Chris Anderson's Blog, page 29

Susanna and the Words in the Dust

Daniel 13:1-62; John 8:1-11

Fifth Monday of Lent

 

“I am completely trapped,” Susanna says,

and we are, too.

By these patterns of sin we can’t seem to break.

By all the people and forces

who are looking at us and trying to coerce us

into being untrue to who we really are.

Or we are the elders

peering through the branches at Susanna,

unable to control our urge to gaze,

to see the bodies of others as mere objects,

as things to possess and consume.

Then we lie.  We lie to ourselves.

We lie to God.

 

What is it that Jesus writes in the dust?

This is the only time we see him writing

in all the gospels, and we long

to see the words he forms on the ground

as God formed Adam

from the ground and forms us.

 

I think they say something different

to each of us,

and something different each day.

 

I think they say, to the woman:  believe.

To those who would stone her:  forgive.

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Irresistible

April 2, 2017

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Romans 8:8-11; John 11:1-45

 

I was out of town over the weekend, and when I came back to my hotel room Saturday I turned on the radio.  And Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was playing, the first movement, with that slow rise and fall of those few simple notes, maybe the most beautiful music ever written.

And suddenly I had the strongest memory of my mother playing the Moonlight Sonata on the piano in the living room, on a summer night, and of sitting on the front porch in the dark and listening to her through the screen door, and of just being filled with the beauty of it, and the sadness, and I was again, in that hotel room, by an airport.

It was one of those moments we all have when we are moved by the mystery of things, when we feel the presence of God.

 

We believe in heaven because we’ve been there.  We believe in the afterlife because now and then we are taken out of ourselves, and we feel something, and we know something, and we come to believe that what we feel and know is greater than we are, is God.  And God is God.  If he exists in us now, we will exist in him forever.  “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,” as St. Paul puts it, “the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you.”  It’s a kind of proof.

But it only works if we’re alive now.

 

A study was done recently in which people were asked what they would rather have:  a broken bone or a broken phone.

46% said:  bone.  And the researchers thought some of the others were lying.

When I asked my classes this question one of my students asked me, “which bone?”

 

On average we spend three hours a day on our phones.  We pick them up an average 47 times.

 

Ten years ago, before the I Pad and the I Phone, a study was done in which it was determined that the average attention span of an adult is 12 seconds.

This year the study was done again and the average attention span was 8 seconds.

 

The average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.

They know this:  they hold an image up before the fishbowl and time how long the fish looks at it.

 

We have attention spans shorter than that of a goldfish.

 

I get these statistics from a new book, by Adam Alter:  Irresistible:  The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.

Yes, the Spirit dwells in us, but we’ve buried it:  in the tomb of our technologies, in the tomb of our addictions, in the tomb of our sinfulness.  We are all Lazarus and we are all rotting and only the Lord can save us.

And he comes to our tombs, and he raises his arms, and he cries, “Come Out!”  But we don’t.  We’re too busy texting.  Or we do, but we’re still looking down as we stumble towards him, scrolling through Facebook.

Or we walk out, and we look up, and for a moment we’re alive again.

But then the 8 seconds are up.  We’re bored.  We move on to the next thing.

 

I know a young woman who was abused by her uncle growing up but had buried her trauma, hadn’t told anybody about it.  For years she carried this around, this death, this dying, until finally she had the courage to go into therapy and do the hard work of therapy, and to admit the abuse and to face the abuse, and finally even her parents, who hadn’t believed her at first, who couldn’t understand what had happened, they came to therapy with her, too, and together they’ve rolled back the stone, slowly, they’ve dealt with the abuse, over time, and now this person who was born into the world with God’s love and God’s grace inside her, as we all are, with the Spirit inside her, can feel that Spirit again, can walk freely in the world, scarred but fully alive.

 

I know a young man who has decided that he can’t ignore what he sees as the injustice and the oppression in the world around him, can’t pretend that everything is OK, and so is studying the facts and getting involved and serving the poor and the outcast in concrete ways.  He has risen from the tomb of his indifference.

William Barry describes prayer as “a long, loving look at the real.”  But sometimes we don’t want to go into that light.  It’s too bright.  We prefer the darkness of the tomb.  No one bothers us there.

But not this young man.  He has heard the voice of God and he has responded.  He has broken out.

 

I was talking to an older woman the other day about angels and about wings.  I was saying that it makes sense to me that the Spirit of God would be symbolized by a dove, because that’s the way the moments are.  They’re fleeting.  They’re hard to pin down.

And she said that when she was pregnant with her first child, when she first started to feel the baby kick, it felt to her like a fluttering.

It would come and it would go, she said.

And it was like wings.  Tiny wings.

 

We have to be born again, Jesus tells Nicodemus in the beginning of John.  We have to come out of that darkness and into the light.  But in his Farewell Discourse at the end of John Jesus changes the metaphor.  You have sadness now, he says, but soon you will have joy.  You are like the mother, in the pains of labor, in that suffering, but soon you will know the joy of having given birth, and that’s what it is we’re all called to do, as adults: to bring things to light.

And when we do, when we’re sitting in a hotel room near an airport, and we hear the Moonlight Sonata, and we feel the sadness of it and the beauty, and we remember our mother and the front porch and the summer night, we are not just remembering something in the past, and we’re not just experiencing something in that moment.  We’re tasting what it is to come.  For in God there is no past and there is no future, there is only now, and in him and through him, finally, that moment is a moment of tenderness, and gentleness, and almost unbearable joy.

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Daffodils: A Homily

March 26, 2017

Fourth Sunday of Lent

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

 

Last week I was driving past the house of a man in the parish whose wife just died of ALS.  Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  It’s a very hard way to die.  In the end you can’t move.  You can’t breathe.  The last time I gave her the Body of Christ her gnarled hand was bent almost perpendicular to her wrist.

But in the house next door the daffodils were blooming, brilliant yellow, a whole row of them, right on the edge of the parishioner’s yard, and seeing them gave me a little feeling of lift, of joy, of light as I drove away.

Seeing them, I felt the presence of God.

And this was the most important thing that happened to me that day, that one brief moment, even though I feel a little silly talking about it.  Daffodils?  Along a yard?  But yes, not the meetings and the classes and all the kinds of things we usually talk about, but this, this deeper story.  “Because,” as the first book of Samuel tells us, “man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart,” and at the heart of those bright yellow flowers was spring, was hope, was the Lord himself.

 

You might say, wait a minute.  Aren’t you being a little soft?  Isn’t this just a subjective thing?  Yes.  It is.  I don’t know what it means for sure.

“All I know is that once I was blind and now I see,” at least for a moment.

 

This is the idea of the examen of conscience, the prayer technique of St. Ignatius Loyola, that Jesus is the “light of the world” and that this light is always shining in our lives, though it’s often blocked or we don’t see it, so the way to pray is to pray our lives, to think back on the moments of light and to give thanks, and to think back on the moments of darkness and to face them, and then to give it all to God, surrender it all to Him to make sense of and hold together.

 

Most of us don’t see Jesus directly.  An angel doesn’t land on our doorstep, complete with wings.  But that’s OK.  We can detect the presence of the Lord in other ways, in everything that happens, because the “light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth,” as Paul says, everything that is good in our lives comes from him, and so we just reason backwards.  Whenever we feel goodness, whenever our hearts lift up, we think:  God is behind that.

 

“Do you believe in the Son of Man,” Jesus asks the man he healed, and the man says, “Who is he sir, that I may believe in him?”  All the blind man knows is what has happened to him, all he knows are the daffodils, and it’s only now, after the fact, that Jesus tells him how to interpret this.  The daffodils:  that’s me.

 

And of course this interpretation, this faith, will be resisted.  All of the Pharisees outside us and inside us will come crowding in, ready to challenge the moments and demean the moments and finally throw them out.  We want permanent, but the moments are fleeting; we want what we can measure, but the moments can’t be measured; we want obvious, but the moments are subtle, and easy to miss, and easy to talk ourselves out of.  We do it every day.

We think it’s God who doesn’t exist but really it’s we who don’t.

 

In a way the very fact that we can’t prove the meaning of the moments is a proof.  If we could manufacture grace we’d be doing it all the time.

But God is always a “surprise,” as Pope Francis puts it.  “We don’t set the time and place of the encounter.”

And later Pope Francis says this.  It’s a really striking passage:

In this quest to find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty.  There must be.  If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by some margin of uncertainty—that is proof that God is not with him.  You must leave room for the Lord, not for certainties.  Uncertainty is in every true discernment.

 

      Darkness exists.  It’s all around us.  There’s not just the brightness of the daffodils but the grief of the man next door.

     1000 children in the world died of malaria yesterday.  149 people died of starvation in South Sudan.  Yesterday.  And in a very important way that’s our fault, that’s the result of our own sinful selfishness and inaction, but in another way it’s part of the suffering of the world and the suffering that will always be there, and it leads to the biggest question of all:  if there is a God, how can He let this happen?

Doesn’t the death of the woman cancel out the beauty of the flowers?

And there’s our own darkness, too, within, our own desolation often in prayer, the dryness day after day when nothing seems to be happening anymore, after all those days, maybe, of sweetness and conviction.  Maybe we were deceived before, when we felt the first rush of joy.

That’s how the world sees it:  that joy is naïve, faith always a delusion.

 

But here’s what I think Pope Francis is saying and what the readings are saying today, that we have to face the darkness and acknowledge it, we have to “expose” it, as Paul says, not pretend it isn’t there–we have to accept it, accept it all, honestly, with humility—but without rejecting the joy, too, without throwing out the hope, because hope, too, is real, it’s all real, and our call is to live with the contradictions, not to try to reconcile them, not to try to make sense of them.   That’s beyond us.  It’s arrogant, finally, to think that God has to obey our own rules for coherence.  Our call is to do what Our Lady does in the stories in the first part of Luke and “hold these things in our hearts,” “treasure these things,” and as Luke says, “all these things.”  Accept them.  Take them in.

And trust in God.

And then a great freedom comes.  The moments happen.  The daffodils rise up, and they are beautiful and they are true, and spring is coming, too.  Spring is here.  There is crucifixion and there is resurrection, never one without the other, and in some paradoxical way we can never understand and don’t have to, the one who is God and man, both, not one or the other, the one who reconciles all things in himself, is reconciling all of us, too, all of the things in our lives, the children who die and the woman who dies and all of us who live, in every moment.

Every given, sacred moment.

 

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Daffodils

Mine are late again, just thin green spears

poking up from the shady bank,

no bright yellow petals and bells,

but in the yard of the man who has hated me for years,

who once coming down an aisle in a store

aimed his cart right at me, only veering at the end—

in the bark of his immaculate beds

groves of daffodils, forests of daffodils,

are exploding in all yellow and green profusion;

and at the house of the man

whose wife just died of ALS, unable to move, finally,

unable to breathe, but this happening slowly,

inexorably, day-by-day—her gnarling hand the last time

I gave her the Body of Christ canted sharply back

from her wrist, almost perpendicular—

on the edge of their sad and dreary lawn

the daffodils shine as yellow as the sun

a child might paint in school,

smiling down on a Daddy and a Mommy

and a little girl.

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What We Do Matters

A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love,

the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance, all these new beauties that appear

for the first time, in me or around me, on the human face of the earth—

the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it.

Our smallest tasks contribute infinitesimally, at least indirectly, to the building of something definitive.

That, ultimately, is the meaning and value of our acts.

Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things is translated into some increase

in my power to love and some progress in God’s blessed hold on the universe.

With every creative thought or action, a little more health is being spread in the human mass,

and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.

We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands.

 

Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Abstaining from Labels this Lent

Monday, March 13, 2017

Luke 6:36-38

 

“Stop judging and you will not be judged,” Jesus tells us in Luke today.

And we keep judging anyway!

Here are excerpts from a remarkable essay, “What’s in a Label,” by Archbishop William Lori, Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus, published in Columbia, the Knights of Columbus Magazine.

 

The Church embraces societal efforts to speak with charity and goes further by teaching that a person is not the sum or his or her weaknesses or sins.  No one’s humanity should be reduced to and summed up by labels such as “cheater” or “liar”—even if one may be guilty of those offenses.  Such labels do not do justice to the whole person, nor do they recognize the possibility of repentance and reform.  Rather, they are a way of writing off that person as unworthy of our consideration.

All around us we find disparaging labels applied to others with little hesitation—and sometimes with outright enthusiasm.  We saw this in the bruising 2016 political season and have sadly seen it even in some Catholic journalism.  We who are consumers of the news media—both secular and Church-related—too readily apply pejorative labels to other people.

In the heat of political battle, for example, candidates often hurt epithets at one another and their supporters.  Last year’s presidential race in the United States gave us many painful examples of this.  Ad homineum insults took the place of the reasoned political discourse that candidates owe to one another, to the electorate, and to the country.

Of course, the fault for the negative personal tone of politics does not lie entirely with politicians.  Rather, it reflects a society already accustomed to snarkiness.

Unfortunately, the Church is not immune to all this.  The style and content of the speech all around us affects us deeply.  Yet if we are striving to follow Christ and live the Beatitudes, our regard for others should be markedly greater than what we find in the secular media.  We should be very reluctant to pin labels on others.

Labeling a Church leader is a way of putting that person in a box so that one does not have to deal thoughtfully with what the leader actually says or does.  For example, some parishioners may readily refer to their priest as “conservative” or “liberal” without ever really talking to him.  Though labels may contain a grain of truth, they often short-circuit important conversations.  And, sadly, ideological labels readily degenerate into uncharitable, ad hominem attacks on the integrity, abilities, and worth of fellow Christians with whom we are supposed to be united in the Body of Christ.

The net effect of labeling our fellow Christians is to weaken the Church’s mission by weakening the Church’s unity.  This unity is based on truth—not only the revealed truth but also basic truths about our common humanity and what constitutes a just a peaceful society.  If, instead of building bridges, we find ourselves obscuring the truth by pitting Church leaders and fellow parishioners against one another, we are breaking down that oneness that the Lord willed for his followers.

So, here’s an idea for Lent 2017.  Let’s abstain from labels.  Let’s abstain from snarky, uncharitable speech.  Let’s contribute to making our society less divisive plan by making the Church less divided.  Doing so will take a lot more grace, self-control and self-sacrifice than giving up candy, liquor or caffeine.  Yet, as winter gives way to spring, such a sacrifice will yield a harvest of truth, joy, peace and love.

 

I couldn’t agree with this more.

 

 

 

 

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Practicing Joy (from the Preface, LIGHT WHEN IT COMES)

Maybe whatever seems

to be so, we should speak so from our souls,

never afraid, “Light” when it comes,

“Dark” when it goes away.

–William Stafford

 

     The shock of stars at five a.m.  The bright belt of Orion and the arc and sweep of those other brilliant, nameless lights and even the blackness glittering.

The smell of wood smoke and fir.  The cold, damp air.

I hear the voice of my wife calling from another room:  “Do you know where I put my book?”

Standing at the sink rinsing out a bowl, I look up and see a strand of a spider web rising and falling, made visible by the wind.  Then another and another, looping from the willow to the roof.  Glinting on and off.  As if all the shingles and boards of the house are secretly bound with thread.

 

We all have moments like this, moments that move us somehow, that seem to mean something we can’t quite put into words, but we are embarrassed by them or we doubt them or in the rush of things that happen to us each day we forget about them.  For a moment we believed—in something—a presence, a beauty.  But we let the moment pass.

“The believer,” Pope Francis says in The Joy of the Gospel, ‘is essentially one who remembers.”

My purpose in this book is to help you remember the moments, and to trust in those moments, to believe in them, by sharing moments from my own life, as a husband and father and grandfather, a teacher of English and a Catholic deacon.  “I have said these things to you,” as Jesus tells his disciples, “so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”  However small they are, however fleeting, moments like this can lead us to God.

And not just the moments of joy but the moments of loneliness and struggle and fear.  Darkness is important, too, and in a way more important, because it’s darkness that teaches us the nature of light.  In darkness, too, God is calling us.

 

This is the idea of the examen of conscience, the much-loved prayer of St. Ignatius, that God is always calling us, the Spirit is always moving in our lives.  The examen is a simple but powerful way of remembering, and I mean the scenes and stories that follow to be examples of how it works, how it keeps deepening and opening up.

At the end of each day:

we remember the light and give thanks for the light;
we remember the darkness and ask for forgiveness, and refuge, and strength;
and we let it all go–we ask for the grace to follow the light, to know what we should do—but then we leave it all to God, trusting in his kindness.

The light of grace is always shining, it’s always pouring down, though it’s refracted and scattered and easy to miss, and so one way to pray is to look back on the moments of our day and recall when we saw the light breaking through, and when we didn’t, when we felt it being blocked or opposed.

This is the practice of joy:  remembering.

 

And then releasing–waiting, too, for an idea to form or an intuition to emerge about what God is calling us to do—but waiting with the knowledge that these things are mysteries, beyond understanding, and trying to give up our need for control.

The moments are poetry, not prose.  We are rarely given a single, clear message, an unmistakable sign, or at least a message or a sign we can explain in the abstract.  The practice of joy is the practice of scene and the practice of story because joy is an experience, not an idea.  The best we can do is describe what happened.

The moments are parables.  The details are simple and yet there’s something “arresting” about them, as C.H. Dodd says of the details in a parable.  We glimpse something, we encounter something, and yet we are left in “sufficient doubt” about what the image means or the details point to that we are “teased into thought,” just as we are by the stories Jesus tells.

 

The root of the word “parable” in Greek is paraballo, to place one thing beside another, to juxtapose, and this is what Jesus does.  He puts images side-by-side.  He leaps from one idea to the next.  He brings things together and asks us to bring things, too, connecting what we can and accepting what we can’t—accepting everything.

 

Be not afraid, Jesus says.  The light comes and the light goes and all we have to do is see that and name it.

We don’t have to resolve the tensions, and we don’t have to reconcile the opposites, and we can’t.  All we can do is live with things the way they are, trusting the days to God–remembering the darkness and remembering the light, and holding them both in our hearts, together, side-by-side.   Our only obligation is to speak what is so.  Our longing.  Our grief.

The stars and the web.

The voice of the one we love, calling from another room.

 

from my LIGHT WHEN IT COMES: TRUSTING JOY, FACING DARKNESS, AND SEEING GOD IN EVERYTHING (Eerdmans, 2016)

 

 

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Meteor

That night you came over to cook me dinner

you wore a poodle skirt.

 

I lived in the desert, then, in a cinderblock house.

 

I was a scientist,

patches on the elbows of my rumpled tweed.

 

The night was cool and clear,

and we went out on the patio to look at the stars,

and looking up, you said,

I’ve never seen the moon shaped like an egg,

 

when a giant meteor

came flaming over the ridge

and slammed into the earth,

plowing a long, glassy furrow.

 

The ground rippled out in waves,

and for a moment there wasn’t any sound,

and then all the Fiestaware

in the kitchen started to rattle,

bouncing up and down in its rickety racks.

 

The cinderblock began to glow.

 

Ephphatha! Jesus whispered:  Be opened!

 

And I was.

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Apples and Apples

March 5, 2017

First Sunday of Advent

Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:-1-11

 

Imagine turning off all your devices and shutting down all your screens.  Imagine sitting in a room in silence.

Except it wouldn’t be silent.  Soon you’d hear a joist crack and the house shift.  Or the furnace come on.  The cat snore.

Maybe a warbler would fly past the window.  Maybe your eye would rest on a picture on a shelf, a picture of someone you love or of a place you love, and those feelings would come back.  Those memories would surface.

 

Robert Barron says that when we read this creation story in Genesis we’re so focused on the tree we’re not supposed to eat that we ignore all the trees we can, and I think he’s right.  The word that stands out to be in the Genesis story today is “various”—the various trees in the garden, and how “delightful” they are, and “good.”

This is why we fast and this is why we try to resist temptations, not just to deny ourselves but to fulfill ourselves in the end–to make ourselves available to all the true abundance around us, hidden or unnoticed or forgotten.

 

“For if,” Paul says, “by the transgression of the one, death came to reign through that one, how much more will those who receive the abundance of grace . . . come to reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.”

The abundance of grace.

 

Jesus fasts for forty days in a desert, and a desert is a difficult place, and a harsh place, but it’s also beautiful and full of life and layers and depths of structure and meaning, if we know how to look, and Jesus did.  And he was hungry, Matthew says, after forty days, and who could blame him, and imagine how good that apple must have tasted when he bit into it, or that fig, or that piece of bread.

 

On Mardi Gras night Barb and I had pizza, and I ate and ate, until my tongue got thick and my stomach congealed, and it didn’t taste good really after the first slice, didn’t satisfy any real hunger.

But when I have been more restrained and I have watched what I’ve eaten, and I finally bite into that apple, I am aware all at once of how wonderful apples are, and how pure and sweet, what a miracle food is, and I think that’s one of the reasons we fast, not to punish ourselves but to prepare for the deeper satisfactions of eating what is healthy and right.

 

It’s not the only reason, of course.

We fast because when we’re even a little bit hungry we’re in a better position to identify with all the hungry people of the world—the hundreds of thousands in South Sudan and neighboring countries, for example, who are suffering now through what the United Nations has just officially declared to be a famine, a terrible, terrible famine.

And because we’ve spent less on food, we have money to give them.  From our excess we can distribute what is needed elsewhere.

 

Food isn’t a little thing and it’s not just a metaphor.  It’s part of whole systems of production and distribution, some of which are just and some of which are not, so that whether we like it or not eating is a political act.  It has consequences.

 

I also think that fasting from chocolate or coffee or something like that is valuable exactly because it’s so simple and conventional.  It humbles us, especially those of us who like to think in terms of big ideas and symbols.  No, this is down-to-earth, and it’s real, and by the way it’s not in the least bit easy.  It’s difficult.  It does involve suffering to some degree, and that suffering is necessary and that suffering is good.

 

But what strikes me the most today about the temptation of Adam and Eve, and the temptations of Christ, is that these temptations come from the outside, are external, and that they come into a naturalness and goodness that already exists.

Adam and Eve are in a garden, a perfect garden, and in a sense we are, too:  we are fundamentally good, deep down.  We are valuable and worthy of love just for who we are.

It’s like when we go on a vacation or a retreat, and we get away from all the pressures and the judgments and the evaluations, and if we have enough time we start to relax, we start to come back to ourselves.

But then we have to go back to work and go back to the competition, and the emails start to fly again and the gossip starts to circulate again and we start to let those outer voices get to us, disrupt us, build up in us, until finally that summer peace or that weekend peace or that peace that can come on retreat is compromised or stolen or made to seem foolish.

You’re no good, Satan says.  Other people are better.  You have to change, become more powerful, not let anyone else beat you.  And these messages aren’t obvious, they’re subliminal, they’re snaky, they come through some image we glimpse on the internet, some little criticism on the edge of a remark.

 

The sin in the garden wasn’t that the Adam and Eve were naked but that they were ashamed to be.  That they covered themselves up.  That they lost faith in who they really were.

 

And what I love about Jesus in this story of his temptation is that he doesn’t listen to those voices, doesn’t let Satan convince him that he has to be more interesting or powerful or widely known.  The desert is enough for him.  Ordinary life is enough for him.  What Jesus knows is that life is the miracle, and that joy comes not from excess but from breathing, from walking, from tending a garden or installing a floor or writing code, and from loving other people, embracing them, laughing with them, that the sweetest and most miraculous meal of all is the meal we eat in the company of others, and that all those other subtle temptations, all those other come-ons, are just an effort to get us to forget that, to walk away from that, to sinfully desire more than we have when what we have, what we have been given and are always being given, is wealth enough and grace enough and grace abounding—is abundance beyond all telling, always here, always present, in the quiet rooms of our houses, in the quiet moments of our lives, in our deserts, in our gardens, in our hearts.

 

 

 

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The Two Nets

Matthew 4:12-23 and Isaiah 8:23-9:3

It’s amazing how quickly the disciples drop everything and follow Jesus.  They’re in the middle of a work day, fishing, and yet they hear the voice of the Lord and leave their nets behind, just as we must abandon all the nets of our anxieties and ambitions.

The nets are like the yokes that burden the people in Isaiah, and the poles, and the rods.  They are all the things that weigh us down and shouldn’t.

 

I’ve been reading Thomas Merton again and I came across this passage:

     Fear is the greatest enemy of candor.  How many people fear to follow their conscience because they would rather conform to the opinion of others than to the truth they know in their hearts!  How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?  Others have no right to demand that I be anything else than what I ought to be in the sight of God.  No greater thing could possibly be asked of a person than this!  This one just expectation, which I am bound to fulfill, is precisely the one they usually do not expect me to fulfill.  They want me to be what I am in their sight:  that is, an extension of themselves.

I really like this, and it’s really true for me.  Of all the nets that trap me and catch me and keep from being myself, concern with reputation is the biggest.  Pride is the biggest.  Ego is the biggest.  When I’m alone and at peace I know deep down what’s right and good, at least in a general way, because God is always calling us in who we really are, in our own actual natures.  He calls us in what makes us truly happy.  To do the will of the Lord is our delight, Psalm 40 says, and so whatever gives us true delight is always the will of God.

But then we get around other people, or I do, and I hear them talk and watch what they’re doing, and 9 times out of 10, even after all these years and all this prayer and instruction, I find myself getting pulled off my ground.  I get disoriented, clouded.

Blessed are you when you are persecuted, Jesus says in the Beatitudes, and Robert Barron interprets that this way:  blessed are you when you no longer care what other people think of you.  Blessed are you when you are free of the false influence of others.

 

I think, too, of a related passage from Merton, a longer one that I keep coming back to. “How am I to know the will of God”? Merton asks.  That’s the question I’m asking.  That’s always the question, the only question.  The disciples had the distinct advantage of being able to see Jesus face to face, in the flesh.  He was actually walking by them, by the shore.  But we’re not so lucky in a way, because here 2,000 years later Jesus is walking by in subtler forms.  He’s always walking by, he’s always calling us, but through events and through moments and through the momentum and drift of our lives.

That’s Merton’s point:  that in the absence of some sort of particular revelation, some sort of voice coming down from heaven, literally and physically, “the very nature of each situation usually bears written into itself some indication of God’s will.”  Life is our call, in other words.

The Lord calls us through the actual facts, through what is possible and what isn’t.  If it’s raining, God is calling me to get wet.  If I rupture a disc, God is calling me to limp.   The Lord calls us through our capacities and our incapacities.  I’m really sure that I’m not supposed to be a neurosurgeon, for example, and that I’m not called to be an accountant either.  I can’t add, and I pass out at the sight of blood.  The Lord calls us in every moral situation we encounter, everyday. “Whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God,” Merton says. “To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be true.”  Say a woman we know asks for our help.  If she’s telling the truth and we have the means, it’s the will of God in that moment for us to help, because helping is the right thing to do and the true thing to do.

The Lord even calls us in the hoeing of a garden, Merton says.

     The requirements of a work to be done can be understood as the will of God.  If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing.  To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work.

     Entering data, dry cleaning a jacket, writing a brief.    For most of us, most of the time, to stay at our nets is what God wants us to do, if only as a way of humbling us, of teaching us to die to ourselves.

 

I think the key is peace.  I think the key is always to follow what gives us peace, as much as we are able to, at least.

A final passage from Merton, another one I love:

Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly.  He may permit that through no fault of our own we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins, and to the sins of the society in which we live.  In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid.  But let us not to be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work and unnatural.

     There’s a lot of wisdom here, and practicality.  What we can’t avoid, we accept, of course, but the question is:  what can we avoid?  How much of the unnatural and anxious work we do is the result of our own sin and not the sins of the culture?  And what good does it do to deny the distinction, to pretend that sound and healthy work is an illusion and that we have to forget it?  That it’s unattainable?

No.  God is calling us to what is sound and healthy and natural, and he is calling us through these things, and to do his will is to do all that we can to eliminate the stresses and the burdens and the distractions that keep us from such work.

 

In this sense there are finally two nets, the right one and the wrong one.

What must we do to put down the one and take up the other?

Whatever that is, that’s what God is calling us to do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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