Chris Anderson's Blog, page 34

Smitty

Afternoons he’d poke his head through the gap the open window made.  His dark eyes snapped.  His spunky Van Dyke.  He was waiting for me to come home, he longed for me, he lived for me.  The white paint peeling from the window frame.  Our little house snug as a cabin on a boat.  550 square feet.  Beyond it the wide gray water of the lake where in the summer the voices clamored and the motors lugged and surged, and then the mountains, and the pass through the mountains.

That little dog still lives.  I tell you:  that little dog still lives.

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Smitty

Smitty

Afternoons he’d poke his head through the gap the open window made.  His dark eyes snapped.  His spunky Van Dyke.  He was waiting for me to come home, he longed for me, he lived for me.  The white paint peeling from the window frame.  Our little house snug as a cabin on a boat.  550 square feet.  Beyond it the wide gray water of the lake where in the summer the voices clamored and the motors lugged and surged, and then the mountains, and the pass through the mountains.

That little dog still lives.  I tell you:  that little dog still lives.

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Now This is Allegory

Galatians 4:22-5:1

In the paper yesterday there was a letter from a woman to an advice columnist about how she has lost her faith in “organized” religion and that whenever she reads the Bible she “just rolls her eyes,” I guess because the Bible seems so preposterous to her.

I think this woman just hasn’t learned how to read yet.

What’s interesting about the reading from Galatians today is that it gives us a glimpse into how the Biblical world itself read the Bible it produced—how Paul did, which is how the average educated person of his time read, and how we should read, too.  And that’s allegorically.  “Now this is allegory,” Paul says, in his discussion of the Sarah and Hagar in the Book of Genesis:  Sarah a symbol of freedom, Hagar a symbol of slavery.

To read allegorically just means to read beyond the obvious and read beyond the surface.  It’s too assume that the scriptures are full of rich and interesting images and that these images have something to say about our own lives here and now.  It’s not to believe in fantasies.  It’s not to believe anything that’s contrary to science—beyond science, yes, far greater than science, but not crazy or superstitious—though I think most people who regard the Bible as contrary to science have a pretty rudimentary understanding of what science is, too.

And this is how the Church teaches us to read Genesis and many parts of the Bible, as rich and complicated and interesting literary texts.  Even the gospels.  The gospels are a different kind of writing, a kind of writing based on history, but the Church tells us to read the gospels, too, with a sense of their complexity and sophistication–not that Jesus wasn’t an historical figure, not that the things that are described aren’t as real as anything has ever been real, not that they are merely symbolic as opposed to real.  Not at all.  But we are to read these stories as adults, not as children.  We are to read them as great works of literature, not as what we wrongly assume are children’s stories we can easily dismiss as silly or naïve.

And in this way we can come into contact with spiritual realities, not merely physical ones, with great beauties and great truths, with mysteries, historical and more than historical and joyous and grand, mysteries that should make us not roll our eyes but open them in wonder.

To read narrowly, in a way that makes us roll our eyes, is to read like Hagar in Paul’s interpretation, to read as slaves:  slaves to false notions of the real, to false notions of reading, to false notions of how language works and how God works.  To read with open eyes and open minds is to read like Sarah:  with freedom.

This is the Joy of the Gospel.  That it’s true.  Radically true.  Truer than anything has ever been true.

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Paul’s Anger

Galatians 3:1-5

 

I find Paul’s anger in Galatians oddly inspiring.

Partly because it shows that Paul was a real person, too, just like me and just like you, capable of anger and capable of frustration.  “O stupid Galatians!” he shouts.  They’re insisting on laws in a narrow sense, making the newly converted adhere to arbitrary standards, and it makes Paul furious, and rightly so.  “Are you so stupid?” he says again—the word “stupid” two times in one passage, in the sacred scriptures.

No, it’s the Spirit that matters, it’s faith that matters, it’s Jesus Christ, not any particular set of ritual practices and not any particular set of strictures or laws.  This is Paul’s battle as it’s our battle, too.

 

Or maybe I find this inspiring because sometimes my own life seems frustrating and full of conflict and I keep thinking there’s something wrong and of course, there is.  But it’s not as if becoming a Christian meant I’d be free of conflict forevermore, that everything would forever go right for me.  It certainly doesn’t for Paul:  he was shipwrecked and beaten and run out of town, and in the end, tradition says, he was beheaded, so in a way when we’re in the middle of own daily struggles we’re not on the wrong path and in any event we’re in good company.  We’re in Paul’s company.  We’re in the company of Jesus, who chose Paul and who chooses us.

 

There never was a Golden Age in the Church and there never will be because the body of the Church is composed of our bodies, our stubborn human bodies and our stubborn human minds, and we better just get used to that and get down to the day-to-day work, entering more deeply into the life of Christ and our life for Christ, which involves joy, too, of course, and elation, and grace upon grace, but which also unfolds in the real world, in our anger and in what makes us angry, in our blockheadedness and the blockheadedness of others, and all praise to Christ for not refusing to deal with us even so, for bothering to come and to stay with us, to stay with us always, to forgive us and to call us and to be there even even in our failings.

And because of this, we have to try to be there, too.  To be here.

Because Jesus never abandons us, we can’t abandon those who make us mad.  Because Jesus never ceases to offer us his love and his mercy, we must pray for the grace to offer our own love and our own mercy to the people around us, in our own stubborn community, in our own intricate and human time and our own intricate and human place.

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Praying for the Grace of Letting Go

We all have many possessions.

We have our pride, and our resentments,

and our anger, and our fears,

and most of all, our need to be in control.

 

Most of all, our constant effort to avoid

the daily trials we always have to face.

 

“Sell what you own,” Jesus says,

“then come, follow me,”

but when the rich man hears this,

he is shocked–his “face falls”–

and he walks away.  (Mark 10:17-27)

 

As I am always doing.

I am very rich in all these false ways,

and I don’t want to lay my burdens down.

 

I hear the gospel and my face falls, too,

again and again,

a hundred times a day,

and I walk away empty, and lonely, and sad.

 

O Lord, I pray for the grace of letting go.

I pray for the courage

to jump off the cliff.

I pray for the wisdom to stand before you.

Not to walk away.

 

Forgive me my false possessions,

and all my holding on,

and help me to lay aside

my opinions and my plans

and my great fear of dying

and to trust only in you.

 

Because I know it’s only then,

it’s only when I suffer the trials,

that I will feel your “indescribable joy.”

I know the trials don’t last.

I know that as soon as I face them,

they fade away.

They disappear, or they no longer matter,

because all that is left is You.

All that is left are the moments.

 

This moment.

This ordinary gray morning,

which is full of your grace,

“more precious than gold.”    (1 Peter 1:3-9)

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Everything Is Turning

My new book, Light When It Comes:  Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything, has just been published by Eerdmans, and they asked me to write a blog post for their blog introducing the book to their readers for what they call a “Meet my Book” column.

 

Meet My Book

 

It was a foggy January day.  I was walking across campus to my next class, and I saw a man pruning a plum tree, by the Life Sciences building.  I had a lot on my mind.  Students hurried around me.  But I looked at the man in his overalls doing his clear, simple work, clipping here, then there, and at the dark structure of the tree, the wet trunk and the bare, wet branches, clear and clean against the fog, and I thought:  No, I’ve not wasted my life. 

 

I don’t know why that idea popped into my head—it didn’t make sense, really, didn’t follow—but I’ve learned over the years to try to notice moments like this and remember moments like this and to trust them, to see them as God speaking to me and the Spirit reaching out to me, and in Light When It Comes I encourage you to think of these moments in the same way, as the Lord speaking to you.  Because He always is.  God is always speaking to us, through the fog, when we’re on our way to somewhere else, though we’re usually so rushed and skeptical and discouraged we let the moments pass.

In a way we don’t want moments like this.  They’re too small: we want big.  They’re too subtle:  we want clear, unmistakable.  And we can’t control these moments or reproduce them or pretend that they have anything to do with our merit or worth or superiority, because they don’t.

But these are the moments when God is speaking to us, moments sometimes of joy, moments sometimes of sorrow or loss,  and using “the examen of conscience,” the prayer technique developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, we can learn to spot them and hold on to them.  At the end of each day:

we remember the light and give thanks for the light;
we remember the darkness and ask for forgiveness, and refuge, and strength;
and we let it all go–we ask for the grace to follow the light, to know what we should do—but then we leave it all to God, trusting in his kindness.

This is what my book is about.  It’s a collage of examples of how the examen can work, drawn my life as a husband and father and teacher and deacon.  I tell stories, I share images, and I hope these stories and images will trigger your own memory and desire.  I leave gaps between the stories, white space between the images, as a way of suggesting the presence we all sense sometimes, beneath the jumble of our lives, a tenderness, a gentleness, we can’t explain or describe.

 

The old woman meets me on the hill and takes me to where her boys are buried, in a single coffin—Davy with his head on one end, Mike with his head on the other.  Elbows touching.  They drowned, they pulled each other in, many years ago, and now the woman is old and gray, and she is telling me her story, and she is weeping.

It’s a beautiful sunny morning in early fall.  I look out at the fields and trees, and everything is turning, the hay and the wheat and the leaves.

Everything is turning, amber and lemon and gold.

 

Our call is rarely clear, and what we glimpse we glimpse day-to-day, and all we can do is live with that uncertainty, trusting God to hold the pieces together.  Our call is finally to the moment, because where God is calling us is deeper and deeper into the mystery of things.

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There are All These Levels

Matthew, chapter 13

 

 What’s wonderful about the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, and all the parables in scripture, is that they can mean so many different things.  They can speak to us in so many different ways.  There are all these levels.

 

If we’re depressed, if our life seems empty and barren and flat, the parables are saying:  yes.  Sometimes that’s the way life is.  Life is a field, a barren field, a fallow field.

But wait.  There’s hope, too.  There’s a treasure buried in that field.  There’s a pearl beyond price.

If we’re upset with the Church, if we’re mad at the Church, if the Church has disappointed us, the parables are saying:  yes, of course, what did we expect?  The Church, too, is a field.  The Church, too, covers things up.  It buries things.

But wait.  There’s a treasure here, underneath.  There’s a pearl.

If we’re disappointed with a child, or a spouse, or a parent, or a friend, or with ourselves, the parables are saying:  look deeper.  Look beyond the obvious, because the truth is rarely obvious.  People are like the sea, they are full of good fish and bad, as the Church is like the sea, full of good fish and bad, and we just have to get over it.  We just have to accept that.

 

If we’re doubtful about God, if the existence of God doesn’t seem obvious, if there doesn’t seem to be any obvious proof, the parables are saying:  yes, that’s true.  The kingdom of God isn’t like a fleet of giant space ships that comes sailing in over our cities and just floats there above us, for everyone to see.  It’s like a pearl.  It’s like a seed.  It’s small.  It’s easy to overlook.  A bird on a branch.  A certain slant of light.  An intuition.

That’s the good news:  that God is everywhere and always.  The bad news:  we can’t pin this down, we can’t make this stick.  “I wanted to be as certain about things which I could not see,” Augustine says, “as I was certain that seven plus three equals ten.”  But that’s not how it works.  It just doesn’t.

 

If we’re mad at people who disagree with us, at people who vote for the wrong candidate or people who don’t share our particular understanding of the faith, the parables are saying:  who are we to judge?  It’s the angels who will sort out the fish, not us, it’s God who separates the good from the bad, and that’s not going to happen for a long time.  There’s still plenty of opportunity for things to change, in us and in others.  In the meantime, we just have to mind our own business.

 

If our lives are hectic and chaotic and out of control, if we don’t have time to hear ourselves think, if we’ve buried ourselves in commitments and possessions and anxieties, the parables are saying:  sell it all, give it all up, and keep what matters most.  Simplify.

If we don’t know what matters most, if we can’t figure that out, they say:  wait.  Be patient.  Give it time.

They say:  follow your joy.  Follow what most gives you life and hope.  That’s what the man does when he finds the treasure in the field.  He sells everything, and not out of fear, not out of narrow, unthinking conviction.  He sells “out of joy,” Matthew tells us.  He acts out of joy.

If you feel joy like that, if you feel pulled like that, if you feel this hope—that leaping up of your heart, that surge:  trust it.  Listen to it.  That’s God speaking to you, underneath everything else.  That’s God calling you.

 

All these meanings, all these levels and layers, because these texts today are the field, and these texts today are the pearls, and there is treasure everywhere and there is paradox everywhere and there is meaning and invention and hope.

 

If we’re lonely and afraid, we have to act,

If we’re lonely and afraid, we have to do nothing.

Act:  because the treasure is buried.  It’s not handed to us on a silver platter.  It’s not spoon-fed to us.  It’s not for children but for adults and it’s time we grew up and stopped criticizing God for not meeting our own immediate and childish needs; time we examined who we really imagine God to be, deep down, unconsciously, a sugar-daddy, a granter-of-wishes, or something far richer and deeper and infinitely more believable.

Do nothing:  because it’s the angels who will sort it all, in time.  It’s God who will make sense of all this, not us.  Sooner or later.  And we have to surrender to that, give in to that, with humility, which is hard, but also with trust, which is finally freeing.  There’s nothing to be afraid of.  The challenge is simply to be patient.  The challenge is simply to accept the way the world really is, in its subtleties and its mixed-upness, and the way we are, too.  The challenge is to believe, is to have hope, and so to let the love beyond all love enter into us and enter into our situation and change us and change others, and to believe that it can, that He can, and to believe that He will, to believe that everything can change, and that it will, and that it always is.  That whatever is intractable will be moved.  That whatever is unsolvable will be solved.  Will be softened. Will be opened.  Will be found.

Just not in the way we expected it to be.  Just not in the way we wanted it to be.  In a better way:  far, far easier, far more joyful, far more playful, far more multiple and leveled and layered.

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Naked Came We

Job 1:6-22; Luke 9:46-50

 

Naked I came forth my mother’s womb / and naked shall I go back again.  

 

They say that the way to overcome a fear of public speaking is to imagine the people in the audience naked.  To be naked is to be ordinary.  Just who we are.  Any body.

They say that clothes make the man and clothes make the woman but they don’t really.  God makes the man and God makes the woman.  Clothes are just the way we try to make ourselves: make ourselves look better, makes ourselves look more powerful, makes ourselves look more important than other people.

The sin in the garden wasn’t that we were naked but that we were ashamed to be:  ashamed to be ourselves.  Wanting more than what we have, which is everything, in Christ.

To be naked is to be who we really are and the insight of Job is that this is just true:  this is how we come into the world and this is how we leave, without armor, without protection, without power.

What happens to Job happens to us all in some way or another. We have setbacks, failures, tragedies, losses, and at those moments we realize that no amount of virtue or effort or faith can protect us from suffering or save us from death.  Only God can.  Only Christ–

–who was naked on the cross, stripped of all that is cheap and false, exposed as weak—even God, become naked as a child—but not ashamed, glorious at even this moment, absolutely real, as we should not be ashamed, as through the suffering of this one vulnerable naked man we are all redeemed, all of us made glorious in our true selves, all children again, all blessed.

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What if My Nerves Were Singing?

There are stages in the spiritual life.

In the beginning, in the stage of Conversion, there are piercing insights and frequent joy.  Everything makes sense.  We have changed our lives and consolation rains down on us.

But then, sooner or later, we start to feel bereft and and lonely and afraid.  Everyone does.  Our prayer life falls apart.  Our old patterns of sinfulness reassert themselves, and new ones, too, and we feel powerless to escape them.  The Church doesn’t add up anymore.  It’s full of hypocrites.  It’s medieval.  We’ve gone out on a limb and now all we have is the limb.

But this isn’t a regression, really.  It’s not a falling back or a failure but the next stage, an even higher and more advanced one.  It’s the stage of what some spiritual writers call Purification, where we are cleansed of our spiritual pride and really opened up to the will of God.

 

Most of us go back and forth between this and the stage of Conversion.  We alternate between joy and sorrow, consolation and desolation.  But the purification is necessary.  We have to get there, because until we do it’s too easy to think that the graces are happening because of how good we are.  In desolation or stagnation, as St. John of the Cross puts it, God is “leading us by the hand to the place we know not how to reach.”  According to St. John, “it is God who in this stage is the agent:  the soul is the receiver.”  That’s all we can do when we’re really down like this.

Receive.

 

Because there’s another stage in this process, a final, still higher stage:  Transformation. 

It’s like Conversion, but better.  Fuller.  Higher.  It’s the stage of of an abiding sense of the presence of God, of ecstatic joy, of the gifts and fruits of the Spirit, and even if most of us never reach that stage in our lifetimes, even if we only glimpse it, in the end, the bargain we think we’re making, we are, just not in the way we imagined it, just not in our own petty terms.

We will be rewarded.

After the cross, the resurrection.  After the darkness, the light.

 

Standing in line for the Eucharist.

Standing in line for an Americano with cream.

 

The host in my palm.

The coffee in a paper cup.  With a sleeve.

 

Through the bedroom window one long slim branch of the maple we planted, curving out to touch the glass.  So shyly.

 

I am walking down the road I always walk down, and something like electricity is coursing through me.

In short, I am afraid.

But what if this is You, Lord, showing me the way?

What if my nerves are singing?

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Two Theological Speculations During Mass

Often when I preach it feels like I’ve lowered myself into the river of my own anger and insecurity.

One Sunday, at the ambo, looking out at the congregation, I wondered, is this part of what the Lord shares in when He shares in my particular humanity?

This ego and this awareness of ego?  This desire for approval?  This insecurity?  This constant interior struggle with idolatry and pride?

 

Then, as I was kneeling at the altar, at the moment of consecration:  maybe the Host really is Christ, really is His Body, but in a perfectly obvious and ordinary way, as in the sky is blue or it’s cold outside, this is life, and so the response doesn’t have to be ecstasy or awe, though in another sense it should be, but ordinary acceptance.

To say This is His Body is to say this just is, this is happening and this is ordinary and this exists, and to say it without judgment or (even) adherence.

The Host embodies indifference.

It takes up and contains all the ordinariness of my life and of every life.

 

 

 

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