Chris Anderson's Blog, page 31

The Astronaut’s Confession

for Gene Cernan, January 16, 2017

 

The truth is I didn’t get along with the other guys.

I admired them in a way, and they were nice enough,

in the simulators and on the missions.  But secretly,

they bored me.  Do you know, my commander turned

away when I poured wine on the moon?  We had

just landed, and I said the Our Father and put the host

on my tongue.  When I poured the little bottle of wine

it flowed like a thick, red syrup–that slowly–but

the commander wasn’t looking.  I think he was nervous.

There was a pause, then we flipped more switches.

 

*

 

The LEM looked so small when I turned back

from a distance.  I had driven the rover onto the rim

of a crater about five miles away, and from there

the lander looked like a spindly toy against

the Taurus Mountains.  I was working then, just like

anyone else.  I had my tools.  I took sips of water.

My little house was waiting for me, down in the valley.

The hummocks and hills looked so soft and bright

I longed to lie down in their dust and never get up.

 

*

 

I left a lot of things on the moon.  I left a gold ring.

I left my book.  I left a picture of Mom and Dad

with me and Tim and Ted outside our church

at my confirmation.  I remember how red Mom’s dress

looked against the gray, how suddenly I knew color

is a miracle.  That’s when I started writing in the dust,

like at a beach when you’re marooned, but I was just

writing words.  I wrote “God?” in big letters.  I wrote

a “yes” and a “no.”  I wrote the name of my daughter.

I wrote a lot of words on the moon, words that no one

will ever know or see.  They’re all still up there.

 

      from The Next Thing Always Belongs (Airlie Press, 2011)

 

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Hidden in Activity

The Baptism of the Lord:  Luke 1: 19:28

 

Last week I took a walk in the woods, and as I was walking past Cronemiller Lake a woman stopped and asked me, “did you see the eagle?”  An eagle?  No.  Then she pointed to the other side of the lake, where an eagle was preening its feathers in a fir tree, a bald eagle, with its snowy white head and dark wings, big as life.

And I would have missed it.  I was walking too fast, head down, distracted and preoccupied.

 

I think of the crèches in Italy, the nativity scenes, which are much more elaborate than ours, not just stables but whole villages, with houses and shops and streets so crowded with women doing the washing and children playing and shopkeepers selling their wares we don’t see Mary and Joseph at first.  They’re off in a corner, two little angels hanging on wires above them.

The baby in a manger, almost covered with straw.

The Italians call these presipi, and what they represent is a profound insight into the nature of the Incarnation:  that when God came into the world he came “hidden in activity,” as he is always hidden in activity.

 

The gospel today describes a moment when Christ isn’t hidden at all—he is revealed, he is glorious, he is the light made known to the nations—and John the Baptist sees him, he beholds him.  This is part of the greatness of John the Baptist, his capacity to see.  But even here John says, twice, that he “did not know him” until now, and in the passage right before this he tells the Levites and the Pharisees that “there is one among you do not recognize”—a seemingly ordinary man, a carpenter’s son, doing his work and living his life.  Sweeping the floor.  Weeding the garden.  In Nazareth.  In this ordinary little town.   This is what the tradition calls the “Hidden Life” of the Jesus, the thirty years he spent before he entered into his public ministry.

And even when he does begin to preach and to teach, out in the open, Jesus is misunderstood and persecuted and finally crucified—his divinity entirely hidden in the death of his body.  Think of everything else that was happening in Jerusalem and in the Holy Land and everywhere else, all the ordinary work being done, the babies being born, the children playing, while in that one dusty corner of the world a man was hanging on a cross, drawing his last breath.

 

A thousand children die of malaria every day in the world, every day, now, while we are drinking our lattes and doing our email.

 

Even after the Resurrection Jesus is hidden.  He appears and then he vanishes.  His closest friends don’t recognize him at first.

The Gospel of John is always symbolized by the eagle—the eagle is the icon of John the Evangelist—because it’s the grandest gospel, the surest.  Yet John, too, continually points to the humanity of Our Lord.  Jesus eats, he weeps, he walks by the lake, and the true meaning of who he is is never fully revealed, because it can’t be.

 

This is the great grace of our lives, that God is hidden in our own activity.  And yet this is also our greatest challenge.

I’ve just finished reading the autobiography of the Carmelite sister Ruth Burrows, this powerful spiritual writer I often quote from.  It’s the story of how she felt the call to the cloistered life when she was a girl but then experienced great tedium and distractedness and dryness once she entered, not just at first but throughout her life in the monastery even until now, into her eighties.  The cloisters were cold.  The landscape was drab.  The sisters were often petty and vindictive.  For years Burrows longed for a better place, a true Carmelite cloister, until one day she realized:  no.  This is it.

Here there was indeed nothing—no security, no glory, nothing to give satisfaction.  I had vowed poverty and I had it.  I had declared myself ready to depend on God alone and he had taken me at my word. This was religious life in the raw, so to speak, and this was the essence of Carmel.  Oh, if I had entered what I happily dreamed of as a perfect Carmel, with its fine tradition, its cloisters, I would have sought security in those externals, assumed the image of the Carmelite and escaped from God’s working in me.  There had been no mistake; he had not let me down; this was the set up I needed, where I would be open to him. 

We keep forgetting that when God came into the world as an ordinary man he was calling us to be ordinary.  Because God is hidden in the world we have to face the world, and the suffering in the world, and our own limitations.  We don’t rise above.  We enter in.

 

And this is what John the Baptist knows and what he most heroically represents, this radical surrender to what he glimpses now, along the river, but will never see again in this life, this greatness beyond him, this person so much more than he can ever be, this one whose sandals he is not worthy to tie.  John isn’t seeking glory.  He knows what we are told in Colossians, that we must die and be “hidden” ourselves “in Christ,” hidden in the one who is himself hidden and must be hidden.  “Divine love meets us in this real world and nowhere else,” Burrows says in The Essence of Prayer: 

in this moment; in this circumstance painful and humiliating though it may be; in this person, in the daily unexciting round of seeming trivialities which afford no measure of self-glorification. Divine love meets us here in our flawed, suffering, human condition, and nowhere else.

I’ve quoted this passage many times before, and now, after reading Burrows’s autobiography, I think I understand it a little better.

 

This week, when we encounter something painful or humiliating or unexciting, let us give thanks.  This week, when we find ourselves longing for something perfect and “Holy” and above it all, and even more when we think we’ve found it, when we think we possess it, we’ve arrived, let us stop, let us think again.

For this is the great grace of our lives, and the great spiritual task:  to see the Lord in the chaos and in the jumble.  The baby in the manger.  The man walking towards us.  The eagle perched in the tree, and the tree, too, when the eagle flies away, and the dark water, and the gray skies–this, this reality, where Christ is so hidden he is everywhere revealed, all around us.

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The God Question

At the heart of all temptations is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives.  Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation, refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion—that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.  Moral posturing is part and parcel of this temptation.  It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into the work of actually making the world a better place.  It claims, moreover, to speak for true realism:  what’s real is what is right there in front of us—power and bread.  By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one really needs.  God is the issue:  is he real, reality itself, or isn’t he?  Is he good or do we have to invent the good ourselves?  The God question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence.

This isn’t Pope Francis—it’s Pope Benedict—and it’s terrific; it’s terribly important.

God is the issue.  Is he real, or isn’t he?

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Any Increase We Can Bring

Every day water and matter and light come together and become food.

Every day we take food into our bodies and it becomes energy.  It becomes thought and language and action.

Every day we turn fabric into clothes and trees into buildings and sounds into songs.

Every day morning becomes afternoon and afternoon becomes evening.

And this is all miracle.  This is all the work of God.

 

I know we all feel small and insignificant.  I know we all feel invisible.

But what could be more ordinary than wedding feast?  What could be more ordinary than sitting together and drinking wine?  Most of the people at the wedding in Cana, in the second chapter in John, don’t know a miracle has occurred at all.

But it has.  The wine has run out, and Mary has spoken, and Jesus has turned the great jars of water into great jars of wine, and only the servants know he has, and they don’t understand, and this is always going on, this is always happening, in some profound and invisible way, and it can happen through us.

 

The other day I saw a man go up to another man and pay him a compliment.  He put his hand on the man’s shoulder and spoke a kind word to him, and I saw the man’s face light up, transform, and I felt the air in that room change, I felt some increase occur inside of all of us.

Just a look.  A word.

“Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things,” says Chardin, “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.”

 

Of course the bread and the wine become the Body and Blood.  Everything does, and always has done, and so do we.  In the Eucharist we become Eucharist, we become what we receive, every one of us, you no less than me, and if we believe this and if we act on this, everything changes, in us and around us.

This is of infinite importance.  On this transformation within us—on this conversion—everything in the universe depends.

 

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All the Branches

for Barb

 

In spring we wait

for the first yellow flash

of a warbler’s wing.

 

In fall we wait

for the first yellow

turn of a leaf.

 

But the birds, of course,

are hiding, darting

in and out of the trees,

 

while now the leaves

they all have fallen

and all the gray and

 

reaching branches

can be seen.

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Miracles: An Appreciation of Yehuda Amichai

I can’t get over this beautiful poem by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, or many, many of his poems.

Amichai died in 2000 but his collected poems have just come out this year, edited by Robert Alter and translated by Alter and many others.

That’s part of what I like about Amichai’s poetry, how though something is lost in translation, of course, something is gained, too, a strangeness and a directness, a wonderful awkwardness almost, as in, too, the English translations of the Polish of Czeslaw Milosz.

I love the way Amichai writes about the shadows of flowers against a wall or the smell of sage or a lovely woman in the midst of all the great conflicts and violence and complicated politics of Israel, acknowledging the large but focusing on the human and small, where we can identify with him, and enter in, and learn to see our own details and facts.

I love the way his lines seem so straightforward, and are, and yet at the same time shift and open up and take us somewhere we didn’t expect and don’t quite understand.

And in this particular poem, I love the idea of it, the idea of what a miracle is.

Just lovely.  And profound.

 

Miracles

 

From a distance everything looks like a miracle

but up close even a miracle doesn’t look like that.

Even someone who crossed the Red Sea when it split

saw only the sweating back

of the man in front of him

and the swaying of his big thighs,

or at best, in a hasty glance to one side,

fish in a riot of colors inside the wall of water,

as in a marine observatory behind panels of glass.

 

The real miracles happen at the next table

of a restaurant in Albuquerque:

two women sat there, one with a diagonal

zipper, altogether lovely,

and the other said, “I kept it together

and didn’t cry.”

And after in the red corridors

of the foreign hotel I saw

boys and girls who held in their arms

 

tiny children born of them,

and they held

sweet little dolls.

                                    translated by Robert Alter

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Learning How to Lose

The Feast of St. Stephen

Acts 6:8-7:59; Matthew 10:17-22

It can be hard for us as believers at Christmas when our children come home or our friends come over and they don’t believe anymore.  They don’t “rise up against us” and have us put to death but sometimes they argue or criticize, and their indifference can be hard for us, too, a kind of shadow over our holidays.  There’s always some teeth-grinding when families gather, on all sides, and that’s not easy.

And arguing back doesn’t seem to do much good, no matter how eloquent we are.  St. Stephen, the first deacon and the first martyr, is full of “wisdom and the spirit” in his debates, but that’s obviously not enough–or he would just be the first deacon, not a martyr at all.  His stoning is only a more extreme version of our own failures as apologists.

Although unlike St. Stephen we usually don’t accept our failures.  They bother us.  They can undermine our faith and our confidence and our good will when really we should expect to fail, we shouldn’t be surprised, we should realize:  this is it, this is the way it is.   Do not depend on the hope of results, Thomas Merton writes, in “Letter to a Young (or Old) Activist”:

When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself.

This is what St. Stephen does.  He doesn’t just concentrate on the truth of the work itself but he sees that truth, in the heavens, the “Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”  He is focused on God, not on what the world thinks of him, and so he has the confidence to suffer not just rejection but even death.

You are probably striving to build an identity in your work [Merton continues].  You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation.  That is not the right use of your work.  All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. . . . The real hope is no in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

     So let’s not be surprised or depressed when our children don’t come to mass with us or our friends make fun of us or we can’t seem to convince the people we love of the great coherence and beauty of our faith.  This is par for the course.  This is the way it is and always has been and our role is to keep our eyes fixed on God, on the reality of God’s presence all around us, in the sky and on the ground and everywhere, whether or not anyone else can see this and feel this.  It’s OK.  It’s not up to us.  It’s not about us.  To be a deacon is to put ourselves second, in relation to something and someone always greater, and our challenge isn’t to convince anyone else of this but to convince ourselves, to battle our own egos and our own pride and our need to look good and be right.  And since we can never win this battle on our own, since we can never on our own give up our need to succeed, to win, let us pray again and again to be filled with the Spirit, as St. Stephen is.  Let us pray for grace, for ourselves and for our children and for our all our friends and families.  For we are only conduits.  We are only vessels.  The work is not ours, it’s God’s, and He knows what he’s doing.

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Why We Celebrate Christmas

When Maggie was three days old we brought her home from the hospital.  I walked back into the living room, and there she was on the couch, still swaddled in the hospital blanket, and she was so perfect and so beautiful that I walked over and kneeled.  I kneeled because I wanted to be close to her, to put my face next to hers, and that’s why we kneel at Christmas, too—why we celebrate Christmas.

Christ is all our daughters and all our sons.  Christ is everything beautiful and perfect, and she’s sleeping on the couch.  He is lying in the manger.  All we should want is to be close to him.  All we should ever want is to kneel and put our face close to his.

There is something greater and more important and more beautiful than who we are alone.  There is the body; there is sadness; there is death.  There are other people, and history, and tradition—all these things we didn’t create.  There is joy beyond measure.

 

adapted from my

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

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Christmas Letter

It’s the morning of Christmas Eve and I’m painting the bathroom.

I just started.  I’m trying to figure out how to maneuver in there

with the paint and the ladder and the trays.  How best to reach the ceiling.

Foggy outside, but the sun coming through.  This is the morning

 

we decided to put our cat down, too, and I’ve been thinking about that

as I soak the roller and begin to smooth the paint on the wall.

She was a little squirrel of a cat, dust-bunny gray, furtive and unmannered,

and I’m checking in with myself to see if maybe we’ve behaved callously

 

in taking her to the vet this morning, Christmas Eve of all days,

when the Child was born in a manger among the cows and the sheep,

with their sweet, warm breath.  But it feels right to me, though sad.

This power we all have, of life and death.  These choices we all make.

 

When I look back on the year I realize that more and more the events

of my life are interior.  Nothing much seems to happen.  But it does.

In secret.  In silence.  All that is asked of each of us is to wrestle in faith

with God and with whatever opposes us in the world, Guardini says.

 

In the Christmas letter I got the other day from my old debate partner

in high school, someone I always looked up to and used to think of

as very smart, as a genius, he misspells the word empirical, talking about

his cats and dogs and grandkids—he spells it with an “I”—impirical—

 

and that really surprises me and bothers me, though of course

empirical is a good word for talking about the realism we need to have

as we grow older, the facing of facts, the giving up of illusions,

and in any event forgiveness is the most important thing of all,

compassion, first towards ourselves, and then towards others—

towards all living things, all that moves and breathes and has its being.

And I rub and I roll, and the roller squeaks, and the walls smooth out,

a greenish-blue this time, clean and bright for another few years.

 

How solemn painting is, how formal:  the careful preparations,

the spreading of cloths, the small, deliberate movements of our hands.

There’s a kind of quiet at the center.  A kind of tenderness.

Things have been stripped away.  Things are about to change.

 

published in The Apple Valley Review, Fall 2016

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The Blind Boy, on the Solstice

A blind boy whose father dies finds no comfort

in a picture of him standing by the roses.

The musk, maybe, of an old sweater he used to wear,

but that will fade.  If only the boy had saved

a few of the voicemails his father was always leaving,

all the times and places they would meet.

We never know what we really need.  Here, let me

take you down to the banks of the swollen river.

Let me take you to where the river has begun to flood.

Every winter at the solstice we walk among

the muddy leaves.  Every winter at the solstice we listen

for the high thin notes of the kinglets foraging

in the upper branches of the oak, with the chickadees, too,

and the yellow-rumped warblers:  tsee tsee tsee.  

Their quick, sweet, tumbling chatter.  I will teach you

what to listen for.  You can count on this:  the solstice

always comes and the kinglets always fuss,

high in the bare trees, and every winter the river floods,

it thickens and swells and increases in volume

and increases in force, sweeping up branches and trunks

and carrying them along.  Let me try to describe it.

The river is rising now.  It’s beginning to race.  It’s thick

and brown and wide.  If we wanted to keep up

we’d have to run, faster than we’ve ever run before.

 

published in Ascent Aspirations, December 2016

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