Chris Anderson's Blog, page 38
July 18, 2016
Dying Into Your Distances
O Lord, when I think of the galaxies and the stars, I am afraid.
“I have said these things to you,” Jesus tells his disciples, “so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
But this is the night before the crucifixion, this is the Farewell Discourse in the Gospel of John, and sadness fills the room. Fear.
How can joy be possible?
In the beginning of John Jesus says we must be “born again,” but now he changes the image. He says, “when a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.”
And so, “you have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
Not birth: labor. Not a child anymore. The mother.
No one is happy yet, Goff says, but then he makes a distinction between “the banality of happiness” and the spiritual condition of “joy.”
The Reverend Norvel Goff, Sr. climbs into the pulpit of Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a few months before a gunman walked through the door and killed nine people sitting in a prayer circle. They had been studying the Parable of the Sower. A grandmother. A little girl. The pastor was one of those killed—Goff is taking his place—and he stands now in the pulpit and begins to preach.
“Many have asked, ‘How are you? How is Mother Emanuel?’ he says. “My response is: ‘With your prayers and encouragement and with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.”
They’re not happy. How can they can be happy? No one is happy yet, Goff says, but then he makes a distinction between “the banality of happiness” and the spiritual condition of “joy.”
Joy. Not a feeling but a faith, that God is God and God is mercy and that in some way we can’t comprehend there is a justice and a love at work in the world stronger than our doubts and stronger than our fears and stronger than any evil within us or outside us.
“Even in the midst of trials and tribulations,” the Reverend Goff proclaims, “we still have joy.”
Joy. Not a feeling but a faith.
O Lord, when I think of the galaxies and the stars, I am afraid.
When I try to imagine the distances, I am defeated, I am lost.
And yet the scriptures say you know me and love me by name. The gospels say you follow the flight and the fall of every sparrow.
And the warblers? I could crush one with my hand.
And yet when they return in the spring, and I hear them in the trees, I rejoice and am glad.
Is this how it is for you, my God? Do you delight in me as I delight in them, when I hear them sing again?
O Lord, may I sing, and may we all sing, and when we fall, may we fall into the vastness of your love.
May we die into your distances.
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July 7, 2016
To Become Who We Already Are
In the face of that baby we can see the stars.
I know a man, a fine, thoughtful person, who has decided to become Catholic, and he has asked me to help him get started. He doesn’t know the Bible very well or theology or many of our traditions and practices, and I’m of course really glad to help as best I can. And this is what RCIA is for, in part, and the Catechism.
Faith is in the love of this man for his wife and his children and his grandchildren. Faith is in his kindness and his compassion. Faith is in the music he plays—he’s in a band on the weekends—and in everything that gives him pleasure.
But it seems to me that the three readings for today are a really good place to start. They put everything into perspective, because as the reading from Deuteronomy says, faith isn’t finally complicated or a question of terminology and ideas. “For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you.” We don’t have to climb mountains or cross seas. We don’t have to read every book in the world. No, faith is “something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts.” Faith is in the love of this man for his wife and his children and his grandchildren. Faith is in his kindness and his compassion. Faith is in the music he plays—he’s in a band on the weekends—and in everything that gives him pleasure. Faith is in his desire to be Catholic, in his very attraction, in the pull itself, and all the terminology and all the history and all the particular practices of the mass are various ways of expressing this longing, this hope, this inner goodness, and honoring it, and acting it out.
When this man comes to understand the teachings, they will be deeply familiar. He will realize that he’s known them all along.
Judaism is characterized by hundreds of laws, about everything from what to wear to how to manage livestock to how to set up a worship space. But in the Gospel today when Jesus is asked what the most important commandment is, he answers without hesitation, and his answer makes everything crystal clear, and simple, and direct—and so all the more challenging. All of the hundreds of laws, he says, come down to two: love of God and love of neighbor. All of the law is based on love—not judgment, not anger, not abstractions, not rituals—love, a devotion to God above all and a compassion for the people around us, and not in some soft, fuzzy sense but concretely, in the world.
This is a man who takes care of his elderly and demented father, visiting him every week and managing his finances and keeping track of all his details. This is a man who takes care of his grown children, financially and otherwise, who spends time with them and talks with them and tries to respect and understand the choices they’ve made. This is a man who the other day walking into a restaurant saw a homeless person begging on the street and who on principle, overcoming his skepticism, stopped, bent down, and gave that person a $100. Just did it. Without fanfare.
And the reason to learn how to pray the Rosary and what the mass is and what the Pope is and how all the Catholic things work is to understand more deeply what is already true, what is already inside of him.
This is a man who is already Catholic in every way that counts. And the reason to learn how to pray the Rosary and what the mass is and what the Pope is and how all the Catholic things work is to understand more deeply what is already true, what is already inside of him.
The ancient church understood that the Bible is often very hard to understand, that parts of it are troubling and violent and obscure. So, they said, let’s use the clear parts to understand the unclear parts– because parts of the Bible are really clear, they said, not obscure at all– so let’s use those parts as ways of interpreting the others, let’s use them as interpretative tools or lenses. And the clearest part of all, the part of the Bible we’d choose if we had to choose one part to define it, is right here, is the Greatest Commandment, the commandment of love.
As St. Augustine puts it, any interpretation of the Bible that is contrary to love of God and love of neighbor is false and in error. Any interpretation contrary to love: it’s wrong.
And this lovely reading from Colossians leads us into the more mystical and the grand.
One of the things this man knows the least about is the Bible and the stories of the Bible. He doesn’t really know who is who and what the overall plot of it is, as most people don’t, and it’s really important for him to learn it—not even the principles of interpretation first but just who is Abraham and who is David and who is Mary and how many disciples there were and what exactly happened when Jesus was crucified and after.
What we believe is that God became a human person at a particular moment and in a particular place and so it’s terribly, terribly important that we learn the story of the historical Jesus. Our faith isn’t abstract. It’s concrete. It’s grounded in history. It’s grounded in a person.
Our faith isn’t abstract. It’s concrete. It’s grounded in history. It’s grounded in a person.
But at the same time we believe that this person who came into history has always been present, since the creation of the world and before, and is never not present. We believe not just in the historical Jesus but in the Cosmic Christ, not as a force or energy but as a person, The Person, through whom all things were created and are continually being created. “He is before all things, / and in him and all things hold together.” There are the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, the stories of Jesus being born in manger and of the shepherds and the wise men, but there’s also a prior nativity story, and it’s the story of the Big Bang, it’s the story of the nativity of the universe, and Christ was there, Christ was what made this creativity and this goodness and this life possible in the first place, and he is still creating and filling and animating all things, so that there’s not a molecule, not an atom, not a quark that isn’t charged with his presence and charged with his goodness and love and always was and always will be.
“For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, / the visible and the invisible.”
And in that sense everything this man already knows about science, about the planets, aboutthe chemistry of the body and the life of the world, everything he feels when he looks up at the night sky and sees the stars: that’s Christ. Everything he knows about life, and about death: that’s Christ.
What’s so amazing and wonderful about our faith is that this Cosmic Christ, so sublime we can’t grasp him, also becomes a child, becomes a person, becomes a man we can see and touch and love, becomes a host, a wafer of bread, enters into the world so that we can tell his story in words that make some sense to us even as they point to a mystery we can never grasp.
In the face of that baby we can see the stars. In the face of that glorious man on the cross, we can glimpse all the galaxies.
How blessed are we in Christ, how blessed are we in our tradition as Catholics. How blessed are we in the scriptures today and every day. How blessed am I to be asked to help this man become who he already is.
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July 6, 2016
Stardust
Once by a pond I watched cedar waxwings
swoop and stall, snatching insects. I’d never seen
so many before in one place. Their dark masks.
Their yellow-dipped tails. Later, evening.
Once in a meadow I lost my silver rosary.
A small one with a clasp, the kind a girl might wear.
But it wasn’t hard to find, the way it glittered
later in the grass like a string of tiny pearls.
Once at a funeral an old man slowly rose
and belted out Stardust. Teary-eyed. Quavering.
Oh memories of love! The purple dust of twilight
steals across the meadows of our hearts!
I really wasn’t expecting this. But after a while
I realized how beautiful life is, and sad.
Nothing is ever lost.
It’s always just somewhere else.
From The Next Thing Always Belongs
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July 3, 2016
Dogs & The Universe
1. Lucy
I believe in God when it’s only me and Lucy in our own green wood. The white tip of her tail. A kingfisher skimming the pond.
OK—and Barb and the kids and a few of our friends. Say a village.
But not all the faces blurring by on the freeway and the endless mothers jostling at the mall in their bulky parkas and the farmers coming in from the centuries to drink a cup of buttermilk, all their widows keeping lilacs on all their grassy graves—or the land and the birds and the beasts on the land, forest after forest primeval seething with snakes and bacteria for eons too glacial and cataclysmically slow even to contemplate, this one small planet whirling in the great mass of stars and the other galaxies blurring in that poster with the arrow pointing at this one tiny dot of light because that’s the only place you are and ever can be: you are here.
Where the kingfisher is gliding over the pond, and the mist is lifting, and Lucy is trotting along the shore on her four proud white paws.
2. Pip
If there were an earthquake and you were on the moon looking down, you wouldn’t see any movement at all. The earth would seem to just hang in space, seas a deep blue, clouds creamy white.
And it’s good to look at life like this, from a distance, because it humbles us and exalts us and it makes us aware of how fragile life is and interconnected, the way it did the astronauts, gazing homeward through their hatches.
But it’s good, too, to zoom in and keep on zooming, from high up all the way down to the very pixel you’re in, to the living room and to the couch in the living room and to the little dog sleeping on top of the back cushions of the couch, his head and his front paws draped over your shoulder in such a way that one day during Holy Week, when in the scene from the Last Supper in the gospel that morning the Beloved Disciple leans back in his love and his sadness and his grief against the chest of Our Lord, your left ear is pressed against the chest of that little dog, and you hear through the layers of his fur and the muscle and the bone the steady beating of his little doggy heart.
You sit there a long time. You hold very still.
3. Max
Dear Mr. Rogers:
I should have written before, when you were still alive and I was still a boy.
I always admired how slow you were, and brave. How you never turned away.
Christmas one of our dogs died, a border collie, sweet faced. His name was Max. We buried him on the hill, and every time I walk past the little cross we put up, I ache to be with him again—not much, I admit, but every time.
Now it’s April, and wild iris are blooming by his grave, and a silence opens up the way it used to on your show when you were just being in the room. You’d be sitting in a chair, before the next thing, and you’d let the camera show your face going empty and still the way every face really is.
That’s what I admired.
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July 2, 2016
Eat What Is Set Before You
We must die to live, must empty ourselves in order to be filled.
About a week ago a group of us were on pilgrimage in Rome, in St. Peter’s Square, and Pope Francis went by in his Pope-mobile not more than ten feet away, smiling and waving. It was a wonderful moment. The trip was full of wonderful moments. We got to have masses in all these great churches, and we got to see all this great art—Michelangelo’s and Caravaggio’s—and there was pasta and gelato and the light on the stones.
And then it was over. We had to come home. Stupid with jet lag. Ten pounds heavier. And there were lawns to mow and laundry to do, and maybe the internet goes out at the house and we have to spend hours on the phone with tech support and it still isn’t fixed and where or where are all those moments in the sun? Did Rome even happen?
And this is how it is. This is how the readings are today.
We got to have masses in all these great churches, and we got to see all this great art—Michelangelo’s and Caravaggio’s—and there was pasta and gelato and the light on the stones.
In the reading from Isaiah we have this beautiful image of God the mother holding us in her arms and comforting us, and we are told to rejoice, and again to rejoice, because our bodies will flourish like the grass and we will be filled with delight. And the Psalm tells us to shout with our joy, not to hold back at all, because the works of God are tremendous.
But in Galatians Paul is talking about being crucified to the world and how he bears the marks of Jesus in his body, and the whole letter to the Galatians is angry and tense because the people in that place have failed to get the point Paul was making when he was there. And in Luke Jesus is preparing his followers for struggle and persecution as they go out into the world to evangelize, preparing them to have the door slammed in their faces again and again. They are lambs among wolves, he says.
Life is up and life is down and that’s a good thing finally because it shows us that the joy when it comes isn’t a fantasy, isn’t an illusion, because if it were, we’d be feeling it all the time, we’d be manufacturing it. But it comes and it goes because it’s a gift from God, not an achievement of ours, not a prize we earn, so that even in the dark times we can rejoice, knowing that the Lord will come again and is with us even in the darkness, even in our sadness.
So what do we do? We accept. We accept it all. We “eat what is set before us,” as Jesus tells his disciples, taking what comes, the good with the bad, and not trying to change it or presume that we can.
Walter Burghardt’s definition of prayer: “a long, loving look at the real.”
Life is up and life is down and that’s a good thing finally because it shows us that the joy when it comes isn’t a fantasy, isn’t an illusion, because if it were, we’d be feeling it all the time, we’d be manufacturing it.
He also says, “the real I look at. I do not analyze it or argue it, describe or deny it. I do not move around it. I enter into it.”
When we enter a house we wish it peace, and if the person who lives there accepts this peace, great, terrific. It will stay there. But if we enter a house and the person who lives there says no, says I don’t want your peace and your goodwill, we move on. We shake the dust from our feet. We don’t argue and push, we don’t try to control the person’s life, and we don’t take it personally, either, don’t let it get into us. We just leave. We just let it go.
Most of us pack a lot more for our journeys than Jesus says the disciples should pack. We take all our assumptions, all our preconceived notions, all our selfish expectations. But Jesus says, leave all that behind. Have no expectations. Be in the moment, accept the moment, rejoice in the moment.
In Assisi, in the Church of Saint Clare, we saw the habit of St. Clare, and some of her hair, and the shoes that St. Francis wore, thin and papery, like slippers—St. Francis, the one who stripped off all his finery and walked out in the hills to be with God among the birds and the trees.
But this isn’t exactly right either. It’s not just that there’s darkness and there’s light but that for us as Christians the darkness and the light are necessarily related.
To the extent that any of us for a minute conform even a little bit to the heart of Jesus, are even just a little bit Christ-like, we will be persecuted. Have you experienced this? The moment we become like lambs, the wolves attack: with a cutting remark, a snub, a cold shoulder. It’s hard in this world to be kind to others and to give up ambition and in fact it inevitably leads to a kind of suffering. We are on the way of the Cross. We are in our own small terms experiencing the Passion.
And that leads to the joy. That leads to the resurrection. We must die to live, must empty ourselves in order to be filled.
And it’s not just that. It’s not just that we have to endure the darkness when it comes but that even then we can rejoice.
The day after we saw Pope Francis we got have mass at St. Peter’s, in the chapel of the tomb of St. Pope John Paul, right next to Michelangelo’s Pieta. St. John Paul’s body, in its coffin, was actually inside the altar itself, and I was really aware of that as I served.
I think what I admired the most about John Paul was the way he let us watch him grow old and frail, and not gently but brutally, with his Parkinson’s and how it devastated him. He too, bore the marks of Jesus on his body, and that’s what I admired, not his power but his powerlessness, not his charisma but his weakness, because I think he was showing us what really matters after all.
The moment we become like lambs, the wolves attack: with a cutting remark, a snub, a cold shoulder. It’s hard in this world to be kind to others and to give up ambition and in fact it inevitably leads to a kind of suffering. We are on the way of the Cross.
The Pieta: the body of our crucified Lord, limp in his mother’s lap.
“Do not rejoice,” Jesus tells us, “because the spirits are subject to you”—because sometimes things go well, because sometimes the light pours down—“but rejoice because your names are written in heaven”—because however things go, we have Jesus, we are one with him.
“For neither does circumcision mean anything, nor does uncirumcision,” Paul says, “but only a new creation.”
And while the mass was going on, in the chapel of the tomb of John Paul, there was this really loud noise outside of us, like some kind of machinery, and it was getting louder and louder, closer and closer. It was a man on a floor polisher, riding it, like a kind of Zamboni—not the Pope on his Pope-mobile but a janitor on a floor polisher, and I thought, here it is, here’s life, both light and dark, the dignified and the ridiculous, both at the same time, all at once.
Rejoice, rejoice, I say it again rejoice. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirits, brothers and sisters, Amen.
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July 1, 2016
The Problem With Joy
The problem with joy isn’t that we don’t ever feel it.
It’s that we don’t want it. Not really. We feel it all the time, it comes to us all the time, but the moments are either too small or fleeting—and so we let them go or we don’t trust them or we don’t recognize what they are in the first place—or they’re too huge, too overwhelming—and so we run from them, try to deny them, can’t handle them; and in either case they’re moments of emotion, not pure reason, and moments of spontaneity, not order and control, and we don’t like that. We want to be in control. We want to understand what’s happening.
Joy isn’t just something that comes when we’re good but something that comes when we’re bad, too, or desolate, or in despair, and that scares the hell out of us.
We want to be able to put the moment into words, and if there’s one defining quality of these moments of joy, it’s that they elude our language. We can only point to them. And we can’t make them happen. There’s no cause and effect. We can’t pray the rosary and think the right thoughts and do moral things and help people and study and all of this and have it lead automatically, causally, in every case, to the feeling of joy. Joy isn’t reproducible by another experimenter. Joy isn’t a product of our behavior and will. Joy isn’t just something that comes when we’re good but something that comes when we’re bad, too, or desolate, or in despair, and that scares the hell out of us.
The problem with joy is that it’s always pulling the rug out from under us, and what’s underneath are the stars. What’s above us are the stars. It’s the starry night over and over again, or a glimpse of it. Gorgeous. Frightening.
Just there.
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June 23, 2016
Outside Rome
Above the Catacombs of St. Callistus
fields of grass and flowers grow.
Fescue and poppies
above the dark mazes
where the bones lie.
A blue sky with clouds.
Not a cross but an anchor.
A fish.
Not another English actor
but a beardless boy, a lost sheep
wrapped around his neck
like a scarf.
The way the roots of the Cypress
shoot straight down,
deep into the waiting earth.
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On Sometimes Why It’s Good to be Narrow
Enter through the narrow gate. A homily from the Rome pilgrimage.
I’ve been thinking about all the narrow paths we walked on the pilgrimage in Rome and Florence and Assisi, down the alleys and crooked streets and up the many steps and stairways.
I’ve been thinking about the all narrow gates, through the security checkpoints and into the churches and museums, and about the Holy Doors, at St. Peters and St. Paul Outside the Walls and all the others, which were narrow, too, massive and high but narrow.
All the lines we stood in.
All the squeezing to a point.
I’ve been thinking about the tight schedule we were on, the narrow margins of time we were given, and necessarily—all of this was necessary. If we didn’t come back on time, we missed the bus. If we didn’t stay on the narrow route, we didn’t get where we were going.
Sometimes, in some ways, it’s good to be narrow-minded.
I’ve been thinking about the eyes of the David, in Florence, of their great intensity, and focus, and determination—and of the intensity and balance and poise of his whole magnificent body, and how it’s only this focus and this narrowing, this great coming to a point, that makes it possible for him to kill Goliath with his single stone.
Sometimes, in some ways, it’s good to be narrow-minded.
And of the intensity of Michelangelo in his making of this glorious thing, his great single-mindedness, blow by blow and cut by cut, over three years.
We are all wandering and lost, as Dante was wandering and lost in the dark wood Florence, when he was exiled, and it’s because we are too open-minded, are listening to too many other voices, are taking too much in, and we have to make a choice, decide on a way, decide who to trust and who to follow, again and again, and that someone is Christ, is Our Lord Jesus, the One Thing Necessary, the Only Thing.
Prefer nothing whatever to Christ, St. Benedict says.
Those of us in the group talked a lot what we were going to do when got back home, how we were going to use the energy we felt in Italy, and I think that has to mean narrowing our focus, concentrating this energy. We can’t be fiddling with our phones or talking about lunch when rising above us, right there in our midst, is the David. We have to look at him with some of the intensity he shows us, because that’s not David that Michelangelo has sculpted, it’s Christ, Christ in all his vitality and humanity.
Then everything opens up again. We come through the narrow door and suddenly we’re inside a magnificent church, a vast, echoing nave.
God himself is narrowing his focus, to you and to me.
God narrowed himself down so radically he became a man, a baby in a manger, and through that narrow wooden box comes a whole universe—on that narrow wooden cross everything was ripped open and sanctified—we make this choice and we eat this one small circle of bread and the whole Parousia is ours, the end of the old world and the beginning of the new.
This is what we find when we get through the narrow gate. This is what we get to: to glory, to beauty.
And all the while, whether we are lost or found, scattered or focused, God himself is looking at us, just as intently as the David is looking out at Goliath, but not to kill but to save us.
To love us. God himself is narrowing his focus, to you and to me. Each one of us, somehow, in his marvelous grace, is the point He comes to.
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June 22, 2016
Hello Brother Ass
A homily from my recent Rome Pilgrimage.
When I saw the Porziuncola again, the little church within the church, inside the Basilica of St. Mary’s of the Angels, in Assisi—the simple stone hut that St. Francis built in the 12th century, with brick and stucco and mud, about the size of a one-car garage, and vaulting up all around it, marbled and high-ceilinged, still another great Italian church, a basilica, with all the usual arches and statues and bronze—I thought of the soul.
I thought of us.
We all have an inner innocence. We all have an inner goodness. But our pride engulfs it–our self-consciousness–all the elaborate architecture of our egos.
We have to throw off our finery, as St. Francis famously did. Not be afraid to be who really are.
I don’t mean that we have to be spiritual athletes, because we can’t be. Francis never expected his followers to observe his own austerities. He was always very gentle with others and accommodating of their frailties and their humanness, and in fact at the end of his too-short life he even expressed regret for the way he had abused his own body. I should have been kinder to poor “brother ass,” he said, speaking of his body, of himself. At the very end he asked a friend to make him the special kind of almond cake he loved.
We have to throw off our finery, as St. Francis famously did. Not be afraid to be who really are.
St. Francis wasn’t a puritan or a scold but more a clown, not just free of pretension but full of joy in the simple things of life.
You know how when you travel you worry about your clothes and about packing and what you will eat and where you will sleep and how you will get to where you are going? I do, and I think, I shouldn’t be thinking about these ordinary things. I should be thinking higher, spiritual thoughts.
But in the museum of the Basilica of St. Clare the relics set out behind the glass looked just like the contents of our own suitcases: the shoes of St. Francis. The habit of St. Clare.
The spiritual life is a life, it’s ordinary, it’s a matter of simple things and bodily acts and living together day to day. I think that our own Porziuncola is made up of our ordinary human needs, our eating and our sleeping and our getting around, and that we should just admit this and not pretend otherwise—not keep spinning out complicated theological abstractions and using big words all the time, as if we’re not just everyone else.
What does Jesus say on the cross? I thirst.
And maybe this is the really spiritual thing about going on pilgrimage, the way it leaves us vulnerable and reminds us of our humanness.
The spiritual life is a life, it’s ordinary, it’s a matter of simple things and bodily acts and living together day to day.
Maybe whenever we hunger or thirst or are tired, we should just stand back and see this and admit this and laugh at ourselves, affectionately. Say, hello Brother Ass. Maybe we should stand back and admit how radically dependent we always are on the kindness and competence of others and how radically dependent we are most of all on Jesus Christ, the one who satisfies our deepest thirst, the one who answers our every hunger and our every need, who in the Eucharist and in every moment, in everything we see and do, in Corvallis or Assisi, Spokane or Siena, is giving himself away to us, feeding us who he really is, human and divine, both, equally, the one in the other.
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