Chris Anderson's Blog, page 3

How to Look at the Waves

Mark 6:30-34

     I’ve never known how to look at the ocean and the waves coming in.  I don’t know how to see it all at once, the whole wide, straight line of it.  It’s not like a cove surrounded by trees where you can grasp the shape of it.  It’s not like a library where the books are neatly shelved.  People love the beach.  Families come with their kids and their dogs, and the kids scream with delight and the dogs run into the surf.  For some people the sight of the sea lifts them up, the way the stars in the night sky do or a mountain range.  I feel flattened.  Emptied.

     Jesus says to his weary disciples in the Gospel for this Sunday, “come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.”  The ocean is a desert for me, a deserted place, in its vastness, its endless repetitions.  It washes everything away.  The roar of the waves drowns out all my thoughts, my plans.  There is only a single boat on the water as far as I can see.  No human face.  No human figure.  The people are on shore.  Their backs are to me, and I’m on the dunes above them.  The water when you look at it is different colors:  blue further out, then gray as the waves start to rise and comb, then brown as they come in, churning up the sand. The endless grains of sand.  

    What else can we do but turn to God?  The one who promised he will be with us always even unto the end of time?  The one who made the stars and made the seas and takes all things unto himself?  The one who loves us.  Who never lets us go.

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Fathers

video

June 16, 2024—Father’s Day, Mark 4:26-34

     Happy Fathers’ Day to all fathers out there.  I’m a father, too, and I know what it’s like.

     When my son Tim was around ten, I picked him up from soccer practice.   A couple of the boys were talking tough about their next game.  “We’re going to kick their bottoms,” they said, or words to that effect, and Tim said “yeah, we’re going to kick their bottoms.”  Then he turned and saw me and burst into tears.  

     He knew what he said was wrong.  He knew there would be consequences.

    This is what it’s like to be a father.  In a way we have a lot power.  We have the power to set boundaries, and we should exercise that power, and there should be consequences when the boundaries are crossed.  But in another way, we don’t have much power at all.  We’re vulnerable.  We can’t keep our children from rubbing shoulders with the world, we can’t keep them from being hurt, and that’s really hard.  We love them.  When they burst into tears, we burst into tears.

   I love the word “scatter” in the first parable in the Gospel today, how it implies the hard work of sowing but also a letting go.  I love the idea that the seed grows “we not know how,” because God is a mystery.  I love the idea that the seed grows “of its own accord,” because grace is a gift.  We can’t earn it or control it.  

     And our children are gifts, our children grow of their own accord.  We work and work to support them and teach them, but they have free will, they make choices, and they’re their own people from the beginning, even from birth.  They’re not us.  We have to tell them things, important things, but we also have to learn who they really are, uniquely. God is in their lives, too.       

     Tim has grown up to be a wonderful man, and my son, John, too, and Maggie has grown into a wonderful woman, and I had something to do with that, but looking back now I realize how much was grace, how much was given.

     Later that day, after Tim said the bad word, I dropped something heavy on my foot and said a couple of bad words and had to wash my own mouth out with soap.

     And we can take this further, we can turn this around, because we are taught to call God Father.

     The scriptures describe God as mother, too, in Psalm 131, several times in Isaiah, and in a couple of other places in the Old Testament.  Jesus compares himself to a mother hen gathering her brood.  And as the Catechism tells us, God is beyond all language, including our own, and so is beyond all gender.

    But “father” is the most common image in the scriptures, it’s the image that Jesus uses most often, and that’s really important.  It means something.  God is all-powerful, of course, so this comparison breaks down at a certain point, but if he is anything like human fathers he can also be hurt.  He’s vulnerable.  In a sense he expresses his power most fully by giving it away, and he enters into our lives, and he feels what we feel.  He cries when we cry.  

     And above all he gives us freedom.  He lets us grow of our own accord.  He sets us in a garden and then lets us ruin it, and there are consequences, we are expelled, but he never stops caring for us, never stops loving us.  It’s his love that is unending.

     Someone told Barb the other day that she couldn’t believe in a God who would sacrifice his own son, just give him away to be killed.  But she’s gotten that wrong.  Jesus gives himself freely.  The scriptures make that clear more than once.  And if the Father is one with the Son, and the Son with the Father, isn’t it the Father, too, who is hanging on the cross, who so loves the world that he suffers for it and with it?  I’ve never heard this before, so maybe it’s wrong, but it seems to me that it has to be true.

    In the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, the father lets his son waste his inheritance and fall among the pigs, but when his son comes home, he runs out and embraces him.  He throws him a party.  The father is prodigal, and the father is God, pouring out his love.  All we have to do is come home.

     Power and vulnerability.  Authority and letting go.  Both.

     The father didn’t approve of how his son had chosen to live, and the son knew it.  The father tried to guide the son, until he couldn’t.

      I saw a young father the other day.  His three or four-year-old son was driving a little child-sized bulldozer, self-powered.  He could steer it.  It was like the real thing.  And the father was walking along beside him, looking at his phone.  He never looked up.  He never looked at his son.       

     It was just a moment.  Who knows what happened the rest of the day?  But that image really stays with me—I think it’s representative—and it really saddens me.

      Parables like the parables in the Gospel today are simple stories drawn from everyday life, as C.H. Dodd says, but stories that “leave us in sufficient doubt” about what they mean that we are “teased into thought.”  This is how Jesus taught.  It’s the at very heart of the Gospel.  This is why the scribes and the Pharisees had him killed, because he wouldn’t spell everything out.  He wanted them to think for themselves.

     Maybe the image of God the Father is the biggest parable of all.  Maybe that’s what God the Father really does:  he calls us to think.  Maybe that’s what all of us who are fathers should try to teach our children:  to read between the lines.

     In the last few years of his life my father had aphasia.  He knew what he wanted to say but he couldn’t find the right words.  One of the last times I saw him before he died, we were standing in his carport.  We were saying goodbye.   When he hugged me, I heard his hearing aid buzzing.  He said, “Chris, I will never forgiveyou.”

     But I knew what he meant:  he meant, “I will never forget you.”

    God the Father never forgets us, and he always forgives.  Always.

     My mom and dad didn’t belong to any church, they were very skeptical about religion—and about me being Catholic, and about me being a deacon–and I always worried about what I would say as they were dying, whether I would be able to give them any comfort.

    My mom died suddenly, so it wasn’t until my dad was in the hospital at the end that I had a chance to say something.  He was frantic and irrational.  He thought I was his brother.  And he was afraid, he seemed lost, like a little boy trying to find his way home.           

   And I knew what to say then.  I had to shout it, but I knew what to say:  don’t be afraid, Dad.  God is with you.  Don’t be afraid.    

     The Father is waiting.  The Father is here.

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Darkness and Light

Darkness and Light

     This week I did a poetry reading at a little bookstore in Portland.  It was a nice evening, but I was reminded again of how easily people dismiss and caricature Christianity and the Church—good, moral, spiritual people.

     Two passages have come my way since then and helped to put this experience in perspective.  

    This is how it works:  sometimes we are given just the things we need.  They just appear.

     The first is a passage from St. Gregory, one of the early Church Fathers, comparing the Church to the dawn.  A friend mentioned it in email.  

     “The dawn intimates that the night is over,” St. Gregory says, but “it does not yet proclaim the light of day.”  Both darkness and light are present in the Church, the good and the bad, just as in anything else—any government, any family, any person.  “While the dawn dispels the darkness and welcomes the light, it holds both of them, the one mixed with the other.”

     Why do so many people have a problem with the simple idea that the Church isn’t all bad?  That there’s good in it, too?  St. Gregory figured this out in the sixth century.  Paul in the first.  

     The second passage is from another interview with the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.  I’m very much caught up with his poetry right now, in part because he grew up Catholic in Northern Ireland and talks with such insight about the Church.  Heaney gradually lost his faith in Christ and in the Eucharist, but he lost it “sadly,” as he put it, without bitterness or rancor, and all his life he continued to respect the sacramental and liturgical traditions of Catholicism.  

     In the passage I came across he’s talking about poets and others who leave established religion behind and cobble together their own self-created religion, taking a little bit from this tradition and a little from that, often relying on the merely faddish and superficial.  But “like many Catholics, lapsed or not,” Heaney says, he thinks that “if you desert this system, you’re deserting the best there is, and there’s no point in exchanging one great coherence for some other ad hoc arrangement.”

     In a way Heaney’s statement has more authority for me because he isn’t part of the Church anymore.  But he’s wise, and learned, and he understands that whatever the sins of the institution—and they are substantial—it is intellectually and aesthetically coherent, richer than all the easy memes about it.

     Both these passages help, a lot, though really it comes down to something even simpler. 

     I’m like Peter.  I sink as soon as I feel even the slightest breeze.  I can’t even be challenged in the polite way I was challenged that evening—I can’t even withstand lack of response, or polite blankness.  “Do not fall from your own stability,” the Second Letter of Peter says, in a striking phrase (3:12-18), but I do, all the time.

     The darkness and the light are in me, all mixed up.

     Thank God for St. Gregory.  Thank God for the good and wise friend who sent me the email.  Thank God for the smart and gentle Irish poet.  Thank God.

Postscript.     

     Actually, you know what it would really mean to be a Christian in a situation like this?  To love people unconditionally.  To listen, not seethe.  To stand firm in your own faith and not let the misconceptions of others bother you in the first place, but at the same time not to judge or stereotype anyone else in return—to believe that Christ is present in every situation and in every bookstore and in every person and moment altogether, as he was present in all those good, moral, spiritual people looking back at me.

     That’s what God was teaching me.  That’s what God is always trying to teach me.

     Thank God for that evening in that little bookstore.

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The Double Rainbow and the Yellow Plane

The Double Rainbow and the Yellow Plane

     The other day I went to see an older man whose wife died last summer.  His son was there, too, and it was obvious as they talked what a remarkable person this woman was and how much they loved her.  

     The son told me this story—that not long after his mother died, he was driving down a road.  And he looked up at the sky, and there was a double rainbow, very bright, every band of color in both of them clear and shining and distinct–it was beautiful, and sudden, and his heart lifted up.  He thought, mom.  Mom.

     This is how I think joy is.  This is how it works.

     The gospel today is about joy, as every gospel is–Pope Francis called his first exhortation The Joy of the Gospel–but today the gospel describes joy itself, the joy of the disciples when they see the risen Lord, a joy so intense they can’t believe it at first.

     And this is really important.  “Joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God,” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it, and today’s gospel describes the circumstances of joy and the qualities of joy, not just for the disciples but for us.  

     Let me just make a list.

     Joy isn’t something we can schedule.  It’s not something we can produce.  It just happens, it just appears, as Jesus just appears to the disciples, out of the blue, when they least expect it.

     Joy isn’t something we can earn.  We don’t deserve it.  It comes to us even when we’ve not been doing too well, like the disciples today.  They’re a pretty unimpressive bunch so far, and yet Jesus comes to them anyway.    

     Joy isn’t happiness, because we can do things to be happy–we can make ourselves happy—but joy is always a gift, always a surprise.     

     Joy comes even in the midst of darkness and suffering and grief, as Jesus comes to the disciples today in their fear and confusion, and the joy they feel doesn’t take away all the pain or remove all the challenges to come.

     Joy doesn’t make things easy.  It gives us strength.  

     Joy is deeper than pain.  Joy survives even suffering and doubt. 

     Joy can be intense, as it is today for the disciples.  We might feel joy like this only once or twice in our lives.

    And joy can be subtle, too, soft, elusive, woven into everything that happens to us.  A man falls in beside us on a road.  We sit at a table with friends.

    Joy is something we often forget.  Even those intense moments fade, and the subtler moments, the everyday moments–we forget them all the time.  We’re too busy.  We’re preoccupied.

     Joy is something we can misinterpret, we mistake joy for a ghost, we think it’s unreal.    

    Joy is something we always doubt, even when it’s overwhelming—the disciples are so joyous today they’re incredulous.  They can’t believe what they see.  It’s all too good to be true.

     Joy is fleeting–we only just glimpse the Lord and he’s gone–the way he disappears in the story of Emmaus, before this in Luke, vanishing at just the moment the disciples finally recognize him.  

     And yet joy never dies, it never fades—if we learn the discipline of remembering it, if we make a commitment to it and choose to trust it even in the darkness.

     Joy is one of the nine fruits of the Spirit, the theme of our series of homilies this Easter season.  Paul lays them out in Galatians.  Last week we talked about peace, and next week we’ll talk about gentleness and patience, and later the others, and nothing is more important than knowing what these are.  Because it’s from the fruits of the Spirit that we can reason back to their source.  Joy is a sign of the presence of God, Chardin says, and we need signs.  We’re not the disciples.  We don’t get to experience Jesus directly the way they did.  Jesus is present to us indirectly, in the Spirit he left us, and the Spirit is quiet, it moves “between the lines of persons and things,” as Abbot Jeremy Driscoll puts it, and so we need to pay attention to what’s going on in our lives and to what’s going on inside us.  

     God isn’t dead.  He’s here and all around us.  We just have to learn what to look for–we just have to learn discernment.

      The disciples are terrified of Jesus at first today, but fear like that is never from God.    

     Anger, hatred, envy—all “the fruits of the flesh”–they are never from God.

     That sense of worthlessness so many of us feel, or that sense of hopelessness we sometimes feel—they are never from God.  

       Joy is a going out of ourselves, a being swept up into something beyond us.

       Joy is an awareness of a beauty within us.  Joy is an awareness of a beauty in others.  Joy is an awareness of a beauty and a goodness coursing through the world, however terrible things seem, a light that the darkness can never finally overwhelm.

       Joy gives us courage, but it asks for courage, too.  We first have to trust it.  We first have to risk it.

      By his Resurrection, the Catechism tells us, Jesus opens for us the way to a new life.  The Resurrection reinstates us in God’s grace, it says, quoting St. Paul, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

     Joy is the gift of the Resurrection, and it changes us.  It transforms us.  It enables us to live in a radically new way, with confidence and creativity and compassion. 

     Joy is the proof of the Resurrection,  because the Risen Christ is here, in this very place, right now, in us.  

     Last week, as we were sitting at the kitchen table eating cinnamon rolls and drinking coffee, the man whose wife died got up and brought back this wonderful picture of the two of them many years ago.  A yellow Cessna 180 is floating on a mountain lake, and they’re standing beside it, on one of the pontoons.  He is young and handsome, and she is young and beautiful, the wind has just ruffled her hair, and she’s looking at the camera with this love and this life and this joy in her eyes, and that love and that joy were still there, they were moving in the air of the room, even though the man was choking up as he talked.  They were both bush pilots in Alaska, he said–his wife was a doctor–and this Cessna was their plane, it was their honeymoon plane, they were always flying, and this was the way his wife was–she always had a spirit of adventure, her whole life was an adventure, and it still is, he said.  The adventure, he told me, is still going on.

     This is joy.  This is the sign of the presence of God.  Deeper than tears.  Something remembered.  Something held onto.  Something believed:  that this woman is flying still, in that bright yellow plane, she is soaring, as one day we too will fly.  We too will soar.

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The Problem of Praise

January 28, 2024

Psalm 95, Mark 1:21-28

     The psalm today, Psalm 95, is one of the best-known psalms in the Bible, and it does what in one way or another all the psalms do.  It praises God and asks us to praise God.  “Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord,” the speaker says.  “Let us joyfully sing psalms to him.”

     And we don’t want to.  We don’t want to praise God.  We’re too wrapped up in ourselves, we’re too interested in our own lives.  We’ve got things to do.  And besides, what has God done for us lately?  Our days are empty and gray.  Violence and injustice are all around, as the psalmists knew, too.  They weren’t naïve.  What is there to praise?

     Even if God does exist, why would he want us to praise him?  How big is his ego?

     Thomas Merton puts it this way in a little book called “Praying the Psalms.”  “It is quite possible that our lack of interest in the Psalms conceals a secret lack of interest in God.  For if we have no real interest in praising Him, it shows that we have never realized who he really is.”  

     These two sentences really bring me up short.  They really hit home.

     When we become aware of God, Merton says, of his holiness and love, of all that he has created and intends, “the only possible reaction” is thanks and praise.

     A few weeks ago I was walking with my labradoodle in the woods.  We were walking along Cronemiller Lake, and I saw a young man standing by a tree touching the moss on the branches with his fingertips.  He was deaf and blind, and he seemed to be exploring the texture and feel of it.  There were two women helping him, and when they guided him back to the road, I let them pass.  I was thinking my own thoughts.  But then I thought, no, no, and I stopped, and turned, and I called after them and asked if this young man, this boy really, might want to meet my dog.

     And she tapped out my question on his arm, and he nodded and smiled, and Bumble came wriggling up to him.  The women helped him bend, and when he reached out and touched Bumble’s curly fur with his fingertips, he laughed out loud, this beautiful, openhearted laugh.

     It was a wonderful moment.  It took me out of myself, it made me forget about my own life, and yet somehow I felt more like myself, too, bigger somehow.   This is the paradox:  that it’s in our own experience that we glimpse the divine.  The people are “astonished” by the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel today, as the young man seemed to be astonished by the feel of Bumble’s fur.  I think astonished is too strong a word for what I felt, but something like that–moved, maybe, by the man’s delight, by the women at his side, by the lake and trees, and moved to thanks and praise, just naturally.  Spontaneously.  I didn’t feel coerced.  I felt free. 

     We all have moments like this, if only we stop, if only we remember, and this is the leap that we are all called to make, to choose to see these moments as moments of grace, as moments when God is reaching out to us, and to hold onto them in the dark and empty times, and to leap even then.  “Do not grow stubborn,” Psalm 95 tells us.  “Today, listen to the voice of the Lord.”

     It’s what the first disciples do in the gospel last week when Jesus walks by and says, follow me.  They get up and go.  I don’t think Mark has left anything out.  There must have been something about Jesus to draw the disciples, something powerful and good, but in the end they just had to decide.  First comes obedience, then comes grace, not the other way around—or rather, first comes obedience, and then we become aware of the grace that has always been there.  

    Obedience.  That’s a word we don’t like anymore.  We’re skeptical about authority, and when it comes to human authority, we should be.  We should never blindly follow any other human being.  But with God it’s the only way.  We have to.  First comes faith, then comes proof, not the other way around—though proof isn’t the right word either.  Intuitions.  Glimpses.  

     Sister Ruth Burrows is straightforward and blunt: do you believe in Jesus or not?  Because of course as Christians when we pray the psalms it’s Jesus we are praising.  Forget all your theological scruples, Burrows says.  Stop trying to make God into a God you can be comfortable with, a God who agrees with all your views.  Leap.  “Faith is a gift,” she says, but a gift that will be given “only if we choose to believe, choose to take God at his word and stake our lives on it.”  

      “Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord,” Psalms 95 says.  “Come, let us bow down and worship, / bending the knee before the Lord, our maker.”  Lately I’ve been renewing the commitment I made as a deacon to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, the Church’s ancient book of psalms and prayers, and every morning begins with this psalm.

     Sometimes I still struggle, as I always have, sometimes I resist, but I’m trying to change the direction I’m looking in, to focus on God and not myself, and I’m trying to use the language of the scriptures, not my own language—to use the words that Jesus used, because Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews prayed the psalms, morning, noon, and night.  In the Gospels Jesus quotes the psalms more than any other part of the Bible.  Whenever I hit a rough spot, whenever my mind gets in the way, I say, “leap of faith,” “leap of faith.”  I remind myself that whenever we pray the psalms, Jesus is praying in us, or we are praying in him.

     “O Lord,” the speaker says in Psalm 131, “my heart is not proud, / nor haughty my eyes.  / I have not gone after things too great / nor marvels beyond me.”  We are all deaf and blind.  We all have to humble ourselves.  “Truly I have set my soul / in silence and peace,” the psalmist says.  He has set it, as in he has decided, as in he has made an act of will–and then, sometimes, “as a child has rest in its mother’s arms, / even so my soul.”  When we trust, we can breathe.  When we trust, we can be confident and unafraid.  

     We don’t love God because he forces us to.  We love God because he loves us—loves us as a mother loves, tenderly and completely.  We praise God because he is wonderful, and sometimes, for a moment, we glimpse that wonder, we sense that mystery.

     Sometimes we stop, and we bend down, and we reach out our hand, and like a child we laugh, we laugh out loud, and our laughter rises up like a song. 

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Thawing Pipes

Thawing Pipes

January 21, 2024

John 1: 35-42 

     Last Sunday, the Sunday of the Baptism of the Lord, I woke up to frozen pipes.  Ice everywhere, thick and hard as fiberglass.  Even our dogs were slipping and sliding.  We’d lost power the night before but had gotten it back, but now the pipes were frozen and we had no water.  It was bitter cold.

     I’ve always loved the Baptism of the Lord, the power and humility of John the Baptist; Jesus coming up out of the water and the dove descending; the voice of God saying who this is; the waters of the Jordan flowing clear and clean.

     But now my waters were frozen solid, I was entirely stuck, and I had to I spend an hour in the freezing garage with a hair dryer and a space heater and outside in the ice where the pipe comes into the garage from our well.  Finally, I heard something gurgle and begin to slide, like a Slushy in a Slushy machine, the water tank began to fill, and Barb shouted from inside the house that water was spitting and flowing out our faucets.

    The reason we don’t love the Psalms is because all they do is praise God, Thomas Merton says, and we don’t want to praise God.  We want to stay in our own darkness and busyness.  We’re frozen.  We don’t want to praise God, Merton says, because we don’t really know God and what he has done, or don’t remember it, or don’t stop to see it:  that God created all the waters, and created all the storms and the ice, and the sun and the moon and all the seasons.

     Ruth Burrows puts it bluntly:  do we believe in Jesus or not?  Stop all the theologizing.  Leave behind all the delicate intellectual structures.  These are evasions.  Either we believe in Jesus or not, and most of us don’t, not really, not deep down.  We want proof.  We want reasons.  

     When Andrew sees Jesus “walking by” in the Gospel of John, and he hears John the Baptist say, “behold the Lamb of God,” he just follows.  The Gospel isn’t leaving anything out.  There was no negotiating or debating or delaying or demanding of proofs.  Andrew just follows.  He just leaps.

     Then everything flows.  Everything comes spitting and coughing and flowing out of the faucets, and there is hot coffee, and there are hot showers, and the water is pouring down on us, the warm, blessed, cleansing water.

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You Know What?

     One Sunday after Mass I was asked to talk to the little kids in religious education, three years old to first grade.  When I was done, I got a lot of questions—“is Jesus a ghost?” “If Jesus is in heaven with my grandma, how can he be down here, too?”—questions not unlike the questions of theologians and Biblical scholars.  

     But I didn’t need to answer.  One little girl jumped in, perfectly happy, and said that Jesus is everywhere, all around us, and everybody nodded.  Then a little blonde boy raised his hand and said: “You know what?  My mom made blueberry pancakes this morning!”  

     And somehow that seemed to follow.  It made perfect sense.

 

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

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Touch

Touch

The deaf and blind boy stood by a tree 

and touched the moss with his fingertips, stroking 

the springy patches on the trunk.  Then the two 

women on either side led him gently away, 

 

guiding him back to the road where Bumble 

and I were walking, too.  I let him pass, not wanting

to risk embarrassment.  But I stopped and turned, 

calling after them, and one of the women 

tapped my question on his arm.  And he nodded 

 

his head and grinned, and Bumble came wriggling. 

The women helped him bend, and he reached 

out his hand, and he touched Bumble’s warm fur 

with his fingertips, and he laughed out loud, 

his laughter rising up into the air.

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Breath

Breath

 

At the Chapel of the Tomb of St. Francis,

the altar sat flush against a wall of stones.

 

Behind the wall were the bones of the saint, 

and in the front, a large bronze crucifix,

the body of the Lord hanging limp. 

 

The priest and deacon face the people now, 

standing behind the altar, but that day

we faced the cross.  We all looked the same

direction.  And I was up against

 

the stones.  I was preparing the paten 

and cup, and that altar was narrow. 

I could touch the wall.  I saw my breath 

stirring the dust in the grooves.

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The Grand Canyon Compared to My Dog

The Grand Canyon is hard.  Bumble is soft.

The layers of the Grand Canyon are made of

rock and mostly horizontal.  Bumble’s layers

are creamy fur, and they wave and curl.  

 

The Grand Canyon is vast, Bumble small.

People come from all over the world 

to gape at the cliffs and great gulfs of air.  

When people see Bumble, they smile.

 

The way the Grand Canyon loves me 

takes millions of years.  Bumble bounds, 

his eyes warm and bright.  His tongue 

hangs out, his head lifts up.  For him 

there is no time.  He is wagging all over.  

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