Chris Anderson's Blog, page 7

Tilt a Whirl

 

I am down on all fours on a paved path

just beyond the Benton County Fairgrounds.

Who knew how dizzy a dad can get?

I have a picture of Maggie as a little girl

riding in a kiddie car.  She is slowly going

around and around.  She is smiling the smile

I was always afraid

concealed her disappointment.

But we are older now,

and we’ve just been on the Tilt-a-Whirl,

and everything is spinning.

Please . . . no . . .

I tell the deputy sheriff.   I’m OK.

As if that long, smooth path

were the only way

I’d ever make it home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Tilt a Whirl appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Smiling Man

A hundred years ago

the smiling man in the wheelchair

wore the same white gown

his great-grandson

is wearing now as I get ready

to baptize him.

I’m not sure what we’re doing here

except that it’s beautiful.

A summer morning.

A breeze moves in the leaves

of the tree.

It’s too slight to sway

the windchimes.

The post The Smiling Man appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

from Pope Francis (Pentecost, 5/23/21)The Spirit affirms ...

from Pope Francis (Pentecost, 5/23/21)

The Spirit affirms the primacy of today, against the temptation to let ourselves be paralyzed by rancor or memories of the past, or by uncertainty or fear about the future.  Let us live in the present!

Only by emptying ourselves do we leave room for the Lord.  If we give priority to our own projects, our structures, our plans for reform, we will be concerned only about effectiveness.  We will think in horizontal terms.  The Church is human, but it is not merely a human organization.

If we listen to the Spirit, we will not be concerned with conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left.  When those become our criteria, then the Church has forgotten the Spirit.

 

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Sweetness

for the video, click here

July 10, 2022

Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10: 25-37

I’ve always struggled with the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Partly it’s because its message is so obvious:  we’re supposed to stop and help people in need.  Of course.  What else is there to say?

But really the problem is that I don’t want to stop and help.  I’m so sunk into myself and my own problems, so lacking in compassion and concern, I just keep on walking.  I’m too selfish.  I resist the parable because I’m the Levite.  I’m the Priest.

Or I’m the man who has been beaten by the robbers and left by the side of the road.  We all are.  Anxiety has beaten us up.  Struggle and work and the long, hard days have robbed us of our energy and capacity.  Everything we read in the news, everything we know about ourselves:  it all leaves us feeling stranded and abandoned.

We aren’t the Samaritan.  We need the Samaritan.

And we just have to admit this, we just have to face this, because it’s God who works through us, it’s Christ who inspires us with his love.  We can only love God if he gives us the gift of loving him.  We can only love our neighbors if he gives us the gift of loving them.  We can only love ourselves if he gives us the gift of that love.

Last week Barb and I spent a day at the beach.  That evening we went to a nice restaurant for dinner.  It was crowded and they had to seat us at the bar, and as we sat there on the stools we watched the bartender, a young woman, running back and forth trying to serve everyone.

There was a man at the bar, an old man, in his seventies or eighties, sitting by himself a little further down.  After a while, the bartender stopped and asked how he was doing, and he said, this is the anniversary of my wife’s death, she died two years ago today, and this was her favorite place.

Then this busy young woman, this harried, overworked bartender, she stopped, and she stood there, and she talked to that lonely man.  She listened to him.  She didn’t say anything profound.  She wasn’t a Levite.  She wasn’t a Priest.  She looked at him, and she stopped, she listened, and I thought, go and do likewise, go and do likewise, and for a moment the bartender’s kindness and the old man’s grief and the mystery of death and all the stories and the sadness in that crowded place, it all felt like grace, the Spirit was there, moving in others and moving in me, and it was a clear, warm summer evening, and the sun was setting into the ocean, and the waves were coming in and going out, and the love was in me, too, the kindness was in me, Christ was in me, and I was no longer trapped, I was no longer caved in on myself.  I was free.  I was free to love others.

My brother Ted has been diagnosed with Type Two Diabetes, and he’s taking it very seriously.  He’s reading about diabetes.  He’s managing his diet.  He’s amazed at how addictive sugar is.  He’s amazed at how his mind has cleared since he stopped putting all that sugar and all those chemicals into his body.

The other day he was sitting at his computer—he works from home—and he looked out the window and saw a hummingbird, hovering at his flowers, and the thought came into his mind:  there’s the sweetness.

There’s the sweetness.

That thought, I’m sure, came from Christ.  I know it did.  That was Christ.  All things were made through him and all things were made for him, hummingbirds and oceans and bartenders and you and me, all things continue in being in him, he is not far away, he is not in the sky, he is here, in every moment, and in that moment he broke through to my brother, he could feel it, and when he called and told me about it, when he shared this moment, Christ broke through to me, too, through my selfishness, my sadness.

The word is not far away.  The parables are all around us.  The word is in our hearts and in our minds.  In our glucose levels.  In the cells of our bodies.

I take the scholar as a symbol of those who think faith is just a matter of ideas, of being able to repeat back abstract, theological principles, and not a question of our own lived experience, of what actually happens in our lives, and maybe the Levite and the Priest have the same problem. They’re not just hypocrites, they’re intellectuals, as in a sense we all are when we argue and fight and beat each other over the heads with the Catechism.  It’s the big irony, since in the end what the Catechism says again and again is that Christ is mystery, Christ is love, and his love is given, not earned.  It’s beyond us.

When people talk to me about becoming Catholic, or about unbecoming Catholic, they usually want to talk about doctrines they can’t accept or do, but that’s not it.  That’s putting the cart before the horse.  “The secondary role of doctrine is vital to understanding biblical religion,” George Dennis O’Brien says.

What leads the religious believer is not a statement of belief, a dogma, but some lived actuality.  We don’t start with theological doctrine and then instance reality; we start with the given reality and then try to understand what there is about it that the theologian may be pointing to. When the angels appeared over the stable in Bethlehem they did not say, “Behold, I have brought you a topic for discussion.”

Charity is a way of knowing.  Whatever we do for the least of these, Jesus says, we do for him.  Jesus tells the scholar to go and actually do something not just because it’s good for others but because it’s good for him, because in helping someone else he will know God in a way he never could in the abstract.  He will touch him.  He will feel his skin.  His breath.

When Gerard Manley Hopkins was asked how we can better understand the doctrines of the Church, he said “give alms.”

When the angels appeared over the bar as the waves were coming in, when the angels appeared outside my brother’s window, hovering at the flowers, they were saying, behold, all things continue in being in him, and he is present in all things, he is the light, and the light is not overcome by the darkness.  They were saying, this is love, not that you loved me but that I first loved you. They were saying, you are not abandoned, you are not alone, however dark the world seems and however overwhelming, I am here and I am with you.  Open your eyes.  Stop.  Listen.  And then go out into the world.  Go out and serve.

The post The Sweetness appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Scythes

 

for a reading and discussion, click here 

 

 

 An old woman hired us to scythe

a vacant lot beneath a tall, white billboard.

Rusty scythes with wooden handles.

Dry weeds and dry grass and the sound

 

a scythe makes, and the leaping

of the grasshoppers, and the sun beating down

and the cars rushing by.  The dark stilts

the billboard rose on smelled of creosote.

 

Lunchtime she brought us sandwiches,

spam on white bread, with catchup, wrapped

in aluminum foil, and we straightened our backs

and thank-you-ma’am-ed.  I’ll never forget

 

that sandwich.  That morning.  What I can’t

remember is what the billboard said.

 

 

 

 

The post Scythes appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

It’s Always All Mixed Up

            a reflection on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi

When I was going to Gonzaga I used to go to mass with Barb and her family.  I wasn’t Catholic then, but there was something that felt right about the liturgy.  It wasn’t any particular thing but more the cumulative effect of it over time. The tone.  The atmosphere.

When I decided to become Catholic it wasn’t mostly because of an intellectual shift or conversion, though the four years I spent at Gonzaga involved a great deal of philosophy and theology and writing and thinking about the big issues college students should be thinking and writing about, and I loved that, I was inspired by that—but it wasn’t finally because of ideas that I became Catholic.  It was because of Barb and her family and the Jesuits I knew and the feeling of sitting in the student chapel as the mass was being said and the light was coming through the stained-glass windows.  The ideas I was encountering helped me make sense of that experience, helped me to name it, although the biggest idea of all was that ideas are finally limited, are secondary.  That’s what dogma and theology are for, to proclaim that Jesus wasn’t just human.  He was divine.

Divine:  beyond our understanding.

For me it’s still primarily about the feelings I have at mass, to a greater or lesser degree, something in my chest sometimes, at the sternum, like a kind of slight pressure, and at the same time like a kind of hollowness.  It’s like butterflies in the stomach, too, or like a lump in the throat, and sometimes it lasts through the whole mass.  Or it’s a tingling.

More often it’s, again, a kind of cumulative sense of the mass and the Church, something that’s been building over the forty-five years I’ve been Catholic, a warmth or a feeling of rightness or a feeling of respect and admiration.  It’s a little like the feeling I have for Dante or Shakespeare or Keats and all great literature:  that it’s great, that it’s beautiful.  With St. John Henry Newman and others in the tradition, it’s possible to think of the mass as a kind of poetry, as a great work of art that keeps happening and that we’re inside of again and again.

It’s like the smell of the lilies at Easter.  It’s everywhere.

I don’t mean that we can prove the Real Presence by how we feel about it.  Feeling is just one part of the equation, and feelings come and go.  Ultimately, after we think through the theories and the terms, this is a matter of faith, of a leap we make from the limited evidence of our experience.  It’s an act of obedience.  It’s an act of surrender.  It’s an act of longing.

In fact, the going away of the feeling, the absence of the feeling, is a really important part of the process, too.  Because sometimes at mass, even often—let’s admit it—we don’t feel anything.  We’re preoccupied, or we’re bored, or we’re angry, or even more we’re despairing and empty and bereft and the consecration and the elevation of the paten and the chalice have no effect on us at all, and it’s then that the Real Presence really becomes defined for us, when we can choose to turn away and give up on it or turn towards the emptiness and enter into it.

Of course:  we need to prepare ourselves as best we can.  We need to be as open and engaged as we can be.  Of course.

But what did we think, that we could make the feelings happen whenever we want them to, just by being good–that the mass is a switch we can just turn on?  What did we think, that we could see Jesus whenever we want to, all the time, when even his disciples didn’t recognize him at first, after the Resurrection, when he would just appear, then vanish?  When even Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener?

When we don’t feel anything at mass, we’re joining with Mary Magdalene, we’re talking with the Gardener, we’re being reminded that Jesus is hidden in all things and that all we can do is recognize our own finiteness and weakness and pray for him to fall in beside us on the road again, to sit down with us at table, to show himself for just a second, before he vanishes again.  Were not our hearts burning?  the disciples ask, after their encounter at Emmaus.

When we don’t feel anything at mass, we’re joining with Jesus himself, who was hungry, who was sleepy, who must have been just as bored and tired and distracted as we sometimes are.  Who was human, too.  Fully human.

It’s really a good thing that we don’t always feel wonderful at mass, because that’s a sign that the feeling isn’t coming from us.  If it were, we’d make it happen all the time.

The Risen Lord tells Mary not to hold on to him.  We can’t hold on to him.

We always think of the consecration from the perspective of the bread and the wine becoming the Body and Blood.  But it works the other way, too:  the Body and Blood become mere bread and wine, and this is just as much of a miracle and maybe even more of a miracle.

The miracle is that Jesus didn’t come down from the cross.  He emptied himself out.  He so loved the world he came into it.

When at the preparation of the altar the deacon pours a little water into the wine, he says this prayer: by the mystery of this water may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

I’ve talked about this many times before.

See the two movements there, intersecting?  We go up, towards the divine, and Christ comes down, towards the human.

And then that water and that wine–water as a symbol of the human, wine as a symbol of the divine–they’re completely mixed up, they’re entirely blended together, we can’t separate them out once the water is poured.  They are one substance, one reality, and that’s the reality that saves us.  That’s the Beauty beyond all beauty.

It’s always all mixed up.

The post It’s Always All Mixed Up appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

Spring Leaves

 When in the fourteenth century

the priest said hoc est corpus meum,

this is my body,

what the people heard was hocus pocus—

they didn’t understand

the language—and I’m not sure

that’s such a bad thing.

I could tell you the names of all the birds

in the forest, just on the basis

of how they sing,

but it’s spring now, and today I walked

among the burgeoning trees,

and wherever I looked

there was nothing

but green.

The post Spring Leaves appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

What It Means to Surrender

for a video commentary and reading, click here

 

Maybe I’ve been thinking about this all wrong.

Maybe I don’t have to be roasted on a spit

or kneel all day in a shaft of light.

Maybe I don’t have to stop being human

and stop living my life.

 

Maybe I do live my life, but slowly.  Quietly.

Maybe to surrender to you, Lord,

means to walk in the woods with a clear mind.

Maybe to surrender to you means to walk

in the woods alert and aware.

To feel the road beneath my feet.

To hear the woodpecker drumming

in the top of the tree.

 

Maybe to surrender to you—to say,

your grace and your love are wealth enough

for me; give me these, Lord Jesus,

and I ask for nothing more—maybe

that means, Lord, give me this moment.

Lord, help me be in this moment.

Lord, help me be myself.  Fully myself.

 

You created all these things, you love

all these things, all these things continue

in being in you—I continue in being in you.

Do I really think you care less about me

than you care about anything else?

There is no place where you are not,

not even here, not even now.

 

I am walking down a gravel road.

I glimpse the valley in the distance.

My dog leaps ahead me.

I am surrendering myself to you.

You have given me your grace and love.

You have given me this day.

You have given me my life.

I ask for nothing more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last week I was asked to be the poet for an episode of” R...

Last week I was asked to be the poet for an episode of” Rattlecast,” a weekly podcast sponsored by Rattle magazine, a poetry magazine I very much admire.  I read a few of my poems and was interviewed by the editor of the magazine, Tim Green.

This is the link to the podcast.

The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

The Clouds Through the Window

In the last scene of The Passion of the Christ Mel Gibson actually shows us the Resurrection, from inside the tomb.  We see the linens collapse, the ones that wrapped the body, and then we see the Risen Jesus, crouching on the floor, naked and handsome and strong, and all of us in the theater know who it is–there’s no question about it—it’s Jesus—it’s the same actor who’s been playing Jesus all along–and there’s this stirring, military music, and the drums are beating, and it’s all dramatic and cinematic and nothing at all like the Resurrection as it’s described in the gospels themselves, because the gospels themselves never describe the Resurrection.  They can’t.

In all four gospels we are always outside the tomb and the tomb is always empty—the angels keep telling us, he’s not here, he’s not here–and the emphasis is always on the act of seeing, on the act of interpreting, and the people who are seeing and interpreting are mixed up and afraid, and even when Jesus appears to them, even when he’s standing right in front of them, they don’t recognize him at first, they don’t know who he is, and they can never hold on to him when they finally do.  He always vanishes.

We could never have filmed the Resurrection.  It was too real.  It wasn’t just some strange thing that happened a long time ago but something that is always happening and is happening still.

To film it we’d have to show someone standing at the sink, doing the dishes.

To film it we’d have to show someone sitting in the living room, reading.

The clouds through the window.

 

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