Chris Anderson's Blog, page 32

Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean (an Advent Homily)

Once upon a time there was an ocean

but now it’s a mountain range.

Something unstoppable set into motion,

nothing is different, but everything’s changed.

     Paul Simon

 

A dear friend dies.  Just like that.  I get a phone call and she’s gone.

My mother dies.  Just like that.  Before the paramedics even get there.  I get a phone call and she’s gone.

I’m in the locker room putting on my pants, and suddenly my back goes out.  The next thing I know I’m in emergency.

We think we’re in control but we’re not.  “We think our faith gives us security,” Anthony de Mello says, but it doesn’t.  “Faith is insecurity,” and by that I think he means that all this a mystery and we can’t pretend it isn’t.  “The unbeliever thinks he knows all about God,” Walter Kaspar says, “but the believer knows that he cannot provide himself with answers, and that the answer which God gives is a message about an abiding mystery.”

 

It’s almost as if the Church gets the readings wrong during Advent.  It’s supposed to be Christmas.  “If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming he would have stayed awake,” Jesus warns us in Matthew (24:37-44).  What?  It’s supposed to be cookies and cocoa and roaring fires, not thieves in the night and fires and floods and the end of the very world. But no.  For one thing, it’s Advent, not Christmas.  We have to delay our gratification.  For another, the whole meaning of the season of Advent and Christmas is keyed to the season in the real world outside us.  It’s keyed to winter.  It’s keyed to the bare trees and the cold air and the dying of the year.

Eating is fine, but not orgies.  A drink or two is fine, but not drunkenness.  Sex is a wonderful thing, it’s from God, but not promiscuity and lust.  And the culture every Christmas is trying to sell us orgies and drunkenness and lust, and it’s doing that, I think, because it fears what’s really out there.  It fears reality.  It’s trying to make us fall asleep, and we really have to resist that, in that sense we really have to “make no provision for the desires of the flesh,” as Paul puts it in Romans (13:14).

Before we can put on the armor of light, we have to face the darkness.

 

I loved the Nestucca Sanctuary, the Jesuit retreat center on the Oregon coast, the trees, the view of the sea, the smell of it and the feel of it, and I loved the man who directed the place, Andy Dufner, a Jesuit.  I spent many weekends there over the years, and once a whole month.  It was like my second home in a way.

And now Andy is dead, for many years, and the sanctuary is closed, locked up, and all the buildings burned to the ground for fire-fighting practice, and a metal gate bars the road in, where I used to walk and pray.

Nothing earthly remains, not people or places or even churches.  The very stones of the temple will be cast down, and that’s a blessing, as Andy knew and St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, knew, because it teaches us again and again what we most need to learn:  detachment.  Detachment from the things of the world, even the good things, detachment from anything that might distract us from God or substitute for God.

And with detachment, joy, and confidence, and a wonderful freedom.  Because nothing now can hurt us.  The stars are falling and the temples are crumbling and yet, the Lord says, as he always says, be not afraid.

Lord Jesus Christ, take all my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will.  All that I have and cherish, you have given me.  I surrender it all to be guided by your will.  Your grace and your love are wealth enough for me.  Give me these, and I ask for nothing more.

This is the great Jesuit prayer.  An astonishing prayer, really.  It asks for so much.  It asks for everything. Every time I pray it I think how h=impossible it is in a way.  And yet how incredible, how wonderful.

I pray for that kind of faith.

 

Or here’s how St. Ignatius puts in the beginning of his famous Spiritual Exercises, in what he calls the “Principle and Foundation”:

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.  All other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him fulfill this end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use these things to the extent that they will help him to attain this end.  Likewise, he must rid himself of them in so far as they prevent him from attaining it. Therefore we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in so far as it is left to the choice of our free will and is not forbidden.  Acting accordingly, for our part, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short one, and so in all things we should desire and choose only those things which will best help us attain the end for which we are created.

And so the passing away of things doesn’t matter.  Death doesn’t matter.  Or it does:  it’s part of God’s infinite grace.  It prepares us.  It helps us towards the final dissolution, the letting go we could never achieve on our own.

 

This is the world into which Jesus was born.  In a stable.  in the darkness.  And we can’t really see him if we’re too busy making merry.  in the midst of all the city lights, we can’t see the stars.  We really have to tone ourselves, quiet ourselves, limit ourselves, if we are to hear the cries of that little child.  If we are even to find him.

In a stable.  In the darkness.

This is the sudden, unbelievable change, the thing we never expected, this birth into darkness, into silence, and we’re going to miss it entirely if we don’t stop, and wait, and look out the window, at the bare trees and the snowy ground.

At this dying world, this frozen world, this world that one day, unbelievably, will turn into spring.

 

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A Story in the Desert

Clark Gable is telling Marilyn Monroe a story as he drives her through the desert in a big, white station wagon, 1961.

This is in The Misfits, the last movie either ever made.

They both died not long after, Marilyn face down on her bed, after swallowing a bottle of pills.

 

Gable is a cowboy in the movie, an aging, crinkly cowboy, with a cocked hat and a look in his eye.  One hand on the wheel.

Everything is black and white.

 

“A city boy sees a country boy rocking on his porch.”

A sideways glance, at Marilyn.

“Can you tell me how to get back to town?

Nope.

     Can you tell me how to get to a train?

Nope.

Can you tell me how to get to a road?

Nope.

You sure don’t know much, do you?

Nope.  But I ain’t lost.”

 

And Marilyn laughs a little.  Nervously.  Uncertain.  She is glowing like a pearl.  She is luminous.  She is wearing a scooped black dress with skinny straps that keep falling from her wondrous, blurry shoulders, but you don’t want to make love to her.  It’s not like that.

There’s something about her mouth, a softness, an indistinctness.  She is gradually coming apart, she is slowly disappearing, and somehow you know this.

 

Outside the windows the desert keeps going by.  The rocks and hills.  The bare, dry earth.

Beyond the ridge the testing grounds, smooth and bright as glass.

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A Question for the Stream

The winter rains have swelled the stream

and now a river roars beneath us, down

 

in the ravine where we never go,

surging and rushing through the trees.

 

But how can I let my heart leap up,

how can I love you, as I do,

 

when soon I know the rains will pass

and the waters cease to flow?

 

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The Little Bridge

December 11, 2016

Third Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 35:1-6, 10; Letter of James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

 

One of the good things about prayer is how boring it sometimes is.

Sometimes I feel joy when I pray, sometimes I feel the presence of God, but a lot of the time when I wake up in the morning and do the Liturgy of the Hours, I’m cranky and preoccupied and nothing seems to be happening.  I’m just going through the motions.

Yes.

One of the good things about mass is how boring it sometimes is.  Sometimes I feel the presence of God, sometimes something touches me, but usually my back hurts, and I’m hungry, and I’m just counting the minutes until I can go home.

Yes.  That’s a good thing.

 

And then one morning I’m walking across a little bridge, and the trees on either side form a kind of tunnel, and I can smell the deep, rich smell of leaves.  It’s been raining hard, and the stream is swollen, the water is shooting through the gap, and for a moment it’s as if I’m remembering something really beautiful and really important but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

 

“God is always a surprise,” Pope Francis says.  “You never know where and how you will find him.  You are not setting the time and place of the encounter with him.  You must, therefore, discern the encounter.”

Weather is the perfect metaphor for this, its unpredictability, the fact that’s it’s beyond our control, as in the Letter of James today.  “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.”  This is the metaphor, too, in the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, that faith is like a garden.  We prepare the soil, and we go to the well and bring up the water, but in the end we have to wait for the rain, and the rain is beyond us.  We can’t make it come.

God is the rain.  Grace is the rain.

 

And so boredom is a good thing, even desolation is a good thing, because it shows us our need.  It shows us that we’re not in charge, however much we pray and no matter how good we try to be.

It’s a kind of proof in a way.  If we were just making all this up, we’d be doing it all the time.  We’d be making ourselves feel good every minute.  But we can’t.

The joy must be coming from somewhere else, and it is.  It’s coming from God.

 

This is why we pray, and this is why we come to mass, to remember:  to remember the moments of light, which are subtle and fleeting and easy to doubt; and even more, to remember that we didn’t make them happen.

Do this in memory of me, Jesus tells us.

When we saw someone smile.  When we heard a song.  When we prayed the rosary or shook someone’s hand or read a line in a book.  God is all around us, everywhere, in all the small things.

And at mass, too, of course.  In the Eucharist.  In all of us here, together.

This is the meaning of the Immaculate Conception, which we celebrated a few days ago.   The Christmas commercials keep telling us that if only we buy this or bake this or click on this, we can feel joy for sure, on the spot.  But as Pope Pius IX wrote in 1854, when he formally announced the dogma, “Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by the singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Savior of the human race, preserved free from the stain of original sin.”

Mary isn’t the source of grace.  Jesus is.  She was made sinless before she had any chance to earn it, before she was even conscious at all, and Christ gives himself to us, too, freely, as gift, even when we’re not paying attention, even when we turn away.  Mary was the receiver, as we can be, she was the conduit, as we can be—John the Baptist was the receiver, the pointer, as we can be–however stained and sinful we are.

 

This is the paradox.  This is the mystery.

Some of you may remember Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where about a year and a half ago a gunman walked through the door and killed nine people sitting in a prayer circle.  They had been studying the Parable of the Sower.  A grandmother.  A little girl.

The pastor was one of those killed, and one Sunday a few months later the interim pastor, the Reverend Norvel Goff, climbed into the pulpit to preach.

“Many have asked,” Goff says, “‘How are you?  How is Mother Emanuel?’ My response is: ‘With your prayers and encouragement and with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.”

Of course they’re not happy.  How could they be happy?  But then Goff makes a distinction, the crucial distinction:  between what he calls “the banality of happiness” and the spiritual condition of “joy.”

Joy.  Not a feeling but a faith, that God is God and God is mercy and that in some way we can’t comprehend there is a justice and a love at work in the world stronger than our doubts and stronger than our fears and stronger than any evil within us or outside us.

“Even in the midst of trials and tribulations,” the Reverend Goff proclaimed that Sunday, “we still have joy.”

 

In the darkness of Advent we hope for the light, and this, too, is why we come to mass and why we pray, not just to remember but to hope, and to hope in faith and in confidence that the light we long for will come and in fact is already here. “He is coming who is everywhere present,” says an ancient Church Father.  This is the paradox, this is the mystery, for no corner of our lives is without his tenderness and without his presence, no corner of the universe is without his saving energy and his saving love, and it’s only we who need to turn towards it, we who need to open our hearts and open our eyes.

And the rain will come and the streams will swell and the joy will rise in us, too, and even the darkness is grace, even the dying of the leaves.  The Lord is here, and “the land exults.”  The Lord is here, and we are “crowned with everlasting joy.”

 

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Andy and Opie

Opie accidentally killed a mother bird with his slingshot

and Andy made him take care of the baby birds, feeding

them worms with tweezers.  At the end the chicks

were all grown up and Andy was standing on the porch

in his crisp, khaki uniform looking masculine and wise

the way he always did, sort of stern and compassionate

at the same time, and Opie realized he had to free the birds

from the cage he was keeping them in.  He had to let them go.

 

You could see little Ron Howard’s blonde eye lashes

as he bravely lowered his head.  He must have been five,

with those little boy shoulders all you want to do is squeeze.

 

That day on campus these big spaces had been opening up

before me.  The halls were empty, nobody was around,

and this void kept yawning beneath my feet,

these long hours of silence when I felt like the speakers

in the Psalms when they talk about their spirits fainting

and the enemy crushing them to the ground.  I didn’t know

what to do except just sit there until it was time to go home.

 

So I was ready for the way the show ended, though

I knew of course that this wasn’t really Mayberry and Andy

wasn’t really Opie’s father.  But I was ready and grateful.

 

The cage sure seems empty, Opie said, when the birds had flown.

Yes, it does, Andy said.  But my, don’t the trees seem full.

 

Then the camera pulled up and away and we were in

the tree tops, and though there weren’t any birds there really,

there was a soundtrack of some birds chirping and bubbling

and singing, and even after Andy put his arm around Opie

and they walked back into the house, I kept loving them

and thinking of my own sons when they were that age

and of my father, how sometimes I imagined him

in Andy’s uniform, with that crease in the trousers–

how Andy never wore a gun, even when he should have.

 

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Love is the Fire

December 4, 2016

Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72; Romans 15:4-9; Matthew 3:1-12

 

“Brothers and sisters, “St. Paul says to the Romans, “whatever was written previously was written for our instruction, that by endurance and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

Where can we turn for hope in this moment?  Where can we find encouragement and the strength to endure?  Where we’ve always been able to find it:  in the scriptures, and today, in these particular scriptures.

 

First of all, the gospel tells us, we have to realize that we are not Jesus Christ.

It’s no accident that a lot of crazy people think they are, because deep down we all do.  We think we’re special, that the world revolves around us, or should, and what’s so powerful about John the Baptist is that he knows better.  He knows that one far more powerful is coming and that all he can do is serve him.

We don’t earn the grace and the light that sometimes come to us.  They’re gift.  They have nothing to do with our piety or our purity, and it’s a good thing.  Deep down in all of us there is darkness and sin, there is pride and grasping, and selfishness, and fear, and until we admit that we can never be free.  Only Christ can save us.

This is what John the Baptist knows and what he represents.

 

So humility, that’s the first thing, and it leads immediately to the next thing:  compassion.  When we realize our own poverty we become aware of the poverty of others, and their need, and our obligation to this need.  “For the Lord shall rescue the poor when they cry out,” as the Psalmist says, “and the afflicted when they have no one to help them”–except that if we’re following Christ, there is someone to help them.  Us.  You and me.   It’s the unassailable logic of the gospels.  “Welcome one another,” St. Paul says, “as Christ welcomed you.”

Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche communites, puts it this way.  “We all have to discover,” he says, “that there others like us who have gifts and needs; no one of us is the center of the world. We are a small but important part in our universe.  We all have a part to play.  We need one another.”  And so, to go back to Romans, we seek “harmony with one another.”  For Paul the battle was between the Jews and the Gentiles, and he’s trying to bring those people together at a level deeper than their differences.  So us, in our own time and place.  We can’t generalize about others, judge others, demonize others.

The wolf can’t be a guest of the lamb if it keeps acting like a wolf.  The leopard can’t lie down with the kid or the lion with the calf if the lion and the leopard keep having the calves and the kids for lunch.  This is an ecological vision, a going back to the first chapters of Genesis, when the animals are all given the green plants for food and no one is eating anyone else, and it’s also a social vision.  “There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain,” the Lord says in Isaiah.

 

This is no abstraction.  It’s no utopia.  We can talk about what’s involved here very concretely, as Pope Francis did on All Saints Day this year, at a mass in Malmo Sweden, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, when he proposed six new Beatitudes for us in this new, twenty-first century world:

Blessed are those who remain faithful while enduring evils inflicted on them by others and forgive them from their heart.

Blessed are those who look into the eyes of the abandoned and marginalized and show them their closeness.

Blessed are those who see God in every person and strive to make others also discover him.

Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home.

Blessed are those who renounce their own comfort in order to help others.

Blessed are those who pray for full communion between Christians.

This isn’t soft.  This isn’t fuzzy.  This has all the clarity of the gospel, and all the challenge.  Because it is the gospel.

 

Think of John the Baptist in his camel hair clothes, in the desert, his food locusts and wild honey, as our Advent booklet encourages us to do this Sunday.  He is the figure of detachment, of frugality, someone who purged himself of anything that kept him from God, and so should we, maybe by going through our old clothes and other things this Advent and giving away what we don’t need–giving of our excess to those who don’t have enough.

And the booklet asks us, too, to reflect on what needs to be stripped away within us, what generalizations and stereotypes, what unjustified hatred, what lack of knowledge, what refusal to live with the complexities and the suffering of the way life really is, not just for us, but for others.  This can be the focus of our examination of conscience.  This can be how we prepare for reconciliation this Advent.

 

“Love means to learn to look at yourself, /the way one looks at distant things,” the Catholic poet Milosz says, “for you are only one thing among many.”

 

And third and finally, the readings are telling us today, we need to have the courage and the clarity to stand up against language and actions that are unjust and untrue and immoral, to call out what we know is wrong.  John the Baptist doesn’t mince words when he thunders against the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and what he’s thundering against is their treatment of others, their assumption of privilege, their oppression of the poor and the other.  We have to do that, too.  We have to be alert and watchful, as he was; we have to be brave as he was; we have to be clear as he was.

And since we none of us can do this on our own, without grace, since we none of us are Jesus Christ, we have to pray for his presence and pray for his courage and pray for his fire.  We have to keep coming back to the scriptures, because they never counsel us to turn our backs on the poor, never call us to conquest and arrogance and consumption and greed.  Never.

But not just the challenge, the encouragement.  The scriptures give us hope, too.

Through them we feel not just the Lord’s anger but his tenderness and his gentleness and his fierce, uncompromising love, for in the Lord Jesus Christ tenderness is the fire, gentleness is the sword, love is the call, again and again and again, now and forever.

 

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Getting Through Our Thick Skulls

Matthew 8:5-11

It used to be, as I’m sure you remember, that after the elevation of the host in the mass, we’d say “Lord, I’m not worthy to receive you, but only the say the word and I shall be healed.”  But now, since the language of the mass has been revised, we say exactly what the Centurion says in today’s reading, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” which is more concrete, and physical, and almost awkward, but in a good way.  We have to concentrate a little more when we say it.

The sequence is important:  first the elevation, then these lines, then communion, so that when we open our mouths and take in the host, Jesus is entering into the house of our bodies, coming under the roof of our heads.

And no, we are not worthy.  We’re not even paying attention usually, and what’s amazing is that Jesus keeps trying anyway.  He keeps trying to get through our thick skulls, past our preoccupations and anxieties and trivial distractions, our skepticism, our selfishness.  He offers himself again and again.

All we have to do is trust him.  All we have to do is respect his authority and submit to his authority, as the Centurion does today.  Open ourselves up.  And he will come.  He will enter into us.  He will become us.

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It’s Our Call to be Happy and at Peace

Luke 21:29-33

 

Yesterday after our Thanksgiving dinner we had a pretty heated discussion about the political situation in our country.  My nieces are very anxious and very upset, and they asked me, what as Christians should we do?

What I wanted to say was this:  whatever God is calling you to do.

It’s not a political question.  It’s a spiritual question.

 

“Consider the fig tree and all the other trees. When the buds burst open we see for ourselves that summer is near.”

 

It may be that the feelings my nieces are having are a sign that they need to become politically active in some way, or get involved in policy-making, or even protest, lawfully and peacefully.  We all have different charisms and we all have different talents, and if we look steadily and patiently inside us we will see the buds bursting forth.  We will be able to discern the will of God for us.

Most of us don’t have that political charism, or that activist charism.  I don’t.  And that’s fine.  Our responsibility is to be informed and to be alert and to vote, and to be prepared to resist injustice if the time comes, but then to follow where the Lord is leading us day to day, as best we can.

For all of us we have to make sure that we don’t get swept up in abstractions and swept up in generalizations.  We have to make sure that we don’t demonize people who disagree with us.  We have to make sure that we don’t end up believing that the outer life is more important than the inner life.  Because it isn’t.

Kindness makes a difference, and it’s the only thing that does.  Prayer makes a difference, and it’s the only thing that does.

 

And whatever we do, we have to make sure that we don’t get caught up in anxiety or despair.  There’s no need.  “Heaven and earth will pass away,” and that’s frightening, of course, and hard to endure when it happens, and it’s always happening.  Things are always changing. Things are always giving way.

But the words of Jesus will never pass away.

Jesus will never pass away.

Love will never die.  Tenderness will never die.  Grace will never stop welling up.

 

It’s OK to be happy.  It’s OK to be at peace.

In fact, it’s our call to be happy and and at peace.

 

Lord Jesus Christ, take all my freedom, my memory, my understanding and my will.  All that I have and cherish, you have given me.  I surrender it all to be guided by your will.  Your grace and your love are wealth enough for me.  Give me these, Lord, Jesus, and I ask for nothing more.

 

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Six New Beatitudes from Pope Francis

On All Saints Day this year, at a mass in Malmo Sweden, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Pope Francis proposed six new Beatitudes for us in this new, twenty-first century world–six new Beatitudes even more important, even more urgent, in the aftermath of our election.

Blessed are those who remain faithful while enduring evils inflicted on them by others and forgive them from their heart.

Blessed are those who look into the eyes of the abandoned and marginalized and show them their closeness.

Blessed are those who see God in every person and strive to make others also discover him.

Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home.

Blessed are those who renounce their own comfort in order to help others.

Blessed are those who pray for full communion between Christians.

Amen.

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Love is a Great Emptying Out

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

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

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

Who knows what this man was thinking or what he was seeing.  Maybe he wasn’t talking to his daughter, maybe he was talking to Death, but this is what he says, you bitch, and this is what his daughter does.   She rises from that chair, and she leans over that bed, and she whispers in her father’s ear:   Daddy, I love you.  And that night, he died.

Love is a great emptying out and losing.  Love is a rising from a chair.  It is a leaning over a bed.  It is a whisper in a room and a word in a room.

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

——-

*from my Light When It Comes:  Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in              Everything, just published this month by Eerdmans Publishing.

 

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