Chris Anderson's Blog, page 27

Uncle Wally Gets the General Idea

Uncle Wally gets the general idea

but struggles with the details.

All his teachers told him this,

and he believed them.

 

So he went to work for Bristol-Myers,

driving from town to town.

When he opened doors

there was a little bell ringing

and the smell of perfume.

People were glad to see him,

in his bright white shirts and loud striped ties.

 

He didn’t need to sell them, really,

just order what they needed,

though sometimes he forgot

to mark it down in his book.

 

He was in the back room with the manager,

telling stories.  The prairie was all around.

The wind was coming down from the North.

But Uncle Wally was always in the warm back room,

eating donuts and telling stories, laughing.

 

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This is My Body

I first received the Eucharist in the shabby living room of the bungalow near campus where we were housesitting for a professor on sabbatical, a few of us gathered around the coffee table, among shelves of jumbled books.  Dave falling asleep.  Our jumpy Irish Setter mix biting Katie on the palm and Barb having to take her to get stitches, though I didn’t learn about this until later, as I didn’t learn many things.

Peter was the celebrant, the young Jesuit who talked with such ease and economy about Hegel and Sartre and Camus.  How I loved those ideas.  How I loved those beautiful structures.

But as I look back now the process of my conversion feels more like a matter of being carried along by moments and of living in the moment.  I don’t remember the raising of the host or any of the words.  I remember the dusty sunroom off the porch where in the evening we used to sit and watch Masterpiece Theater.  Or sitting on the edge of the water bed one summer morning as I was waking up, sitting for a moment and looking down at the orange shag carpet and rubbing my face with my hands and feeling my face in my hands and thinking, this is me, this is my body.

from Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

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Uncle Wally Looks in the Mirror

When Uncle Wally looks in the mirror

what he sees are cheeks and jowls.

His face is entirely square, temples silver.

Where he goes he carries this face,

day after day.

 

His slacks curve out like a belted tub,

his shirt so tight you see his nipples.

Shoes, Florsheim.

 

But the thing is, he knows all this.

He carries himself with him wherever he goes.

Every night what hat lies on his pillow

is that same silver head, that same square face.

 

His own face.

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A poem I love by Kaylin Haught

God Says Yes To Me
I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

—Kaylin Haught

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How Traveling a Long Way is Like Dying

 

You forget all about the life

you thought you loved:  your books.  Your coffee pot.

The way in the morning the carpet feels

on your bare feet when you swing your legs out of bed.

 

You’re just walking down a narrow stone street

with shops on either side and all you’re thinking about

is spices.  Saffron.  Tahini.  Also Roman coins,

watches, fabrics of many colors and designs.

You’re brushing shoulders with many people, some

of them in headdresses.  The men have dark beards

and are shouting and gesturing.  It’s wonderful.

 

It’s like a tunnel and maybe when you come out

the sun is setting on the sea and you’re eating a fish

someone just pulled out of the shining waters

and you can’t believe how good it tastes.

 

And none of this is to any purpose.

It doesn’t matter at all.

 

I should say that you’re traveling when you’re older

and you’ve finally accepted the fact

that you’ve done all you’re going to do with your life.

You’ve accomplished all you’re going to accomplish.

So you’re not bringing any of this back

to impress anyone.  The beautiful things

you’re seeing are just for you.  They’re just inside you.

 

No one knows you in the dark churches.

No one knows you in the markets.

No one knows you.

 

One afternoon the guides let you off by the side

of a road and you walk a little way

into a small, narrow valley:  smooth grassy slopes,

then rocky cliffs on either side.

 

Flowering mustard.

Other flowers you can’t name.

 

It’s late in the day and the shadows are gathering

and the air is cool and dry and the path

curves ahead slightly into some soft, green trees.

The last light is hitting the top of the cliffs.

 

The Valley of Doves, they call it,

because the doves nest there

in the cliffs and coo and mourn but also because

when the wind comes down through the gap

it sounds like doves and it sounds like sighing.

 

Jesus walked here, the guides tell you.

 

He must have.

It’s the only way.

 

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The Rain in the Leaves

Ascension

May 28, 2017

Acts 1:1-11; Matthew 28:16-20

 

We’re always talking about Jesus.  Jesus this, and Jesus that.  We’re always thinking about Jesus, what he looked like, what he said.  And we should.  Jesus is the center of our lives.  He is our lives.

But I also think that sometimes we forget about the Ascension and what it means for us as Christians:  that Jesus withdrew—that he left us—that he isn’t here anymore the way he was.

And this is the good news, too.  It’s very good news.

 

Last week Barb and I put up in a bird feeder in the side yard, one of those where you twist a pole into the ground, then put a skinnier pole in that one, then a skinnier one in that one, then hang the feeders from the top.  It was morning and it was raining and suddenly I was aware of all the leaves and of the sound of the rain falling through the leaves.  When the rain falls in the winter it falls straight through the bare branches, but now it was whispering in the leaves.  There was a softness and a fullness to everything.  I was just very happy, as we all sometimes are, very aware, and what I believe more than I believe anything is that it’s in exactly moments like this that God is speaking to us.  He’s saying, I am, and this is, and you are, too.

In a way I’m not talking about the Ascension—I’m talking about Pentecost, when Jesus fills all things with the Holy Spirit, through the Church.  But the Ascension is essential to that.  Jesus must first leave in order to create this new space.  He ascends in order to gather everything into himself and then to charge the world, charge all the universe, with his sweetness and his courage.

From now on he isn’t limited to one place and one time.  He’s spread out.  He’s distributed.

 

And even this is too linear.  Jesus is what Pope Benedict called an evolutionary breakthrough, the culmination of the evolution of love, in time, but he was also present from the beginning of time and before the beginning.  All things were created through him and all things continue in him.  In the moment of the Big Bang, the Annunciation and the Nativity and the Passion and the Resurrection happened all at once, simultaneously, and they still are.  “I am with you always,” Jesus tells us, “until the end of the age.”

 

I didn’t see a bearded man at the feeder and I didn’t see any birds at first either.  I heard the rain.

But that’s OK, that’s fine.  The Ascension is calling us to a new kind of awareness.  “Though we once knew Christ according to the flesh,” St. Paul says in Second Corinthians, “we know him thus no longer” (5:16).  We know him now in a deeper way.

Or as Michael Casey puts it, at the later stages of the spiritual life, “the public face of Christ fades from view, as it were, and the person is introduced into a mysterious intimacy with the Incarnate Word.”

 

I have to admit that sometimes in prayer I’m even blocked by the image of Jesus, or by a too literal image.  Jesus is a dear, lovable man.  Through him we can know God as a brother and friend.  But sometimes in prayer I can’t get the faces of the actors who have played Jesus out of my mind, all the Hollywood Jesus’s, and all the paintings of Jesus down the ages.  I become too specific.

I think that’s a problem for a lot us, and that’s OK.  That’s fine.  We can turn then to the Holy Spirit, to this in a sense more generalized idea of God, of God as no longer located anymore—or as located everywhere.

And this is Jesus, with all his warmth and personality.  The Spirit proceeds from the Son, and the Son is one with the Spirit, and they are both one in the Father.  All are one.

 

And then sometimes it all just goes blank.  It just crashes.

Sometimes we wake up and everything that pleased us the day before seems irritating and gray.  We snap at our spouses.  It’s still raining, it’s always been raining, and all the work ahead of us seems pointless and tedious.

Chicken one day, feathers the next, my Dad always says.

And that makes me think of the really remarkable passage right after our reading in Acts today, remarkable because it’s so flat and anticlimactic.  The Ascension has happened, this glorious moment in the clouds, and then the disciples just have to go back to “the upper room where they were staying,” as the scripture puts it.

That’s it.  They just have to go back.  The party’s over.

But that’s the other thing about the Ascension and the other way it calls us to maturity.  Sometimes the space our Lord leaves us is a space we just have to live in, just a space, just an emptiness, and we have to be there, in it, endure it, do the best we can in it.  The disciples are filled with joy, too, we know that, and they’re sharing everything, doing everything with one accord, but it’s not hard to imagine how hard that is.  We know how hard it is:  not to snap at our spouses on those rainy days, not to slack off at work.

 

Last month at the Shalom Center at Queen of Angels Monastery in Mount Angel I heard a sister talking about how the sisters in the convent are aging, and have decided not to accept new members, and are shutting down the retreat center and in a way letting themselves shrink, accepting the fact that they’re not going to grow.

And somebody in the group I was with asked, what’s going to happen to the Benedictine way, to that life of prayer, when the sisters are gone?  And the sister said something really striking in reply.  She said, we hope you will continue it.   She said, it’s up to you now.

And I thought of Jesus in the Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John:  And now I will no longer be in the world, he says.  But you will be.  I thought of the angels in Acts today, asking the men of Galilee:  why are you standing there, looking up at the sky?

We are very blessed in this parish to have the Saint John Society and the Society of Mary, in their youth and their fervor and their energy–and their vocations, too, are a call for us to deepen our own, in the world, in the classrooms and the courtrooms and the operating rooms and the living rooms and all the upper rooms where we work and live every day.

When in a moment we receive the Eucharist, the Lord in his flesh, we will become him.  We will be clarified, and strengthened, and renewed, and then we are to go out into the world—to leave this place.  “Go, therefore,” Jesus tells us.

For in the grace of the Ascension and in the grace of Pentecost, this is our great commission.  This is our purpose.  To be the rain and to be the leaves.

To be the body of Christ for others.

For this is who we are.

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A Straight Run

Acts 16:11-15

There’s a wonderful matter-of-factness in the reading from Acts today.  If we didn’t know this passage was in the Bible it would read like an entry in a ship’s log or a letter from a traveler: “We set sail from Troas, making a straight run for Samothrace.”  “We spent some time in that city.”  “We went outside the city gate along the river.”

Almost a flatness to the language.  Actual places, in the world.

Maybe there’s some symbolism in the fact that the Lydia was a dyer of purple cloth, but somehow what resonates is that Lydia was doing ordinary work.  That the cloth had a color.  This color.  A particular color.  Purple.

Nothing miraculous happens.  People talk, along a river.  Lydia invites the disciples into her home.

And yet that’s the most miraculous thing of all.

That on any given day and in any given place, in the midst of our day’s travel and work, the Lord is present and our hearts can be opened.

Today may our hearts be opened, too.

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Malta

In Malta we dug a hole in the earth

not far from the banks of the Milk River,

deep enough for two of us to stand in

and wide enough for two of us to sit in,

then roofed it over with leafy cottonwood branches

and hid out and waited.

The pleasure of not having to get anything straight.

The firmness of the earth.  Also the sweetness.

How the mosquitoes swarmed and bit

as soon as we got out of the car fifty years later,

the river nothing more then than a muddy trickle,

seeping around small islands of brush.

That dusty little town on the Highline.

Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles.

But what I want to say

is that as we crouched beneath the striped

and stippled shade of the branches

happy and sheltered and snug,

through the dark walls of the earth

and the sweetness of the earth and the firmness

we could feel the river flowing

just beyond us, we knew it was there,

strong and milky and deep,

and we still do.

 

published in the latest Cortland Review, issue 75

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Lunch Hour

Acts 14:5-18

I’ve always liked St. Isidore the Farmer, because he’s a farmer, a person in the world.  He was thought to be so devout that the angels did the plowing for him, so he could sit and pray.  But I like to think that he prayed while he plowed—that his plowing was his prayer, as our work in the world can be prayer, too.  Our daily lives can be our path to holiness.

The other day I was tired after my morning teaching, so I went out to the quad and sat on a bench and had my lunch.  It was one of those beautiful sunny days we’ve been having now and then, in between the rain.  Everything was green.  I watched the students walking by and ate my tuna fish and gradually my spirit began to lift, my sadness to ease.

And all this time at the foot of the bench there’d been a plaque explaining who the bench was dedicated to.  I’d been looking at it upside down.  But it was only when I got up to go and was brushing off my pants that I finally really read the name.

I’d been sitting on a bench dedicated to an old friend, I’d been sitting on a bench in loving memory of someone I’d taught with in the English Department for years, and I hadn’t known it.  I wasn’t paying attention.

There it was, carved into the brass so plainly and clearly it seemed to me like a commandment.

“The Lord made the heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them,” Paul tells us today in Acts.  Even before our Lord himself, the Father gave us witness, “for he gave us the rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filled us with nourishment and gladness for our hearts,” and he still does.

But now in the name of Jesus.  The name on the plaque is the name of Jesus—the whole world is dedicated to the name of Jesus, the whole universe, and everything speaks that name, again and again, if only we will stop and read it, and that name is the name of someone who isn’t dead and isn’t gone but is here, working in all things, shining through all things, and nothing is ever lost, and nothing is ever forgotten, but everything is being brought together and taken up and made holy, now and forever.

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Seeing the Light

From the opening pages of the first chapter of Light When It Comes (Eerdmans 2016)

I am called to bless a bathroom.

A young poet has committed suicide there.  Her boyfriend found her and tried to revive her.  He was soaked with blood when the EMTs arrived, and then the police, and though he’s moved out now, and the biological hazard team has scrubbed the blood away, the landlord and the boyfriend and the boyfriend’s father want some kind of further cleansing, maybe a kind of magic.  But who am I to say?

So I drive to the complex, a warren of condominiums, chalky and cheap, and I wander around until I find theirs, and I knock on the door and introduce myself to the parents, fifties, disheveled, in dirty sweatshirts and jeans, and they take me down the hall, past boxes and piles of clothes.

The apartment is new, the bathroom small and bright.

I squeeze in by the toilet, stand against the wall, facing the mirror, and say the prayers for the dead and the blessing for a house, my voice echoing, and with a small, plastic bottle begin to sprinkle the room with holy water.  The vanity.   The mirror.  The clean, fiberglass tub.    Perpetual light shine upon her, oh Lord.  Amen. 

     The boyfriend couldn’t bear to come.  His mother and father stand in the doorway, bowing

their heads.

And as I wave the bottle and say the words, the cap flies off, it pops, bouncing into the bottom of the tub, and I have to lean over to get it, picking it up off the slick, shiny surface of the fiberglass.  May she rest in peace, I say, embarrassed now, but alert, too.  Aware.  The words

as they echo sound good to me in that hollow place, and proper, and true.  May the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. 

     Then I turn, trace the cross in the air, and give the final blessing–in my left hand the cap, about the size of a dime, with a hole in the middle.  Like the prize in a box of crackerjacks.  A whistle, or a top.

 

The old woman in ICU wants to rail against the Church.

Patriarchy, she says, hierarchy, and I sit and listen.

“But you’re dying,” I say.  “Why are we talking about this?  Why does any of this matter?”

And the sun slants through the dusty window.  My Roman collar chafes.  On the monitor, the peaks and valleys of her failing heart.

“May I give you communion?” I ask her.  And she says, “would that mean I’d have to come back to the Church?”

“No,” I say.  “No.  It will be our little secret.”

 

Are these moments of darkness or moments of light?

All I have done is come into a room, a bathroom, a hospital room, and I have been awkward and clumsy, and there’s been something odd about the moment, and random, and embarrassing, and yet I also have this sense of privilege, of being accorded some high honor.

Something solemn is going on.

 

God doesn’t come to us in a wind, and he doesn’t come to us in an earthquake, and he doesn’t come to us in a fire.  He comes to us in a still, small voice, as he comes to Elijah in the first book of Kings, and all we have to do is listen.

What’s miraculous isn’t the walking on water but the water itself, is the lake, the Sea of Galilee, thirteen miles long and eight miles wide, with the sun rising over it in the mornings, and every lake, Yellowstone Lake and Lake Pend Oreille and even Cronemiller Lake, the pond in the woods by our house in Oregon, because God is everywhere, lovely in 10,000 places.  The miracle is life itself, is the ordinary.

The seed really falls into the earth, and the fields are really smooth and bare, and then the rain comes and the sun, and the leaf and the grape, and then the crushing and the wait, the long wait for whatever it is enzymes do.

Water is always becoming wine.

 

My wife Barb and I were driving through the fields and hills, and I looked out at the trees and the new-cut hay, at the farms as we passed them, and for a while I felt an unusual peace, a sense of happiness and blessedness.  Deeper than usual.  Quiet but intense.  I can’t put it into words.  I didn’t even tell Barb about it.  We talked about ordinary things.  We listened to music.  But for a while, an hour or more, I had this quiet sense of joy, of belonging, as if some kind of energy was flowing into me from somewhere else.

But not as if.  An energy was flowing through me.

Thoughts like this are not our thoughts, they are the still, small voice, they are Jesus coming towards us, on the water.  Sure, we’ll jump out of the boat and sink, again and again.  We are all like Peter.  These moments pass and we doubt them and forget them.  We’re embarrassed to talk about them.  That’s OK.  Jesus reaches down and pulls us out, again and again.

And besides, the water is fine.  Even in our drowning, the Lord is with us.  The water is clear and sweet and the light is shining through it.

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