Chris Anderson's Blog, page 33

Lord, Please May I See

Monday, November 14, 2016

Luke 18:35-43

 

If Jesus walked by us, if he came down the road, what would we cry out to him?

Would we ask him to give us a better job or a bigger house?  Would we ask him to punish our neighbor?  Keep out the riff raff?

 

Or would we cry out at all?  Would we be too embarrassed to speak?  Would we be too busy?  Too skeptical?

Would we let him go by?

Because we do.  We let Jesus pass us every day.  Every minute.

 

No.  We should cry out with all our hearts, and we should cry out what the blind man cries out:  help me! Save me! Have mercy on me! We should be exactly that selfish, in that sense, too aware of our own sinfulness and our own need to judge anyone else.

 

And if Jesus stopped, as he always does, and if he turned to us, in particular, as he always does, and he asked us to say again what exactly we want him to do, to clarify our request, what would we say?

Do we really know what we want?  Do we really know what we need?

 

No we don’t, and we should.  Because what we need is what the blind man needs.  What we need is to see.

The blind man’s request should be our request, too:  to really see the world around us, and to face it, to see the darkness and see the light, to see what is really true, and not to change it, in a way, not to try to bend it to our will or make it over in our image, but to see it the way it really is, in all its stubborn complexity, in all its humanness.  To see the need beneath the masks, the human soul beneath the skin, and the goodness, and the hope.  To see ourselves for who we really are, no better than anyone else, loved by God, made in his image and likeness, infinitely precious in His eyes and yet small, limited, marred by sin, always, always in need of grace.

And to see Jesus in our midst, in the crowd, on the road and on every road, in us and in everyone, in every situation, every moment.

 

This is what we should ask for, and we ask for it now:  to see you Lord, in the Eucharist.  To you Lord, in our lives, this day.

 

O Lord and Master of our Lives, we pray with St. Ephrem, take from us the spirit of sloth, faintheartedness, lust for power and idle talk. 

     Give rather to your servants the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love.

    Yes, O Lord and King, grant that we may see our own faults, not to judge our brothers and sisters, for thou art blessed from all ages to all ages.

 

 

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A Reflection on the Election, the Morning After

Shocked.  Shaken.

 

What does the election mean for us as followers of Christ?

I think it means that we need to be even more committed to living in this country as Christians—as people of courage and compassion, confidence and creativity.

 

We need to commit ourselves to critical thinking and to understanding what the complicated facts really are, not just to reading our own news feeds, hearing what we want to hear.  For us as Christians memes are not enough, feelings are not enough, biases are not enough.  Some things are true, in the world, and some things are not, and as Christians we are called to think past the easy answers and available clichés –past all the posts and all the tweets and the endless advertising, the endless branding.

We need not to click but to think.  Not to swipe but to learn.

 

We need more than ever to commit ourselves to respect for everyone and for the dignity of everyone and for the Christ who lives in everyone, behind the masks and beneath the skin.  And we need to commit ourselves to seeing the skin, not to trying to be colorblind and gender-blind but to seeing all the others and all the strangers for who they really are, not who we assume them to be.  We need not to generalize, not to demonize, not to ignore.  Sexism is real and we need to face it.  To name it.  Racism is real and we need to face it.  To name it.

And classism is real and we need to face it, especially those of who we are educated and who tend to think we have the answers and who tend to think that people who are not educated and who don’t read and who drive up to the fast food windows and watch reality TV are ignorant and dumb and not worth listening to.  We have to listen to them, to what they fear, to their wisdom, to their complex and shifting realities.

 

We have to commit ourselves as Christians to civility—not to “political correctness,” which is just a label, just a way of not really having the conversation, but to a genuine civility which comes out of a genuine humility, the recognition that we are not the only people in the world and that others are not just other but beings made too in the image and likeness of God, beings too deserving of respect, loved just as much as we are by the God who loves and forgives us all.  Language matters.  What we say reflects and determines what we think and how we act, and we have to speak as Christ spoke and still speaks, as Jesus was himself and still is, not avoiding the hard truths, not refusing to say what needs to be said, but speaking with deep respect for women and deep respect for people of color and deep respect for the alien and the other and the immigrant and the foreign, and the poor, and the outcast—calling all to the table, not excluding, not building walls.

We can’t shy away from arguments.  We can’t refuse to engage in the debate.  But we have to engage in the debate with kindness and compassion and humility.  This isn’t niceness.  This is precision.  This is the hard, difficult work.

 

And we have to be confident.  We have to be joyous, and we can be.  We have to be of good cheer.  Because God is all in all and He is still all in all, even this morning, even in the aftermath of whatever it is this election means.  Though the mountains may fall God is God. Though the glaciers melt and the oceans turn to vinegar and the even the birds refuse to return in the spring, God is God and the hills rejoice and the trees clap their hands and even the waters of the flood are filled with his power and filled his love and filled with his great and subtle purposes.  And the waters have not entirely turned.  Ice remains.  There is still a sweetness, a dearest freshness deep down things.  There is still the moment, this moment, in whatever rain and whatever sun, and the next moment, and the next, and this is what we called to, this is who we are, this is the source of our confidence and joy, eternal life, here and now, eternal life in every breath we take.  We can abandon all hope because hope is not needed.  The future isn’t to be feared.  It’s already here.  We have all that we need.  We have Christ, we have each other, we have Christ in each other—in all our stubbornness and concreteness, despite all our bias and impulse and fear—and all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.

 

 

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Everything Exists

     In the last few years of her life, in her bitterness and her narrowing, my mother recorded dates and times and medications in a smaller and smaller hand until finally when we found the cache of her spiral notebooks, in a clear plastic storage bin, we couldn’t make out a lot what she was saying except now and then a temperature, or a recipe, or something else she hated about my dad.

But I have the bin now, and going through it last year I found a 4 x 6 lined recipe card, and on it, written in her longer, loopier style, the lyrics of “Amazing Grace.”

Amazing Grace! she wrote out, carefully, this woman who never went to church and was always so cynical about churches, who often reminded me that churches are full of hypocrites, as of course they are, who said to me more than once, talking of one old friend or another, “I wouldn’t cross the street to talk to that son of a bitch”—Amazing Grace, she wrote, how sweet the sound / that saved a wretch like me. / I once was lost but now I’m found / was blind, but now I see.

And then, rounded and neat and clear, the last few lines, which I’ve always found so beautiful, so haunting.  How precious did that grace appear / the hour I first believed–then this, this leap:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years

bright shining as the sun,

we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

than when we first begun.

“There” is heaven, is eternity, so vast and unmeasurable it overwhelms us, it terrifies us, but imagined here as full of light and music and the warmth of human voices.  As a single, never-ending moment.

 

Or Blake, in his great prophetic poem, Jerusalem. 

     All that is or was, he cries out, you and me and my mother, and the words she scribbled, and the letters of the words—they are not lost not lost nor vanished, even unto the end of time,

                    & every little act,

word, work, & wish, that has existed, all remaining still . . .

every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear,

          one hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away

 

 

 

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Come, My Soul

The night before the big parade,

three in the morning, I leap out of bed

and hop into my slick black pants,

grab my black wool jacket

with the snowy white bib, fumble

for my clarinet:  Come, my soul!  Let us

vault over all this earthly labyrinth!

 

But then I hear my father’s voice,

calling down the stairs:

 

“No, son!  No.  It’s not time.

You’re still asleep.

 

You’re still asleep.”

 

 

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Scales

All Hallow’s Eve

Philippians 2:1-4; Luke 14:12-14

I have a friend in Spokane, a really fine man, who has decided to become Catholic.  But the other night was the first night for RCIA, and my friend was tired from work, and he just didn’t feel like going, so he started making excuses in his mind.

But something told him to go, he said, and he forced himself, and right away, driving through the autumn leaves and the evening light, he started feeling his heart lift a little.  And then, when he got to church, there was a small group of people there, and the priest, and they prayed together and started talking, and by the end of the evening my friend was recharged, rejuvenated.

And on the way home something clicked.  My friend is a musician—he plays in a band—he’s a very good guitarist—and he thought, going to RCIA is like learning the scales and practicing and doing what you need to do to learn an instrument, and you do it so you can play, so you can make music.

And the Eucharist is the music.  The Eucharist is when you sing.

And you can’t do it alone.  You need other people.  You need the people at RCIA and all the people in the parish and you need all the people in the Church today throughout the world and you need all the writers and poets and theologians and you need all the saints who have ever lived, the whole cloud of witnesses.

Because what we believe as Catholics is that all the ties that bind us together in this life do not end with death but that the saints in heaven and all the angels pray for us and support us and keep us going when we don’t feel like doing it ourselves, and when we can’t.

And they’re playing, they’re singing, here on All Hallow’s Eve, all the angels and the choirs of angels, and all the saints, and one day we will join them, we will be singing and playing with them forever, and we can glimpse that now, through the Eucharist, we can feel that a little now, on the wet road through the autumn leaves, in the evening light.

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Tamale Pie

All day I’ve walking around saying tamale pie

and we’re not even having tamale pie.

Pip’s nose on my knee.

The thick, creamy swirls of his fur.

On this the whole day depends.

What’s the difference between praying

and sitting in a chair?

There is no difference.

What’s the difference between praying

and walking in the woods?

There is no difference.

The stars, of course.  Dreams.  Trees.

All the lovely variations.

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As of a Fragrant Aroma

Monday, October 24, 2016

   Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.  Ephesians 4:32-5:8

A few years ago I got to meet the writer and religious leader Parker Palmer.  He was in his late sixties then, I think, much taller than I expected, 6’ 6” it turns out, dressed in black pants and a dress shirt with an ordinary fleece vest.  And there was just something about him.  I could feel it, sense it, from the beginning.  It was in his person, almost in his body, in the way he carried himself, in the way he listened to me and looked at me.  It was kindness.  It was wisdom.   And as I got to spend more time with him and talk with him more I could see this kindness and wisdom more and more plainly, and not in anything he said exactly–he couldn’t have been more down-to-earth—but in that very down-earth-ness, in that very simplicity.

It was if he gave off a fragrant aroma–as if he had a kind of smell, or a kind of essence, or something, not literally but in some way I can’t put my finger on, and I’ve known other people like that, people I just want to be around, to be in the presence of, and I think that must be a little glimpse of what it was like to be in the presence of Christ, and what it’s still like, because when we’re in the presence of Christ we are in the presence of a person, not an idea, not a principle, but a person, who loves us and “gives himself over” to us.

I don’t mean to idealize Parker Palmer, who is just like anyone else, with faults and limitations, too, but to say that there was in him something that was Christ-like, just as there can be with anyone else, with any of us, if we avoid “obscenity” and “silly talk,” if we try not to act out of “impurity” or “greed.”

I remember Palmer asked me to take him back to his hotel room a couple of hours early, before his talk.  He wanted to have enough time to pray for an hour.  To quiet himself.

That’s what I was sensing in him:  that silence, that grounding in God.

“Empty arguments” don’t matter.  We can’t let them deceive us.  We can’t think we’re supposed to engage in them ourselves.  They’re beside the point.

How can we be a Christian in the world?  How can we be a Christian in a classroom or an office or lab at OSU?  In a store?  In our kitchen?

By smelling like this:  like a fragrant aroma—an aroma that comes from sacrifice—the sacrifice of our egos, the sacrifice of our false and distracting selves.

 

 

 

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This Morning in Heaven

I love walking on a cool summer morning before a hot summer day.

The soft air on my skin.  The light in the trees.

 

When in the Paradiso, in Canto III, Dante meets little Piccarda, he asks if she minds being on the lowest run of heaven, a lesser soul among the great figures of light.

She just smiles.

“In His will is our peace,” she says.

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This Morning in Purgatory

In Dante’s Purgatorio the proud are punished by bearing the huge stones of their pride on their backs.

They are bent over, groaning, and as they groan and shuffle along under the great weight of those stones they are praying the Our Father, over and over again, the simplest prayer of all, the first prayer we teach a child to pray.  Our Father who art in heaven . . .  Our Father who art in heaven . . .  Our Father who art in heaven.

I think of this on mornings like this one, when I’ve gotten up to pray, as I always do, and I sit here blank and empty and uninspired.   Anxious.  Distracted.

And I keep judging myself, interiorly:  I’m a bad pray-er.  I should be having visions and entering into this deep peace and feeling this compassion for everyone and I can’t and I don’t and it’s because I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough.

No.  And yes.

All I can do is the mechanical.  All I can do is rote.  All I can do is repeat myself.  Repeat myself.

Our Father, who art in heaven . . .  Our Father . . .   Our Father . . .

 

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This Morning in Hell

There are two famous sinners whirling around in a whirlwind in Dante’s Inferno.  Their names are Paolo and Francesca.  Francesca was married to Paolo’s brother, but she and Paolo had an affair, her husband caught them and killed them, and now they’re whirling around in hell together, on the level of the lustful.

And some readers over the years have condemned Dante for this, for putting lovers in hell.  They’ve thought Dante is opposed to love and to spontaneity and to people being happy.  But the thing about Francesca is that she only talks about herself.  She’s beautiful, but she only talks about her own feelings, and she never mentions Paolo by name.  She doesn’t even look at him, she’s looking away, and the eyes are key in Dante.

When in the beginning of the poem Dante’s beloved Beatrice looks down from heaven and sees he’s in trouble, wandering in the dark forest, she really sees him, really cares about him.  Her eyes are focused on him.  And then she sends the poet Virgil to guide Dante on this long journey and Virgil is always looking Dante in the eye and studying the expressions on his face, his eyes are always fixed on him, and that’s the image of what love really is.

Paolo and Francesca aren’t in hell because they loved each other.  They’re in hell because they didn’t.

Love serves, Ruth Burrows says.  When we lust, “we want to possess, dominate, devour, destroy,” she says, but “love serves,” and this is who Jesus is.  Jesus is always looking at others, always giving himself away.  “We are to love one another,” the letter of John says.  When one day it is revealed who we shall be, “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”  See him.  Be like him.

As Burrows puts it, “when God showed us his inmost nature, the way he is as God, he came to us in the form of a servant, and as I have done, so you must do also.”  It’s the nature of the human person.  To be human, we must be servants.

We must look away from ourselves and at the other.  We must see the other.  Fix our eyes on the other.

 

 

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