Author

deaconcanderson

Nothing Matters More

Year after year they keep track of the birds as they first appear in the spring, writing down what they see in their ledgers. They publish this. You can read these: Cinnamon Teals and Blue-ringed Teals and plovers and yellowlegs and terns. Hidden, they see what is hidden; unnoticed, they notice, and they write it all down, as if it matters, as if it makes any difference.

Because it does. Nothing matters more.

Vaux’s Swift: Earliest Arrival Date: 5 April Average Arrival Date: 19 April

Records Kept: 34 years

Vesper Sparrow: Earliest Arrival Date: 19 March Average Arrival Date: 12 April

Records Kept: 15 years

Eastern Kingbirds, Western Kingbirds, Vireos—Warbling, Cassin’s, Red-Eyed—and Nashville Warblers and Yellow Warblers and Black-Throated Grays and birds I didn’t know we had, didn’t know came through here, from wherever they come, here in the valley where I walk and look out at the rooftops and the hills one morning when the cherry trees are blossoming and there is a haze in the air like fall.

Before we pray, Anthony de Mello says, we should “seek this disposition: that we embark upon this exercise not for ourselves alone but for the welfare of creation, of which we are a part, and that any transformation we experience will redound to the benefit of the world.”

This is the hardest thing to believe, and the most freeing. That what we think and feel matters. That the inner life is as real as the outer, and finally even more so. That somehow we are all connected.

God comes to Julian of Norwich holding out “a little thing” like a nut, a hazelnut, something small and round and hard, and looking at it Julian is confused. What is this?

God answers: “it is all that is made.”

All that is made? How can that be, Julian asks, “for it seems it might suddenly have sunk into nothing because of its littleness.”

And then she is answered again: “it lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.”

Not a sparrow falls, Jesus says, but that the Father knows it.

March 24, 2023

Uncategorized

Wild Iris

The boy who lived a day died years ago,

and now his mother has died.

We buried her last month.

This morning we dug a hole almost to the lid

of her coffin, then lowered the baby’s coffin in.

It was sitting in the wet morning grass,

a small white box, exhumed and flown to us.

His father is shoveling back the muddy earth.

It’s spring, quiet and green. In the woods,

the wild iris is blooming.

And on every purple petal there is a white

feather, and on every white feather

there is a stroke of yellow, as if someone

has quickly brushed it on.

March 12, 2023

Poetry

My First Car

for a video click here

My first car was a 56 Chevy, pockmarked

and rusted, faded red and white.

They only wanted three hundred dollars for it,

but Dad checked it out and it always ran great.

I could take you right now to the exact spot

along the river where the sheriff found it

the morning after it was stolen,

nose first, halfway down the bank,

and the river would still be flowing,

the beautiful, the beautiful river.

March 2, 2023

Poetry

Alice Rose

for a video

What happens at mass is that a single point

explodes into a billion, billion pieces, and the pieces

fly away at incredible speeds, and they become

atoms, then gasses, then stars and planets,

and on one planet amoebas appear, and the amoebas

become fish, and the fish become dinosaurs,

and the dinosaurs become monkeys and dogs, everything

is always becoming something else, until finally

the universe comes to consciousness of itself

and we’re standing there looking around thinking wow,

this is really beautiful. This is really sad.

When Jesus appears in the flesh

we don’t recognize him at first.

We think he’s the gardener.

An old man and an old woman

walk down the breezeway with a baby.

They must be in their seventies, maybe their eighties.

The old man is bowlegged and wearing jeans.

He looks like he’s worked his whole life.

The old woman has wrapped a shawl around her head

and swaddled the baby, but it’s the old man

who is holding the baby as they walk.

She is four months old, they tell me.

Her name is Alice Rose.

You baptized her, the old woman says, smiling,

a couple of months ago.

The baby’s head is smooth and soft

and there is a band around it, and on the band,

in the center of her forehead,

there is a little white rose made of cloth.

What happens at mass is that I keep watching

the old man as he sits in the pew

looking down at the baby and smiling,

rocking her in his arms.

February 17, 2023

Homily

Becoming Real

February 5, 2023 for a video, click here

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

1^st Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16

In the middle of my career I read a book by Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, that changed not just my teaching but my life. It’s a wonderful book, full of warmth and insight, and when I was on a committee that invited speakers to come to OSU, I was able to invite Palmer to come.

I was a little nervous as I was making the arrangements, because he asked for a king-sized bed and to have a few hours alone before his talk. I wondered if I’d be dealing with another academic prima donna. But he was a wonderful man. He needed a king-sized bed because he was six foot six, a lot taller than I imagined from reading him, and he wanted the time alone so he could meditate before his talk, get centered, and his talk was very, very good.

But it wasn’t just his words or his wisdom that attracted me, but a kind of light that shone out of him. “You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells us, and we must let that light “shine before others,” and that’s what I experienced with Palmer. He’s a Christian man, from a Quaker background, but he didn’t talk about that. There was just something about him that you wanted to be around, a decency and a kindness, an authenticity. I saw that in the workshop he did for faculty before the big talk, even as some of them resisted him and his methods, and I experienced that when everything was over and I invited him to the Beanery for coffee. He stretched out his long legs, and he took a sip of his coffee, and he said, “tell me about yourself” and he meant it. We talked, and in his listening he brought out the best in me.

We’ve all known people like this, people who seem to have a certain kind of energy or warmth. They are the ones who influence us, who change us. We are the light of the world, and that light is in us, and that light is Christ, and when we act out of our best selves, people glimpse God through us.

I knew a woman who was dying, a woman who had an important job in Seattle and was admired by many people, especially younger people, and a lot of them made pilgrimages to Corvallis to see her one last time and tell her how much she meant to them. She must have been a remarkable leader, and mentor, and boss.

But she was a cranky person, too, and an impatient one, the kind of person I can really identify with, and she told me that she was tired of having to play the wise and kind old woman and just wanted to be left alone to die in peace. She didn’t want to have to make people feel better by having a good death. She didn’t want to have keep showing people how strong she was.

And this is why I admired her, because she wasn’t perfect and didn’t pretend to be, because in her honesty there was a humility, as Parker Palmer was humble, too, in his own way, despite his reputation and his fame. “When I came to you, brothers and sisters, proclaiming the mystery of God,” St. Paul says, “I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.” I came, he says, “in weakness and fear and much trembling,” and finally that’s exactly the point. It wasn’t his own wisdom he was proclaiming, it was he wisdom of God, and maybe that’s part of what makes certain people compelling to us, that they’re not looking at themselves, but outward, and they help us look outward, too.

In admitting their flaws and limitations, they give us the courage to admit our own and then the confidence to keep doing what we can do—and to do it in our own way.

In our own way.

I can’t be Parker Palmer. I’m only 5’ 7,” for one thing, and I’m never going to be taller. As Thomas Merton puts it, in New Seeds of Contemplation:

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody’s else life? Their sanctity will never be yours; you must have the humility to work out your own salvation. It takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the person God intended you to be.

God made us who we are, with all our quirks and likes and histories, and this is who he calls, us, right now, as he calls the disciples as they sit mending their nets—he doesn’t say come and follow me when you get act your act together. He says: come now.

I think of so many students I had over the years who felt that they had sound like they were going to college when they were writing their papers, using big words when smaller ones would do, trying to fake a wisdom and a knowledge they didn’t have when really, if they just let themselves write, if they said what they really had to say, if they were honest and direct, their writing was far more powerful and insightful than any of the usual academic talk. Teaching them to write was unteaching them. It was saying, knock off this other stuff, which was really saying, trust yourself. You can only be as tall as you are.

And I think that’s finally what most attracts us to certain people, their fidelity to themselves, and in their fidelity their humility before God, and in their humility their confidence in his power to work through them. This is what in The Courage to Teach Palmer calls “integrity”:

Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my selfhood, what fits and what does not—and that I choose life-giving ways of relating to the forces that converge within me: Do I welcome them or fear them, embrace them or reject them, move with them or against them? By choosing integrity I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real.

Of course, we have to admit our sins and do all we can to overcome them. Again and again. Day after day. We can’t overlook them. We can’t pretend they’re not there. We can’t pretend we’re saints. The saints never do. But our sins do not define us, our sins are not who we really are, and we have to know this and believe this. Our sins are not our deepest layer. They are not at the core.

To let our light shine we have to be comfortable in our own skin.

And this is what I pray, for you and for me. That we discern what fits us and what doesn’t, that we find what is life-giving, that we welcome the forces inside us—not the sinful ones, but the deeper ones. That we become more real.

Because when we do, that’s Christ moving in us, expressing himself through us, through our true self, our real self, however small and limited and imperfect we all are.

May we all become more real.

February 3, 2023

Poetry

Geese

We were having mass on a hill above a bay.

This was after a storm, and through

the windows the rain still glistened on the alder.

And at just the moment of the consecration,

as the bread was becoming the Body of Christ,

a great flock of geese came clamoring

over us, honking and clattering.

It must have been enormous.

We could almost hear the words.

for a video, click here

January 17, 2023

Prose

Faith Over Fifty: The Grace of Growing Older

A silent retreat with Deacon Chris Anderson
Mount Angel, March 17-19, 2023

How God calls us deeper and deeper into relationship through the freedom and challenges of aging.

Deacon Chris Anderson is a professor emeritus of English at Oregon State University, a poet and essayist, and author of fourteen books, both poetry and prose (www.deaconchrisanderson.com).

Cost: $330 Single occupancy; $480 double occupancy

Email retreat@mtangel.edu for availability.

What Remains

1 John 3:18-24; John 15:1-8

Last week I received two really remarkable emails.

The first was from a man who was a student of mine a number of years ago. We used to talk about spiritual things, and he was writing to say that he’d been struggling for a long time and had finally admitted he was an alcoholic. For years he “pursued accomplishments and other avenues of escape,” as he put it, until finally he reached a turning point, a moment of desperation, and started going to AA meetings.

AA is a spiritual program, he says: “Cliff Notes for a spiritual life: follow God, help others, deal with your own garbage, and let God take it away, pray, meditate.” I can’t think of a better description of the program the gospels put forward, of the teaching of Jesus, and I admire this man very much for his courage in entering into it. “It’s pretty incredible stuff!” he says, “and hard, hard to follow God and not follow your own agenda. I fail all the time.”

What impresses me is his resolution combined with his humility, his recognition that he isn’t the vine, just one the branches. “I’ve been my own God for most of my life,” he wrote—another really striking statement, a statement I think almost all of us could make—but now he understands exactly what Deacon Teo was preaching last week at the 9 o’clock mass, that despite our human desire to be independent, our need to be in control, we can never know real freedom until we surrender to God. “Without me,” Jesus says, “you can do nothing.”

The second email was from a man I don’t know. I don’t even know where he was writing from. He had just read something I’d written and reached out to me online.

He’s in his early fifties, a poet and a person of faith, but although he’s been writing all his life, he’s never had anything published. “By all the usual measures,” he says, “my efforts are a complete waste of time . . . all my words are written on sand. “

And “it isn’t just poetry–so much of our efforts seem fruitless,” he says, and suddenly the email takes a turn. It opens up.

“I am a father,” he says, and “my daughter was killed by a drunk driver just after she left home to begin school as a university freshman. All that labor, all that love–for what?”

I wasn’t expecting this. I was surprised and moved, and I was wondering what would come next, what this man was asking of me.

But he wasn’t asking anything of me. He was giving me something. He was giving me his faith and his wisdom and his hope.

This is how the email ends:

All that labor, all that love—for what? But I quickly realized that isn’t even a relevant question. I wish now only that I had spent more of myself loving my daughter while she was alive. Something beautiful for God is beautiful even when it remains hidden to every other eye. God invites us all to die to ourselves . . . . Love is the only thing that remains, after all.

This is incredible, this is the real thing, the way this man moves, in a single sentence, from hopelessness and despair to the recognition that he was asking the wrong question, that we are all asking the wrong question. “For God,” as the letter of John puts it, “is greater than our hearts.” Greater than our loss, greater than our death, greater than our life.

Notice how the man seems to echo the letter of John when he says that he wishes he’d shown more love for his daughter while she was alive: for this is what the Lord commands us, John says, that we should “love one another.”

Notice the word “remains” in the man’s email: “Love is the only thing that remains,” he

says–and in the letter of John, “the way we know he remains,” and in the Gospel of John, “remain in me, as I remain in you.”

I am the vine and you are the branches.

For me the most important question is how we can know God when he lived so long ago and when the narratives of his life and his teachings in the four gospels are so beautifully open-ended. We use the name “Jesus” all the time, but what does it really mean?

I think it means everything.

Because Jesus remains in us and we remain in him, because he isn’t just someone who lived in the past but someone who is living now, because at the end of the days of his post-resurrection appearances he ascended into heaven and then sent the Spirit, his own spirit, to fill all the world and to fill our hearts, and it is through the Spirit that we know his presence and know his will. “The way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he gave us,” the letter of John says, and this Spirit is something we feel whenever we feel joy or whenever we feel sorrow, whenever we feel something opening up in us and moving in us—when someone sends us an email and we’re sitting reading it and suddenly our heart leaps, it expands, and we know something in a way we can never put into words.

Or maybe we don’t feel anything for days and weeks and years, we’re desolate, we’re empty. Then the way we know the Spirit is through the people around us, through the people who send us the emails, through the people who sit with us in the pews, through the cloud of witnesses that has filled all the centuries since the historical Jesus walked the actual ground.

How can the poet who lost his daughter rise to such wisdom and compassion? How can the alcoholic find himself and grow so much at exactly the moment of his greatest failure?

Because the Spirit is always moving, if not in you or in me at a certain moment, in others, and those others sometimes sit down at a computer and in their generosity and faith send us an email, to share what the Spirit has revealed in them. And for a moment, reading it, we know, or we suspect, or we at least glimpse the possibility, that what the gospels proclaim might really be true.

God exists, and God is bigger than our hearts, and even in the darkness there is light, there is exceeding light.

December 28, 2022

Poetry

What is Going On

A hundred years ago the smiling man

in the wheelchair wore the same gown

his great-grandson is wearing now.

It is made of white cotton, softened

and yellowed with age, and goes

all the way past the baby’s toes.

The family has been telling stories,

but quiets now and gathers around.

The mother holds the baby in her arms.

The old man is smiling, and his eyes

are clear and aware. He knows

what is going on, and for a moment

I do, too, and I stand at the font

and cup the water in my hand.

November 30, 2022

Homily

Before All Things

for a video click here

November 20, 2022; Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe

Colossians 1:12-20; Luke 23:35-43

The criminal on one side of Jesus in the Gospel today, the one who taunts him, doesn’t understand who God is for us. What he means by the word “god” isn’t at all what we mean.

The criminal who taunts Jesus doesn’t understand that for us God is bigger and more mysterious than anyone can possibly imagine—and at the same time more intimate and loving than anyone can possibly imagine.

The criminal who taunts Jesus is like many contemporary atheists. He thinks that matter is all there is, that if something can’t be measured or understood according to certain mechanical laws, it isn’t real. “Are you not the Christ?” he says. Then “save yourself, and us,” as if Christ is just a creature like any other creature in the universe, except with superpowers–not “God” with a capital “G” but a god, like Zeus or Thor—and a God like that is easy to make fun of. If God is just a genie who gives us three wishes, and doesn’t grant any of them, either he’s a pretty bad genie or he doesn’t exist in the first place.

But as Christians this isn’t what we think at all. We don’t believe that God is just a being, however powerful, but the source of all being, the cause of it, the life of it.

Here’s how David Bentley Hart puts it in The Experience of God, a really remarkable book that Bishop Barron has been recommending and that I’ve recently read and very much recommend, too:

The most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings [only] in magnitude and power.

I know that’s pretty abstract and philosophical, but it’s good to know that Christians can do this kind of thing, too, and we don’t need it anyway, because we have this magnificent poem in Colossians, this great hymn, which is saying exactly the same thing. For in Christ

were created all things in heaven and on earth / the visible and invisible . . .

All things were created through him and for him / he is before all things

and in him all things hold together.

Science cannot account for beauty and it cannot account for loneliness and it cannot explain how we got here in the first place or how anything did. But faith can. The universe comes from God, who was “before all things” and who created all things out of his great generosity and joy and continues to create them and fill them with life and bind them all together.

And this is what the criminal on the other side of Jesus understands, not just in his head, but in his heart, in the midst of his suffering and his pain, when whatever intellectual pride and arrogance he may have had, whatever indifference, has been burned away, has been destroyed, and he is there, hanging on a cross, right next to Jesus—and he reaches out, he begs Jesus, “remember me, when you come into your kingdom.”

Can you imagine that? My friend Bob Reed asked me this the other day when we were having coffee. He said, can you imagine not just hanging on a cross but hanging next to Jesus himself, just a few feet away?

Unlike the first criminal, the second “fears” this, he says, “fears” God—fears as in feels it, fears as in knows it in his bones—knows that God is vast and mysterious and knows that the man dying on the cross isn’t all there is to God but just a glimpse of him.

But no. That’s not right either, because at the same time what the second thief knows in his humility and his grief is that this is God, that what is revealed here is the very nature of God, the King of the Universe not in the sense of Odin or Zeus or even David but a king who empties himself out, who dies, who gives himself away, who is there, beside us, in our helplessness and need, absolutely human and in his humanity, absolutely divine.

Bob asked another really powerful question the other day, when we were talking about this gospel: what would have happened if Jesus had gotten down from the cross?

All would have been lost, I think.

We don’t believe in Jesus because he lived. We believe in Jesus because died, and then rose again.

My chief desire, David Bentley Hart says in The Experience of God,

is to show that what is most mysterious and most exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest at hand, and that what is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy, and that we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing, in large part because we labor to forget what is laid out before us in every moment, and because we spend so much of our lives wandering in dreams, in a deep but fitful sleep.

Last week a woman in the parish, a woman many of us loved, died suddenly. Unexpectedly. And we were stunned. We were shocked and deeply saddened.

How do we account for a death like this? How could God have let it happen?

We could say with the first thief that well, obviously God doesn’t exist. This is proof. There is no purpose or meaning. We all just die.

But I was at the funeral, I served as a deacon, and the church was full, and there were many people there who were not Catholic but who had been touched by this woman, and the grief in that moment was palpable, you could feel it, and yet somehow it was beautiful, too, it was rising up and filling this whole space, it seemed to be lifting us all up, and I was so glad for the mass and for the Eucharist, and proud of it, I was so glad for its beauty and power and the way it could move us more deeply into the sadness and yet through it finally to faith and hope, and this wasn’t an intellectual thing, this wasn’t just a thing in our heads, it was in our chests, it was behind our eyes where the tears were, and nothing made sense and everything did, all our assumptions had been shattered and yet somehow that was good, it was necessary and good, and we were all there together, and Jesus was right next to us, he was hanging before us, grieving, too, he was hanging there, before all things, and there was nothing without him and there could be nothing without him, he was present in all things and he was loving us in all things, even in the darkness, even in death, even in that moment, and I longed for him, and I feared him, and I reached out to him, and I trusted him. We all reached out to him.

“Jesus, remember her, when you come into your kingdom.”

O Lord Jesus, bring us all into your kingdom.

O Lord Jesus, remember us all.

November 18, 2022

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