Homilies and Poems

Hands

2012-02-06T06:22:00.001-08:00

February 5, 2012
Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Job 7:1-7; First Corinthians 9: 16-23; Mark 1:29-39

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Jesus came into our house? If he approached us, and reached down to us, and lifted us up? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he healed us of our own fevers, of our anxiety, our sadness, our fear?

But he does.

Sometimes we feel like Job in the reading for today. Our days are drudgery, empty and meaningless, “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” “without hope.” Sometimes we look up at the night sky and we think about all the stars and all the planets and we feel so small. He calls each star “by name,” the Psalmist tells us today. But how can that be? How can any one of us matter at all?

Under the weight of all this, the gospels seem like fairy tales, odd little stories told by people long ago.

But the stories of the gospels aren’t just stories. They’re lenses, they’re tools, they’re windows. What they describe isn’t ancient. It’s new. Jesus didn’t just live and he just didn’t die. He rose from the dead and he ascended into heaven and then he sent his spirit into the church and into the whole world. He took everything up into himself and then he broadcast it out again, so that now he is everywhere, he is in all things, and he has always been everywhere and in all things. “In him all things in heaven and on earth were created,” Colossians says, “things visible and invisible. All things have been created through him and for him. In him all things hold together.”

And this creation is still going on. We may imagine that it was finished long ago, says Teilhard de Chardin, but it wasn’t. “It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world,” and we are a part of it, “we serve to complete it, here and now, even by the humblest work of our hands.”

Jesus leaves the synagogue today, he leaves the church, and he comes into peoples’ homes. He enters all the nearby villages. He is present, Mark says, throughout “the whole of Galilee.” He rises early and he goes out into the desert, he watches the sun come up, because he knows that God is here, too, in the hills and in the sky, in all the beauty of the earth.

The role of the Church, Pope Benedict says, “is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality for the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host.” This, the Pope says, is “the great vision” of Chardin, this vision of a “true cosmic liturgy.”

The Eucharist, in other words, isn’t something that just takes place here at St. Mary’s. What happens in the mass is that we are opened to the reality that is always, always true. We are changed, or can be. We are made aware. Every Sunday we bring up the gifts, the work of our hands, of our week, and this bread and this wine is brought to the altar and blessed and broken, and then it is given back to us again, as it was the week before, and the week before--we take it in our hands--and then we go away again, into the parking lot and into our lives, being who we already were, being the body of Christ, because that’s our name. That’s literally true. The mass is never ended. Not if we go in peace. Not if we love and serve the Lord.

And this is why the new program from the Paulists, “Living the Eucharist,” is so important. It’s a six week program for Lent, to guide small groups towards a deeper understanding of the mass. It’s a very good program, with very good, structured materials, and the archdiocese has adopted it for all the parishes in Western Oregon. The archbishop is urging all of us to become a part of it, and I am too. The signups are in the bulletin today. All the information you need is in the bulletin.

The best thing about it for me is that each of the six group sessions is grounded in the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, divine reading. The program teaches you how to do it, it guides you, and the key to Lectio is the step called meditatio. You slowly read aloud the gospel for that upcoming Sunday and let the words invoke in you whatever memory or longing. You don’t analyze it. You free associate. You don’t think. You imagine. And the idea isn’t to focus on what happened a long time to ago. The astonishing claim of mediatio and of Lectio is that these stories are happening now, that whatever the gospel is describing is true in your life, too, at this very moment, and that the words and images of the readings can be used as a way of looking at your life and seeing this. Lectio expands our understanding of miracle: not just that Simon’s mother in law was healed or anyone was healed or any storm stilled or crowd fed. We don’t need to prove that or worry about that one way or the other. The miracle is now. We are being healed, our storms are being stilled. In our village. Throughout all of Corvallis. Who says there aren’t any burning bushes anymore? We just have to know how to see them. “By virtue of the Creation, and still more, of the Incarnation,” says Chardin, “nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”

A friend put it to me this way in an email. His goal during Lent is to deepen his experience of communion, not just at mass, but everywhere, “to be in communion,” he said, with “every moment.” I’d much rather “live in my head,” he said, but he is committing himself to a deeper discipline: to living in reality.

The other day at OSU I got a little angry with another friend and colleague. We were standing on the stairs before classes, talking about a particular issue, and I let my irritation show. I had to go and teach, but afterwards I walked down the hall to my friend’s office and knocked on the door. She turned around in her chair, smiling, and I started to apologize. But she shook her head, and she took my hand in both of hers, and looking up at me she said, “Chris, it’s OK. It’s OK. Just be yourself. Just be yourself.”

Jesus does come to us, and he does take our hand, and he does forgive us and love us. Every day. We have all been given what St. Paul calls “a stewardship,” and that gift is our own brief lives. We just have to be ourselves, which of course is all we can ever be. History has been abolished. Time has been abolished. Distance has been abolished. As the Paulists put it in their brochure for this program, we need to “renew our experience of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, as a mystery to be believed, a mystery to be celebrated, and a mystery to be lived.” A mystery: something we can’t reduce to magic or to measurement. And a mystery to be lived, on the stairs, not just on the altar, in our offices and our kitchens and our bedrooms, not just in the pew.

Last week Fr. Ignacio preached on the authority of the Church, and he was exactly right. The Church, he said, is flawed, it’s even corrupt sometimes, but through all that the Spirit still speaks and the Spirit still moves, as the Spirit still moves in us, despite our own personal sinfulness. This is the authority of the Church: the authority of our lives, of our deepest hopes and intuitions. This is the authority of the Eucharist: the authority of the world, of the universe, of all that is and was and ever shall be.

This is where is where the Lord is, at communion--and everywhere else we live and move and breathe: He is in our hands.

The Way of the Child

2012-01-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

January 8, 2012
Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-11

The stories of Christmas aren’t just stories. They’re theology. The stories of Christmas aren’t just children’s stories. They’re about a child, they use the image of the child, and that image is telling us something astonishing about the very nature of God.

*

There’s the way of Herod, the way of the King in the story today, the way of power and domination and lying and deceit. It’s the way of the dishonest politician. It’s the way of the corrupt corporation. It’s the way of competition and consumption and it’s in the culture, it’s outside of us, pushing in on us all the time, and it’s inside of us, too, in our own natures, in our own appetites and insecurities. It’s the way of the world, the world that slaughters the innocents, as Herod slaughters the innocents.

A child dies of starvation every three seconds on this planet. Every three seconds. Four out of ten young girls are sexually abused in this country. Four out of ten.

But also: that the world tries to exploit any simplicity or enthusiasm, that something is always trying to tear us down and use us and consume us.

*

And then there’s the way of the child, there’s Jesus the way the wise men see him today, in the story of Epiphany: kicking his little legs, balling his little fists. A baby, cradled in his mother’s arms.
And this, the story is telling us, is God.

We keep getting this mixed up in our minds, we keep thinking of God in Herodian terms, as a dominating King, as a being of power to beseech or condemn, to worship when He helps us and to abandon when He doesn’t. But these Christmas stories are giving us a completely different image to contemplate. God is a child, and the way of God is the way of the child, the way of gentleness, the way of powerlessness, the way of ordinariness, the way of obscurity, the way of spontaneity, and this should be our way, too. This is the way of wisdom.

What’s wise about the wise men is that they seek out innocence even in the face of Herod’s inducements and threats. They don’t act out of greed and they don’t act out of fear. They follow the star, and it leads them to a child, and when they see the child they do what we’re supposed to do, too. They kneel. They give up their own claims to power and privilege. In the presence of the child they become children themselves.

What defines us as Christians is what we do for the weak and the vulnerable--and an inner gentleness, an inner orientation, towards listening and openness and service.

*

Isaiah tells us that when we behold the splendor of the Lord our hearts shall “throb and overflow.” We shall be “radiant.” Matthew tells us that when the wise men see the star they are “overjoyed,” and we all have moments like this. When we feel happy and free. Maybe the way we felt this Christmas, with our families. Any moment when the burden seems to fall away.

And these moments are normative. It’s in moments like these that we can discern the will of God for us, because God calls us in our joy. God wants us to be who we are, the way we were as children, before we learned to doubt and hide.

What are the terms of this happiness? What are the conditions that obtain when we are able to come back to our “own country,” to our true selves, as the wise men do at the end of the story? And when we go back to work, when the term starts again, when we reenter the fray, how can we keep from forgetting our own truth?

And how should we act so that others can do this? What conditions must obtain in the world for everyone to have this freedom?

*

We have to come back, as the wise men do, “by another way. “

We have to stand up to Herod, and when we can’t, we have to avoid him, as the wise men do. We have to slip away. Turn off the screen. Walk away from the abuser. Avoid the friends who are not really friends. In our minds, if we can’t in fact. We have to just not listen to all the false voices.

*

Mr. Rogers was a wise man, I think, a wise man who sought out the child.

And once he went to Washington, to the Whitehouse, to give a speech. And in that speech he asked the audience to take a minute to think of someone who had made a difference in their lives.

Imagine all those dignitaries, sitting there in silence.

After the speech, as he was leaving, Mr. Rogers heard something from one of the military guards standing like a statue at the door. He heard the guard whisper, “Thank you, Mr. Rogers.”

So he stopped, and he went over to talk to the guard, and he saw that there were tears in his eyes. And the guard said he’d been thinking of a great-uncle he hadn’t thought of in years. How this man had given him a fishing pole when he was a kid, and how important that had been to him.

And here’s how Mr. Rogers concludes this story:

"As far as I’m concerned [Mr. Rogers says], the major reason for my going to Washington that day was that military guard and nourishing the memory of his great uncle. What marvelous mysteries we’re privileged to be part of! Why would that young man be assigned to guard that particular room on that particular day? Slender threads like that weave this complex fabric of our life together."

This is epiphany: the gift of moments. This is the way of the child: an openness to those moments.

Not the Whitehouse. Not the speech. The guard, and the tears in the eyes of the guard.

*

Let’s all of us take a moment now to think of someone who was important to us when we were young, someone who reached out to us and helped us. Let’s remember who this person was and what this person did, and the effect that it had on us, and that it still has.

For just a moment, let’s hold these people in our hearts.

What marvelous mysteries. What slender threads.

This is epiphany. This is the way of the child.

Home for the Holidays (homily)

2011-12-19T16:27:00.000-08:00

December 18, 2011
Fourth Sunday of Advent
2 Samuel 7:1-16; Luke 1:26-28

My mother used to get so excited when she got new carpets or countertops or drapes. For a while she’d be so happy. But it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. Gradually the sadness would start to creep back in. The bitterness.

At Christmas Mom would work so hard to make the house cozy and warm, and Christmas morning there’d be all these presents beneath the tree. And we were all excited, too, for a while, the three of us boys. But it couldn’t last. No stereo or sweater or game could take away the sadness that was underneath us. The emptiness.

And I’m a lot like Mom. Barb and I have had to do some remodeling lately, we’ve been choosing colors and textures and buying things, and I get so wrapped up in all of it, so anxious, as if we’re on some show on HGTV and the goal is to have the perfect house. I’m like King David in the reading today. We all are. We’re sitting in our cedar houses, our perfect little cedar houses, and we think in our smugness that we can build a house for God, too. That we already have.

But the Lord says to David, a little amused, I think, a little impatient: you, build a house for me?

*

People in the media are talking again about “the war on Christmas.” They’re upset that we can’t say “Merry Christmas” anymore. We have to say “Happy Holidays.” Baloney. If there is a war on Christmas, Christmas has won—corporate Christmas, consumerist Christmas. All we hear on any street corner are silver bells, silver bells, silver bells, ad infinitum, in every store and every mall, on every radio station. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind. People who have never darkened the door of a church and never will suddenly have the Holy Family out on their front lawns, Mary and Joseph and the little baby Jesus, right next to the Santa Claus in the inflatable helicopter. With some of these houses you can see the lights from space.

Let’s keep Christ out of Christmas. That Christmas. That phony Christmas. Because He already is.

*

For one thing it’s not Christmas yet, it’s Advent, and both seasons are better spent in a stable or a cave, without any lights at all. Any holly or mistletoe. God didn’t come in the form of a president or a rock star. He came in the form of a fetus in the womb of a teenage girl, an unmarried teenage girl, and a Jewish girl, one of the oppressed, one of the despised, and when he was born he was born way out in the middle of nowhere, way out in the desert, where nobody was looking and nobody would know except a few ragged shepherds watching their flocks by night.

This is the true temple: not some big, spectacular building, but the body of this young woman.

When the angel first comes to Mary, in this story in the gospel today, she doesn’t run around decorating the house. She doesn’t throw a big party. She asks questions. She ponders. And then she chooses, in her courage and her faith, she chooses to let this mystery and this darkness and this enormous uncertainty come into her, come inside of her. There are so many things to admire here, but I think what I admire the most is Mary’s radical silence, her radical, creative silence, alone, in that room, that bare, ordinary room, and we should imitate her. We’re supposed to.

Christmas isn’t about what we say. It’s about what God says. Our role isn’t to walk around saying Merry Christmas and being mad when we can’t. Our role is to be quiet and to listen.

*

That’s what I loved about the Immaculate Conception mass last week. It was just the mass. No Immaculate Conception dinner to cook. No Immaculate Conception half-off sales event. It was the mass, lovely and quiet and sweet, and Fr. Steve’s homily was making exactly the point we all need to hear, that Mary’s birth was immaculate not because of any worth in her, not because of any virtue in her, but because of what God chose to do through her, because of the inventiveness and action and love of God himself from the very beginning of this little girl’s life, before she had the awareness or ability to do anything at all.

*

We keep forgetting this. We keep forgetting that Christmas takes place around the solstice, the shortest day of the year. We keep trying to block out the darkness, to overpower it with light. But the wisdom of the tradition, the great insight, is that the coming of the Savior and the coming of the solstice are intimately and necessarily connected.

Mary isn’t illuminated by the Spirit. She is overshadowed.

What we’re afraid of is death. What we’re afraid of is that we don’t really matter and we won’t really persist and so we construct all these fantasies to distract us from what we think is the truth.

But the truth is that the darkness is full of grace.

There’s a poem I love by the American poet Jane Kenyon. She died in her late forties, on her farm in New Hampshire, and in this beautiful poem she writes about her coming death with a calm and an acceptance that I think is very like Mary’s acceptance of what the angel tells her.

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through the chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun goes down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in the long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Not a mansion, just an old barn. Just a stable. And not blinding, artificial light. The darkness. The coming of the evening, like the coming of the solstice just a few days from now. And we let it come. We let it be done unto us, because only then can the true joy come, the real joy. Fr. Ignacio’s homily last Sunday was exactly right, too: that lasting joy is possible only when we stop thinking about ourselves and start thinking about God. When we recognize once and for all that we can’t make a perfect house or a perfect room or a perfect self. That only God can.

That God is our true home. That we belong inside Him.

*

And so I ask you to pray for the repose of the soul of my mother, and I ask you to pray for all those so desperate for home, so desperate for comfort and peace.

And I say to you: let evening come.

This solstice, let’s each of us sit in a room, in the early evening, and watch the light fade away. Let’s each of us sit and watch the darkness come. And the next day, in the morning, let’s sit in that room again. Let’s just sit there, quietly, with Mary, and ponder what this greeting means.

Because slowly the sun will rise. Slowly the light will come again. Without us having to do anything at all. Without us having to think or act in any way. Each day will slowly lengthen, each day will get a little longer, until one day it will be spring, and then summer, and then fall again.

One day the child born into darkness will rise, and light will flood the world.

Notes from Underground

2011-11-13T16:34:00.001-08:00

Thirty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Psalm 128; Matthew 25:14-30

Last week in my Bible as Literature class at OSU we were talking about the idea of “fearing” the Lord. And my students were really resisting that idea. God is loving, they said. God is our friend. We shouldn’t be afraid of him.

And of course that’s right in a way. God is loving and God is our friend. But that’s not all He is. There are many, many images of God in scripture and tradition, as king and poet and lover, as mountain and whirlwind, and all of them are partial, all of them are limited. We can’t assume there’s only one.

And we can’t assume that the nicest image, the easiest image, is the best. That’s the underlying danger here, in this generation of students, a sense that the best thing is always what feels good. That we should always be able to put our feet up. We should always be able to walk around in our PJs. And I think that’s an attitude in us baby boomers, too. We’ve so thoroughly rejected the distortions of the hell-fire-and-brimstone approach that we’ve lost sight of something really important.

“Blessed are you who fear the Lord,” the Psalmist says today, and of course “fear” here means respect. It means to be in awe of. It’s like at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind when that giant space ship is hovering over the mountain. People go quiet. They’re stunned. It’s like going to the Grand Canyon. There’s something really there, objectively out there, and it’s so beautiful and so vast we naturally stop talking, and should. That’s what God is and who God is: He is the Grand Canyon and Michelangelo and everything vast and beautiful rolled into one, and the fact that this God becomes a child, is born into the world and walks in the world and reaches out to us and tells us to be not afraid, only makes him still more magnificent and deserving of awe. That’s why we don’t have cup holders in the pews. Why we don’t eat popcorn during mass. This is the Lamb of God here, this is He who takes away the sin of the world, not some guy we met at a party.

A student comes up to me at the end of a class, six weeks into the term, and asks when my office hours are. I say, they’re in the syllabus. And he says, “there’s a syllabus for this class?” A student comes up to me at the end of a class and says that she didn’t bring pen and paper and so couldn’t do the quiz. Could she come to my office and do it later? Well, no. Sometimes I teach an advanced course in grammar for student teachers. Once a student in that class emailed me after I handed back an exam and said that she didn’t like her grade. She said that she “felt” she’d done better on the exam.

But it doesn’t matter how she felt about it. A verb is a verb. A subordinate clause is a subordinate clause. I really like my students. I think they’re smart and try hard and are finally no different than I am. But sometimes there’s a truth out there. There’s just something that is, and we have to adjust to it. Modern people, C. S. Lewis writes, believe “that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important!”

The third servant in the parable today says he buried his master’s money because he was afraid of the master. But that’s not true. He’s lying. He’s projecting. He’s making excuses, and the master knows it. He instantly sees what’s really going on. The servant, he realizes, is “lazy.” He’s lazy. The servant is kidding himself and kidding us because deep down he just doesn’t want to make the effort that reality requires.

Next term in a survey class I will teach once again a long short story called “Notes from Underground” by the nineteenth century Russian writer Dostoevsky. It’s about this small-minded little civil servant who hides in his room all day and nurses his grudges against all the people who have hurt him. At the end of the story he has a chance at redemption. He’s humiliated this poor young prostitute named Liza, treated her very badly, but for a moment she rises above him and rises above herself and feels compassion for him. She reaches out to him, literally, holding open her arms. But the Underground Man says no, he turns away from the chance for love, and here’s why he says he does it. Here’s his reason: Should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea? I say, let the world go to hell as long as I can have my tea.

Incredible. Stunning, in its own way. And yet deeply familiar. Because this is us, too. This is us. Maybe not to this degree, maybe not with this kind of directness and honesty. But this is us. “Which is better,” the Underground Man asks later, “cheap happiness or sublime suffering? Well, come on, which is better?” The Underground Man has buried his humanity the way the wicked servant has buried his talents, and they’ve both done it for the reason we all do it. We’d rather be comfortable. We’d rather have our tea—or our latte, or the X Factor, or the internet. We’d rather have a cheapness and a shabbiness than the real thing, because the real thing is always too much trouble.

No one in scripture is ever said to have been sent to hell by name, not even Judas. This is a parable, and it’s designed to scare us, to frighten us, into changing our ways, as I think “Notes from Underground” is designed to frighten and disgust us into change. The Church has never in all its two thousand years ever said that any one individual has been sent to hell. That’s for God to decide, not us, and anyone who has ever said to you or to someone else that so and so is going to hell for whatever reason is simply arrogant and presumptuous and wrong. That’s not our business.

But our own choices are our own business, and those choices make a difference. It’s not too late for the Underground Man, even after all those years of bitterness. Even at the very end, he can be saved, as we can all be saved. Grace is always abounding. But some things are wrong, they’re just wrong--sin is real--and we have the choice and our choices make a difference and our little choices have a cumulative effect over time, they color us, they change us, and at some point it’s too late.

No, God doesn’t send anyone to hell. But we do. We send ourselves.

It’s not about having just one talent. It’s not about failing or succeeding. The master wouldn’t have rejected the servant if he’d tried to do the right thing and failed. We are loved, infinitely loved, for exactly who we are, whether we have one talent or ten or a thousand. But we can choose to reject that love and we do choose to reject that love and we need to stop and admit that and do something about it before it’s too late for us and we get contaminated, warped, shrunk.

We have to make that tiniest little move. We have to move, and if we don’t, we’re in serious trouble.

We have to wake up. We have to wake up and look around. We have to change out of our PJs and put on our work clothes and get to work.

Stones to Build With

2011-10-29T15:41:00.001-07:00

Thirty First Sunday in Ordinary Time
Psalm 131, 1st Thessalonians 2:7-13; Matthew 23:1-2

In September, as some of you know, about forty of us went on pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi. It was a wonderful trip for all of us, I think, full of surprises, and one of the biggest for me was that I got to preach at St. Peter’s.

I didn’t preach to the Pope or to the Cardinals, just to the people in our group, and we weren’t at the main Bernini altar, beneath Michelangelo’s magnificent dome. But we were directly underneath it, in the crypt, in the chapel of the tomb of St. Peter—of St. Peter himself--and the ambo was marble and the pews were marble and all around us were the marble tombs of the Popes.

And I stood there in that place, and I preached the gospel, in a quavering voice, and the walls didn’t come tumbling down and I wasn’t struck by lightning.

There was a tremendous thunderstorm that night—there really was—a tremendous storm, in the skies above Rome, but I don’t think that was because of me, and in fact, I think I was the perfect person to preach that day, in the church named after Peter.

Poor, manic-depressive Peter. Peter, who declares his undying faith, and then turns around and denies Jesus three times. Peter, who jumps out on the water, confident and unafraid, and then sinks like a stone. Peter, that flawed, ordinary human being. I’m exactly like him, I could be his twin, and so could you. We all deny Jesus, three times and more than three times, we all jump out and sink, and yet Jesus has chosen me in my ordinariness and my blockheadedness, as he chose Peter in his and you in yours, and he never stops choosing us.

We fit right in to St. Peter’s. We all did. We belonged there.

“We are frequently tempted to censor difficulties, to hide them even from ourselves,” Monsignor Massimo Camisasca says. But this self-censoring, he says, is a “diabolical act,” “born of the fear of losing the positive image that others have of us.”

Our stature before Christ has nothing to do with this image, nor can it be measured in terms of the mistakes that we make or avoid making. Rather, it is decided by Christ himself and by our belonging to him. So to hide your own limits, your own problems, really doesn’t make any sense. You do not find freedom from your own miseries by censoring them but by handing them over to Christ, which is to say, by letting him embrace them. This embrace is like the one with which the mother enfolds her child in her arms.

I love this. It’s not that we should stop trying to defeat our sinfulness but that we should admit we can never succeed—not without grace, not without Christ. It’s not that sin is a good thing. It’s that we must first admit to it, honestly, before we can understand our need for God. And in this sense our sins and limitations don’t have to discourage us anymore. We don’t have to despair of them. In this sense, Camisasca says, we can see our sins and limitations as the very “stones to build with.”

These are the stones that Michelangelo used to build St. Peters. These are the stones of the Church.

And notice how Camisasca’s other image, of the mother’s embrace, echoes Psalm 131 today. When we surrender to God, the Psalmist says, we are “stilled and quieted,” like a “child on its mother’s lap.” It’s not that we have to wallow in our sins or be full of self-loathing. It’s that we have to realize that we are loved, loved anyway, loved first, loved for who we really are, and so we don’t have to pretend, we don’t have to cover up.

Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I don’t mean to imply that the people on the pilgrimage were running around Rome and Assisi sinning all the time, because the best thing of all about the pilgrimage was being with these people and getting to know them better. It’s just like in the parish. When you start to talk to people and hear their stories, you realize what faithfulness there is and what heroism, going on behind closed doors: people taking care of their mothers or their disabled children or their husbands or their wives, really sacrificing themselves, quietly, heroically, when no one is looking. People working at the soup kitchen or St. Vincent De Paul’s or the homeless shelters, giving away their time and their money, and never calling attention to that, the way the Pharisees do, not preaching at all, just practicing.
I keep hearing people talk about how corrupt the church is and how terrible it is and I’m really getting tired of it. What do they mean by “church” anyway? Who are they talking about?

We had several afternoons of free time in Rome and Assisi, on our own, and I kept coming around corners and seeing people from our group, when they couldn’t see me, and they were helping someone get up the steps, they were praying the rosary, they were giving money to a beggar.

Sure, we are all sinners, sure, we are all hypocrites, but that’s not all we are. The best thing about Rome wasn’t seeing the Pope, though we did see the Pope, and that was great. The best thing was seeing Jon and Ann, and Joe and Sue, and Barbara and David. The best thing about Rome wasn’t the Pantheon or the Coliseum. It was Leleli, and Walt and Carmela, and Mary Alice, and Chuck. Everyone.

“I give thanks to God for all of you,” as St. Paul says to the Thessalonians, so “dearly beloved have you become to us.”

And it’s the parish, too.

I came around the corner once at St. Mary’s and saw a parishioner raking leaves and a homeless man sitting on the curb. I was at just the right angle so that I could see them but they couldn’t see me. And the man raking leaves was talking to the homeless man, pleasantly, the way he’d talk to anybody else. They were just passing the time of day. The homeless man had long, stringy hair and he was missing some teeth and he probably hadn’t showered in weeks. But the man raking leaves stopped and asked his name and chatted with him for a few minutes, just like he was anybody else. Because he was.

We all have one master.

And no one was looking.

It was a sunny fall morning, and the light that was falling through the leaves was just like the light in Rome, that wonderful light that fills up the piazzas.

There are fountains in Rome, too, everywhere. The water flows down from the Apennines, following the course of the ancient aqueducts, and it bubbles up in these beautiful stone fountains, on every corner.

But every place is holy, Rome is everywhere, and the water that wells up is welling up in us. It’s inside us all.

The sun is pouring down and the fountains are welling up and everything is grace.

Everything is grace.

Three Roman Homilies

2011-09-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

Three Roman Homilies

From our recent pilgrimage to Rome

Saturday, September 17th, the Chapel of the Tomb of St. Peter—at St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome!
1 Timothy 6:13-16; Psalm 100; Luke 8:4-15

“St. Paul and Me”

When Father Charles so generously invited me to preach today—here! at St. Peters! at the very Tomb of St. Peter!—I was overwhelmed. I was shocked.

But you know, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Because I have a lot in common with St. Peter.

I am a sinner. I am a flawed, ordinary human being.

I am full of faith one minute, confident and unafraid. And the next I panic. I doubt. I sink like a stone.

I have denied Jesus three times, and more than three times.

I will die, as Peter died. I will return to the ground.

And yet Jesus has chosen me in my ordinariness and my blockheadedness, as he chose Peter in his and chooses you in yours, and he never stops choosing us. He never stops throwing out those seeds, no matter how many rocks we have in our heads.

In this he is entirely inefficient and undissuadable.

The Lord Jesus Christ is King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Not us. Not Peter. Not Francis. But finally this “unapproachable light” isn’t unapproachable at all. It’s raining down us, it’s pouring down, and all we have to do is turn and accept it. It’s being given away, freely, all the time: in the mountains and in the trees, in a glass of wine with friends, in all laughter and our conversation.

Today we will be awed by the things we see, and we should be. Today we will feel the greatness and grandeur of our tradition, and that’s proper and good.

But all this art architecture and design are only meant to remind us of what is always already true. They’re meant to open us up. We go on pilgrimage only to discover that we already have what we seek: the Lord Jesus himself. He is in us, he is all round us, wherever we are. He will be with us always, even onto the end of time.

***

Monday, September 19th, St. Mary Major, Rome
Ezra 1:1-6; Psalm 126; Luke 8:16-18

“The Duty of Delight”

Things get better.

Sometimes we are in exile, as the Jews were in exile. We are lost. We’re stuck.

But then something happens, something changes, when we least expect it, and it’s never our own doing. What happens always comes from the outside, from out of the blue. It’s like the weather—like a sudden thunder storm, in the night.

The lost child returns. The job opens up. The house finally sells.

How could the Jews have possibly imagined that the king of Persia, their enemy, the oppressor, would be the agent of their great change? Would soften, would open up? Who is it in our lives we think can never change, never help us?

We have to carry our crosses. There are all the sorrowful mysteries, in our lives as in Mary’s, and they keep coming around, every week. But there are also the joyous and the glorious and the luminous, and as Christians we are charged with the responsibility of continually believing in them, of always holding them in tension with our struggles and travails. As Christians we have what Dorothy Day called “the duty of delight.”

The early Christians, the ones we encountered yesterday in the catacombs of St. Callistus, were famous for their courage and their cheerfulness, even in the face of persecution. The Roman commentators all remarked on this, and it really puzzled them. What could possibly account for this joy? But we know. We saw it with our own eyes, scratched on the rocks in the catacombs: the Risen Christ, the Chi-Ro, the Phoenix. Their knowledge of this and their faith in this is the light that shone in those people long ago and that shines in us now, the light that can never be hidden, even in the tomb, even across the centuries.

So, if there’s something weighing on you, some problem waiting for you at home that you think you can just never solve: you’re right. You can’t solve it. But God can. The Spirit can, and will. Let go. Surrender. Don’t just do something, sit there. The change will come, somehow, someday.

Hope in the Lord.

And if like the Psalmist today you are filled with laughter and rejoicing, if on this pilgrimage you have felt joy and renewal, trust that feeling. Believe in it. It won’t go away, not really, and it’s not an illusion, though of course the sorrowful mysteries will still keep coming around. No, we shall come back from Rome rejoicing, carrying our sheaves, and our souvenirs. Because this laughter, this hope: it’s telling us something, something real and true: that God exists and that God is love and that the Lord is risen and is always rising, in us, here and everywhere, now and forever.

***

Wednesday, September 21st, the feast of St. Matthew, the Church of San Cosma e Damiano, Rome

Ephesians 4:1-13; Psalm 19; Matthew 9:9-13

“Every Window is a Cross”

It’s really remarkable for me that the gospel today describes the call of Matthew. Really remarkable.

Because maybe the thing that has moved me the most on this pilgrimage are the three magnificent paintings by Caravaggio in a side chapel in the Church of San Luigi, near the Piazza Navano--three magnificent paintings depicting the life of the apostle Matthew. I’ve walked all the way over there twice in the last two days just to see them, past St. Peter’s and across the Ponte Umberto. Just to stand there. Just to look at them.

Especially the first one, the one on the left as you face the window: the one depicting the call of the apostle.

This very moment, this very gospel.

The gospel for today, our last mass together before we leave.

Jesus is standing on the right with Peter and reaching out his right arm to point at Matthew, who is sitting in his finery at a grubby little counting table, surrounded by four other figures, counting out his coins. The Lord is standing in darkness, barefoot, in a coarse robe, but a great shaft of light is coming over his shoulder and illuminating the figures at the table, especially the face of Matthew, and of a young boy with a feathered cap.

With one hand Matthew is still holding onto his money, but with the other he’s pointing to himself, at his chest, as if to say: who me?

We’ve caught him at just the moment of recognition, of decision. He seems shocked. Scared. Uncertain.

It’s a very dramatic scene. The hand of Jesus as it points at Matthew is meant to remind us of the hand of God in the Sistine Chapel, giving life to Adam. And Jesus has just the suggestion of a halo, just a hint. But we almost don’t see the halo at first, we miss it, and that’s the most dramatic thing of at all, really. The tendons are cording in the neck of our Lord. Matthew’s fingernails are dirty. The light that floods the deep shadows of the room is coming from a source somewhere outside of the picture. But it could be the light that shines through any open window, in any room.

In the window we can see in the painting, just above the hand of Jesus, the two panes make a cross. A simple, obvious cross.

I didn’t see this at first, either—my brother had to point it out to me.

We never see the cross. At first.

Just for a moment forget St. Peter’s and the Pope and the Bernini altar and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. As Father Charles said yesterday at mass, God is always calling us, in every ordinary thing.

Every window is a cross. And every cross is a window.

We walk along the streets of Rome, we start to flow along with all the thousands of other people, we start to feel at home. And suddenly it comes to us: every place is just a place. Every moment is just a moment. The ancient Romans were people just like us, and so were the early Christians, and so is every person alive on the planet today wherever they are and whatever language they speak.

“Day pours out the word to day,” the Psalmist says. “Through all the earth their voice resounds.”

There were clouds passing over the oculus of the Pantheon this morning, just clouds, across a blue sky, as clouds are passing over everywhere, even over our own roofs, in Corvallis.

Who, me? Yes. Me. You. We with our dirty fingernails. We with our one hand still trying to hold on to our money, our ambition, our pride.

But with our other hand, at least, we’re point back at ourselves, at our own chests, our own hearts.

We’re starting to understand. A light is always shining on us, and it’s the ordinary light of day.

We’re starting to understand: we, too, have been called to “the one hope”—“one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Thank you all for being a part of this pilgrimage—for your good will, your good humor, and your companionship along the way.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

Ikea and the Cowboy (homily)

2011-08-24T07:42:00.001-07:00

August 28, 2011
Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16:21-27

Last week Barb and I drove up to Portland to the big Ikea store, near the airport, and it was like traveling to a new country. I thought we might need a passport. There were hundreds, thousands, of beds and sofas and shelves and coffee tables, and they were all so organized, into styles and finishes and modules and units, as far as the eye could see. It was like you’d somehow walked into a website. You were inside it. There was all this information in front of you, all these bits of data, and all you had to do was click on something to make it your own.

I don’t want to criticize Ikea itself, necessarily. When we can afford it, we’ll probably buy something there, as we buy things at lots of places, as we all do. But I think what I experienced at Ikea is “the spirit of the age,” as St. Paul puts it: the spirit of information and acquisition, of mass production, of consumption and overconsumption. This is the air we breathe and the water we swim in, and this is what we must not conform ourselves to, St. Paul tells us today, must not give in to, and this is what at this point in the gospel St. Peter still doesn’t get.

Peter, at this point, is still conforming. He’s still imagining the church to come as something very like the Church of Ikea, organized and under control, a way of getting things and having things, and of getting and having so many things that he won’t have to worry anymore. Jesus will make his life clear and Jesus will make his life easy.

But Jesus says no, and he says it emphatically. He says that that way of thinking is an “obstacle” to him. That that way of thinking is even Satanic. Yes, he is the “messiah,” but that doesn’t mean for him what Peter assumes it means. He’s not coming to turn Israel into some giant, multi-national corporation. He’s not coming to maximize profits. What “messiah” means for Jesus, what he makes it mean, is to give all that up, for good, to give everything away, to let it all go, all that grasping and wanting, all that producing.

*

The psychologist Carl Jung believed that people suffer because they try to escape from suffering. A certain amount of suffering is just part of life, it’s legitimate, and we simply have to face it. “It’s not that suffering or failure might happen,” Richard Rohr explains, “or that it will only happen to you if you are bad, or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it.” No. “It will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences—all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey.”

This is what Peter has yet to learn at this point in the gospel, but what he will learn, by the end. That, as one Zen master put it, from the point of view of the ego, the spiritual life is “one insult after another.” Or that, as another master put it, the spiritual life is really “one mistake after another.”

This is St. Peter’s first insult, to be called Satan. This is his first mistake, to think that he shouldn’t be. This is what he learns finally, to keep making mistakes and to accept that he has, to be flawed and to admit that he is, until in the end when he is crucified, as the legend tells us, he asks in his humility and his self-awareness to be crucified upside down. He doesn’t want to be crucified the way Jesus himself was.

Because now he knows. Faith turns everything upside down.

*

I think of a movie I saw last week, a movie I really want to recommend, “Buck.” It’s a documentary about the real life horse-whisperer, the real person behind the Robert Redford character. How he grew up with an abusive father and suffered terribly. How he was taken in by a foster family who loved him and supported him. How he learned the ways of ranching and the life of the cowboy and discovered in himself a great empathy with horses and a great ability.

There was such gentleness in this man and humility, completely contrary to all those false images of the manly man and the strong man and the gunslinger, and in fact, this is the whole point of Buck’s work. That the wildness and the biting and the misbehavior of our horses mirror our own violence and possessiveness and will to control. That we’re trying to dominate our horses, whipping them and binding them, instead of listening to them, instead of seeing, honoring, discerning.

It was so moving to watch this grizzled, middle-aged cowboy with the hat and the boots just stand there in the middle of a corral and very gently, very slowly, begin to work with the animals, almost dancing with them, movement for movement, establishing limits but also reassuring and rewarding them. His voice was so soft. He was so calm. So rooted. Again and again, after just a few minutes, without this man even raising his voice, these wild, undisciplined horses gentled, slowed, calmed. It brought tears to my eyes just to see this, and it made think of Jesus. That this must have been what Jesus was like, the way he was with people. This radical gentleness. This radical listening.

This isn’t the spirit of the age, not at all, it’s the spirit of Christ, and what the horse-whisperer is doing, in his own small arena, is radiating out that spirit, giving it away, one horse at a time, one rider at a time. I don’t even know if Buck’s a Christian. I don’t think God was mentioned once in that movie. But I felt his presence. I felt the spirit welling up in him, in me.

The most moving thing of all in the movie was a story Buck told about the first time he met his foster father, when he came to take him away, out of all that violence and abuse. Buck was just a boy of eight or nine, I think, stunned and afraid. And this big man in a cowboy hat pulled up in this big pickup, and he walked out, and he came up to him, and pulled out a pair of new calfskin work gloves. Kneeled down. Handed them to the frightened boy. These are yours, he says. Then: come on, we’ve got fence to build. And that’s what they did the rest of the day. They worked together, building fence, and as the horse-whisperer talked about this now, as a grown man, softly, without exaggeration or sentimentality, you could tell what this meant. This quiet act of kindness. This gift of the gloves, these beautiful gloves, the first the boy had ever had, so beautiful he wouldn’t even use them. He kept them in his pocket that day. He didn’t want to ruin them. He kept pricking his hands on the barb wire. But he knew then. He was OK.

Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will save it. This is the Christological key. This is what Jesus is trying to teach to Peter and what he never stops trying to teach him. This is what he never stops trying to teach us.

We are the boy, and the Lord is handing us these calfskin gloves. Not to save us from the work, but to call us to it. This hard work, with the barb wire.

And we are the foster father, too, the cowboy, or should be--but this kind of cowboy, this kind of person. Who gives. Who acts. Who knows.

There are All These Levels (homily)

2011-07-20T06:58:00.001-07:00

July 24, 2011
Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Matthew 13:44-52

What’s wonderful about these parables today is that they can mean so many different things. They can speak to us in so many different ways.

There are all these levels.

If we’re depressed, if our life seems empty and barren and flat, the parables are saying: yes. Sometimes that’s the way life is. Life is a field, a barren field, a fallow field.

But wait. There’s hope, too. There’s a treasure buried there. There’s a pearl beyond price.

If we’re upset with the church, if we’re mad at the church, if the church has disappointed us, the parables are saying: yes, of course, what did we expect? The church, too, is a field. The church, too, covers things up. It buries things.

But wait. There’s a treasure here, underneath. There’s a pearl.

If we’re disappointed with a child, or a spouse, or a parent, or a friend, or with ourselves, the parables are saying: look deeper. Look beyond the obvious, because the truth is rarely obvious. People are like the sea, they are full of good fish and bad, as the church is like the sea, full of good fish and bad, and we just have to get over it. We just have to accept that.

If we don’t know how to read the Bible, if we can’t believe in miracles, if we can’t take the scriptures at face value, the parables are saying: don’t. Look deeper. The Bible is the field and the Bible is the sea and its meaning is not obvious and its meaning is not singular. It’s deep and it’s multiple. It’s inexhaustible. But we have to dig. We have to let down our nets.

“I therefore decided to give my attention to the study of the Holy Scriptures,” St. Augustine writes in The Confessions. “And what I saw was something that is not discovered by the proud and is not laid open to children; the way in is low and humble, but inside the vault is high and veiled in mysteries.” This is the key, in the reading of the scriptures and in the reading of our lives. We need to humble ourselves so that we can enter in through this little door, and we need to sharpen ourselves so that we can penetrate the depths that are hidden there once we get in.

If we’re doubtful about God, if the existence of God doesn’t seem obvious, if there doesn’t seem to be any obvious proof, the parables are saying: yes, that’s true. The kingdom of God isn’t like a fleet of giant space ships that come sailing in over our cities and just float there above us, for everyone to see. It’s like a pearl. It’s like a seed. It’s small. It’s easy to overlook. A bird on a branch. A certain slant of light. A smile. A memory. A sudden intuition.

That’s the good news: that God is everywhere and always.

That’s also the bad news, the hard news: because this isn’t obvious, we can’t pin it down, we can’t make it stick. “I wanted to be as certain about things which I could not see,” Augustine says, “as I was certain that seven plus three equal ten.” But that’s not how it works. It just isn’t.

If we’re really mad at people who disagree with us, at people who vote for the wrong party or people who don’t share our particular understanding of the faith, the parables are saying: who are we to judge? Who are we? It’s the angels who sort out the fish, not us, it’s God who separates the good from the bad, and as Fr. Steve pointed out last week, that’s not going to happen for a long, long time. There’s still plenty of opportunity for things to change, in us and in others, to get better or worse. In the meantime, we just have to mind our own business.

If our lives are hectic and chaotic and out of control, if we don’t have time to hear ourselves think, if we’ve buried ourselves in commitments and possessions and anxieties, the parables are saying: sell it all, give it all up, and keep what matters most. Simplify.

If we don’t know what matters most, if we can’t figure that out, they say: wait. Be patient. Give it time.

And they say: follow your joy. Follow what most gives you life and hope. That’s what the man does when he finds the treasure in the field. He sells everything: and not out of fear, not out of narrow, unthinking conviction. He sells “out of joy,” the scriptures tell us. He acts out of joy.

And if you do feel joy, if you do feel pulled, if you do feel hope—that leaping up of your heart, that surge—trust it. Listen to it. It’s God speaking to you, underneath everything else. It’s God calling to you.

“Do whatever most kindles love in you,” St. Teresa of Avila says.

All these meanings, all these levels and layers, because these texts today are the field, and these texts today are the pearls, and there is treasure everywhere and there is paradox everywhere and there is meaning and invention and hope.

If we’re lonely and afraid, we have to act.

If we’re lonely and afraid, we have to do nothing.

Act: because the treasure is buried. It’s not handed to us on a silver platter. It’s not spoon fed to us. It’s not for children but for adults and it’s time we grew up and stopped criticizing God for not meeting our own immediate and childish needs; time we examined who we really imagine God to be, deep down, unconsciously, as a sugar daddy, as a granter of wishes, or as something far richer and deeper and more infinitely believable.

Do nothing: because it’s the angels who will sort it all out, in time. It’s God who will make sense of all this, not us. Sooner or later. And we have to surrender to that, give in to that, with humility, which is hard, but also with trust, which is finally freeing. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. The challenge is just to be patient. The challenge is just to accept the way the world really is, in its subtleties and its mixed-upness, and the way we are, too. The challenge is to believe, is to have hope, and so to let the love beyond all love enter into us and enter into our situation and change us and change others, and to believe that it can, that He can, and to believe that He will, to believe that everything can change, and that it will, and that it always is. That whatever is intractable will be moved. That whatever is unsolvable will be solved. Will be softened. Will be opened. Will be found.

Just not in the way we expected it to be. Just not in the way we wanted it to be. In a better way: far, far easier, far more joyful, far more playful, far more multiple and leveled and layered.

The Light in the Trees

2011-05-02T13:54:00.001-07:00

May 1, 2011
Divine Mercy Sunday
1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

In one of his poems the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz asks God to come to him in some visible form. To bend the grasses like the wind in a field. To make the arm of a statue move in church. “I am only a man,” he says. “I need visible signs. / I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.”

And so do all of us. We are all only men and women. We believe in God even though we do not see him, as St. Peter puts it today. But it’s so hard sometimes, to have only glimpses and intuitions and ideas. Like Thomas in the gospel, we are human beings and so we need to see things with our own eyes. Touch them with our own hands.

That’s why the sacraments are so essential. In the bread and the wine we behold the body and blood, and we eat them, we drink them, we take them into our own bodies. In the people around us at mass, in their hands and their faces, we see the Lord. We feel. We know.

And that’s the grace of Divine Mercy Sunday and of the visions of the Blessed Faustina, this Polish nun who like Milosz lived in Poland in the 1930s, before the war, and who had several visions of Jesus. She saw something concrete, something visible, an image of rays of light shooting out of the heart of Jesus, and she heard Jesus tell her to pray the rosary in a certain way, and that’s the gift, as it always is with the rosary. That we can touch something. That our fingers can feel the beads and our voice can say the words and that as we do these things we can focus our attention.

It’s a simple and beautiful way of praying the rosary. On the Our Father beads we simply pray that through Christ God will forgive the sins of the world. On the Hail Mary beads we say again, “for the sake of His Sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” Then we conclude, three times, with “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”

And when in 2002 Pope John Paul, another Pole, another person who lived in Poland before the war, when he made the Sunday after Easter Divine Mercy Sunday and invited all of us to practice this particular form of devotion, a form of devotion he personally knew and loved, he was giving us what the church is always giving us, another visible sign, another way of touching and feeling the mercy of God.

And today in Rome, on this Divine Mercy Sunday, when John Paul was beatified, we were given still another sign.

There’s nothing new here, as of course there never can be. What was revealed in Christ is perfect and complete. “I want the whole world to know my Infinite Mercy,” Jesus told Faustina in one of her visions,” as he is always telling us and always has told us, in every word of scripture, in every gesture of the mass. “I want to give unimaginable graces to those who trust in My Mercy,” he tells her, as he tells the disciples in the gospel today, very simply, very plainly. “Peace be with you,” he says. Peace.

Summarizing the scriptures and the whole tradition of the Church, Pope John Paul explains in his encyclical on the mercy of God that this mercy and this love are “inexhaustible.” “Infinite are the readiness and power of forgiveness,” he says, “which flow continually from the marvelous value of the sacrifice of the Son.”

Forgiveness flows continually. It has always been there and always will be there. We don’t manipulate and control it with any particular devotion or practice, and we don’t have to. All we have to do is ask for it. Turn towards it. Because Jesus is always seeking us out, in a thousand, thousand ways, in Poland and in Oregon, in Argentina and Mexico and the Philippines, everywhere, in the languages and the styles of every culture and time, loving us and reaching out to us and calling us to himself.

He doesn’t have to be convinced. We do. The chaplet isn’t for him, it’s for us.

The resurrection had already taken place, it was fact, before Thomas ever touched the blessed wounds, and it would have been fact if he never had. What happened in that room wasn’t for the Lord. It was for Thomas. It was to help him recognize what was always already true.

When we pray we don’t change God, C. S. Lewis says, we change ourselves.

We bring ourselves into alignment with the divine, we try to make ourselves available to it, and for that we need all the help we can get, every bead and prayer and image and story, though finally all we really need is trust.

“Trust in me” Jesus tells Faustina. That’s all. Those are the words written under the image of the Divine Mercy and those are the words written under every moment in our lives.

I’m having coffee with a friend, we’re sharing our hopes and our stories, and after a while I begin to hear this, beneath our conversation, I began to feel this, very faintly, but there: trust in me. Trust in me.

I’m looking out my window in the early evening, and the maple tree is starting to bud, and the clouds are moving above it, forming and reforming, and I hear this again, I feel this: trust. Be at peace. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to do.

I’m standing at the altar at Father Matt’s funeral, and I look at the bowl and I look at the cup. I embrace the other ministers at the Sign of Peace. Father Matt’s coffin is at the foot of the altar, his head facing the congregation, as if he were still sitting there, in his wheelchair, giving us communion, as in a way he is.

God expresses his great mercy, John Paul says, “by means of the whole universe,” by means of every cloud and tree and moment, every person, as if the whole universe is a chaplet, the whole universe is a devotion, and it is.

The grasses do bend. The statue does move.

We could wish things clearer and more definite. We could wish that we were always touching the wounds. But in a way we always are, we always are, and for this we should be grateful: for the Blessed Faustina and for our families, our friends; for Blessed John Paul and the person sitting next to us, right now; for the light raying out of the Lord and the light raying down in the evening. For all the signs and images, let us be grateful: grateful to this world, grateful to this life, grateful to the Church in this place and this time, here in Corvallis, in May, through which the mercy of God is always flowing, as it always has and always will.

In Memory of Father Matt

2011-04-23T11:36:00.001-07:00

April 20, 2011

I served as a deacon with Father Matt when he first came to St. Mary’s, and I watched him as we all did as his Parkinson’s progressed and he could no longer preside at mass.

By then I was going to him for confession, as many of us did. He said he could hear confessions even if he was shaking like a leaf, and that he loved hearing confessions, and I loved going to him, for his kindness and his compassion. I always got the sense with Fr. Matt that he accepted me for who I really was, despite my sinfulness. I think we all felt that. That’s why we kept coming to him. Through him, in a very direct and down to earth way, we experienced the mercy of God. And because so many of us came to him—so many different kinds of people, of different political persuasions and from different positions in the church—I think Matt was a sign of unity. In his person, he brought us all together.

He was also very intuitive as a confessor. He was an artist, and he thought in images, and he trusted his imagination. Once he told me that my penance was to write a poem. I don’t know why I think that, he said. It just came to me.

Another time he was talking about a painting he was doing and how a voice in his head kept telling him that the painting was stupid and that he was stupid. And suddenly Matt just turned around in his mind and said “get out of here.” Get out of here. That was Satan, he believed, that was the devil, because self-doubt like that is never from God. God loves us and cares for us and never wants us to despair about our fundamental worth.

Matt struggled with this, as we all do, as a priest and as a person. As his health continued to worsen he was sometimes depressed. He was sometimes embarrassed that he couldn’t do more as a priest. But what Matt was for me was an example of spiritual courage. The courage to believe that when we’re painting, we’re praying, even if no one ever sees the result. That every act of kindness and creativity is the work of God in the world, and that we’re all in this together, in every little moment of our lives. In every little moment the great battle is going on, between good and evil. But finally, it’s not much of a battle at all, because good is always stronger and humility is always stronger:

Though I thought I had toiled in vain [Isaiah says]
and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength,
yet my reward is with the Lord,
my recompense is with God.
For now the Lord has spoken,
who formed me as his servant from the womb.
Now I am made glorious in the sight of the Lord.

That’s what Matt showed us. That the Lord is always with us, whoever we are. Whether we can stand up or not. Whether we’re shaking like a leaf or steady as a rock. The Lord is always with us, and we are loved, we are seen, we are known.

Look Up

2011-03-24T23:55:00.000-07:00

March 27, 2011
Third Sunday of Advent
Exodus 17:3-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-8; John 4:5-52

Because we have bodies we’re always thinking about the body. About the physical. Because our lives are so short we are always thinking about the past. About history. And God knows this and allows for this and in his mercy and his love reaches out to us as physical, historical beings. That’s what the Incarnation is: God becoming human, so that we can see him and touch him.

The Lord is “tired from his journey,” John tells us, and “sat down at the well.” The Creator of the universe, of all the galaxies, sitting down by a well.

“It was about noon,” John says.

*
But I can’t help noticing, too, how the Samaritan woman keeps taking Jesus literally. I can’t help noticing how at first she only thinks about the physical. When Jesus offers her the waters of life she says, wait a minute, you don’t even have a bucket. She says, yes, I want that water, because then I won’t have to keep coming to the well.

But Jesus keeps gently trying to move her inward, from the literal to the spiritual. No, he says. The “water I shall give will become in you a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” It’s as if the woman can only grasp one pole of the paradox, one part of the Incarnation, the human part, the physical. And Jesus is gently trying to move her towards the other pole, the other part: the spiritual, the inner.

The disciples are the same way. They come back from town, where they’ve gone to get food, and they urge Jesus to eat. But he says to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know,” and they think, what? Did someone already bring him some bread? The disciples, too, are literalists. Here they’ve been with Jesus and walked with Jesus and known Jesus and still they only see what’s on the surface. “My food is to do the will of God,” Jesus says, and he’s been saying that all along. It’s the whole emphasis of the Gospel of John, this effort to help the disciples and all the people see things as signs, as openings to something greater.

*
And this is us, too. All of us. When we read the scriptures we tend to worry too much about the miracles, whether they happened or whether they didn’t. If we don’t think they did, we don’t believe. If we do, we do. Our sense of the Eucharist seems to verge on the magical, too, sometimes, as if through the words of consecration we can force God to appear, and in our own narrow, merely physical terms. If we believe that, we believe. If we don’t, we don’t.

*
It’s as if we get too caught up in history. When we think about religion we tend to think only about the past, only about all these strange and wonderful things that happened centuries ago--we’re fascinated by this, and sometimes trapped by it. Because after a while that’s all that the Bible becomes: just ancient history, just a collection of dusty scrolls. What does any of it have to do with us, with our own lives?

It’s as if sometimes we only think about part of the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Mystery: not just the Crucifixion, not just the Resurrection, but the Ascension, too, and Pentecost, Jesus becoming Christ and in a sense leaving the earth, joining the Father, but only to fill up all the earth, every nook and atom of it, through the Spirit.

It’s as if sometimes we don’t believe in the Spirit, sometimes we’re not really Trinitarian, we believe only in the Father and in the Son, and we have to correct that. We have to take advantage of the marvelous economy of the Trinity, and of the Spirit in particular, of the Advocate, the Paraclete, because it’s the Spirit that helps us to see the beauty and the wonder all around us. That the miracle is now. That the Eucharist is everywhere.

*
“The hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth,” Jesus says. The hour is now here, and he means here, this moment. Because God has come into history, all history is meaningful, even our own. Because God has come into history, all history has been transcended.

*
We all have cause to “boast,” as Paul puts it. We all have cause to “boast in the hope of the glory of God,” and “hope does not disappoint.” But the reason hope doesn’t disappoint isn’t because we can prove or disprove some miracle in the past, and it isn’t because we can prove or disprove some particular property of the Eucharist. We don’t have to make our stand on such things, one way or the other, to doubt or believe. No, the reason that hope doesn’t disappoint, Paul tells us, is ‘because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

In our hearts.

“God is Spirit,” Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, “and those who worship him must worship him in Spirit and in truth.” It doesn’t matter where: on a mountain, in a temple. It doesn’t matter. All that is irrelevant.

“I tell you,” Jesus says, “look up.” “Look up and see the fields ripe for the harvest.”

Look up.

*
There’s this sense we all have, if we just take a minute, there’s this awareness, of something deep inside us. We can feel it: that we have a heart, a living, beating heart, and we have breath, we have lungs, and even deeper, that there’s a life force inside of us, a miraculous life force, in all of us, a kind of energy, and it’s always welling up in us, it’s always there, even when we ignore it and get caught up in all the busyness of things. It’s always there when we come back to it.

And deeper than that, still deeper: just this mystery that we are, that we exist. The mystery of awareness itself.

It is like a stream. A living stream, always flowing, inside of us, at the center.

*
“We no longer believe because of your word,” the people of the town tell the Samaritan woman, “for we have heard for ourselves.” This is where we should try to go. This is what we have to keep reminding ourselves in prayer, whenever we get hung up on abstractions—as we do, as we always do. It’s our greatest temptation. It’s the way doubt does its work on us. But whenever that happens, we have to remember these words of Jesus. Look up. We have to remember his gentle urging to look deeper, to look beyond.

To look around: at the coming of spring. At the trees and the rain. At the faces of the people we love, and the faces of the people we don’t.

“Oh that today we would hear his voice,” the Psalmist says. Oh that today.

Because it’s true, it’s all true. We are in this conversation, too, this conversation that Jesus is having at the well. It’s a conversation that has been going on from the beginning of time, and it will always be going on, always and everywhere. All we have to do is enter in.

Seeing Ourselves Seeing

2011-01-30T13:25:00.001-08:00

Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Matthew

The Beatitudes are so beautiful and so challenging. So hard.

Blessed are they who mourn?

Think of how you feel when you mourn. When a parent dies. When a child suffers or fails. When you lose a job or a house or a friend. How terrible this is. How the rest of the world disappears. How all the things that mattered suddenly don’t anymore. The office intrigues. The garbage disposal. The neighbor’s dogs in your flowerbeds. Nothing. You are radically focused. You are overwhelmed with feelings you can’t put into words. Nothing makes sense. It’s so bad it’s like something has happened in your body: this heavy, heavy weight.

And that’s good? That’s blessed?

Blessed are you when you are persecuted? When people attack you?

Think of those times. You’ve had a falling out with someone at work and the emails are going back and forth. People are shunning you and talking behind your back. It’s hard even to walk into a room. Or you’re going along and everything is fine and suddenly you get this devastating piece of criticism. All those metaphors: of carrying the world on your shoulders or being stabbed in the back. They all seem literally true. You can’t breathe sometimes.

And that’s good? Is Jesus a sadist? Does God want us to suffer?

No, I don’t think that’s it at all. I think these terrible times are a means to end. I think they’re good because life is mysterious and life is overwhelming and we need to see that and accept that. We need not to cling to our little illusions. I think these terrible times are good because they strip us of what is false, because they force us to give up our attachments—our attachment to reputation, our caring about what people think, even our clinging to the people we’re closest to, our false dependence on them.

When my mother died, I kept on living. As bad as I felt, as hard as this hit me, I survived. I felt guilty about this for a long time but then this freedom came. I am not just my mother’s son. When I fought with a colleague and we became enemies, I kept on living. I walked to my car and the rain was still falling and I was aware of the rain falling. As hard as this hit me, as terrible as this was, it didn’t finally affect something deep within me, and that’s the advantage of such moments, that’s the blessing: that suddenly I’m aware of this deep, inner place.

This is what it means to have the mind of Christ, to live in this place and from this place.

There’s the self that experiences things, that loves and suffers and wants and needs. And then there’s the deeper self, the one that is able to step back and think about itself thinking, see itself seeing. All the mystics talk about this. All the psychologists. Somehow we have to learn to stand back and watch our own dramas. To see ourselves from a compassionate distance. Somehow we need to learn not to identify with our own feelings, to not be defined by them. There’s this viewing platform, this place from which we can see, and this where we have to stand. Whenever we panic or fear or get angry we have to withdraw to this place within us, behind our eyes.

Because from this place we just aren’t affected anymore by the things that used to affect us. We’re no longer triggered, hooked, snagged.

We think: I’m having this angry feeling or this selfish feeling. Not: I am angry, I am selfish. We realize feelings come and feelings go and they always will. We can’t repress the negative ones. They’ll always be there. And that’s fine, as long as we don’t think, this is who we are. No. Who we are is deeper than that. Behind that. Underneath that. Above that.

Imperishable. Absolutely cared for. Infinitely valuable.

From this place, from this platform, we don’t constantly rank and categorize, ourselves and others, we’re not constantly judging anymore, because we’ve been flattened and reduced ourselves. We know that none of that matters. And we also know that deep inside these other people they too have a center, a spark, the self we all share. We’re all equal.

We’re at a distance in one way but the paradox is that this brings us closer in another. Food tastes better. The air seems purer. The grass is more intensely green. We’re not distracted anymore and so we can be more available to the moment, to the weather, to the person who happens to come. We love the people we love more deeply because we no longer love them to possess them, to use them to make ourselves feel better. We just see them. We’re just glad to be around them.

Blessed are we. Blessed are we. In some translations the phrase is “Happy are we.” “Happy are we.” And that’s it. We don’t need to do anything to be happy. We don’t need to own anything to be happy. We don’t need to be anything to be happy. Whatever the external circumstances, whether we’re rich or poor, famous or obscure, young or old, healthy or sick, we are who we are and life is what it is.

This is why growing old is a gift, because it helps us to let go and forces us to. This is why death is a gift, one of the greatest of gifts, because it completes the process of stripping away and prepares us for the next stage.

This is the faith of the martyrs, the faith that sustained them in their suffering. This is what gave the early Christians the confidence and the courage that all the ancient historians marvel at. This is the courage and the love that Jesus brought to the cross. This is the wisdom we consume in the Eucharist. This is the faith and the joy and the confidence that we are given in Christ Jesus every day of our lives.

That place, deep inside of us. That’s where Christ is. That is Christ. And nothing can take it away.

Blessed are we. Happy are we. Loved are we. Everywhere and always.

The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid?

We Will Do and We Will Hear

2010-12-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

December 29, 2010
Fifth Day in the Octave of Christmas
1 John 2:3-11; Luke 2:22-35

One of my favorite poets is the 19th century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he says in one of his poems.

Hopkins was also a Jesuit priest and served in the slums of Liverpool. Once when he was asked how we can better understand Christian doctrine, how we can get a better idea of faith, he said: give alms.

Serve the poor.

To believe isn’t a matter of ideas, Hopkins was saying. It’s a matter of action. And I think that’s what the first letter of John is telling us today, too. We can say “we know him,” but we don’t really know him if we don’t keep his commandments, if we don’t do what he says. And there’s a sequence implied here: not that we think and then act on our belief, but that we first act, we first do what we’re supposed to do, and then, through those actions, come to understand. The truths of faith are the sort of truths we can only understand through experience over time.

I’ve been reading this lovely little book over Christmas break, Jewish Spirituality: An Introduction for Christians, by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. It’s really been nourishing for me, and there’s a fascinating chapter in the book centered on a verse in Exodus. When God gives the people of Israel the Torah, they say in response, “we will do and we will hear.” That’s Exodus 24:7. Again, the sequence. Not, we will hear and then we will do—we will understand first, in our heads; we will get this all figured out first, in the abstract. No. The opposite. In Jewish spirituality dogma isn’t the key. In a way belief doesn’t matter. For the Jews it’s not about what’s in your head but about the life you lead here and now. “Some actions simply cannot be understood,” Kushner says, “until they are performed. By doing, we understand.”

But this is Christianity, too. What Simeon takes into his arms isn’t a theological treatise. It’s a child. He doesn’t exclaim, now I get it, now I understand. He says, “my own eyes have seen.” It’s all about what can be known in the body, in time. It’s all about what no one can finally explain to anybody else. It’s not an idea that saves us, it’s a person.

At Christmas Eve mass I was looking out at the congregation and thinking how many good people there are in this parish. I know so many of the stories: husbands taking care of their wives, wives taking care of their husbands, children taking care of their parents, all kinds of people doing all kinds of selfless things, when no one is looking. They are the models for the rest of us. If we want to understand, we should do what they do, because they are walking the way that Jesus walked (to get back to the letter of John).

And for those selfless people. I know they despair. I know they sometimes feel desolate and empty. But I think the readings today are saying: rejoice. Be of good cheer. For you are with the Lord, even on those days when you can’t think straight, even when you no longer have any idea what’s going on. Yes. Now you’re there. You’re doing the work of the Lord, and therefore, in this, and only in this, the Lord is with you.

Zigging and Zagging

2010-12-24T09:56:00.000-08:00

December 26, 2010
Feast of the Holy Family
Colossians 3:12-21; Matthew 2:13-23

When I first became a deacon I was all excited about wearing an alb and stole and being on the altar and everybody seeing me doing all these holy and spiritual things. But more and more I’ve realized that I’m supposed to be a deacon all the time, even in private, when no one is looking, and that the hardest thing of all is to be a deacon in my marriage. And that I hardly ever am. I’ve been married 34 years and I don’t know how many days or hours or minutes I’ve ever really served my wife, ever been a deacon to her.

We think that to be holy means to do all these monkish things or to travel to some foreign country or to be martyred, but in a way those things are too easy. What’s really hard is to sit across from your husband or your wife at breakfast some days. To pay the bills. Clean the bathroom.

I think as Catholics we get too hung up on the specifics of contraception when we talk about sex when the real issue is how in sex we’re supposed to serve the other person. We’re supposed to be mutually obedient in sex, mutually subordinate, the wife putting the husband first and the husband putting the wife first.

Honestly, how often have any of us ever done that? As a man I ask that specifically of the men here. How often? But all of us, men and women both: we’re all deacons, we’re all servants of God, and we serve God not just at the altar but at the kitchen sink. I stand at the right hand of the priest and I elevate the cup, the very blood of Christ. But we all do that, when we stand at the sides of our husbands or our wives, when we reach down to lift up our daughters or our grandsons.

This is what makes Joseph a saint. His path to holiness is as a husband and a father. It’s in serving his child and serving his wife. It’s not in the temple. It’s not out in the open where people can admire him. It’s in private, even down to the privacy of his own dreams, for Joseph is not just a deacon as we are all deacons, he is a dreamer as we are all dreamers, and his holiness lies in his ability to listen to those dreams and act on them. To put himself last. To put others first.

The other idea that really strikes me as I reflect on the story of the Holy Family this year is how messy and disorganized and kind of chaotic this whole experience is.

There’s a book I really like, by a Buddhist theologian named Jack Cornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. The title says it all. I love that title, because I think it’s true. I mean look, Mary and Joseph have just experienced the birth of the Christ child and the coming of the magi. This great, this wonderful moment. And then boom. They’ve got to flee. Everything gets complicated and dangerous and out of control, and they’ve got to get out of town right away.

It’s like the first few minutes after everyone’s opened all the presents under the tree, after all the smiles and thank you’s: ripped up wrapping paper everywhere, the dog eating the Christmas candy, the kids hitting each other with their I-Pods. Except it’s worse, of course, a thousand times worse, because their lives are at stake. They are in great danger.

But aren’t our lives always at stake, in these everyday, ordinary moments? It was on Christmas day a few short years ago, in the middle of Christmas dinner, that Sue Gifford called and asked me to take her to the hospital. She was so sick she couldn’t move. People think that when you’re called by God and you have faith everything is good forevermore, you don’t suffer, you don’t doubt. People of faith think that. I do. I keep catching myself thinking this, when I know better: that happiness and peace and everything going right are the signs of the authenticity of my call, the authenticity of my faith; that when things go wrong and I feel ordinary or depressed or anxious, my call is being questioned. I must be on the wrong path. But no.

Joseph is the stepfather of the Lord, he’s just had the best Christmas ever, and now he has to go to Egypt. No, wait, he has to come back to Judea. No wait, he can’t go to Judea, he’s got to go to Galilee. Two steps forward, three steps back. First this way, then that way. It’s all zig zaggy, it’s all a mess, and that’s the point.

When we find ourselves in Egypt, in our own Egypts, whatever they are, back at a job we don’t like or struggling with money or dealing with our various and terrible addictions, all of us: we’re with Joseph, we’re with Mary, we’re with the Christ-child. This is the path. First this way, then that way. Zigging and zagging. Never quite sure. After the ecstasy, the laundry, and the laundry is the ecstasy, or can be. It’s the call. It’s where we’re supposed to be, up to our eyeballs in the complications and challenges of everyday family life, of our own countless little acts and decisions.

There’s this wonderful Zen parable that Cornfield tells in his book, about this young monk who was really proud of his spiritual progress.

The first month he wrote the master, “I feel one with the universe!” And the master just glanced at the note and threw it away.

The next month: “I finally discovered the Divine. The divine is in me.” And the master yawned.

The third letter: “The mystery of the One and the Many has been revealed to my wondering gaze.” Whatever, the master said, and went back to hoeing his weeds.

When the next letter came--“no one is born, no one dies,” it said—the master just sighed and shrugged and put on the kettle for tea.

Then weeks went by and nothing. Months. A year. Finally the master thought it was time to check in with the novice again.

The disciple wrote back: “I am simply living my life. That’s all. As for my spiritual practices, my fasting and my praying, I don’t know. I’m just doing the best I can.”

And the master looked up, smiled, and said out loud, “Thank God! He’s got it at last!”

And then he went back to hoeing his weeds.

The Twelve Million Names

2010-12-21T06:49:00.001-08:00

December 21, 2010
Song of Songs 2:8-14; Luke 1:39-45

I love the O antiphons, the seven antiphons for the Canticle of Mary leading up to the Vigil of Christmas: O Wisdom, O Adonai, O Root of Jesse, O Key of David, O Dayspring, O King of the Nations, O Emmanuel. You hear them in the verses of the hymn O Come Emmanuel, and my favorite one is today, O Dayspring. Because it’s so beautiful and so different and so fresh. Because it comes from nature, from the natural world, and from the thing in nature we most long for this time of year, just in our bodies, light and warmth.

That’s who Christ is, that’s who the baby Jesus is. Everything we long for.

I think the conventional language of our faith gets so familiar sometimes we don’t hear it anymore. No pictures form in our minds, no feelings arise. The conventional language and scenes and images are beautiful, too, and sacred, and sometimes their very familiarity is what we most need, but sometimes I think this familiarity is even a barrier to worship, it shuts us down, or it does me. Especially this time of year, when we’re flooded with all these saccharine and commercialized images of the Christ child, this once unbelievably fresh image, inconceivable, rendered hackneyed through overuse.

That’s why I love the O Antiphons and why I love the Song of Songs, where suddenly we have not just the wonderful images from nature again—“the winter is past, the rains are gone, the flowers appear on the earth”—but something striking and unusual and almost scandalous at first, the idea of God as lover, a lover seeking us out in his desire: “Hark, my lover!” And lover not as soft and gentle but as ardent and strong, leaping across the hills, a young stag. It’s like the image of Aslan in C.S. Lewis in a way, Christ as Lion. It restores our sense of the potency and the vibrancy of the divine, its activity, its strength.

I know a lot of people who say they don’t believe in God but who really do. They just don’t respond to the conventional language of God. They say they find Church cold and unhelpful and that they find God in nature instead, and in a way they’re absolutely right. It’s possible to experience God without acknowledging God, and maybe there’s even some spiritual value in us, too, us believers, as Church-goers, trying to get past all the language of acknowledgement to the experience itself.

The striking image in the story of the Visitation today is the image of something leaping up inside of us. Of us being pregnant with God or with something that always recognizes the presence of God. I always think of that as an image of intuition and of joy, of my heart leaping up, in the words of Wordsworth. That’s faith. That’s the basis of faith in us, this feeling, this intuitive recognition deeper than words, and whenever we feel it, and we often feel it, whenever anybody feels it, and everybody does, that’s God. However we name the feeling, with whatever traditional words.

In the last few days as we prepare for Christmas let’s come up with as many of our own names for God as we can, as many of our own O Antiphon, completely personal: O Friend, O Hope, O Everything I Long For. O Dove, the Song of Solomon says, another striking image. O Varied Thrush. O Junco. Let’s take imagery from the world around us now and our actual experience and use it to figure who God is because God is everywhere in our world, not just in a manger but in our own houses, our own hard drives, our own memories.

And whenever we use this language, let’s remember, joyfully, how partial and limited it is, how our lover and our friend so exceeds us. Let’s remember the practice of our brothers and sisters in Judaism, who believe it’s blasphemous even to say the name of God, to say the word “Yahweh.” It can’t be said. It can only be pointed to. Which is why they substitute the spoken word “Lord” whenever the word “Yahweh” appears, “Adonai”—one of the O Antiphons, in fact. In our English Bibles we indicate that move, that substitution, with the word LORD printed out in all capital letters.

Let’s remember that, with reverence and with joy. That finally we can never say the name of the Lord. Never. That it’s not we who call the Lord by name, but he who calls us. He who is seeking us, each of us, who naming us, each of us, who knows us all by our own particular name.

And that name is “beloved.”

Ten Million Advents

2010-12-06T06:29:00.001-08:00

Monday of the Second Week of Advent
Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 5:17-26

I had a chance to go on an Advent retreat this weekend at Mount Angel, with Deacon Owen Cummings, and I’d like to pass along something I learned there.

There are really three advents in the Church, Owen said, not just one. Advent is simply Latin for “coming,” and Christ in that sense has come not just in the Incarnation, at Christmas, in the past, but also in Word and in Eucharist, every Sunday and every day, in the present, and thirdly, in the Parousia, in the future, in the second coming of Christ, which is really the third in this sense.

And these comings are also going on in each of us, the first Advent in our Baptism, the second every time we come to mass or open the scriptures, and the third at our own parousia, our own end, our death, which is something we shouldn’t fear but welcome.

But it’s really even more than that. There are thousands of Advents, millions. They are countless. All of reality is an Advent, because as St. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel, Christ was present at the beginning of the world and even before. “All things were made by him.” “Nothing was made without him.” Advent as the Big Bang. Advent as the creation of the stars, of the galaxies. “He is before all things,” Colossians tells us, too, and “and by him all things consist.”

And that cosmic creativity and purpose and love is still going on, not just in the galaxies but right down to every little moment of our lives. Advent is simply coming and that coming happens “whenever two or three are gathered,” Matthew says, or whenever we act with compassion for the “least of these.” There is never a time when Christ hasn’t come and isn’t coming, for “I am with you always, to the close of the age,” as Jesus says at the end of Matthew.

For “Christ dwells in our hearts through faith,” Ephesians says.

A liturgical season like Advent simply organizes our attention so that we can see what is always already true. It slows down in time what is timeless, beyond all time. We don’t have to wait for the Christ child to be born. We are holding him in our arms.

There is a “highway,” Isaiah says in the reading today, “called the holy way.” “It is for those with a journey to make.” And that’s us. That’s all of us. That highway has always been here and we have always been on it. We are the ones with a journey to make, and we are making it.

Jesus heals a paralytic in the gospel today, and the people are struck with awe. “We have seen incredible things today,” they say. Yes, we have, and we will. Even now, in the darkness and in our own darkness. Today. That’s the most important word in the reading. Today.

We are the paralytic. We are paralyzed by our sins. We are paralyzed by our fear. We are paralyzed by our literalism and our small-mindedness. We are paralyzed by all the junk of the culture of junk, all the death of the culture of death. But Christ has come to heal us and Christ will heal us and he already has. Sorrow and mourning have already fled. Because of this communion. Because of this scripture. Because of all of us here in this place, breathing this air. Because of all that we will go out into the world to see today. To witness. To celebrate. To do.

The Rain Fell

2010-12-02T06:32:00.001-08:00

December 2, 2010
Isaiah 26:1-6; Matthew 7:21-27

“The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house.” I often feel this way. Buffeted. By the things people say. By the things they do. I come from prayer or from mass feeling centered and good and then I seem to hit a wall or a force field or some kind of negative energy and I’m disoriented, depressed, insecure.

I haven’t really built my house on rock yet.

It’s interesting to me that the image in Isaiah is the opposite of this in a way. It’s about the destruction of the house. The Lord “tumbles it to the ground,” “levels it with the dust.” But that’s the false city, the false house, the lofty and proud one. In this sense the buffeting and the storms are good and necessary. The destruction leads to renewal. We have to start over again.

In Jungian psychology the house is the image of the ego, of the self. If you dream of moving to a new house you’re dreaming of growth or change in who you really are. And I don’t think it’s an accident that Jesus is always using these and other images that are so psychologically resonant, that the whole scripture taps into these images. Whatever else it is the gospel is deeply true psychologically.

We have to die to our false self to rise to our new self.

At the Ennegram workshop last month Father Menniger defined humility like this: to know the truth about who you really are. I really love this. He said: that’s what the gospels are all about. That’s the virtue that Christianity teaches: humility in this sense.

I know a few people like this. People who have the gift of being themselves. Of being who they really are. There’s a professor in history I really admire, an Evangelical Christian, who is just so clear about who he is. Humble and confident. It’s good to be around him. There’s Sister Hilda, who used to be in the parish with us, before she became a sister at Mount Angel. What a powerhouse. She just knows who she is. She just is who she is. Not anyone else.

If we’re buffeted today, if we’re really thrown off this Advent, if we don’t feel solid and secure, the Lord is telling us something. We’re learning something about ourselves.

There’s no way to prove scientifically and historically and beyond a doubt what really happened at the resurrection, and I think that’s a grace, the way the Lord intends it. But history can prove one thing for sure. The ancient historians attest to this again and again, that the early Christians were remarkably confident and happy and cheerful in the face of persecution and adversity. Courageous. Unwavering. They kept going. They stuck to their guns. They didn’t give up.

That courage and that confidence. That groundedness. That’s what I pray for this Advent, for you and for me and for all of us. That kind of humility: to know who we really are. Sons and daughters of God. Brothers and sisters of the Lord himself.

Principle and Foundation

2010-11-28T14:11:00.001-08:00

Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:37-44

How unbelievable sudden change is.

Sue Gifford dies. Just like that. I get a phone call and she’s gone. My mother dies. Just like that. Before the paramedics even get there. I get a phone call and she’s gone.

I’m in the locker room, I’m putting on my pants, and suddenly I can’t move. My back is out. The next thing I know I’m in the emergency room.

We think we’re in control but we’re not. “We think our faith gives us security,” Anthony Demello says, but it doesn’t. “Faith is insecurity,” and by that I think he means that all this is a mystery and we just have to stop pretending it isn’t. “The unbeliever thinks he knows all about God,” Walter Kaspar says, “but the believer knows that he cannot provide himself with answers, and that the answer which God gives is a message about an abiding mystery.”

It’s almost as if the Church has made a big mistake in the lectionary this Sunday. Gotten the readings wrong. It’s supposed to be Christmas. It’s supposed to be cookies and coca and roaring fires, not thieves in the night and the end of the world. But no. For one thing, it’s Advent, not Christmas. We have to delay that gratification. For another, the whole meaning of the season of Advent and Christmas is keyed to the season we’re actually in. It’s keyed to winter. It’s keyed to the bare trees and the cold air and the dying of the year.

Eating is good, but not orgies. A drink or two is fine, but not drunkenness. Sex is a wonderful thing, it’s from God, but not promiscuity and lust. And the culture right now is trying to sell us orgies and drunkenness and lust, and it’s doing that, I think, because it fears what’s really out there. It fears reality. It’s trying to make us fall asleep, and we really have to resist that--in that sense we really have to “make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”

Before we can put on the armor of light, we have to embrace the darkness.

I used to go this place on the coast, a Jesuit retreat center near Pacific City, the Nestucca Sanctuary. I’ve talked about it many times. I loved that place, the trees, the view of the sea, the smell of it and the feel of it, and I loved the man who directed the place, Andy Dufner, a Jesuit. I spent many weekends there over the years, and once a whole month. It was like my second home in a way, my real home.

And now Andy is dead. Five years ago November 19th. And the Nestucca Sanctuary is closed, locked up, because the Jesuits of the Northwest had to declare bankruptcy in their own pedophilia scandal. There’s a metal gate barring the road.

It’s all over now. It’s all gone.

Nothing earthly remains, not people or places or even churches. The very stones of the temple will be cast down. And that’s a blessing, I think, as Andy knew and St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, knew, because it teaches us again and again what we most need to learn: detachment. Detachment from the things of the world, even the good things, detachment from anything that might distract us from God or substitute for God.

And with detachment, joy, and confidence, and a wonderful freedom. Because nothing now can hurt us. The stars are falling and the temples are crumbling and yet, the Lord says, as he always says, be not afraid.

“Lord Jesus Christ, take my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have and cherish you have given me. I surrender it all to be guided by your will. Your grace and your love are wealth enough for me. Give me these, Lord Jesus, and I ask for nothing more.” That’s the great Jesuit prayer. An astonishing prayer, really. It asks for so much. It asks for everything. Every time I pray it I think how impossible it is in a way. And yet how incredible, how wonderful.

I pray for that kind of faith.

Or here’s how St. Ignatius puts it in the beginning of his famous Spiritual Exercises, in what he calls the “Principle and Foundation”:

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. All other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him fulfill this end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use these things to the extent that they will help him to attain this end. Likewise, he must rid himself of them in so far as they prevent him from attaining it. Therefore we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in so far as it is left to the choice of our free will and is not forbidden. Acting accordingly, for our part, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short one, and so in all things we should desire and choose only those things which will best help us attain the end for which we are created.

And so the passing away of things doesn’t matter. Death doesn’t matter. Or it does matter. It’s part of God’s infinite grace. It prepares us. It helps us towards the final dissolution, the letting go we could never achieve on our own.

This is the world into which Jesus is born. In a stable. In the darkness. And we can’t really see him if we’re too busy making merry. In the midst of all the city lights, we can’t see the stars. We really have to tone ourselves down this season, quiet ourselves, limit ourselves, if we are to hear the cries of that little child. If we are even to find him.

In a stable. In the darkness.

This is the sudden, unbelievable change, the thing we never expected, this birth into the darkness, into silence, and we’re going to miss it entirely if we don’t stop, and wait, and look out the window, at the bare trees and the snowy ground.

At this dying world, this frozen world, this world that one day, unbelievably, will turn into spring.

Be Not Afraid

2010-11-23T06:29:00.001-08:00

Luke 21:5-11
Memorial: Miguel Agustin Pro

I used to go this place on the coast, a Jesuit retreat center near Pacific City, the Nestucca Sanctuary. I loved that place, the trees, the view of the sea, the smell of it and the feel of it, and I loved the man who directed the place, Andy Dufner, a Jesuit, like Blessed Miguel Agustin, the man we remember today. I spent many weekends there over the years, and once a whole month. It was like my second home in a way, my real home.

And now Andy is dead. Five years ago November 19th. And the Nestucca Sanctuary is closed, locked up, because the Jesuits of the Northwest had to declare bankruptcy in their own pedophilia scandal. It’s all over for now. It’s all gone.

Nothing earthly remains, not people or places or even Churches. The very stones of the temple will be cast down. And that’s a blessing, I think, as Andy knew and I believe Blessed Miguel Agustin knew and St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits knew, because it teaches us again and again what we must need to know: detachment. Detachment from the things of the world, even the good things, the wonderful things, detachment from anything that might distract us from God or substitute for God.

And with detachment, joy, and confidence, and a wonderful freedom. Because nothing now can hurt us. Nothing can steal our peace. The stars are falling and the temples are crumbling and yet, the Lord says, as he always says, “do not be terrified.” Be not afraid.

“Lord Jesus Christ, take my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have and cherish you have given me. I surrender it all to be guided by your will. Your grace and your love are wealth enough for me. Give me these, Lord Jesus, and I ask for nothing more.” That’s the great Jesuit prayer. An astonishing prayer, really. It asks for so much. It asks for everything. Every time I pray it I think how impossible it is in a way. And yet how incredible, how wonderful. I pray for that kind of faith.

Or here’s how St. Ignatius puts it in the beginning of his famous Spiritual Exercises, in what he called the “Principle and Foundation”:

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. All other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him fulfill this end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use these things to the extent that they will help him to attain this end. Likewise, he must rid himself of them in so far as they prevent him from attaining it. Therefore we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, in so far as it is left to the choice of our free will and is not forbidden. Acting accordingly, for our part, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short one, and so in all things we should desire and choose only those things which will best help us attain the end for which we are created.

And so the passing away of things doesn’t matter, death doesn’t matter. Or it does matter. It’s part of God’s infinite grace. It prepares us. It helps us towards the final dissolution, the letting go we could never achieve on our own.

This is the faith of Blessed Miguel, who was even shot, who was killed, for being a priest and administering the sacraments. Who said, as he was dying, “Long live Christ the King.” This is the faith of Andy Dufner, who wrote in his journal the month before he died that though he wanted to live, in the end it wasn’t the most important thing. My prayer he said, is simply this: “I love you, I want to be close to you, do with me as you will.”

As we will all be martyred a little today, in some way, as we will all be given a chance to let go, just a little, or tempted to hold on to things, to love things more than the love that informs them. Every day. We can’t do this on our own. It’s not an accomplishment. It’s all grace. We have to pray for it. We have to keep opening ourselves up to it.

But it’s there for us, this grace and this meaning and this love. It’s always there. Whatever happens. Whatever passes away. If even Nestucca itself passes away, the hills and the bay, the ocean, the sky. In the end, nothing can ever hurt us, because at the heart of things is a grace and a meaning and a love that never passes away. A love that never fades. A love that never dies.

An Analysis of Miracles (homily)

2010-10-30T08:37:00.001-07:00

Thirty First Sunday of Ordinary Time
Wisdom 11:22-12; 2 Thessalonians 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10

What I really admire about Zacchaeus is his eagerness and his joy and his willingness to climb that tree. His willingness to change his perspective.

Think of all the people that day who didn’t bother. Think of all the people everyday who don’t bother. Because Jesus is always passing through town. He is always walking by. But we’re too short to see him. We let the crowd obscure him.

*

I’ve had a number of wonderful conversations lately, with students and friends, and in one of them I was led to a passage in C.S. Lewis I’d never read before, an analysis of miracles.

“How could a thing remain unless you willed it?” Wisdom asks today. “Your imperishable spirit is in all things.” All of creation is miraculous, in other words, it’s a miracle always going on--or as Lewis puts it, “there is an activity of God displayed throughout all creation,” “a wholesale activity,” but in our smallness and our busyness we’re blind to it. We ignore it.

And that’s where the miracles come in. They are reminders of what is always already true. They do “locally” what God does “universally.” “They are a retelling in small letters,” Lewis says, “of the story which is written across the whole world in letters too large to see,” and if these miracles, the walking on water and the multiplication of loaves, if these miracles don’t help us to see the miracle of the everyday, if they don’t help us to see what’s always around us and in us, we’ve missed the whole point.

Water is always being changed into wine, every year, as the rains fall and the grapes grow. The body is always being healed, internally, naturally, “little by little” as Wisdom says. We are always dying and we are always rising and the little things of our lives are always being multiplied. The miracle of the Virgin Birth recalls for us the miracle of every sperm and every egg.

I really love this idea. It’s a wonderful idea: not that the miracles never happened but that they always are. We just have to know this, understand this. We just have to see behind the stars and the rain and the faces of the ones we love exactly the same power that calmed the storm and raised the dead—and to see that power not just as a power, not just as a law or a force, but as a person, as Christ, as the Lord himself, always and everywhere at work.

Of course the bread and the wine are the body of Christ. They always were.

We don’t change God in the Eucharist. We change ourselves.

We climb the sycamore.

*

Notice that in the story of Zacchaeus the Lord comes to stay with him before he decides to act morally, to make up for his sins and give to the poor. Moral behavior isn’t the condition of love but the result of it. We don’t have to earn this grace that is always around us, and we can’t.

But do have to act, as Mary, too, acts, when she hastens to the hills to see her cousin Elizabeth. We have to hasten, we have to run as Zacchaeus runs, quickly and without hesitation, not listening to the crowd.

Notice that it’s only the people who think that Jesus must come to the righteous and the good. It’s only the people who try to limit the Lord, to reduce him to systems or institutions or abstract notions of what’s right and wrong. The Lord could care less about all that, and so could Zacchaeus. That’s another thing we should admire about Zacchaeus: how he ignores the others. He “stands” there, Luke says. He stands his ground. He trusts in his love and his joy and his spontaneity and he ignores all those artificial formulas.

“Do whatever most kindles love in you,” St. Teresa of Avila says, and that’s what Zaccheus does. He isn’t “shaken out of his mind,” to quote Thessalonians from today, he isn’t “alarmed” or disturbed, because he knows that Christ never calls us when we are shaken like that, that we best hear and understand what the Lord wants from us when we are at peace, when we are in touch with our own best selves.

*

Our best selves. Zaccheus isn’t arrogant or proud. He knows how small he is, how fragile, but he also knows that he is infinitely loved, infinitely important to God. He just feels this, this amazing paradox: that the greatness of God is measured by his capacity and his willingness to love each little thing, to be present in each little thing. That that’s how God expresses his infinite nature. In the finite.

And of course that leads to moral action. Of course that leads, naturally and inevitably, to solidarity with the poor. “Behold,” Zaccheus says, “half of my possessions I shall give to the poor.” Because as soon as we recognize that God exists within us, even in our smallness and especially there, we intuitively, we spontaneously understand that he is present in everyone else and especially in the weak and the marginal and the outcast. It’s the logical corollary: humility and joy lead to compassion; self-love to love of others.

This is the mystery of our faith: that I am infinitely important to God. And so is everybody else.

It’s not a question of who is deserving and who is pure and who is right. It’s not a question of our favorite little issues and practices. It’s a question of the universe. It’s a question of all that is. “Before the Lord the whole universe is as a grain from a balance,” it is as “a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.” And we are the grain and we are the dew and we are precious in his sight, we are created by him and from him and therefore loved, for he loves all things that he has made, he spares all things, he abides in all things, and all things then are imperishable, all things then matter, they infinitely matter, you and me and the rain and the leaves and all that is and ever was and ever shall be.

What else can we do but climb this tree? What else can we do but climb up to this altar? The Lord today has come to our town. The Lord today has come into this house.

We have only to see him. We have only to ignore all those who tell us how foolish we are. We have only to believe in our joy.

Three Thoughts About Catholic Social Teaching (homily)

2010-09-26T07:29:00.001-07:00

Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Amos 6:1-7; Luke 16:19-31

The readings today very much call to mind Catholic social teaching.

I want to make three points about this.

The first is that Catholic social teaching is what Cardinal Bernadine called “a seamless garment.” There are seven major aspects of the teaching and we have to see them all in relation to each other. We can’t just focus on one. And there’s an underlying principle that unifies them all, a logic, a fundamental commitment. That’s the key thing. That’s what we have to use to interpret our experience and our actions, and that underlying principle is the respect for life, for all life.

We therefore have to be committed to the rights of the unborn, we have to be opposed to abortion. It’s a no-brainer. It’s obvious. At the same time and for the same reason we also have to be committed to the poor man Lazarus, the one covered with sores, the one at our own doorstep. He’s not cute, like a baby. He’s not innocent like a baby. He’s ugly. He’s smelly. He’s harder to love. Impossible. And yet in the logic of the seamless garment, in the logic of Christ, we have to honor him and love him and care for him with just the same compassion and just the same tenderness.

That’s the thing for all of us. Whenever we get attached to one particular part of Catholic social teaching—and that’s fine, that’s natural, we’re all called to certain things—but whenever we get attached to one part of that teaching, we have to continually remind ourselves of the other parts, see our own particular concern in relation to the whole system of thought. If we’re strongly committed to the rights of workers—one of the elements of our teaching—we have to stop and think now and then about the environment, about the rights of nature, because that’s another element. If we’re strongly committed to the environment, we have to stop and think about the necessary relation between that commitment and the rights of the unborn.

It all holds together. It has to hold together.

In fact, maybe that’s part of the call for each of us here. Whatever in Catholic social teaching makes us the most uncomfortable, whatever we tend not to see, whatever isn’t quite natural to us, that’s what we’re supposed to look at and think about.

The second point. We can’t let all this get politicized, we can’t let all this get cast in terms of Republicans versus Democrats, Liberals versus Conservatives, and we do, we inevitably do, and we have to stop that. What the Church calls us to and what the scriptures call us to are underlying principles, an underlying ethic, an ethic of compassion, an ethic of listening, an ethic of love. The practical applications are up to us to think through, and people of good will can and do disagree. We have to never lose sight of this.

At the end of the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, Jesus doesn’t say: and so go and vote for a Republican. Go and vote for a Democrat. And the bishops never say that either. And the Pope never says that. No Pope ever has.

Principles versus application. That’s the key.

A person passionately committed to the environment may honestly think that the policies of the Republicans can best achieve the end of protecting and nurturing the natural world. A person passionately committed to ending abortion may honestly think that the policies of the Democrats can best achieve the practical end of decreasing the number of abortions in this country.

This is for us to decide, using our own brains and our own best thinking. The Church respects that and the Church wants that. It wants us to think. It wants us to apply our reasoning and our research to the problems of our time and the problems of our lives, and how that works exactly will be different for each of us.

And that leads to the third and final point I want to make: obedience to authority.

The root meaning of the word “obedience” is to listen. To obey the Church is to listen to her with all openness and prayerfulness and then to act in our lives according to the best dictates of our own consciences. We have to do that. At the heart of all Catholic moral teaching is a belief in the sanctity and freedom of individual conscience—educated and formed by the tradition.

Now there are those who pick and choose here, and I want to urge them not to—or I want to urge them to recognize it when they do—when they say that the American bishops are too liberal, for example, and decide that this one bishop, or this one alternate group, is more Catholic or more obedient to the tradition. What these people are really doing is exercising their own individual consciences, exercising their own freedom, exercising their own minds, as we all have to, and so let’s say that, let’s honor that. Let’s not call an act of conscience an act of blind obedience. It isn’t. Let’s not criticize others for not blindly obeying when we don’t either. Let’s honor each other as thinking people living together with the questions.

I’ve heard people say that in his statements about the environment Pope John Paul had been co-opted by the left—or that in the Bishops Pastoral on the Columbia River the bishops had been co-opted by the left. And then turn around and quote the bishops on some other issue and say: see, we have to do this.

Wait a minute.

Besides, it’s not some pope who’s arguing all this or some group of conservative cardinals or liberal cardinals or some college or some website. It’s Jesus. It’s our Lord. The authority is the authority of scripture—of the Prophets, of Isaiah and Jeremiah and of Amos today, thundering from the sycamores, “Wow to the complacent of Zion.” The authority is the authority of the parables, the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, and the Parable of the Prodigal, and the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and every other parable in Luke and every other parable in every other gospel. If we read the prophets and the gospels and don’t at least get what the Church calls the preferential option for the poor, we’re not reading the gospels. We’re not getting it at all.

If we go to mass and receive the Eucharist and don’t act, don’t change our lives, don’t open our eyes, and to more than our own pet issue, more than our own personal project, more than our own politics, we’re just not there yet. We need even more the grace of the Eucharist. Because the Eucharist itself commits us. The Eucharist itself calls us, inherently, intrinsically. That’s the authority of Catholic social teaching, however messy, however difficult to figure out and act out. The call is in the very bread and wine.

“Jesus would reject a relationship in which we merely gazed at him in silent adoration,” Amy Florian says. “Christ is to be worshiped, but Christ is also to be received, broken and shared for the salvation of the world. A Christian who is intensely concerned that the consecrated host not be left alone in the chapel must, therefore, also be concerned about the homeless people left alone in the streets. Those who reverence Christ’s presence in the host must also reverence Christ’s presence in human bodies.”

This is Catholic social teaching. This is it. It’s the Eucharist.

Come on in, the Water's Fine (homily)

2010-08-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

August 29, 2010
Twenty Second in Ordinary Time
Sirach 3:17-29; Luke 14:1-14

You know how the lanes are set up for lap swim at the Aquatic Center? There’s a sign that says “Slow,” a sign that says “Medium,” and a sign that says, “Fast.”

I’ve been swimming laps again this summer for the first time in a long time and I’m really enjoying it. But I have to admit that every time I get into the “Slow” lane I feel self-conscious. Self-critical. Isn’t that ridiculous?

I mean, that’s the lane I have to go in. I swim like an anchor. Old ladies are always lapping me. Michael Phelps may think that there are “no limits”—he’s the swimmer who won the eight gold medals at the last Olympics, and that’s the title of his book: No Limits. But he’s wrong. He’s six foot eight and has hands like flippers. I’m five foot eight and sink like a stone.

But what’s the big deal? “Into things beyond your strength search not,” Sirach says.

The water’s just as cool and sweet for me as for anybody else. The endorphins buzz for me—in fact, I get more exercise than most people. I’m trying not to drown.

To worry about how I look in the water or what other swimmers think of me is crazy. It’s the American sin. It’s the masculine sin. It’s original sin.

It’s exactly counter to what Jesus is always preaching.

Tap into any passage in the Gospels or any part of scripture, anywhere. They’re never saying: be number one. They’re never saying: you have to be the best. They’re always saying the opposite, exactly the opposite. Conduct yourself with humility. Do not recline yourself at places of honor.

This is the pattern of the Christian life. The calculus of the Christian life. The logic of it. It’s the pattern of the life of the Lord, our brother Jesus, the one we love more than anyone else and want to be like in all things.

We buy big houses and cars and lots of things we don’t need until we get into debt and have to work two jobs and all we’re doing is killing ourselves with work.

With our inner life, too. We’re wasting our spirit. We’re worrying about things that only exhaust us interiorly, instead of simply being where we’re at, enjoying who we are, living in the given moment.

Who cares where we’re sitting at the table? The food is just as rich and savory. The banquet is still laid out before us. In fact, I have trouble talking and eating at the same time, don’t you? It’s so much better to let other people do all the talking and the impressing. That way you can relax. Enjoy the dishes. Just be.

“An attentive ear is the joy of the wise,” Sirach says.

Think of all the tables you sit around during a week. The literal tables.

There’s a lovely scene in The Passion of the Christ where Jesus and his mother are joking about a table some rich people have asked him to make. It’s a table with chairs, Jesus says. You don’t recline, Jesus says. You have to sit up high, like this—and as he gestures with his hand he and his mother are laughing together, this is such an odd thing.

It’s always good to remember that the people who wrote the Bible aren’t from around here, that we can’t assume that we know what even the simplest words mean.

But the table is an image, too, it’s a symbol, and it’s calling us to think about our own lives here and now.

Think of all the tables you’ve sat around this summer, the dining room tables in the houses of friends, the tables at wedding receptions, the tables in restaurants, the picnic tables and the card tables, the table in your own kitchen. Conference tables at work. The table your computer sits on. Be aware of all the tables in your life this upcoming week and what happens around them and what you do around them. Are you trying to impress? Are you trying to dominate? Are you swimming in the wrong lane? And how is that working for you? How does that make you feel? What are you missing?

When you sit at the table where your computer is, what do you do? What are you trying to accomplish when you send out an email or get on a website?

And who’s sitting around those tables besides you? Because that’s the other part of the Gospel today. Jesus flips things around. He says, not only should you be humble when you’re invited, you should invite the humble when you’re the doing the inviting.

Who do you invite when you have the chance and why? Only the rich, the powerful, the popular?

What do you invite into your mind when you sit at that computer? What do you read? What do you look at on the screen, and why?

It’s the issue of hospitality, in a profound and challenging and finally really liberating sense. I’m a teacher, for example, and maybe what Jesus is saying to me is that I have to welcome and feed the students who struggle in my class, who don’t already know what it is I’m trying to teach them—not complain about them to my colleagues—not just focus on the good students. That I change the atmosphere that way, my own assumptions.

How would that work for you as an engineer, or a business person, or a doctor, or a clerk, or a plumber? A mother? A father? How would you treat people?

Do we do what we do because we want to be rewarded, paid attention to, celebrated, paid back?

Jesus says no: Blessed are you when you do something for someone who can’t repay you, who may not even thank you at all.

What would that be like, to live our lives not for gain, not based on what we think others think, not based on what the culture wants and pounds into us every second?

It would be blessed. Blessed are you, Jesus says. Because then you are free. Then you can just be. You can just be in the water, in the sweet and lovely water. The waters of life, the waters of baptism. You can just sit around the table, you can just eat and be filled, and everyone is gathered around with you—around this table, the table of the Eucharist, the table of life.

To humble ourselves isn’t to make ourselves miserable. It isn’t to walk away from the party. It’s to really come to it. It’s to really be at it.

We’re all invited.

And we’re all laughing and talking. We’re all listening. We’re all just there.

It’s like the pool. It’s like the Aquatic Center on a sunny day. Overflowing with people, all kinds of people, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the fit and the lame. And we’re all laughing and shouting. We’re all diving in. Floating. And it’s wonderful. It’s really wonderful. The water’s fine. It’s really fine.

The Great Divorce (homily)

2010-08-19T10:19:00.003-07:00

August 19, 2010
Ezekiel 36:23-38; Psalm 51; Matthew 22:1-14

One of my favorite books by C. S. Lewis is a little book called The Great Divorce. It’s not about divorce at all. It’s about a bus ride to heaven.

There are all these people living in a shadowy city down below. Anytime they want they can get on a bus and ride up to heaven. It opens up before them. And when they get there and get off the bus and walk around on the grass, they can stay. Anyone who wants to can stay. No questions asked. No problem.

The amazing thing in the book, and the true thing, is that almost everybody gets back on the bus. They don’t want to stay. The angry person stays angry. The ambitious person stays ambitious. The petty person stays petty. For each person who comes there’s a heavenly soul, a kind of angel, who greets them and talks to them and encourages them to go further up and deeper in. But again and again Lewis shows these people clinging to their sins, refusing. They’d rather keep being their small, petty selves with their small, stony hearts, than risk the surrender and the freedom and the mystery of this beautiful place.

They turn around, get back on the bus, and go down to the sad, gray, empty city.

It’s like the wedding feast today. Everyone is invited. Everyone can come. But the rich people refuse and the busy people refuse. They’re too rich. They’re too busy. They even beat up and kill the messengers who’ve invited them. The king in the story is harsh. He kills people in return and casts them out, but only after he’s tried again and again to get them to come to the table. More amazing than his violence is his patience, I think.

The man who comes but doesn’t dress the part isn’t really trying hard enough. He doesn’t care enough to make the effort.

The parable ends with the scary line, “many are invited, but few are chosen,” but I think it should end, “many are invited, but few come.” Many take the ride, but few get off the bus.

And you might think, that’s crazy. Why would anyone not stay in heaven? Why would anyone refuse to come to the feast?

Well, why do we? Because we do. Everyday.

When we lie, when we gossip, when we complain, when we cheat, when we do the easy thing not the right thing, when we look at the screen. No one makes us do those things. We are completely free. That’s the point. That’s what this is all about: freedom. Our radical freedom. To do wrong and to do right.

And God’s infinite mercy. His infinite patience. Because even when we do lie, and gossip, and cheat, we can get off the bus, we can come to the feast. We don’t have to be good. We don’t to be perfect. We don’t to be worthy. We just have to say yes.

“A clean heart create for me, O God / and a steadfast spirit renew within me.”

Oh Lord, take away our stony hearts and give us new hearts, natural hearts.

In the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia a group of dwarves is sitting in a dirty stable, among the straw. It’s completely dark. Except it really isn’t. Really the stable is a gateway to heaven, like the stable in Bethlehem long ago, and all around them is a beautiful feast, all these wonderful foods. As readers we can see it. We know that Aslan is there, the great lion who is Christ, and beyond the stable beautiful trees and fields. But the dwarves just don’t see it. They won’t see it. They’re too petty and small. “The dwarves are for the dwarves,” they keep saying. They won’t be taken in.

Let us not be so small minded, so stonyhearted. Let us be taken in. Let us open our minds to see that the stable is a door and that heaven lies beyond it. That heaven is all around us.

Who Do You Say You Are? (short homily)

2010-08-11T08:16:00.000-07:00

August 11, 2010
Feast of St. Lawrence
John 12:24-26

If President Obama summoned you to the White House and said, bring me all the riches of the Church, bring me all the Church’s wealth, what would you bring him?
Would you bring him all the art and all the stained glass?

Would you bring him the Catechism?

Would you bring him the Eucharist?

What do you think is most important about the Church, most defining?

Here’s what St. Lawrence, whose feast day it is today, here’s what St. Lawrence the deacon did, in the fourth century, when the Emperor of Rome summoned him and demanded all the riches of the Church in Rome.

He went out and rounded up all the poor and the sick and the lame, and he took them and brought them to the palace, and he said to the Emperor, here, here is the wealth of the Church. And he meant it. He wasn’t joking. And for this he was martyred, roasted on a spit.

We’re always talking about the Church. We’re always saying this about it or that. But what are we talking about really? What do we think the Church really is?

Say you’re at a dinner party with some people you don’t know very well and you’re making small talk the way we do. You’re telling each other what you do for a living and where you live and that kind of thing. There’s always a subtle element of competition in these moments. We’re always trying to assert ourselves, make ourselves look good.

So what do we talk about? Who do we say we are?

We can’t brag about our acts of charity, of course, or about our great spiritual poverty, because that would be an example of spiritual pride. Those things have to remain secret. But what are we feeling in that moment? What’s happening to us interiorly? Do we allow ourselves to be defined by our income or our possessions or our profession or our accomplishments? Do we subtly try to work into the conversation our latest triumphs? The important people we know? The important person we are?

What do we think deep down is our own true value? Our own true worth?

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a grain of wheat. Which is to say we have to fall to the ground. We have to die. It’s to say that the pattern of the Christian life is the opposite of the pattern of the life of the world. What is up for others is down for us. What is down for others is up for us. What should define us is our hiddenness and our obscurity. What should guide us is not ego and pride but listening and compassion.

Sitting at that dinner party we should be at peace inside. Because we know who we really are. We are the seed. We are the pearl beyond all price. We are loved by God, infinitely, as is everyone else around the table, everyone else. We are all the Church and we are all the riches of the Church.

The Sun Will Rise (homily)

2010-08-01T11:28:00.001-07:00

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Ecclesiastes 1:2-23; Psalm 90; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

The readings today seem really depressing at first. But I don’t think they are. I think that really they should make us happy.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, Ecclesiastes says. Isn’t that wonderful? Our lives are nothing, they’re like a watch in the night, the Psalmist says. Isn’t that great?

Jesus calls us fools. He tells us this parable about how we’re all going to die and nothing we do will last.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you.

One fall I was doing the TA orientation for new teaching assistants in the English Department and I was really worked up about it. There was a lot to do. The graduate students were scary smart. It was all very intense. And one morning that week one of the new TA’s, a young woman who has become a very close friend of ours—who has become a Benedictine nun, in fact, Sister Hilda—one morning Hilda came to my office before things started and gave me a little quote she’d found from the Talmud, the great Jewish commentary on the Torah.

It was just one sentence, on a little strip of paper: “The sun will rise without your assistance.”

I’m not sure why Hilda would give that to me. Or maybe I am. But it didn’t embarrass me and it didn’t depress me. It helped me. The whole rest of the week I let things go a little more. Enjoyed things more.

That’s the dynamic in today’s readings, too, I think. First, life is meaningless and then we die--but then, underneath that, life is wonderful and then we live.

It’s the great illogical turn in Psalm 90, a turn that isn’t illogical at all, in faith. We are like grass that springs up and dies in a day. Our lives are so short they are like a “tale that is told,” as the wonderful King James translation puts it.

But then, knowing that, fully aware of that, we suddenly feel ourselves filled with the “kindness of the Lord.” We “shout for joy.”

As the great Catholic poet Czeslaw Milosz puts it:

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things,
For you are only one thing among many.

I just got this quote the other day, from another friend of mine. It’s a stanza from a poem, and I think it’s the saying the same thing as the psalm. We are all insignificant. We are all fleeting and small. But then the next move, the immediate consequence: “Whoever sees that way,” Milosz says, “heals his heart, without knowing it.”

Yes, we are only one among many--but we belong to the many. Yes, we are hidden, but we are hidden in Christ, Colossians says. In Christ!

Yes, yes. All those depressing philosophers are right, all the doomsayers. We don’t deny it. As Christians we don’t deny anything. But the sad philosophers are only partly right. The pessimists have only half of the truth. Because behind the nothingness there is really a beauty and a meaning. Behind the illusions there is love. To admit to the sadness and the loss—for us as Christians, as believers--is only to tear away the veil and the falseness and the illusion and to expose a marvelous reality, a final, joyous truth.

It’s the opposite of Freud, really. It’s the opposite of all the postmodern artists and intellectuals.

It’s the logic of Christ: that to die to what Colossians calls the false self, to the “old self with its practices,” is only to rise to the new self, to the self which is being “renewed . . . for knowledge, in the image of its creator.”

And now the burden is lifted, and now the weight is removed.

To seek “what is above,” to “put to death the parts of us that are earthly,” isn’t to walk around in sackcloth and to be sad all the time and pious all the time. It’s to be children again. It’s to be happy and spontaneous and free, because through Christ and the logic of Christ, through the Incarnation, what is above is now here, in front of us, everything that is earthly has been redeemed, and we can see it now, when we’re not distracted, when we’re not worshipping what is false. We can see it and taste it and feel it.

All the drinking and the eating and the sleeping around, all the buying of things and the accumulating—none of that really makes us happy. Just look at any crowded street. Just look at the quad between classes, any day. Does there really seem to be a conspicuous amount of happiness to go along with our conspicuous consumption? Is there really a lot of joy out there, as a result of our so-called freedoms? I don’t think so. I think people are lonely. I think people are afraid.

But through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the Spirit is moving everywhere, in everything, gently and quietly, beneath all the noise. “Christ is all and in all,” as Colossians puts it. And if that’s true, if Christ is present in everything, as He is, He is, everything is good and everything is to be taken pleasure in.

If only we will put down our cell phones. Our bottles. Our forks.

It’s like this moment last weekend, in Sisters. Barb and I were coming back from a little trip to see our daughter, who is working for a few weeks outside of Maupin. We were so relaxed. We were walking around town, going into bookstores and quilt shops. I wasn’t worried about anything. Barb wasn’t worried about anything. Nobody knew us, nothing depended on us, because nothing ever does, not really. It was wonderful.

The sun will rise without our assistance, and it does, everyday it does, and it was shining down us in Sisters that lovely afternoon, it is always shining down on us, and we are warmed by it and we are delighted by it and in the light of it everything can be seen, clear and sharp and real, everything is beautiful and bright, and we are flooded with gladness, we are filled with joy, and the beauty of the Lord is upon us, as the King James Bible puts it. The beauty of the Lord is always upon us.

Three Passages about the Eucharist (short homily)

2010-06-17T06:41:00.001-07:00

As always Jesus is telling us today not be holier than thou, not to get all caught up in words, not to think we own the truth. As always the distinction is between arrogance and humility, appearance and reality. As always the call is to act, with justice and forgiveness.

The Our Father in its simplicity and directness contains all the truth and all the doctrine we ever need, and it’s about the moment, and it’s about surrender, and it’s about forgiveness.

A friend gave me a list of really powerful passages about the Eucharist and the meaning of the Eucharist and I think two of them relate to this today. The Our Father is at the center of the Eucharist for us. We pray it immediately before we receive. In a sense when we receive the Body of Christ we also eating the Our Father. We are swallowing it.

The first quote is from Father Edward Hays, and it’s a good one. It’s exactly parallel to what Jesus is saying in the Gospel:

The invitation of Jesus is to “take and eat,” not bow before and adore. A true adoration of Christ present in the Eucharist leads to seeing Christ present in the Living Eucharist of humanity and creation. If adoration before Christ in the Host is an eye-opener to Christ in the poor and homeless, in prostitutes and convicts, then it is a devotion of value. If not, it, like many devotions, borders on idolatry. Those who promote this devotion would be well served to begin their hour of adoration with this prayer by Henri de Lubac: “If I lack love and justice, I separate myself completely from you, God, and my adoration is nothing more than idolatry. To believe in you, I must believe in love and justice, and such belief is wroth a thousand times more than saying your name.”

The second quote is very much the same, but it’s from one of the early Church fathers, St. John Chryostom:

Do you wish to honor the Body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk, only then to neglect him outside where he is cold and ill-clad. He who said. “This is my Body” is the same who said: “You saw me hungry and you gave me no food,” and “Whatever you did to the least of my brothers you did also for me.” What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with gold chalices when your brother is dying of hunger? Start satisfying his hunger and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well.

It’s the same. It’s the pattern. It’s the central insight of scripture and tradition, over and over again.

A final passage, from maybe the greatest of the Fathers, St. Augustine:

The bread is Christ’s body, the cup is Christ’s blood. If you, therefore, are Christ’s body and members, it is your own mystery that is placed on the Lord’s table! It is your own mystery that you are receiving! Be a member of Christ’s body, then, so that your Amen may ring true! Be what you see; receive what you are. All who fail to keep the bond of peace after entering this mystery receive not a sacrament that benefits them, but an indictment that condemns them.

These are wonderful passages, I think, all three of them, and I’ll leave them on my blog if anybody wants to have them for prayer and for reflection. I feel really inspired by them and reassured by them. I feel really called by them, and I hope you do, too.

Oh Lord, we praise you for the Eucharist, we praise you for your body, and we praise you for the great and simple prayer you left us. May we pray it with complete humility and complete faith. May we receive in you who we really are. May we celebrate in the Eucharist the mystery of our own lives. May we celebrate our own lives. May we celebrate the lives of our others and serve others. May we serve. May we act. May we live.

Sun and Rain (homily)

2010-06-17T06:40:00.000-07:00

I think a lot of people assume that in Christianity God is the great punisher. If you do bad things, God punishes you. If you do good things, He rewards you. This is the God we fear and this is the God we long for in a way and this is a God we can easily reject. Because bad things happen to good people all the time. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to things, and so the rhyme and reason God can just be dismissed. This is the God the atheists and agnostics have in mind and they’re right. That God doesn’t make sense. That God is dead.

But in the gospel today Jesus says something really astonishing, something I think we miss. He says that God makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and he causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. He’s saying to all of us, you’re right. The Big Daddy God doesn’t deserve our worship. He can’t be sustained. You’re right, life is way more complicated than that, way more apparently random, way more incomprehensible, and I am, too.

Or not random. Profligate. Abundant. Random in the sense of God showering down grace all the time, showering down reality. All we have to do is see it. Pick it up. Take it. All of us. It is like the sun and it is like the rain, that wild and generous and unpredictable. Even Ahab can take it, if he wants, if he turns just a little bit. Just a little.

No one is better than anyone else. No one is more deserving than anyone else. If we have good things, it’s not because we’re so great, spiritually or any other way. If we’re suffering, it’s not because we deserve it and it’s not because God doesn’t exist.

This is a God the atheists and agnostics cannot dismiss. This is a God who is not simplistic and easy. This is a wonderful, radical theology.

And there’s more. More that I think people don’t get. We don’t get. Because there are consequences to this theology. If God is like that, if he loves without reason, if he just loves, if he loves in some mysterious sense that at the same time doesn’t deny suffering and loss but is somehow present in it—if God is like that—then we have to be like that, too. That’s what Jesus is saying. Love like that. Be like the sun. Be like the rain. Love everybody, even if they don’t deserve it. Throw out love the way the sower broadcasts seed. Be that inefficient. Be that spontaneous. That unthinking. That inclusive. Exceed all the categories like that. No smugness and no self pity and no moral outrage either. No. Humility. And spontaneity. And joy. Wild abandon. Total acceptance: of everything, of everyone. Everything that happens. Everyone we see.

It’s wild. It’s amazing.

Dancing with the Stars (homily)

2010-06-17T06:37:00.001-07:00

May 30, 2010
Trinity Sunday
Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

First comes the Father, and then comes the Son, and then comes the Spirit, flowing out of them both, playing between them.

With the Spirit we have the Trinity, and with the Trinity everything changes. All bets are off.

With the Trinity God isn’t remote. He isn’t distant. He isn’t always somewhere else. He is here, with us, in nature, in the very fabric of things--in “the face of the deep,” Proverbs says, and “in the sky above” and in the very “foundations of the earth.”

With the Trinity God isn’t static. He isn’t fixed. He is always moving and flowing. He is always changing.

I have been talking with a farmer, a handsome young man in his late twenties, sunburned and clear-eyed, who has lately felt the Spirit moving inside of him and moving in his work as he plows the fields and plants the fields in radishes and lettuce, hundreds of acres. I really admire this man, because he works hard and because he works with the earth, and because as he works he prays. He prays the rosary on his tractor. He opens the scriptures before he goes to bed at night. He’s reading Augustine on the Trinity.

When you talk with him you can feel his energy and his excitement.

We have to make our appointments tentative. They depend on whether the sun is shining that day—if he can work or not—he’s always looking at the weather report on the internet, always looking at the skies—and this seems profound to me, so different from the lives that most of us live, locked in our cubicles. We don’t pay attention like that.

I really like how this man talks about his wife. His love for his children. His humility. I really like how he respects all the people around him and doesn’t force his faith on them, doesn’t judge, doesn’t preach.

This is what the Trinity is about. It’s about life. It’s about the earth. It’s about all the things that grow and change and ebb and flow.

With the Trinity God isn’t trapped inside a Church. He isn’t owned. He’s present within all of us, “poured out in our hearts,” as Paul says in Romans. With the Trinity God isn’t outside, he’s inside, and so we have to trust ourselves and believe in ourselves, in our deepest hopes, our truest desires. This is what the Trinity means. It means that to discern the will of God we have to study our own patterns and study our own thoughts and moods the way this young farmer studies the weather. We have to look within. Because what moves within us is the Spirit, and it’s always moving.

My mother-in-law, at her eightieth birthday party. It’s a surprise. We’re waiting behind the door in a banquet room, thirty of us, children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, and when she opens the door and sees us, she staggers, she literally staggers, she is so surprised and overwhelmed, and then, smiling as we sing to her, she starts going around the room, talking to each of us. It takes several hours for her to hear the stories. There are so many of us, touched by her and changed by her.

This is what the Trinity means. It means that all of us make a difference and all of us matter. It means that the moment matters. Every moment. It means we are always opening a door and there is always a room. Always a surprise.

It’s staggering.

A dog has been coming to one of my classes the last few weeks, a beautiful collie. His name is Indy, after Indiana Jones. He’s a service dog in training. He wears a harness with a large handle sticking out, and the trainer is training him as a kind of living crutch for people with problems keeping their balance. The trainer is disabled herself and I love watching her work this dog and how the dog responds, so patiently, slowly walking down the stairs.

Friday I had a little girl in class, too, about three, with lovely blonde hair. Her mother had to bring her, balancing her on her hip.

She looked at me so solemnly, that little girl. She was holding a yellow balloon.

What the Trinity means is that we are always in relation. What the Trinity means is that we are never alone. What the Trinity means is that the Lord has sent the “Spirit of Truth” to guide us, and the Spirit is always guiding us. We have only to follow what is right and healthy and good. We have only to pay attention.

My five year old grandson when he comes to dinner. He loves to say grace before we eat. He insists on it. He loves to make the sign of the cross, though he doesn’t exactly make the up and down motions yet, the straight lines. He just touches his fingers to his forehead and then sort of makes a circle in front of his face. A quick, circular motion.

But I really like that. I think there’s tremendous theology in that.

The Trinity doesn’t dribble. The Trinity doesn’t come out in little pieces. It “pours,” the readings say. Proverbs says that: that wisdom “pours.” Paul says that: that the love of God has been “poured out.” And that implies abundance, and that implies smoothness and fullness and ease, and that implies play, too. Maybe play most of all.

Wisdom “plays,” Proverbs says. It “delights” in the Lord and it “delights” in his creation, it “delights day by day,” and it “plays before him all the while.” It “plays on the surface of the earth.”

This is what the Trinity means. It means that God isn’t grim. It means that religion isn’t grim. It means that faith isn’t about judgment and it isn’t about rules.

This is what’s so profound about the doctrine of the Trinity: that faith isn’t finally about doctrines at all.

It’s not a system. It’s not a ledger. It’s not a museum.

It’s a celebration. It’s a dance. A wonderful, never-ending dance.

The Parishioner and the Homeless Man (homily)

2010-06-09T07:06:00.001-07:00

June 9th
Matthew 5:17-19

For a long time I’ve been wanting to share this little story.

One Monday morning as I was walking back from OSU to St. Mary’s I happened to see a parishioner on the other side of the parking lot. I was coming around a corner, so I could see him but he couldn’t see me. There was no one else around, except for a homeless man, a big, shaggy man with a shopping cart, there on the sidewalk. It was just the two of them, and what the parishioner did was say good morning. He said good morning and he talked to the man for a minute, like he was anyone else, a quick, friendly hi-how-are-you. He didn’t have to. He could have easily walked by. But he didn’t. He was kind. He was Christian.

When no one was looking.

And this is only one example. I can think of so many people in the parish working at St. Vincent’s or serving at Stone Soup or being foster parents or visiting the sick, all in private, all when no one is looking, day after day.

It’s important for us to be Christians in public, to let people know that we’re Christian, to profess our faith and to evangelize for our faith and sometimes even to be apologists for our faith. But the danger here is that we might turn the Church into still another way of building an identity and getting attention. The biggest problem we all of us have is caring too much about what other people think, and this creeps into our faith life, too, before we know it. Hey, look at me being holy. Look at me being spiritual.

That’s why it’s important for us to go into our inner room and to pray, because there it’s only God who is looking at us, it’s only God who is loving us.

And not just that. Then we have to leave our rooms and go out into the world and when we see a homeless man on the sidewalk say good morning. We have to act on our faith. “The Eucharist commits us to the poor,” the Catechism says. “To receive in truth the Body and Blood of Christ given up for us, we must recognize Christ in the poorest, his brothers and sisters.”

I recently read a long article about Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback Church in California, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, a book that’s made hundreds of millions of dollars. As I read along I was thinking what a hypocrite this guy was. I was judging him because he’s made so much money from that book and is so famous. And then at the end it turns out that Warren has given most of that money away, 90% of it, to help with AIDS and other diseases in Africa. 90%.

Well, that’s it. That’s all that matters.

Sure that work is public and sure Warren is maybe doing it in part so that other people will admire him. But 90%.

Finally what it means to be a Christian is to be a Christian. Not to talk about it. To do it. First to pray, always to pray. Then to act. Always to act.

This is the law and this is the prophets. This is the smallest letter and the smallest part of the letter.

And for all of you who do pray and who do act, who quietly and selflessly serve others, all praise. You humble us. You teach us. You show us the way.

A Distraction (homily)

2010-04-24T07:22:00.001-07:00

Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 13:14-52; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:27-30

Once when Maggie was about twelve we were driving to mass and I was yelling at her. I was shouting. The tendons were popping out on my neck I was so mad.

We slammed into the parking lot, I raced into church, threw on my alb, processed up the aisle, proclaimed the Gospel, and looking out at the congregation, got ready to preach.
And there was Maggie, looking back at me, in tears.

*

I am an ordained minister of the Catholic Church. I have been ontologically changed.

And: I am an ass. I am a hypocrite.

And Maggie of course already knew that. She knew that and she forgave me.

She didn’t lose her faith. She was able to separate things out: the human from the divine.

*

Pope Benedict is a sinner. He is a flawed human being in need of grace just as I am and you are. He has a confessor. He has a past. He has a personality. And he’d be the first to tell us that if he were here.

Pope John Paul was a sinner, and Pope John the Twenty Third was a sinner, and every Pope who ever lived was a sinner all the way back to Peter himself, and not just when he betrayed Jesus during the Passion but after, in all the events that are narrated in Acts, when he waffled and fought and got things wrong even as the Spirit was moving through him and he was helping to create the Holy Catholic Church.

That’s the thing that’s so inspiring to me about the book of Acts: how messed up the early Church was. Just like now. Because the Spirit is always moving through our personalities and our conflicts and our gifts and our flaws and we never need to panic. Just grow up. Just accept reality.

*

All the voices we’re hearing, in the media and on the internet, all the voices attacking the Church because of the scandal in Europe now, all the voices in the media defending the Church, just as loud, just as shrill.

Ignore them. They are not the voice of the Shepherd.

Here’s the voice of the Shepherd, here’s the sign of the Shepherd: Pope Benedict praying with the victims of abuse in Malta. Asking for forgiveness. Tears in his eyes.

*

There’s a great liturgy going on in heaven, in the universe, in nature. It’s going on all the time. It’s the liturgy described in the book of Revelation today, with the multitudes singing and the Lamb on the throne, and our liturgies are aligned with this, they tap into this, they catch a glimpse of this, through all our imperfections and distortions, like a stained glass window that both admits the light and refracts it.

But the mass here is not exactly and completely the mass in heaven, the Church is not God, as the Scriptures are not God, are inspired by Him and contain Him but are not exactly Him, and if we let ourselves think that they are, we are sinning, we’re getting it wrong, we’re indulging in a fantasy that the Church herself preaches against and more important that Jesus preaches against.

The Church is a finger pointing at the moon. It’s not the moon.

*

Imagine the Church exactly as you would want it to be. The ideal Pope. Just the kind of people you want ordained, just the kind of doctrines, just the kind of liturgies. If you’re an arch-conservative, an arch-conservative church. Everybody else kicked out. If you’re a liberal, a wildly liberal church. Everybody else kicked out.

You’d still have to get up in the morning and look in the mirror. You’d still have to face your own sinfulness. Your own sadness. Your own fear.

What would really change? Would anything really be easier?

No. I don’t think so. In fact, if we didn’t have anything external to complain about, we’d really be in trouble. We’d really have to start being Christians, and that’s hard. That’s doesn’t get into the New York Times. That doesn’t get on Fox News. That doesn’t get into some sort of mass email: hey, everybody, I prayed the Psalms today.

*

I mean to be talking to all of us, to the people so intensely attacking the Church and to the people so intensely defending the Church. The problems in Europe right now are real problems and important problems and we have to face them and solve them, structurally, with justice and compassion and wisdom. But.

There’s a great temptation here. A great distraction.

It’s easy to look outward. It’s easy to worry about the Other. But all those things described in Acts today are inside of us, in our souls, and that’s where the real work is. The believers in Antioch, the resisters in Antioch, the jealousy and the abuse are all within us, are all dimensions of our own personalities, and our call is to turn and face those things, humbly and honestly. All we can reform is ourselves—our own failure to listen to the voices of the people we’ve hurt, in our own lives; our own imperiousness, our own arrogance, our own devotion to power and to structure.

And we can’t do that anyway. We can’t reform ourselves. Only God can.

Until this life is over and we join the multitudes in heaven in the heavenly liturgy, we will hunger and we will thirst, the sun will fall on us and the rain will fall on us, and we have to stop expecting otherwise.

If a twelve year old girl can figure this out, so can we.

*

Get off the net. Stop reading the emails and writing the emails. Stop standing in the square and telling other people what to do.

Go into your room and pray. Join Pope Benedict and pray, in tears.

Because it’s only then, in the silence, that we can really hear the voice of the Shepherd. It’s only then, when we stop shouting and stop listening to the shouting, that we can hear the Lord calling us.

And here’s what he’s saying. Here’s what he’s always saying: peace be with you.

Peace.

Annie (homily)

2010-04-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

April 2, 2010
Good Friday

I know a woman who is a first grade teacher in a small town, and she gave me permission to tell you about a little girl in her class, Annie.

Annie was abused by her father, and her mother was abused, too, and finally, before the father left them both, in his anger and his meanness he burned their house down. To the ground.

Annie’s mother is a screamer. She likes to scream at Annie and she likes to come to school and scream at the teachers. And now she’s living with a new boyfriend, which means that Annie is living with a new man, too.

Who knows what will happen to her as time goes on?

“The first movement is singing,” Czeslaw Miolsz writes in a poem.

A free voice, filling mountains and valleys.
The first movement is joy.
But it is taken away.

And yet one day in class in a little writing exercise, Annie drew a cross. This cross. She spent some time on it, you can tell. The wood of the cross is brown, and Jesus, hanging on it, is red. Notice how precisely Annie has colored the red. How deep the color is.

This isn’t a Catholic school, it’s a public school, but somehow the cross is in Annie’s mind, and what she writes at the bottom, in her awkward printing and jumbled spelling, is about Jesus.

I know it’s hard to read, but what she writes is this:

I love God because he died for my sins. He died on the cross. He loves me. He had angels. He is the Dad of the world. His name was Jesus but we call him God.

Notice the word printed in the bottom corner of the picture itself: Dad.

I don’t know who taught Annie this or how she learned it, but it’s profound in ways she can’t really understand-- or that maybe, come to think of it, she understands too well.

In the midst of her suffering and the complications of her family Annie knows of the cross and she thinks of the cross and the cross gives a meaning to her suffering and a meaning to her life. The cross does two things at once: it confirms her suffering, and it transforms it.

*

I love our new crucifix. I love the wood and the bronze. Do you know that the corpus, the body of Jesus, weighs something like 750 pounds?

What I love about our crucifix is that it’s hard to tell what it is. It’s hard to tell whether Jesus is being crucified at this moment or whether he’s rising. Whether he’s suffering or exalted. Because he’s both, at the same time.

I love how the corpus is hanging just a few inches away from the cross itself. There’s a gap between them. I love that the cross seems to have broken apart. It’s still a cross, but the pieces of it are starting to pull away. Because Jesus has shattered it, he has opened it up, without changing its shape, without denying its nature, and the Spirit is radiating out from the hole this has made, these bronze half circles are flowing out like sound waves or ripples in a pond.

As Christians we are both tremendous realists and tremendous optimists. We don’t deny suffering. We embrace it. We see it clearly. Not just the suffering of Annie but the suffering of all the Annies, all the children of the world, all the children of history, in the rubble of the earthquakes and the rubble of the wars and the rubble of family life shaken by our own selfishness and sinfulness. And at the same time, in the very face of it, we see the Resurrection. The two things are intimately connected. The Crucifixion always implies the Resurrection, the Resurrection always implies the Crucifixion, and whatever we see we apply the logic of this, we apply the great And.

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? This is what Jesus cries out from the cross, and he means it, this moment is absolutely desolate and absolutely bleak, it is the end of all meaning. And, at the same time, it is the beginning. The beginning of all joy. Because with the cross and through the cross the Resurrection comes into the world and the wood of the cross is shattered and the Spirit of the Lord comes flooding through, exploding into our reality.

Jesus died on a cross and he had angels and he loves us. Jesus is the Dad of the world, he is the father of all of us forsaken by our fathers and forsaken by our mothers and no one is finally abandoned, no one is finally unloved and unregarded but everyone is taken up and held in the arms of this cross and in the arms of this man.

His name was Jesus but we call him God. Because he is God, because he is the Dad of the World, he is the Son of the World, and he is always with us, he is always loving us, even in our suffering and especially then. Always then.

Already? (homily)

2010-03-20T19:49:00.000-07:00

March 21, 2010
Fifth Sunday of Lent
John 11:1-45

The poet Maya Angelou is always surprised when people come up and tell her that they’re Christian. Already? she says.

As if for these people Christianity is some kind of achievement. As if Christianity is something they’ve accomplished once and for all. Not a process. Not a life.

*

And it’s not only arrogant to say this. It’s pessimistic, it’s sad, because it implies that everything good has already happened. That the rest is downhill.

Now that I’ve reached a certain age I sometimes feel this way myself. I’m as good as I’m ever going to be. I know as much as I’m ever going to know. There won’t be any adventure anymore, nothing new and nothing exciting.

But that’s not true, not if I’m really Christian. If I’m really Christian and you’re really Christian we’re never done with becoming Christian, the life of faith is never over, and that means that the adventure is never over.

*

Mary and Martha and Lazarus had met Jesus already. They had eaten with him and talked with him and become friends of his. How could they have possibly imagined anything better? That was it. That was the peak.

But then when they least expect it, at their lowest moment, something really incredible happens. The adventure starts all over again. Because Lazarus dies, and everyone is of course terribly upset, and then Jesus comes to them again, and he stands at the open tomb, and he calls out in his loud, clear voice, Lazarus, come out.

And Lazarus comes out. He comes out!

Who could have imagined this? Who could have expected this? Here at the last moment and even beyond the last moment, a new thing happens. A wonderful, new thing. And the story isn’t over anymore, it’s not over at all, it’s only beginning.

*

Because the really amazing thing for Lazarus is that he’s not still done being transformed. The really wonderful thing is that he will get to die again. As Mary gets to die and Martha gets to die and you and I get to die.

I’ve been quoting Teilhard de Chardin a lot lately, and I want to quote him again, because he says something really powerful about death. He talks about it in a way that makes sense to me and that captures its excitement and its transformative power.

God must in some way or other make room for Himself, hollowing us out and emptying us, if He is finally to penetrate into us. And in order to assimilate us in Him, He must break the molecules of our being so as to recast and re-model us. The function of death is to provide the necessary entrance into our inmost selves. It will make us undergo the required disassociation. It will put us into the state organically needed if the divine fire is to descend upon us. And in that way its fatal power to decompose and dissolve will be harnessed to the most sublime operations of life. What was by nature empty and void can, in each human existence, become plenitude and unity in God.

I know that’s a little complicated, but what Chardin is really saying is what the Church has always said. That unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it is just a grain of wheat. Death is the necessary breaking down. Death is the emptying out, the dissolving, in even just the biochemical way we all know it is. But it’s not just that. It’s not just an emptying out and it’s not just a dissolving. All that is preparation. All that is preliminary to a new and wonderful expansion of the Spirit, a new and wonderful opening up of the story.

*

One of the arguments against the existence of God or of a just God is that there are wars and there is suffering and children die and innocent people die and a just God wouldn’t let that happen. But that’s to understand life from just within the perspective of life. It’s not to stand back and look at life from the larger perspective of death, and death understood as a stage, a stage of purification and radical change.

When I’m feeling depressed and down because I’m getting older I’m doing the same thing. I’m looking at life in a limited way. I’m looking at death in a limited way. As the end. As something to fear. But it isn’t. It’s a great, great grace. It’s a great thing.

*

As are all the little deaths in our lives day to day. When we lose an argument. When we lose our energy. When we realize all at once how little control we have over what happens to us and to the people we love. Yes, those are sad moments. Those are real deaths. But we shouldn’t run away from them. We should embrace them. We should enter into them. Because they are teaching us how to die, they are preparing us for the great purification. They are, or they can be, transformative, if we transform our attitude about them. If we see them as what they really are: the beginning of all hope, the beginning of all adventure.

*

And in the meantime, let’s not rule out the possibility that something wonderful can still happen to us in this life.

To think that it won’t is to presume to know the will of God. To think that it won’t is to presume that God doesn’t want us to be saved, that God doesn’t want us to be happy.

There will be new friends. New triumphs. New experiences. Wonderful things can still happen, and they will happen.

*

And that problem we can’t solve, that intractable problem, in our families or our work?

Why we do think that if we can’t come up with a solution, there is no solution? If we can’t fix it, it can’t be fixed?

That we know what the future holds?

Why not just wait, in hope?

Why not just wait for Jesus to come?

For Jesus to stand at the tomb.

For Jesus to call out in his loud clear voice,

Titles (a short homily)

2010-03-02T06:24:00.001-08:00

March 2, 2010
Matthew 23:1-12

A few years ago I spent some time on the coast, doing a silent retreat.
It was a very powerful experience for me, it really changed me, and I keep going back to it in my mind and thinking about it.
One of the things I missed the most during that time was people seeing me and knowing me and addressing me by name, and more, addressing me by my titles. Professor. Deacon.
I missed my roles. I missed walking into a classroom the first day and everyone knowing I was the teacher. I missed putting on an alb and everyone knowing I was the deacon.
I hadn’t realized how much I am defined by these roles. By what other people think of me. By how they address me.
Especially when it comes to spiritual things.
Pride is a problem for all of us, in everything, but spiritual pride is an especially subtle one, an insidious one. Because we think we’re being humble. We think we’re giving up what the world wants of us. But we want everyone to see us doing that. We want everyone to know how humble we are and admire us for that.
Hey everybody, I’m on the coast praying in silence! See?
Being a Christian, being a Catholic, gives us an identity, gives us a way of being in the world, and that’s wonderful and good. It’s part of what the Church is for.
But we all have to be careful that we don’t get proud, that we don’t get addicted. Because finally the purpose of the Church is to take away our identities, to strip away all our pretensions, and to put us back on the ground, where we belong. In relation to each other. In relation to the moment. This is the purpose of the Church because it is the purpose of Christ.
I am infinitely important. And so is everybody else.
“We all have to discoverer,” Jean Vanier says, “that there are others like us who have gifts and needs; no one of us is the center of the world. We are a small but important part in our universe. We all have a part to play. We need one another.”

Good Company (homily)

2010-02-28T14:53:00.001-08:00

Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 15:5-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 9:28-36

I have a student who has a friend who is very confident about God. He knows it all. He’s been praying a lot lately, and God has been telling him he’s supposed to drop out of school. God wants him to drop. No question.

Well, my student said to him, jokingly, next time you talk to God, will you ask him a few questions for me? Because I can never seem to get a straight answer.

And the friend replied: you’re just not praying hard enough.

As if this is all up to us. As if we just have to be good enough and pure enough. As if the people who are having problems in this world are having problems because they aren’t as advanced as the really spiritual people.

No. This is a sign of this young man’s immaturity. This is a sign that he hasn’t really read the Bible. He just thinks he has.

Look at Abram in Genesis today. The Lord shows him the stars in the sky and Abram puts his faith in Him. He acts with righteousness. But then the very next thing in the story is that Abram doubts. He turns around and questions. “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” Because this is how it really goes in the spiritual life. Faith is always followed by doubt. Highs are always followed by lows. God has spoken to Abram directly, intimately, as God speaks to all of us directly, intimately, but even that’s not enough. Even the stars are not enough. We have to ask for a clarity that we can never really have.

And God’s response to the question isn’t to make Abram feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s to put him into a trance, to “envelope” him “with a deep, terrifying darkness.”

That’s how we know that this young man, this good, young man, hasn’t matured yet in the faith. He hasn’t been terrified yet. That’s how we know that he’s getting this backwards. He’s trying to envelope the Lord, and he thinks he has. He’s not being
enveloped.

Look at what happens to Abram before this passage, a few chapters earlier, when the Lord first comes to him. “The Lord spoke to Abram,” Genesis says. Just that. That’s all. We have no details. There’s no sense of why God would choose Abram, what’s so great about Abram, how Abram could have deserved this, because Abram doesn’t deserve it, as we don’t deserve it. It’s all grace.

And what’s the first thing that Abram does at that point? Immediately? He lies. He lies about his wife being his sister, to save his own skin, to keep the Pharaoh from killing him and taking her, because she is so beautiful. He lies.

This is how it goes throughout the book of Genesis, with Abram and his descendants. It’s one big dysfunctional family, full of cheating and lying and favoritism and sleeping around and sibling rivalry and conflict and pettiness of all kinds, and God keeps coming to them anyway, again and again, keeps coming to them and blessing them and guiding them. And that’s the good news, because God will keep coming to us, too, into our dysfunctions, into our fractured and difficult lives.

This is how it is, that God comes to us and promises us as he promises Abraham but that the promise doesn’t seem to be fulfilled, the good things don’t seem to happen, at least not in the way we expect. Abraham is told that he will be the father of the nations. But then the child doesn’t come. Sarah is barren. They’re too old. And they wander around the desert, and they question and they despair, and when the child finally comes, when Isaac starts to become a man, the Lord suddenly asks Abraham to sacrifice him, to offer him up on the altar.

This is how it is. We are promised the Promised Land, we are promised home, but somehow, despite the joy we feel now and then and all the good things we receive, the Promised Land is always far off. We don’t quite reach it, as Abraham doesn’t reach it, or Isaac, or Jacob, or Joseph. Not even Moses reaches the Promised Land. Centuries go by and the promise isn’t fulfilled, at least in the way we expect it to be, because as Philippians says, we are too preoccupied with “earthly things,” we are thinking in terms of power and glory, not in terms of what faith is really about.

The poor disciples in the gospel today, overwhelmed by the light of the Transfiguration, so terrified they want to build booths and sell tickets. They don’t get it yet.

Remember what happens before this moment, in the great pre-transfiguration discourse, when Jesus tells them that he will die and they must die, too, to their false selves, to their hope for power, to their boyish misconceptions that like this young man who thinks that he is in control they are in control and to follow Christ is to have everything figured out. No. They must die.

Remember what happens after this: conflict and confusion and the cross. The crucifixion.

And even after this moment of such beauty, of such greatness, when the stars and the sky are all concentrated into a single place, are all brought together on this hill into the person of Jesus, even after this, on the way down the mountain, the disciples are arguing and fighting and bickering about who is the greatest.

So let us rejoice. We are in good company, in our weakness and our doubt. In the company of Peter and James and John. In the company of Abraham and Sarah. Rejoice. There’s nothing we can do to earn the grace of God and there’s nothing we can do to lose it. The stars are always there and the light of the Lord is always there, on every hill, and we are always blessed, even in our boneheadedness. By our loving and patient Lord. Our loving and mysterious God.

In fact, it’s only when we wander, it’s only when we’re fractured and apparently forgotten--it’s only when we admit this, when we realize this, when stop thinking we’re so great and admit that we need the light and we need the grace--it’s only then that the light can shine into us. Only then.

The stars are always there. But it’s only the darkness that we can see them

In Town (poem)

2010-01-30T07:34:00.000-08:00

I never knew how much I like clocks
until I happened to walk into a clockmaker’s shop
and it was a festival of clocks and a cathedral of clocks
and there were a hundred thousand tiny golden gears
turning a hundred thousand tiny golden wheels.

I also like the sound of the word breakfast
and the idea of the word breakfast. I like the sound
of the word lunch and the idea of the word lunch.
I like the clink of the spoon as it taps the cup.
I like the clattering of plates and the gathering of voices
and the air that rises in the warm, fragrant rooms.

Later I walk along the river. Bright sun. Couples.
Linden trees. The river is always moving,
it’s always flowing, wide and wrinkly and brown.
But every time I’ve looked, it’s always been there.

Love Always Rises (homily)

2010-01-30T07:32:00.001-08:00

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Cor 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

I have found it to be a law in my own spiritual life that joy is always followed by doubt. Joy is always challenged, right away.

Partly this is just the way life is. Life is just up and down and we should be aware of that, not think when we’re happy that we’ll always be happy and not think when we’re sad that we’ll always be sad.

But I think it’s more than that. I think that joy calls out doubt and skepticism and fear. Draws them. I think there is something in us and something in the world that actively resists love. That is offended by love.

This is why the demons always shout at Jesus. They know who he is.

*

We often hear these beautiful words from first Corinthians at weddings. We hear them, and they move us, and they’re so beautiful that maybe we make the mistake of thinking that love is somehow soft and sweet. That if only we have love, everything will be fine. But no.

Love not only never fails. It always fails. Love is not only patient and kind. It is despised. Love is seen as weak. Love is seen as unmanly. Love puts down its gloves and gets hit in the face. Love never makes a million dollars and never gets on the front page and never wins the prize. Love has no answers. It doesn’t possess the truth but is possessed by the truth. Love is laughed at. Love is made fun of. Love is slapped around
and spat on. Love leads us into the desert. Love makes us vulnerable. Love opens us up to loneliness and to sorrow. To everything.

Love gets up in the assembly and reads from Isaiah and everyone is impressed. Then mad. The people are offended by love, they are outraged by love, because love tells the truth, love says no, love sets boundaries, love isn’t afraid, and so the people grab love and they take love to the edge of town and they try to throw love off a cliff.

This is how it always is. Love is always beaten and tried and hung on a cross.

*

Surely I’m not the only one to have this experience. I had it the other day. I woke up after a good sleep and sat down to pray and I felt the presence of God and I felt confident and alive. I felt like myself. So I got dressed and I packed my lunch and I drove to school.

And got flattened. From the minute I stepped into my office. Problems. Resistance. Meanness. I tried to do a right thing and say a right thing, and I did, as best I could, and was attacked for it. Mildly. Subtly. But really. By the end of the day I was tempted to feel like a fool. To think that the joy I’d known in the morning had been an illusion.

Because the thing that hates love and the thing that despises love isn’t just in the world. It’s in us. We collaborate with it. It’s in the voice that says: that’s stupid. It’s in the voice that says: this is the way the world is.

*

But Christianity can’t be about mere emotional uplift, as Bonhoffer says. If we really are disciples of the Lord, if we really want to imitate Christ, we’re going to feel it, we’re going to be opposed, and if we’re not, if we don’t encounter resistance and struggle, there’s something wrong. We’re kidding ourselves. We haven’t really stripped away our illusions.

Which is to say, too, that whenever we do feel this counter-pull, this meanness and doubt, we know that we’re on the Path. The stronger the temptation, the more we know we are inside the Pattern.

*

I don’t mean that evil is stronger than good. Not at all. Evil is a coward. Evil is weak. As soon as we turn and face it, it runs away. It dissipates. The Lord is our light and our salvation, whom shall we fear? Though an army encamp around us. Though we are surrounded.

Or maybe we don’t think of this as a battle exactly. Maybe we just stand back and see it. We say, oh, here are these feelings again. Here this is happening again. We don’t give into it but we don’t fight it either. We acknowledge it. We see it as simply part of the fabric of life, part of the ebb and flow.

And so, too, it loses its power to hurt us. It loses its power to persuade us.

*

A friend gave me permission to tell you this story.

Her father was dying after a long illness. He just shook in bed for days, rigid, his eyes closed. Sometimes he would come out of it for a few minutes and take some water or say a few words.

All his life he had been a difficult man, an angry and abusive man. He was a Viet Nam vet, he had seen combat, and maybe that was part of it. But he had been bitter and mean for a long time, and he was bitter and mean as he died.

And my friend was taking care of him. She had spent days at his bedside, feeding him and reading to him. Though she didn’t really want to, though he had hurt her so much growing up, she was there every minute at the end, in that dark fetid room.

And at one point he stopped shaking and opened his eyes. He looked right at her, his daughter, and he spoke. He said one phrase.

He called his daughter a name.

I can’t repeat it. But it was a name. A vulgar name.

Maybe he wasn’t talking to her. Maybe he wasn’t right in the head. But whatever this was, it was the last thing he ever said, to her or to anyone else. The last thing. In a few hours, he was dead. And the last thing he ever did was to say something vulgar and bitter and mean.

And how did his daughter respond?

She leaned over, and she kissed him, and she said: Dad, I love you.

Love is a mystery. Love is a heartache. Love is a tremendous heroism.

Love is beaten and love is crucified. And then it rises.

The last thing that man ever said was vulgar and mean. But that wasn’t the last thing he ever heard.

At the very heart of things, there is love. In the darkness and the light, there is love. In the darkness and the light there is love beyond counting, there is love beyond knowing.

Love is crucified. Love is buried. And then it rises. Love always rises.

Blind Seed (poem)

2009-12-24T07:31:00.000-08:00

Every blade of grass has its angel
that bends over it and whispers: grow . . . grow
The Talmud

Sometimes he wore a cowboy hat. A tall man,
slightly stooped. We bury him on a hill
looking out over other hills and fields, the sky
a deep, dark gray. Then rain, then horizontal rain,
the heavy canvas awning above the grave

flapping hard in the wind. Years ago, looking
through a microscope, he solved the problem
of Blind Seed disease, a blight that was killing
all the grass seed in the valley. Burn the stubble,
he said. Plow it under. Now the grass flows on

for miles, smooth and green, all the valley like
a single thing, and the family has placed the coffin
so he can see it. Feet west. Head towards me.
The fields and the hills. The sun and the rain.
From here, they say, you can always see.

It is What It is (homily)

2009-12-24T07:29:00.000-08:00

December 27, 2009
Feast of the Holy Family
1 Samuel 1:20-28; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:41-52

Like everyone else I’ve spent a lot of time at parties and family gatherings recently, and at some of them I’ve felt great, and at some of them I’ve felt homicidal.

Sometimes I just don’t want to be a husband and father and grandfather and uncle and brother and friend and deacon and colleague. I just want to be left alone.

Sometimes I’m really disappointed with people and mad at people--and I’m disappointed and mad at myself for feeling that way.

But this is what is family is for and what community is for. What’s holy about the family is that it continually reminds us of our limitations. Of our need for grace.

*

Community, Jean Vanier says, is a “terrible place.”

It’s the place “where our limitations and our egoism are revealed to us,” he says, where we come into contact with our “monsters”: our inability to love, our capacity for judgment and violence, all our inner frustrations and desires and patterns of sin.

And until we admit this about ourselves, we can’t be healed.

We can run from this truth. We can hide from it in busyness and in projects that make us feel useful and better than others. We can hide in prejudice. But until we honestly admit to ourselves that we are in need of grace, we can’t receive that grace, and what’s essential about the family and about community more generally is that it provokes this realization. It confronts us with who we really are.

What’s powerful about Vanier saying this is that he’s the founder of L’Arche, these group homes around the world where people live together with the developmentally-disabled. He’s someone we think of as saintly and heroic, and he is. But exactly because he doesn’t pretend to be.

*

I’ve been thinking about the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The teaching that Mary herself was born without sin. Because it’s one of those mysteries of the Church that I just don’t understand. I just don’t get.

But maybe one of the lessons of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary never earned the grace that fills her. It was given to her, at birth. From the beginning.

Maybe even Mary isn’t a spiritual athlete. She’s a vessel.

*

And until we’re ready to accept our own weakness, we can never accept the weakness of others. We can never really understand: they’re just like us, just as afraid and insecure, just as flawed. “In community life we discover our own deepest wound and learn to accept it,” Vanier says. “So our rebirth can begin. It is from this very wound that we are born.” And born again that way, we turn to others, and we no longer expect them to be perfect. We no longer expect them to take away the hurt that only God can take away, to fill the void only God can fill. “As the Lord has forgiven you,” Paul says to the Colossians, “so must you also do.” We have to “put on” that forgiveness and put on that love, and I don’t hear Paul being naïve and sappy here. I hear him being deeply realistic. He knows what it’s like to live together with other people. It’s a mess. And so we have to work on it and accept the messiness and trust that the Spirit will come into the situations we can’t solve and bind us all together in the only way we can be, through humility and forgiveness.

*

It’s a matter of realism. It’s a matter of seeing:

"Too many people come into community to find something, to belong to a dynamic group, to find a life which approaches the ideal. If we come into community without knowing that the reason we come is to discover the mystery of forgiveness, we will soon be disappointed."

I keep thinking I should be better and I keep thinking that the people I’m around should be better, the people at OSU, the people at St. Mary’s, the people in my own household. But no. We can choose our friends but we can’t choose our family, the saying goes, and that’s right, in a profound way. But we can’t even choose our friends, really. We are given who we are given. We could wish them smarter or better looking or nicer, but no. These are the people God has chosen to send into our lives, and it is with them that we are called to live out our vocations.

If we’re not standing next to someone we can’t stand, C.S. Lewis says of the Church, there’s something wrong.

*

Mary and Joseph in the Gospel today, wild with worry. Confused. But even in their anxiety they stand there and they see. They see their son, discoursing with the rabbis. They see their son, not doing what they expect him to do, not following the conventions, but being who he really is, and they accept this. They accept this without understanding it, without trying to solve it. Mary ponders these things. Mary keeps these things in her heart. She is the figure of the worrier and of the thinker and of the person who reflects and she does this over time, day after day, and she doesn’t impose a solution, doesn’t try to label all this and put it into a box. She lets it unfold. She accepts the reality of the given moment and she stands ready, in faith and confidence, for whatever will happen next, because she knows it’s not she who is writing the story. It’s God. It’s not she who gets to choose. It’s God. And he will choose, and he does, and whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen, even the suffering and the pain. It’s all meaningful in ways we can’t really understand in the thick of it.

*

The boy Jesus, in the temple. Hannah in the temple, with Samuel.

My niece and my daughter, sitting next to each other on the couch. Laughing and joking. Two beautiful young women.

My oldest son, home on leave. My new daughter-in-law and her sons.

The dogs barking and running around.

Outside it is dark and wet. It is the Solstice. The earth is slowly turning. Already the days are getting longer, minute by minute, and that’s something else we can’t change. We can only become aware of it. Or not.

Reality is lovely, Anthony De Mello says, it’s absolutely lovely, and sometimes through grace we feel that, despite all the darkness inside us, despite all the resistance and fear. Sometimes we can see.

That every family is holy, every home, every community, in the darkness and in the light. That everything is good. Holy and blessed and good.

Life Before Death (homily)

2009-11-29T13:33:00.000-08:00

First Sunday of Advent
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25; 1 Thessalonians 3:12-4:2; Luke 21:25-36

One day a little fish came up to a big fish and asked him a question.

“Excuse me, sir, but can you tell me, where is the ocean?”

“You’re swimming in it,” the big fish replied.

*

The key to faith isn’t life after death, as Anthony De Mello says. It’s life before death. It’s life right now--the fullness of life.

I don’t know about you, but wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I’m always a few minutes ahead in my mind. If I’m reading, I’m thinking about walking. If I’m walking, I’m thinking about lunch. I’m always worried about the next thing, and deeper, I’m always longing. I’m always longing for the future. There’s something missing in my life, something unfulfilled, and in the season of Advent the Church says, yes. The old world will end and a new world will come, and it will be wonderful and beautiful and fulfill all our desires. “In those days Judah shall be safe and Jerusalem shall dwell secure,” Jeremiah proclaims, and “this is what they shall call her: The LORD our Justice.”

But Jesus isn’t linear. Jesus isn’t bound by time. “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again” we say. All time has been transcended, through Christ and in Christ. It has been folded back onto itself. The one we long for has already come. The child has been crucified and has risen and the Spirit he sent into the world fills every corner of it. There is no particle of matter that is not charged with his energy and charged with his love.

So what are we waiting for? It’s right in front of us. It’s all around us.

*

DeMello tells the story of a young monk who went to the master. (I’m paraphrasing all these little stories from DeMello.) Master he said, you haven’t told us the meaning of life. You haven’t told us the secret.

Suddenly, in the forest, a bird began to sing. It was a beautiful, haunting sound.

Did you hear that? the master asked.

Yes, the young monk said. And suddenly he understood.

*

What the readings in Advent are really saying is: wake up. “Beware that your hearts not become drowsy,” Luke warns us, but “be vigilant,” be open and aware, because the world is always ending and the world is always beginning and we’ll miss it entirely if we don’t stop and pay attention.

“There will be signs,” Jesus says, “in the sun, and the moon, and the stars.”

A couple of weeks ago the full moon was shining through the bare branches of our maple tree. This was in the morning, before dawn, as the moon was setting. I’d been so preoccupied all term, with my classes and with other things--with what Luke calls “the anxieties of daily life”--that I’d missed the leaves turning in the tree. I couldn’t remember if I’d seen them at all. But just then, through grace, I was present in the moment that had come. I was aware of the silence of the house. I was aware of my breathing. I was aware of the light of the moon falling on the books and on the chairs, on all the trees of the forest.

Awareness is holiness. Eternal life is already here, for all of us, and when we know that, when through grace we really feel that, we are free and happy and entirely unafraid.

*

Because of course the future really scares us. We think about it so much because we’re afraid of it. We’re afraid of all the things that might go wrong and all the things that will go wrong, all the things that will hurt us, and we think that by worrying and obsessing and getting ourselves ready we can keep ourselves from getting hurt.

But we can’t. Who of us by worrying, Jesus says, can add one moment to the span of our lives?

This is what I keep hearing behind the readings today. I hear Jesus in the valley telling us to be like the birds, which neither sow nor read. To be like the flowers, which merely grow.

All of us, through awareness, can live in the moments we have. All of us, through listening and through seeing and through opening ourselves up, can be filled with the presence that fills all things.

And when we are, what can hurt us? When we are, what else can possibly matter? The light of the moon falls on everything equally. The light of the moon is falling through the bare branches of the tree. “All the paths of the Lord are kindness and constancy,” The Psalmist says. Even when the world ends, Luke assures us, even at the apocalypse, we who believe can “stand erect” and “raise our heads.”

For there is nothing to fear. Our redemption is at hand.

*

Awareness is holiness. Our task this Advent is simply to be alive. To be fully alive.

Or maybe that’s too much to ask. Maybe all we can do for now is stand back and be aware of how hard it is for us to be aware. Just stand back and watch ourselves being distracted and preoccupied and caught up in things--not judging ourselves, not condemning ourselves. Just watching our thoughts and our feelings float by, like the weather, like the clouds.

That’s a good Advent task, in fact. A good discipline.

All the rest is grace anyway.

*

A boy was in love with a girl but she resisted his advances. He wrote her letters and poems, beautiful love poems, pages and pages of them. Finally, she relented. Come and see me, she said, and the young man came, and he sat down in a chair, and pulling out a sheaf of his poems he began to read aloud.

Stop it, the girl said, amazed. Stop it. I’m right here!

A man fell asleep, and he had a dream, and in the dream he was signing a contract for a million dollars. Suddenly his wife was shaking him. Wake up, she said. It’s time to go to work. But the man was angry. You interrupted me, woman! Let me go back to sleep! I’m about to become a millionaire!

All our contracts are just dream contracts. We’re all just living in illusions.

We’re all just little fish in a big ocean, and we can’t see it. We can’t believe it.

But if we did, if we did, we’d be filled with joy. We’d be exalted.

Look! Look! All around us is the sea, the glorious sea.

Sugar (homily)

2009-10-25T11:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-27T05:27:00.001-07:00

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)

2009-08-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-07-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-07-30T11:40:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-07-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-07-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Nestucca (poem)

2009-07-23T14:50:00.000-07:00

They’ve paved the road
where I used to walk
and God spoke to me
through the yellowthroat.

There is a lookout now
on the hill above the sea
where I watched the clouds
form and the sun set.

Good signage.
A slim young woman
in a crisp khaki shirt.

Now everyone can come
and stand in the meadow
where the owl
whistled over my head
like a shuttlecock.

And I’m glad.
We’re all the same,
just at different stages,
and all I need
is a clear, unobstructed
view of the sea.

That flat, that
endless surface.

Body and Soul: Three Poems

2009-07-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

Brothers
with two lines from Jessica Powers

We were brothers.
When we climbed the mountain
we thought the mountain cared.

Blue skies. Bright gulfs of air.
Across from us
a greater, snowy peak.

And then, as we struck camp,
screaming down the valley,
flat gunmetal gray,

wings brutal as knives,
a bristling Air Force F-16,
banking so close we thought

for a moment we could see
the face of the pilot
beneath the helmet and mask.

But we couldn’t.
No soul can view
its own geography.

What Trees Can Do

Every morning I am given all this wisdom
and every afternoon I throw it all away.

I can’t pray.
I can only walk: the forest is my audience.

There is a hill behind me, it has always been
behind me, and it has been given to me to climb,

especially in the summer and in the morning
when it is cool and soft and I can tell the trees

all know and love me.
If I were to die at the top, overlooking

the valley, if my body were to drop,
the trees wouldn’t move.

They would never leave me.
They would just keep rising.

Honor

When you walk in the woods in the morning
you get spider webs on your glasses.
They cling to your temples, sticky and invisible.

But when you arrive at the pond, an osprey
cries from the top of a fir, like a small, pale eagle.
You’ve never seen one there before, above

the modest brown water. Typically you think
of yourself as unimportant, as unworthy. But now
that osprey is looking right at you, stock still,

he’s noticed you, all the way from the top of the fir.
He hasn’t moved. And that’s quite an honor:

to be noticed by an osprey.

The First Station (poem)

2009-06-27T12:32:00.000-07:00

The summer after my mother
died, when my wife was away,
I drove out into the desert:

loneliness within loneliness
within loneliness. I wasn’t
prepared for the canyons,

how narrow they were,
and deep. I wasn’t prepared
for the Stations of the Cross.

They climb into a pine
forest behind the monastery
at St. Gertrude’s, but they

begin in an orchard,
a cherry orchard,
and it was harvest time.

Jesus Condemned For Us,
the first one said, the scene
in plaster, framed by wood.

But beside it a cherry tree,
heavy-laden, thick with fruit.
Bright red fistfuls of Bings.

Chasm (poem)

2009-06-27T12:30:00.000-07:00

on my birthday

Sometimes in the spring
there is a scent in the forest like mint.

Sometimes in the fall
there is a scent like tea, and the leaves
are the color of tea.

You descend into a deep chasm
thick with spruce and fir.
You are near the sea, and it is rainy
and wet, and you have to slap
through the salmonberry and fern
that hang over the path.
Before long you are soaked
clear through.

When you arrive at the bottom,
something seems to change.
The trees seem to pull back.
The birds begin to sing as if
you are approaching a ceremony.

But it is just a meadow, with a stream.

Clear water flowing
over smooth, gray stones.

Don't Listen (homily)

2009-06-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24; Second Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

We all know how important it is to listen. To pay attention.

But one of the keys to the gospel today is that Jesus doesn’t listen. He doesn’t pay attention.

Jairus’s daughter has died and the crowd is anxious to tell Jesus that. You think you’re so important, Jesus? You think you’re so special? Well, forget it. You’re too late.

But, Mark tells us, Jesus “disregards the message.” He goes right ahead with what he was planning to do anyway.

“Why all the commotion and weeping,” Jesus asks a little later in the story. When I walk into a room, I’m easily influenced by what people seem to be feeling. If they’re anxious or angry, it rubs off on me. It gets into me. But not Jesus. When he asks about the noise and the fuss, he’s really saying that it’s all meaningless. He’s shutting it out. No matter how much people “ridicule” him, no matter how strong the resistance, he’s not listening.

* * *

Lately at OSU my computer has been flooded with emails about the economic crisis and the looming budget cuts. There’s been quite a bit of commotion and weeping. And it’s important to pay attention, up to a certain point, to be a responsible citizen.

But the example of Jesus suggests that after that certain point, we just have to turn it all off. We can’t let the outer world be stronger than the inner world. We can’t let what other people say and do determine who we think we really are.

Whatever is flashing on my computer, the sun is shining. Breath is coming in and out of my lungs. I am loved by God. Whatever is flashing on my computer, it’s usually about the future, and the future hasn’t happened yet. The only place I can be is in the moment, in the here and the now. Everything else is just an abstraction. Everything else is, in some fundamental sense, unreal.

* * *
Because the issue here isn’t really not-listening, of course.

When I say that Jesus doesn’t listen, I mean that he really listens--but not to the powerful, not to the prestigious, not to those the world regards as important. He listens to the hemorrhaging woman. In all that surge of people he can feel her presence, and he turns to face her and see her. He pays a deep and radical attention to her, this woman the people regard as unclean, as unworthy--and he can do that because he’s not allowed himself to be distracted by the babbling of the crowd, by the 24 hour news cycle.

* * *

A subtler example. I was sitting at a talk the other day next to a person I know slightly. We chatted a little, and like every other time I’ve been around this man, I got a really negative feeling from him, a strong, negative energy--anger and judgmentalism and an odd kind of possessiveness. I had this instinct to get away.

Listening and not-listening. In that particular situation I think that I was supposed to listen to my own feelings and not listen to what the man was saying to me. I was supposed to ignore him and listen to myself.

It’s like what happens when we’re in the act of writing and the critic pops up in our heads and says, that’s stupid, that’s dumb, don’t say that. So we stop. We get blocked. Instead we just have to accept the voice that is really ours and we have to write what it is we’ve been given to write. We can all write. We all have good things to say, and besides, there’s plenty of time to revise and polish later. But for now: ignore the audience. Just write.

* * *

I don’t mean to judge the man at the talk. I don’t want to condemn him.

I want to do something more basic and instinctive. I want to try to get to the level of simple and direct acknowledgement of my own reality--because this, I think, is what Jesus is calling us to.

“God did not make death / nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living / for he fashioned all things that they might have being / and the creatures of the world are wholesome.” This is the pattern and this is the rule: that we are fundamentally good and that the world is fundamentally good and that anything that tells us otherwise, any crowd, any individual, is to be shut out and ignored. The voice of deep or defining self-doubt: that is never the voice of God.

* * *

I know a woman whose husband died and whose son came to the funeral--her estranged son, a son who had pulled away from the family and lived a life that many might disapprove of. In fact several people at the funeral did disapprove, and they let the mother know. All the mother felt was joy at his return, all she felt was a mother’s love. But her friends said, that’s Satan tempting you, this desire to embrace him, because he’s sinful. He’s going to hell.

Listening and not listening. What to listen to and what not to listen to.

Again: the Church doesn’t teach that any particular individual has ever actually been sent to hell--the Church teaches God’s infinite mercy--the Church teaches that we shouldn’t judge--that it’s not up to us--that we are all sinners and that the only sins we should be concerned about are our own.

So just on the face of it, being as strict and literal as we possibly can, what the friends at the funeral said to the mother was wrong, theologically, dogmatically.

But the readings today tell us something more. They say: disregard the message. They say: forget all the commotion. They say: don’t listen to the friends.

Listen to love. Always listen to love.

* * *

As Jesus always listened to love, and still does. As the little girl listened to love. The innocent little girl. She listens and she rises, she listens and she knows, that it’s death that is the lie, not life. Doubt, not joy.

And we are the little girl. We are dead and we are lost.

But not if we listen to the Lord. Not if we listen to the voice we most want to hear.

The One Voice.

Rise, little girl. Rise.

Clarno (poem)

2009-05-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

The fossil of the leaf embossed on the face
of the rock forty four million years ago
is no more important than the leaf that dances
on the branch outside the window. The same
dear little ribs. The delicate nets of veins.

The sign said that each step we took on that
trail was worth thousands of years. But so
is every step we take. The man at the casino,
bragging like a frat boy. The beautiful women,
with their honeyed skin. We are all afraid.
We are all running away from our loneliness.

But deep within our bodies we, too, have hearts.
We, too, have bones. Beautiful, clean, white
bones. Like the treasure, buried in the field.

Wild Geese (homily)

2009-05-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

May 31, 2009
Pentecost
Acts 2:1-11, 1 Corinthians 12:3-13, John 20:19-23

There’s a poem I love, by Mary Oliver, and I’d like to share it today as a way of talking about the readings. It’s called “Wild Geese,” but I really think it’s about the miracle of Pentecost.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You have only to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

You do not have to be good.

Grace is abundant, it’s flowing all around us, and all we have to do is open our eyes. We can’t earn it. We can’t lose it, unless we want to. We don’t deserve it but we don’t have to because it’s God who is good, infinitely good. All we have to do is turn, even just slightly, and the light will shine into us and the light will fill us up, no matter how sinful we’ve been, no matter how tight and clenched and bitter we’ve become, how distracted, how compulsive. All we have to do is turn.

You don’t have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

Of course we have to repent. We have to repent everyday and keep on repenting. But we don’t have to be heroes to do it, we don’t have to be spiritual athletes to do it, we don’t have to act like monks or martyrs or saints because in a way that would be too easy. Salvation isn’t dramatic. The hard thing is to be kind. The hard thing is to take five minutes to pray, right there, at the breakfast table. The hard thing is to have a little self control in the course of an ordinary day, when no one is looking. That’s the call we’ve all been given, the call to the present moment, and we can answer it. We can all answer it.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Deep down whatever we most want is what God wants. Deep down whatever makes us truly happy is the will of God. The whole idea of “natural law” is that goodness is natural, that the law is written on our hearts, and so, when we are most ourselves, we can trust ourselves. We are like plants that grow towards the light. There are compulsions, too, of course, and sinful impulses, very strong ones and consistent ones, sometimes almost overwhelming ones, but we can tell the difference. We know. We know because following those negative impulses never really makes us happy. We wake up with a hangover. We wake up feeling lonely and sad, and that’s the feeling to trust and to follow, to the deeper feeling underneath, to our natural love of what’s pure and good, to our spontaneous instinct for God. The only mystery is why through our own free will we cover that up, why we ignore it and suppress it. The sin in the garden wasn’t that we were naked but that we were ashamed to be.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Nothing is more important than realizing that Pentecost didn’t just happen once and didn’t just happen a long time ago. It’s happening now, in the clean blue air. When Jesus ascended and then sent the Spirit, goodness and meaning and light infused the whole universe. An energy was released that both transcends all merely historical moments and saturates them, charges them, enters into them completely. That’s what I think all the hard-to-pronounce place names are doing in the account of Pentecost in Acts, Mesopotamia and Judea and Cappadocia. They’re telling us that God can no longer be restricted to any particular place or time because he is now present in every particular place and time. It’s not that there aren’t any miracles anymore. It’s that we don’t see them. It’s not that the world has changed since the time of Jesus but that we have, that we have lost our capacity to experience the mystery. To repent, metanoia, is to change our minds. To open them. To see and to experience the sun and the rain and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. It’s no accident that the Holy Spirit is often figured as a dove. It’s no accident that scripture is full of birds and of wings, as symbols of the Spirit, of moments of grace, and the geese are such a symbol, too, and such a reality. The sound of their voices is like the sound of the people at Pentecost. They are speaking in tongues.

Yes, we all feel despair. But however sad and wounded we are, there is beauty and there is grace and it calls to us. It is always calling us.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination, /
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-- /over and over announcing your place / in the family of things.

What happens at Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit enters into the people without destroying their individuality. There is unity in diversity. All the people are made into one and yet they are still speaking in their own languages, in their uniqueness, and that I think is like a family and that I think is like an ecology and that I think is where we really belong and where we really are. “We have to discover,” Jean Vanier says, “that there are others like us who have gifts and needs; no one of us is the center of the world.” And that sounds depressing in a way, I guess, but it isn’t. It’s wonderful, and it’s true. “We are a small but important part in our universe,” Vanier says. “We all have a part to play.” In the beginning we think that we’re special, we’re the hero, we’re the one, and everyone is less than us, inferior, unworthy. Then life hits us hard and life takes us down and we suddenly switch to the other extreme. We think we’re nothing, we think that no one is special and nothing matters. But then, through grace, we reach a higher stage, or can--the stage of Pentecost--when we realize that if no one is more important than anyone else, no one is less. We matter, too. We matter with others. I have my role and you have your role and then we will die and pass away and others will come to take our place, and somehow the very transitoriness of this, the fragility of this, is part of its beauty and its value and its infinite worth. Somehow it all holds together and somehow we are a part of it. “There are different kinds,” “there are different forms,” but “One Spirit.”

It’s true. It’s all true. Our lives make sense and the world makes sense. We have a home and we belong, to something wonderful, to something wonderful and beautiful and good. We just have to see. We just have to listen.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You have only to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Blueberries (poem)

2009-05-27T16:18:00.000-07:00

I have been wanting to say how beautiful I think
the blueberries are, and precious, and soft.
They are like the beads of a rosary, except they give
when you touch them, they keep falling away, and

they are food for the birds and food for us, and
they are countless, there are hundreds and thousands
of them hidden in the leaves. And this one is for me.
And this one. Through all the stages of its pushing

and its striving this one berry in its fullness
has fallen to me. It bursts in my mouth. No one
is more important than anyone else. No one less.
The old man and the child, the lover and the object

of love, the young girls on the beach, shrugging off
their sweatshirts and shaking out their hair. The young
girls on the beach, laughing now and joining hands,
running out towards the waves. About to be beautiful.

Be One (a weekday homily)

2009-05-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

Acts 20:28-38; John 17:11b-19

I was pretty upset a few weeks ago when Pope Benedict was in Israel and the press kept talking about how he’d belonged to Hitler Youth when he was a boy--as if somehow the Pope was a Nazi now or something, which is of course ridiculous. My wife’s father is the same age as the Pope, and he grew up in Germany, and he, too, was in Hitler Youth, and then later drafted into the army, as was the Pope. Try being a teenager in Germany in 1932 and saying no.

Both my father in the law and the Pope did what they had to do. Who are we to judge them, or anyone who endures such suffering?

But this is just the kind of oversimplifying that we should be used to when people talk about the Church. Earlier, in February, the Pope was attacked for trying to welcome back several bishops who had been in schism--attacked for seeing reconciliation--and then he changed his mind, he reversed himself, in the face of the criticism, which I also think is admirable and good. That’s what mature Christians do. They think in complex ways. They are open-minded. And the Pope was attacked before that, last year, when he quoted a medieval Muslim leader who had argued for the killing of one’s enemies--attacked because he resisted that idea, because he, the Pope, was arguing for rational and charitable discussion.

Several times recently Pope Benedict has cautioned all of us to remain united in faith and love. In an address this winter to students at Rome’s diocesan seminary, he recalled St. Paul’s warning to the Galatians not to “go on biting and devouring one another.”

“St. Paul refers here [the Pope said] to the polemics that emerge where faith degenerates into intellectualism and humility is replaced by the arrogance of being better than the other. We see clearly that today, too, there are similar situations where instead of joining in communion with Christ, in the body of Christ which is the church, each one wants to be superior to the other and with intellectual arrogance maintains that he is better. “

I really like this. I think this is exactly right. I think that when we call each other names and demonize those who disagree with us we are enacting what the Pope calls “a caricature of the Church,” a cartoon of it. And notice how in response to those attacking him, the Pope turns inward in this passage, calling Christians to account. He calls us to not to demonize each other, and in the process he refuses to demonize those who have demonized him.

“Holy Father,” Jesus prays in the gospel today, “keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are one.” Wolves will come among you, Paul warns today, and they will pervert the truth, and the truth is always the truth of love and humility.

Let us not, in the name of the Church, fail to obey it. Let us not, in the name of tradition, fail to really study it and understand it, in all its complexity. And when we speak, let us imitate Pope Benedict, who in turn is imitating Jesus, and let us speak with courtesy and accuracy and precision, especially when we claim to be speaking as Catholics.

The Junco and the Boy (poem)

2009-05-26T17:18:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I shot a bird. A deranged, obsessive junco
that had been banging against our window for weeks, fluttering
in and up again and again, hundreds of times a day, enraged
by its own reflection. You can’t reason with a bird. And this one
we couldn’t scare away, with flags or foil or glittering strips.

Nothing worked. After a while even Barb wanted me to kill it.
We woke up Saturday at five when it started hurling itself
at us again, for another day, and she said get a gun. So I went
to a friend of mine, our lawyer, a Republican, and he loaned me
a rifle, patiently demonstrating how to load the birdshot

and find the target, and I spent the afternoon stalking through
my own backyard, firing and missing, firing and missing.
It’s been forty years since I shot a gun--at scout camp
one summer, at the lake, when I got my shooting merit badge.
We were the sort of parents who never even let our kids

have toy guns, who wouldn’t let them make sticks into guns,
even though in the end our oldest son became a soldier
and went to Iraq and is on his way there now a second time,
an expert with an M-16 and a 50-caliber machine gun
they call the “saw.” My son. I’d never even been on

an army base until we went to Fort Benning to watch him
graduate from infantry training. We sat in the bleachers
like at a football game, and the loudspeakers started blaring
“Bad to the Bone,” and then these soldiers came out
of the woods firing blanks at the crowd through an orange

and yellow smoke screen. I was kind of impressed at first,
I have to admit, though Barb just wept. What bothered me
was that we couldn’t tell where he was in all the blocks
of marching soldiers, later, on the parade ground, all of them
sheared and pressed and squared, all of them the same. It was

the knob on the back of his head that gave him away, and
even then it was like he was older somehow, older and younger
at the same time, and in a kind of time warp, too. It was like
we were all somehow trapped inside a World War II movie.
Pearl Harbor had been bombed and we were striking back.

I couldn’t shake this feeling. When I finally hit the junco,
on something like my fifteenth try, I think--he had flown into
a magnolia, next to the deck, and maybe it was luck or maybe
I was getting the hang of it again, but I squeezed the trigger
and the rifle fired, and the bird twitched, then dropped,

straight down, into the backyard--when I finally hit it I didn’t
feel guilty exactly. I’m not sure what I felt. I know
I wanted to get rid of that bird. I know how frustrated I was
with all the fluttering and the banging. I know how embarrassed
I’d been all afternoon, firing and missing, firing and missing.

Later I drove our four-year-old grandson into town, to the store.
I haven’t done this in a long time either. He’s our step-
grandson. The woman John married before he left this weekend
for Iraq has two little boys. So we have these instant grandsons
and I’m still adjusting. But it was good to know that I could

do this still. Strap a little boy into a car seat. Talk to him
on the way, looking into the rear view mirror. Bribe him
and pace him and manage him through the aisles of the store
as we got our cereal and butter and bread. All the way home,
driving through the fields, I had this feeling that the Honda

was very light and that my grandson was light, too. Everything
was very light. His brown knees. His arms. His sleepy
brown eyes. I felt very protective of him. I loved him fiercely.
I thought, when we get back home and I reach in to free him,
he’ll be no trouble at all. I’ll be able to lift him with one hand.

What the Church Really Teaches About the Resurrection (homily)

2009-04-23T12:58:00.001-07:00

Third Sunday of Easter
Luke 24:35-48

If the Resurrection is just this weird thing that happened a long time ago, I don’t care about it. If the Resurrection is just this spooky, sort of supernatural thing involving this one man in the first century, what’s the point?

But the Resurrection isn’t just that. It’s far more profound and real than that.

You know, there are a lot of stupid versions of Christianity out there in the world, silly oversimplifications. Why do Catholics pray to Mary? Well, we don’t really do that. Why do Catholics think that the Pope is better than Jesus? Well, we don’t really think that. There are a lot of people who were raised Catholic but who heard things that are not true. I’m getting this a lot lately. I grew up Catholic, one of my students said, and so I was taught to read the Bible literally. Well, actually, Catholics don’t read the Bible literally, or they’re not supposed to. The other day another student told me that she was taught by a nun that Native Americans are going to hell. Well, no. Maybe my student was just hearing things in a childish way-- mishearing them--maybe it’s time for her to grow up and start thinking like an adult. But if she really was taught this, the teacher was wrong. It’s not what the Church teaches.

It’s the same with the Resurrection. I think too often people don’t know how beautiful and profound the Catechism really is. The Church is always celebrating the mystery, not reducing it.

I want to just quote you a fairly long passage from the Catechism. I’ve quoted it before, but it’s really beautiful and important. If you’re interested, you can find it on my blog --the address is under my name in the Bulletin.

“No one was an eyewitness to Christ’s resurrection and no evangelist describes it. No one can say how it came about physically. Still less was its innermost essence, his passing over to another life, perceptible to the senses. Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb . . . still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history (647).”

Let me try to unpack this a little. There are three important things here and throughout what the Catechism teaches about the Resurrection.

First, the Resurrection was more than a physical event, more than a mere resuscitation. Jesus isn’t Lazarus. After Lazarus was raised people knew who he was, and they could touch him, too, anytime they wanted. Jesus can also be touched, sometimes, as he is touched in today’s gospel. He is not a ghost, he is not a hallucination. But there are also times when Jesus can’t be touched, when he comes through walls, as he does here in this story, or when he vanishes, when he just disappears, as he does in the great story of the travelers to Emmaus, right before this in Luke. And even when Jesus is present in some kind of discernible way, it’s really significant that people don’t always recognize him, even people who knew him in his former life. You have to be open to seeing him. You have to have imagination and receptivity and faith.

Second, the Resurrection is not just a single event. It didn’t just happen once. The Church is open to the idea that the gospel accounts are a kind of literary shorthand for a realization and a joy and a faith that took several generations to unfold and that is still unfolding. As the great Catholic scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, the Resurrection of Jesus was not “simply a matter of visions and appearances to selected individuals. . . . The experience cannot be confined to such sporadic events.” In fact, here’s another quotation from Johnson, another slightly longer passage I’ve also quoted before and that I want just to make available to you, because it’s so useful and good:

“The Resurrection faith that gave birth to Christianity was rooted in a complex combination of experience and conviction. The experience was that of transforming, transcendent, personal power, a power that altered not only the consciousness but the very status of those experiencing it.”

Something happened inside the early Christians, something profound. You can see it in the record of their courage and their joy, even in the face of great persecution, and you can see it still, in us, on our good days, at our best moments.

That’s the third and final point: that the Resurrection is not just outer but inner, not just something that happened long ago but something that is happening now, inside of all of us. The scholars don’t have to dig up the tombs. They just have to come here. They just have to come to Church. Because we are the body of Christ, we are the Resurrection, we are the living proof of it, no matter how weak and partial and stumbling our faith often is. We’re here. And we’re here because in some way we have felt joy. We’re here because in some way at some point in our lives we have been moved, we have been given the peace that Jesus gives his frightened disciples today in Luke.

This is what the Churches teaches about the Resurrection. That it’s not just a symbol, it’s not just an idea. That it’s far more profound, far more real than that. And that it’s far more profound than the merely physical, too, far more real than the merely scientific, the merely historical, the merely measurable.

I’ve said this before and I want to say it again. Just as the cross is a lens, the Resurrection is a lens. The Resurrection is a kind of logic. A kind of discipline.

If we’ve lost our job, if we’ve lost our marriage, if we’ve lost our hope, yes, that suffering if real and we have to go through it. But there’s more. That’s not all there is. There is also joy, there is also faith, there is also reason for happiness, and we have to hold ourselves to that, discipline ourselves to that: not be downhearted, even now, not be devastated, even when life devastates us. Why are we anxious, finally? Why are we sad? On what have we staked our hope and desire? On what are we counting?

If we feel lost, if we feel ignored by God, we have to think again. God isn’t ignoring us, we’re ignoring him. We’re looking in all the wrong places. If we doubt the Resurrection, if we doubt the source of the disciples’ first joy, we have to think again. We have look again, and in a new way. The Resurrection is going on all around us, in the beauty of the spring, in the gift of our friends, in the smallest, simplest moments, the moments we overlook and discount because they’re not big enough for us, not good enough. But no. These little moments are enough. They are beautiful and real and important, and they are here and they are all that’s here, just the present moment, just the present, and that’s everything, that’s the whole universe, that’s the whole cosmos, that’s Jesus Christ himself coming through the walls of our merely empirical minds, if only we will let him, if only we will surrender our stupid versions of things, if only we will die to our small and petty selves. He is risen. He is here. He is now.

Windfall (poem)

2009-04-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

Windfall
for Franz, on his 80th Birthday

After the storm the forest is still the forest.
The scars are openings. Light shines
through them, above the tangle of fallen trees.

Dazed at first, the old man and old woman
resume their puttering, in the house
by the pond. They wake in the morning

and move among their books, then go out
to study the windfall. The puzzle of it.
The pattern. They know they still have time.

Every stand is different: matchsticks
on the hillside, riprap by the stream;
above the chaos, the great spruce and the fir.

In youth we think that youth is ours.
We think that it defines us. But it doesn’t.
It passes away, and who we really are remains.

For a moment I don’t even fear
the coming of age. The sagging of faces,
the gnarling of hands. After the storm,

in the house by the pond, I think, no.
Maybe everything that was promised is true.
Maybe we are all being transformed.

God is Dead (homily)

2009-04-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

Good Friday 2009

God is dead.

Nietzsche announced this in the nineteenth century, but God really died long before that, on Golgotha, and he has died again today.

God is dead. His body is right here. It is hanging on this cross.

The CEO in the Sky is dead. The Great Policeman is dead. The Unwavering Judge is dead. The God we love because he gives us what we want. The God we resent because he doesn’t. That God is dead. He has given himself away. He has emptied himself out.

He has surrendered all his power and surrendered all his potency and so we can’t blame him anymore. For hunger and poverty and war. For all the injustice and suffering in the world. Because God isn’t remote anymore. He isn’t invulnerable anymore. He has a body, an ordinary, fragile body, and now that body has been tortured and beaten and hung up before us. God is no longer above all suffering. He has entered into it.

***

The God of our language is dead, the God of our words, the God of our own convenient and comforting slogans, the God we think we can understand and control, the God we think we can use to judge other people. That God is dead.

The God who favors one football team over another, one political party over another, one country over another, one kind of person over another.

That God is dead. He is dead and gone. We can no longer pray to him.

Do you know that Hell is mentioned only nine times in the Bible? And six of those are in Matthew. And no one in the Bible is ever said to have been sent to Hell by name, no one, not even Judas. All those stories are admonitory. They’re warnings. They’re efforts to call us to conversion. The Church has never taught that anyone by name has been sent to Hell, ever. For all we know there may be a Hell and there may be no one in it.

So that God is dead.

***

Jean Luc Marion is a contemporary Catholic theologian, from France, who has written a book called God Without Being. What he means by that is that God is so great and God is so good that even our basic philosophical categories like “being,” like “nonbeing,” like “life” and “death,” don’t apply to him.

That God is dead. The God of philosophy. The God of theology.

Of course we don’t know what we’re talking about, St. Augustine says. If we knew what we were talking about, it wouldn’t be God.

***

The old God is dead, the false God is dead, the God merely of power and might, and because of that, we, too, can die. We can die to all our false ideas and all our false selves. The self that desires money. The self that wants to look good. The self that wants to be righteous. The self that expects easy answers. The self that fears change.

Everything has been stripped away, or should have been.

There’s a new video game about to come out, based on Dante’s Inferno--you can find the trailer on YouTube--but Dante isn’t a suffering, middle-aged man, the way he is in the poem. No, he’s a buff, righteous warrior with a giant sword made of bone, and the woman doesn’t save him, he saves the woman, diving into the pit and beating the hell out of all the demons he meets. At one point he takes out a big, metal cross and wham, flattens a devil with it. Wipes him out. The cross as weapon.

Which is too often how we all use the cross. Too often we turn the faith into a video game. Too often we dumb the faith down, as if for fifteen year old boys. We see it from the perspective of a child, a selfish, adolescent child.

But that self in us has died, or should have, with this beautiful, tender man, this grown up man, in his suffering. This beautiful man, hanging before us. That kind of violence isn’t necessary anymore, or it shouldn’t be, in word or in fact. All that has been stripped away, all that has been rooted out, all our stupidity, all our nonsense, all our pettiness, so that something far subtler and more beautiful can come into being. A gentler self. A more giving self. A more creative self. A more responsible self. A humbler self.

***

Today the world has come to an end. And good riddance. It was the wrong world.
Tomorrow the new world comes into being. The new kingdom. The kingdom not of our own righteousness but of spontaneity and being in the moment, of entering in, of touching, of holding, of witnessing, of collaborating, of blessing and embracing, of listening, of seeing.

***

But this is the sacred moment. This is the astonishing moment. This is the moment no one could have expected or prepared for, the moment that doesn’t make sense, the moment that rewrites the whole universe, top to bottom. The resurrection is easy. We get that. We know God can do that. What we didn’t expect, what we couldn’t possibly have bargained for, is that God would do nothing. That God would allow himself to be nailed. That God would allow himself to be hung. That God would allow himself to be spat on and looked at and questioned and killed.

God is dead and we rejoice. God is dead and we pray in thanksgiving.

This is the moment. This is what makes everything possible. This is what we have never understood and never will understand. Today, in God’s dying, and in ours, our true life becomes possible. Our life with Him.

Our life with this beautiful, broken man. This beautiful, broken God.

The Big Story (homily)

2009-04-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

April 5, 2009
Palm Sunday

The Passion is the Big Story, the Story that contains every other story, and all of us are somewhere in it, are one of the characters in it, depending on where we are in our lives. We keep shifting around, moving up and down the arc of the plot.

Sometimes we feel the joy of our faith. We’re confident. Faith is beautiful. We know we have it. It’s in us. And so everything is like the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We’re singing and we’re waving palms.

People think that this is the only feeling you’re supposed to have when you believe in God, that faith is always a matter of joy, so when joy disappears or isn’t possible, faith is discredited, undermined.

But of course that’s wrong. The life of faith is a life and so it’s complicated. It’s up and down. It’s mixed. Sometimes we’re doubting and sad. Sometimes we’re afraid. We’re anxious. Our life is like the moment of the trial of Jesus when everything goes wrong and falls apart, and that’s a sacred moment, too. The Bible embraces that desolation and says it’s holy. It’s part of the story. When we feel that way, as all do, we haven’t lost the faith. We’re experiencing a different part of it. We’re entering into a new dimension of it. But Jesus is there, too. Jesus is always there.

It’s like the Passion as the Great Story is a graph, a time line, a big sort of outline, and we can chart every part of our selves and our experience at some point on the line.

We are made fun of. We feel physical pain. We start to die.

Sometimes we are Judas and we sell Jesus out. We laugh at a joke we shouldn’t laugh at, we gossip when we shouldn’t gossip, we don’t explain our faith or stand up for our faith. Even just in our own minds we give it up, we sell it, we let it go in exchange for whatever the thirty pieces of silver might represent in our lives: the approval of others, maybe, professional prestige, social status.

Sometimes we are Peter. We profess our faith and then deny it, under pressure. We can’t handle it. We don’t have the courage or the staying power.

The only difference between Judas and Peter is that Peter repents. They both betray Jesus, as we do, everyday. But Peter repents, he starts over and tries again, he is forgiven, and that’s part of the Story, too, maybe the heart of the Story, that we are always starting over, that underneath all these ups and downs there is a grace that saves us and sustains us and makes all things meaningful.

We think our lives don’t make sense. We think things are random. But they’re not. There’s a deep structure, a pattern, and that pattern is this story, the Story, the Passion. We can locate ourselves here. We can find our way, and it is a way, a way that makes sense and has meaning, even if in the particular moment it doesn’t seem that there’s any peace or order in sight.

Because the Passion leads to the Resurrection. Outside this story there is the rising. Not just the hope but the fulfillment of the Hope. J. R. R. Tolkien said that the Gospel was the biggest fairy tale there ever was, not because it isn’t true but because it is true. There’s a catch in the breath when we read a fairy tale or see a version of it on the screen when out of the worst suffering we can think of, at the darkest moment, the hero wins through, somehow the catastrophe is averted, somehow the hero lives and triumphs, is returned to wholeness. We get tears in our eyes. We’re crying in the theater. We hope that no one is looking. But it’s OK. We shouldn’t be embarrassed, because in that instant we are in contact with the truth, we glimpse it, it has touched us. Because in the gospel, in this story of the passion, every story that has ever been told, every turn, every happy ending, is verified and validated and taken up and revealed as absolutely true, the fairy tale as not a fairy tale but a fact. All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well, even now, even here, through the grace and the beauty and the strength and finesse and creativity and silence and courage of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Story and the Author of the Story, the Hero and Plot, the Narrator, the Reader, the Word, the One.

White Swans in a Green Field (homily)

2009-03-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

March 29, 2009
Fifth Sunday of Lent
John 11:1-45

A friend of mine died last month and I had the honor of doing her memorial service, at a bar in Brownsville. I stood by the bar and talked about her life and what she hoped for, trying to project my voice as best I could.

I didn’t raise her from the dead, the way Jesus raises Lazarus in the gospel today. Jesus didn’t raise her from the dead. Not yet. But the honor of her memorial has stayed with me, and the loyalty of her friends, and just the quiet beauty of that moment.

And on the way back from Brownsville, in a field of winter wheat, I saw a whole flock of swans. White swans. Hundreds of them. Nibbling on the green shoots. And it was so beautiful and so striking I actually said aloud, as I was driving, “OK, Lord.” OK. Because it was obvious to me for a moment that even in sadness there is meaning and even in sadness there is life and the thread of hope. I can’t explain it exactly. I can’t translate out what the moment means. But it was a moment and it’s stayed with me and it’s helped me.

*

I’ve been reading a little Teilhard de Chardin over my spring break, the great twentieth century Jesuit paleontologist and theologian, and he talks about how the language of Christianity has to change. It’s become outdated, he thinks, given our new understanding of nature and of the quantum universe. “In fact,” he says, “the best non-believers I know would feel that they were falling short of their moral ideal if they went through the gesture of conversion.” I know non-believers like this, too. I work with them and teach them all the time. Any mention of God, any mention of Jesus, any use of the traditional language of the Church, of the Resurrection and the Life, would just scare them away. As Chardin puts it, “by dint of repeating and developing in the abstract the expression of our dogmas, we are well on the way to losing ourselves in the clouds.” We have to change. “Christ must be born again in a world that has become too different from that in which he lived.”

I know that Lazarus was raised from the dead. I know there were swans in that field. But how can I share that knowledge with people who run from the very mention of the word God? The reality of Christ is unchanging. Christ is completely and absolutely true. But how can we get beyond the limits of the language of the past and the limits of our own language to the energy that endures and the spirit and the truth, the life that runs through our DNA, through all the physical universe, and transcends it?

*

It was also my honor to accompany my friend in the last few months of her life, as she died. She asked me to be there. She conferred on me that honor. So I came and saw her several times a week in the Mennonite home, reading her the Psalms or talking with her, as long as she could talk. It was my first experience with this and what surprised me was how much energy it gave me, how much grace. I looked forward to seeing her.

The night she died her family left me a message at my office on campus, but the next day I left to see her from home. So I didn’t know. I walked down the hall and went into her room. And there was her bed, neatly made up with a quilt. A Bible on the pillow. And for a moment what I felt, oddly, was disappointment. Just disappointment that I couldn’t see her that day and spend time with her.

This is what I mean. This is what I know. How to explain it?

*

Please understand. I’m not saying don’t believe. I’m saying: believe everything.
I’m not saying there aren’t any miracles anymore. I’m saying there are miracles everywhere.

*

Jean Vanier talks about all this, too. Vanier is the contemporary Catholic layman who founded L’Arche, the Ark, a program that creates communities in which people live and work with the developmentally disabled, not just helping them but being helped. “People who are powerless and vulnerable,” he says, “attract what is most beautiful and most luminous in those who are stronger.”

And in another essay Vanier explores the same issue that Chardin is exploring, the same question that I’m trying to ask:

"I can really understand atheists [he says]. I can really understand people who proclaim that they do not believe in God because what they are saying is that they do not believe in false gods. They do not believe in a romantic God that just blesses human beings by making them rich. They do not believe in a God who is going to punish them. Some atheists, who refuse to believe in these false gods, have a deep sense of the human heart and a deep sense of human reality."

Whenever we read the Bible we have the challenge of embracing the God of mystery and complexity or of falling back on some convenient image that will either be easy to reject or that will give us some easy comfort. What does it mean to us now that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead? What did John want us to believe?

I’m really sure that he didn’t want us to believe that Jesus was a superhero or a magician. He could have been, of course. He could have been anything. But what would that mean? What difference would that make? I’m really sure that John didn’t want us to walk around thinking that nothing will ever hurt us and that we don’t have to do the hard and joyous work of living everyday as fully and honestly as we can.

I think he was talking about our tombs. I think he was calling us to free ourselves from what binds us--from all our false notions, all our easy answers--and to break out of the tombs of our lack of imagination, our lack of subtlety, our lack of spontaneity and trust and hope. “Those who do not believe in God,” Vanier says, “have not met the true God, and the true God I believe deeply has been revealed to us by Jesus, who comes to undermine all the fortresses built on fear. Jesus comes to touch our hearts in the deepest cravings of our being.”

What is it we crave? What is it we fear?

*

Or a final image.

Deacons are not allowed to do the anointing of the sick, but once with my friend I did something kind of similar. I bought some essential oil from a health food store, some concentrated scent of rose, and put a little on her hands. It was very strong. It filled the room. In fact, at first I thought I’d made a mistake, I thought I’d never get it off my own hands and my clothes. But then, back at OSU, as I answered my emails and taught my classes, I realized what the gift was. That she was with me. I was carrying her with me.

And the white swans in the green field. And the friends at the bar. And spring. Just spring, and the birds coming back, and the daffodils and the tulips.

This is what I mean.

Who says there aren’t any burning bushes anymore? Who says?

Who says we don’t rise from the dead?

183 Questions (homily)

2009-03-13T06:34:00.000-07:00

183 Questions
March 13, 2009

Like Joseph and his brothers, we are entering into lean times. Into a kind of famine. When the other night Manolete gathered together everyone who is worried about the economic crisis, I could really feel the anxiety in the room.

And it would be nice in times like this to have someone like Joseph to figure things out, someone clever. You can see why the ancient Jews would have loved this story, deep into the Exile, because Joseph triumphs in the end, with his brain. He’s a problem-solver and a manager, kind of like Warren Buffett and Barak Obama rolled into one.

But I think there’s something deeper here, in the scriptures and in our lives. I think that maybe the famine is the point. I think that maybe the economic crisis is giving us an opportunity to fast in a way that we should have been fasting all along. I think it’s only when our defenses our down that God can get in, only when we are emptied out that we can be filled, with the right things and the good things. I think there’s a mystery here and there’s always a mystery here, not something we can solve or control.

Did you know that Jesus is asked something like 183 questions in the Gospels, directly or indirectly? And do you know how many he answers? 3.

I get this statistic from the Franciscan writer Richard Rohr and I just love it. I think it’s fantastic, and I love, too, what Rohr says about it, how he follows it up: “Jesus’s idea of church [Rohr says] is not about giving people answers but, in fact, leading them into threshold and dark spaces, where they will long and yearn for God, for wisdom and for their own souls. This is itself--and always has been--the only answer.”

As Christians we are people of joy and people of hope, whatever happens, because at our best our lives are grounded in faith. We can feel the grace of the Lord always flowing into us.

But first we have to get to this point, we have to arrive at this place, and that means giving up and letting go, and I think that most of us can’t do that on our own, we can’t choose that, we have to have life flatten us and stymie us and show us again and again that at least on this superficial, material level, none of us matter or stay on top for very long. Then we can cry out. Then we can yearn. Then: the joy.

A second quote I’ve been thinking of, a second passage. It helps me grapple with the other question here, which is what can I do for others in this crisis? As a deacon, as a person? Problem-solve, yes. Bring all our resources to bear. Coordinate things. And some of us have that charism, to use Father Mike’s terms, from the parish mission, the charism of administration and of helping. But there are other charisms, too, and in this quote from the Catholic writer Henri Nouwen, we are called to one of them. To just listening. To just being there.

‘When we honestly ask which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, makes it clear that whatever happens in the external word, being present to each other is what really matters.”

Jesus only answers three questions because this is the kind of friend he is, the kind who listens, who tolerates not knowing and wants us to be able to tolerate it, too, wants to get us there, to that place, who wants us to know that presence is what really matters, none of this other stuff, that the internal world matters far more than the external. And he’s calling us to be this kind of friend now, to each other, whatever else we do, whatever happens over the next few years. We have to turn and face it. We have to turn and face each other.

And we have to believe, and we do. Jesus is listening. He is being silent with us. He is staying with us in our hour of grief. He isn’t giving us solutions but something far greater, his gentle and his tender hand.

Misery, Miniskirts, and Games of Solitaire (homily)

2009-02-07T15:24:00.000-08:00

February 8, 2009
World Marriage Sunday
Job, Mark

The other day I talked with a woman who is worried about her daughter. She’s had a lot of trouble and heartache, the daughter has, and now that she’s in college, the mother told me, she’s really angry at God and at the Church, really doubting. She’s not at all religious, the mother said.

But I think that’s wrong. Anger and doubt are religious emotions, too, not just peace and joy. “Is not our life on earth a drudgery,” Job asks. Is it not all “misery”? And this is in the Bible. This is lament, one of the great literary forms in the scriptures, and it’s absolutely fine. There are reasons for it. Two thirds of the psalms are psalms of lament, of sadness, of doubt--My God, my God, why have you forsaken me--and who can blame the psalmist, given the way life often is? Who can blame the daughter?

It’s OK. Let it all out. God can take it.

*

I think about this because it’s World Marriage Sunday, and I think this is one of the holy things that marriage teaches us. It teaches us misery.

Last week there was a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that said that being a virgin is better than being married because virgins worry less than married people. Taken out of context I think that really gives the wrong idea, too, partly because worry is a good thing. Worry is part of what the Incarnation is all about.

The Incarnation, Avery Dulles says, the coming of Christ into the world, “does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of the heavens. Rather it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.”

Jesus walks right into the house of Peter’s mother in law, and there are dishes everywhere and stacks of newspapers. The TV is blaring. This is a woman who’s been sick, after all. Under the weather. But Jesus doesn’t disdain her. He doesn’t think he’s too good for all that ambiguity and reality. No. He takes her by the hand and he heals her, and then they all have dinner together, the men and the women together, not apart. They laugh and they talk as evening comes and the shadows fall.

I think this is what’s sacramental about marriage, that it plunges us into the real, deep into the heart of the planet and deep into our own hearts, where there’s not just misery and worry, of course, but also laughter and joy. It’s all of it mixed up together.

“We are sometimes so busy being good angels that we neglect to be good men and women,” St. Francis De Sales says. We’re imperfect and we always will be--“our imperfections are going to accompany us to the grave”--and we simply have to accept that. We should keep trying to reform, of course. We should keep trying to improve. We just have to stop thinking that we’ll ever succeed. “Dear imperfections,” De Sales says. “They force us to acknowledge our misery, they give us practice in humility.”

*

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not really talking about misery here, not in the sense of real cruelty or abuse or neglect. Those are entirely different things. We don’t have to suffer these things, and we shouldn’t.

And in a reasonable marriage, in a compassionate marriage, all the mushy stuff is true, too, the romantic stuff. Just off and on. Sometimes when I look at Barb I get the same feeling I got when I first saw her, in the band, in that yellow miniskirt I always talk about. Sometimes I just have to be with her. Most of the time. Just be with her in a room.

So all that is true, all those feelings are still there.

I’m just saying that there are other feelings, too, and that finally it’s not about feelings anyway. It’s about the day. It’s about that particular day and its challenges and its work. The routine. The commitments. Being faithful to the real.

*

The other thing that really strikes me in the gospel today is what always strikes me in this gospel, that Jesus gets up early in the morning and goes off to pray, and I think that this has a lot to do with marriage, too.

When I was a young husband I expected Barb to feel the way I did, at the moment I felt it. I thought we were supposed to like the same things and do the same things. Maybe this is a guy thing. I felt threatened when Barb wanted to be by herself and guilty when I did.

But if there’s anything I’ve learned in 33 years of marriage it’s that Barb and I are different and that that’s OK. Barb likes to travel. I don’t. Barb likes to play solitaire on the computer. I’ve always thought that was kind of strange, kind of sad. When Barb gets mad, she doesn’t talk. She goes silent running. When I get mad I explode--I get in touch with my feelings, and so does everyone else.

But all of that is fine. It’s OK.

What’s most holy and sacramental about marriage is that it teaches us difference, it teaches us otherness, it teaches us to accept the mystery of the human person, especially the mystery of one who is not us.

As the German poet Rilke puts it, “in marriage, we protect each other’s solitude.”

Maybe I’m just talking to the men here, I’m not sure, but husbands, give your wives some time alone. Give them the gift of distance from you, to pray or think or do whatever they want to do. Because it’s not about us finally. It’s about God and about the love that comes from God, and unless our wives can make contact with that love, unless they can open themselves up to it, their love for us will never be enough. Because it never is. We can’t save our wives, and they can’t save us. Only God can.

And husbands, we have to make time for ourselves. Alone. On the mountain. And for the same reasons.

There’s an ebb and a flow here that I think is itself holy and good, that exactly mirrors the life of Jesus, from the chaos of the household to the quiet of prayer, from the shock of the real to the peace of the Lord, back and a forth, day to day.

What husbands and wives teach each other every day is that they are not God. They are not the center of the universe. And this is a good thing. This is the source of our joy. Because it’s only when we accept this, only when we humble ourselves before the fact of this, that we are really free. It’s only when we accept this that we can really love the other, really love, not dominate and use. It’s only when we accept this that marriage begins to make sense, the misery and the miniskirts and the games of solitaire, that everything, all of it, becomes sacramental.

Sam! Dean! Dad! (a homily)

2009-02-01T13:13:00.001-08:00

February 1, 2009
Ordinary Time
Mark

All week I’ve been thinking about demons. The demons we all have.

It’s not like demons are just these weird beings that existed long ago when Jesus was on the earth. Jesus is on the earth now, and we are, too, and we’ve got all kinds of demons inside of us.
*

There’s the demon of self-doubt--the voice that says you’re no good, you’re ugly, you’re dumb.

There’s the demon of anxiety--the voice that says nothing is safe, everything is falling apart.
*

Sam and Dean Winchester can kill demons with rock salt and spells. They can tell who the demons are, because the eyes of the demons at some point go black.

Do you ever watch that show? Supernatural?

It’s not like that. That’s too easy.

There’s the demon of lust, there’s the demon of gluttony, there’s the demon of greed, there’s the demon that says what the hell, do it. You know it’s wrong, you know it’s going to hurt you, and others, but you do it anyway.

All these demons, and they’re in us. They’re in us, and yet they’re not us. Somehow they’re separate, too, apart, because underneath is the real self, the self made in the image and likeness of God.

Hasn’t this happened to you? You get all worked up, you get frantic--I’m beside myself, we say--and then something happens and the fever breaks and suddenly you come back to who you really are.
*

Bikram Choudhury is the creator of a kind of Hatha Yoga that’s very popular in this country, a kind of yoga that’s sometimes called “Hot Yoga.” In a new book about this he says something that I think is really true.

Why is it so hard to do the right thing? “Why is it so hard to get off our fat, lazy butts”--this is Bikram’s language--“and go to yoga class?”

The power of negative attraction.

Negative attitudes are like black holes, Bikram says, so powerful they swallow everything. Negative attitudes are nine times stronger than the gravitational pull of the positive, he says.

Overeating, overdrinking, not exercising--all the negative attractions: nine times more powerful.
*

Of course, this is sin and evil understood as coming from the outside, as a force working on us. But in one way at least I don’t think that matters. The point is the same.

“I presuppose,” St. Ignatius says in The Spiritual Exercises, “that there are three kinds of thoughts in me: that is, one my own, which springs from my mere liberty and will; and two others, which come from without, one from the good spirit, and the other from the bad.”

The key is to know the difference. God moves in us, but so do other things, and we have to learn how to tell which is which. And we always can, finally. We always can, even though evil is sometimes very subtle.
*

The demons in the gospel always know who Jesus is. They know and they resist, and we do, too.

We know that many of our actions are wrong. Let’s not kid ourselves. We know. That’s why we don’t want to be around Jesus. That’s why we fear him.

We don’t want to change.
*

Finally it doesn’t matter whether these demons are external or internal. Finally it doesn’t matter whether this is merely a psychological phenomenon or something else, too. These are forces, and they are at work, and they are at work in us, pulling us down, and we need Jesus to rebuke them.

Quiet! Come out of him! Quiet! Come out of her!

Sure they are powerful, sure they are strong, these spirits or influences or whatever we want to call them, but Jesus says, and the Church says, that we have minds, too, and will, and that we can take the first step of admitting that we are possessed and that we have allowed ourselves to be possessed. We can confess our sins and ask for God’s saving grace, and it will always come.

I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned again you, oh Lord, whom I should love above all things.

In the quiet afterwards, we look around and see who we really are.
*

A final caution--a caution about this paradox, of the inside and the outside.

There’s no doubt that evil is a force in our culture and that we have to resist it. It’s also exterior. Of course. There is evil in the world.

But we have to careful. There’s always the danger that we will project our own sinfulness onto an object or person, that we will allow ourselves to judge or to hate other people, and that in hating and resisting these others we won’t pay attention to our own sinfulness.

“Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone,” Anthony DeMello says, “you’re living in an illusion. There’s something seriously wrong with you. You’re not seeing reality.”

Be careful of your causes. Be careful of your campaigns. Be careful of praying for the conversion of others.

Because there’s a demon here, too, the subtlest and most dangerous of all.

It’s the demon that doesn’t want us to look inside.

It’s the demon that doesn’t really want us to change.

Four in the Afternoon (homily)

2009-01-17T15:15:00.000-08:00

January 18, 2009
Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 3:3-19, 1 Corinthians 6:13-20, and John 1:35-42

What strikes me most in the gospel today is the sentence, “It was about four in the afternoon.” I don’t know. That time of day probably has some kind of symbolic meaning in the story, but what strikes me as I read it is just how ordinary it sounds. How random. Particular.

It was four in the afternoon.

Four in the afternoon is the hardest time of the day for me. It’s when I start snapping and snacking. My blood sugar is low then and that makes me cranky. My mind shuts down. And I’m hungry, too, and I just starting roaming around the kitchen stuffing things into my mouth. Whatever I can find.

We act like we don’t have bodies, but we do. We act like the body doesn’t matter, but it does. We act like it’s wrong to get hung up on little rules and sins. But it’s the little things that are the most dangerous, exactly because they’re little. They creep in and start to infect us, from the inside, like computer viruses. We are people with bodies, bodies in time, and the body is Christ’s, who is also in time, the body is sacred, and we have minds, too, and will, and we can just exert a little self control in those cranky times and those binging times when we do things we know we shouldn’t.

An Episcopalian friend of mine recently gave me a copy of a really lovely daily prayer, and the middle part of it puts this sweetly and beautifully: “In particular I will try to be faithful in those habits of prayer, work, study, physical exercise, eating, and sleep which I believe the Holy Spirit has shown to be right. And as I cannot in my own strength do this, nor even with a hope of success attempt it, I look to thee, O Lord God my Father, in Jesus my Savior, and ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit.” No, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over the little things, but neither should we let ourselves off the hook.

It’s interesting that Samuel is sleeping when the Lord calls him, so in the morning, I guess, when the mind and the body are open and susceptible, as is often the case in the scriptures--that the Lord comes in a dream, on the edge, in the darkness or the half darkness. God is always calling us, all of us, and it’s our bodies that are the receivers, our senses. He comes not in general and not in the abstract but in time, at particular moments, and that’s where are bodies are, too. So we have to tune them, clarify them. Our eyes. Our ears. This is exactly what I think John the Baptist is calling us to. “Behold,” he says. Pay attention. Think of how many people watched Jesus walk by and didn’t know, didn’t notice. The disciples apparently wouldn’t have known. They needed John as their mentor, to point Jesus out, as Samuel needed Eli, needed a mentor, to interpret for him the meaning of his own experience. And John is a model of that kind of seer, entirely clarified, there in the wilderness, his vision cleansed. He is present in his body and present in the moment and so when the Lord comes he can see him. Behold!

It’s not: Think. Argue. Debate. Read. Analyze. It’s behold. It’s go and see. It’s go spend a day with this man, this Jesus. We’re hiring somebody in the English Department right now. I just spent a week picking people up at the airport and taking them out to dinner. Vitas are fine, and writing samples are fine, but finally you’ve got to see the expressions on faces and hear the tenor of voices. Because it’s only when we spend time with people like this, are just in their presence, that somehow, in our bodies, we know. If this is true for a job candidate, how much truer for Jesus. A thousand times truer.

So time and the body. The moment. Recently I was visiting an elderly woman in the hospital. She has an inoperable brain tumor and doesn’t have long to live. She’s a writer, and she’s always been driven, but now, as she faces death, she’s becoming aware that only the moment matters. All we have is the moment, she told me. This moment. When I went to see her the other day in the nursing home, she was fast asleep, her gray hair fanned out around her face. She looked just like a little girl again.

Time and the body. The moment. And pattern. I guess that’s the other thing that strikes me today in the readings and that speaks to my own experience as a believer and someone who struggles to believe. Patterns and the Pattern. Because to discern the will of God in our lives is to keep track of what repeats itself. To know what God wills for us is to stay open and ready and to note how over time the same thing keeps happening, in the same way. That’s the sign. It’s not the first time that Samuel hears the Lord calling him, or the second, or even the third. It’s the fourth. The fourth.

Four in the morning and the fourth. I keep hearing people say that only the moment matters. I keep seeing people who are dying and how they face their death. I keep being humbled. I keep reading the scriptures and seeing patterns there, too, the Great Pattern, the Pattern that helps me interpret all these things that are happening to me, and it’s the pattern of dying to live, of surrendering, of dropping everything and following Jesus, of forgetting what I’m doing, tearing myself away from it, letting it go, and spending the day instead in the presence of Jesus, in the presence of the beautiful and the precious and the real.

At the end of every day think about what you’ve experienced, the good and the bad, the light and the dark. Consult your feelings, again and again. Over time the pattern will emerge. Follow the light. Every day, in your body, follow the light.

There’s another beautiful prayer I came across again the other day, from the great 20th century Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, and I want to end just by sharing it. I just want to give it to you, because it takes all these little meditations and brings them together, relates them, offers them up.

Lord Jesus Christ, let me know your will, your will for me, your will here and now, at this moment of my life. I know, O Lord, that I am forever trying to fashion your will according to my own wishes. I know the thousand tricks of argument my sinful heart uses, bargaining and haggling with my conscience until it gives in and only dictates what I want and what I like doing. Free me from my preconceived and false ideas of my life. Enlighten me. Give me the courage to be prepared for the unexpected demands you may make on me, the courage to justify your confidence in me, even in the things for which I think my strength is insufficient, the courage to believe that your strength is in my weakness and then to ask your will. Give me the moderation of the true and honest servant who knows that a small deed in your service counts more than a great rush of emotion and thousand enthusiastic intentions. You can do with me what you will, O Lord. You can hide your treasure in earthen vessels, you can hide the wonders of your overflowing grace in the mediocre and ordinary life of any person. But do not permit me to use this truth as a pretext behind which my heart can hide its cowardice, laziness, and mediocrity. This is never your will. Show me your will. Give me strength as a good and faithful servant to recognize your will and to fulfill it always.

The Gift of Poverty (homily)

2008-12-28T14:22:00.000-08:00

Holy Family

It’s worth remembering on this Feast of the Holy Family that the Holy Family was a poor family, very poor, and a family living under tremendous stresses and fears. And I think it’s possible that this is the point: not that they were holy in spite of this poverty but because of it.

Behind the readings for today I’ve been hearing a passage from Paul’s first letter to Timothy about the dangers of wealth. “We brought nothing into the world,” Paul tells us, and “we can take nothing out of it,” and that’s a good thing. Poverty is a good thing--not poverty in the sense of hunger and want so extreme that we lose our dignity and our selves. We have to have food and clothing, Paul says. But as long as we do, as long as our basic needs are met, “let us be content,” let us stop striving for more, for “people who long to be rich are prey to temptation, they get trapped into all sorts of foolish and dangerous ambitions,” and of course Paul isn’t just talking here about the desire for material wealth but the desire for anything false, for admiration, or approval, or prestige.

This is the kind of poverty we should strive for, a poverty of spirit, as Matthew puts it in the first Beatitude. Blessed are the poor in spirit--blessed, that is, are the humble-- because they haven’t allowed themselves to get caught up in all the wrong things.

*

Again I wonder about the spiritual value of the economic crisis in our country now and our world. I don’t mean that God intended this to happen exactly or is punishing us or is bringing about the end times, but I do mean that God speaks to us through our lives, in everything that is happening, and this is what’s happening to us now, this economic disaster, this shrinkage, this threat, and it’s happening to us as families this season, this season when the consumer culture is as always trying to trick and deceive us.

What we can we learn from the Holy Family? What did they do when they were driven from their homeland, when the innocents were slaughtered, when their world was torn apart? We know, for one thing, that they observed “all the prescriptions of the law.” They stayed in the community, they obeyed all the customs, they prayed. Tradition pulls all kinds of pious and sentimental images of the Holy Family from the few hints about them in the scriptures, but I don’t think those pious images are far off. I think the Holy Family was holy, was remarkable, because they were focused on what in their poverty they had to focus on: on each other and on God.

*

In 1883, in England, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes a letter to his beloved sister Grace trying to comfort her in her grief. Her fiancé has just died, the man she loves above all others, and Hopkins says this to her, of all things: blessed are they who mourn. Blessed are you, Grace, for in mourning we are all brought closer to God. In Liverpool, where he serves as a parish priest among the unbelievable slums, Hopkins puts this idea in a homily. Why, he asks, does God permit terrible things to happen? “Because if we were not forced from time to time to feel our need of God and our dependence on him, we should most of us cease to pray to him.”

This is what the Holy Family knows and feels. Hopkins is a Jesuit, and has made the radical choice, and as harsh as it sounds, he knows it too: that it’s only through our struggling that we are led to joy, because it’s only through our struggling that we can ever come to terms with our radical dependency on God. “God is for us a refuge and strength,” the Psalmist says: “a helper close at hand, in time of distress, / so we shall not fear though the earth should rock, / though the mountains fall into the depths of the sea.” Even then, and therefore especially then: we know there is God, and only God.

I know families torn apart by alcoholism. I know families torn apart by sexual abuse. I know families torn apart by bankruptcy. What did we think, that we would be the only people on earth immune from suffering? That we out of all of the people who have ever lived would not be pierced by the sword that pierces Mary, too, and Joseph, and every other mother and every other father in history up to the present moment? We all have to watch our children suffer: in love or in work or in simply growing up.

Look at Abraham, wandering in the desert. He is supposed to be the father of the nations, but where is he? He is nowhere. He is 99 years old, Sarah is 99 years old, and they are childless, they are living with absence, they are living with impossibility, in the darkness. And it’s exactly here and exactly now that the promise is made again. At just this moment. Abraham, come out and look at the darkness. Look up at the sky.

What did we think, that our jobs define us? Our professions? Our careers? So when we lose our jobs, we lose our selves? We are no longer loved by God?

*

I don’t think it’s an accident that Christmas comes in the darkest time of the year. Partly this is because Christianity took over a pagan ritual for the solstice, but there’s wisdom and grace in this, and in the season. The world is teaching us. The world gets darker and darker, the nights longer and longer, and there’s nothing we can do about it. The planet is going to spin whether we like it or not. We have no control over any of this finally, and that’s the source of the joy that finally comes. We’re free.

It’s the night sky that God shows to Abraham. It’s all the stars. It’s the way the stars make us feel both insignificant and ennobled, both at the same time, crushed and raised up.

So let us take every opportunity that comes to us this season to conform ourselves to the pattern of the stars. To the pattern of loss and of gain. To the pattern of the cross. Let us pray as St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, invites us all to pray, to our Holy Mother, that she will intercede for us that we might receive the gift of total dependency on her son; that we be so detached from all things that we can put all our talents and possessions and achievements at the service of Christ; and even in the end, if it be not sinful, if it be God’s wish for us, that we might be given the courage and the strength to endure the very poverty of the son. Even this. As gift. A poverty.

And we pray for this in hope. We pray for this out of our deepest desire. For the days now are getting longer. Every day they are getting longer. For there’s not just darkness, there’s light. There’s not just desolation, there’s consolation. There’s never one without the other, ever, and that, too, is the source of our joy, even if we have to wait for it, even if all our lives are a kind of advent, a kind of waiting. There is always joy, too. Because He has come and He is here. The light in the darkness. The freedom that comes from surrendering, and only from surrendering.

The Lord of all become a Little Child. A helpless little child. A human being.

So may we all become little children. So may we all become human beings.

The Thing About Purgatory (homily)

2008-11-03T07:31:00.001-08:00

November 2nd, 2008
All Souls
John 6:37-40

Purgatory is one of those strange Catholic ideas that most people don’t get and that even most Catholics don’t get. The idea developed over centuries, was for a time very important to Catholics, and since Vatican II has been de-emphasized. I never heard a thing about it in seminary when I was studying to be a deacon. There’s only one page about it in the 700 pages of The Catechism.

And yet tonight, on the feast of All Souls, when we pray for our beloved dead, it’s good to think about the idea of Purgatory and how useful it is, and encouraging, and instructive.

I think it teaches us five very important lessons.

Lesson One: Don’t be Over-specific.

The Muslims believe in Purgatory, too, and imagined it, in the Middle Ages, as a mountain that rises out of the ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. The great Catholic poet Dante borrowed this idea in his Divine Comedy, picturing Purgatory as a seven-story mountain. He describes it in great detail, right down to the plants and the rocks, and he thinks of it as a joyous place. People are glad to suffer for a higher end. They’re always singing.

But Dante was a poet and he was making things up and he expected all of his readers to know that he was making things up. In the few paragraphs it devotes to Purgatory, and to Heaven and Hell, The Catechism doesn’t give us any details. It doesn’t talk about devils with pitchforks or angels with wings. There’s nothing about boiling in pitch or floating on clouds. As in every other central dogma in the Church, there’s a wonderful open-endedness in what the Church teaches, and that’s because the truths that dogma attempts to describe are mysteries. We can’t know the details.

And that leads to the second lesson: Don’t be Literal.

For one thing, Purgatory isn’t in the Bible, and that’s OK. There are a few hints about it here and there, but nothing specific. The idea of Purgatory is the result of the Church’s long reflection on the nature and identity of God, it comes from philosophy and theology, and that, too, we believe, is the source of revelation. Scripture is one source of revelation, but so is tradition, and thinking, and the ongoing life of the people of faith.

For another thing, in these general paragraphs about the afterlife in the Catechism, what the Church stresses is the idea of relationship with God. Heaven is to be in communion with God, hell is to be out of communion with God. They’re not really places exactly. We can’t imagine them in human terms. Purgatory is the same way. Pope John Paul suggested that maybe Purgatory is something that happens to us instantaneously in the moment of death, but in any event, he said, “purgatory does not indicate a place, but a condition of existence.”

This is really important, in all our thinking about faith. We have to keep from believing that our images for God are really God. They’re not. “The mystery of blessed communion with God,” The Catechism says of heaven, “is beyond all understanding and description.” God isn’t a Democrat and he isn’t a Republican and he’s not even Catholic, and the place where He dwells isn’t really a place and he’s not really dwelling there, and he’s not necessarily a he or a she anyway, because dwelling and place and he and she are human metaphors, not divine realities.

Lesson Three: Don’t Just Think About the Afterlife but About This Life.

The Church’s teaching about Heaven and Hell and Purgatory is meant to assure us that life continues after death, but it’s also, the Catechism says, “an urgent call to conversion.” We create hell on earth when we sin. We create it for others and for ourselves. Just look around at the poverty and the hunger and the suffering in the world. But we can create heaven, too, or glimpses of it, if we act for justice. Thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven, we pray in the Our Father, using the image of heaven as a model for the kind of world we should strive to bring about in the meantime.

Lesson Four: Choice. Freedom.

The Catechism assures us that “God predestines no one to go to hell,” that God wishes no one to perish. “I will not reject anyone who comes to me,” Jesus says in the Gospel today, and this is the key, the center, what so many people don’t understand and so fear. God doesn’t put anyone in hell. We put ourselves there. Jesus doesn’t reject anyone. Anyone. All we have to do is come to him, of our own free will, and we will be saved in the end.

I’m sorry to keep quoting the Catechism, but this is really important, and I want to take this chance to say it and stress it and for you to know that it has the authority of the Church. For any of us to go to hell, The Catechism says, “a willful turning away from God is necessary, and persistence in it until the end.” We can’t go to hell on a loophole. We don’t have to be perfect to get to heaven. God wants all of us, all of us, without limit, without quotas, exactly as we are. All we have to do is to turn even a little bit in his direction. All we have to do is to take the slightest breath, make the smallest move.

And that leads to the final lesson: Lesson Five: The Infinite Mercy of God.

OK. So we believe that God loves us and that we have only to choose. But we also know that none of us are perfect, and that we all make mistakes, and that we won’t be perfect the moment we die, at least most of us. We won’t be ready. So what happens? Purgatory is the Church’s answer. Purgatory is the result of the Church’s long thinking about this. Purgatory is the Church’s way of following out the infinite logic of God’s infinite mercy. If we’re not perfect at the end of our lives, but God’s mercy is perfect, there must be a way--however mysterious, however much it exceeds our human understanding of time and place--there must be a way for us to purify ourselves after death, to get ready, to keep going, to keep following the path. Purgatory is the Church’s term for describing this way. It’s like we get to go to a divine aerobics class, to work off the weight of our sin. It’s like we get to go to a divine therapist and keep unraveling our neuroses, even after we die.

And whoever is willing to do this, is in. Whoever is willing to do this, gets to heaven.

But of course, these, too, are just metaphors, my metaphors, and they are metaphors for a love we can never understand but only believe in. The key is that love. The key is to not be afraid. The key is to rejoice. The Church isn’t a courtroom and God isn’t a judge. The Church isn’t a machine and we’re not the faulty circuits.

But wait. Metaphors again. Only metaphors. In God is the reality. God is reality. And that reality is love: not anger, not nothingness, not rigid, silly rules. Love.

That’s what Purgatory is about.

The Lens (homily)

2008-10-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

October 26, 2008
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Exodus 22:0-26; and Matthew 22:34-40

The reading from Exodus today is from something called “the Covenant Code,” a long list of rules that Moses brings down from the mountain. It’s not just the Ten Commandments that are etched on those tablets. The Ten Commandments are part of a larger code of conduct, hundreds and hundreds of laws and restrictions.

Those must have been really big tablets.

The excerpt for today still rings true to us, I think, because the emphasis is on charity and compassion--though I think some of us have forgotten the part about not oppressing the aliens in our land.

But the Covenant Code also includes a lot of other things, things that we don’t hear at mass and don’t want displayed in our courthouses or schools, in Alabama or anywhere else. Here’s one, for example, just a few verses before today’s excerpt: “When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.” In the Civil War the Confederacy used this verse and others like it to say that slavery was OK. But we don’t believe that, not anymore, and we don’t think the Bible does, not down deep.

The Spirit of God shines through the distortions of human history and culture, and our job as readers is not to mix these things up, not to mistake the divine for the human.

The early Church solved this problem really well. There are parts of the Bible, it said, that are problematic--obscure or contradictory or violent. There are other parts, though, that are crystal clear, that are unmistakable, and the thing to do is to use these clear parts to figure out the rest.

And the clearest passage of all is our gospel reading for today.

Jesus doesn’t answer the scholar by saying everything is equally important. He doesn’t say: it’s all or nothing, take it or leave it. He interprets. He prioritizes, first quoting the Shema, from Deuteronomy, about loving God, and then quoting from Leviticus about loving our neighbor and our selves. This is all that really matters, he’s saying. He’s saying: don’t get so busy keeping score that you forget to play the game.

And so, the Church says, let’s play the game. Let’s take this passage and make it the basis of the way we read all the rest of the Bible. As Augustine first put it, in a commentary on these verses way back in the fourth century: “any interpretation of scripture that’s contrary to love is false and in error.” This is the key. The screen. The lens. If we read a passage of the Bible in a way that leads us to fear or to hate, we are a wrong. If we read a passage of the Bible in a way that leads us to judge and exclude and condemn, we are wrong.

Any interpretation that’s contrary to love of God or of neighbor is false and in error.

And not just of the Bible, but of our lives.

Let’s all take a minute to think back on this week and on how often we’ve judged other people: on the basis of appearance, or of some minor flaw in their behavior, or of some little tic in their speech. Let’s think back on how often we’ve let ourselves get caught up in little details at work or at home, obsessed with things that don’t really matter.

That’s certainly true of me, I’m afraid. The things I blow up at are always the silly things. The ridiculous things. I always realize that afterwards, when I’m apologizing.

Or let’s think about our greed. Let’s think about the sin of avarice. Because avarice, too, after all, is a matter of losing sight of what’s most important.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about our financial crisis and about the greed of our financial institutions. But what about our own greed? What about our own desire for what doesn’t really satisfy, for that which is not only beyond our means but not really necessary to begin with? How much of our financial problems might have been avoided if we’d all paid more attention to this single commandment of our Lord Jesus Christ, if instead of straining to buy, we sought to love, if instead of striving to succeed, we made an effort to serve--to be, to live in the moment?

Last week I talked with a wife and mother whose husband is in danger of losing his job. I was worried about her and her family, but she was the one who reassured me. “God loves us” she said, and I could tell she really meant it. She wasn’t being falsely pious. She wasn’t being naïve. “If we’re together, that’s all that matters,” she said. “If we have a roof over our heads and food on the table, we’ll get by.”

I think this man is lucky to have this woman as his wife, and I was lucky to run into her in the parking lot.

Because the greatest commandment isn’t just a reason to examine our conscience, and it’s not just an interpretative key. It’s the basis of our hope, of the joy that sustains us, no matter what else happens. It’s not just a commandment to love but a promise that love is always there, always flowing into us, from God.

And if that’s true, if that’s really true, what can finally frighten us? What can ever really rob us of our peace?

There’s a lot to scare us in the news these days. We’re in for hard times, everybody says, in Corvallis and everywhere else, and there’s no use denying it. As Christians we are called to face reality and we are called to sacrifice.

And in fact, maybe that’s how God is working through this crisis. Maybe the crisis is a call to a poverty that we should have embraced a long time ago. Maybe the crisis is a call to return to the Gospel, to store up our treasure where it really belongs, not in what molds and decays and fades away.

But there’s a deeper call here, too, and that’s the call to joy, to a deep and sustaining joy, to a faith in what’s central, and a faith in what’s true, and a faith in what’s underneath everything that happens to us: a faith in the Alpha and the Omega, in the Word, in the Spirit. In the Way, the Truth, and Life.

This is the other side of the Great Commandment: the Great Reassurance.

Seek first the kingdom, and all else shall come. Because all else won’t finally matter. It won’t matter at all.

Furniture (homily)

2008-08-31T13:35:00.003-07:00

Twenty Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 21:28-32

I really like all this renovation that’s going on. I really like how the Church looks now. Everything is being stripped away. We’re getting down to the foundations, to the actual ground.

And the Eucharist is still the Eucharist. The mass is still the mass.

Last year at this time, over in the Newman Chapel on Monroe, we had the chairs arranged in a circle around a new central altar. But after a while some of the students wanted the chapel to be arranged in what they called the “traditional” arrangement. So they put the chairs into straight rows again, facing the tabernacle.

And that’s OK. That’s fine. I think this longing for the past is really a longing for God, a deep and sincere longing, and that’s wonderful. We just have to sure that we know what we mean by “tradition.” 1950 or 150? We just have to be sure that we don’t lose sight of what’s underneath.

Fr. Lucas, I know, really stresses this. As he said to me this morning, if it’s stuck in 1950, or any year, it’s not really tradition. Because tradition is living. It’s alive.

Be of one mind, St. Paul tells us today in Philippians, have in you the single heart of Jesus, and that means getting down to the heart of things in the first place, getting down to the foundation, and not letting ourselves be distracted by anything else.
The Eucharist is the Eucharist, even if the chairs are on the ceiling.

There’s this beautiful scene in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ where he imagines Jesus the carpenter joking with his mother about this strange new thing he’s been asked to make. A table. With chairs. Gibson shows Jesus indicating with his hand the height of these new chairs--about waist high--and then he and Mary laughing. Because of course in the time of Jesus people reclined on cushions, around a central low-lying table. There weren’t any chairs like ours.

There weren’t any churches. People met in houses. In caves. In catacombs.

Or let me come at this from the opposite direction.

Most of the couples who ask me to marry them want to get married outside, by a river or in a garden. Almost all of them. And that’s always a problem, because the Church doesn’t approve of outdoor weddings and it takes a lot of time to write the Archbishop and get permission.

I understand why people want to get married on mountains. God is present in the natural world, and the natural world is beautiful, and why should it matter anyway, wherever the wedding takes place? But on the other hand, I understand the Church’s position. Why should it matter?

Recently I asked a couple I was working with, point blank: what’s most important, having a Catholic wedding or getting married outside? And they answered: getting married outside. And that’s OK. I like this couple a lot. I’m glad for their love and I’m glad for their commitment, and I assured them that the Church will be there for them, in the future, whenever they’re really ready.

The question is, in this and in everything, what’s the surface, what’s the depth?

The National Council of Catholic Bishops hasn’t told us who to vote for this election; it’s told us what issues to think about. It hasn’t given us the answers, it’s given us the questions. There are certain underlying principles, the bishops say, in their document on “Faithful Citizenship,” and it’s up to each Catholic to decide which candidates would best apply those principles in the real world. As Archbishop Vlazny wrote in the Catholic Sentinel last month, “it seems clear that no single candidate embraces all the social teachings of our Catholic community,” and so, “just as political leaders must act according to their consciences, so must we in casting our votes.”

This is our own bishop, in communion with the other bishops.

These are complicated issues, in other words, and people of faith can have different opinions about policy. The Eucharist is the Eucharist, the the mass is the mass, and it’s really important, for our country and our faith, that we not mix these things up, that we not mistake politics for religion or religion for politics, however much they inform each other.

One of the men in my class when I was studying to be a deacon was Ron Benz. He was the oldest and I was the youngest, and we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, too, and of the theological spectrum. He’d make comments in class I didn’t like and I’d make comments he didn’t.

But one day Ron invited the deacons and their families to come out to his ranch, outside Scio. You can tell a lot about a person from the pictures on his walls, and you can tell a lot about a person from the way his children act, and his grandchildren, and as the day wore on I realized what a fine and generous man Ron was.

I’d thought Ron was the Pharisee, but he wasn’t. I was.

And this hit me again at Ron’s funeral, where I was one of the pall bearers. Ron died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, a few years later, and despite all my earlier efforts, we were brothers, in the diaconate, and all of us in his class helped to lay his body to rest. I’ll never forget that. I’ll never forget all the tributes people made that day, to Ron’s humanity, to his compassion.

Not long ago I found a picture of the two of us, processing out together after our ordination mass, at the Cathedral. We’re side by side, in our blue and white dalmatics. Ron seems to be saying something and I’m laughing.

We couldn’t have been more different, Ron and I, we were opposites, and yet the archdiocese ordained us anyway. It ordained us both.

And there we are together. Laughing.

When we walk out of mass tonight, let’s stop and look at the hole they’ve dug in the floor, down to the earth.

When we walk out of mass tonight, let’s all of us laugh and tell each other stories. When we go, let’s go in peace. Because that’s what the Lord always gives us, in the Eucharist and in our lives. He gives us peace.

He gives us the peace beyond all understanding. He gives us the joy beyond all politics, the joy beyond all religion, the joy that no one else can ever give us--the joy that can only be found in Our Lord, Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, the Word Made Flesh. Our heart. Our hope. Our one fou

Bargains (homily)

2008-08-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

Twenty Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jeremiah 20:7-9; Romans 12:1-2; Matthew 16:21-27

I think we make bargains with God. And we don’t even know it.

We say sure, I’ll die to myself. I’ll be selfless and humble and accept the suffering that comes to me. For a while. But secretly we’re thinking: and when I do, God will reward me. Sure, I’ll carry my cross. For a while. I’ll go through all that. But deep down, unconsciously, we’re thinking: and God will give me what I want in the end.

Then we get into trouble. Everyone does, sooner or later. We have problems with our health or our family or our job. We’re out of work. Deep in debt. No one knows us. No one respects us. And suddenly we feel “duped,” as Jeremiah feels duped in the Old Testament today. We’ve been tricked.

But no. To “conform” to the cross, in the words of St. Paul, we really have to conform to the cross, and not just in the abstract, and not just for a while.

What do you mean you’re going to die? Peter asks Jesus in the gospel today. He’s feeling duped, too. He’s panicking. No! You’re the one. You’re the one with the power, and if I follow you, I’ll have power, too. Eventually. I’ll be important. I’ll be known.

But no. The cross is the cross, and we have to carry it.

Spiritual directors are taught to see the spiritual life in stages. In the beginning, in the stage of “Conversion,” there are piercing insights and frequent joy. Everything makes sense. We have changed our lives and consolation is raining down on us.

But then, sooner or later, we start to feel bereft and lonely and afraid. Everyone does. Our prayer life falls apart. Our old patterns of sinfulness return, and new ones, too, and we feel powerless to escape them. The Church doesn’t add up anymore. It’s full of hypocrites. It’s medieval. We’ve gone out on this limb by really trying to be Christian, and now all we have is the limb.

But this isn’t a regression, really. This isn’t a falling back or a failure, but the next stage, an even higher or more advanced stage. It’s the stage of what some spiritual directors call “Purification,” where we are purified of our spiritual pride and really opened up to the will of God.

Most of us go back and forth between this and the stage of conversion. We alternate between joy and sorrow, consolation and desolation. But the purification is necessary. We have to get there, because until we do it’s too easy to think that the graces are happening because of how good we are. In desolation or stagnation, as St. John of the Cross puts it, God is “leading us by the hand to the place we know not how to reach.” According to St. John, “it is God who in this stage is the agent: the soul is the receiver.” That’s all we can do when we’re really down like this. Receive.

There was a wise old man who went out into the desert.

I told this story a few months ago, at a daily mass. (It’s a Hindu story--I stole it from a book on yoga.)

There was a wise old man who went out into the desert. He fasted and prayed and fasted and prayed. He was a very holy man, or so he thought. He had given up everything for God. Everyone knew that. Everyone admired him for that.

But one morning he wasn’t looking where he was going and he fell off a cliff. He grabbed a branch on the way down and was just hanging there, for dear life, the river boiling beneath him, hundreds of feet below.

Oh Lord, he cried out. Help me! I trust in you. I believe in you. Help me.

Yes, my son, came the voice of God. I am here.

Oh thank you, said the man. Thank you! Tell me, what should I do?

Let go, God said. Just let go of the branch and fall.

Silence. A few seconds went by. A few more.

Hello? cried the old man. Hello? Is there anybody else out there?

But no. We really have to let go. Because the truth is at the bottom. The truth is in the air.

Or here’s another way to think about this. I got this from a very wise friend of mine. It’s a quote from the ancient Church Father, Irenaeus: It is not you who shaped God. It is God who shapes you. Yes! We keep forgetting this. We get into trouble and we keep thinking that it’s all our fault and all our doing and that every decision is ours. But it isn’t. It’s not you who shaped God, it is God who shapes you. So:

“If then, you are the work of God [Ireneaus says], await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season. Offer him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you. Let the clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers.”

So here’s the question that my wise friend asked: what is God shaping in you right now?

I don’t know where you are in your journey. I don’t know what problems you face, what sadness, what fear. What hope. What joy. But I want to offer all of you this same question. I want to ask you all the same thing. Everything that you’ve been feeling and thinking, everything that has happened to you recently, is in some way part of God’s effort to shape you. Into what? Towards what?

Because there’s another stage in this process, after the stage of purification, a final stage, a still higher stage: the stage of “Transformation.” That’s what the spiritual directors call it, and it’s where we’re all headed. It’s like the stage of Conversion, but better, fuller, higher. It’s the stage of an abiding sense of the presence of God, of ecstatic joy, of the gifts and the fruits of the Spirit, and even if most of us never reach that stage in our lifetimes, even if we only glimpse it, in the end, on this much higher level, the bargain that we think we’re making, we are--just not in the way we imagined it, just not in our own petty terms.

After the cross, there is resurrection. After the darkness, there is light.

What is God shaping us for? You and me and all of us?

What unimaginable task? What impossible joy? What unbearable fullness?

The Buried Life (II)

2008-06-25T07:03:00.003-07:00

July 26, 2008
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
1 Kings 3:5-12; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13:44-52

Last week Barb and I went on vacation. One night at the hotel where we were staying we watched a group of people getting drunk and making fools out of themselves. People about our age, trying to act like they were still teenagers: bragging and joking and hitting on each other. It was sad and depressing.

Yet what the Old Testament tells us today is what the gospel is always telling us, too. We are not to judge. Like Solomon we are to ask for “an understanding heart,” we are to ask for compassion, because underneath the coarseness and the stupidity we might see in others are human beings just like us, vulnerable human beings, loved by God. Only the angels can judge the good from the bad, and only at the end, long from now. The dragnet is huge--it takes everyone in, you and me and the people at the hotel--everyone--and it’s not our job to sort it out. It’s God’s job, and only His.

Besides, it’s not as if I’m in possession of the truth. It’s not as if I know for sure the way things are. The kingdom of God is a treasure buried in a field, and it’s buried deep down. It’s small. It’s hidden. The kingdom of God is a tiny pearl, not a neon sign, not a bumpersticker.

We were traveling last week through the John Day highlands, to see the Fossil Beds. I love that high, clean desert landscape. At the Clarno Unit, near the town of Fossil, we walked down a path where every step we took represented 37,000 years of geologic time. We were walking back into history and prehistory, to when the volcanoes erupted and the desert was a rain forest and there were saber tooth tigers in Oregon. On the bare face of the rocks you could see the clear imprints of sycamore leaves and maple leaves 44 million years old. It was breathtaking.

And it made us feel so small, before the grandeur of life and of change, the grandeur of God. Thomas Condon was a Methodist minister who first discovered the fossil beds, in the 1860s, and for him the evidence there, of vastness and of change, of evolution, was in no way at odds with his faith but deepened and confirmed it. “The hills from which these evidences were taken,” he said, “were made by the same God who made the hills of Judea, and the evidences are as authoritative. The Church has nothing to fear from the uncovering of truth.” The opposition between evolution and faith that we think is necessary is really pretty recent, and it comes from our own smallness, our own lack of humility.

All things work together for the good, the whole creation is moving and groaning, in ways so great and unimaginably vast the effect should be to silence us completely. We come from somewhere, and that somewhere is beyond us.

On another path, in the Blue Basin, we’d come upon exhibits, in the earth: an ancient tortoise, an ancient horse, a pelvis or a skull carefully dug away and exposed. Coming out of the ground. Millions of years old. Treasures, buried in ancient fields. Pearls beyond price.

Like us, too. Like the reality of who we are, buried beneath all the layers of our sin. Our real selves, which only God can expose.

“Our universe is constantly evolving,” Jean Vanier writes. “The old order gives way to a new order and this in its turn crumbles when the next order appears. It is no different in our lives in the movement from birth to death.” Vanier is the contemporary Catholic theologian who founded the L’Arche movement, communities where ordinarily abled and developmentally disabled adults live and pray together. I think that he is a saint.

“Change of one sort [he says] is the essence of life, so there will always be the loneliness and insecurity that come with change. When we refuse to accept that loneliness and insecurity are part of life, when we refuse to accept that they are the price of change, we close the door on many possibilities for ourselves, our lives become lessened, we are less than fully human. If we try to prevent, or ignore, the movement of life, we run the risk of falling into the inevitable depression that we must accompany an impossible goal.”

I think that this is what’s behind the behavior of the people at the hotel, their efforts to look younger and act younger than they really are, their gambling and their drunknessness. The fear of loneliness. The fear of reality. And I know this because it’s true for me. It’s true for all of us. Sin is the refusal to accept the reality of change--the reality of loss--of loss that can give way to gain, to great freedom and joy, if first we surrender our arrogance and our pride.

All things work together for good, all the cycles of geologic time, all the violent changes. There’s an order to all this, a logic and a beauty, and in that order every little thing matters, every little thing counts. The leaves imprinted on the rocks. The bones emerging from the earth.

The thing that’s impossible to believe but that is true is that the God who created this great and unimaginable universe cares for each of us with infinite regard. Each of us individually. We are the treasure, each one of us. We are the pearl. And the lost coin, and the lost sheep. The scriptures are full of this paradox, of vastness and of tenderness somehow connected and combined. We are tiny. We are of infinite value. Both somehow.

“Oh Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. / Before the mountains were brought forth, / or ever you had formed the earth and the world, / you are God.”
This is Psalm 90. “For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, /
or like a watch in the night. / You sweep us away, we are like a dream, / like grass that is renewed in the morning, / and in the evening withers and fades.” And yet how does this beautiful psalm end? With a nonsequitor, in a way. Illogically. But not illogically, from the perspective of faith. It ends by affirming God’s regard for each of us individually, even and especially in our smallness and our vulnerability. “Make us glad,” the Psalmist sings. “Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children.” And “prosper the work of our hands.” And again, repeated, “O prosper the work of our hands.” As if our hands matter, as if our work matters to the God who made all the universe. But it does. Somehow it does.

Loneliness is a part of life. It comes when we move from one stage to another, and we are always moving from one stage to another. But we don’t have to fear it. We don’t have to try to escape it. We don’t have to hide. Because on the other side of this loneliness is a great and unshakeable joy. On the other side of this is the conviction that all things work together for good. Because they do. They do.

Seed (homily)

2008-06-25T07:03:00.002-07:00

July 12, 2008
Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Matthew 13:1-23

This summer one of my students came to see me, a young woman who is fighting with her boyfriend about religion. I’ve talked about students like this before and now here’s another one. It’s an epidemic.

The student and the boyfriend are of different faiths and the boyfriend doesn’t think they should be. He thinks they should be of one faith. His. He thinks that everything has to be nailed down before they get married and that he’s got the one right answer. He’s always hammering away at this young woman. Sometimes he makes fun of her.

I just don’t think that love is like this. I just don’t think that faith is like this.

The Word of God isn’t an instruction manual and it’s not a computer program and it’s not a box you can cram everything into. The Word of God is a seed, Jesus says. A tiny seed. And the thing about a seed is that it’s hidden, in the earth. It’s buried. It takes a long time to grow and at any one point in the life cycle of that seed you might be standing there looking and not see a thing.

To say that faith is like a seed is to say that it is a process, a journey, a way of life, not an idea you can grasp once and for all. To say that faith is like a seed is to say that there are seasons of faith. It comes and it goes, it ebbs and it flows, and you don’t really understand it or have control over it, anymore than a farmer can control the sun and the rain, however hard he works. To plant a seed is to surrender. You can’t make it grow.

I got a birthday card the other day from our friends Dan and Karen Sundseth with one of my favorite quotes on it, from the German poet Rilke, a quote that makes this same point. Let me read it to you. It’s from a letter to a younger poet:

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. “

This is the way faith is. It’s a living into the answers. It’s a locked and beautiful room.

And marriage is like this, too, as Dan and Karen know and as Barb and I know and as all of you who are married know. My ordination as a deacon is a great grace, but so is my marriage, and it came first. When I sit in the pew with my wife, I am every bit as sacramental as when I stand on the altar. As are all of you. Your presence in the pews Sunday after Sunday, all of you who are married, your being here together, in faith, is a tremendous sacramental sign.

And I talk about this now because in a few minutes I will have the honor of blessing the marriage of Erik and Maura Sundseth--Erik, who I’ve known since he was four, when he was just a seed.

Something small and precious is always there in marriage. Love. Selfless regard. Just being together. And the anxieties and pressures of the world are always threatening to choke it and overwhelm it and cover it up. It takes a lot of work to keep love clear. It takes a lot of patience to watch love grow.

There are seasons of love. Highs and lows.

In marriage you’re always interpreting, reading past the surface to the depth--a depth you can never know completely because the one you are married to is a person, and so a mystery.

This is the great gift of making a life long commitment, of pledging to grow old together--time is the real sacramental element in marriage--because it’s only over time that we grow into all the paradoxes and mysteries. Only time softens all our dualisms. Only time opens our closed minds. Barb and I have been married thirty two years, and sometimes I look at her and think, who is this woman anyway? I hardly know her. I mean this in a good way. Moments like this move me. And yet I do know her, too, after all this time. I know her in ways I can never explain, and through her, and because of her, in the give and take of daily life, in the sacrifices marriage demands, in the aging of our bodies and the aches and pains of our bodies, in going to the store and cleaning the bathroom and playing cards and walking in the woods, day after day, in all these ways, through my living with Barb, I know Christ and the true nature of Christ.

I know this sounds a little fuzzy and uncertain and hard to get a hold of, but I can’t help it. That’s just the way it is. That’s reality. And that’s what Jesus is calling us to today and everyday, to life, to reality. I just don’t see how you can interpret it any other way.

But not uncertainty really. Deep certainty in the end. It’s just that this certainty can’t come all at once or through the intellect or through any achievement of our own, and when it does come, it can’t be put into words. As Jean Vanier puts it, in all of us, the Word becomes flesh, and it’s the flesh that speaks, the life.

That’s the gift of marriage, as Dan and Karen know, as Barb and I know, as all of us who are married know--a gift not just to us but to the whole church--that over time it moves us from the head to heart, to the vulnerable heart, the searching heart, which is where God is, and where joy is, too.

Not certainty, then. Joy.

Erik and Maura, I know that you’re not like my poor student and her bullet-headed boyfriend. You’re too generous and loving, and I’m glad for that, and I pray for you that this continues. I praise you for your commitment, this breathtaking commitment you make, in all innocence and hope.

I pray that more and more and over time you learn to live with the questions and to love the questions, to have patience with everything that is unresolved. Because everything is.

And when you do this, I pray, as happens now and then in my life, and in all our lives, that at just this moment, just this moment of surrender, you will feel the grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ come rushing in. Just the moment you fall silent. Just the moment you stand there looking at each other and wonder, who is this?

And suddenly you know. You know. It’s the beloved. It’s the One. It’s Christ.

We Can Always Begin Again (homily)

2008-06-25T07:03:00.001-07:00

2 Kings 22:8-13; 23:1-3
Matthew 7:15-20

There’s a strangeness in the stories we’ve been reading lately from First and Second Kings. A harshness. The Spirit shines through human history and human limitation and so we’re always having to read past certain distortions in the scripture, to get to the underlying message.

But the story of the King today, King Josiah, is really our story, or can be.

Every morning we wake up with our bodies, and there is air to breathe and the earth to see. We have our families and our friends and our lives. Everyday the Lord invites us into covenant. Into health and balance.

And everyday we turn our backs on this. We forget this. We lose the Book of the Law as Israel has lost the Book of the Law in the reading for today. We choose the superficial, the cheap, the easy, the temporary, and it’s not God who punishes us for this exactly. The sin is its own punishment. We eat too much, we drink too much, we get angry and shout, we look at pornography, we ignore someone who needs our help, we gossip, we lie, and all these things leave us bereft, empty, in exile. We put ourselves in hell.

As Jesus puts it, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.

The cliché about the God of the Old Testament is that He is a vengeful and violent God, but that’s not finally true. The whole point of the Old Testament histories is that we bring all this onto ourselves, through own choices--that it’s we who violate the
Covenant--and that God is infinitely patient and kind, always waiting for us to return.

Everyday we can find the law we have lost. Though our choices hide it. Though it’s buried in our waste. Though we’re usually going by it too fast to see it. But it’s there and we can find it, if like Josiah we show enough intelligence and presence of mind. We have a conscience, we have joy, we have an intuitive sense of what is good and what is not, and so when the Law is presented to us again, we know what it is deep down. We just have to act. We just have to choose. And we can.

Everyday we can begin again.

This is that moment, as every moment is that moment. Let us return from our Exile. Let us return to balance. Let us return to peace and to beauty and to health. Let us recognize our distortions, see them, admit to them, and then move deeper, to the Spirit that flows underneath and always flows underneath.

Jump (Homily)

2008-03-30T15:15:00.002-07:00

June 20, 2008
Matthew 6

This is the first time I’ve preached since March. I’ve been recovering from surgery the last three months, and it’s very good to be back.

But you know, once I started feeling better and could reflect a little, I realized that my illness was a grace. I had gotten too attached again. I was storing up my treasure on earth and so that was where my heart was: with my career, with my possessions. It happens gradually and subtly, but it always happens.

But after the surgery I was able to appreciate just sitting in a chair. Just taking a walk. Just playing cribbage with Barb. I had this built in excuse now for not doing a lot of things. I was able to leave a lot of things out of my life for a while. I could just live in the moment.

The trick for me now is not to add everything back in.

The wisdom of the gospels isn’t just in the gospels. It’s in the body, too. It’s deep in our organs and our bones. It’s saying let go. It’s saying you’re not in charge. It’s saying move on to the next stage. It’s saying be not afraid.

The gift of getting older is that it forces us to accept what Jesus is saying. The changing of our bodies leads us to the truth.

There was this very old and wise man who went out into the desert to get closer to God. He fasted and prayed and walked over stones. One day he fell off a cliff and was hanging from a branch high above a river.

Oh Lord, he cried out. All my life I have tried to follow you and do the right thing. All my life I have been your disciple. Come to me now. Help me now.

Suddenly there was a voice in the air around him.

Let go, my son. Just let go. I will save you. Let go.

A few minutes went by. The old man was still hanging there, above the river.

Hello? he cried again. Is there anybody else out there who can help me?

We’ve got to let go of the branch. We’ve got to fall off that cliff. Because that’s where the truth is. It’s at the bottom.

In fact, we should jump off. We just fling ourselves off.

Understand: I don’t have the courage or faith to do this yet, but I think I see that this is the call. I think that this is what my body is telling me and what your body is telling you, too. It’s what the gospel is telling us all.

We have to jump.

Because when we do, we are jumping into freedom. We are jumping into joy. We are jumping into love.

Burn Pile (poem)

2008-03-30T15:15:00.001-07:00

I wanted to burn my burn pile.
Branches and leaves. Parts of a fence.
But the recycling had already come
and there wasn’t any newspaper.
So I used old drafts of poems.
I toss them in a drawer until the drawer
is full, weeks of them, and as I stuffed
the pages in the cracks and hollows
of the tangled pile, I’d glance
at a stanza or a line and remember
the problem I was trying to solve.
But this isn’t a poem about poetry.
It’s a poem about an occasion for sin.
Because the fire wouldn’t build.
It would flare and die, first one corner,
then another, the twigs catching,
and the leaves, but not the branches,
until I’d fed it every poem I had
and all there were were ashes.
Not even a hundred abandoned poems
could produce the necessary heat.
Only smoke.
The sweet, leafy smoke of spring.
A soft gray plume, rising
above the cherry trees. A wreathe.
Oh let my prayer arise, oh Lord,
like incense before you.
Like the evening sacrifice
be the raising of my hands.

The Duty of Joy (homily)

2008-03-30T15:15:00.000-07:00

Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:42-47, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31

Recently I read a fine book by the religious historian Huston Smith called World Religions. There are very readable chapters on Hinduism and Buddhism and all the
world religions, focusing on their central beliefs, and the effect for me, by the time I got to the chapter on Christianity, was to strengthen my faith. As I read what Smith has to say about our own tradition, it seemed to me to be this wonderful and beautiful thing, involved in this fundamental human enterprise.

And one of Smith’s most striking comments is about the effect that the death and the alleged resurrection of Jesus seemed to have on his followers--the effect as witnessed by ancient historians--the Roman ones, the neutral observers.

Because the resurrection itself was more than an historical event, there’s no way to prove that it happened. Even if we could go back in a time machine with special equipment, we couldn’t capture it. It wasn’t just a physical resuscitation. Jesus wasn’t Lazarus. It wasn’t just a single event, but the releasing of a deep, transforming energy.

But there is an historical record of how the first Christians suddenly started to behave. How they acted. What they did. The Romans could see this with their own eyes, and they wrote down what they saw, and they were astonished.

What shocked them first, according to Smith, is that the early Christians treated each other as equals, regardless of race or gender or social status, and that they lived in communities where everything was mutually shared. The Romans had never seen anything like this before, this generosity, this leveling of the age-old class system. “See how these Christians love one another,” one of the ancient sources says, and of course, that corroborates the reading from Acts for today, how “all who believed were together and had all things in common.”

The second thing that surprised the Roman observers is how happy the early Christians were. They weren’t stupid. They weren’t foolish. They just seemed to have a deep and abiding joy, even in the face of persecution, when there was no apparent reason to feel anything but fear. “In the midst of their trials,” Smith says, “they had laid hold of an inner peace that found expression in a joy that seemed exuberant,” even “radiant.” As another theologian once put it, “being sad in Jesus’ presence was an existential impossibility,” and this seemed to be true for his followers even after he was gone.

Amazing. No other religion had had this effect before. Somehow the early Christians had been freed of the fear of death. Somehow they had been freed of their own egos. Somehow they had been freed of the burden of their guilt. And so, Acts says in the reading for today, “they ate their meals with exultation and sincerity of heart.” And so, Peter says, “they rejoiced with indescribable and glorious joy.”

No one can prove that Jesus really walked through those walls and breathed peace onto poor doubting Thomas. But wherever it came from, the peace and the courage of the early Christians was widely known and frequently recorded. However mysterious the cause, the effect is an historical fact. And that means something, it seems to me.

We don’t call ourselves Christians because of the wonderful things that Jesus said. Many of them had been said before, in the Torah and in other traditions. We don’t call ourselves Christians because of the miracles that Jesus performed and the healings he accomplished. There’d been lots of miracles before, by lots of miracle workers, inside and outside of Judaism. We call ourselves Christian because of the resurrection. We call ourselves Christians because Jesus rose from the dead. No one had ever done that before, not like that. No one had ever infected the spirit of his followers so thoroughly and completely after death as to entirely transform them, entirely change their lives. It’s the resurrection, and the effects of the resurrection, that made the early Christians Christian and that make us all Christians still, here and now.

So let’s be historical about this. Let’s use this objective, historical standard that Smith opens up for us.

Where is our sense of equality and of community, all of us here, the week after Easter?

If we are a boss, do we treat our employees with respect and generosity? If we are an employee, do we stand up to injustice and inequality as much as we possibly can? If we are parents, do we treat our children with respect? Our spouses? If we are men, do we treat women as our equals? If we are white, do we treat people of color as our equals?

Do we gossip and compete among our friends? Do we even just inwardly assume the inferiority of any other person? Are we in right relation with the people in our lives?

And second, where is our sense of joy, of hope, this week after Easter?

I know how it is when there’s a financial crisis or a health crisis, how it lowers our IQ’s. Suddenly we’re operating on instinct. Suddenly we don’t have the spiritual energy to pray or to “offer it up.” It’s all we can do just to get through the day, and later, when the crisis is over and we’re looking back on it, I think we need to be forgiving of ourselves for this, and so forgiving of others, too.

But also, as we’re looking back, I think we need to inquire into the grounds of our despair. Why were we afraid? Why were we anxious? What the resurrection means is that the whole universe is moving from love and toward love and in love, both on some vast and unimaginable scale and also on the scale of the lives of even the tiniest things. Including us. In the light of this glory and this movement, money shouldn’t matter, success shouldn’t matter, not even life and death should matter. Because there is only life. Life forever.

“Radiance is hardly the word used to characterize the average religious life,” Smith admits, “but none other fits as well the life of these early Christians.” So what on earth has happened to us? Why so glum? Why so narrow and pinched and ornery and sad? He has Risen! He is not here! Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory. Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. Joy unspeakable and full of glory!

Look. I know. I’m one of the saddest and orneriest and most skeptical people you’d ever want to meet. Joy is hard for me. But that’s exactly why I’m qualified to talk about this. I know the challenge. It’s the challenge of joy and the duty of joy and it’s realizing that for us as Christians it’s not just the cross that is our standard and our lens and our way of interpreting the world. It’s the resurrection. It’s not just death that we must always keep before us. It’s life.

Our work for the world is not to demonstrate that the resurrection happened. Our work is to demonstrate through our actions that we really believe it did.

Faith in Practice (Good Friday homily)

2008-03-16T08:55:00.005-07:00

March 21, 2008
Good Friday

My wife, Barb, is just back from a week in Guatemala with the “Faith and Practice” group, a group of doctors and dentists and nurses who go down to Antigua every year. Barb went as the chaplain. A number of people in the parish have been a part of this over the years and I’m just so amazed by it and so admiring and so intimidated, really: by the tremendous poverty and need of the people, and by the tremendous work that the doctors and nurses do--70, 80 operations in that week.

It’s overwhelming, the thought of it.

The ancient world wasn’t scandalized by the idea that Jesus was divine. Lots of people had been before. The Emperor was. What scandalized them was the idea that he was human, too, fully human, as weak and vulnerable as we are, and I think that’s what scandalizes us still.

We’re scandalized by Good Friday. We don’t want to think about it.

It’s calling us to radical change and we don’t like change. It’s calling us to absolutes and we don’t like absolutes. It strips everything away, and we don’t want everything stripped away.

Barb tells the story of a little girl on a blanket on the floor in a hallway, terribly scaling and mottled because of a protein deficiency caused by severe malnutrition.

A little girl, about five months old, starving, abandoned by her parents, being cared for now by the sisters at the orphanage at Casa de Angeles. By those saints.

A little girl, sloughing off her own skin.

A little girl, smiling, finally, when Barb spoke to her and touched her and tickled her.

A little girl, laughing, finally. Like any other little girl.

***

What do we do with this? It’s magnificent and it’s frightening.

Christ is present there, in that child.
Christ was a child, and today he is again. He submits himself to us. He makes himself helpless before us.

What do we do with this?

***

We have to change our lives, and we don’t want to.

***

Our God is not an all powerful God who ignores the suffering of others. Our God is an all powerful God who by his very nature gives all his power away. He is Absolute, and He chooses to empty Himself out for us, absolutely.

This is the great paradox that we keep forgetting and that we can’t get our minds around in the first place. It’s the greatest theological truth in history. It solves every theological problem.

It’s only we who act like God, or try to.

It’s only our narrow, human understanding that makes us think of Him in terms of power and domination and control.

He isn’t dead. He makes himself most present in death.

He joins us.

He calls us.

***

The cross is a lens.

It is a standard.

It is a way of measuring things.

It is our formula for interpreting every situation we find ourselves in.

What should we do? Whatever conforms us the most closely to the logic of the cross. Whatever turns the situation upside down. Whatever reverses all our values and assumptions.

The opposite of what we think. The opposite of what we want.

Whatever puts others first. Whatever empties us out.

***

Did you read about the man who picked up the bobcat? He’d found it unconscious by the side of the road, injured, so he picked it up, put in on the backseat of his car, and drove to a vet for treatment.

And at the end, before he got there, the bobcat started coming to. On the backseat. It started waking up.

The man had to talk to it very softly.

But this is what it’s like. We have to stop. We have to see and then act and that can be very dangerous.

There’s something wild in the backseat. Something we can’t control.

***

No wonder we’re uneasy. No wonder we turn away.

And yet we’re supposed to come forward. In just a minute we’re supposed to come forward and embrace all this. We’re supposed to embrace it and kiss it and venerate it.
This cross.

This obscenity. This horror. This symbol of exactly the opposite of the way we want to live.

We have to change our lives.

***

The phone rings and we can see from our Caller ID who it is and we don’t answer. We don’t want to talk to that bore, that nuisance, that nobody.

But we’re supposed to.

Being God is easy. Being human is hard.

There’s a situation out there we don’t want to be in.

We’re supposed to be in it.

It doesn’t have to be in another country.

It doesn’t have to be something exotic and heroic.

It can be small and ordinary and probably is.

It’s different for each of us.

But it’s there and we know it and we have to submit ourselves to it. And when we do in our own small way we are entering into the way of the cross. We are entering into the mystery.

It’s easy to be God, or to think we can. To hold ourselves back, in reserve. But that’s not what God Himself does. He pours Himself out, He gives Himself away completely, and that’s what He calls us to do, too.

To dive in.

What are we supposed to do? This.

Whatever empties us.

Whatever silences us.

Whatever puts us in solidarity with others.

Whatever makes us poor.

Whatever gives us the chance to die.

Windfall (poem)

2008-03-16T08:55:00.004-07:00

for Franz, on his 80th Birthday

After the storm the forest is still the forest.
The scars are openings. Light shines
through them, above the tangle of fallen trees.

Dazed at first, the old man and old woman
resume their puttering, in the house
by the pond. They wake in the morning

and move among their books, then go out
to study the windfall. The puzzle of it.
The pattern. They know they still have time.

Every stand is different: matchsticks
on the hillside, riprap by the stream;
above the chaos, the great spruce and the fir.

In youth we think that youth is ours.
We think that it defines us. But it doesn’t.
It passes away, and who we really are remains.

For a moment I don’t even fear
the coming of age. The sagging of faces,
the gnarling of hands. After the storm,

in the house by the pond, I think, no.
Maybe everything that was promised is true.
Maybe we are all being transformed.

A Summer Day (poem)

2008-03-16T08:55:00.003-07:00

A ukulele band strums by the grave
of an old woman I never knew.
I lead the prayers, alb flapping,
helping to lay the body to rest,
and as the family lingers,
quietly walk away,
down the hill to another grave
I remember from before.
It was winter then, and the oak was bare,
and the one we buried was a boy.
I keep thinking he’ll be cold, the father said.
He’ll need his coat.
But it’s summer now, and the farmers
are haying in the yellow fields.
The dust of the harvest is softening the air.
And as I stand at the marker, looking out,
a feeling starts to come over me,
a kind of peace, almost like the peace
I prayed for up the hill,
the peace of God,
which surpasses all understanding.
It spreads through my body like warmth.
I know.
I’m just saying what happened.
I’m just saying that it surprised me, too.
The farmers, and the yellow fields,
and the warm, summer wind.
The ukulele band, strumming still.