Chris Anderson's Blog, page 30

A Poem by Maya Angelou

A funny, and bighting, poem from the great Maya Angelou.

     We are all Imperfect Catholics.  We are all Imperfect Christians.

     And God is a God of infinite mercy. 

     God is a God with a terrific sense of humor.

     And tenderness.  And patience.

 

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”       

            Maya Angelou

 

I’m not shouting “I’m clean livin’.”

I’m whispering “I was lost,

Now I’m found and forgiven.”

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”

I don’t speak of this with pride.

I’m confessing that I stumble

and need Christ to be my guide.

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”

I’m not trying to be strong.

I’m professing that I’m weak

And need His strength to carry on.

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”

I’m not bragging of success.

I’m admitting I have failed

And need God to clean my mess.

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”

I’m not claiming to be perfect,

My flaws are far too visible

But, God believes I am worth it.

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”

I still feel the sting of pain.

I have my share of heartaches

So I call upon His name.

 

When I say … “I am a Christian”

I’m not holier than thou,

I’m just a simple sinner

Who received God’s good grace, somehow.

 

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Not Turning Away

Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Leviticus 19:1-18; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23; Matthew 5:38-48

 

Not long ago I had one of those horrible, terrible days we all sometimes have.  I teach English at Oregon State, and that day I not only had my own classes but an extra class, for a colleague who’d been called away, and it was raining and sleeting and snowing, and I had a bad head cold, with body aches and a sore throat, and all the students I tried to teach just stared back at me, unresponsive, restless.  I couldn’t get a rise out of anyone.  It was all just a slog.

And what does the Lord call us to do on days like this?

Turn the other cheek.  Turn and face this.  Because this is a grace.  This a call.

We don’t want this kind of grace, of course, and we’re always trying to find ways to avoid it.  “People will do anything,” Carl Jung says, “no matter how absurd, rather than face their own souls.” What I like is to get a scone and another cup of coffee, or jump on Facebook and start scrolling and clicking, or find someone in another office to gossip and complain with.  And there’s nothing wrong with scones and there’s nothing wrong with Facebook, unless I start eating more and clicking more, and gradually the eating and the clicking become part of a general pattern of avoidance and addiction, as they are, really, for most us.

Or worse, rather than turning the other cheek we can start blaming everyone else for our emptiness—blaming the students in this case, demonizing them, turning them into some Other we have to manage and control and keep away from us, and I can fall into that trap, too, as we all can, and it’s wrong, scripture tells us.  “We must love our neighbor as ourselves,” Leviticus says, and even love our enemies, according to Jesus, and I think when we don’t it’s because we’re avoiding what’s inside us, projecting onto a scapegoat.

Of course there’s injustice in the world, and we have to resist it.  There’s evil in the world, and we have to fight it.

But not before we turn and face our own darkness, our own sin.

Not hating ourselves.  I don’t mean that.  Not thinking of ourselves as worthless and terrible.  That’s another temptation, from the other side, to think that everything is our fault, that we’re not worthy of love, when we must love ourselves, too, must remember that we are “temples of the Holy Spirit” every bit as much as anyone else, despite our human limitations.

The “enemies” we have to love are also the enemies inside us, the fear and the anger–“love” not in the sense of letting these things determine our behavior but in the sense of admitting them, realizing that we’re not perfect and that we need grace.

The best thing about a cold is that it reminds us that we have bodies and that we’re mortal.  The best thing about the dark and dreary days is that they remind us that grace is not our accomplishment but the work of God and the gift of God.

And then, feeling that, knowing that, we look at other people differently, not as enemies but as family.  Brothers.  Sisters.

 

In a way the biggest temptation of all is to think that unless our lives are heroic and dramatic and trending on Twitter, they don’t really count.

I say I want to serve the poor.  Well, here they are, staring back at me from their little desks.

I say I want humility.  Well, now I’ve been given it.

What I really want, of course, is for everyone to see me being humble and to admire me for being humble.  Kneeling in a shaft of stained glass light.  Choirs of angels singing in the background.

But no.  It’s this moment, and the next, and the next, and every moment, and especially the everyday moments when we just have to do the best we can and admit we’re not succeeding—those are the moments when the Spirit moves in us and the Spirit comes into us, if we let it, because these are the moments that Jesus came into, in an ordinary stable, in an ordinary little town beside the lake, a man who ate and slept and laughed and cried just as we do and who never turned away from the world and who never rejected any of the ordinary people who came to him for help but served them and loved them right down to washing their ordinary, smelly feet.

“Do you not know that you are the temple of God,” Paul asks us, and not just when we’re in church, not just when everything is going the way we want it to, but wherever we are and whatever we do, sitting at our desks, standing at our sinks.

 

And the rain it sometimes falls, and falls, and falls, and it falls on the just and it falls on the unjust, Jesus tells us, and there’s nothing we can do about it, it just what it is, which is why weather is used again and again in the Old and New Testaments and in the Christian tradition to describe the peace and the joy that sometimes come to us in prayer, but only now and then, and when we least expect them, and not because we’ve prayed in the right way or earned that grace or ever have to or ever could.

We prepare the soil, St. Theresa of Avila says, and we work hard at that, and we plant the seed, and we work hard at that, and we tend the rows and weed and water and do all we can, and because of our work the seedlings begin to rise, and maybe, in the early stages of our prayer life, we think, hey, I really know what I’m doing, this all feels really good.

But then as we all know, all of us who have committed ourselves to a life of prayer, the desolation comes, and the wind and the storms, and our garden won’t grow and our garden won’t yield unless the weather brings the rain or the sun we need, and all we can do is wait.

And even on the rainy days there’s the lovely sound of the rain, and the bright green of the moss on the trees, and the boy and the girl laughing and running as they share an umbrella, and they’re so young, and new, and full of life.

And soon it will be spring, and the crocuses will be coming up, miraculously–every year they come up again–and the bright yellow daffodils, and the cherry trees blossoming, and all the earth is growing, and all the earth is dying, and all praise for the miracle of life itself, the water always becoming wine, the crucifixion always leading to the resurrection, our dying-to-self always leading to a new self, rising, coming free, through grace, through love, through this man who walked the earth and is walking it still, in us and through us and all around us.

 

 

 

 

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When Shy Ran Away

I was standing on the hill

talking with a woman who had stopped

to say how much she loved

my book.  A runner, young and lithe,

in a lithe group of runners,

 

bouncy, neoprened,

and Shy, who had been nosing

in the brambles on the side of the road,

was frightened, I think.

We’d only had him a week.

 

The woman was pressing

her hands together in an attitude

of prayer, mock-bowing

but sincere, thanking me,

when over her shoulder I saw Shy

 

burst from the brambles

and shoot down the road, flat out,

ears flapping, faster than I thought

a little dog could run.

Could fly:  a small, black streak.

 

What I was wondering

in the hours I ran up and down

the trail and back and forth

on the road, scanning the scrubby

February forest, every fallen

 

branch a Yorkie mix,

was what might be

the nature of the revelation

in a moment like this,

What might it mean?

 

What does it mean

that Shy was waiting for me,

on the front porch,

trembling, bedraggled,

when I finally stumbled home?

 

 

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On Some Lines from St. Augustine

When the word has been conveyed to you

does not the sound seem to say

the word ought to grow and I should diminish?

 

The way in the forest the clearings

hold the morning mists.

 

The way on the pond the raindrops

fall one by one from the trees,

and each drop makes a circle,

and there are circles within those circles,

and all of the circles are widening

and widening and overlapping,

until the dark surface of the pond

is a pattern of overlapping circles,

bigger and smaller and smaller and bigger,

and all of them are moving,

and all of them are dying.

At their widest point they all disappear.

 

How I stand and watch this.

 

The sound of the voice has made itself heard,

and has gone away,

as though it were saying, my joy is complete.

           

    See Office of Readings for Advent, Liturgy of the Hours Volume I, p. 261

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Light When It Comes

Genesis, chapter 1

 

February is always a dark and difficult month for me, even though the days are getting longer.

But last week I was listening to a young colleague talking about her teaching, and she was so sincere and devoted, so intent, I could feel my heart lifting.

And then an older colleague started to talk, and I was moved again, by what she was saying, by her wisdom and compassion.

And then, a few days later, as I was walking out of class in a crowd of students, one of them reached out and patted me on the back.

Just that.  No words.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and he created the light, and the light shone in the darkness, and it’s still shining.  Creation didn’t just happen once and it didn’t just happen then.  It’s always happening, through Christ and his love, through the Spirit and its work, and however dark and chaotic our lives can seem, however dreary, we know that there is order and beauty, and meaning and power, and that the light is always shining, underneath.

 

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Shy

In a recent New Yorker essay, a review of a book about the voices we all hear in our heads, Jerome Groopman talks about the evolution of the idea in the Hebrew scriptures that the voice we hear within us is the voice of God:

At Mt. Sinai God’s voice, in midrash, was so overwhelming that only the first letter, aleph, was sounded.  But in later prophetic books the divine voice grows quieter.  Elijah, on Mt. Horeb, is addressed by God in what the King James Bible calls “a still small voice,” and which, in the original Hebrew is even more suggestive—literally “the sound of a slender silence.”  By the time we reach the Book of Esther, God’s voice is absent.

Not “the sound of silence”:  the “sound of a slender silence.”  A subtler silence still.

And trailing off, Groopman seems to be saying, disappearing altogether finally, as our faith disappears and we begin to doubt the voice we thought was God’s and ignore the voice we so loved and feared and turn instead to other voices, inside and outside us.

 

But I don’t know.

I’ve been reading a biography of Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit scientist and mystic, almost saintly, I think, in his kindness and his openness and his love of God and his love of life, who believed that the whole cosmos is bursting with grace, matter charged with spirit and always becoming spirit, so that the whole sum of material things becomes itself a sacrament, always and everywhere.

For Teilhard

the great mystery of Christianity is not exactly the appearance, but the transparence, of God in the universe.  Yes, Lord, not only the ray that strikes the surface, but ray that penetrates, not your Epiphany, Jesus, but your diaphany.

Diaphany:  revelation everywhere, in everything and in every moment.

Not shrinking the idea of miracle but expanding it, infinitely.

The silence of God arrived at in Esther not a sign of his absence but of his ever increasing presence.

Or an evolution, as Teilhard revered Evolution itself, the great movement of the universe from energy to matter to spirit over countless eons, into the cell, into the body, into the heart and into the mind and bursting out, evolving into something higher still.  We no longer need the voice.  We are the voice—and the listener, too.

 

The other day my newly-retired wife brought home a rescue dog, a one-year-old ten-pound cross between a Yorkie, a dachshund, and a squirrel abandoned in Bakersfield, California under a car and rescued and shipped to a shelter in Oregon and so timid and shaken and shy we named him Shy, called him what he is, though as he learns to trust Barb and trust me he is more and more coming out of himself, trotting behind us through the house, wagging his tale.  Scruffy black.  Bowlegged.

His bright, curious eyes.  His bushy, caramel eyebrows.

What has moved me is how the house has gentled since Shy has come.  When we approach him directly, from above, he cowers and hides.  So we sit on the carpet.  We let him come to us.  We speak in soft voices.  For a few days I’ve been quietly aware of the comfort and order and peace of the place where I live, the books and the music and the smell of coffee, and the trees outside the window, and how this might look through the eyes of this abused and abandoned little dog, what comfort we might give him.

This is all infinitely silly.

This scruffy little dog, with his scraggly, ratty tale.

He’s never barked.  He’s never made a sound, except the sound of the nails of his tiny, mismatched paws as he hurries across the kitchen floor.

 

We are in the living room, and we’re listening for God’s voice, but God doesn’t come in the earthquake, we told in the First Book of Kings, and God doesn’t come in the storm.  He comes in the still small voice, and not even there, but in the silence, in the slender silence.

The bounce of it.  The wag of it.

How it felt the first time Shy came into my lap.  Slowly.  First one paw, then another.

How it felt when I picked him up, and held him, and he put his scruffy, whiskery head on my shoulder.

 

 

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Proof

Proof

     in memory of  Dorothy Stein

 

A life like Dorothy’s is proof of the afterlife,

because it was a life full of joy and love and laughter,

with gardens and grandchildren and cooking

and the family growing and thriving and always coming

together again.  The Spirit bears witness with our Spirit,

St. Paul says, that we are children of God,

and so we know.  We feel God all around us and we feel God

in us and we feel God in a special way in a woman

like Dorothy, in her goodness and her kindness, and God is God.

He is stronger than death.  He exists beyond death.

We believe in the afterlife because we believe in this life.

We know that Dorothy is now in the presence of God

because God was always present in her.

Through her we have glimpsed who God is and who God

will be for us, too.  He is love, He is kindness,

He is all goodness forevermore, and no one is ever lost

or taken or beyond His love or beyond His reach.

 

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The Duty of Delight

The other day I was walking up the stairs and joking with a young colleague, and she said, laughing, “O, I was raised Catholic, I know all about guilt,” which is something I hear a lot and that always bothers me, and it bothered me then.

I don’t think faith is about guilt.  I think faith is about joy.

Of course, my colleague was joking, too, and her experience is her experience, but what’s funny about that moment was that I was feeling discouraged and down just then, lacking confidence, unsure, and I knew that as a Christian I am called to confidence and to courage, I am called to optimism, not in some naïve or simple sense but as a discipline, a choice, in the midst of all the complexities of things—that the voice I was hearing, of self-doubt and anxiety, is never the voice of God.

 

“I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete,” Jesus says in the Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John–not “so that you will feel guilt,” but “so that you will feel joy.”  Pope Francis didn’t write The Guilt of the Gospel, he wrote The Joy of the Gospel, and that’s a call, a pattern to conform to, a tool to use to interpret the shape of our lives even when we can’t quite see the whole design.  It’s the pattern of joy:  not just crucifixion, but resurrection, always, the two in relation.

“I was thinking,” Dorothy Day writes in her journal, “how as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on earth, the suffering, the Cross.  And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy which goes with loving.”

Me, too, as I grow older.  And for me, too, this is my duty as I get older, as a Christian, as a Catholic, what Day calls here “the Duty of Delight.”

 

And besides, there’s something to be said for guilt.  We all should feel guiltier and more often, because some things are wrong and some things are right, and though we can hide from this or fool ourselves about this or cover this up, and we do, all the time, it’s simply true that we’re flawed and finite and limited people, and that all our problems and mistakes and injustices and social problems come from assuming that we’re right and special and privileged, and until we give that up, let all that pride and greed and gluttony go, we can’t be happy and we can’t be free.

Guilt, if it’s authentic, if it’s real guilt, is always temporary.  It’s the first stage in liberation.  It’s the trigger.  It’s the jumping off the cliff, and then we fall, and fly.  Float.  Blessed are the poor in spirit, Jesus says, blessed are the humble, not forever guilty are they, forever miserable are they, because there is a sequence here, a blessed sequence–because first we humble ourselves, or admit we’re already humble and always have been and have just been deceiving ourselves, and then suddenly our burden lightens and we realize we’re loved, we are forgiven, we can just live in the world, in reality, free and easy and at home along with everyone else who is intimately and infinitely loved.

Permanent guilt is unsuccessful guilt.  Interrupted guilt.

We don’t go to confession to be condemned but to be forgiven.  We go for mercy.  All we have to do is admit our need for grace, and it’s there, pouring down on us.

 

As it was on the stairs in that little moment of persecution, that tiny, easy, merely social persecution—blessed are you when you are persecuted, Jesus always says—though this wasn’t really a persecution anyway, not really, though it stung. because after the sting I was able through grace to look inside me for just a split second and glimpse my pride and my need to be seen and understood a certain way, to see my usual patterns of self-centeredness, and at just that moment my anger and my pride dissolved, they faded, or they were there but I was distant from them, they didn’t matter, there were just there, and I laughed some more and looked up at the January sun streaming through the window, and the students were flowing up the stairs all around us to their classes, and I had my work to do that day, and I was able to see this new young colleague as the smart, dedicated, committed young woman she is, with her life and career all before her, loved by God though she doesn’t claim to believe in him anymore.  Her doubt doesn’t matter.  None of these things matter.  All is well.  Reality is lovely, as Anthony De Mello says.  Absolutely lovely.

 

 

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My Lack of Recollection

from the Detailed Rules for Monks by Saint Basil the Great

“To confess my personal feelings, when I reflect on all these blessings I am overcome by a kind of dread and numbness at the very possibility of ceasing to love God and of bringing shame upon Christ because of my lack of recollection and my preoccupation with trivialities.”

 

January, the sun finally out

after much rain.

Driving through the light

while a Haydn violin concerto is playing

and I’m eating the rest

of my blueberry sour cream muffin.

Tears in my eyes it tastes so good.

Snow very white on Mary’s Peak

and the dark trees leading up to it.

A freshness to things.

Everything clean and bright.

Blue, blue sky.

 

 

 

 

 

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A Ritual to Read to Each Other

 

a poem by William Stafford

      (for the Inauguration )

 

If you don’t know the kind of person I am

and I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

 

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

 

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,

but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

 

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

 

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 

 

 

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