Chris Anderson's Blog, page 5

Wisp

video

 

It helps to look at the branches of trees

when you tire of all the actors who have played Jesus

and all the paintings, all the beards and ribcages

and knees.  Look at the sky.  The clouds in the sky.

 

But these, too, are moments.  Are temporary.

Everyone has a body.  The students come up

one-by-one, whispering what they want us

to pray for, and we put our hands on their heads

 

and call the Spirit down.  Pray for my anger.

Pray for my grief.  Pray for my loneliness,

one young woman asks.  She has been crying,

and she leans in so close I can feel

the warmth of her tears.  A wisp of her hair.

 

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Particle and Wave

a homily from Sunday May 7, 2023

John 14:1-2

     I know a woman who had a remarkable experience the day her husband died.  He died in the morning, at home.  A few minutes later she was walking out of his room.  She had taken a couple of steps down the narrow hall when she felt something like a wind rushing by her, close to the floor, about knee-high, whooshing towards the front door, and it felt like joy, like glee.  It felt like freedom.

     That was several years ago, and the woman hasn’t had anything like that experience again. She’s still not sure what it meant.  She’s in her early nineties now, a little wobbly and frail, and every day she slowly walks to the mailboxes down the block, and as she walks, she prays the Our Father, line by line, again and again, Our Father who art in heaven . . .  Our Father who art in heaven . . .  She gets in about ten, up and back.  Sometimes it’s raining.  Sometimes the sun is shining.  Sometimes the trees are leafing out and everything is green.

     Today in the Gospel the disciples ask Jesus to show them the Father, to help them see God, and Jesus says, a little exasperated, I think, “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”  And sometimes in his company the disciples have felt something like a rushing wind.  They have witnessed the Transfiguration.  They have seen Lazarus coming out of the tomb.  And sometimes the days have just flowed by, one thing after another.  Jesus has lived among them like any other man, getting up in the morning and eating breakfast and going about the day, and he hasn’t done anything interesting at all.   He’s just like everybody else.

     And we believe that now, after all this, this Jesus who had a body and lived in a place and time rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sent his Spirit to fill the whole earth, and we believe as John says in his marvelous prologue to his gospel, in this great poem, that in another mode the Word was with God from the beginning of time and has always been filling the world with his life and still is.

     And for us, too, as for the disciples, but in this different, subtler way, in our own time and place, there is sometimes a flash, a single, vivid moment, and sometimes, and more often, there are weeks and months and years when nothing seems to be happening at all, we’re just living our lives, until finally one day we realize that Jesus has been there all along, woven into the fabric of things.  Not a particle, a wave.  Not a photograph, a video.  Every day we walk to the mailbox, up and back, saying the Our Father, and sometimes the trees are blooming.

     So many people say that they see no evidence of God in their lives, and I think they mean they haven’t felt a rush of wind, they haven’t seen a blinding light.  But the disciples have seen a blinding light, and they still don’t get it, as the old woman doesn’t know if what she felt in the hallway was true, if Jesus really was bringing her husband home, if he really has prepared a place for him.

     I think we all want things to be more obvious than they are.  We all want the fireworks and the special effects.  For several months I’ve been feeling tired and dull and sad, and I’ve been praying for a little more joy, a little more energy at least, and what’s helpful for me in times like this is to switch from thinking like that to thinking of the wave, of the river, the long haul.  In my journal I’ve simply been keeping track of my blessings, all the things that might not seem important and would otherwise slip by, and now and then I read back over the journal and realize how those little things add up, like pennies in a jar, and that the empty times are part of a larger pattern that tends always towards joy.

     It’s been helpful for me, too, to focus more in prayer on the resurrected Christ than on the historical Jesus.  It’s wonderful if we can imagine him in the flesh, if we can see his face or hear his voice.  I’m just not very good at that.  For me it works better to think of the Jesus who rose and sent the Spirit, of the Logos of the prologue, continually creative, and maybe that could help you, too, when you’re trying to pray.  As Thomas Merton says,

When God’s love begins to burn within us, there is no strict necessity for using our imaginations any more.  Some may like to, some may not.  Use whatever helps you, and avoid what gets in your way.

       He also says,

Every moment and event of our lives plants a seed in our souls.

 

      Mary Oliver puts it this way in a beautiful little poem called “Praying”:

 

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

 

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

 

into thanks, a silence in which

another voice may speak.

 

     And isn’t this what Jesus called us to?  Isn’t this how he taught us to pray?  Simply and directly and about our own lives?

     Our Father, thy will be done, on earth as it is heaven . . .  Our Father, give us this day . . .

 

      A few weeks ago I did my first emergency baptism.  The parents had been told that their baby had severe problems and wouldn’t live long after it was born.  So they called the parish, and I was the one who was available and could be on call.  And when I did get the call, and hurried over to the hospital, and walked into that room, everything happened so fast I couldn’t take it in:  the mother weeping in her hospital bed, and the father standing beside her, and the nurse in her scrubs, weeping, too, the baby in a bassinet among the monitors and tubes, wrapped so tightly you could only see her tiny face.

     It wasn’t until later that I remembered the most important thing that happened in that moment.  I had a squeeze-bottle of Holy Water, and when I tried to squirt a little of it into my hand, I squirted too much, and when I poured it on the baby’s head, it spilled onto her face and down her cheeks.  And the nurse came, and knelt, and folding a paper towel, gently wiped the water away.

     She came, and knelt.   She folded paper towel.

     “I have been with you so long, and you still don’t know me?”

 

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The Anointing

video  

 

A priest goes to a village in Alaska

to anoint a dying man.  Maybe he flies there

in a Cessna.   But he’s forgotten

the Oil of the Sick—he left it on the counter

 

in the sacristy, hundreds of miles away—

and when he asks the son for what he has

he brings him a can of Valvoline.

Forty-weight.  But the priest goes ahead.

 

He anoints the man with motor oil,

forgiving his sins and getting him ready

to die, wiping off the excess

with a paper towel.  It’s not a problem.

 

All the way home he’s smiling,

bumping along in the low clouds.

 

The post The Anointing appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Recognition

      video

I was walking down a flight of stairs,

and an old woman was walking

below me, carefully, one-step-at-a-time,

arm-in-arm with a younger woman,

dark-haired and slim.

They were talking in low voices,

and I only saw them from behind.

I assumed the girl was leading,

helping the old woman down.

But when they reached the landing

and turned to leave, I saw

that I was wrong, as I often am.

The slim young woman was blind.

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Nothing Matters More

     Year after year they keep track of the birds as they first appear in the spring, writing down what they see in their ledgers.  They publish this.  You can read these: Cinnamon Teals and Blue-ringed Teals and plovers and yellowlegs and terns.  Hidden, they see what is hidden; unnoticed, they notice, and they write it all down, as if it matters, as if it makes any difference.

     Because it does.  Nothing matters more.

Vaux’s Swift:              Earliest Arrival Date:  5 April            Average Arrival Date:  19 April

Records Kept:  34 years

Vesper Sparrow:         Earliest Arrival Date: 19 March         Average Arrival Date: 12 April

            Records Kept: 15 years

     Eastern Kingbirds, Western Kingbirds, Vireos—Warbling, Cassin’s, Red-Eyed—and Nashville Warblers and Yellow Warblers and Black-Throated Grays and birds I didn’t know we had, didn’t know came through here, from wherever they come, here in the valley where I walk and look out at the rooftops and the hills one morning when the cherry trees are blossoming and there is a haze in the air like fall.

     Before we pray, Anthony de Mello says, we should “seek this disposition:  that we embark upon this exercise not for ourselves alone but for the welfare of creation, of which we are a part, and that any transformation we experience will redound to the benefit of the world.”

     This is the hardest thing to believe, and the most freeing.  That what we think and feel matters.  That the inner life is as real as the outer, and finally even more so.  That somehow we are all connected.

     God comes to Julian of Norwich holding out “a little thing” like a nut, a hazelnut, something small and round and hard, and looking at it Julian is confused.  What is this?

     God answers:  “it is all that is made.”

     All that is made?  How can that be, Julian asks, “for it seems it might suddenly have sunk into nothing because of its littleness.”

      And then she is answered again:  “it lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.”

     Not a sparrow falls, Jesus says, but that the Father knows it.

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Wild Iris

The boy who lived a day died years ago,

and now his mother has died.

We buried her last month.

This morning we dug a hole almost to the lid

of her coffin, then lowered the baby’s coffin in.

It was sitting in the wet morning grass,

a small white box, exhumed and flown to us.

His father is shoveling back the muddy earth.

It’s spring, quiet and green.  In the woods,

the wild iris is blooming.

And on every purple petal there is a white

feather, and on every white feather

there is a stroke of yellow, as if someone

has quickly brushed it on.

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My First Car

for a video click here

 

My first car was a 56 Chevy, pockmarked

and rusted, faded red and white.

They only wanted three hundred dollars for it,

but Dad checked it out and it always ran great.

I could take you right now to the exact spot

along the river where the sheriff found it

the morning after it was stolen,

nose first, halfway down the bank,

and the river would still be flowing,

the beautiful, the beautiful river.

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Alice Rose

for a video

 

What happens at mass is that a single point

explodes into a billion, billion pieces, and the pieces

fly away at incredible speeds, and they become

atoms, then gasses, then stars and planets,

and on one planet amoebas appear, and the amoebas

become fish, and the fish become dinosaurs,

and the dinosaurs become monkeys and dogs, everything

is always becoming something else, until finally

the universe comes to consciousness of itself

and we’re standing there looking around thinking wow,

this is really beautiful.  This is really sad.

When Jesus appears in the flesh

we don’t recognize him at first.

We think he’s the gardener.

An old man and an old woman

walk down the breezeway with a baby.

They must be in their seventies, maybe their eighties.

The old man is bowlegged and wearing jeans.

He looks like he’s worked his whole life.

The old woman has wrapped a shawl around her head

and swaddled the baby, but it’s the old man

who is holding the baby as they walk.

She is four months old, they tell me.

Her name is Alice Rose.

You baptized her, the old woman says, smiling,

a couple of months ago.

The baby’s head is smooth and soft

and there is a band around it, and on the band,

in the center of her forehead,

there is a little white rose made of cloth.

What happens at mass is that I keep watching

the old man as he sits in the pew

looking down at the baby and smiling,

rocking her in his arms.

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Becoming Real

February 5, 2023                                                           for a video, click here

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

1st Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16

     In the middle of my career I read a book by Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, that changed not just my teaching but my life.  It’s a wonderful book, full of warmth and insight, and when I was on a committee that invited speakers to come to OSU, I was able to invite Palmer to come.

     I was a little nervous as I was making the arrangements, because he asked for a king-sized bed and to have a few hours alone before his talk.  I wondered if I’d be dealing with another academic prima donna.  But he was a wonderful man.  He needed a king-sized bed because he was six foot six, a lot taller than I imagined from reading him, and he wanted the time alone so he could meditate before his talk, get centered, and his talk was very, very good.

     But it wasn’t just his words or his wisdom that attracted me, but a kind of light that shone out of him.  “You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells us, and we must let that light “shine before others,” and that’s what I experienced with Palmer.  He’s a Christian man, from a Quaker background, but he didn’t talk about that.  There was just something about him that you wanted to be around, a decency and a kindness, an authenticity.  I saw that in the workshop he did for faculty before the big talk, even as some of them resisted him and his methods, and I experienced that when everything was over and I invited him to the Beanery for coffee.  He stretched out his long legs, and he took a sip of his coffee, and he said, “tell me about yourself” and he meant it.  We talked, and in his listening he brought out the best in me.

     We’ve all known people like this, people who seem to have a certain kind of energy or warmth.  They are the ones who influence us, who change us.  We are the light of the world, and that light is in us, and that light is Christ, and when we act out of our best selves, people glimpse God through us.

    I knew a woman who was dying, a woman who had an important job in Seattle and was admired by many people, especially younger people, and a lot of them made pilgrimages to Corvallis to see her one last time and tell her how much she meant to them.  She must have been a remarkable leader, and mentor, and boss.

     But she was a cranky person, too, and an impatient one, the kind of person I can really identify with, and she told me that she was tired of having to play the wise and kind old woman and just wanted to be left alone to die in peace.  She didn’t want to have to make people feel better by having a good death.  She didn’t want to have keep showing people how strong she was.

     And this is why I admired her, because she wasn’t perfect and didn’t pretend to be, because in her honesty there was a humility, as Parker Palmer was humble, too, in his own way, despite his reputation and his fame.  “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, proclaiming the mystery of God,” St. Paul says, “I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.”  I came, he says, “in weakness and fear and much trembling,” and finally that’s exactly the point.  It wasn’t his own wisdom he was proclaiming, it was he wisdom of God, and maybe that’s part of what makes certain people compelling to us, that they’re not looking at themselves, but outward, and they help us look outward, too.

     In admitting their flaws and limitations, they give us the courage to admit our own and then the confidence to keep doing what we can do—and to do it in our own way.

     In our own way.

     I can’t be Parker Palmer.  I’m only 5’ 7,” for one thing, and I’m never going to be taller.  As Thomas Merton puts it, in New Seeds of Contemplation:

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not.  It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be.  How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody’s else life?  Their sanctity will never be yours; you must have the humility to work out your own salvation.  It takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the person God intended you to be.

God made us who we are, with all our quirks and likes and histories, and this is who he calls, us, right now, as he calls the disciples as they sit mending their nets—he doesn’t say come and follow me when you get act your act together.  He says:  come now.

     I think of so many students I had over the years who felt that they had sound like they were going to college when they were writing their papers, using big words when smaller ones would do, trying to fake a wisdom and a knowledge they didn’t have when really, if they just let themselves write, if they said what they really had to say, if they were honest and direct, their writing was far more powerful and insightful than any of the usual academic talk.  Teaching them to write was unteaching them.  It was saying, knock off this other stuff, which was really saying, trust yourself.  You can only be as tall as you are.

     And I think that’s finally what most attracts us to certain people, their fidelity to themselves, and in their fidelity their humility before God, and in their humility their confidence in his power to work through them.  This is what in The Courage to Teach Palmer calls “integrity”:

Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my selfhood, what fits and what does not—and that I choose life-giving ways of relating to the forces that converge within me:  Do I welcome them or fear them, embrace them or reject them, move with them or against them?  By choosing integrity I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection.  It means becoming more real.

Of course, we have to admit our sins and do all we can to overcome them.  Again and again.  Day after day.  We can’t overlook them.  We can’t pretend they’re not there.  We can’t pretend we’re saints.  The saints never do.  But our sins do not define us, our sins are not who we really are, and we have to know this and believe this.  Our sins are not our deepest layer.  They are not at the core.

     To let our light shine we have to be comfortable in our own skin.

     And this is what I pray, for you and for me.  That we discern what fits us and what doesn’t, that we find what is life-giving, that we welcome the forces inside us—not the sinful ones, but the deeper ones.  That we become more real.

     Because when we do, that’s Christ moving in us, expressing himself through us, through our true self, our real self, however small and limited and imperfect we all are.

     May we all become more real.

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Geese

We were having mass on a hill above a bay.

This was after a storm, and through

the windows the rain still glistened on the alder.

And at just the moment of the consecration,

as the bread was becoming the Body of Christ,

a great flock of geese came clamoring

over us, honking and clattering.

It must have been enormous.

We could almost hear the words.

 

for a video, click here

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