sins I tell myself I’ve overcome but haven’t, and never will, no matter how senior I become, and so I thank God for the sting of that young woman’s question.  What is it that you do?  It was a good question, and I have to answer it, and part of the answer is:  I try to make things about me.  I pout.  I have my feelings hurt.  That’s what I do.

 

But the most important implication of the word “overshadowed,” its most challenging aspect, is that when we are overshadowed we are “exceeded in importance,” we are made less, first in the sense of being called to care about others, to put their needs before our needs.  But more even than that.   Far more.  Because the real challenge here is to put God first, to surrender ourselves completely to Him, and that’s something we can never really do, none of us, without grace.  We pay lip service to that idea all the time.  Yes, we follow the way of the cross, we say, yes we trust in Jesus–but put us under the slightest pressure in our everyday lives, take us out of church and put us around a conference table or any other table, and we abandon our faith in an instant.  It all falls apart.

Even in our spiritual lives we do this, Ruth Burrows says, in her terrific little book, To Believe in Jesus.  “Over and over again,” she says, “we must realize how, in what we think of as our love and service of God, lurks a ravenous self-seeking which would use God to inflate self.”  “When we come to the spiritual life . . . what we are wanting is that it will make us feel good,” she says, we want glory and reward, and we want to be in control, in charge, and that’s not at all the message of the gospel.  What is the Christmas narrative about if not God emptying himself out completely and becoming a baby in a womb, entirely helpless, entirely powerless?  What’s the story of the Crucifixion about if not God emptying himself out completely and becoming a man on a cross, entirely helpless, entirely powerless?  The central fact and the central idea of our faith is that God lets himself be overshadowed–by us–by our own sinful humanity–and that’s our model, our template, and yet again and again we try to turn the gospel into an excuse for arrogance and smugness and a nice, safe identity for ourselves.

Even at this silly little meeting I couldn’t put that young woman first, or accept being ignored, because it wasn’t God I loved and cared about the most, it was my own reputation, my own image.

 

And that was the gift of it: that sudden, sharp awareness that without grace I am nothing, that I can’t do any of this on my own—just as Mary doesn’t achieve her sinlessness but is given it, from birth, saved by her son before she is even pregnant with him.

 

Just admitting that was enough.  Seeing it.  Being aware of it.  Even then a certain freedom comes.  Even then, with just that, a real joy begins to break through.

 

There will be other kinds of joy this Christmas, this evening and tomorrow, the joy of laughter and of giving gifts and of eating good food, and we can accept that joy and trust that joy, because it’s from God, as are all good things.  That’s grace.

But that’s easy.  That’s obvious.  The challenge is to accept the shadows, too.  The challenge is now and then to look at the darkness outside the window, beyond the Christmas lights.

If you are sitting around the table at Christmas dinner with your family and friends, and you start to feel invisible, unappreciated, overshadowed, ask for the grace to put the needs of others before yours, ask to be given a love for the others, a concern with their well-being, and ask even more for the grace to see this moment as a reminder of Mary and of the “yes” she says, and as a small way of sharing in that yes.

“Only in God be at rest my soul,” Psalm 62 says.  “He only is my rock and refuge. . . . I shall not be disturbed.”  Imagine the freedom that would come if we really believed that, if we really could let go like that, as Mary does, and then ask for that freedom, pray for it, for that joy, that true and unshakable joy, to be that open and that free, entirely without fear, even in the darkness.

What is it that we do?  We say yes.

And then God comes pouring into us—God comes pouring through us.  God does it all.

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Spiritual Virginity

December 20, 2017

Third Week of Advent

Luke 1:26-38

 

I’ve been rereading this really terrific little book by the Carmelite writer Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus, and I wanted to share three short passages from it this morning as a commentary on the story of the Annunciation.  Because I think they are.

Mary is exactly the model of the humility and self-surrender we are called to this Advent and this Christmas.

 

Here’s the first passage:

     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.  It is going to be secret from ourselves. 

     Everything will depend on our having the correct idea of the nature of prayer, how it is God who works and we who receive.  This will make us wise and we shall know how to pray.  Prayer is to going to be a very simple thing, so simple in fact that it may well scandalize us and dash our hopes.  We wanted it to be an exulting, satisfying experience [but this is not what it is].  Prayer is self-surrender to God at every moment.  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.

     The reality of our prayer will be the reality of our self-surrender, not how we feel.

     “Behold,” Mary says, “I am the handmaid of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word.”

 

The second passage:

“We shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind: and your neighbor as yourself.”  If we ponder these words we are impressed by the totality of the love demanded, the wholeness of the gift.  This, I think, is the significance of consecrated 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.  He has to belong to God body and soul.  Some are called to reach this in marriage, others in the single life in the world, others in a state of consecrated celibacy.  The means are different, the end is the same.

     “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word.”

 

And the third and final passage:

God is always working to bring us to an awareness and acceptance of our poverty, which is the essential condition of our being able to receive him, and the petty frustrations, the restrictions, humiliations, the occasions when we are made to feel poignantly and distressingly hedged around, not in control of the world, not even in control of that tiny corner of it we are supposed to call our own, are his chosen channel into the soul.  It is the one who has learned to bow his head, to accept the yoke, who knows what freedom is.  There is so much that we must take whether we like it or not; what I am urging is a wholehearted acceptance, a positive appreciation and choosing of this bitter ingredient of life.

“Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  May it be done to me according to your word.”

 

O Lord, give us the grace to receive your grace.

Give us the humility of Mary, and her willingness to surrender, to empty herself out.

Help us to see all the stresses and pressures of the next few days as opportunities for surrender, as Annunciations.

Whatever our particular vocation, may we through You be spiritual virgins:  wholehearted, holding nothing back, giving all to you.

We thank you, Lord, for the Christ child, born into this ordinary world, this ordinary, complicated, sometimes tedious world.  May we, too, take this child into our selves, in our own ordinary lives, and give birth to him again and again through our kindness and our honesty and our cheerfulness and our faith.

 

    

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How She Loves Me

     for Sister Teresa

 

The morning moon through the bare

branches of the maple, and I think of Mary

 

reflecting the light of her son.  Black sky

with stars and the forest still black.  What’s left

of the snow on the cold, cold ground.

 

Silence.  Stillness.

 

And the moon is full and bright

and white as shell, and the light that falls

falls on everyone.  O Lady,

 

how you love me.  How you love us all.

 

December 9, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Swords into Plowshares

Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 8:5-11

 

O Lord, beat my sword into a plowshare:

my anger into acceptance,

my pride into humility,

my impatience into patience,

my doubt into faith,

my selfishness into compassion.

 

O Lord, beat my spear into a pruning hook:

that I may cut out all that is unnecessary

in my life,

and all that is distracting in my life,

and all that is sinful

and especially all that is subtly sinful,

that slowly dulls and deadens me

so that I no longer see you

and hear you;

may I clear away all that chokes the good

and holy and clean

and free my true self, my self in You.

 

Lord,

help me to know my unworthiness,

my smallness,

my ordinariness,

my limitation and my need;

help me to admit

how little I understand

and how little I can do,

so that you can enter into me.

 

O Lord,

enter under my roof:

break through my thick skull,

break through my useless thoughts,

break through my anxiety

and my obsessiveness and my fear.

 

O Lord,

come into the secret of my heart

and never leave me,

make of my heart a home

for your spirit and your love,

make of my heart a fire so bright

it will light my way

through the darkness to come.

 

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On the Twentieth Anniversary of My Ordination as a Deacon

November 29, 2017

Luke 21:12-19

Last week I was called to the funeral home to do a prayer service for a four-month old baby who had died.

What I’ll never forget is the wailing.

The mother was holding the baby in her arms–she wouldn’t let go of her–and she was rocking back and forth and calling her name, and wailing, and all the baby’s aunts were wailing, too.  The sound of it came in waves, rising and falling.

 

Today is the twentieth anniversary of my ordination as a deacon, and as I think back on those years I think of all the graces and gifts of my ordination, and I think back, too, in light of the gospel today, on my struggles, on my “persecutions,” although nothing I’ve experienced really rises to that level.  I haven’t been hated.  I haven’t been beaten.  Mostly I’ve just been ignored, at OSU anyway.  I’ve been able to connect with a number of colleagues and students over those years, spiritually, and everyone has been polite to me, and respectful, but by and large I’ve just been dismissed.  Discounted.  For the majority of my students and the majority of my colleagues, faith is a language they just don’t speak, a music they just don’t hear.

I feel very much supported and appreciated at St. Mary’s, and I’m very grateful for that, but a lot of the situations that a deacon is called into are awkward and undefined, and no one in those situations knows what a deacon is, and no one cares, and that’s been good for me, really, one of the real graces of my ordination, though it’s taken me years to see this.

I was so grateful to the Church the other day, for the scriptures and for the liturgy.  I didn’t need to come up with the words myself, and I couldn’t have.  But I knew where to find them, and I knew how to say them, and they were beautiful words, and they rose and fell, too, they had a rhythm and a force, and I think after a while they started to calm and center the people at the funeral home, as I said them into the dark air of that room.

But mostly what I felt was helpless, was powerless, and I was helpless, I was powerless, and that was the grace of it.

It was a moment like all the moments of awkwardness and hiddenness, but intensified, transformed.

No one was paying any attention to me, nor should they have been.  No one cared who I was, nor should they have.  It was the words that mattered, and what was deeper than words, and I felt that.  I knew that.  For a moment, just a moment, the intensity of the family’s shock and the intensity of the family’s grief burned through my ego and burned through my pride and I wasn’t thinking about myself at all.  I was caught up with the mother and the father and the grandparents and the uncles and the aunts and everyone else in that room in that terrible, beautiful darkness.  That terrible, beautiful mystery.

“Let the children come to me,” Jesus said.  “Do not keep them from me.  The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

This wasn’t a moment of challenge.  It was a moment of grace.  It was a moment of the presence of God and of the love of God, overflowing, in some way I can’t explain.

 

O Lord, You call us all to be deacons, to be servants:  give us the grace and the strength to serve.

You call us into your darkness, and into Your light.

You call us deeper than words and deeper than grief.

Beneath all the other voices you are quietly calling us home.

O Lord, You became a little child for our sake:  bless us and keep us.

We are all children, we are all precious in your sight:  take us into your arms.

 

 

 

 

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Scripture Never Says

November 15, 2017

Wisdom 6:1-11; Luke 17:11-19

 

Scripture never says, look out for number one.

Scripture never says, crush the weak.

Scripture never says, ignore the cries of the poor.

There’s a pattern here, in the Old and the New Testament,

embodied and fulfilled in the life of Jesus,

who didn’t come down from the cross,

though he could have,

who didn’t reign down fire on the people,

though he could have,

but who humbled himself, who emptied himself,

as we should, too.

Scripture is unambiguous about the responsibility of our rulers:

“For those in power scrutiny impends.”

Scripture is unambiguous about our responsibility, too:

to fall at the feet of Jesus and to thank him,

like the leper Jesus heals and is always healing.

We are the leper,

not strong, not powerful.

We are the leper,

who was also a Samaritan, not a Jew,

despised and rejected as alien, as other.

We are nothing,

and only when we admit that are we free.

Only then is joy possible.

Prayer isn’t something we do,

Ruth Burrows says,

it’s something God does in us.

All we can do is throw ourselves down

at the feet of Jesus,

and beg him, and call on him,

and thank him.

Prayer isn’t something we do,

it’s something God does,

and he is doing it now, in us, here,

and in the Eucharist, in his very body,

not Lorded over us,

not imposed on us or forced on us,

not used to crush and exploit us,

but blessed, and broken, and given,

again and again and again.

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The Dark Parts

Colossians 1:24-2:3

Recently a friend was complaining to me about another friend.  That this other friend was too gloomy and pessimistic.  That this other friend only saw the negative side of things.  “He’s only read the dark parts of the Bible,” he said, and what he prefers to do, this first friend, is to think only about the positive and the uplifting parts, the happy parts.  The positive and happy parts of life.

The dark parts of the Bible?  Like the crucifixion?

I don’t think we can ignore the darkness in the Bible or the darkness in life, especially not on a day like today, the anniversary of the events of 9/11, because when we do ignore the darkness and the struggle, we ignore Christ, who suffered and died for us, who hung on a cross–who cures the man with the withered hand in the gospel today knowing full well that it and his other actions and the things he’s saying and the things he’s teaching will lead him to be crucified.

“Brothers and sisters,” Paul says, “I rejoice in my sufferings,” for “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body.”  Paul wants us “to know”—he doesn’t want to deny it:  he wants to advertise it, to emphasize it—he wants us to know “how great a struggle” he’s been having in his ministry, all the tarring and the feathering and the arguing and the struggle, which leads after all to his own death.

The cross isn’t just a cross.  There’s a body on it.  It’s not a cross, it’s a crucifix, and it defines our lives as it defined the life of Jesus, and we have to face that and acknowledge that.

And rejoice in it.  Welcome it.  Embrace it.

Because the more we enter into the world the way it is, the more we humble ourselves, the more we admit our own temporariness and sinfulness, the freer we are, of all the materialism and the false promises and all the many things we cling to that don’t make us happy.  We have to die to live, and we do live, as Paul does, as Our Lord does.

When we realize that only in God is our soul at rest, only in God is our refuge, in the words of Psalm 62, we find that refuge, we find our rest.

The way up is the way down.

Denial comes at a great cost, in our compassion, in our humility, in our awareness of others and our actions towards others.  Denial hurts our psyches and hurts our communities.  But in facing the darkness, by entering into the darkness, we find the light, we find the “richness of assured understanding,” the mystery of the great love of God, the enormous treasure, which is not on the surface, is not found in mere pleasure, but is buried, is deep in us, at the bottom of all pain, at bottom of all grief, at the bottom of all our trials.  There is where we find the Lord.  There is where we find our savior:  Christ in us.

 

 

 

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Salutations

Romans 1:1-7

 

When we write an email or a letter, how do we identify ourselves?  What title do we give ourselves?

Would we ever call ourselves a “slave,” as Paul does in his opening to the letter to the Romans?

Would we ever identify ourselves in terms of our relationship to Christ, as utterly dependent on him for grace and for energy and for commitment and strength—as not the Lords of ourselves, not responsible for our own accomplishments?

 

How do we think of ourselves off the page, in our hearts?

Secretly, do we think of ourselves as nothing, as worthless, as not good enough?  Is that why we brag and inflate and puff ourselves up in public or on the screen?

 

How do we think of the people we are addressing?  Do we think of the members of the committee we’re copying on the email as “beloved of God,” as “called to be holy”?  Or do we think of them as enemies, or rivals, or less than we are, or more?

 

We live in an age when public discourse and private discourse has been degraded and corrupted and reduced to name-calling and falseness.  We live in an age when everyone from children to public figures seem to be participating in or victimized by some kind of generalized, pervasive cyber-bullying.

 

That’s not who we are.  That’s not the path to holiness.

Everything we are is defined by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and everything other people are is defined by the resurrection, too, and that should determine the ways we think of ourselves and what we call ourselves and that should determine the ways we think of others and the ways we address them.

 

Chris, a slave of Christ Jesus, or trying to be, praying to be, called to holiness as we are all called to holiness–to all the beloved of God in Corvallis, to all who are called to belong to Jesus Christ:  grace to you and peace8

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Mars Mission

When I see my friend Marty, and I ask him what he’s been doing, he says he’s been working on the Mars mission.  The Mars mission!

Marty’s an oceanographer, and the rover is crawling now, inch by inch, with its googly camera eyes and spindly tractor wheels, over the dry floor of an ancient sea millions of miles away, and Marty sits before a screen and watches the graphs appear and the pictures come in, pixel by pixel, and he studies every granule, every speck, molecule by molecule, and he doesn’t care how long it takes—it could take months to travel across your own front porch at this rate, months to examine the light and the texture of the first thing you happen to look at when you wake up in the morning, the threads in your sheets, the angle of the sun—because this is how it should be, this slow, careful seeing, this painstaking study, entirely without judgment, entirely without prejudice or hope, even if you never find signs of life, no spark at all, only rock and sand and the ordinary granules and the wind like any other wind since time immemorial and even before, neither life nor death nor fear nor hope.

How Marty’s face lights up as he tells me.  That reality is so lovely.

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

 

 

 

 

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