Chris Anderson's Blog, page 9

Spiritual but Not Religious

Dorothy Day famously said, quoting Romano Guardini, that “the Church is the cross on which Christ is crucified.”

As if that’s a bad thing.

Which of course it is, in the sense of the terrible abuse that has gone on in the Church, and the violence done in its name, and the corruption, and the hypocrisy.

 

But I think the biggest danger for many of the good and sincere people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” is the unspoken assumption that there’s a way to be happy all the time, and avoid boredom, and never have to face the darkness inside them, and the emptiness, and the need.

In that sense the tackiness of the Church, and the tedium of the Church, and the ordinariness—the threadbare carpets, the bad singing, the bumbling liturgies—all of that is to the good.  It humbles us and it crucifies in small and necessary ways, because it’s only in the ordinary and the everyday, only there, in the moment, that Christ appears.

 

Sometimes people who think of themselves as spiritual-but-not-religious live lives of committed spiritual practice and charity towards others.

But sometimes to be spiritual-but-not-religious really means keeping everything in our heads where it doesn’t have to be acted out and so compromised.  We can avoid making fools out of ourselves and avoid making mistakes because we haven’t tried to do anything in the first place.

It’s like deciding to be a musician and never picking up the guitar.

 

I know a man who travels thousands of miles every year, and climbs mountains, and visits  monasteries, and prays and fasts, and who reads book after book about theology and world religions, and who talks about Christianity and about faith from that pristine and temporary distance, as if the life in the pews is somehow not good enough, not aesthetically and intellectually pleasing enough, when if he would stay on the mountaintop a little longer, for more than a week or so, if we would actually live in a monastery, over time, he’d get tired of the food and bored with the clouds and irritated with this monk or that, as they would get irritated with him.

Life.  Ordinary life.

 

Michael Casey says that the reason to go to a monastery is to discover that God can’t be found there.

He means:  it’s not magic.  God is everywhere, on the mountaintop and in the valley and in the drivethru at Starbucks, and especially when we’re so bored and tired and emptied out we realize that the grace when it comes, the light when it comes, isn’t our achievement but a gift given to us freely as it is given to everyone.

God is in the monastery, too, of course.  But in just this sense.

 

An ordinary daily mass.  A Wednesday morning, say.  The same scattering of people.  The same white running shoes.  The same rumpled khakis.  The old lady in her walker.  The fervent college student.

The same hurried prayers.  The same mechanical recitations.

In the corners, in the silence, all the familiar shadows.

 

Caryll Houselander once wrote:

     Every day crowds of unknown people come to him, who feel as hard, as cold, as empty as the tomb.  The come with the first light, before going to the day’s work, and with the grey mind of early morning, hardly able to concentrate at all on the mystery which they themselves are part of:  impelled only by the persistent will of love, not by any sweetness of consolation, and it seems to them as if nothing happens at all.  But Christ’s response to that dogged, devoted will of a multitude of insignificant people is his coming to life in them, his Resurrection in their souls.  In the eyes of the world they are without important, but in fact, because of them and their unemotional Communions, when the world seems to be finished, given up to hatred and pride, secretly, in unimaginable humility, Love comes to life again.

 

     Sometimes I get so impatient with people, and with myself, so tired of all of us who say the Church doesn’t speak to us, who turn up our noses at it because this or that particular doctrine doesn’t suit us, or because of some simplistic or sentimental or offensively dogmatic thing some poor priest or believer says who can’t put into better words the love or hope or despair they feel.

As we can’t either.

We judge by the way people look. We judge by what people say.  We judge.

 

I wonder how much of the resistance of many intellectuals to institutional religion doesn’t really have to do with class and race.

 

But deeper than the funny hats or the pious platitudes, underneath the skin, is a mystery we can’t fathom and are wildly arrogant to think we can.

Is Christ.

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The Stroller and the Basketball

for a video of this homily, click here

 

December 26, 2021, Feast of the Holy Family

Colossians 3:12-21; Luke 2:41-52

 

Last week Barb and I decided to take our fifteen-month-old grandson and our two dogs for a walk in the woods.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

For one thing the tires on the stroller were half-flat, and the dogs were jumpy, and then it started to rain, and then it rained harder, and Hank started to cry, and then to cry louder, until finally Barb picked him up and walked home, without a word—just took off—leaving me in the mud with two barking dogs and a stroller I had to drag behind me all the way back.

I was so mad I could barely see straight—not at Hank—he’s a perfect little boy—but at Barb, at my wife—and I shouldn’t have been mad at her.  It wasn’t her fault.  Really, I was mad at myself, that even as a grandfather I can’t seem to control my emotions.

 

How can any of us ever be as patient and loving as the scriptures suggest Mary and Joseph are?  As faithful?  As kind?  In today’s gospel Mary and Joseph are “anxious,” we’re told, and maybe frantic, and maybe they even raise their voices a little when they find their little boy in the temple.  “Why have you done this to us?”  But I think the traditional interpretation is finally right, that in the end they were patient, they accepted, they listened, even though they didn’t understand—they were holy—and it just doesn’t seem fair that we’re supposed to live up to that standard ourselves.

But I think that’s too easy.  That’s letting ourselves off the hook.

We need ideals.  We need high standards.  We have more than enough examples all around us of slacking off and letting things go and making excuses.  We need models of virtue and love, even if we know we can never live up to them, and in a way that’s the point, that we know what is right and know when we’re wrong and so turn to God for forgiveness and grace.

That’s what the stories of the Holy Family are really about.  Grace.  The immeasurable stores of God’s grace.

Mary was conceived without sin, which is a lot more than could ever be said of us.  But she was conceived without sin, before she was even born, before she could do anything to earn or achieve that grace.  Mary was saved by the love and the mercy of the son she had yet to bring into the world.  In that sense the only difference between her and us is that we are saved after Jesus was born, and because he was, and that we have to keep asking for his grace after we are born, every day.

And also, unlike Mary a few short years later, we don’t say yes when the angel calls us.  We say no.  Again and again.

But that grace is always there, it’s always there, and all families are holy in the sense that they continually give us opportunities to admit our failings and receive this grace.

 

O Lord, forgive me for my anger and impatience in the woods.  I am a small and sinful man and I need your grace and I need your help.  Please, O Lord, strengthen me to be more like Mary and more like Joseph.

 

I was talking with my dental hygienist the other day in the pauses as she cleaned my teeth.  She’s a young, Christian mother with two kids, including a boy who is on a basketball team.  The other night, after the opposing team scored and the coach was urging the kids to hustle back down the court, he didn’t.  He just walked back.  And his father was furious when they got home, he was really angry, and the boy ran up to his room and wouldn’t come down to dinner.

So the mother went upstairs to comfort her son, but she also went up to support her husband.  She told her son she was sorry his dad had gotten so mad but that he was right to be upset.  You weren’t doing your best, she told him, you weren’t doing what God wants you to do, and your dad and I have to call on you that.

The next day the dad apologized, too, but he didn’t back down either.  There were consequences.  There were expectations.

Sometimes dads have to be dads, and moms have to be moms, and moms and dads have to support each other, and moms and dads have to set boundaries and establish standards for their kids, even when they get too mad and aren’t perfect and make mistakes.

Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, which I take to mean, be loving.  Put them first. Husbands, love your wives and avoid any bitterness toward them, which I take to mean, be subordinate to them.  Put them first.  Children, obey your parents, because you don’t know everything and you can’t do whatever you want to do—but parents, do not provoke them.  Don’t be too hard on them.  Don’t discourage them.

 

My hygienist and her husband are struggling to balance their commitment to their church with the sports their kids get involved in, as many parents are, since often practices and tournaments take place on Sundays.  Church has to come first, even if sometimes in the interests of the kids the parents have to make compromises.

But what’s obvious, too, is that God was on the court that night, God was in the game, as he was with me and my barking dogs and that stupid stroller with the flat tires.  He is always with us, and every situation gives us a chance to discern the will of God and to act in Godly ways or try to.

 

My wife heard this story and passed it on to me.

A woman’s three or four-year-old grandson was standing at a window looking outside.  After a few seconds he reached up and tried to swipe the window.

He tried to swipe the window.  As if it were the screen on his phone.  As if it were too dark and rainy and he wanted to look at something else.

We don’t establish rules and set boundaries to make our children conform to who we are.  We do this to help them conform to who God is.  We do it because there’s a reality beyond that window, a real world we have to face and to see and to deal with, whether we want to or not, and that takes discipline and that takes humility and that takes faith.

Only in God can the souls of our children be healthy and whole and good, and we know that because it’s true for us.  We are all of us always searching for Jesus, as Mary and Joseph search for him today.  Every moment is a window.  This is what we know and what we try to teach our kids:  that there is goodness and beauty and excellence in the world, that Christ is in the world, and that only in Him can we ever be happy and free.  Only in him can we ever be who we were really meant to be.

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Questions We Could Ask

At that time John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord to ask,

“Are you the one, or should we look for another?”

     Luke 7:18, Wednesday, the Third Week of Advent

 

Is this my life, or should I live another?

Is this my church, or should I find another?

Is this who I am, or should I be another?

 

Is this all there is?

Is there something more?

 

What is the one thing in my life?

What makes me truly happy?

 

Who am I looking for?

 

 

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Fall

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First and Second Sundays of Advent, 2021

Luke 21:25-36 and 3:4-6; Thessalonians 3:12-4:2 and Philippians 1:4-11

 

This is the second Sunday of Advent, and this last Monday was the 24th anniversary of my ordination as a deacon—24 years!—and all week I’ve been thinking about my friend, Father Matt.

Father Matt was an elderly priest who retired to Corvallis and helped out in the parish now and then.  He was a kind and gentle man, a man of real faith, and I very admired the way he handled his Parkinson’s disease as it got worse and worse.

Early on when I invited him to lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in town, his hands shook so hard it took him forever to eat.  He’d pick up a forkful of noodles, and he’d aim them at his mouth, and then most of them would slide off the tines and he’d have to start over again.

But he kept at it, and he didn’t seem to mind, he didn’t seem embarrassed at all, and we had a nice, long lunch.

 

In the gospel for last Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, Jesus warns us that big changes are coming, that there will be signs in the stars and the moon and the sun. and the foundations of the world will be shaken, and we’re going to be frightened and overwhelmed but should just “stand erect” in faith and hope.  And, of course, we think of climate change and the devastation of the planet, and the pandemic and how it seems it will never end, and all the stresses and ugliness and fear all around us.  But I also think of my own personal apocalypse, of all the people in my life who are sick and suffering and all who have died.  Father Matt.  Many of my old teachers and more and more of my friends.  One of the deacons I was ordained with died last month.  And I’m getting older, too, and creakier, and sometimes that just amazes me and sometimes it really scares me.  I can’t believe it.

One thing an older deacon knows that a younger deacon doesn’t is that the joy and elation you feel at your ordination never go away, they’re still there deep down, but they change.  They are sobered and tempered and complicated.

John the Baptist, the focus of the Gospel for the second Sunday of Advent, is the figure of the deacon, a model for what a deacon should be.   He’s crying out in the desert and he wants us to be in the desert, to empty ourselves out.  And we don’t want to.   The desert is beautiful, and sometimes it rains and there is a flowering, but living there is often a hard and trying thing.

Often what I’m crying out in the desert is that I don’t want to be in the desert.

I’m so grateful for my ordination.  It continues to give me this deeper joy.  Next to my marriage and my children it’s the most important thing in my life.  But what an older deacon knows that a younger deacon doesn’t is that sometimes you just don’t feel like being a deacon. You may have been ontologically changed at your ordination—that’s what happens, technically, when you’re ordained:  you’re ontologically—fundamentally—changed.  But you’re still the person you always were, too, with all the same faults and limitations, and sometimes you just don’t feel like you have the love you’re supposed to have and that the situation requires, you just don’t have it in you, you just can’t handle it.  And you’re right.  You can’t.  The love you need comes from the Spirit, it comes from Christ, and every day you have to pray for that, you have to ask God for that, directly, as St. Paul does in that wonderful prayer he offers for the people of Philippi:  that their “love may increase ever more.”

 

I’ll never forget one moment with Father Matt at one of his last masses.  I was serving as his deacon, standing beside him at the altar, and he started to tip over backwards.  He couldn’t keep his balance.  And I reached out and pressed my hand against the small of his back as he said the Words of Consecration.  That way we could both remain standing.

But really it was Matt who was holding me up, by his example, and God who was holding us both up, who was pressing his hand against us.  Matt was a quiet, gentle John the Baptist, crying out from the wilderness of his old age and his Parkinson’s, and he inspired me by his humility and by his openness, but it wasn’t his doing any more than it was mine that the bread and the wine became the Body and Blood.  Make holy, therefore, these gifts, he prayed, that they may become for us the Body and Blood.  It’s the Spirit that makes the gifts holy, from the Father and through the Son.  It’s the love and kindness and gentleness of our Lord Jesus Christ.  That’s what truly feeds us.   That’s what strengthens us to face the darkness and to live in the desert and to keep finding joy even when the world is once again coming to an end.

 

 

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Jesus Must Have Been Distracted, Too

A Reflection on the Solemnity of Christ the King

 for a video of this, click here

 

November 21, 2021

Revelation 1:5-8; John 18:33-37

 

 Jesus was fully human and fully divine and we make a mistake when we think he was one and not the other—usually that he was just divine.

We are fully human and partly divine and we make a mistake when we think we are one and not the other—usually that we are divine.

All our problems and struggles come from the assumption of our own divinity.  We think we are in charge.  We think we are in control.  We think we are the king.

 

Jesus isn’t divine in spite of his humanity.  He doesn’t have to escape his humanity in order to become divine.  His humanity and divinity so intersect we can’t separate one from the other.

Jesus tells Pilate in today’s gospel that his kingdom “is not of this world,” and it isn’t.  And it is.  He is the king of all creation, the first born of the dead.  He could call down all the armies of the angels.  But he doesn’t.  He is the Alpha and the Omega, through him and in him all things were made, and yet there he stands, in his body, on that cold marble floor, as Pilate sentences him to death.

He is not a king in the way we understand kings.  He is not divine in the way we understand divinity.

 

Lately in prayer I’ve really been struggling with distractions.  My thoughts are all over the place, and they’re mythoughts, about my plans and my projects.  It’s as if the conversation between Pilate and Jesus is going on in my head, and Pilate is winning.

I want to be the king of my own mind, I want to be my own master, and yet I can’t even manage that.

But I take solace in the thought that Jesus must have been distracted, too.  When he woke up in the morning and sat down to pray, he must have found himself thinking about all kinds of things.  He must have struggled as we all do to let go and be in the moment.

I don’t mean that he sinned, because he was without sin.

But being distracted isn’t sinful.  It’s human.  It’s the way we are.

What I imagine is that when Jesus was praying and his mind began to wander, he did what he calls us to do.

He smiled, he opened his hands, and he said, “here I am, Lord.  I come to do your will.”

 

 

 

 

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Saying No to God

I’m still thinking about last week’s gospel about “The greatest Commandment,” that we should love God with all our hearts and our neighbors ourselves (Mark 12:28-34).  For me there’s a difficult paradox here.

One the one hand I think a lot of us have trouble loving our neighbors as ourselves because we don’t really love ourselves.  And yet at the same time the reason we can’t really love God is that we’re so caught up in ourselves.  We’re so self-centered.

It’s a real problem.

But the other day I was rereading a book by Anthony DeMello, Seek God Everywhere, his book on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and he says something that really consoles me and gives me hope.  Sometimes, he says, God asks us to do something that we’re just not ready to do.  And that’s OK.  We just have to say to God:

Sorry, Lord, you want that?  Increase the love in my heart so that I may give it joyfully.  For the time being I am saying no.  I would like to give it, but make me love you more.  Increase my love.  Give me your love and your grace.

I like this very much.  Our spiritual lives are not about what we can achieve ourselves but about what God can do in us if we let him.  DeMello doesn’t even say that we should pray to be able to accomplish something difficult, just that we should pray to want to in the first place, and this is a good prayer, I think, and a real prayer, and in a sense the only prayer we can pray, because it’s at just that moment, as we’re praying for this love, that we let go.  It’s at just this moment that we open ourselves up, just a little, and then everything else comes rushing in.  Grace comes rushing in.

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Take Courage

October 24, 2021

Hebrew 5:1-6; Mark 10:46-52

 

Several times recently I’ve been talking with people in their seventies and eighties, and they’ve described this feeling of sadness and futility they sometimes have, this sense that there’s nothing more to look forward to.

And I know that feeling very well.  I’m getting up there, too.  Seventy doesn’t seem that far away anymore!

But for us as Christians this is a serious mistake, not just because we have an afterlife to look forward to, but because in our sadness and anxiety we’re not living in the moment.  We’re stuck in a past we can’t change.  We’re anxious about a future that hasn’t happened yet.

But in the present moment we’re neither young nor old.  We just are.  In the present moment life is what it’s always been.

The mist in the trees.  Our morning coffee.  Our little tasks for the day.

 

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.

 

A few weeks ago a friend of mine died, someone I knew and worked with for many years.  She was very important to me, but our relationship had its ups and downs, and for days after she died I couldn’t shake feelings of guilt and regret.

But regret like that is a temptation, because it traps us in the past, where’s there’s nothing more we can do.  In Christ there’s always more we can do.  The call is always to the present moment, and the future is always opening up before us, and in Christ even death is not the end.

We can console those who remain.  We can reach out to those we’ve kept at a distance.  And we can ask the dead to forgive us, as we can forgive them.

Because the dead are not truly dead.  They live in him, as we all live in him.

 

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.

 

Today is World Priest Day and we pray in thanksgiving for our priests.  We’re very lucky to have the priests we do.  Very blessed.  We pray in thanksgiving for their energy and their enthusiasm–and most of all for showing us what it really means to be called.  That it’s God who calls us, not we who call God.  A priest isn’t ordained because of his virtue but out of his humanity.  A priest can “deal with us patiently,” Hebrews says, because he, too, is “beset by weakness”–and like even Christ himself, he is not “glorified in himself” but in God and through God.  Just as in our different ways we all are.  We all are.

 

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.

Can you imagine what it be like to really hear those words?  How thrilling that would be?

But we do hear those words.  We hear them every day.

 

And look at how this works in the literary structure of the Gospel at this point.  How all of this has this context.

It’s not an accident that Mark in his genius as a writer puts the healings of two blind men on either side of the Transfiguration scene and Jesus’s teaching about the crucifixion, that we have to die to ourselves, that we have to be servants of all, that this isn’t about power and glory but about humility and faith.  And the disciples don’t get it.  They see that incredible light and they’re still arguing about who’s on first.  It’s just brilliant the way Mark does this.  He doesn’t come out and say it, but here are the disciples who can see but are blind to who Jesus really is and who they should be, and then, right before and right after, here are these two blind men who are blind but can see, who do know Jesus and know that he can save them if only they humble themselves.

 

Bartimaeus does call Jesus, and Jesus does answer the call.  But Bartimaeus calls out, in his weakness and his need, and Jesus answers in his compassion and his love, and he comes only to call him in return.

 

Two blind men, one in chapter 8, on the way up the mountain, the one Jesus heals with spit; and now Bartimaeus, in chapter 10, as they’re coming down the mountain, and Jesus is still trying to teach those egotistical, self-involved disciples that they have to let go.

Us, in other words.

The transfiguration is right in the middle.  The light.  The marvelous light.

 

This is where we always are, at exactly this same spot.

Before too long I’m going to have to go to this big event—not a Church event but something secular—and the other day I told a friend that I was really dreading it.  I said I knew it was just going to be this big, two-dimensional thing.  That’s the word I used:  two-dimensional.  Because it’s just going to be a secular gathering.  Because it won’t involve any talk about God, any prayer.

And my friend called me on it–very gently, and not in so many words–but he sort of implied that maybe the problem was me.  Maybe I’m the one being two-dimensional.

I’m the one who is blind.

Grace is at work everywhere, in everywhere situation.  God loves everyone just as much as he loves all of us at St. Mary’s, and maybe I could plan on going to that event and looking for that grace and listening for that grace.  Because it will be there.  God will be there where anyone talks about him or not.

Maybe, instead of just talking about Christianity, I could, you know, actually try to be a Christian.

 

I’m glad Jesus is just as patient with me as he is with those clueless disciples.  Again and again he is telling all of us where true greatness lies and true freedom and true joy.  In dying.  In weakness.  In letting go.

 

Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.  He is calling all of us.  He will cure all of us of our blindness if only we ask him to.  If only we first realize we can’t really see.  O Jesus, Son of David, have pity on us!

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The Boy on the Bike

for a video of this homily, click here

 

September 19, 2021

Mark 9:  33-32

 

Because the parking was always bad, I used to park at St. Mary’s when I was teaching and walk the five or six blocks to campus.

And I saw a lot of things on those walks over the years.

One beautiful sunny morning in the fall, as I was nearing the English Department, I saw a young woman in a wheelchair who had paused on the sidewalk about a block away.  I think she had cerebral palsy.  And as she waited there, she dropped her water bottle, and it rolled off the curb into the gutter, where clearly she couldn’t reach it.  She couldn’t bend over from her wheelchair.  She could barely move.

And before I had a chance to react, a young man with a beard came riding by on his bike, in a hurry.  But as he approached the intersection, he seemed to see what had happened, and he stopped, and he got off his bike, and he bent over and picked up the water bottle and handed it to the young woman.  They exchanged a few words, and then he hopped on his bike again and shot away.

It was just a moment, on a sunny morning, in September.  But it moved me.

 

“God comes, and his ways are near to us,” St. Oscar Romero says:

Each person’s life, each one’s history, / is the meeting place God comes to. / How satisfying to know one need not go to the desert to meet him.  / God is in your own heart.

 

I don’t think a university is any better or worse than any other world, but it’s the world I happen to know, and I can tell you that the idea of the first being last and the servant of all wouldn’t really work on a tenure and promotion or a scholarship committee.  The rule in a university is competition, the rule is trying as hard as you can to be the first, not the last, and to fill up your classes, too.  Receiving just one child, as Jesus urges us to do today, wouldn’t be enough–it’s all about numbers–and taking the Letter of James as a guide for recruiting would never work.  Come to OSU and learn “wisdom?”  Come to OSU and learn to be “pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant”?  No one would sign up.  We have to promise money and status and prestige.

Becoming a deacon sidetracked me in the English Department, it took me out of the game, and I have to admit that I always struggled with that.  I wanted to surrender to God’s will, I prayed for the grace to let go, but again and again I found myself still trying to impress everyone—sometimes, in fact, by trying to show them how humble I was.  See?  Look at me not caring about what you think.  I’m way better than you.

 

And now I’m retired, and retirement is a kind of dying, too.  It never ends.  I’m so glad to be away from OSU and the pressures of it, I’m so glad to be retired, but aging is a spiritual practice, too, or can be, and what it involves is a slow stripping away of whatever authority we might have, whatever power, and everything depends on how we face that or whether we do.

 

But isn’t this what it means to be a deacon?  Isn’t this what being a deacon has always been about?

“Be humble,” Pope Francis told the deacons of Rome this June.  “Let all the good you do be a secret between you and God. And so it will bear fruit.”

Like the boy on the bike.  He didn’t know I saw him do what he did.  He couldn’t put that on his resume.  It was a secret, between him and God.

 

The boy on the bike is the figure of the deacon.  The boy on the bike shows us what we should do.

We have to stop.  We have to climb down.  We have stoop.  And in the world, on the street corners, on the curbs.

We have to help those who need us to reach what they cannot reach on their own.

 

The logic of the diaconate, Pope Francis says, is the “logic of lowering oneself,” as Jesus lowered himself, as Jesus stooped.  “If there is one great person in the Church,” Francis says, “it is the one who has made him or herself the smallest,” and it’s in this sense that the diaconate is prophetic.  “Deacons,” the Pope says, “precisely because they are dedicated to the service of the people, remember that in the ecclesial body no one can elevate himself above others.” Deacons, he says, can help overcome “the scourge of clericalism,” the idea that priests are a special “caste” of people, “above the People of God.”

This has to stop, and deacons can help stop it—but only by being deacons, by resisting our own clericalism, our own deep desire for status and prestige within this institution we so love.  We have to try to see all the embarrassments we suffer, all the ways priests and laypeople misunderstand us or dismiss us or leave us out, we have to see all these things as maybe the most important, the most central part of our ministry.

 

We have to be willing to be mistaken for the gardener, again and again.  Jesus was, in the garden of the tombs, in the garden of stone, and in this is all our freedom, all our joy.

 

“Who will put a prophet’s eloquence into my words,” St. Oscar Romero says,

to shake from their inertia / all those who kneel before the riches of the earth– / who would like gold, money, lands, power, political life to be their everlasting gods! / All that is going to end. / There will remain only the satisfaction of having been, / in regard to money or the political life, / a person faithful to God’s will. / We must learn to manage the relative and transitory things of earth according to his will, / not to make them absolutes. / There is only one absolute:  he who awaits us / in the heaven that will not pass away.

 

We are just the boy on the bike, all of us, and no one will see us, and that’s enough, that’s everything, because it’s morning, it’s a beautiful September morning, and the sun is shining, and God is here.  He is always here, on every street corner.  He is here, at every intersection, at every crossing.

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Be Opened

Click here for a video version of this homily.

 

September 5, 2021, Ordinary Time

Isaiah 35:4-7; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37

One way to describe how I feel when God is with me is that I feel free.  I feel open.

Ephphatha, Jesus says today, “be opened,” and sometimes we are.

It’s the way we feel when we’re doing something we love and we’re caught up in it and we’re not thinking about anything else.  It’s the way we feel when we’re in a place we love and we can just be ourselves.  It’s the way we feel when we’re with people we love, as if Jesus has touched our ears and touched our tongues and we can really say how we feel without fear of being judged or rejected, and we can really listen, too.

In the opening prayer for mass today we ask that through Christ we may receive the gift of “true freedom.”  True freedom.  That’s how we know:  when we feel free, when we feel this sense of release, of being unbound, we know that Christ is present.

It’s as if the springs have burst forth in the desert.  As if the drought is over and the rain has come.

 

A few summers ago I was using a listening exercise with a group of deacons and their wives.  It goes like this.  People pair off and one person gets to talk on a certain topic for several minutes while the other person listens.  When the timer goes off, they switch, and the talker becomes the listener and the listener the talker.  When you’re the listener you can only listen.  You can’t say a thing.  When you’re the talker you get to say whatever you want to say—and if you run out of things to say, you both just have to sit there, in silence.

It’s a remarkably freeing exercise.  One deacon wife said that this was the longest her husband had ever listened to her in 45 years of marriage—and she was only half kidding.

Someone is always interrupting us, someone is always trying to fix us, someone is always trying to silence us, and I think that’s why we’re so sealed off to begin with.  If we post something online we’ll be blasted; if we say what we think, we’ll be shunned; if we talk about our fears we’ll be thought of as weak.

Or we won’t be listened to at all.  How many voices in the world go unheard?  How many cries for help go unheeded?

 

This is how we writing teachers have ruined writing for generations of students.  We’ve made them so afraid of making mistakes they can’t really say what they mean.  No, William Stafford says: “Permit yourself to like what you are doing (if you feel any qualms, then veer towards what feels good—why oppose the only compass you have?)”  Sure, you’ll have to revise, but save that for later.  Just get going.  “When in doubt, lower your standards,” Stafford says, and I think that applies to the spiritual life, too.

We think we have to be pious when we pray and that being pious means being on our best behavior, putting our best foot forward.  But we can tell Jesus anything.  We can wear our shabby clothes.  We can confess our poverty, our smallness.  We can tell Jesus how bored we are.  We can tell Jesus how sad we are, or angry, or discouraged.  We can tell Jesus about our leaky sink and our sick cat and our cranky boss—Jesus loves us, he’s woven himself into every part of our lives, nothing is too small or trivial for him.

Jesus “groans,” when he exorcises the man.  I never noticed that before.  It’s remarkable.

We can groan, too.

Jesus loves us even when we sin and especially then and in fact this is the mystery of sin, that when we confess it there is always rejoicing—if we open up, if we tell the truth.  This is what the sacrament of reconciliation is all about.  God never rejects us.  He shows “no partiality,” as the letter of James says.  He loves us before we sin and he loves us afterwards and so we are free, entirely free—not to keep sinning, but to keep being ourselves.

“One of the essential graces of repentance,” Anthony De Mello says, “is joy.”

It is the authentic, homecoming happiness.  How lovely it is to surrender oneself with one’s inadequacies into the loving arms of God and be accepted.  How much evil I have done and how much I am loved!  How wonderful!

 

We talk to God and he listens.  He listens.

 

There are different kinds of silences, and the silence of God is the silence of listening, of love, of compassion.  He never interrupts us.  He never cuts us off.

 

I had very close friend at OSU.  We were exactly the same age.  We were both professors, we were both members of the parish, we were both married, and we used to meet at the MU every week for coffee and talk about OSU and St. Mary’s and our wives.  I could tell him anything, I could be myself around him, and he could tell me anything.

And then he got sick and he died, two and half years ago.  I preached at his funeral, here at St. Mary’s.

And then, just last month, this August, two and a half years later, his widow called and asked if I would preside at the burial of his ashes, at the cemetery outside of Philomath, looking out over the fields.

The family had planned to bury the ashes back in the Midwest but that hadn’t worked out.

I’d never had this experience before.  It was as if I had to go through my friends’ funeral all over again, renew my sadness and my grief, and it was very hot that afternoon, stiflingly hot, and I just didn’t want to be there.

But as I began to say the words of final commendation, something started to happen.  I started to feel the way I used to feel, when my friend and I were having coffee at the MU.  I was talking and he was listening.  I was talking and God was listening, and my friend was talking to me, and God was talking to me.  The grave is beneath a great maple tree, and on the plaque above his name it reads:  Devoted Husband, Father, Grandfather, and Teacher.  And underneath his name is this.  He had asked for it to be engraved there:  I love you, I have lived a good life.  Thank you.

I could feel the silence softening.  I looked down the slope of the hill over the dry grass, and I could feel my sadness deepening into something else.

We can tell God everything, and he will listen.  He is always listening.

And God tells us everything, every minute—God tells us everything.

 

 

 

 

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Assurance

It’s interesting and useful for us that the scriptures come out of a desert culture and so often describe deserts and droughts and the blazing sun, and the miracle of water—God as the water, God as the spring, God as the rain.  We can take heart from this, because the water is inside us, not outside; the spring is the Spirit, is Christ, welling up in us always.

Yesterday when Bumble and I walked to Cronemiller Lake, I ran into a friend.  Her dog was chasing a ball, diving into the water and coming out, dripping.  I started talking about the weather and the drought and the virus, and my friend said, just matter-of-factly, “God is with us.  Everything is OK.”

This didn’t seem foolish to me or too easy.  It seemed true.  It was true.

 

When you went forth, O God, at the head or your people,

              when you marched across the desert, the earth trembled;

            the heavens melted at the presence of God,

            at the presence of God, Israel’s God.

 

            You poured down, O God, a generous rain;

              when your people were starved you gave them new life.

            It was there that your goodness found a home,

            prepared in your goodness, O God, for the poor.    Psalm 68

 

            Deliver us, O Lord, from our bondage,

              as streams in dry lands.   Psalm 126

 

—

 

A beautiful poem by the Oregon Poet William Stafford

 

 

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names- and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles- you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head-
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

 

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