Chris Anderson's Blog, page 26

Uncle Wally is Ontologically Changed

Uncle Wally studies and prays

and studies and prays and learns

all the words he must learn to say.

 

Until one day he goes to the cathedral.

His alb is too small, he can’t button the neck,

his shoes are brown instead of black,

but he’s so happy that day,

standing on the altar with the bishop,

the angels all around him in the air.

 

What Uncle Wally likes best is being on call,

like a plumber, knowing what only a plumber knows.

He likes holding babies over the water

and pouring the water over their soft, little heads

and the Holy Spirit pouring out then

in the water and the light.

 

What he likes is when he stands on the altar

in his bulging alb and scuffed brown shoes

and knows that he is slowly fading away,

he is disappearing.

 

In the end you can see right through him,

everything, the cross, the candle,

the jug of wine.

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When an Idea or Feeling Comes from God

When an idea or a feeling comes from God, William Barry says, it has a certain resonance.  It’s striking.  It’s like the feeling we have when we’re reading a book and a passage hits us as true and right.  It’s in boldface.

When an idea or feeling comes from God it has a certain clarity and persistence.  We don’t forget it.  It sticks with us, and it keeps coming up, again and again.  It doesn’t go away.

And third and most important, Barry says, when an idea or feeling comes from God it’s accompanied by joy and peace to varying degrees.  It lifts our hearts—we feel good, like ourselves—even if later we begin to question and doubt again, as we always do.

The sheep hear the voice of the shepherd directly, in the image from John’s gospel, and they follow it.  But these feelings we have are the voice of the shepherd, too, these feelings of resonance and clarity and joy.

“It seems as though these thoughts come to me,” Barry says, “and I know that what I am experiencing is different from when I am talking to myself.”

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally Hears a Knock

Uncle Wally doesn’t care about

orbital mechanics or translunar injection

or any piece of that vast and unimaginable machinery.

 

Every capsule he pictures is cozy as a kitchen, awash in light,

and his comrades are floating in the air beside him,

his confidants and friends, they are all bobbing and floating in air,

checking off the checklists, confident as dads.

 

There’s a knock on the door the morning of launch

and everything’s just like Christmas,

the house cleaned up and put away,

everyone on tiptoe, smiling.

 

Outside, in the darkness,

the silence is as huge and gentle

as snow.

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Tea Ceremony

The elderly father of a friend has moved in with her, and at first he was driving her crazy.  She’s a busy, driven, accomplished woman, she has a lot to do, but her father, though he’s in good health, takes a long time to get up in the morning.  To put on his slippers.  To walk down the hall.  He’s 86 years old.  He’s careful.  He’s deliberate.

And then—this really bothered my friend at first—he slowly starts to makes his tea.  He fills the kettle with water.  He puts the kettle on the stove.  He puts the tea bag in the cup.  He gets the milk from the refrigerator.  All of this slowly.  Carefully.

And then he stands and waits for the water to boil, looking out the window.  He notices the birds.  He looks at the clouds.

Half an hour to make a cup of tea!  I don’t have time for this, my friend said.

But then she realized.  She does.  This is what she’s been thirsting for and didn’t know it:  not the tea but the silence.  The awareness.

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally is Tossed on the Waves

Uncle Wally builds a raft, lashing the logs

the way he learned at camp,

and sets out to sea.

 

But then the great storms come

and the water heaves and Uncle Wally

is tossed on the waves, bobbing twenty days.

Only his belly keeps him afloat, like a Mae West.

 

Finally, in the darkness,

he is flung onto shore,

hypothermic and spluttering,

burying himself in a pile of leaves.

 

He wakes in the morning to the laughter of girls,

running and playing in the thick, wet grass,

practicing corner kicks.

And he rises up blubbering,

Uncle Wally rises up, begging for mercy,

bare as a blimp, caked with brine.

 

And though the young girls giggle

and turn away, ponytails swishing,

one of them hands him a towel and another

gets on her cell phone and they bundle him off

to coach’s SUV, heat on high.

 

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Desolation is Proof

If you struggle in prayer and prayer is hard and you feel lost and lonely and unsure:  you’re on the right track.  You’re making progress.

Desolation is a grace, a gift, because it shows us we’re not the ones who make things happen.  We’re not in charge.  Desolation teaches us, St. Ignatius says, that “it is not within our power to acquire or retain great devotion, ardent love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all of this is a gift and grace of God our Lord.”  Desolation demonstrates we shouldn’t “claim as our own what belongs to another, allowing our intellect to rise up in a spirit of pride or vainglory, attributing to ourselves the devotion or other aspects of spiritual consolation.”

Think of it:  how do we know we’re not making this up?  How do we know it’s God we’re encountering?  Exactly because grace comes and goes.  As Thomas Green puts it, paraphrasing St. John of the Cross:  “the best proof that it is really God is that he is often absent when we seek him, and present when we are not seeking him.”  If religion were merely the opiate of the masses, if I were just manufacturing God to make myself feel better, I’d produce him on the spot.  I’d make myself joyous all the time.

Desolation shouldn’t just humble us, it should encourage us, it should give us strength, because then, when the joy comes, when the idea comes, when the problem goes away, when the sun pours down, we can rejoice and be glad.  Because we know:  it’s not us.   We just happen to be here.  We didn’t plan anything.  We didn’t do anything.  It’s the Lord who is sending the peace and the joy, it’s the Lord who is with us.

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans)

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Uncle Wally is Tempted by Evil Spirits

Uncle Wally tosses and turns in his narrow little bed.

 

His teeth are bubbling on the nightstand, in a glass.

 

During the day, when he puts them in,

his mouth turns down like a clamp,

like a puppet jaw, snapping and clacking when he talks.

 

But now his teeth are bubbling in a glass,

and his mouth caves in, it is a hole,

and the evil spirits are coming out from the walls

and trying to enter into him.

 

You have no teeth, Uncle Wally, they say.

You are empty.  You are nothing.

Let us fill you up.

 

And he tosses and turns,

he tightens his lips and he shakes his head,

tears streaming.

 

In the morning when he comes down to breakfast,

he is clean and bright and smells of aftershave.

His teeth clack once a minute, every time he smiles,

broad and straight and white.

 

No one knows the battle he has fought that night,

the battle he fights every night,

tossing and turning on his narrow little bed.

 

 

 

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Shorthand

When some of us say God has spoken to us or we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re using a kind of shorthand for a series of moves that begins in our own experience, in our joy and sorrow and need.  Some people actually see Jesus himself, even now, or hear his voice.  I believe this happens, this kind of direct revelation, but it doesn’t seem to happen very often, and for most of us it never does.  For most of us “the Lord is my shepherd” or “He guides me in right paths” are phrases we decide to apply to subtle, everyday things.

One day we are overcome with a feeling of well-being.  Reading a book something suddenly makes sense to us.  Over time a conviction starts to build in us.  We walk by a river or hike in a forest or look at the people we love and we have this nameless sensation, this feeling beyond words.

 

Except we do name it, some of us.  We do give it words.  Because of our upbringing and our tradition and our life in the Church, we label this experience with a dogma, we describe this experience with the words of the creed, we understand this experience through the scriptures.  We’ve made a leap.  We’ve moved from the concrete to the saving abstraction.  We say, this feeling, this glimpse of something beautiful and meaningful and real–everything that everyone else experiences in the course of their daily lives–this we decide, is Christ.  We reason from the gift to the giver, from effect to cause.

 

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally Reads Augustine

Uncle Wally reads Augustine’s Confessions

but finds it too narrow and dark.

Why was this man so tortured?

Why spurn the long lovely limbs we so long desire?

 

But then a door opens unto a sweetness,

Uncle Wally reads,

a state of sweet and pure delight,

before our sad weight makes us fall again,

we are swallowed up and weep.

 

And this Uncle Wally understands:

the sad heaviness,

the weight of the body.

 

But the sweetness, too.

God opens a door:  the birds, say,

and the sun in the morning,

or the pretty young girls who always take his orders,

their blonde hair so shiny and soft,

and the light is falling on the tablecloths and the plates,

it’s blinding and white,

and the yolks of the eggs are running,

the yolks of the eggs are so sweet and pure

he could eat and eat and eat.

 

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Please No Explanations

In Jerusalem the churches swarm with tour groups, each with its guide, lecturing in low tones about history and architecture.  The walls echo with commentary.

But outside the Church of All Nations, at the Garden of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, there is a sign:  Please No Explanations Inside the Church.  And you walk through the doors, and you sit in a pew, and there is silence, finally, and coolness, and shadows.

 

The altar is built above a hole where a large, flat rock rises out of the marble floor—the rock where tradition says Jesus knelt and prayed the night before his crucifixion, and where you can kneel and pray, too, along the edges, lining up first to bend down and kiss the stone or run your hands over its thick, dark layers.

from Light When It Comes  (Eerdmans 2016)

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