Chris Anderson's Blog, page 25

Uncle Wally Fades Away

Uncle Wally fades into the landscape.

 

First a tree,

then a line of trees,

then a cloud,

then a cloud settling over a hill,

then dew on the grass.

 

Then animal again, singular:

a Varied Thrush, humming in the alder,

a crouching lynx,

a bounding doe.

 

Then Uncle Wally rises up

and moves out over the water.

He descends into the bay.

 

A sleek, black head breaks the surface,

shiny and wet,

then slinks back down again,

drifting and drifting away.

 

 

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We Have to Stop

October 21-22

Matthew 22:15-21

see, too:

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/faithful-citizenship/upload/forming-consciences-for-faithful-citizenship.pdf

 

I was walking on campus one morning not long ago, the sun just breaking through the fog, and I saw a young woman in a wheelchair paused at the curb.  She had dropped a water bottle in the street and couldn’t reach down to pick it up.  I think she had cerebral palsy.

And just then a young man with a beard rode by on a bike, clearly in a hurry.  But he stopped, got off, bent over and picked up the bottle, and handed it to the woman.

They exchanged a few words—she must have been thanking him—and then he jumped back on the bike and rode away.

 

It was a moment like many moments in our lives, a moment of beauty and a moment of grace, a moment of the presence of Christ.

It was also a moment of compassion, of unexpected kindness, and in that way it can help us think about this really difficult issue that Jesus raises in the gospel today, of what it means to render unto to Caesar what is Caesar’s.

 

Since the election last fall I’ve had so many difficult conversations about politics and religion—anguished conversations, sometimes angry conversations–and with people I love and respect, from all over the spectrum, people who want to follow the Gospel and do what is right.  The Popes have all struggled with these questions–St. Pope John Paul, Pope Benedict, and now Pope Francis.  The bishops have struggled with this.  We all have, I think—I have, and I still am.

What I think is so helpful in this famous gospel passage is how radically nonspecific Jesus is.  The sentences are clear and balanced: “repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”  But as in the parables, this apparently straightforward language is really open-ended when you stop to think about it.  Really provocative.   What exactly belongs to Caesar?  Jesus doesn’t say.  What exactly belongs to God?  Jesus doesn’t say.  What Jesus does in the gospels is give us fundamental moral principles—to love God and to love our neighbor—to be compassionate, to be kind—and then again and again calls us to think for ourselves about what this means in our own lives.

This is the main idea, too, in a very important document put out by the American Catholic bishops several years ago and again, in an updated form, in 2015, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship:  a Call to Political Responsibility.”  I really urge you to read this—I’m surprised by how many people haven’t.  Just google “Faithful Citizenship” and you’ll find it, or ask me for the link.  Because I think it can really help us, all of us, and not because it tells us how to vote, but because it doesn’t–because it gives us, very clearly, the basic principles of Catholic moral teaching—to respect all life, to help the poor and the vulnerable, to take care of the environment—and says that when we vote and when we participate in the political discussion, we have to act in accord with these basic principles, all of them, in relation to each other.

We have to stop.  We have to get off our bikes.

But what exactly that means when it comes to particular policies and particular issues, that’s for us to decide ourselves.  “The Church is involved in the political process but is not partisan,” the bishops say, writing as a body, exercising their teaching authority as leaders of the American church.  “The Church cannot champion any candidate or party.  Our cause is the defense of human life and dignity and the protection of the weak and vulnerable.”

 

Not all of Catholic moral teaching lines up with a single party.  Some of it lines up with one party, some of it with another.  And so we have to weigh things, we have to make choices, and we can.  It’s OK.  “Catholics may choose different ways to respond to compelling social problems,” the bishops say.

What matters is what they call intent.  If we vote for a candidate because that candidate favors abortion, or assisted suicide, or unfair treatment of workers and immigrants, or any other “intrinsically evil act,” then we are sinning.  But there may be times, the bishops say, when “a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.”

In other words, we really have to think about this.

What are our real motives, underneath?  How do we balance the competing claims of the Gospel?

 

This is what it means to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s:  not to get them mixed up—not to confuse the political with the religious.

This is what it means to be a faithful citizen:  not to lose sight of what we really have to fight for, the dignity of the person, in all its contexts and dimensions.

This is what it means:  to resist all the forces that war against the dignity of the person, what St. Pope John Paul called all the “structures of sin,” abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, racism and poverty and environmental degradation.

These are not, the bishops say, “optional concerns which can be dismissed.”   They are all important, and they are all related, and though we can differ on how exactly to fight them, “we cannot differ on our moral obligation to help build a more just and peaceful world . . . so that the weak and vulnerable are protected and human rights and dignity defended.”

We have to stop.

 

Pope Benedict talked about how the love we experience in the Eucharist should shape all our thoughts and actions, including those in the political realm.  He called for “Eucharistic consistency” on the part of all of us.

“It would be a serious mistake,” the Bishops say in their document on “Faithful Citizenship,” “to use only selected parts of the Church’s teaching to advance partisan political interests or validate ideological biases.  All of us are called to be servants to the whole truth in authentic love.”

 

I was walking near campus on another morning not long ago—a rainy morning—pouring down rain.  And a boy in trucker’s cap, in a Chevy Blazer, on big monster wheels, came roaring through this enormous puddle on the other side of the street, parting it like the Red Sea.

And there was a woman walking on the sidewalk there, at just that point, and the wave on that side rose up, over her head, and came crashing down, soaking her completely.

And I thought:  isn’t that just typical?

But then the boy in the blazer slammed on his brakes, leaned over, rolled down the window, and shouted above the roar of his engine, I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  I didn’t know you were there!     

     And the woman just laughed.   She was wearing rain gear, from top to bottom, and she was laughing, and the water was streaming off her.  She was shining.

 

We have to stop.

“First and foremost,” the bishops say, we are “citizens of the heavenly Kingdom.”

If we pass by the woman without noticing that we’ve soaked her; if we see that we’ve soaked her and keep going anyway; if we drive through the puddle on purpose– if we want to soak her—then we are participating in evil.  We are sinning.

We have to see her.  We have to ask her for forgiveness.  We have to dry off her clothes, or find her new clothes—or maybe we have to fix the drains and repair the streets, and sit on the committees that decide those things, and organize, and campaign.

But however we do it, whatever this means for us, in our own particular situation, given our own sense of the practical realities of the world—however we think the problems are best solved–we have to stop.

We have to stop.

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Falling Down

I drive up to Hillsboro to St. Matthew’s to do a wedding for a student.

I’m such a pro.  I know what I’m doing.

The problem is the ambo at St. Matthew’s is elevated—you have to walk up two steps—and when I went to proclaim the gospel I forgot about this.  There I was, standing in front of several hundred people, and when I turned around, not thinking, I fell off the steps.  I had to grab the edge to keep from hitting my chin, and even then I was looking up, at my feet, in the air.  It’s a miracle I didn’t hurt myself.

I got up and the wedding went on.  Everything happened anyway.

Driving home I started to laugh.  Up the mountain and down into the valley.  I kept thinking of our silly pretentions, our false pride.  I kept thinking how beautiful the world was, the winter trees and the sky.  I kept thinking how I’ll look on America’s Funniest Home Videos:  there one second, gone the next.

Maybe in a way that’s my vocation, and yours, too:  to fall and to keep falling.

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally Glides Through the Country

Uncle Wally puts on his sunglasses,

lowers his power window and raises his power seat,

and pressing the pedal he glides, he floats,

over the hills and through the little towns

of what used to be his territory.

 

He still knows all the soda jerks by name,

all the waitresses in all the cafes

where he used to sit and shoot the breeze.

Every Rexall rushes by like a line in his ledger.

 

Uncle Wally glides through the country,

singing as he crests the hills, leaning back and singing,

the wind skipping off the fins of his Buick.

And the fields flow by and the land gives way,

it opens up, as far as the eye can see.

 

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And

At the Sea of Galilee I looked out over the waters, to the hills, and the sky, and I saw what our Lord himself must have seen, the same topography, the same rises and falls.

And in Nazareth I saw this:  a middle-aged man walking with his son.  The son was 15 or 16, with wild eyes and a wild smile, neck straining, head at a crooked angle, stumbling and twitching down the sidewalk.  Flapping his arms.

I looked away, as we do.  I didn’t want to see it—not there, in Nazareth.

But later I remembered.  I remembered how patiently the father managed to get the boy into a car.  I remembered how heroic the father seemed, and how terribly burdened.

And I believe in the dove, too, descending from the sky.  I believe in the wind blowing against the door.  I believe the man who wept over Jerusalem entered into it, and let it enter into him, and we must, too, and when we do, when we feel what we must feel, we will rise with him and we will live with him and somehow, in the midst of this sadness and loss, there is joy, too, joy we can’t explain and don’t have to because it’s real, it exists, it’s true.

All of it.  All at once.

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally Blesses a Dead Man

Uncle Wally is called to the hospital

but arrives a minute late.

 

The body, though warm, is twisted and shrunk,

foam still drying around the mouth, eyes rolled back.

The grieving wife weeps by the bedside,

the daughter in the hall, stupid with loss.

 

Uncle Wally hurries in to comfort the weeping women,

taking their hands in his.  Then he turns around,

and leaning his belly against the rail,

makes the sign of the cross

in the fetid air above the dead man’s head.

 

Uncle Wally raises himself up.

Uncle Wally gazes on the face of death:

the plastered hair, the marbled eyes.

 

How sad he feels!

How proud!

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Are You Envious Because I Am Generous?

September 24, 2017

Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Isaiah 55:6-9; Psalm 145; Philippians 1:20-27; Matthew 20:1-16

 

Classes have started again at OSU, and this year, as every year, my students are concerned about grades.  They want to be graded fairly, they want to be rewarded for their work, and they should be.

Imagine how they’d react if I treated them the way the landowner treats his laborers in the parable today—if I let students add in the seventh or eighth week, and didn’t require them to make up the papers and exams, and gave them A’s for the class.  I’d get terrible student evaluations.

As Jesus got terrible student evaluations, the worst in history.  At the end they called him.

 

But this is just the point:  God’s ways are not our ways.

 

The character of Job in the Book of Job is like the first laborers in the parable.  He’s a righteous man but not a very nice one.   He’s followed all the rules, exactly, and in that sense he doesn’t deserve the bad things that have happened to him.  But he’s not somebody you’d want to have lunch with.  He’s obsessed with the rules.  That’s all he can think about.  When he complains about the boils he’s broken out in or the livestock he’s lost, his argument is that God hasn’t honored the contract, hasn’t stayed within Job’s own legalistic boundaries, and at the end of the book God replies to this, in the famous speech from the whirlwind—a Category 5.

     Where were you when I created the universe and all the morning stars sang?  Tell me.  Tell me how big the oceans are, how big the galaxies.  Didn’t you measure them with your ruler?

And Job realizes what a prig he’s been, and repents, and falls silent.

 

In the last few years three of my students have died, from suicide or accident or illness, three students who sat in these same rooms and these same desks, looking up at me, brightly, on the first day.  They were good people.  They worked hard.

God is the landowner, and we are the laborers, and he doesn’t play by our rules.  He’s a hurricane, not an app.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, / nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord [in Isaiah today]/ As high as the heavens are above the earth, / so high are my ways above your ways / are my thoughts above your thoughts.

His greatness [the psalmist says] is unsearchable.

 

We know nothing about God.  Nothing.  All we know is his “graciousness,” “his mercy.”  That’s the next thing the psalmist says, and that’s the paradox, the leap:  we know nothing about God but this, this one great thing, his “kindness,” even in the face of suffering, even in the face of randomness, even in the face of death.

The early laborers in the parable are envious of the landowner because he’s generous with the workers who come later.  They think that life is a zero sum game, and they want to be the winners, they want to be the special ones.  But it’s none of their business what the landowner does with his money.  It’s his money.  And second, they’re committing the sin of ingratitude, enormous ingratitude, failing to be glad for the work they’ve been given, for their own day in the fields.  Why should they care what the other workers are getting?

The landowner is inscrutable not for evil but for good, not out of scarcity but out of abundance.  None of us is entitled to anything, and yet we are all blessed in our own ways.

“We all have to discover,” Jean Vanier says, that “there are others like us who have gifts and needs; no one of us is the center of the world.  We are a small but important part of our universe.  We all have a part to play.”  And what gives this such authority for me is that Vanier is the founder of the L’Arche communities—I’ve referred to him many times—communities in which the able live with the disabled, and not just so that they can help the disabled, but so that the disabled can help them–can show them that we all loved by God, equally, whether or not we have a college degree, whether or not we can walk or talk.  What matters is a smile, a touch.  A simple act.  The moment.

 

If we ever doubt the generosity of God, we have only to look at the stars.

If we ever doubt the generosity of God, we have only to consider the trillions of cells in our bodies.

 

And not even death can argue against this, not even death cancels this out.  So many people think it does.  How can there even be a God if 21 innocent children die in an earthquake in Mexico City, crushed by the roof of their own school?

But what the third reading, from Philippians, is telling us today, the radical claim that Paul makes—and this is my final point–is that in the end death doesn’t matter, death doesn’t change a thing, because in death we are still with God, we are with Christ, in even deeper ways.  Death isn’t the end and death isn’t the worst thing that can happen because God is God and there are no boundaries, not biological nor logical nor theological.  God is always shooting across those gaps, and no one is lost, and it’s never too late.

 

I want to thank all of you who have sent me condolences on the death of my father last month.  I started to thank you individually but there were finally too many of you, and that’s a wonderful thing, the grace of this community.

My father believed in God, but he was a stubborn, ornery man, and he had turned away from everybody in his last years, cutting himself off from any group or institution or community.  He kept pulling out his tubes in the hospital, trying to get away.  And as his dementia deepened he became increasingly confused and uncooperative, and afraid.  When I saw him in the hospital at the end he was very afraid, I think.  It was hard to witness—something that I think most of my students just couldn’t understand now, that I could never teach them.

All I can do is grade them fairly, and stay within the rules that are proper now, at OSU, and pray for them as they go on.

But I wish that I could also somehow teach them what Jesus taught us, that no one is ever lost, and that even late in the day, even on our deathbeds, even if we’ve long been stubborn and cut off from the world, we, too, are being called home, we, too, are being offered the mercy of God, are in fact coming to know in a far deeper way his infinite generosity.

That even death is grace, a way of stripping us of our pretentions, breaking through our barriers.

My faith in this is not nearly as strong as Paul’s, but I’m learning—I’m a student, too–and that’s what I pray for, for myself and my students and for all of you:  a deeper and deeper confidence, a deep and deeper hope, a deeper and deeper conviction, that nothing, nothing, can ever separate us from the love of God.

 

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Crook

Juan has come late to mass again, wandering over from the retirement center next door.  He can’t seem to remember what time it is.

I’m unsnapping my alb—everyone else is gone—but, grudgingly, I bring him over to the tabernacle, open the two small metal doors, and remove the Body of Christ.

And when I reach out to put the host on his tongue, before he receives, he turns his smooth, brown, ancient head and kisses me on the inside of the arm.

In the crook.

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally Feeds His People

When Uncle Wally gives communion,

the feelings wash over him in waves.

 

The people come up one by one,

cupping their varied hands,

the cracked and the blistered,

the hard as horn, the soft

and the trembling and the white.

 

Or the eyes, crinkly or hooded or blank,

the eyes of sadness or the eyes of hope

as they look right at him or turn shyly away.

 

The anger and the longing and the hope

keep pouring out of the people

and passing into him, like radiation,

weakening his bones.

 

The old woman opens her mouth,

her pink tongue frilly as a flower.

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Shadowhawk

Just a shape at first, wide and blank, merging with my own dark outline on the road, the shadow of a hawk passes over my shoulder, so suddenly I flinch, I start, as if some unexpected hand has touched my actual body.

But gently, without a sound.

Seeming to dissolve then and rise, becoming three-dimensional:  a sparrowhawk, golden, gliding just before me along the curve, a single feathered muscle pushing off finally above the fields, behind it, in the delicate sky, bulging in air, as huge and sudden as a world, the afternoon moon.

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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