Chris Anderson's Blog, page 8
May 5, 2022
Quitting Cross Country
When I told Coach Long I was quitting
Cross Country, he understood, it was cool,
though he said he’d just figured out
what my name would be. He named us all.
Caveman. Scooter. Breeze.
He had to watch us first and see.
I’ve been wondering again
what my name would have been.
I’ve been praying,
and in the early morning darkness
a light from my neighbor’s house
has made a pattern on the wall
above the couch, like leaves.
The post Quitting Cross Country appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
April 21, 2022
Planting Your Garden
for a video of this homily, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ZlE85_QGQ
Divine Mercy Sunday
Revelation 19:9-19; John 20: 19-31
The other day a friend of mine said something that’s really stuck in my head.
She said that she doesn’t feel that she should bother God now with her own small problems when the bombs are falling and the children are dying.
She loves to work in her garden, to put her hands in the dirt, but she knows that when she feels the joy of that, somewhere in the world, at that same moment, someone else is feeling terror, someone else is dying, and doesn’t that cancel out the joy? Doesn’t the suffering of others expose our joy as foolish, as an illusion?
And I know how she feels. I feel that way sometimes.
That’s why the vision of the twentieth century Polish mystic, St. Faustina, is so important to us now, on this Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday she inspired. Because St. Faustina was born in Poland, next to Ukraine, and she was born in 1905, before the outbreak of World War I, and she died in 1938, as World War II was breaking out, and out of that experience of fear and death came this image of Jesus walking towards her, his infinite mercy raying out of his heart—a mercy stronger than fear and stronger than war and stronger than death.
“Be not afraid,” Jesus tells the author of the Book of Revelation, who is writing, too, in a time of great “distress”: “I am the first and the last, the one who lives,” and nothing is ever lost, and every moment is sacred and every moment is real.
“Peace be with you,” Jesus says to the disciples hiding out in their fear. He says this twice: “peace be with you.” And he doesn’t break down the door, he appears; and he doesn’t shout, he breathes. And he comes into a room. He doesn’t appear in the sky for everyone to see. He isn’t generalized. He comes into a room, into a moment, and now all rooms are holy, and all moments are holy, and all gardens. And what he asks us to touch are his wounds, not his strong back or his strong shoulders, his wounds, the wounds in his hands and the wounds in his side, and so we know that God is present even in our terror, that all the children who die and all the mothers and all the fathers, they are never alone, they are taken up in his love, because the God we know is a God who dies into our death and who is suffering with us.
“For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” This is the prayer we repeat in Faustina’s Divine Mercy Chaplet, on every decade bead of the rosary, and what could be more beautiful? More profound?
So it’s not just that God is therefore present in the garden, too; it’s not just that any moment of joy is a sure sign of the presence of God—it’s that working in the garden and living the moments of our lives is exactly what we can do to oppose war and oppose the suffering and oppose the injustice.
“Any increase that I can bring upon myself and upon things,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “is translated into some increase in my power to love and some progress in Christ’s blessed hold upon the universe.” “God awaits us every instant,” he says. “He is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle—of my heart and of my thought.” And this work isn’t just for us. These small things somehow make a difference, invisibly, in some way we can’t measure, as Saint Faustina understood, too. She believed in prayer and the power of prayer. She believed in the quiet, the small, the interior. She believed that tenderness conquers death, and Teilhard is saying that, too, in a different way. “We serve to complete the work of creation,” he says, “with even the humblest work of our hands.”
What can we do about war? About the devastation of the earth? About the suffering of the children? We can send money, we can write congress, we can go to the barricades ourselves. But most of all we can pray–and that’s not just a pious thing to say. Prayer makes a difference, prayer changes things—and every creative act, and every act of kindness, and every job well done.
Where St. Faustina uses the beautiful language of traditional piety, Teilhard uses the language of contemporary science, of evolutionary biology and cosmology. He was a twentieth century French mystic, and he was a scientist as well as a theologian, and for him the Christ who is the Alpha and the Omega is the Cosmic Christ moving through the life and death of the galaxies and the stars towards some ultimate fulfillment. But he was a contemporary of Faustina’s—he was born in 1881and died in 1955—and as a young man he, too, had a vision of the sacred heart of Jesus, encompassing all things, and his joy in the boundless creativity of Christ was given to him in the midst of war, when he was serving as a medic in the trenches in World War I, and he knew in his heart what St. Faustina knew, too: that we don’t have to hold the moments together. God does.
“Jesus,” Faustina says, “I trust in you.”
“I’ve come to think,” Teilhard says, “that the only, the supreme, prayer we can offer up, during these hours when the road before us is shrouded in darkness, is that of our master on the cross: Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
To the hands that broke and gave life to the bread,
that blessed and caressed, that were pierced; . . .
to the kindly and mighty hands that reach down
to the very marrow of the soul and mold and create,
to the hands through which so great a love is transmitted,
it is to these that it is good to surrender our soul,
and above all when we suffer or are afraid,
and in so doing there is a great happiness and a great merit.
Trust in him, St. Faustina tells us. Trust in him.
“Eternal God,” she prays,
in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your Mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.
These are our prayers, now in this moment and in every moment, even if the world should end. This is always our faith, whatever happens, now and forever.
“Jesus, I trust in you.”
The post Planting Your Garden appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
March 23, 2022
Everything Happening
My roses are blooming, my yellow roses,
and a child is dying of hunger
or disease or a gunshot or grief
and someone is laughing and someone is crying
and someone is lifting a cup, a star
is exploding, a heart
is breaking, the wind is blowing
over a desert, over a forest, over the sea,
and it is morning and it is evening
and it is the first day and the last
and every moment somewhere
the Host is being raised
in the air,
in the air, in the air.
—-
The post Everything Happening appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
March 22, 2022
My Heart is Like a Shallow Ford
My heart is like a shallow ford,
and on either side of the road that leads to it
there is a chain link fence with razor wire
on top and signs, in several languages,
warning of unexploded bombs.
My heart is like a shallow ford,
and when you finally reach it the water
flows creamy brown and reeds wave
on the bank and on the other shore
there is another country,
with fig trees and palms.
My heart is like a shallow ford
where Jesus may have come, and may
have knelt, and may have risen up,
streaming, though there are other bends
in the Jordan where he could have
entered, too, and seen the dove
and heard the voice. No one knows.
My heart is like a shallow ford.
The post My Heart is Like a Shallow Ford appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
My Heart is like a Shallow Ford My heart is like a shallo...
My Heart is like a Shallow Ford
My heart is like a shallow ford,
and on either side of the road that leads to it
there is a chain link fence with razor wire
on top and signs, in several languages,
warning of unexploded bombs.
My heart is like a shallow ford,
and when you finally reach it the water
flows creamy brown and reeds wave
on the bank and on the other shore
there is another country,
with fig trees and palms.
My heart is like a shallow ford
where Jesus may have come, and may
have knelt, and may have risen up,
streaming, though there are other bends
in the Jordan where he could have
entered, too, and seen the dove
and heard the voice. No one knows.
My heart is like a shallow ford.
The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
March 10, 2022
Gratitude
The man in the hospital has bright eyes
and there are tears in them he is so afraid
and so glad to talk and he knows God
is with him or hopes he is. He is nearly bald,
and his old body is wrinkly and pale,
and I can see it from the waist up, the slack,
ropy skin, and his wife has a gentle voice
and is kind and I can feel the Spirit
there among the monitors like the light
on the green fields outside the window,
and I feel a love for this man, my father,
my brother, my friend, and I lift up my hand
and bless him, and I, too, am filled with tears.
What I feel is gratitude, what I feel
is thanksgiving, and I know, then, O Lord,
that You are there, that this is grace,
for we are not grateful for what we have done.
We are grateful for what we are given.
Three boys come up to me at communion,
little boys, in descending order,
their mother behind them, and when I raise
my hand to bless him, the oldest boy
solemnly raises his hand and gives me
a high-five—and then his brothers, first one
and then the other, they high-five me, too,
slapping my palm and walking
back to their pew, and I laugh, I pray,
I say it again: rejoice.
The post Gratitude appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
Gratitude The man in the hospital has bright eyesand ther...
Gratitude
The man in the hospital has bright eyes
and there are tears in them he is so afraid
and so glad to talk and he knows God
is with him or hopes he is. He is nearly bald,
and his old body is wrinkly and pale,
and I can see it from the waist up, the slack,
ropy skin, and his wife has a gentle voice
and is kind and I can feel the Spirit
there among the monitors like the light
on the green fields outside the window,
and I feel a love for this man, my father,
my brother, my friend, and I lift up my hand
and bless him, and I, too, am filled with tears.
What I feel is gratitude, what I feel
is thanksgiving, and I know, then, O Lord,
that You are there, that this is grace,
for we are not grateful for what we have done.
We are grateful for what we are given.
Three boys come up to me at communion,
little boys, in descending order,
their mother behind them, and when I raise
my hand to bless him, the oldest boy
solemnly raises his hand and gives me
a high-five—and then his brothers, first one
and then the other, they high-five me, too,
slapping my palm and walking
back to their pew, and I laugh, I pray,
I say it again: rejoice.
The post appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
February 26, 2022
Beyond Dread
for a video of this post, click here
Psalm 92: 2-16; First Corinthians 15:54-58
Teilhard de Chardin is traveling by mule train through the hill country of Western China on his way to find more evidence in the fossil record of ancient human life. This is 1927. And he looks up at what he calls “the stupid, wicked deforestation” the landscape has suffered at the hands of the people there, so that all the soil now washes away in the rains, and it breaks his heart, he says. It’s “heart-breaking to see,” and I think of the dread I keep feeling, even now that the pandemic seems to have eased again, maybe for good. I think of the anxiety we all feel, about the starving children in Afghanistan, and the sudden war in the Ukraine, and underneath all these other dreads, the dread we always feel about climate change and the slow, inexorable–“the stupid, wicked”—destruction of precious earth. How helpless we all feel. How this all seems inevitable, irreversible.
But then Teilhard makes a quiet move in his mind, a remarkable move. He feels, he says, “oddly indifferent to this devastation”—not, I think, in the sense of not caring and not being committed to doing all he can to reverse the devastation, but “indifferent” in the Ignatian sense, in the sense of seeing beyond even these environmental catastrophes to a still deeper love and creativity and life in nature and in us. It’s a quiet move, as I say, and yet it’s helped me the last few days:
Huge cracks appear on all sides, down which the storms carry torrents of stones and earth . . . But, basically, I feel oddly indifferent to this devastation. My interest has wandered so much further afield, even when I am most absorbed in geology. It is the Other that I now seek, the Thing across the gap, the Thing on the other side. Is this no more than an effect of age? Or have I really broken through some barrier?
Letters from a Traveller
As someone growing older, I am struck by Teilhard’s question about the detachment that can come with age, but even more, I am struck by the idea that even now, when the effects of climate change are so inescapable, are global, are everywhere, they are not really everywhere finally because the earth is not all there is and this moment is not the only moment and matter, which Teilhard loved and gloried in, too, but matter is not all there is. There is Spirit. Always there is the Spirit, and the Spirit is always moving through our world and all the worlds and through every atom in all the galaxies to some fulfillment in our Lord Jesus Christ—a cosmic movement, the movement of the Cosmic Christ, who nonetheless is present in every ordinary moment of our daily lives.
“Brothers and sisters,” Saint Paul says in the first Letter to the Corinthians, the epistle for this Sunday: “when this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility,” then “death is swallowed up in victory.”
The other day I talked with a young woman who is in chronic pain after a botched surgery. It’s very, very hard. There doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do, and it’s driving her to despair.
But at one point in our conversation she lit up talking about her dog, her new rescue dog, who was, she said, waiting for her out in the car.
And so as I was walking her out to her car, I asked if I could meet her dog, and when she opened up the back, this sweet little black and white border came up to me, very shyly, bowing her head so I could pet her.
The sweetest dog.
And as soon as I touched her, as soon as I stroked her fur, out there, on that rare sunny day, I could feel a little surge of energy coming through her and into me. A little flash of joy. Of light. I was smiling and this young woman was smiling. The sun was shining.
Something from that little dog entered into me, entered into us.
“It is good to give thanks to the LORD,” the psalmist proclaims in Psalm 92, the psalm for this Sunday, “to sing praise to your name, Most High / to proclaim your kindness at dawn / and your faithfulness throughout the night.”
The post Beyond Dread appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
February 7, 2022
Our Everyday
for a video of this homily, click here
February 6, 2022
Luke 5:1-11
Lately I’ve been working on a writing project, but for a while it seemed that the harder I tried, the less progress I made. I’d work all night and not catch a thing.
And then one day I lowered my nets and pulled up all these ideas. My mind was full of them, and it wasn’t anything I did exactly. I just let go a little. I just put out to slightly deeper water.
It was that way when I was teaching. One day I’d go in there and no matter what I did I just couldn’t get the students to respond. Then another day I’d go in, and I’d relax a little, just wait to see what might happen, and gradually the class began to open up. Ideas started flying, and there weren’t coming from me.
It’s that way in prayer. Praying is like letting down our nets. We sit in the morning in our favorite chair and wait for what might come, and sometimes nothing does. There’s just emptiness. And sometimes something does come. There’s a fullness, an abundance. Deep down in our lives, in what happens every day, there’s great energy and creativity and love, and sometimes we’re given an awareness of that.
The other day the thought of one of my oldest friends came into my mind as I was praying, and it had a different texture or quality than the usual random things that come to me. It wasn’t overwhelming—it wasn’t like a great bulging net of fish. It was more like a single fish I’d pulled out of the water. It was like I was fly-fishing. But that slight sweetness, that brief clarity: that’s what we have to be alert to, because that’s a sure sign of the presence of Christ.
I think it’s always like this, up and down and back and forth—this is how we’re called—and the dark nights are just as important in this as the fullness and the gift.
It’s curious: Simon and the others make this tremendous haul, they’ve caught enough fish to support them for months, and then Jesus asks them to walk away from it, to give it all up.
And think of what happened to the disciples in the rest of the gospels and into Acts, the hardships and struggle. The journey doesn’t end on that one glorious morning. There’s the next day and the next—and not everyone is called to walk away from their jobs. Someone has to stay and do the fishing, and that’s a vocation, too.
Mary and Martha, Zacchaeus, Nicodemus—they are all called, but they are called in place.
The other day a former student got in touch with me, a wonderful young woman, in her late thirties now and living in Portland. She’s a gifted writer, but she and her husband are struggling to make ends meet and she’s taken a nine-to-five job. She’s been trying to write in the evenings and on the weekends but she doesn’t have the energy, and she’s depressed and wondering what’s happened to her life.
I tried to counsel her to do what I find so hard to do, to trust, to let go, even to let go of the writing for now, and to give it all to God, because without God, none of this makes sense. None of this is worth it. I know this woman doesn’t go to church anymore, though she was raised Catholic, and I thought she might be touchy about that, so I just suggested, as gently as I could, that she might think of the journaling she does every morning not just as self-reflection but also as a dialog, that she turn it slightly in her mind so that she sees the events of her life, even the ordinary things that happen in her job, as coming from God, and to reflect on what God might be saying to her in those moments.
There’s this wonderful prayer about the Eucharist by the German Jesuit Karl Rahner. When we receive the Eucharist, he says, we receive the heart of a man who took upon himself what Rahner calls “a slow and toilsome life in a single corner of the world.” And we receive our own lives, too:
When we receive you [Rahner says] we accept our everyday just as it is. We do not need to have any lofty feelings in our hearts to recount to you. We can lay our everyday before you just as it is, for we receive it from you yourself, the everyday and its inward light, the everyday and its meaning, the everyday and the power to endure it.
The call isn’t to do any particular thing. It’s to pray, to let down our nets and see what comes, and even the emptiness when it comes is revelatory. “We have to trust it utterly to God,” Ruth Burrows says. “We must be ready to believe that ‘nothingness’ is the presence of divine reality; emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling.” In fact, Burrows says, it’s only in our emptiness “that we really experience that we need Jesus,” and everything depends on this,
on letting go of the controls, handing them over to him and accepting that we have no holiness, no achievement of our own, to be before God as nothing. This is to die so that Jesus becomes our all.
And not just the emptiness. Not just the nights. The days, too, and the light and the flow and all the lovely things. All the lovely, ordinary things.
We don’t have to stop living our lives. We don’t have to stop being human. We do live our lives, but more deeply.
Maybe to surrender to God just means to walk down the street with a clear mind. Maybe to surrender to God just means to be alert and aware. To feel the sidewalk beneath our feet. To feel the sun on our faces. Maybe to surrender to God—to say, your grace and your love are wealth enough for me—maybe that just means, Lord, give me this moment. Lord, help me be myself.
God created all these things in Christ, God loves all these things in Christ, in Christ all these things continue in being. In him we continue to be.
We are walking down the street. We are looking at the clouds. We are looking at the faces of the people as they pass.
We are surrendering ourselves to Christ. He has given us his grace and his love. He has given us this day. He has given us our lives. We ask for nothing more, and we need nothing more, because this is everything. This is the fullness. This is the bulging net. This is life and love beyond all telling.
The post Our Everyday appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
January 28, 2022
An Invitation to a Retreat
I invite those of you in the area to join me in reflecting on what aging means for us as believers—how growing older can be a spiritual practice, a way of entering more deeply into the mystery of Christ.
Cost: $290 for a single, $420 for a double.
Register at the retreat house by March 6th
by phone: 503- 845-3025 or email: retreat@mtangel.edu.
For more information, contact me at deaconcanderson@gmail.com
For a short video about the retreat click here.
The post An Invitation to a Retreat appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.
