Sugar (homily)

Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Mark 10:46-52

I want to recommend a new movie, a very Christian movie, even though it never talks about God directly. It’s called “Sugar” and it’s about a young man from the Dominican Republic, a pitcher, who comes to the United States to play baseball.

He starts in the minor leagues in Arizona and Iowa, and he has great success at first. He strikes out a lot of people. He’s starting to make a name for himself.

They call him Sugar because his curve is so sweet.

But then he has an injury and has to miss a few games, and when he comes back, he’s lost something. He’s just not as good anymore. Other young pitchers start to edge him out, and he begins to feel a lot of pressure, and he’s been homesick all along.

You know how the standard sports story goes: hero works hard, hero experiences adiversity, hero wins big in a blaze of glory. The end. What’s so great about this movie is that it doesn’t follow that story. It follows reality, and in following reality, it becomes Christian, deeply Christian.

***

One day, depressed and despairing, Sugar walks away from the team and takes a bus to New York to look for a friend. He finds the Dominican and Spanish-speaking community in New York, he gets a job washing dishes, he meets new people, and he works, too, in a carpenter’s shop and finds a mentor in an older man from Puerto Rico. He’s failing in a way. He’s becoming just like everybody else. A nobody.

Except that in doing the dishes and working as a carpenter, in simply living his life, Sugar is finally happy. Not deliriously happy, not wildly happy. Quietly happy.

Free. At peace.

In the end he starts playing baseball again with other men who were once recruited and exploited, he starts playing just for fun, on a ragged field in the Bronx with a few aluminum bleachers. The sun is shining and everyone is laughing. When someone makes a mistake it’s no big deal. And as he starts throwing his fastball again, and then his change up, and then his curve, Sugar starts to really love the game again, for its own sake. He doesn’t care about being famous anymore. He’s just playing the game. Being in the moment.

***

In The Cost of Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoffer talks about what it really means to follow the way of the cross. “If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship,” he says,

if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands and which fails to distinguish between natural and Christian existence, then we cannot help regarding the cross as an ordinary, everyday calamity, as one of the trials and tribulations of life. We have then forgotten that the cross means rejection and shame as well as suffering.

Jesus doesn’t go out in a blaze of glory. He is executed, he fails, and Bonhoffer is saying that we shouldn’t explain that away. This is the moment we all have to face, this is the way life is--because of our bodies, because they are temporary and mortal; because of the pressures and stresses that come to all of us, no matter who we are.

The question is how we respond to these inevitable limitations. Do we ignore them, taking refuge in some fantasy of glory or privilege? Do we become angry or bitter? Or do we do what Jesus did? Do we embrace the darkness? Do we open ourselves up?

***

I was driving down the street the other morning and I realized that I’d been feeling a little guilty since our friend Sue died--guilty because I’m still alive, because I’m still happy and doing my work. It’s the way I felt for a while after my Mom died, too. I think we all have that feeling when a loved one dies.

But then I thought, wait a minute. That’s crazy. When I die the world will go on without me. Everyone I love won’t just give up. They won’t die, too. The world will go on and all the work will get done, and there will always be people living and dying and others taking their places and carrying on the business of things, and that’s wonderful and freeing, really, if you stop and think about it.

The only thing to feel guilty about is why we’re so worried and distracted. I was, driving down that street. I was preoccupied with all the stuff I was in charge of that day, or thought I was, with all the ways I thought I could assert myself and be approved of.

All the people I thought I could strike out.

I wasn’t paying attention to what really mattered. To the rainy asphalt. To Barb sitting next to me. To the coffee steaming in our cupholders. I was blind to that.

***

“The Christ-suffering which every person must experience,” Bonhoffer says, “is the call to abandon the attachment of this world.”

And later: “The call of Christ . . . sets the Christian in the middle of the daily arena against sin.” Every day the Christian “encounters new temptations, and every day he must suffer anew for Jesus Christ’s sake.”

The temptations, I think, are to power and to fantasies of power, to glory and fantasies of glory. The temptations are to avoid thinking about the mundane and the everyday. This was Sugar’s problem in the beginning. He was cocky, he was full of himself. He an only becomes a hero, a true hero, in the end, when he’s been humbled and accepts that he has been. When he calls for help. When he reaches out.

And it’s only then he can be happy. “We can of course shake off the burden which is laid upon us,” Bonhoffer says, but then we find that “we have a still heavier burden to carry--a yoke of our own choosing, the yoke of our self.” Our fantasies are a heavy burden, and Jesus invites us to put them down and to take on his burden instead. His yoke. And his yoke is easy and his burden light.

It’s just a game, a lovely game, and all we have to do it is play it.

***

Blind Bartimaeus throws off his cloak, springs up, and comes to Jesus, and that’s what we must do.

Throw off our cloaks: our false self. Our fantasy self.

And then we can see.

For and Against

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Mark 11:25-29

Whoever isn’t for us is against us, Jesus says.

That’s what I like: black and white. My way or the highway.


But wait a minute. That’s not what Jesus says in the gospel today. It’s what he says in Matthew and it’s what he says in Luke, and there are reasons for this and contexts for this.

But the gospel today is Mark’s, and what Jesus says in Mark is: whoever is not against us is for us.

Now that’s a completely different proposition. That’s a much more open-ended thing.

There are six billion people on the planet, and only a handful of those are against me personally in some way--they don’t like me or approve of me. And only say 10% are against me in some general way, because I’m an American or a Catholic or a man.

OK. So that means that well over 5 billion people are for me, are with me, are on my side.

It’s not a war, it’s a concert. Not an army, a choir. A river.


I did a wedding in Seattle over the summer, at St. Joseph’s church, between a Catholic woman and a Hindu man, from India. At the rehearsal, the Hindu man’s little niece walked into church. She looked around, and she looked up, at the statues and the stained glass windows. And then she said, in all innocence and sincerity: wow, great decorations!

I think it really means something that the Church doesn’t object to a Catholic woman marrying a Hindu man--that it doesn’t require the Hindu to become a Catholic. All that’s necessary is that he respect and honor his wife’s faith, that the two of them live together with mutual respect.

As Tyler and Erin will live together in mutual respect--Tyler and Erin, here in the front row, married yesterday in a Lutheran liturgy. Tyler Catholic, Erin Lutheran, in love with each other and accepting of each other.

In just a minute I will have the great honor of blessing their marriage, of offering our Church’s approval and support. And we welcome today all their family and friends. It is good that you are here. It is good that we are all here.


Whoever is not against me, is for me.


And then the gospel makes an interesting leap.

You know that the gospel writers probably didn’t write most of the gospels from scratch. They edited or “redacted” them, stitching together pre-existing stories and sayings of Jesus, and Mark, especially, does this really abruptly and quickly. He really jams things together.

So today we’ve got the first part, the inclusive part, about most of the world being for us. But then we switch to cutting off our feet and cutting off our hands and suddenly Jesus is being really definite and clear. It’s almost the opposite.

Except that on second thought it isn’t. There’s a meaning that jumps across the gap, a spark, and I think it’s this: that we need to be open and forgiving with others and focus instead on our own issues and problems.

“Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone,” Anthony De Mello says, “you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality. Something inside you has to change.”

It’s not that other people are always OK. It’s not that we have to like them and accept them. It’s that we can’t blame them for our problems.

This is how C.S. Lewis advises us to understand the talk about enemies in the Psalms, about slaying our enemies and bashing the babies of our enemies. He says, internalize it. Understand those enemies as your own sins, your pride and your envy and your gluttony. Never take them literally.

But always take them seriously, absolutely seriously, because there is a battle to be fought here, a battle to be fought everyday, and we can’t fight it if we’re busy sticking our noses into other peoples’ business.


If your HBO offends thee, cut it out.

If your internet offends thee, cut it out.

If your credit card offends thee, cut it out.

If your overeating offends, if your drinking offends, if your drug use offends.

Your racism, your sexism, your too easy opinions, your too easy generalizations.

Your profanity. Your lust.

Cut it out. Cut it all out.


Notice: we don’t cut off anybody else’s foot. We don’t pluck out anybody else’s eye.


Most of all we need to cut out our attachments. Most of all we need to pluck out anything that becomes more important to us than God--reputation and power and influence--our jobs, our houses, our bodies. It’s our attachments that keep us from heaven, and not just in the afterlife but now, here on earth.


It’s ourselves we need to face. It’s ourselves we need to analyze.

And if we don’t--if we’re always complaining about others, especially groups of others--immigrants, liberals, conservatives, the Church, the government--whatever it is--if we’re always focused on somebody else, if in marriage we’re always thinking about our spouse’s flaws, always blaming our spouse for our problems, we need to stop and turn and look inside. We need to ask ourselves: what’s wrong with us? What personal problems are we afraid to face? What illusions are we clinging to?

No one else can make us happy, not even our husband or wife. Only God can make us happy. And only we can turn to God. Only we can surrender.


And as we move through the world, as we look around us, let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, just as a default position, let’s assume that all these other people, all these strangers, all these people of different colors and cultures and faiths--all these people are my brothers, all these people are my sisters.

That it’s not evil that’s abounding. It’s grace.

Doing the Dishes (homily)

August 30, 2009
Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
Mark 7:1-23

My mother was a fanatic housekeeper. She was so particular about her kitchen I wasn’t allowed in it. I never did a dish until I was married.

My mother polished the furniture every week. She washed the windows. Every week.

My daughter, on the other hand, is the messiest person on the planet. I say this without hesitation. She wouldn’t scrub a kettle if her life depended on it. There could be a dead elk in the middle of the floor and she wouldn’t notice for weeks.

But my mother loved me and gave me life. My daughter is a wonderful woman, full of insight and compassion.

***

The obvious message for Catholics in today’s Gospel is that we shouldn’t get caught up in the wrong things.

Did you know that in the Middle Ages there were Church leaders who tried to ban the use of the fork? It was new in Europe, just introduced, and there were bishops who thought it unnatural and immoral. “God in his wisdom has provided us with natural forks,” one of them said. “Our fingers. Therefore it is an insult to substitute artificial metallic forks when eating.”

The Spirit works through the human agency of the Church, and the human agency really foul things up. We all know this. We’re always trying to decide where to draw the line: what’s human in this situation and what’s divine?

We were all horrified by the pedophilia scandal. Stunned. It was a terrible, terrible thing. But for those of us who have stayed in the Church, for those of us who are here right now, we apparently decided: no. As terrible as it was, as awful and sinful as it was, it was finally a kettle. It was finally a drum.

Grace still flows beneath all the problems. God still works through this flawed human institution, as he always has and always will.

***

But I’m really thinking about how this truth applies to the way we read people. The human and the divine are mixed up in every person, too, and I think we forget that. We’re like the Pharisees in our relationships, fixed on the trivial, but in a negative way.

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine from Scotland. He’s been married a long time, and he was telling me a story about his wife. At the end he said: I’m in love with a woman who drives me crackers.

Well, me too. You know how it is when you’ve been married forever. Just a raised eyebrow can send you over the edge. A tone of voice.

Barb likes to leave her stuff on the kitchen counter--but complains when I do. She never puts the pillows back on the couch. She forgets to tell me when she writes a big check, and then I’m standing at the counter at Fred Meyer and my debit card won’t go through.

But she’s the love of my life. The Lord shines through her, everyday, and when I forget that I’m being a literalist, a rigorist, a fundamentalist.

It’s easy to criticize the compulsiveness of others. But what about our own? What about the little things we care too much about?

Caps on backwards. Tailgaters. Tattoos.

Who cares? Why do we?

***

And we’re that way with ourselves, too. We judge ourselves too harshly, focusing on the trivial and forgetting about the imago dei--the image of God within us. We gain five pounds and suddenly we’re a terrible person. We get into a fender bender and suddenly we’re not worthy to live. I think that almost all of us live with a constant stream of negative self-talk, a barrage of internal criticism, and it all has to do with things that don’t matter. That’s how the devil tempts us. He gets us to fixate on the kettles. On the drums.

Here’s our compassion, here’s our longing, here’s our intrinsic goodness. And we turn our backs on it. We don’t give ourselves credit for it.

***

Things are just messy and mixed up and we have to stop being surprised that they are.

We have to separate the human and the divine, not confuse them, but the paradox is that in another way they’re always intertwined. We can’t ever seem to have one without the other. Everything is incarnated, and so it’s both wonderful and flawed, good and bad.

I was standing at the kitchen sink the other day doing the dishes. (Believe me, since I got married, I’ve more than made up for my wasted youth.) I was looking out the window at the leaves changing in the maple and this feeling started to build up in me. It came out of nowhere. My prayer that morning had been rushed and distracted. The readings had left me cold. I hadn’t been feeling very spiritual at all. All day I’d been feeling like a failure.

And there, suddenly, up to my elbows in suds, I felt the presence of God welling up in me.

Jesus did the dishes and Jesus lived in the real world and he still does. In fact, he didn’t just wash the kettles and drums. He washed feet. That’s how real he got, and ordinary, and mundane. He wrapped a towel around his waist and he went around in a circle and he washed the dirty, blistered feet of those ungrateful, thickheaded disciples, and he said that we should do likewise.

The reason we have to make sure that we don’t mistake the human for the divine is that the divine is always infused in the human. For us, in this life, that’s the only way we can ever experience the divine, that’s the only way that grace can come to us, through the kettles and the drums--but only if we don’t read them literally, only if we don’t get too worked up about them, only if we don’t assume that the way we like things and the way we want things is the way God does.

Only if we never forget that in everything, in people and in life, there’s always, always more than meets the eye.

Lucy (poem)

When I lived for a month in a hut by the sea,
my little red border collie ran away, back home.
I was walking in a cemetery, on a hill, looking
at the gravestones, and the thought crossed

my mind: Lucy has run away. And she had,
Barb wrote me, that very day. She came back
in the evening. It wasn’t an intuition exactly.
It was just a thought. But all those thirty days

I was more porous than usual, more aware of
all the signs that God sends us, or might,
and I often missed Lucy and thought about her.
I kept seeing her face in the faces of the deer,

or the chipmunks, even the birds. I was
aware of how everything has a face. That we
have eyes and so do the animals, all of them.
We have ears and so do they. They kept me

company in my long, lonely month trying
to pray and sometimes feeling thinned out,
opened. Sunsets. Clouds coming and going.
Dreams. Once, touching the trunk of a tree.

Since then I’ve suffered several losses,
and my new vocation, my new emptiness,
has been a lot harder than I thought it would be.
More and more I think life is about giving

things up. It’s about letting things go, or
trying to. It’s about holding things in memory
and believing in them still. The night before
I gave Lucy away, I brushed her long hair

until it shone, combing out the tangles.
In the morning, when she hopped into the car
and my friend drove her away, she looked
from the back like a beautiful young girl.

The Question of Christ (a eulogy for Sue Gifford)

Earlier this summer I turned from the altar to start bringing the cups to the Eucharistic ministers, and there was Sue, one of the ministers for that mass, standing there with that grin on her face, as if we were both in on some private joke. I was surprised--she’d been on vacation, and I hadn’t seen her come into Church--and suddenly I felt this real love for her, this real gladness.

Sue at the altar, a big grin on her face.

Sue liked to gossip and complain, and I like to gossip and complain, and we often gossiped and complained together, and sometimes that was good for us and sometimes it wasn’t. But I always took what Sue said in those moments with a grain of salt. I’d seen her too often, praying at mass. I’d seen her too often, helping a student in crisis. I’d seen her too often serving as a minister of the Church, with compassion and skill.

In a way Sue was one of the least reverent ministers I’ve known, the least liturgical, and yet she planned hundreds of liturgies and was very good at it and loved it. For someone who liked to complain about the priesthood, she sure had a lot of close friends who were priests, and she went to a lot of ordinations, and she worked with a lot priests over the years, faithfully and well.

She liked to kid me when I vested as a deacon. Nice dress, she’d say. But she never failed to say something nice after a homily or to talk with me later over coffee about what I’d said. We often talked about the spiritual life. She was really faithful. She was really insightful. She had a strong, informed theology, a theology of inclusion, a theology of relationship, a theology of community, and she taught it to hundreds of students over the years, calling them to a more mature and complicated and literate understanding of their faith.

Our friendship was complicated, too. It was a real friendship. Sue disappointed me sometimes, and I know I disappointed her. There were times when we had to keep our distance, when we couldn’t help each other, and with most of the other people I’ve known, that would have been it. The relationship would have been over. But Sue was loyal and Sue was faithful, and over the years we came to accept each other’s limitations and to love each other in spite of them and because of them.

Until the other day Sue had never left me, and she still hasn’t left me, not really, and that’s what I want to say about her and that’s what I want to praise: that she brought who she really was to the altar, her humor, her earthiness, her practicality, her wisdom. Her big grin. Her big heart. And she stayed. She remained.

How are you? she’d ask, accent on the word are, and she really wanted to know. You could really talk to her. What can I do to support you? I must have heard her ask this a thousand times. It was her mantra. I can hear her voice right now, clear as day: What can I do to support you? It was a question, a real question, not an easy answer, not a slogan, and I think it defines her whole theology, her whole approach to ministry.

That question is Sue’s gift to us. That question is Sue’s call to us. That question is the question of Christ: How can we support each other? How can we live together, all of us, in all our humanness and brokenness? How can we help each other do this holy and complicated work that we’ve all been called to do?

The Watchful Tree (poem)

When the Lord came to me I was looking at a branch
of the Watchful Tree.

I was watching the kettle boil.
I was watching the potter at his wheel.

And the Lord said to me, yes, the wheel is turning
and the kettle sings
and the almond tree is the Watchful Tree
because it is the first to bloom in the spring. We watch for it.

I walk into a room and the woman I meet seems to give
off light.
Something is glowing inside of her,
maybe an emptiness,
and it leaks out the corners of her eyes. I can see it.

I walk into a room and I sit down by a man
and the man has a darkness inside of him, a meanness.
I want to run away.
I seem to see a sheet of oil, sliding down a pane of glass.

Hummingbirds bicker by the feeder, brawling
and buzzing and shooting away. Or they hover there,
in their beauty. Impossibly. Shimmering.

The way every season contains the next. Foreshadows it.
The yellow leaves in the summer green.
The shining branch, deep in the heart of the tree.

The Boy with the Basket (homily)

July 26, 2009
17th Sunday of Ordinary Time
John 6:1-15

I’ve been thinking about the boy in the Gospel today, the one with the five loaves and the two fishes. Jesus could have made it rain fishes and loaves that day, but he didn’t.
He used what was there, in that ordinary moment. He took that one meager basket and that one unsuspecting boy and made them both miraculous.

We keep thinking that spiritual things have to be purely spiritual in some sort of extraordinary, unearthly way, and that we do, too. Choirs of angels all the time. Constant self-denial. But grace builds on nature. It begins in the world. As Thomas Merton puts it, most of us are “warped by the idea that everything spontaneous is ‘merely natural’ and that for a work to be supernatural it has to go against the grain, it has to frustrate and disgust us.” But the truth is quite different. We have to overcome our selfish desires. But once we do, Merton says, “we set free our interior, Godlike self,” and we are able to love God and others just as we are.

We are not called to be monks. We are not called to be spiritual athletes. We don’t have to spend all our time in Church doing Churchy things. Our call is to be the best dental hygienists we can be, the best store managers, the best engineers. “What good” are these fishes and loaves, the disciples ask? What good are the ordinary things of our lives? And Jesus says: they are good and they are very good.

The other day when it was so hot Barb and I took our two new grandsons to the Aquatic Center, to the outdoor pool. We were pretty tired, and we’re still a little nervous about being grandparents, but it was tremendous fun. There were hundreds of people there, and the sun was pouring down, and the water was beautiful and blue. The kids swam and we swam, and sitting in a chair drying off and reading a book, I was for a moment filled with the gentle presence of God.

I hadn’t journeyed to some shrine. I hadn’t performed some tremendous spiritual feat. I’d just put on my swimsuit. Gotten in my Honda.

We don’t go to mass to be made holy but to be shown that we already are, or can be. We are all the little boy, we are all carrying the little basket, and the fishes and the loaves are the things of our lives. And we bring them up the aisle, and they are taken up to the altar, and we are made to know what they are inside: holy and beautiful and good.

***

But there’s a flip side to this, a paradox. On the one hand we are good enough and more than enough. But on the other, we aren’t and never will be. Our baskets are meager, they’ll never be enough, and we just have to accept that.

I know that all the numbers in the gospel today have symbolic significance--the five loaves, the two fishes, the five thousand men, the twelve wicker baskets. But what strikes me is just that they are numbers. What they represent to me is how we all try to control our lives. We count and we measure and we add things up as if by just trying we can earn God’s grace. But we can’t.

It happens a lot in the spiritual life. A person starts out experiencing sweetness and consolation in prayer, and that’s good and to be trusted. But a kind of spiritual pride can also creep in. We can start to think that we’re really hot stuff spiritually. And then the desert happens. It inevitably happens. It always does. The well runs dry. The person enters a period of desolation, a long period, a period that can last for years, and after a while she drops out and gives up.

But really the desolation is a grace, it’s a gift, because it shows us that we’re not the ones who make things happen. We’re not in charge. What desolation demonstrates, St. Ignatius says, is that “it is not within our power to acquire or retain great devotion, ardent love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all of this is a gift and grace of God our Lord.” What desolation demonstrates is that we shouldn’t “claim as our own what belongs to another, allowing our intellect to rise up in a spirit of pride or vainglory, attributing to ourselves the devotion or other aspects of spiritual consolation.”

When I did the thirty day Ignatian retreat a few years ago, on the coast, I read scripture and prayed in silence all day. You should have seen me. I was pretty hot stuff myself for a while, a real spiritual athlete, conversing with the angels. But then I crashed and burned, nothing was working, I was starting to go a little crazy, and my director said, take a break, go into town.

And sitting in an empty multiplex in Lincoln City, watching Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, I was suddenly flooded with joy. Giant alien machines were destroying the earth, creatures from another planet were sucking the blood out of everyone, and there I was, blissfully happy, eating popcorn. In the midst of all the explosions and special effects, the Lord was with me, he was powerfully present. There in the multiplex. In Lincoln City.

***

And that’s the point and that’s the proof.

Think of it: how do we know that we’re not making all this up? How do we know that it’s God we’re encountering? Exactly because grace comes and goes. As Thomas Green puts it, paraphrasing St. John of the Cross: “the best proof that it is really God is that he is often absent when we seek him, and present when we are not seeking him.”

If religion were just the opiate of the masses, if I were just manufacturing God to make myself feel better, I’d produce him on the spot.

But it doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.

And isn’t that marvelous? Isn’t it wonderful?

Desolation shouldn’t just humble us. It should exalt us. It should lift us up. Because then, when the joy comes, when the sun pours down and the kids are shouting in the pool, when the alien machines start destroying the earth, we can simply rejoice and be glad. Because we know: it’s not us! It’s not us! We’re just a boy with a basket. We just happen to be here, on the mountain. We didn’t plan anything. We didn’t do anything. And so when there’s this peace and this joy, we know, we know, it’s the Lord who is sending it, it’s the Lord who is with us. He lives! He is real!

And suddenly there’s enough and more than enough. Suddenly we are overflowing. Suddenly where there was scarcity there’s abundance, where there was fear there is hope, there is grace, there is grace abounding.