Chris Anderson's Blog, page 37
August 5, 2016
Grumpy on the Transfiguration
What I realize sometimes when I read the gospel is exactly how much I need it.
Grumpy on the Transfiguration. Out of sorts.
On the feast of the one of the most glorious things that ever happened, a moment of dazzling beauty and life, I’m moody and irritable and low on energy.
The light that comes pouring down doesn’t come pouring down because these three particular men are really good meditators or theologians or in any way special. The world just suddenly opens up and all this dazzling beauty comes rushing in.
But that’s OK.
The problem with basing faith on feeling is that it puts responsibility in the wrong place. It assumes that faith is something that I can make happen, through discipline or hard work or purity of intention, as I’m some sort of spiritual athlete, when faith is a gift, given by God, unearned, unsought. The disciples don’t produce the transfiguration. They fall on their faces before it. They don’t plan it, don’t arrange it. The light that comes pouring down doesn’t come pouring down because these three particular men are really good meditators or theologians or in any way special. The world just suddenly opens up and all this dazzling beauty comes rushing in. The disciples hardly know what hit them, and that’s how prayer sometimes is, when it seems somehow to “work,” when something happens in it. What we realize then is that the joy or the insight have nothing to do with us—that the very condition of this sweetness is exactly that it exceeds us.
What I realize when I look at the gospel sometimes is my own finiteness, the slow, heavy drag of my creatureliness. What I realize sometimes when I read the gospel is exactly how much I need it.
And there’s an insight here into the Church. Every one of us had the experience of the “veil being lifted,” as Rabbi Joshua Heschel puts it. All of us, for a moment, have glimpsed the eternal. But for just a moment. Our glimpses are fleeting and rare and the rest of the time we have to get on with our lives. That’s where what Heschel calls “dogma” comes in, where church teaching and theology apply. What dogma does, what liturgy does, what the whole structure of a church does, is “save” those moments of personal revelation for “the long hours of functional living” when we no longer feel the intensity of the vision. In a very odd and striking image Heschel says that dogmas are like bees “embalmed” in amber—like bees frozen in fossilized honey—and now then they can “electrified,” brought back to life, when our faith suddenly surges again.
Or the image of a library. What the liturgical years does is store the many wonderful pieces of tradition. There are far too many to remember on our own, but when the lectionary lays them out, piece by piece, we are reminded of all that’s there. The weekly and Sunday readings are a whole set of yellow post it notes on the great refrigerator of our lives.
Or it’s this. It’s what the second letter of Peter says about the prophetic message of the gospel. “You will do well to be attentive to it,” the letter says, “as to a lamp shining in a great dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your heart.” That’s me, and maybe that’s you, too. We’re grumpy, we’re out of sorts, but the Church asks us each Sunday and each day to be attentive to certain moments in the story and certain aspects of the faith—say the Transfiguration—we’re supposed to think hard about that, to reflect on that, pray about that. And gradually of course it stars to get to us after all, at least a little. It sinks in. Because we’ve been forced to think about it, because we’ve had to attend to it, the morning star sometimes rises in our hearts, or starts to.
It’s what I feel sometimes when I force myself to Church. When I’m up at the altar, serving, and I look out at the congregation. Not always, God knows. I’m bored and grumpy and sometimes even desolate up on the altar, too—all the same ups and downs are going on—but I think of how St. Gregory the Great put it centuries ago, speaking as a preacher and teacher:
I know from experience that frequently in the company of my brothers and sisters I have understood many things about the Word of God that on my own I did not succeed in understanding. This is the truth: rather often I tell you that which I hear when I am with you.
I often feel that way as a preacher myself, that I can believe and understand only in the presence of the people, only in the Church, in the liturgy. I’m one way off the altar and one way on, and maybe that’s hypocrisy or maybe not. Maybe it’s the liturgy can accomplish. Maybe it’s the self that through mass we all can make contact with.
It’s why we keep coming back every Sunday, gathered around the table of the Lord: now and then really to be changed, really to be opened up. Transfigured.
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Angel
We must die to the old self and rise to the new.
But the new self isn’t just the old self revised.
It’s not a hero and it’s not a saint.
Angel! Angel! I hear a woman crying, deep in the woods
one morning. She is calling for her dog,
a squat, white cattle dog, pot-bellied, bowlegged—
I’ve seen it, I tell her, trotting along the trail.
One ear flat. Tongue dragging. Just as happy as could be.
***
a poem from Light When It Comes
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August 3, 2016
Trust
Cresting a hill, you see it: above the fields and the tops of the walnut trees, low in the sky, very close, a giant hot air balloon, red and blue and green.
And there’s a word spelled out on the side, the letters tall as people: T-R-U-S-T.
Trust.
You assume it’s just advertising. You think, there’s the name of a bank on the other side.
But lately you’ve been so anxious. So afraid.
Long ago the Jews believed the Torah was an orchard.
From a distance all we see are trees, but there are branches, too, closer in, crissing and crossing, and there are leaves, a profusion of leaves, and there is the fruit in its many colors, and the nuts in their many shells, and beneath the skin the flesh, and within the flesh the seeds.
And then you reach the bottom. You level out.
And the trees are wheeling past you, the walnut trees, twisting and gnarled. The rows are flashing by, one after the other.
The long, deep, darkening lanes.
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August 1, 2016
The Sun and the Rain
. . . for the Lord makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.
Matthew 5:45
I think a lot of people assume that in Christianity God is the great punisher. If you do bad things, God punishes you. If you do good things, He rewards you.
This is the God we fear and this is the God we long for in a way and this is a God we can easily reject. Because bad things happen to good people all the time. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to things, and so the rhyme-and-reason God can just be dismissed. This is the God the atheists and agnostics have in mind and they’re right. That God doesn’t make sense. That God is dead.
But in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says something really astonishing, something I think we miss. He says that God makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and he causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
He’s saying to all of us, you’re right. The Big Daddy God doesn’t deserve our worship. He can’t be sustained. You’re right, life is way more complicated than that, way more apparently random, way more incomprehensible, and I am, too.
But in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus says something really astonishing, something I think we miss. He says that God makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and he causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Or not random. Profligate. Abundant. Random in the sense of God showering down grace all the time, showering down reality. All we have to do is see it. Pick it up. Take it. All of us. It is like the sun and it is like the rain, that wild and generous and unpredictable.
No one is better than anyone else. No one is more deserving than anyone else. If we have good things, it’s not because we’re so great, spiritually or any other way. If we’re suffering, it’s not because we deserve it and it’s not because God doesn’t exist.
This is a God the atheists and agnostics cannot dismiss. This is a God who is not simplistic and easy. This is a wonderful, radical theology.
And there’s more. There are consequences to this theology. If God is like that, if he loves without reason, if he just loves, if he loves in some mysterious sense that at the same time doesn’t deny suffering and loss but is somehow present in it—if God is like that—then we have to be like that, too. That’s what Jesus is saying. Love like that.
Be like the sun. Be like the rain.
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July 29, 2016
Nothing Happens
Dorothy Day famously said, quoting Romano Guardini, that “the Church is the cross on which Christ is crucified.”
As if that’s a bad thing.
Which of course it is, in the sense that the terrible abuse that has gone on in the Church, and the violence done in its name, and the corruption of the Church, all of that is terrible and wrong.
But I think the biggest danger for people who are “spiritual but not religious” is the unspoken assumption that they can somehow be happy all the time, and avoid boredom, and never have to face the darkness inside them, and the emptiness, and the need.
To be spiritual but not religious is to keep everything in our heads where it doesn’t have to be acted out and so compromised.
And in that sense the tackiness of the Church, and the tedium of the Church, and the ordinariness—the threadbare carpets, the bad singing, the bumbling liturgies—all of that is to the good. It humbles us and it crucifies in small and necessary ways, because it’s only in the ordinary and the everyday, only there, in the moment, that Christ appears.
To be spiritual but not religious is to keep everything in our heads where it doesn’t have to be acted out and so compromised. We can avoid making fools out of ourselves and avoid making mistakes because we haven’t tried to do anything in the first place.
It’s like deciding to be a musician and never picking up the guitar.
*
I know a man who travels thousands of miles every year, and climbs a mountain, and enters a monastery, and prays there and fasts there, and who talks about Christianity from that pristine and temporary distance, as if the life in the pews is somehow not good enough, not aesthetically and intellectually pleasing enough, when if he would stay on the mountaintop a little longer, for more than a week or so, he’d get tired of the food and bored with the clouds and irritated with this monk or that, as they would get irritated with him.
God is everywhere, on the mountaintop and in the valley and in the drivethru at Starbucks, and especially when we’re so bored and tired and emptied out we realize that the grace when it comes, the light when it comes, isn’t our achievement but a gift given to us freely as it is given to everyone.
Life. Ordinary life.
Michael Casey says that the reason to go to a monastery is to discover that God can’t be found there.
He means: it’s not magic. God is everywhere, on the mountaintop and in the valley and in the drivethru at Starbucks, and especially when we’re so bored and tired and emptied out we realize that the grace when it comes, the light when it comes, isn’t our achievement but a gift given to us freely as it is given to everyone.
God is in the monastery, too, of course. But in just this sense.
*
An ordinary daily mass. A Wednesday morning, say. The same scattering of people. The same white running shoes. The same rumpled khakis. The old lady in her walker. The fervent college student.
The same hurried prayers. The same mechanical recitations.
In the corners, in the silence, all the familiar shadows.
Caryll Houselander once wrote:
Every day crowds of unknown people come to him, who feel as hard, as cold, as empty as the tomb. The come with the first light, before going to the day’s work, and with the grey mind of early morning, hardly able to concentrate at all on the mystery which they themselves are part of: impelled only by the persistent will of love, not by any sweetness of consolation, and it seems to them as if nothing happens at all. But Christ’s response to that dogged, devoted will of a multitude of insignificant people is his coming to life in them, his Resurrection in their souls. In the eyes of the world they are without important, but in fact, because of them and their unemotional Communions, when the world seems to be finished, given up to hatred and pride, secretly, in unimaginable humility, Love comes to life again.
Lately I’ve been so angry with people, so tired of them, the ones who say the Church doesn’t speak to them, who turn their noses up at it because this or that particular doctrine doesn’t suit them, or because of some simplistic or sentimental or offensively dogmatic thing some poor believer says who can’t put into better words the love or hope or despair they feel.
As we can’t either.
We judge by the way people look. We judge by what people say. We judge.
But deeper than the funny hats or the pious platitudes, underneath the skin, is a mystery we can’t fathom and are wildly arrogant to think we can.
Is Christ.
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July 27, 2016
Driving The Dead Man’s Truck
When I borrowed the keys
to the dead man’s truck,
I drove into town
and ordered a sandwich.
Get out of here, he’d said,
smiling through
his snow white beard.
God, that sandwich
tasted good
after all those silent days—
the blandness of the turkey
and the sweetness of the bread.
God, I loved driving
that rusty old Toyota,
rattling down
the brilliant shore.
The endless ocean.
The creamy waves.
There must be billions
of miles
on that engine.
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July 25, 2016
Do This In Memory Of Me
Every mass is an act of remembrance. “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus says at the Last Supper, and that’s what we do every Eucharist. We remember the One Who Died for Us once and for all, definitively, forever, and remember not just in the sense of calling to mind but in the sense of recalling so intensely, through grace, that the past becomes the present and Jesus is here, with us now, in the moment. As He always is.
“The believer,” Pope Francis says, “is essentially one who remembers.”
We are always forgetting. We forget all the good things that have happened, we forget all our manifold blessings, we forget who we really are and that we are infinitely loved and infinitely remembered. Every day there are small moments of grace—a word, a touch, a certain angle of light—but we doubt these moments and let them go. We forget them. We forget that all the many distractions fail to satisfy. We forget that all our accomplishments and awards are illusions.
We forget that grace is always pouring down.
“The believer,” Pope Francis says, “is essentially one who remembers.”
And so we come to mass: to remember. Do this in memory of me–in memory of the countless moments of the day–in memory of “the precious and very great promises” (2 Peter 1:2-7) that have been made and that are always being kept–the promise that we are all loved, that we all matter, and that nothing, not war or poverty or injustice or oppression, can separate us from Christ. From the Truth. From the Mystery. From Reality itself.
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July 22, 2016
Driving Away From Shotpouch
Evening light in the trees and the smell of the woods and the sound of water. Driving back on a dusty gravel road and just wanting to be home with Barb and I feel this quiet, steady sense of God’s presence, as if God is like the light and like the feel of the air and that I can turn my head and miss Him entirely, jump tracks and not feel Him, but that I can turn back and there He is, all around me, everywhere.
No need to fantasize. To imagine myself anywhere else. I am just on this gravel road, driving back in the evening light, through the trees, along a stream.
I don’t know where I’m going, except that I’m going home.
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July 20, 2016
At Keats’s Grave
a reflection from my recent pilgrimage to Rome
One of the things I loved about Fra Angelico’s Annunciation—at the top of the stairs, on the second floor of the Monastery of San Marco, in Florence—was a small window in the background between the angel and Our Lady. The angel’s wings are soft blues and browns and creams, and Our Lady’s gown is soft and cream and blue, and there’s a sweetness about both their faces. A loveliness.
But I keep thinking about the window in the background. Just an ordinary window, latticed, with the suggestion of trees behind it. The green shadows of leaves.
I’ve seen the more geometric Annunciation of da Vinci many times in reproduction—it’s also in Florence, at the Uffizi—but when I saw it in person for the first time my eye was drawn to something I hadn’t noticed before. The angel is poised on the left, as the angel usually is, and Mary is on the right, as she usually is, reading a book, but to the right of her, as we face the painting, there’s a door, and it’s open, and through it you can see a stone floor and shadows on the floor and a neatly made bed, or part of it, the bedspread a kind of rust-colored red, as if Mary is like me when she wakes up in the morning, and before she can pray or start her day she has to make the bed and hang up her clothes. Get things organized.
I shouldn’t love Rome as much as I do, as my tastes run more towards the minimal and spare, but I love it deeply, and I think it’s in part because what’s so grand and monumental about Rome, and what’s so often jumbled about it, and chaotic and intense, only makes the small things, the ordinary things, seem all the more endearing.
On our first trip to Rome my brother and I walked from the Coliseum about a mile, down wide, sunny streets, to the Protestant Cemetery. We circled the walls until we found the gate, then made our way to Keats’s grave.
A man about my age in a leather jacket and a wide-brimmed leather hat was kneeling on the path, sketching the tomb in pencil. Looking up he said, with a heavy twang, “I’d rather have Byron’s life.” He turned out to be a drummer in a heavy-metal band in Australia, though he kept a residence in Rome.
“I’m known as something of a poet in Australia,” he said.
The tombstone is shaped like a large, white thumb. Phallic. Hard to get into the frame. The famous inscription reads, “Here lies a young English poet, whose name is writ in water,” and standing there seeing it I thought of how young Keats was when he died, younger than my sons. How he rose up at the end and cried out.
But I was exhilarated. Sweaty and exhilarated. I had this sense at first of being on an expedition and of having found what I was looking for. Of having reached my destination.
I talked for a while with Ted, then he went to look at the other graves. The drummer had slipped away.
The cemetery, as I said, is walled, and when you walk in through the front gate the graves are thick on either side of a tree-lined lane. Keats’ grave is in the far corner to the left. You turn, and in a few steps the graves thin out and the trees thin out and there’s a sense of spaciousness. It’s more like a park. And the trees, I started to realize, had been reminding me of the trees in Spokane where my brother and I grew up. They were some kind of pine, and their needles on the grass and their piney smell had been reminding me of Ponderosa.
At the end, when Ted came back and I was standing there with him, at Keats’s grave, with my balding baby brother, middle-aged now, like me—late middle-aged—growing old–I was thinking of the way things looked and the way things felt when we were boys, in the woods above the river. Of the wide spaces between the trunks. The dark, volcanic rock.
MORE POEMS, PROSE PIECES, AND HOMILIES FROM THE TRIP:
On Sometimes Why It’s Good to be Narrow: A Homily
The Structure of Angels: A Prose Piece
The Human Person Fully Alive: A Prose Piece
Sometimes Not Having Perspective is a Good Thing: A Prose Piece
The post At Keats’s Grave appeared first on A WordPress Site.
At Keat’s Grave
a reflection from my recent pilgrimage to Rome
One of the things I loved about Fra Angelico’s Annunciation—at the top of the stairs, on the second floor of the Monastery of San Marco, in Florence—was a small window in the background between the angel and Our Lady. The angel’s wings are soft blues and browns and creams, and Our Lady’s gown is soft and cream and blue, and there’s a sweetness about both their faces. A loveliness.
I shouldn’t love Rome as much as I do, as my tastes run more towards the minimal and spare, but I love it deeply.
But I keep thinking about the window in the background. Just an ordinary window, latticed, with the suggestion of trees behind it. The green shadows of leaves.
I’ve seen the more geometric Annunciation of da Vinci many times in reproduction—it’s also in Florence, at the Uffizi—but when I saw it in person for the first time my eye was drawn to something I hadn’t noticed before. The angel is poised on the left, as the angel usually is, and Mary is on the right, as she usually is, reading a book, but to the right of her, as we face the painting, there’s a door, and it’s open, and through it you can see a stone floor and shadows on the floor and a neatly made bed, or part of it, the bedspread a kind of rust-colored red, as if Mary is like me when she wakes up in the morning, and before she can pray or start her day she has to make the bed and hang up her clothes. Get things organized.
I shouldn’t love Rome as much as I do, as my tastes run more towards the minimal and spare, but I love it deeply, and I think it’s in part because what’s so grand and monumental about Rome, and what’s so often jumbled about it, and chaotic and intense, only makes the small things, the ordinary things, seem all the more endearing.
On our first trip to Rome my brother and I walked from the Coliseum about a mile, down wide, sunny streets, to the Protestant Cemetery. We circled the walls until we found the gate, then made our way to Keats’s grave.
A man about my age in a leather jacket and a wide-brimmed leather hat was kneeling on the path, sketching the tomb in pencil. Looking up he said, with a heavy twang, “I’d rather have Byron’s life.” He turned out to be a drummer in a heavy-metal band in Australia, though he kept a residence in Rome.
“I’m known as something of a poet in Australia,” he said.
The tombstone is shaped like a large, white thumb. Phallic. Hard to get into the frame. The famous inscription reads, “Here lies a young English poet, whose name is writ in water,” and standing there seeing it I thought of how young Keats was when he died, younger than my sons. How he rose up at the end and cried out.
But I was exhilarated. Sweaty and exhilarated. I had this sense at first of being on an expedition and of having found what I was looking for. Of having reached my destination.
I talked for a while with Ted, then he went to look at the other graves. The drummer had slipped away.
But I was exhilarated. Sweaty and exhilarated. I had this sense at first of being on an expedition and of having found what I was looking for. Of having reached my destination.
The cemetery, as I said, is walled, and when you walk in through the front gate the graves are thick on either side of a tree-lined lane. Keats’ grave is in the far corner to the left. You turn, and in a few steps the graves thin out and the trees thin out and there’s a sense of spaciousness. It’s more like a park. And the trees, I started to realize, had been reminding me of the trees in Spokane where my brother and I grew up. They were some kind of pine, and their needles on the grass and their piney smell had been reminding me of Ponderosa.
At the end, when Ted came back and I was standing there with him, at Keats’s grave, with my balding baby brother, middle-aged now, like me—late middle-aged—growing old–I was thinking of the way things looked and the way things felt when we were boys, in the woods above the river. Of the wide spaces between the trunks. The dark, volcanic rock.
MORE POEMS, PROSE PIECES, AND HOMILIES FROM THE TRIP:
On Sometimes Why It’s Good to be Narrow: A Homily
The Structure of Angels: A Prose Piece
The Human Person Fully Alive: A Prose Piece
Sometimes Not Having Perspective is a Good Thing: A Prose Piece
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