Chris Anderson's Blog, page 4
November 11, 2023
You Never Know
November 12, 2023 video
Wisdom 6:12-16; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; 4:13-14; Matthew 25:1-13
I was driving at night on the way to Spokane. My mother had died that morning, and I was going home to be with my dad. And as I drove through the high desert, I passed a football stadium in a little town, lit up with those big stadium lights. A game was going on, and the light was pouring into the darkness.
“You know neither the day nor the hour,” Jesus says. My mother didn’t know that in the middle of mopping the kitchen floor she would have a heart attack and die before the EMTs even got there. I didn’t know that driving through the desert at night, in my grief, when I least expected it, I would see a great light–for just a moment, a light, shining into my darkness.
And I wasn’t paying attention. I was too numb to notice, I was driving by too fast, and I think this is how it is for all of us. We’re not ready. We haven’t filled our lamps with oil.
We don’t set aside time to pray. We don’t let the words of the scriptures soak into us, don’t let them train us to see our lives, too, as sacred texts.
We don’t set aside time to remember these moments, to sit in silence and reflect, because moments like this almost always pass us by at first. We’re too busy. We’re too distracted. But we can remember them after the fact. We can see what rises in us again. But only if we stop. Only if we hold still. “The believer is essentially one who remembers,” Pope Francis says.
Wisdom is always waiting by the gate, for those who watch for her.
This is the key to the mass: remembering. “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus says in the Upper Room, on the night before the crucifixion, at the Last Supper. We repeat these words in the words of institution in the Eucharistic Prayer, and what we are called to remember is first the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Christ is the center. Christ is the truth. But at the same time, we are also called to remember our own lives, too, through Christ, our own dying and rising every day. “You are indeed Holy, O Lord,” the priest says in the third Eucharistic Prayer,
and all you have created / rightly gives you praise,
for through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ,
by the power and working of the Holy Spirit,
you give life to all things and make them holy.
The prayer is saying: look at the bread and the wine of your lives. Look at the light shining in the darkness as you pass by or remember it and give thanks for it. “You never cease to gather a people to yourself,” the priest says, “so that from the rising of the sun to its setting / a pure sacrifice may be offered in your name.” From the rising of the sun to its setting. Everywhere. Unceasingly.
And then at the consecration, at that moment, the Holy Spirit makes this holy ordinary bread and this ordinary wine, right in front of us–not just a symbol of Christ but Christ himself, the Bridegroom come, here and now. It’s as if the world is being created a new, as if the Big Bang is happening all over again, whenever the mass is celebrated and wherever it is, every second.
In a recent poll a majority of Catholics say they don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and I think that’s in part because they don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in their lives. It’s too subtle. Too deep. Too ordinary. But this works the other way around, too: in the Eucharist the light shines out into the darkness and through it, the light shines in us. The Eucharist is the oil for the lamp and the lamp, and with it we can see Christ in everything.
This the cycle, the continual exchange: our lives help us understand the mass, and the mass helps us understand our lives.
I don’t mean that God’s presence is obvious. I don’t mean that there was a huge banner hanging above the stadium that night, something that solved the problem of my mother’s bitterness and regret or my own complicated feelings about her or the darkness not just above that desert but above Israel and the Gaza Strip, above the battlefields of Ukraine, everywhere.
The gospel today is a parable, the Lord’s favorite way of trying to teach us, his central form, and we forget how wonderfully open-ended the parables are. As the New Testament scholar C.H. Dodd puts it, a parable is a simple story, but a story that leaves us in “sufficient doubt” about what exactly it means as to “tease us into the thought.” I’ve read the Parable of the Ten Virgins many times, and it keeps opening up for me. Sometimes I identify with the foolish virgins, sometimes with the wise, sometimes with the merchants who have closed their doors. With all of them, really. The meaning is always changing, the meaning is always just beyond my reach.
Our lives are parables, too. Not treatises. Not billboards. Our lives are parables, and the meaning exists “between the lines,” Abbot Jeremy Driscoll says, the Abbot at Mount Angel Abbey.
What does the parable of the stadium mean, of the light in the desert–what did it mean and what does it mean now, as is it has come back to me so vividly?
That I need to stay awake. I need to be ready.
That the darkness is all around us and we can’t explain it away, we can’t understand it or deny it, we can’t figure out how all the suffering in the world can keep going on if there really is a God.
That still the light is shining in that darkness, that there really is a God, who is always trying to speak to us, always with us, even in the darkness and especially then. Both: the light and the darkness, the sadness and the joy, and it’s not up to us to reconcile them in some easy, convenient way but to live with the tensions, the contradictions, to live with everything, and tto rust God to reconcile and make sense of it all. That’s beyond us.
And yet. And yet. “We do not want you to be unaware,” St. Paul says, “about those who have fallen asleep, so that you may not grieve, like the rest, who have no hope.” Have hope. Have hope. “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep.” Death is not the end. Sadness is not the only truth. Violence is not unending, but the Lord, with “the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God” will raise us, and we will be caught up together, to “meet the Lord in the air”—in the air above the stadium, in the darkness above our battlefields.
The light is pouring into the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. A game is going on and the stadium lights are blazing. I am passing by. I am on my way to my father.
But I know that in the stadium the stands are full of mothers and fathers, and daughters and sons, and neighbors and strangers and friends. The whole town is there. I can’t hear them but I know that everyone is cheering.
The post You Never Know appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
October 27, 2023
Lawns
I love lawns. They are soft and green, and continuous,
uninterrupted. When you look out on a broad expanse
of lawn, your heart is soothed. Your eye lingers.
I know about water. But household consumption of water
is only ten percent of consumption overall, and though
sixty percent of that goes to the watering of lawns,
that’s still a small percentage in the great scheme of things.
I know about mowers. But is there no place where I can be
mechanical? Where I can roar? Where I can breathe in
the smells of gas and fresh cut grass and think of my father
with his broad shoulders? His crewcut? His Toro?
Some days when the wind comes from the north, I catch
the sweet odor of the landfill. One day the only mountains
will be mountains of Styrofoam. I know that—
we spring up in the morning and wither at last. And yet
still I long for the broad green lawn. It covers
ground. It is smooth. It has one idea. It is composed
of blades, and over every blade, the Talmud says,
there is an angel whispering grow, grow.
The post Lawns appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
October 11, 2023
The Real Presence of Christ in Our Lives
On the Real Presence of Christ in Our Lives video
I’m teaching a class in the parish on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the other day a woman in the class made a really interesting comment.
She loves the way Hopkins celebrates the presence of God in nature—in hawks and stars and ordinary things. But growing up she was taught something different. She was taught that we properly worship God only inside a church, when we’re down on our knees.
That someone so literate and intelligent could say such a thing shows how deeply embedded this misconception is. And it is a misconception. The Church doesn’t teach that God is present only in the Church, and more importantly, Our Lord doesn’t teach that—Our Lord who roamed the hills and fields, who urges us to observe the birds of the air and the flowers of the field (Matthew 6:25-34). This isn’t what the scriptures teach us, from Genesis to the Psalms to the prophets. This isn’t what’s celebrated in the great creation hymn in Colossians, that in Christ “were created all things in heaven and on earth” and that in him “all things continue in being” (Colossians 1:15-21).
The Big Bang is the first Incarnation, and all creation is incarnational from that point forward, and the work of the Incarnation is fulfilled in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. “All fullness” resides in him, Colossians proclaims. Which is to say, if Christ came into the world and “charged it” with “his grandeur,” to paraphrase one of Hopkins’s most famous poems, how can the world be anything other than sacramental?
Just look at the Nicene Creed itself, for that matter, this canonical summary of all that we believe, a summary that we profess together every Sunday at mass and that defines what is doctrinally valid: that we “believe in one God, / the Father almighty, / maker of heaven and earth, / of all things visible and invisible.” All things. In heaven and on earth. As Vatican II puts it, there are many “modes of presence.”
That’s why in the reading from Philippians at mass last Sunday, Paul can urge us to think about whatever is “honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious” (Philippians 4:6-9)—whatever, not just things in a church, not just things we think of as “holy,” but everything in our lives.
Which is not to say that the mass is therefore secondary or merely symbolic, that we don’t need it, because we do, because in the mass the Incarnation is fulfilled and enacted and brought into being anew. This is what the Church teaches. The liturgy, Vatican II tells us, is “the source and summit” of our faith, the preeminent mode of presence, and it gathers everything in the world into its creative actions, as when the deacon receives the gifts of the bread and the wine–the work of our hands, the fruit of the earth–and carries them to the altar to be transformed, and elevated, and revealed.
In fact, the language of the mass makes this point as clearly as possible, it denies our somehow habitual dualism with lyricism and force, as for example in the second Eucharistic prayer:
You are indeed Holy, O Lord,
and all creation rightly gives you praise,
for through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ,
by the power and working of the Holy Spirit,
you give life to all things and make them holy.
We don’t pay enough attention to the language of the Eucharistic Prayers, to what is actually said in the mass, and we should, because the mass is the dogma, all of it, the whole action and arc of it. We don’t need to theologize about it. It’s all there, and what it says is just as plain as day: that through Christ “all things” are “made holy.”
The bread and wine, after all, are just ordinary bread and ordinary wine.
Except that they’re not: they are the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
And we should carry this faith right into our everyday lives, to see and come to appreciate all the bread and all the wine of our experiences. “Everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty,” Hopkins writes in a notebook entry: “to lift up our hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.”
And when Hopkins says this, he’s being absolutely orthodox. He’s speaking both from his heart and from the heart of the tradition.
In a recent poll of Catholics, not many of us say we actually believe in the “Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” and that’s a cause of great concern. That’s why the bishops of the United States have declared a three-year period of Eucharistic renewal, to help us return to our faith in what really happens at the mass. That’s why Pope Francis has recently issued an apostolic letter on the Eucharist, I Have Earnestly Desired.
What I propose is that we begin to renew our sense of his presence by learning to see God in nature, too, and in everything else.
This is exactly the logic of the second Eucharistic Prayer—this is exactly what the priest says, right after proclaiming that all things are holy in Christ.
Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you,
by the same Spirit graciously make holy
these gifts we have brought to you for consecration
that they become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
That therefore is incredibly important, because saves us from our either/or thinking, and the phrase by the same Spiritnecessarily follows it, because this Spirit is the same Spirit that charges our lives with grandeur. This is the key. It’s exactly because the Spirit is present in nature and in all things that we are inspired to go further, to ask the Spirit to transform these particular things, the bread and the wine, in this fuller, this extraordinary way.
And there’s even more, there’s a tremendous encouragement and challenge, because as the final prayer at last week’s mass makes clear, when we receive the sacrament, we ask to be “transformed into what we consume.”
How can we all be such dualists, how can dualism be our default setting, when through grace we ourselves become the Body of Christ—when at the end of each mass we are dismissed (again by the deacon!) to “go in peace” into the world, to let the Lord charge the world with his grandeur through us and our actions?
This is what I’m trying to say, however vaguely and imprecisely. This is the little piece of the mystery that I think I glimpse: that we can’t understand the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist unless we first understand the Real Presence of Christ in our lives.
The post The Real Presence of Christ in Our Lives appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
September 26, 2023
Turning the Tables
September 24, 2023
Isaiah 55:6-9; Matthew 20:1-16
A couple of weeks ago I was at a wedding reception, and a nice man sat down across from me at the table. He wanted to talk about religion, and he said the same things people always say when they talk about religion: that he was raised in the Church but grew out of it, that the Church is full of hypocrites, and that there isn’t one way to God.
I’ve heard this hundreds of times, exactly these three things: I was raised in the Church, the Church is full of hypocrites, there isn’t one way. It’s the new kerygma statement. The new dogma.
And I don’t mean to be condescending, because the man at the reception is a good man, someone who is sincerely searching for God. It just feels to me that talking in generalities like this is almost always an evasion. It’s beside the point. “Seek the Lord where he may be found,” Isaiah says, and I don’t think he can be found in abstractions.
So I listened, and I tried not to get sucked into a debate, and finally I asked him: what makes you the happiest? Where do you feel most like yourself?
This is the question, I think. This is what really matters.
And the man stopped, and thought, and then veered away again, back out into the memes, back out into ideas, and I don’t blame him. It’s hard to talk about your deepest hopes and fears, especially with someone you don’t know. It’s hard to face your own emptiness. It’s hard to see the subtle ways God is working in your life.
And even when we want to, it’s hard to put what we feel into words. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,” says the Lord in Isaiah, “nor are your ways my ways . . . As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.” That’s why dogma is always secondary, why dogma is always limited, because God is beyond all language, including our own—and this is the dogma, this is what the dogma professes, that the God we believe in doesn’t follow good business practices, like the landowner in the Gospel today, that the God we believe in doesn’t reward us according to how long or hard we work but is loving and generous beyond all measure.
Dogma, Flannery O’Connor says, is “the gateway to mystery.”
God, Gerard Manley Hopkins says, is “an incomprehensible certainty.”
But I wasn’t trying to tell this good man what the truth is. I was trying to say that he already knows it. I wasn’t trying to tell him that he needed to get God in his life. I was trying say that He already is in his life. What most deeply concerns me is how lost and lonely we all are, and that unless we have some kind of tradition and some set of spiritual practices and some kind of community to love us and hold us accountable, we’re going to miss entirely the one astounding fact: that God isn’t dead. He’s alive, in us and all around us. “Seek the Lord where he may be found,” Isaiah says, “call him while he is near,” and he is always near.
Didn’t Jesus perform his first miracle at a wedding reception, when he turned the water into wine—and where nobody could see it, nobody knew it was happening but Mary and the servants who served the others?
And this isn’t just a one-way thing. I get lost in the weeds, I get tempted into pointless arguments, all the time, and this man’s doubts were calling me to humility, and to listening, and to a deeper faith.
“Let us abandon our polemics,” Pope Francis says, in his new apostolic letter on Eucharistic renewal, “and listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Church.” Jesus falls in beside us on the road, but we don’t recognize him at first. We sit down at a table, at a wedding reception or coffee shop or in our own kitchen, and at just the moment of the breaking of the bread, we know: it’s him. Then he vanishes.
This is one of the main reasons we go to mass, I think, to train our hearts, to help us recognize the Lord when he falls in beside us—though as the pope keeps stressing, we need more training to begin with, too, before we come to this table and stand at this altar. The pope published his apostolic letter last year as the bishops of the United States began a three-year Eucharistic Renewal. It’s called, in English, I Have Earnestly Desired, and this is one of its most important points. We have to learn to think more imaginatively and creatively, the pope says. We have to learn to move from the head to the heart. The landowner’s wild and unexpected generosity can’t be understood according to our own narrow philosophical categories. The Eucharist is entirely his gift. Not something earned. Not something predictable. Not something we can put under a microscope. A poem, not a formula. An experience, not an object.
A few days after my conversation at the reception, in the same week, I had exactly the same conversation again, at a lovely brunch in a big, beautiful house on a horse farm in the hills outside of Oregon City. The husband and wife who hosted are kind and generous people, and we all had a wonderful time, and at the end, as were sitting at their kitchen table, the wife turned to me and began to talk about religion: that she was raised in the Church but grew out of it, that the Church is full of hypocrites, and that there isn’t one way to God. And I listened, as we need to listen, and after a while I asked her, what makes you most deeply happy? Where do you sense the presence of the God?
And she answered, immediately: with her horses.
This is a lovely, caring woman, and she has two rescue horses, one blind in one eye, one so old all he can do is lean. Early every morning she gets up and pulls on her rubber boots and trudges down to the barn. She shovels out their oats and brushes them down, and sometimes when she feels their warm breath on her face, she is so moved she cries, she said, and when I heard this, I was moved, too.
Earlier she’d told me that she didn’t think “religion should be hard.” But I said: taking care of your horses sounds like a pretty difficult practice to me.
It sounds like a spiritual practice.
Seek the Lord where he can be found. Call him while he is near.
Isn’t this what we believe? That all things were created through Him and in Him? That the Lord himself was born into the world, in a little town in the hills? That once in a stable a tremendous miracle took place—and is still taking place? Is always taking place?
The post Turning the Tables appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
September 16, 2023
Getting Out of the Way
There was only a row of mourners in front, before the open casket, all of them in black, the women with lacy black shawls wrapped around their heads.
The dead man lay in profile, chalky white.
They hardly said a word when I asked who he was and how he died. They were looking down. But as I turned to get my book, a young woman came up. We are from Albania, she whispered, and I’m the only one who speaks English.
It’s not words that matter but the saying of them, the rise and fall. It’s not ideas that matter. It’s faith. And as I opened my book and began to say the prayers, I realized that I was standing in front of the casket. I was blocking their view. All I had to do was get out of the way.
The post Getting Out of the Way appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
August 30, 2023
Sparrowhawk
The old woman in ICU wants to rail against the Church.
Patriarchy, she says, hierarchy, and I sit and listen.
“But you’re dying,” I say. “Why are we talking about this? Why does any of this matter?”
And the sun slants through the dusty window. My Roman collar chafes. On the monitor, the peaks and valleys of her failing heart.
“May I give you communion?” I ask her. And she says, “would that mean I’d have to come back to the Church?”
“No,” I say. “No. It will be our little secret.”
In Jesus the difference between matter and spirit has been forever transcended. What’s miraculous isn’t the walking on water but the water itself, is the lake, the Sea of Galilee, thirteen miles long and eight miles wide, with the sun rising over it in the mornings, and every lake, Yellowstone Lake and Lake Pend Oreille and even Cronemiller Lake, the pond in the woods by our house in Oregon, because God is everywhere, lovely in 10,000 places. The miracle is life itself, is the ordinary.
This is why we come to church, to offer up these moments, to consecrate them and so become more aware of them, to give thanks for them.
Just a shape at first, wide and blank, merging with my own dark outline on the road, the shadow of a hawk passes over my shoulder, so suddenly I flinch, I start, as if some unexpected hand has touched my actual body.
But gently, without a sound.
Seeming to dissolve then and rise, become three-dimensional: a sparrowhawk, golden, gliding just before me along the curve, a single feathered muscle pushing off finally above the fields, behind it, in the delicate sky, bulging in air, the afternoon moon, as huge and sudden as a world.
from Chris Anderson, Light When It Comes (Eerdmans: 2016)
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August 11, 2023
Not Everything is a Lie
Last month Barb and I went to Spokane for my fiftieth high school reunion, and one day beforehand we drove up to Colville, a town of about 5000 75 miles north where my dad grew up and where I was born and lived until I was five. My dad was a policeman there.
There’s a big C on Colville Mountain made of white stones, and a white cross, and Dad always told the story that he had put the C up there. When I was a boy, I just assumed that was true and didn’t pay attention to the details, but now that my dad and mom are both gone, and everything around us seems to be nothing but lies, it was important to me to find out if that one story at least was true in fact.
So Barb and I went to the historical museum in town and asked, and they took me back into the archives, and after about twenty minutes or so, they found an article about how the C got up there. And the first name I saw was my dad’s.
Not Everything is a Lie
Dad always said he put the C on Colville Mountain,
and he did, when he was student body president,
in 1948. We drove to Colville and asked.
We saw his name in a book. He led the group
that gathered the stones and painted them white
and laid them out in a great half-circle.
Later a tall white cross was raised above the C,
though now the town has moved it
to the side onto private land, but you can
still see them both from miles away as you come
around the bend from Chewelah, by the barn
that has always been falling down.
Further north the lakes
are cold and clear.
Of course, like every other poem in the world, and like every important moment in our lives, this poem isn’t just about what it’s about. The details always point a great mystery, to the mystery of the cross on the mountain, to mystery of a single letter, to the mystery of the lakes further north where the water is cold and clear.
It’s not hard to think of signs and symbols when you’re coming around a bend and see a giant letter and a great cross—a cross, he symbol of all the symbols we most hope is true, however we have moved it to the side.
So there’s a paradox here, for me and for all us, because though I long for something I can pin down and prove, what I really found on this trip is something much larger. What I found is the mystery, something greater than my own story or my dad’s story or yours but that we are all a part of.
The post Not Everything is a Lie appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
July 29, 2023
Walking on the Bluff a Few Days Before My Reunion
My first thought is, how did all these houses
get up here? I used to climb the road
on my Schwinn to look out over the city,
cranking up the long, steep slope.
The sky was the sky, the fields the fields,
dry as notebook paper. Then I remember,
it’s been fifty years! The houses are big,
with various gables and sleek black cars.
The streets broaden and curve. It’s evening,
after a hot summer day, and as I walk by,
a man on one side and a man on the other
stand in the half-light, in the evening air,
and water their front lawns by hand,
calling out to each other like friends.
The post Walking on the Bluff a Few Days Before My Reunion appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
July 7, 2023
The Farmers’ Market
Sunday July 9, 2023
Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9-13; Matthew 11:25-30
Last Saturday Barb and I went down to the farmer’s market and met our son, Tim, and his family: our daughter-in-law, Crista; our almost three-year-old grandson, Hank; and our new granddaughter, Emmy Margaret, who was born just three weeks ago. Crista was carrying Emmy in a sling against her chest. All you could see was her beautiful little face. And the sun was shining, and the farmers were selling blueberries and raspberries, and there were people and dogs everywhere. A band was playing: two guitars, a clarinet, and a kazoo.
When St. Paul tells us not to live “according to the flesh,” he isn’t talking about the farmer’s market. He’s talking about all the mornings and the moments we’ve corrupted with our selfishness and our greed. He’s talking about the fallen body. How can blueberries be anything other than good when God made them in their sweetness and made us to taste them? How can even labradoodles be anything other than good, when as Zechariah says today, our king comes riding towards us on “a colt, the foal of an ass”? To live by the Spirit means to love this Spirit-filled world, and to learn how to see it the way a child sees it, with openness and joy, because it’s through the world, through what we can touch and taste and feel, that the Spirit reaches out to us.
“My dear souls,” Jean Pierre de Caussade says, “you are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: making use of whatever he offers you.” De Caussade was an eighteenth- century French Jesuit. “Everything leads you to union with God,” he says. “The blood flowing through your veins moves only by his will. Every feeling and every thought you have, no matter how they arise, all come from God’s invisible hand.” We have nothing to do, as de Caussade puts it, “but love and cherish what each moment brings.”
We think that prayer is too hard. We think that to try to be holy means to spend our lives on our knees or in the clouds, despising everything that is warm and ordinary and real. But that’s not what Jesus teaches. “Come to me,” he says, “all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest.” “For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”
How can our Lord despise the world when he came into it? How can he disdain the ordinary and the real when he lived it, when he came to the markets and walked through the fields and called the children unto him?
We are all dualists. Dualism is hammered into us from birth by the ideas we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment, from the age of de Caussade, the idea that what is real is only what can be measured, the idea that the inner life is not as important as the outer life. But Jesus says no. The truth has been hidden from “the wise and the learned” and “revealed to the little ones,” and so we have to be little, too. Humble. Ordinary. Small. We have stop getting lost in theological abstractions, however important theology is; we have to stop getting caught up in doctrinal disputes, however important doctrine is; we have to stop getting tricked into political debates disguised as discussions of faith, because debates like this are never anything but a waste of spirit.
There’s a new book by a contemporary Jesuit, James Martin, called Learning to Pray. One of the early chapters is called “Praying Without Knowing It,” and I love that, because we all pray at certain moments in our lives, as Martin says, instinctively, unconsciously, in moments of gratitude and joy, in moments of sorrow, and the reason to pray in more formal ways is to train our hearts to know this and see this. The rest of the book is full of good, clear descriptions of the various methods the tradition gives us—lectio divina, the examen, the rosary, centering prayer, and all the others—but these aren’t meant to take us away from our lives but to bring us back into them more deeply. It’s what the mass does most of all. In the consecration of the bread and wine we are being taught to believe in the fundamental fact of the Incarnation, of God incarnate, here, not far above us, but here, in all that is good and healthy and right.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to quote a third Jesuit, the great nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Generations have trod and trod,” for centuries beauty has been trampled down, “but there lives a dearest freshness deep down things,” Hopkins says, and he wants us to see that and feel that, because he believes that this what the Lord came to teach us. I’m walking past the booths at the farmers’ market. I meet a young colleague I haven’t seen since I retired, and I’m glad to see him again. He’s a good man. I look at all the people as they walk by, all the children and the parents and the grandparents. “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,” Hopkins says in another poem, “lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, / to the father through the features of men’s faces.”
In a journal entry Hopkins talks about all this in theological terms, about what he calls the “incredible condescension of the Incarnation,” “that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion . . . but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.” He through whom all things were made lets himself be trained as a carpenter. The Divine Reason, the Logos, lets himself be lectured to by the rabbis. Why is it so surprising, then, Hopkins asks, that our “reception” of his graces should also take place among ordinary things?
The blueberries are a foretaste of his grace, and the children, and the light, everything, of a beauty revealed for us fully in the Eucharist, which in turn feeds and strengthens us and moves us to read the world differently, to see past its surfaces to what is shining through them. How can blueberries be anything but good when in just a moment the Lord will once again give himself to us in a piece of bread, a little piece of ordinary bread, here and now, for all of us, we who are just living our lives and doing the best we can?
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June 17, 2023
Moving
Jesus was a great traveler. He was always moving from one place to another, and he called other people to move, too, from where they were to somewhere else. Put down your nets and follow me. Let the dead bury the dead. Follow me.
The gospels are organized around the journey Jesus made from Galilee to Jerusalem. It’s only about as far as Corvallis is from Portland, but that’s a long way when you have to walk every step, as they did, from village to village, and of course in a deeper sense it was much further than that. It was a journey from bondage to freedom, from death to life, and to make that journey you have to be open, you have to be humble, you have to be willing to trust, and to endure hardship, and to not know where you are most of the time. You have to be willing to admit that you haven’t yet arrived, that you don’t have all the answers, that there’s something ahead greater than whatever you thought before.
You have to repent: metanoia, to change your mind. To move. To risk. And a lot of people in the gospels won’t take that risk, the Pharisees most of all. They’re stuck. They think the place they are is the only place there is. The old has passed away, Jesus says–behold, I give you something new. But you have to get in a boat and cross to the other side to see it, you have to get up off the couch, you have to get up out of bed on Sunday morning and drive down to church, and stand and kneel, and then get up out of the pew and journey forward to the front to receive the Eucharist, to receive the Body of Christ.
In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is at the bottom of hell, and he’s stuck in ice. He can’t move. He’s a mindless animal, and he can’t move. Everyone in the Paradiso is dancing. Is flying.
All her life Connie was a great traveler. She went everywhere even into her eighties, from Asia to Europe and all over the country, but she was a traveler in this deeper sense, too, always on the way, always making this interior move, and it wasn’t out of restlessness. It was out of enjoyment and curiosity and delight, and even more out of openness, out of humility. There was a quiet calm about her, and a graciousness, but she always wanted to know more, and she wasn’t bothered by uncertainty, and she didn’t think she was in control of everything. “In this quest to find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty,” Pope Francis says.
If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by some margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is proof that God is not with him. God is always a surprise. You never know where and how you will find him.
This was Connie. Quietly. Graciously. God was with her.
And it’s not that she was wandering either, was just roaming around. Everyone says that the journey is more important than the destination but that’s not true at all. As Christians we believe that we are part of a story, and that story has a beginning and a middle and an end, and now Connie has finally arrived where she was going. She has laid down her burden, though in God we are always being swept up, into love, into beauty–the whole universe is moving towards Christ and into Christ.
One of the ways that Connie traveled was as an artist, in her paintings and her art. She was very talented, and one of my treasured possessions is a small painting of hers. There’s this kind of indistinct field of dark red, and against it at the top there’s a faint white outline of a dome, with a cross or a star above it to the right. It’s a church, and at the bottom of it, spilling out of that red background, there is what looks like a river of white falling over a ledge.
It’s a really striking image, and I think it’s an image of someplace she had been, and I think it’s an image of a place inside her, in her heart, and I think it’s the place where she is now, the place all those other places were just glimpses of. It was the Eucharist she was always traveling towards, it was Christ, and now she has risen up and come forward and entered into it fully, she has received and been received, and all her journeying is at an end, and all her journeying is only beginning, is only opening up, is only moving towards a still greater beauty we can’t possibly imagine.
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