Chris Anderson's Blog, page 28

Facing Darkness

from the first few pages of chapter four of Light When It Comes

 

When my oldest son was sixteen we drove to Spokane to pick up an old car my dad was giving him, a 69 Mercury Bobcat, rusted along the doors.

The next morning John got into the driver’s seat, backed out, grinning, and disappeared down the street on his long way home, 400 miles, by himself, through the desert and the mountains.

All I could do was stand there and watch him go.

“Another word for father,” says Li-Young Li, is “worry.”

 

When I think of the image of God the Father, God the Father of Us All, I think of his sadness.  I think of him standing in the driveway, watching his son disappear.

 

Annie is a first grader in a town not far from where I live.  She was abused by her father, and her mother was abused, too, and finally, before the father left them both, in his anger and his meanness, he burned their house to the ground.

Annie’s mother is a screamer.  She likes to scream at Annie and she likes to come to school and scream at the teachers, and now she’s living with a new boyfriend, which means that Annie is living with a new man, too.

And one day in class Annie drew a cross.  She spent some time on it.  The wood of the cross is brown and Jesus, hanging on it, is deep red.  And at the bottom, in Annie’s awkward printing and jumbled spelling, there’s this:

I love God because he died for my sins.  He died on the cross.  He loves me.  He had angels.  He is the Dad of the world.  His name was Jesus but we call him God.

I don’t know how Annie learned about Jesus, what church she might have gone to, but these six brief sentences are profound in ways she can’t understand—or that maybe, come to think of it, she can.

God is dead.

The CEO in the Sky is dead.   The Great Policeman is dead.  The Unwavering Judge is dead.  The God we love because he gives us what we want.  The God we resent because he doesn’t.  He has given himself away.  He has surrendered his power and he has surrendered his potency and so we can’t blame him anymore, for hunger and poverty and war, for the injustice and suffering in the world.  He has a body, an ordinary, fragile body, and now that body has been tortured and beaten and hung up before us.

 

An old man is dying in a dark, fetid room.  His daughter is with him, in her kindness, praying

and holding his hand, though he was a harsh and bitter man all his life and abused her and abused his wife.  He had been in combat in a war and maybe that was it, but now he is dying in a dark, fetid room and he is rigid in his narrow, little bed, shaking, hands clenched, and his daughter is with him.

When I come to read the Psalms to him he seems to recognize the rhythm of the words and how one line is parallel to the next and this seems to soothe him for a while.  He doesn’t shake as much.  His eyes stop darting back and forth beneath the stony lids.

And later, after I leave, he opens his eyes.  He seems to focus for a moment.   He seems to look through the darkness at his daughter, and he says two words to her, in a faint, croaking voice:  You bitch.

Who knows what this man was thinking or what he was seeing.  Maybe he wasn’t talking to his daughter, maybe he was talking to Death, but this is what he says, you bitch, and this is what his daughter does.

She rises from that chair, and she leans over that bed, and she whispers in her father’s ear:

Daddy, I love you.  And that night, he died.

 

Love is a great emptying out and losing.  Love is a rising from a chair.  It is a leaning

over a bed.  It is a whisper in a room and a word in a room.

The last thing this man ever said was vulgar and angry and mean.  But this wasn’t the last thing he ever heard.

 

Love not only never fails.  It always fails.  Love is not only patient and kind.  It is despised.  Love is seen as weak.  Love is seen as unmanly.  Love puts down its gloves and gets hit in the face.  Love never makes a million dollars and never goes viral and never wins the prize.  Love has no answers.  It doesn’t possess the truth but is possessed by the truth.  Love is laughed at.  Love is made fun of.  Love is slapped around and spat on.  Love leads us into the desert.  Love leads us into loneliness and sorrow.

Jesus died on a cross and he had angels and he loves us.  He is the Dad of the World, the father of all of us forsaken by our fathers and forsaken by our mothers and no one is finally abandoned, no one is finally unloved and unregarded but everyone is taken up and held in the arms of this cross and in the arms of this man.

 

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Reward

 

I like to think I’m a pretty advanced Christian.  Kind of a Zen Christian.

I don’t worry about heaven:  I live in the moment.

I don’t believe that the right prayers always get results:  I face the darkness, I embrace the complexity.

 

But that’s not true, finally, that’s just pride and presumption, as I realized suddenly when I came across this striking passage in Romano Guardini’s great book, The Lord, a reflection on the meaning of the life of Jesus.

We have to take the Gospel seriously, Guardini says, we have to take Jesus at his word, and Jesus is always promising us rewards, is always promising us heaven, if only we will believe in him.

And to take this promise seriously, Guardini says—and this is what really struck me—to recognize that I need a reward, that I can’t endure all the rigors of the spiritual life without the hope of something in return, like a child, is to admit that despite all my supposed spiritual sophistication, I am a child.

The promise of reward is “a warning-call” to humility.  Jesus is saying, as Guardini puts it, “you, man—with all your possibilities of perceiving and desiring good—you are nevertheless a creature.”

 

The tomb may be empty, and Mary Magdalene may mistake Jesus for the gardener, and Jesus may say to her, when she finally recognizes him, no, don’t hold on to me, I have go to my Father.  Still, Mary does recognize him, he’s really there, in fact, and she is filled with joy, with indescribable joy, and even as Jesus ascends he promises to send the Spirit and he promises to return and he promises to take up all things unto himself so that nothing, nothing is ever lost.

If the tomb is just empty, if there’s ever just emptiness and complexity and despair, why bother to come to it at all?  What’s the point?

 

Of course I want a reward.  We all want a reward.  We all want to go to heaven, all of us, and sometimes we do.  We already do.

 

I was just coming on to the top of the hill, through the trees, Pip trotting along ahead of me, when no more than three or feet off my left shoulder, an owl lifted off a fir branch, flapping heavily, and crossed the trail in front of me.  And though it was just a juvenile Barred Owl, dirty gray and still fuzzy around the edges, and though owls turn out not to be that smart after all when compared for example to a crow, are in fact relatively stupid, and though I had this feeling that this particular owl was thinking about swooping down on Pip and seeing if he could sink his talons into him, and so I shouted at him and I waved my arms, tried to shoo him away, he was really there, about the size of Pip, with wings even bigger, and he seemed big in the air, with those broad flapping wings, lifting him up and carrying him to the other side of the trail, and I didn’t take him as a symbol, of wisdom or anything else, I took him for a fact, which he was, I took him as real, which he was, and he filled me for a moment with a kind of energy, a kind of excitement.  A kind of joy.

This is why I climb the hill.  This is the reward I want:  now and then an owl, in the middle of the day.  The sudden, startled wings.

 

 

 

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The Discernment on the Road

Clouds in the fields along the estuary.  Low, forested hills.  Other days sun and wind as I climbed the road to the wide view of the sea.  I kept getting the word secret.  One day it’s nobody’s business came into my head, the way answers would materialize in the Magic Eight Ball we used to play with as kids.  It was shiny black, about the size of a grapefruit.  You asked it questions and shook it and random sayings would swim up into a window on the bottom.  That’s how it happened for me.  I didn’t hear a voice.  I became aware of sentences, and they didn’t seem to be coming from me.  Then there was the Common Yellowthroat I kept seeing, canary yellow, flitting around in the alder by the road.  It would hop on a near branch and cock its head, back and forth and up and down, looking me over, and I got the distinct impression that it was the same bird I’d seen the day before, and the day before that, and that it knew me.  It recognized me.  It was so close I could see feathers move.  I could see the weave of the feathers in the mask around its eyes.  A bright, black mask, like a bandit’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Finding Ourselves

Hitchhiking from Scotland when I was nineteen.  Bare yellow hills.  Pale blue sky.  I was trying to have an adventure but all I did was wait.  Once an old woman and her pug—once a refrigerator salesman, all the way to Carlisle.  But then another scrubby interchange.  The wind bending  the grasses.

That night I finally knocked on the door of a lorry parked on the side of the motorway, and the driver let me sleep in back, shivering in the faux leather jacket I bought in Spokane with some of the money I made working at Safeway all summer, stocking shelves and imagining myself in England.

In the morning, squeezed between the driver and his mate on the way to Stoke-on-Trent, I had to pee so badly my eyes began to water.  Long gray factories. Warehouse after warehouse.

We spend all our lives trying to find ourselves.  And we do.

 

Angel! Angel! I hear a woman crying, deep in the woods one morning.  She is calling for her dog, a squat, white cattle dog, pot-bellied, bowlegged—I’ve seen it, I tell her, trotting along the trail.

One ear flat.  Tongue dragging.  Just as happy as could be.

 

Someone parked behind me in the Beanery parking lot and I’m trapped, I can’t back out, but there’s a space to the left and I think maybe I can angle and scooch my way.

And as I start a man comes out to get into his truck but stops to help me.  “You’ve been screwed,” he says, and steps to where I can see him in my rearview mirror, and waves with his hands and measures the air with his hands and holds his hands up to stop me as I crank the wheel and ease forward, then straighten the wheel and ease back, forward and back, forward and back, sidling, sidling, until in the end another man comes out, and the man who’s been helping me calls him over to measure and shout from the front, too, as slowly, slowly, I get within inches of clearing.

The new man has a beard.  The first man, in back, is stubbly and thin and wears a black leather jacket.  Is smiling.  Is a Good Samaritan.

The key thing is to listen.  To inch forward.

The key thing is not to think.  Trust.  Again, and again, and again.

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The Warblers and the Talk Show

“My mind to me,” Augustine says in The Confessions, “has become a piece of difficult ground.”

Sometimes my mind to me becomes like the sound system at church that week it was picking up the morning talk shows.

The priest would be invoking the Spirit to come upon these gifts to make them holy, or we’d be saying the Our Father or the Agnus Dei, or there’d be one of those silences we really go to mass for, one of those moments when we’re sitting in our places and we can hear the silence of all of us being together and rustling and breathing in this big space smelling of candle wax—and all the while some AM talk show host or another would be gibbering in the background, mumbling over the speakers, softer, then louder, blah-blah-blahing.  We couldn’t understand what the words meant.  We just knew they were words, we just recognized their jagged, spiky syntax, because it’s always in our ears.  There’s a radio talk show host in all our heads, a pale, bloated, spittling man blithering on and on about who to hate, most of all ourselves.

O God, my mind to me has become like a sound system.  It has become to me a piece of difficult ground.  It has become to me like the stream this morning and the trees along the stream and the warblers hopping from branch to branch in the trees, the Townsend’s Warblers and the chickadees, fretting the bare maple and oak.  I was walking down the road, and it was muddy and wet, and the Townsend’s Warblers, with that soft, yellow almond curving around the dark of their eyes, they’re back, they’re making their way again, and standing on the altar behind the priest, later, at mass, stepping forward to raise the cup, I suddenly realized this.  This came to me, with a start.  The warblers are back and I had already forgotten them.

 

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Believing Thomas

Sunday, April 23, 2017

Second Sunday of Easter

1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

 

Thomas is always called Doubting Thomas but really he should be called Believing Thomas.  Earlier in the Gospel of John he’s the first to say he will die for Jesus—just says it, confidently, boldly (11:16)—and here, in this passage today, he is the only person in any of the gospels to call Jesus God, to name him as divine: “my Lord and my God!” he says.

But of course, Thomas has the great advantage of knowing Jesus in the flesh and being with Jesus and touching Jesus and seeing Jesus, while you and I are here in the 21st century, stuck in our ordinary daily grind, just one gray day after another.  No miracles.  No revelations.

 

Or so it seems at first.  Because Jesus is speaking to us all the time really, indirectly, subtly, quietly, and more than that, exactly because of this subtlety, exactly because of this indirectness, Jesus says that we are particularly blessed, are even better off than Thomas.   “Have you come to believe because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and believe.”

Peter says the same thing, that we are blessed when we don’t see, and he hints at the reason, that we’re like gold “tested by fire.”

 

Jennifer Hubbard is a writer who lives in Newtown, Connecticut, the mother of two children, one whom, Catherine Violet, was a victim of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 when a disturbed young man killed so many children in that one terrible, unimaginable moment, and now Hubbard has to live with that knowledge and in the wake of that knowledge every day of her life.

Where was Jesus then?  Why didn’t he come through those locked doors?  Why didn’t he save those children?

We’re the doubting Thomas’s, and no wonder:  we have all the reasons in the world.

 

But here’s what Jennifer Hubbard recently wrote in a reflection on her life now, five years later.

She used to be very organized, Hubbard says, keeping a calendar and making lists and defining her life by all the things she got done.  But after her daughter was killed the master list went blank and stayed blank.  “I walked blindly into an uncharted future,” as she puts it, “with nothing to offer but an empty vessel clinging to a mustard seed of hope.”  Slowly, day by day, she survived.  Things didn’t get better, but they did change, and now and then she’d feel a sense of hope, of life.

And here’s the paragraph that really stays with me:

     Days have turned into years, and the page where the list would reside remains blank.  I can now see that it is in setting aside my will that I am better able to see his.  I see that each day is a blank slate in which he will provide what I need to live his purpose.  While I may not see the purpose in its entirety, it is fulfilling his will for the right now that breathes life anew and settles my soul.

     What I so admire about Hubbard is that she has surrendered her will to God’s will.  She hasn’t given up her faith.  She has given up her need to understand it.  There is this terrible darkness—the death of her daughter, the death of all the others, the death of so many every day—and yet God exists and God is good.  Both.  And it’s not up to us to figure how these two things go together or to reduce the one to the other.

No master list for the year, because God is the master.

No need to control each day, because Hubbard knows that God will come into it and is always coming into it, just in the quiet ways.  Our moments are smaller than Thomas’s moment, when he touches the wounds of the Lord himself, but they are moments, they are real, and what I so admire about Hubbard is her openness to them, her capacity to see them and value them and trust in them, and her ability to let them go, her knowledge that these moments are always fleeting, and never earned, and never explicable, and that the darkness and the tedium and the ordinary life that exists in between them are to teach us patience and to teach us humility and to teach us our need for God’s grace.

 

Thomas is standing in line at the coffee shop, and the light is shining through the dusty windows.

Thomas is talking to a student, she has come to see him, and he discovers that she isn’t sullen and indifferent as he thought she was but a thinking human being, a complicated, interesting person, doing the best she can.

Thomas is sitting in his living room reading a book and a sentence in the book catches his attention, it seems to be written in bold face, and for a moment his mind empties and his heart lifts:  my Lord and my God!

 

Thomas is driving to the airport, and he is lonely and afraid.

Thomas is doing the dishes.  Taking out the garbage.  Mowing the lawn.

My Lord and my God!

 

The tomb is empty.  “He’s not here,” the angels keep telling us.

“Though we once knew Christ according to the flesh,” St. Paul says in Second Corinthians, “we know him thus no longer” (5:16).

But this is a good thing.  A very good thing.

As we mature in the spiritual life, the Trappist Michael Casey says, “the public face of Christ fades from view, as it were, and the person is introduced into a mysterious intimacy with the incarnate Word.”

Jesus didn’t just rise from the dead, he ascended into heaven.  And he didn’t just ascend, he sent his Spirit to fill all things—every corner, every moment.

This is the advantage we have over St. Thomas, that for him Jesus was in one place, in time, fixed, but that for us he is diffused, he is distributed, he is everywhere and in everything, however subtly, and he always has been, really, if only, like Jennifer Hubbard, we can open ourselves and humble ourselves and see.  In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and all things were made through him and for him, which is to say that every week is Holy Week, every molecule and every quark is charged with his love and his creativity from the beginning of time.

And nothing is ever lost, not the little girl in the shadow of the gunman, not all the little girls and all the little boys in the shadow of the bombs and in the shadow of the hunger and indifference and neglect of the world, not any of us, but everything is taken up into the arms of God, and no gunmen, and no sadness, and no gray empty day can ever take away from us our faith that this is true.

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The Morning Star That Never Sets

Monday, April 17

Matthew 28:8-15

 

What is the day after Easter?

Easter.

And the day after that?  Easter, too, and the day after that, and that, not just through the Octave of Easter but through Ascension and Pentecost and Ordinary Time and all the year, because Christ is Risen, and everything is changed, everything is charged.

As the Deacon sings in the Exultet:  may this flame [of the Easter Candle] be found still burning by the Morning Star; the one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son, who, coming back from death’ domain, has shed his peaceful light on humanity, and lives and reigns for ever and ever.

I heard this sung at Easter Vigil this year at St. Joseph’s in Colbert, Washington, north of Spokane, where my youngest brother Ted was baptized and confirmed and received first communion.  I never dreamed this would happen.  My brother is a fine, fine man, a man with integrity and compassion and strong intention, and it’s been such a grace to see the Spirit move in him and to see him slowly changing.

We were talking over coffee earlier Saturday, and he was describing a problem that’s developed among a few of his close friends, and how a few years ago he would have just said, to heck with it, I’m not going to have anything to do with these people.  But because of RCIA, and this new commitment, and this change going on in him, he stopped, and stepped back, and asked himself, simply, and honestly, what would Jesus do in this situation?  And he realized the answer:  the kind thing, and the hard thing, and that this is what he should do, too, try to help, not expecting to succeed necessarily or to get his way, but not taking sides and not letting things go either.  And I know he means this, and I know this is Christ, this is the Spirit, working in him.

St. Joseph’s is a country church, small and intimate, and I was struck again as I was even in Rome by how homely and humble and human the Church always is.  These high, solemn rites are performed by ordinary human beings just like you and me.  But they are high and solemn, and Christ is present in them, Christ came into the ordinary world and rose from it and sent his Spirit into it, and though my brother will be tempted as we all are, and there will be ups and downs, and the elation he feels now will fade, and come back, fade and come back, it was such a grace to see and to feel that elation.  Because this is all real, and this is true, and this is imperishable.

This is Jesus Christ, the Morning Star that never sets–the Risen Son of God, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

 

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Paper Maple

We bought the tree with the money I made when I baptized Stan, who had nineteen confirmed kills in Viet Nam.  He’s an old man now, in a wheelchair, shriveled and pale, and he wanted to be cleansed of his sins.  “I’ve been in hell,” he told me, “and I want to be free,” and though he couldn’t talk much, and could hardly move, when I started to pour the water on his head, and I began to say the words—“I baptize you in the name of the Father”—“and of the Son,” he said, “and of the Holy Spirit,” and the water dribbled down his face and dripped off his chin, wetting the front of his pale, checked shirt.

We planted the tree on a fine spring day.  The earth was soft and warm.  We dug the hole, scored the matted roots, and gently set it in, then filled the hole with amended soil and watered, thoroughly, soaking the ground until the bed had turned to mud.

It’s a pretty tree.  A Paper Bark Maple, they call it, because the bark peels off in curly strips almost smooth enough to write on.

 

from Light When It Comes:  Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything (Eerdmans 2016)

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My Mind to Me

“My mind to me,” Augustine says in The Confessions, “has become a piece of difficult ground.”

Sometimes my mind to me becomes like the sound system at church that week it was picking up the morning talk shows.

The priest would be invoking the Spirit to come upon these gifts to make them holy, or we’d be saying the Our Father or the Agnus Dei, or there’d be one of those silences we really go to mass for, one of those moments when we’re sitting in our places and we can hear the silence of all of us being together and rustling and breathing in this big space smelling of candle wax—and all the while some AM talk show host or another would be gibbering in the background, mumbling over the speakers, softer, then louder, blah-blah-blahing.  We couldn’t understand what the words meant.  We just knew they were words, we just recognized their jagged, spiky syntax, because it’s always in our ears.  There’s a radio talk show host in all our heads, a pale, bloated, spittling man blithering on and on about who to hate, most of all ourselves.

O God, my mind to me has become like a sound system.  It has become to me a piece of difficult ground.  It has become to me like the stream this morning and the trees along the stream and the warblers hopping from branch to branch in the trees, the Townsend’s Warblers and the chickadees, fretting the bare maple and oak.  I was walking down the road, and it was muddy and wet, and the Townsend’s Warblers, with that soft, yellow almond curving around the dark of their eyes, they’re back, they’re making their way again, and standing on the altar behind the priest, later, at mass, stepping forward to raise the cup, I suddenly realized this.  This came to me, with a start.  The warblers are back and I had already forgotten them.

 

from Light When It Comes:  Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything (Eerdmans 2016)

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The Parable of the Young Monk

There’s a Zen parable Jack Cornfield retells in his wonderful book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, about a young monk who was really proud of his spiritual progress.

 

The first month he wrote the master, “I feel one with the universe!”  And the master just glanced at the note and threw it away.

     The next month: “I finally discovered the Divine.  The divine is in me.”  And the master yawned.

     The third letter: “the Mystery of the One and the Many has been revealed to my wondering gaze.”  Whatever, the master thought, and went back to hoeing his weeds.

     When the next letter came—“no one is born and no one dies”—the master just sighed and shrugged and put on the kettle for tea.

    

     Weeks went by and nothing.  Months.  A year. 

     Finally the master thought it was time to check in with the novice again.

 

     And the novice wrote back: “I am simply living my life.  That’s all.  As for my spiritual practices, my fasting and my praying, I don’t know.  I’m just doing the best I can.”

 

    And the master looked up, smiled, and said out loud, “Thank God!  He’s got it at last!”

    Then went back to hoeing his weeds.

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