Chris Anderson's Blog, page 6

Faith Over Fifty: The Grace of Growing OlderA silent retr...

Faith Over Fifty: The Grace of Growing Older

A silent retreat with Deacon Chris Anderson
Mount Angel, March 17-19, 2023

How God calls us deeper and deeper into relationship through the freedom and challenges of aging.

Deacon Chris Anderson is a professor emeritus of English at Oregon State University, a poet and essayist, and author of fourteen books, both poetry and prose (www.deaconchrisanderson.com).

Cost: $330 Single occupancy; $480 double occupancy

Email retreat@mtangel.edu for availability.

see also the retreat house website 

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

What Remains

1 John 3:18-24; John 15:1-8

     Last week I received two really remarkable emails.

     The first was from a man who was a student of mine a number of years ago.  We used to talk about spiritual things, and he was writing to say that he’d been struggling for a long time and had finally admitted he was an alcoholic.  For years he “pursued accomplishments and other avenues of escape,” as he put it, until finally he reached a turning point, a moment of desperation, and started going to AA meetings.

     AA is a spiritual program, he says: “Cliff Notes for a spiritual life:  follow God, help others, deal with your own garbage, and let God take it away, pray, meditate.”  I can’t think of a better description of the program the gospels put forward, of the teaching of Jesus, and I admire this man very much for his courage in entering into it.  “It’s pretty incredible stuff!” he says, “and hard, hard to follow God and not follow your own agenda.  I fail all the time.”

     What impresses me is his resolution combined with his humility, his recognition that he isn’t the vine, just one the branches.  “I’ve been my own God for most of my life,” he wrote—another really striking statement, a statement I think almost all of us could make—but now he understands exactly what Deacon Teo was preaching last week at the 9 o’clock mass, that despite our human desire to be independent, our need to be in control, we can never know real freedom until we surrender to God.  “Without me,” Jesus says, “you can do nothing.”

     The second email was from a man I don’t know.  I don’t even know where he was writing from.  He had just read something I’d written and reached out to me online.

     He’s in his early fifties, a poet and a person of faith, but although he’s been writing all his life, he’s never had anything published.  “By all the usual measures,” he says, “my efforts are a complete waste of time . . . all my words are written on sand. “

      And “it isn’t just poetry–so much of our efforts seem fruitless,” he says, and suddenly the email takes a turn.  It opens up.

     “I am a father,” he says, and “my daughter was killed by a drunk driver just after she left home to begin school as a university freshman.  All that labor, all that love–for what?”

     I wasn’t expecting this.  I was surprised and moved, and I was wondering what would come next, what this man was asking of me.

     But he wasn’t asking anything of me.  He was giving me something.  He was giving me his faith and his wisdom and his hope.

     This is how the email ends:

All that labor, all that love—for what?  But I quickly realized that isn’t even a relevant question. I wish now only that I had spent more of myself loving my daughter while she was alive.  Something beautiful for God is beautiful even when it remains hidden to every other eye.  God invites us all to die to ourselves  . . . . Love is the only thing that remains, after all.

This is incredible, this is the real thing, the way this man moves, in a single sentence, from hopelessness and despair to the recognition that he was asking the wrong question, that we are all asking the wrong question.  “For God,” as the letter of John puts it, “is greater than our hearts.”   Greater than our loss, greater than our death, greater than our life.

     Notice how the man seems to echo the letter of John when he says that he wishes he’d shown more love for his daughter while she was alive:  for this is what the Lord commands us, John says, that we should “love one another.”

    Notice the word “remains” in the man’s email:  “Love is the only thing that remains,” he

says–and in the letter of John, “the way we know he remains,” and in the Gospel of John, “remain in me, as I remain in you.”

     I am the vine and you are the branches.

     For me the most important question is how we can know God when he lived so long ago and when the narratives of his life and his teachings in the four gospels are so beautifully open-ended.   We use the name “Jesus” all the time, but what does it really mean?

     I think it means everything.

     Because Jesus remains in us and we remain in him, because he isn’t just someone who lived in the past but someone who is living now, because at the end of the days of his post-resurrection appearances he ascended into heaven and then sent the Spirit, his own spirit, to fill all the world and to fill our hearts, and it is through the Spirit that we know his presence and know his will.  “The way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us,” the letter of John says, and this Spirit is something we feel whenever we feel joy or whenever we feel sorrow, whenever we feel something opening up in us and moving in us—when someone sends us an email and we’re sitting reading it and suddenly our heart leaps, it expands, and we know something in a way we can never put into words.

     Or maybe we don’t feel anything for days and weeks and years, we’re desolate, we’re empty.  Then the way we know the Spirit is through the people around us, through the people who send us the emails, through the people who sit with us in the pews, through the cloud of witnesses that has filled all the centuries since the historical Jesus walked the actual ground.

     How can the poet who lost his daughter rise to such wisdom and compassion?  How can the alcoholic find himself and grow so much at exactly the moment of his greatest failure?

     Because the Spirit is always moving, if not in you or in me at a certain moment, in others, and those others sometimes sit down at a computer and in their generosity and faith send us an email, to share what the Spirit has revealed in them.  And for a moment, reading it, we know, or we suspect, or we at least glimpse the possibility, that what the gospels proclaim might really be true.

     God exists, and God is bigger than our hearts, and even in the darkness there is light, there is exceeding light.

The post What Remains appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

What is Going On

A hundred years ago the smiling man

in the wheelchair wore the same gown

his great-grandson is wearing now.

It is made of white cotton, softened

and yellowed with age, and goes

all the way past the baby’s toes.

The family has been telling stories,

but quiets now and gathers around.

The mother holds the baby in her arms.

The old man is smiling, and his eyes

are clear and aware.  He knows

what is going on, and for a moment

I do, too, and I stand at the font

and cup the water in my hand.

The post What is Going On appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Before All Things

for a video click here

 

November 20, 2022; Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe

Colossians 1:12-20; Luke 23:35-43

 

     The criminal on one side of Jesus in the Gospel today, the one who taunts him, doesn’t understand who God is for us.  What he means by the word “god” isn’t at all what we mean.

     The criminal who taunts Jesus doesn’t understand that for us God is bigger and more mysterious than anyone can possibly imagine—and at the same time more intimate and loving than anyone can possibly imagine.

     The criminal who taunts Jesus is like many contemporary atheists.  He thinks that matter is all there is, that if something can’t be measured or understood according to certain mechanical laws, it isn’t real.  “Are you not the Christ?” he says.  Then “save yourself, and us,” as if Christ is just a creature like any other creature in the universe, except with superpowers–not “God” with a capital “G” but a god, like Zeus or Thor—and a God like that is easy to make fun of.  If God is just a genie who gives us three wishes, and doesn’t grant any of them, either he’s a pretty bad genie or he doesn’t exist in the first place.

     But as Christians this isn’t what we think at all.  We don’t believe that God is just a being, however powerful, but the source of all being, the cause of it, the life of it.

     Here’s how David Bentley Hart puts it in The Experience of God, a really remarkable book that Bishop Barron has been recommending and that I’ve recently read and very much recommend, too:

The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings [only] in magnitude and power.

I know that’s pretty abstract and philosophical, but it’s good to know that Christians can do this kind of thing, too, and we don’t need it anyway, because we have this magnificent poem in Colossians, this great hymn, which is saying exactly the same thing.  For in Christ

            were created all things in heaven and on earth / the visible and invisible . . .

            All things were created through him and for him / he is before all things

            and in him all things hold together.

Science cannot account for beauty and it cannot account for loneliness and it cannot explain how we got here in the first place or how anything did.  But faith can.  The universe comes from God, who was “before all things” and who created all things out of his great generosity and joy and continues to create them and fill them with life and bind them all together.

      And this is what the criminal on the other side of Jesus understands, not just in his head, but in his heart, in the midst of his suffering and his pain, when whatever intellectual pride and arrogance he may have had, whatever indifference, has been burned away, has been destroyed, and he is there, hanging on a cross, right next to Jesus—and he reaches out, he begs Jesus, “remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”

     Can you imagine that?  My friend Bob Reed asked me this the other day when we were having coffee.  He said, can you imagine not just hanging on a cross but hanging next to Jesus himself, just a few feet away?

     Unlike the first criminal, the second “fears” this, he says, “fears” God—fears as in feels it, fears as in knows it in his bones—knows that God is vast and mysterious and knows that the man dying on the cross isn’t all there is to God but just a glimpse of him.

     But no.  That’s not right either, because at the same time what the second thief knows in his humility and his grief is that this is God, that what is revealed here is the very nature of God, the King of the Universe not in the sense of Odin or Zeus or even David but a king who empties himself out, who dies, who gives himself away, who is there, beside us, in our helplessness and need, absolutely human and in his humanity, absolutely divine.

     Bob asked another really powerful question the other day, when we were talking about this gospel:  what would have happened if Jesus had gotten down from the cross?

     All would have been lost, I think.

     We don’t believe in Jesus because he lived.  We believe in Jesus because died, and then rose again.

     My chief desire, David Bentley Hart says in The Experience of God,

is to show that what is most mysterious and most exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest at hand, and that what is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy, and that we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing, in large part because we labor to forget what is laid out before us in every moment, and because we spend so much of our lives wandering in dreams, in a deep but fitful sleep.

     Last week a woman in the parish, a woman many of us loved, died suddenly. Unexpectedly.  And we were stunned.  We were shocked and deeply saddened.

     How do we account for a death like this?  How could God have let it happen?

     We could say with the first thief that well, obviously God doesn’t exist.  This is proof.  There is no purpose or meaning.  We all just die.

     But I was at the funeral, I served as a deacon, and the church was full, and there were many people there who were not Catholic but who had been touched by this woman, and the grief in that moment was palpable, you could feel it, and yet somehow it was beautiful, too, it was rising up and filling this whole space, it seemed to be lifting us all up, and I was so glad for the mass and for the Eucharist, and proud of it, I was so glad for its beauty and power and the way it could move us more deeply into the sadness and yet through it finally to faith and hope, and this wasn’t an intellectual thing, this wasn’t just a thing in our heads, it was in our chests, it was behind our eyes where the tears were, and nothing made sense and everything did, all our assumptions had been shattered and yet somehow that was good, it was necessary and good, and we were all there together, and Jesus was right next to us, he was hanging before us, grieving, too, he was hanging there, before all things, and there was nothing without him and there could be nothing without him, he was present in all things and he was loving us in all things, even in the darkness, even in death, even in that moment, and I longed for him, and I feared him, and I reached out to him, and I trusted him.  We all reached out to him.

     “Jesus, remember her, when you come into your kingdom.”

     O Lord Jesus, bring us all into your kingdom.

     O Lord Jesus, remember us all.

The post Before All Things appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Mystic Rose

            Do not let your hearts be troubled.  In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.

                        John 14:1

    In the Gospel of John Jesus gives us an image of the afterlife and of life and of the whole universe very different from the image that the culture teaches us.  The culture teaches us that matter is all there is, just the physical, and I think deep down that frightens and depresses us.  We look at the images of the galaxies and the stars that the new James Webb telescope is sending us and we think how beautiful the universe is, but also how vast and impersonal, just gases and forces and random events, and we are just particles, too, briefly winking in and then winking out.

      But Jesus says no, the universe is a great house, a mansion, a wonderful mansion, warm and safe and welcoming, and we all have a place in it, we all have our own dwelling places, and we’re not insignificant—we are precious and we are loved, forever.

     Imagine how different things would be if we could believe this!  How free we would be!

     Nothing comes from nothing, and the something that comes can never pass away.  We learn languages and fall in love and are full of talk and ideas and energy and creativity, and then we die, and maybe it seems that all of that is just gone.  It’s just disappeared.  But no.  No.  Every creative act, every kindness, every smile or glance influences all of us, flows out to us in ways we can’t measure, and none of that goodness and creativity ever dies.  What we love in others and what they love in us is something immortal.

     Look at the resurrection that occurs every day, Saint Clement tells us.  “The night lies in sleep” but “the day rises again.”  Look at the sower who goes out and casts each seed into the ground, and from those seeds rise up all that we need.  St.Clement’s image is of God holding us all in his hands:  “Where can one go, where can one escape to, from the presence of him whose hands embrace the universe?”

     In Dante, the great poet of the Middle Ages, the image is of a vast and beautiful rose, the Mystic Rose, in which all the countless souls of the just are arranged, tier upon tier, “mounting with the light,” as he puts it.  I love roses.  We have dozens of them on our deck where the deer can’t get them, and I especially love the yellows and the oranges and the creams, and when I delight in them as I do I glimpse heaven, I am in heaven, and whenever any of us are delighted, whenever any of us see beauty and feel love and are most ourselves, are most free, we glimpse heaven, too.  What we delight in is finally beyond all science and beyond all imagination.

     There, far and near cause neither loss nor gain,

     for where God rules directly, without agents,

     the laws that govern nature do not pertain.

Nothing comes from nothing.   Science cannot account for beauty and it cannot account for loneliness and it cannot explain how we got here in the first place or how anything got here.  To call consciousness an illusion is to be conscious of an illusion, and that consciousness is from God and returns to God, and deep inside the Rose there is place for each of us, it is vast and it is beautiful beyond all imagining.  “Into the gold of the rose that blooms eternal,” Dante says, every petal is “a throne.”

The post The Mystic Rose appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Pilot Whale

 for a reading of the poem click here

 

Riding my bike to school I see a whale.

It surfaces quietly, sleek and black

in the oily water, broad back glistening.

I am standing on a metal gangplank.

In the distance the spires of the city.

I am waiting for the lock to fill and the boat

to rise before I continue on my way,

to my seminars and my books and all I am

trying to do.  But now something sleek

and black has broken the surface—

a Pilot Whale, caught, big as a pickup—

curving and diving, curving and diving,

until the lock finally lowers and it can

swim away, back out to sea.

The post The Pilot Whale appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Please join me for a short course on Augustine’s Confessi...

Please join me for a short course on Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine believed that God speaks to us through certain key moments in our lives–reading him can be a way for us to reflect on those moments in our own lives.

Five Wednesdays, beginning October 12th at 11 amThe Upper Social Hall, St. Mary’s Parish CorvallisThe course is free, just comerecommended translation:  Rex Warner (Signet Classics), easily available on Amazon

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

No Hell, No Dignity

for a video, click here

 

September 25, 2022, Luke 16: 19-31

 

     As far as I can tell, the scriptures talk about hell directly only seven or eight times, and with the possible exception of Judas, and even this isn’t clear, no one in the scriptures is ever said to have been sent to hell by name.  No one.  There is a hell, according to scripture, but for all we know there may be no one in it.

     Today’s gospel is one of those passages, and it’s the only one in which somebody is sent to hell, but this is obviously a story, not a pronouncement, it’s a parable, as many of the passages about hell are parables, and like everything Jesus says about the afterlife, it’s admonitory.  He’s admonishing us.  He’s trying to get us to change.

      But I don’t mean that hell isn’t real or doesn’t matter.  It is real and it does matter, and in fact what I want to say today is that if we try to eliminate the possibility of hell from our faith, the real, objective possibility, if we try to explain it away, what Our Lord says about love and compassion doesn’t make sense anyone.  Hell is necessary for the Gospel.

     No hell, no dignity.             

     I take that powerful four-word sentence from one of the letters of Flannery O’Connor, the twentieth-century Catholic fiction writer.  Someone had written her arguing that the idea of hell was old-fashioned and out of keeping with who Jesus is, and O’Connor responds in this really remarkable paragraph.

     Hell is what God’s love becomes to those who reject it.  Now no one has to reject it.  God made us to love Him.  It takes two to love.  It takes liberty.  It takes the right to reject.  If there were no hell, we would be like the animals.  No hell, no dignity.   

 

     A huge amount of theology is compressed here:  that hell is necessary exactly because God loves us and wants us to love him, wants to be in relationship with us.  That friendship like this is always between persons, and to be a person we must have freedom, we must have the freedom to say no.  If we’re forced to love, that’s not love.  Love must be freely given, and when we say no, when we walk away, that’s hell, and hell on earth, not just in the afterlife.  We create it.  We choose it.

     We don’t have to be perfect and we can’t be.  Everything with God is grace.  We have only to make the slightest move towards him.  We have only to accept the gift of His Self.

     Don’t be fooled.  The rich man knew exactly what he was doing, despite his protests after the fact.  He walked past Lazarus again and again, and he had plenty of chances to change, even up to the end.  You can’t get to hell on a loophole.  You don’t get sent there on a technicality.  You have to want it.

     God doesn’t put people in hell.  They put themselves there.

     And too often we all walk past from the homeless man.  That’s the warning Jesus is giving us.  We all walk past.  Like the rich man we drug ourselves, we deaden our senses, eating and drinking and consuming everything around us until we no longer realize how deadened we’ve become.  This is the hell we create on earth, the hell of our own addictions, and these addictions have terrible consequences for others.  Our selfishness and pride create the political and economic structures that lead to the suffering of Lazarus and countless people all over the world.

     Jesus doesn’t want us to be scared.  He wants us to rejoice.  We are made in the image and likeness of God, and we are called to be confident and free.  But we can only be free after first recognizing that we are finite, too, we are limited, we’re no different than anyone else.

     Jesus doesn’t want us to be scared.  He wants us to pay attention.

     He wants us to stop judging and start serving.

     Start serving:  in your family and neighborhood and community, and in the parish through Alpha and Newman and Catholic Daughters and Knights of Columbus and Stone Soup and our own St. Vincent de Paul, which is having an open house today between masses—as so many of you are already doing.  I see so much quiet, selfless work behind the scenes, I really admire so many of you, and I think the rest of us should try to follow your example.

     Stop judging: this one is harder.  Because in the real world, outside of a story, we can never know what’s going on inside anyone else’s mind, especially in the very last moments of their lives.

     What does Jesus say on the cross when the thief on one side of him asks for forgiveness?  Today you will be with me in Paradise.

      I know a woman whose friends kept telling her that her son was going to hell because he wasn’t living a good, Christian life.  They were sure of it, and maybe they were right to be concerned.  But what Jesus is saying, I think, is mind your own business.  He’s saying what Flannery O’Connor says at the end of the letter I quoted:  Remember these are mysteries.  A God you could understand would be less than yourself.

     I have a former student who has become a leader in his field.  He’s a good husband and father and has a nice house and a nice car, and he told me once that he doesn’t think that he has any sins to feel sorry for.  He grew up in a hellfire-and-brimstone church and as an adult has come to reject the whole idea of sin and hell.  He doesn’t believe in sin.  He doesn’t think he’s a sinner.

    But he is, we all are, and I worry that his success is starting to deaden his senses and put him in spiritual danger–and I think that he knows this deep down, he knows there’s something missing, as we all do, and what I pray for him, and for myself, and for all of us is that we stop and realize that we’re not in control and that we need God, and that we see all the people on our doorstep, and help all the people who need us—that we face all the challenges in our lives and accept all the graces, the leaves turning on the trees, the stars in the morning, and feel grateful, and feel lifted up.  The acknowledgement of sin is an occasion for joy.  A great relief comes, and an energy and a hope, again and again, however many mistakes we make, however many times we fail.

     This, I think, is what Jesus is saying.  Hell isn’t proof that God is a tyrant but that he isn’t.  Hell isn’t proof that God is violent and angry but that he loves and cares for us.  Hell, too, is good news—serious, challenging, good news, news about the radical choices that we are called to make and are always making, choices with vast, eternal consequences.

     No hell, no dignity.

The post No Hell, No Dignity appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

God Says Yes to Me

     If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.  For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  Colossians 3:1-3

“Think of what is above, not of what is on earth,” Colossians says.  “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Doesn’t that sound terrible?  That we have to be “hidden”?  Lost, unseen, unknown.  That we have to think not of the earth, of this world we love so much, with all its beauty and its people, but only of God, only of something that seems so distant and abstract?

But I don’t think that’s really what this passage means at all.  I think it means the opposite.  I think it means that we are all called to freedom and creativity and joy.  I think it means that we are called to be fully and completely ourselves.

I think we misread this imagery of up and down and above and below, as we misread Paul in Galatians when he talks about the “Flesh” and the “Spirit.”  If we take it face value, that kind of language can play into our natural dualism, into our either/or thinking, and we forget that in Christ all is paradox, that in him the logic is never either/or.  It’s always both/and.

For it’s in Colossians, too, that we have the glorious creation hymn, that all things were created in Christ from the beginning of time and all things continue in being in him, that all is Holy, all is good.  Jesus isn’t just divine.  He’s also human, always and at the same time, one without ever diminishing the other, and he doesn’t just die, he rises, and when we die into him we rise with him, into life—a new, warm, fully human life.  That’s what it means to be hidden:  not hidden from God.  God sees us always, he loves us and approves of us, as a parent loves and approves of a child.  It’s the falseness and the phoniness and the shabbiness that we’re hidden from now, that we’re free of, that we don’t care about anymore.

Anthony DeMello makes the brilliant observation that from birth we all given the same drug and we all become addicted to it.  “We are not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life—namely work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind,” De Mello says.  “We are given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention.”  We are taught to define ourselves by what others think.  We are taught to let other people tell us whether we should feel good or bad about ourselves.

This is what we have to die to.  This is what Christ frees us from.  In another brilliant comment DeMello says that we’ve all misunderstood the famous prayer of St. Ignatius:  Lord Jesus Christ, take all my freedom, my memory, my understanding and my will.  All that I have and cherish you have given me.  I surrender it all to be guided by your will.

I’ve always been frightened of that prayer, as lots of people have.  I’m afraid that if I give everything to God he will take it away.  But “that’s ludicrous,” DeMello says. “What is God going to do with an idiot, if we lose our memory and understanding?”  No, God isn’t going to destroy our gifts, he’s going to use them—and he’s going to use them, he’s going to decide what to do with them, not some boss or editor or YouTube follower.

I think Jesus is telling us not to put all our energy into preparing for the future because he wants us to pay attention to the present moment.  I think he wants us to be like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.  I think what Ecclesiastes says about the vanity of all our efforts is supposed to make us deeply happy.  It’s supposed to free us from all these stupid things we get wrapped up in.

Here’s a little poem by Kaylin Haught that captures what I’m trying to say.  I’m not sharing it because it addresses God as a “she,” although scripture now and then uses feminine imagery to describe God, and the Church clearly teaches that God is beyond all gender anyway.*  But that’s not what I love about this poem.  I love it because I think it shows what being hidden with Christ really means, the joy that comes from it and the confidence and the spontaneity:

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

The speaker in the poem isn’t worrying about what other people will think of her paragraphs or her fingernails.  She only cares about what God thinks, and God says “do whatever most kindles love in you,” as St. Teresa of Avila put it.

Do what you really want—not the sinful things, not the false impulses.  Those aren’t our real desires.  Do what you deeply, truly want, do what’s real, and you will be doing God’s will

Wear nail polish or don’t wear nail polish.  Paragraph your letters or don’t paragraph your letters.  All that matters is now.  All that matters is the moment.

Honey, sweetcakes, Jesus says.  What I’m telling you is: Yes Yes Yes

 

 —

     *At the same time, I don’t think we should disparage the more common masculine metaphors the scriptures use to point to God, because I think those images are revelatory, are part of what we glimpse about who God really is.  That’s what they give us, a glimpse, not a full picture—but a glimpse, and a glimpse of something we believe is true.  There is something fatherly, we believe, about the nature of the God who loves us.

     For that matter, we shouldn’t accept without thinking the usual assumptions about fatherliness itself—that “father” represents power and oppression—because in the Christian tradition, that’s not at all what fatherhood represents.  Power, yes, but not oppression.  Love.  Graciousness.  Self-giving.  Tact.  Hiddenness.  Gentleness.  God is a god who as father gives us freedom and who wants us to thrive.

The post God Says Yes to Me appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Blessed Are We

Recently a young woman I know took her life, and with her mother’s permission, I am posting the homily I gave at her funeral mass,

 

In the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, in the beautiful poem we call the Beatitudes, Jesus says something that doesn’t make sense.  It seems to be the opposite of the truth.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” he says.   Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are we now in our shock and our grief.

How on earth can that be?

 

Because we thought we had everything figured out and now we realize we don’t.

Because now we realize things don’t make sense, at least in the way we thought they did.

Because we’ve been hiding from our fear and hiding from our emptiness, we’ve been living on the surface of our lives, and now our defenses have fallen away.

Now we have to ask the only question that really matters:  does God exist, or is this all just random and pointless and cruel?

There’s a mystery here, a great and terrible mystery, and we don’t understand it.

 

This vibrant, intelligent woman—she was a student of mine at OSU a number of years ago, bright and engaged and open—this bright young woman with the smart, knowing smile was finally so sad and anguished she lost all hope.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus says, who feel all this, who know all this, who don’t turn away from this.

 

But then he goes on.  That’s not all he says:  he says, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

They shall be comforted.

As in the other Beatitudes, Jesus turns everything upside down.  He takes all those things we think are valuable and throws them away.  He says no, humility is what matters, and tenderness, and openness, and we have to give up our pride and give up what we think we know, and then, then, God can come to us, God can enter into us, we can experience what is real:  a tenderness and a love and a comfort beyond all imagining.

We think, how can this young woman be gone?  How can her life be extinguished?  This can’t be true, and we’re right.  It can’t.  Because we are infinitely loved, we are precious in the sight of the God who made the stars, and in the end we will be comforted, we will be whole again, in Christ, in the mystery of God’s love and God’s mercy, and if not now, one day, and if not in this life, the next, and Stephanie has been taken up and she is loved and she is herself again, wholly and completely herself.  She has not been lost.  She has been found.

In the Gospel of Mark Jesus cries out from the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he is bereft, utterly bereft, and we are, too, we are desolate and grieving, and that’s a holy feeling, a sacred feeling.  When we feel that grief we are with Christ in his suffering, and he is reaching out to us—he is in us—and Jesus is quoting a psalm from the cross, he is quoting Psalm 22, one of the great psalms of lament, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” the psalmist cries, and then in the next stanza, and yet “I know that you live,” and again, a stanza of grief followed by a stanza of faith, and yet “I know you are God.”

And yet and yet and yet.

 

     “Maybe whatever seems to be so,” the poet William Stafford says,

we should speak so from our souls,

never afraid, “Light” when it comes,

“Dark” when it goes away.

Do not be afraid of the darkness.  Do not be afraid of your grief.   Do not be afraid.

The light will come, and it has come, and the darkness will never overcome it.

Look at this crucifix behind me, this great crucifix floating above the tabernacle, and how Jesus is floating, too, a few inches above the beams of the cross.  His eyes are closed.  His arms are outstretched.  We can’t tell if he’s rising or being crucified, if he is suffering or he is triumphant.  Because he is both:  he triumphs through the cross, and through the cross he brings us home.

We thought we had killed him.  We thought we had put him in a box.  But the tomb is empty.  He is not there, he has risen, and nothing is what we thought it was.  He is not there.  He is with Stephanie, and Stephanie is with him, and he is here with us even now, he will always be with us, in life and in death, in the darkness and the light, even unto the end of time.

The post Blessed Are We appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.