Chris Anderson's Blog, page 35

It’s Not You

 

It’s not you who shape God, it’s God who shapes you.

This is the ancient Church Father, Irenaeus.

We keep forgetting this.  We get into trouble and we keep thinking it’s all our fault and all our doing and that every decision is ours.  But it’s not.

It’s not you who shape God, it’s God who shapes you.

So:

If, then, you are the work of God, await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season.  Offer him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you.  Let the clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers.  

I don’t know where you are in your journey.  I don’t know what problems you face, what sadness, what fear.  What hope.  What joy.  But here’s the question I want to ask because it’s the question I think I’m being asked, every day:  what is God shaping in you right now?

Everything that you’ve been thinking and feeling, everything that has happened to you recently, is in some way part of God’s effort to shape you.

Into what?  Towards what?

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The Only Story You Tell

 

In the morning the sun starts at the top of the hill and works its way down through the trees.  I start at the bottom, in the shadows, and climb up into the light.

We meet in the middle.  The branches resolve. The trunks begin to bronze.

I love you so.

 

*

 

Yesterday a beautiful young woman, slender and kind, touched me on the arm. The hip.  The knee.  Every week I look forward to this.  The pink blossoms of the rhododendron.  The dark, lustrous leaves.  On the wet sidewalk the students hurry and push, unaware of the rain.

O Narrator!  I am not the only story you tell.

 

*

 

Clouds like the clouds the day my son was born, fluffy white in a blue, blue sky.  They do not remind me of loss. They remind me of how I stood on the hill and floated, too.

What do you think?  Is it death that underlies all things?  Or life?

 

 

 

 

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Family–A Guest Post from Dr. Hilda Kleiman

    This is a lovely essay by my friend Dr. Hilda Kleiman of Mount Angel Seminary, an essay about Star Trek and, ultimately,  about why Hilda decided to leave Queen of Angels Monastery in Mount Angel.

My little town is fortunate to still have a single-screen, independently-owned movie theater, so last week I went to see the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond.  While the basic plot of the crew of the Enterprise saving billions of souls from a misguided bad guy was not original, in terms of the relationships among the crew the movie was quintessentially Star Trek.  It was about the larger Star Trek family, the actors and their fans, as well as about the formation of a family and about deciding to be a family.

In Star Trek Beyond, Kirk is struggling with the meaning of his, at this point, young life and career, his reasons for being in space, and the question of which relationships will be his primary bonds.  He smiles sadly when he sees Sulu greet his young family when the Enterprise docks at the space station, and he asks Spock whether Spock thinks the two of them make a good team.  He is struggling to be a man other than his father, to find his own way, and to determine if that way does or does not include the Enterprise. 

Spock is in the midst of his own struggles as well.  Toward the beginning of the movie, he learns that Ambassador Spock has died and receives a box that contains some of the Ambassador’s possessions.  He is struggling with whether he should remain in Starfleet, as well as whether he should honor his relationship with Uhura, or if he should go to New Vulcan to help rebuild part of his native culture and society and make the Vulcans his family.  However, toward the end of the film, he finds a photo among Ambassador Spock’s possessions, a photo of the original Enterprise crew that any hardcore Star Trek fan would recognize as one of the most popular publicity stills from Star Trek The Undiscovered Country. Holding the photo, Spock understands that he will find the family he seeks in the crew of the Enterprise, a family of which he is already a part.  They belong to him, and they are part of his destiny.

This sense of family and belonging is also found in an early scene between Kirk and McCoy.  They meet alone in a bar aboard the Enterprise to mark Kirk’s birthday, which is the same day his father died as well.  McCoy arrives with a bottle of scotch that he says he found in Chehov’s locker.  I heard a small gasp from the others around me in the theater when McCoy said this because, I am sure, we were all aware that the young actor who played Chekov in the new Star Trek films, Anton Yelchin, had died in an accident before Star Trek Beyond was released.  McCoy places a third glass of scotch on the bar, and Kirk and McCoy toast the glass without an owner before they toast one another, saying “To absent friends.”  This honoring continued and was made more explicit in the final credits that included two dedications, one to Leonard Nimoy, who died in 2015, and one to Anton Yelchin.  As odd as it may sound to some, it is from this family, the Star Trek family both fictional and as it is embodied in its fans, new and old, that I think I first took an understanding of community, an understanding that I have always carried with me.

Seeing Star Trek: Beyond coincided with my reading of How To Be Alive by Colin Beavan, a book in which Beavan explores and lives the idea that we may address the ecological perils we face by examining and then living the values that make us the people we truly want to be.  Part of finding and living those values, he explains, is finding your people, the people who reflect who you truly want to be and how you want to live.  How do you find them?  Beavan suggests that you go to where the people who are like those you are looking for like to hang out and hang out yourself until you meet someone.  This could take some time, but when you do meet someone, they will be more likely to be someone who can be a part of making you into the person you want to be.

If you value unity, peace, hard work, and adventure, hang out with some Starfleet officers.  If I value art and creativity, I can visit local art museums and galleries.  If I value supporting the local economy and growing healthy food, I can join the local food co-op and go to their meetings.  If I value reading and literacy and free access to knowledge, I can make good use of the public library and attend some of their activities.  If I value my faith, if I value good liturgy and spiritual community, I can register at the local parish.  Adopt a family or let them adopt you, Beavan suggests.  In the last year friends asked me to be the godmother for their fifth child, and I can give more thought and experiment with them as to what shape my relationship with the whole family may take in the years to come, how I may be, as Beavan calls it, a “social parent.”  I can also consider how the idea of a “social parent” may shape how I work with my students as well, because it seems to me the traits that Beavan assigns to a “social parent” are also the traits of any good teacher.

A few years after I entered the monastery, a friend wrote a poem in which he compared living in the monastery to being a part of the Enterprise, and I still think that comparison may have some truth to it.  However, having left the monastery, I now have the blessing of the time, the circumstances, the opportunity, and the interest to invest more in my friends and to make new friends.  I am more able to be a friend that will stick around long term, a person who is a friend much more by choice rather than due to external circumstances such as work or school or even living in the same monastery.  These friends may be people I already know, but they may be new people as well.  Either way, they may be the friends, like the crew of the Enterprise, who become family and are a part of my destiny.

 

 

 

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Dear Imperfections

September 11, 2016

Twenty-Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time

1 Letter to Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15:1-32

 

I have this habit of sending emails I shouldn’t send.  I get upset about something, and I have this momentary clarity, and I want to get it out of my system, and I end up being a little more direct than I should be.

I did this just recently, even though Barb told me explicitly not to, and I thought, I can’t believe it.  I did this again?  And then, about a week later, I did it again, with another person:  wrote something with a little sting at the end, pressed send, and later realized how stinging it really was.

Why do I do this?  Am I ever going to change?

Well, yes and no.

 

Change is the theme of the readings today, especially the gospel and the letter to Timothy.  Paul was “a blasphemer and a persecutor and arrogant,” but then became a leader of the church, a saint.  The prodigal son was prodigal and then was transformed, became grateful and open and much, much wiser.

But what strikes me in both these readings is that the changes happen at exactly the moment that Paul and the prodigal realize they can’t change on their own.  “Beloved, I am grateful to him who has strengthened me,” Paul says.  It’s not Paul who manages the change but Jesus working in him.  It’s Christ who “came into the world to save sinners,” not Paul, and Paul is saved because he recognizes that he needs saving, just as the key to the transformation of the prodigal is his recognition that he’s prodigal.  He “comes to his senses.”  He returns to his father and says, “father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.”  I’m in a bad way.  I was rooting with the pigs, eating the husks, and the only thing I could do was come back and ask for forgiveness.

And that’s a big thing, a huge thing, to be able to admit your sinfulness, your piggishness, but it’s a big thing because it depends on the recognition that we’re incapable of big things ourselves, on the recognition that we “no longer deserve to be called” sons and daughters.

 

And I don’t think that the prodigal son ever stops needing the grace he finally realizes he needs.  He comes home and he reconciles but I bet in a few months he’s making some of the same mistakes, not being wise with his money, not quite controlling himself, just as Paul in his letters often shows flashes of anger and impatience and often admits to the conflicts he sometimes has with others and to his own limitations as a speaker and a leader.  It’s always up and down.  Two steps forward, three steps back, stumbling along.

We don’t get better.  We just get better at not getting better.

 

Which of course is what the elder son in the parable doesn’t understand or won’t admit.  This is where his resentment comes from:  his refusal to acknowledge his own limitations.  “We are sometimes so busy being good angels,” says St. Francis de Sales, “that we neglect to be good men and women.”  Neglect to be kind, neglect to be forgiving, neglect to be like the prodigal father—the father who is so extravagant and wasteful in his love that he embraces his wayward son and throws a big party.

The elder son is like Job.  He’s a righteous man but not a very nice one.  He does everything he’s supposed to do, by the book, and he measures everybody else by the book, but deep down he’s just like everyone else, and he can’t truly change until he admits this, until he admits, as de Sales puts it, that “our imperfections are going to accompany us to the grave,” that “we can’t go anywhere without having our feet on the ground.”

“Dear imperfections,” de Sales says: “they force us to acknowledge our misery, give us practice in humility, selflessness, patience, and watchfulness.”

 

I don’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to be better and strive to be holy, like our new Saint Teresa of Calcutta, as Father Ignacio was calling us to do last week, because we absolutely should.   But Mother Teresa didn’t become Saint Teresa because she was perfect but because she knew she wasn’t.  Her letters, like Paul’s, are full of humility, her awareness that she is weak and small and powerless.

A saint is someone who doesn’t think she’s a saint.

Yes, change happens, change is real.  But we are changed.

By God.  By our Lord Jesus.

 

You might remember that a few months ago I read the wrong Gospel at mass.  I was rushed beforehand and I didn’t have a chance to check the book, and I was about three sentences in when I realized my mistake.  I was just humiliated.  I’ve been a deacon all these years and I read the wrong gospel?

Well, yes.

Later, when I told Deacon Michael this, he said, “Did you thank Jesus?”

And he wasn’t kidding.  He wasn’t being funny.

 

Dear imperfections!

 

Our Calcutta is Corvallis, as Father Ignacio said.  Our Calcutta is Philomath.  Is Albany.  There’s a special kind of hypocrisy in proclaiming our allegiance to the great, newsworthy causes and then snapping at our spouse at the breakfast table or a colleague at the copy machine.  We have to have the humility to admit that most of the time we are given the small tasks and that even these are beyond us without grace.  We have to try to do the next right thing, and to repair the damage when we’ve failed, one person at a time, one moment at a time, because this is where the change really happens, this is where the Spirit enters in.

The two people I sent the stinging emails to were as gracious and forgiving as could be.  One of them laughed when she saw me and opened up her arms, and I felt a little like the prodigal as he walks down the road and looks up to see his father, waiting to welcome him home.

And the grace that flows into moments like that isn’t our grace and the love that flows in isn’t our love, it’s the love of the Father and it’s the love of the Son, and when we let it in, when we realize how very much we need it, how lost we are without it, it overwhelms us, it revitalizes us, it entirely transforms us.

Again, and again, and again.

 

 

 

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Our Calcutta

1 Corinthians 5:1-8; Luke 6:6-11

Yesterday Mother Teresa was made a saint, this wonderful, admirable woman.  And in his homily yesterday Father Ignacio quoted Mother Teresa saying that “our Calcutta” is right here.  Corvallis is our Calcutta.  Albany.

The poor are all around us:  the lonely neighbor who is poor in companionship, in company; the new student at OSU who is maybe intellectually poor, without experience of literature and ideas; the co-worker who is poor emotionally, without patience or compassion or self-control.  The homeless and the dying of course need our help and of course need our compassion but in a way they are the more obvious, the more photogenic.  We are guilty of a special kind of hypocrisy—as I sometimes am myself—when we profess our love for the marginal and the outcast and yet are cranky with our wives or impatient with a barista.

All Jesus does is heal a single man with a withered hand.  Not all men and women with withered hands.  Not all the sick and not all the suffering.  Just this one man, in this one place and time.  And though he does call attention to his act, does do it in the synagogue, right in front of everyone, he doesn’t do this to win favor but to provoke change in the people around him, and he does:  this is one of the actions that eventually gets him killed.

But all the people in the streets around him, all the people in Israel, none of them knew this healing had happened, as no one but the servants knew Jesus had changed the water into wine at the Wedding at Cana—a whole a lot of water, into very good wine.

This is the special calculus of Christianity, that the God of the universe tends to each tiny thing and each one of us tiny souls with all his infinite mercy and love, and so in a way, the less people see, the smaller the act, the better.  Do you not know that a little yeast leavens all the dough?

At the end of each day, what do we think of?  What do we think counts?  The award we got, the big sale we made, the argument we won?  Or the smile we gave someone we passed in the hall, the kind word we said at the copy machine?

We can’t do anything about this election except vote, and send money.  We can’t do anything about the war in Syria except vote, and send money.  As Jo McGowan points out in the latest Commonweal, 28,000 thousand people lost their lives in terrorist attacks last year, which is terrible, which is awful, but is still a very small number in light of all the world’s people—our chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are one in 20 million—while hunger and malnutrition kill 3.1 million children under the age of five every year, and 2.5 million children die from diseases that can be prevented with vaccinations.  But whether it’s 28,000 or 3.1 million, all we can do is be leaven for the person right next to us today.  There’s someone waiting for us right now—the person who just popped into our heads, who just came to mind—the nasty colleague, the friend we had an argument with, the elderly aunt we haven’t visited.  Let us in our humility accept that this is what we have been given, this one small task, and that even this is too much for us without grace.  Let us think of the those who are withered in our own lives, and let us admit to our great need for healing—and let us believe that the yeast of these and all the countless other acts will leaven all the dough, that God in his great mercy is working through all these tiny things for the great, great good of his unimaginable kingdom.

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The Voice That’s Always Inside Me

I was being interviewed, and I started to feel the way I feel when I’m having an MRI.

The people were nice.  They’d come up to the house.  We were sitting in my living room drinking coffee.

But I broke out in a sweat.  My palms were clammy.

I thought, if I look down at my chest I’ll see my shirt bouncing the way it did when they squeezed me into that cold, fiberglass tube and I watched the thin fabric of the hospital gown bouncing up and down with the beating of my heart.

 

But later when the interview was published it looked like any other interview you’d read.  The words were ordered and calm.

It was odd.  It was as if something were missing, as if something were being left out–another voice, another character.  I kept waiting for it to appear.

But it never did.  There were just the two of us on the page, the interviewer and me, having a friendly, thoughtful conversation, the way people sometimes do.

Because that other character was inside me.  That other voice was the voice that’s always inside me.  The voice of The Critic.  The Accuser.

 

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Enemies: Two Meditations

Matthew 7:1-5

     Anthony DeMello, the Jesuit who was also a psychoanalyst, used to say that whenever we’re really mad at someone else, there’s something wrong with us, something we don’t want to face.  We’re projecting.

Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of “I”; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes.

This is what therapy is all about, and this is also what the gospel is all about.  Jesus is telling us the same thing.  He’s the great psychoanalyst.  Don’t judge others, he’s saying, but turn inward.  Don’t worry about the splinter in the eye of your friend.  Worry about the log in your own.

     And yet on many feast days we honor the martyrs.  We honor St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, for example, who responded heroically to something that was in the world, that was outside of them, the injustice and the sinfulness of King Henry the VIII.  The King didn’t accept the Pope’s decision about the annulment of his first marriage, and these two men knew that was wrong and they stood up to him.  The King’s behavior wasn’t a subjective thing.  They weren’t projecting their own issues onto him.  They had to judge him, and they did, and it cost them their lives.

     So that’s the challenge, as in the serenity prayer adopted by AA.  It’s a prayer often attributed to St. Francis but written really by the twentieth century Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But it doesn’t matter who wrote it, because its’ a wonderful prayer, however clichéd: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the courage to change the things I can,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

That’s the challenge for all of us.  That’s our prayer, every day.

     2. Jeremiah 20:10-13 and Psalm 18

     In his book on the psalms C.S. Lewis says that whenever we encounter language about enemies in a psalm or the conquering of our enemies, we should internalize it.  The enemies are our sins and our doubts, and conquering them means overcoming our inner struggles, and I think that’s really true.  We don’t want to demonize other people.  We don’t want to blame other people.

     But sometimes things happen to us, from the outside.  Sometimes we really are surrounded.

The enemies are our sins and our doubts, and conquering them means overcoming our inner struggles, and I think that’s really true.

     A young man I know was recently fired from his job, unfairly, and he’s devastated.  This was his career.  He poured himself into it, gave himself to it, and now everything has changed.  He’s angry, ashamed, afraid.  It feels exactly like the situation in Jeremiah: “I hear the whisperings of many, terror on every side!  Denounce!”  It feels exactly like the situation in Psalm 18:  “the destroying floods” seem to be “overwhelming” him.

     I wish I could help this young man believe that God can be his “rock and refuge,” that God can be his “shield,” that whatever happens he will be “safe from his enemies.” 

     It’s not that we really want our enemies to be crushed and put to shame.  That’s wrong.  But it’s not wrong to believe that nothing can ever hurt us, not really, if only we believe in God, and that in fact moments like this are sacred moments, moments like this can be moments of grace, because they break us down and open us up, because they bring us closer to what really matters, not how we appear to others, not what we do for a living, but our souls, our inner selves.

     It would sound pious to say, as another psalm puts it, that God is close to “the brokenhearted.”  It would sound pious to quote from the Beatitudes, “blessed are you when you are persecuted.”

     But that’s what I believe, what we believe, and we can believe it for this young man until he gets through this terrible moment in his life.  Like Jesus, and through his grace and love, he will escape from the power of the people who are trying to stone him, whatever happens.

     If the Passion of Christ means anything it means that our suffering has a purpose, it leads somewhere, it leads to the cross but then to Easter, to the Resurrection. 

     This isn’t just an abstract idea.  It’s the fundamental pattern of our lives, and the grace of the suffering this young man is going through is that it is revealing this truth to him, directly.  He is carrying a cross.  He can feel the weight of it on his shoulders.

     But he’s not carrying it alone—it’s not his cross, really—he has been taken from the crowd and he has been made to help carry the cross of Christ—and Jesus is there with him, they are carrying it together—if he is helping the Lord the Lord is also helping him—they are shouldering this awful weight together—and if he turns, if he pays attention, he will feel the Lord beside him, he will feel a slight lightening of the load. 

     This is a moment of great meaning.  This is a moment of great grace.  He is on the way, and the way is the way of the cross, a way that ends in joy, a way that ends in freedom, a way that ends in love.

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Crazy Cake

It took the universe 13.7 billion years to produce this amazing book.

      –John Mather, on the cover of Michael Dowd’s Thank God for Evolution

It took the universe 13.7 billion years to produce this amazing chair.

It took the universe 13.7 billion years to produce this amazing pen. 

It took the universe 13.7 billion years to produce that amazing

rhododendron outside my window and the winter wren overflowing

in that rhododendron, that amazing, bubbling winter wren, overflowing,

not to mention my ears, which hear it, and my eyes, which see it. 

It seems that life is almost indecently eager to evolve eyes,

Richard Dawkins says. The compound eye of an insect or a prawn,

he says, or camera eyes like ours or a squid’s, or parabolic reflector eyes,

like those of a limpet. This is all going somewhere, in other words. 

It’s cumulative. It’s purposeful. It’s always coming to a point. 

It takes an entire universe to make an apple pie, Carl Sagan says.

It takes an entire universe to make a banana split, with whip cream

and a cherry on top. It takes an entire universe to make a crazy cake,

the way Mom used to, before she died. No eggs. Just thumb three wells

into the cocoa and the flour, then pour oil into one well, vinegar

into the second, and vanilla into the third. Stir, bake, let cool, and frost

with vanilla frosting. Oh, how I loved it! I couldn’t stop eating.

Stars had to explode to produce all the ingredients. Eons for the wheat. 

Think of the skies above the fields and the color of the skies. 

Think of the winter wren: 2/3rds of its body is devoted to the production

of song. It’s such a tiny thing, it weighs barely an ounce, but inside

that feathery body the bones hollow and the lungs expand

and the melody and purity of that song keep bubbling and pouring out.

Amazing. The wren is merely a space, an emptiness,

through which song is produced. It is otherwise hardly even there.

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Dorothy Day and the Passion of John the Baptist

The Memorial of the Passion of John the Baptist

Mark 6:17-29

     Today is the Memorial of the Passion of John the Baptist, when we try to put ourselves with John in Herod’s prison, before he was beheaded, and imagine what he was thinking and imagine what he was feeling:  fear, maybe, and despair, and yet the fierce faith and the fierce joy, too, we always associate with John, in his proclaiming of the reality of Jesus.

     How quietly hard faith can be sometimes, day to day.

     A friend of mine has been struggling a little lately.  She has this feeling of futility, as if nothing she’s ever done really matters.  And I thought of these two passages from the diaries of Dorothy Day, the great American Catholic and founder of the Catholic Workers Movement.

     Day is always so realistic to me, and yet so encouraging, for just that reason.

Today I thought of a title for my book, “The Duty of Delight.”  I was thinking, how as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on earth, the suffering, the Cross.  And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy which goes with loving.

     This is from February 24, 1961, when Day was 64.

     And this is from seven years later, Easter Sunday, April 14, 1968, when she was 71

Always when I awaken in the morning it is to a half-dead condition, a groaning in every bone, a lifelessness, a foretaste of death, a sense of “quiet terror,” which hangs over us all.  A sense of the futility of life and the worthlessness of all our efforts. . . .

I turn desperately to prayer.  “O God make haste to help me.”  And those magnificent psalms, and the prayer of the church, prayers which thousands, tens of thousands, are saying each morning all over the world, and I am saved.

This consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day.  I am turned around, away from the contemplation of the world of sin and death to the reality of God. . . .

Through this turning away, “all the way to heaven is heaven” to me, as St. Catherine of Siena said.  The sun has risen, the air is warmed, the birds are singing outside . . . .

     All the way to heaven is heaven, and this is where John the Baptist is and this is where he’s going and where he knows he’s going, even in prison, even in what may have been his sadness and despair.  This is the move, the turning around, we all called to make, every day of our lives, and the move that with grace we can always make, to turn from the world to God, and so to see God in the world, where he has always been.

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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.

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.

     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.”

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.

     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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