Homily

Father’s Day, June 21, 2026

Psalm 69; Romans 5:12-15; Matthew 10:26-33

    I’ve told this story before, but every Father’s Day I think of it again.

    Years ago when my oldest son turned sixteen, my father gave him his old rusted 69’ Mercury Bobcat, and we went up to Spokane to get it.  I’ll never forget how I felt the next morning when John backed out of the driveway and drove down the street—we were going to follow him later.  I was worried he wouldn’t know the way.  I was worried that he’d get hurt. 

     I’ll never forget how I felt when John’s National Guard unit was sent into combat in Iraq in 2003, where he was shot at and mortared and forever changed:  this sense of helplessness, of a helpless, aching love. 

     I don’t know why we always think of God as all-powerful when we think of God the father, because that’s not what I’ve experienced as a father.  

 

    Of course, we believe that God is all-powerful.  The question is whether we understand how he expresses that power.  Of course, these are metaphors, God as father, God as mother.  God, the catechism says very clearly, is beyond gender.

By calling God ‘Father,’ the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood.

The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents.

We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood.  [259]

There’s a lot going on here but one thing that strikes me is the sentence, “the language of faith draws on the human experience of parents.”  Metaphors tell us something about God, and our dominant metaphor for God is father, and on Father’s Day it makes sense for us as fathers to reflect on our own experience, and that experience, I think, is most of all the experience of letting go.  Not power, but as the Catechism says, “tenderness.”

 

      Think of the cross.  Always think of the cross.  Of God the Father giving away his Son, which is to say, giving himself away, completely emptying himself—of God expressing his power by freely abandoning it.  He is always watching us drive away, down the street and out of sight, aching for us, aching with us.  He is always watching us go off to war, and come back, shattered.

 

      Dietrich Bonhoeffer didn’t sacrifice his life out of faith in a domineering God but out of faith in a God of such fierce and courageous tenderness that he entered into our ordinary lives—Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor who was executed near the end of World II for standing up to the Nazis.  He didn’t fight the fascists on behalf of a dictator God but on behalf of Christ, our true and gentle brother, who even when he rose and appeared to his friends appeared so subtly and fleetingly that in his generosity and tact he gave us the freedom to ignore or forget or misinterpret him, and then to walk away.

    In prison Bonhoeffer understood as never before who Christ is and what the cross is trying to tell us:

God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.  Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.

This is not God the wish-granter, the kind or indifferent king, the repressive or liberating father.  This is the man, the real man, who hung on a cross.  

     Bonhoeffer didn’t believe that Christ had abandoned him.  He believed that Christ was with him even in prison and especially then, and that he would always be with him, in death as in life, and finally beyond death, forevermore.  As Pope Benedict puts it, “God has suffered, and through his Son he suffers with us.  This is the summit of his power, that he can suffer with us and for us.”  Or in Elizabeth Johnson’s paraphrase of Cardinal Walter Kasper: “it requires omnipotence to be able to love like this.”  Only an infinite God can love each of us infinitely.

     The truth of the cross is that God is with us, just not in the way we might have hoped for, not in the way we in our immaturity and naivete thought he would be.  

     ‘I suspect we sometimes insist that ‘God is my co-pilot,’” Father Gregory Boyle says, “so we don’t have to fly the plane.”

 

     What does this mean for us as fathers? 

     That we have to love our children fiercely and completely for who they are and not for who we want them to be.

     I’ve been reading a wonderful book by Boyle, Cherished Belonging:  The Healing Power of Love in a Divided Times, about his experience as a Jesuit priest working for over thirty years with gangs in LA, and how his approach is never to judge, not even to try to change the people he works with, not directly, but to love them, radically.  He tells the story of a baby he baptized who grew up and joined a gang, spent time in prison, was on drugs and off drugs, and finally was shot, and of anointing him in the hospital just before he died, still young, and how at every stage of that short, sad life, God was in this man, God was with this man, this boy, whose eyes were filled with tears in that final moment, as Father Boyle’s were filled, too.   

     His ministry rests on two “unwavering principles,” Boyle says:  that “everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions,” and that “we belong to each other, no exceptions.”   It’s by loving people without conditions, without strings attached, that we help them experience their own goodness, their own sense of God in them.

 

     “See, you lowly ones, and be glad,” the Psalmist says today, “you who seek God, may your hearts revive, / for the Lord hears the poor.”

     “Be not afraid,” Jesus says in the Gospel today—”be not afraid” he is always saying—not a single sparrow falls to the ground “without your Father’s knowledge,” though they fall, they still fall.  “Even all the hairs on your head are counted.”

      God’s grace, Paul proclaims today, is “overflowing.”

 

     As Boyle puts it later, God isn’t head of the “Department of Corrections.”  He’s head of the “Department of Connections.”  

 

     This is hard.  Terribly hard.  

    We have to give up our illusions.  We have to stop wanting some strongman to take away all our problems and thinking of God as that kind of strongman, but to keep asking for the grace he continually pours down on us, grace we don’t have to earn, grace that is always there.  

     We have only to turn towards it, we have only to return to the Father, who is love itself, endless, undying, aching love.

     We have to try, however much we fail, however limited we are, to reflect that love to others—to love them by letting go of them, to love them by seeing them, to love them by being with them—as God loves us, unceasingly.

     No strings.  No exceptions.

January 18, 2026, Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

Psalm 40; 1 Corinthians 1:1; John 1:29-34

 

                               to listen to an audio version of this

 

 What’s really interesting to me about the gospel today is that it tells the same story we heard last week, the story of the baptism of the Lord, it repeats it, but from a different point of view.  

    The author of Matthew shows us the baptism—we see things as they’re happening—Jesus came, the heavens opened—but in the reading today from the Gospel of John the baptism itself happens offstage.  We only hear about it secondhand, from John the Baptist: I saw the Spirit come down like a dove, he says.  I have seen the Lord.  

     Today we don’t witness an event but listen to someone talk about his own experience of it and what he thinks it means. 

     It’s a subtle difference, but it matters.  It shifts the meaning, even if we’re not aware of it, and there are differences like this in Mark and Luke’s version of this story, too, and all over the place in the gospels, sometimes big differences, and that’s OK.  The people who put together the New Testament knew what they were doing.  They knew that the gospels vary in what they say and how they say it, and that’s part of the point, that the truth revealed in Jesus Christ is so profound that all we can do is glimpse little pieces of it.

     As Lawrence Cunningham puts it, the gospel is always “according to”—according to Matthew.  According to John.  According to you.  According to me.

     This is important.

 

     A friend gave me permission to tell this story.

     She was in the checkout line at Bi-Mart, and after she paid and was walking away, she almost knocked someone over, a tall, bearded man in a Carhart jacket, a stocking cap pulled over his ears.  He smiled and said, “you dropped this,” then pressed a $20 bill into her hand.   He was so tall that she had to crane her neck to look at his face.  “It was all so quiet,” my friend said, “like no one else was there.”  

     She was pretty flustered, of course, but she thanked him and took the money.  But as she was crossing the parking lot on the way to her car, she suddenly remembered that she hadn’t brought any cash with her that day.  That twenty couldn’t have been hers.

     She stopped and looked around, but the man was already gone, walking down ninth street towards town.

     This is the story my friend told me, as today John the Baptist tells us his story. 

     And they’re the same story.

 

     The more she thought about it the more my friend began to suspect that the man at Bi-Mart had given her “a job to do,” that what she had experienced in that moment was “grace in action.”  There was no mistake.  Suddenly she knew:  this money wasn’t hers to keep but hers to give away again.  

      It’s true that when John the Baptist sees Jesus coming, he immediately knows who he is.  He cries out, Behold, the Lamb of God.”  It’s a moment more vivid, more distinct, than the moments most of us are given.  But the gospel tells us twice that John “did not know him,” not at first, before the moment happens–and when the moment does happen, he’s ready, and he’s ready, I think, because he’s humbled himself, he’s learned to open his ears to “obedience,” as the psalmist puts it today.  

     John the Baptist knows that Jesus “ranks ahead” of him.  “I baptize with water,” he tells the Pharisees a few verses before this, “but there is one among you whom you do not recognize, the one who is coming after me, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to untie.”

 

     This is important, too, very important.  

     We are not “worthy.”  There is “one among us” we “do not recognize.”

 

     We think that John the Baptist was a superhero and that we need to be superheroes, we need to be warriors, but that’s completely wrong.  What defines him is radical humility.  We must strive for the virtues, of course, we must wrestle every day with our egos and desires, but all our striving and straining only serve to level us, to teach us that we have to let go.  “It’s God who sanctifies us,” Ruth Burrows says.  “No one can evolve into holiness through personal effort and discipline no matter how spiritual and sublime.  Of ourselves we can do nothing at all.”  

     In fact, it’s only by submitting to the ordinary, by surrendering to the everyday, that we open ourselves up to grace.  “God is always working to bring us to an awareness and acceptance of our poverty,” Burrows says.  This is “the essential condition of our being able to receive him,” and all “the petty frustrations, the restrictions, the humiliations” of our ordinary lives, all the occasions when we realize we are not in control, the moments when are helpless and overwhelmed—it’s through moments like these that God calls us.  These are what Burrows calls God’s “chosen channel” into our souls.

 

      Who, after all, was “Sosthenes”?  Paul just mentions him in passing in his greeting to the Corinthians—“Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the Church of God in Corinth.”  But almost nothing is known of him.  There’s another brief mention of him in Acts, but no great deed of his is recorded.  No great speech of his is written down.  

      Who was he?  A tall man in a stocking cap walking down ninth?   A hurried woman at Bi-Mart suddenly given a task?

      All we really know is that he is “our brother.”

      What is the gospel according to us?  To you?  To me?      What glimpse have we been given?  What task is ours?

     On Palm Sunday we celebrate great joy and great grief, consolation and desolation, and the question is:  how do they go together?  Does one cancel out the other?

     Jesus rides in on a donkey and everyone is singing and throwing down their cloaks and waving great branches, and by the end of the reading the disciples have abandoned him and he is hanging on the cross.

 

    I run into a friend as Bumble and I are walking in the woods.  She’s walking her dog, too, and we stand on the road and talk about the country, our anxieties, our worries, our outrage, and we agree.  We’re on the same page.  But no matter how much I try to nudge the conversation in another direction, no matter how I try to change the subject, my friend insists on being outraged.  She insists on not being there.  She’s in Washington D.C.  She’s on the border.  

     All the while the trees have leafed out and the cherries are blossoming and a purple finch is singing.  The sun has broken through the clouds.  

 

    Who are we to say?  Who are we to refuse the gift we have been offered?   And to ask this isn’t to avoid compassion or obligation.  Not at all.  To ask this is an act of humility.  “We have to remember the principle,” Thomas Merton says, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “that certain desires and certain pleasures are willed for us by God.”

 

     Merton frequently comes back to this issue in this book.  As a contemplative it haunts him:  what value is there in living the solitary and hidden life of a monk when the world is falling apart?  As a monk is he a guilty bystander?  

     But “why can we not be content with an ordinary, secret, personal happiness that does not need to be explained or justified?” Merton asks.  Why do we feel guilty “if we are not happy in some publicly approved way?”  God gives us the gift of every moment, “the gift and capacity,” as he puts it, “to make our own happiness out of our own situation.”

It’s not hard to be happy, simply by accepting what is within reach, and making of it what we can.  But if we do this . . . we still wonder if there is not something wrong.  Are we getting something that others cannot have?

Everything we need is right here, he says, and yet we worry, 

as if it is not allowed.  As if we could not be happy without the sanction of Madison Avenue, or Washington, or the FBI or somebody.  And yet this, of all things, is precisely that for which no permission is needed.

Joy is a gift, a grace, given to us in one particular moment, on a road, or in a coffee shop, or at home reading a book, as who knows what gift the poor woman at the border is given, too?  The civil servant, just fired from his job?  What glimpse?  What memory?

 

     I think Jesus felt joy as he came into Jerusalem.  I think he felt the sun on his face.  I think he heard the shouts of the crowd.  I think he felt the swaying of the donkey beneath him.  My dad always said, “be where you’re at,” and Jesus always was.  He was always in the moment.  He was never too busy to stop and talk to the people who came up to him.  He had no big projects to distract him, as Luke Timothy Johnson says.  He was remarkably available.

     And I think he was bereft when the time came.  I think he was afraid, he was grieving, as he also knew he would be.  He suffered.  He hung on a cross.

 

     I don’t see how anyone can get the idea of Christian Nationalism out of the gospels. We can do it only by reading the story of the entry into Jerusalem out of context, without the story of the upper room, without the crucifixion, and then by misinterpreting that first moment, when Jesus comes through the gates.  He’s on a donkey, after all.  Not a tank.

     He hangs on a cross. 

     Did we really think we wouldn’t have to suffer, too?  Nothing is different now than it ever was.  We always have to die to ourselves.  Now we just may have to do it more, and in solidarity with so many others who have been dying for a long time.  One day some of us may even have to die in the flesh for our faith, as the martyrs did, as we all have to die anyway sooner or later, even if only in our sleep. 

     What did we think, that we would never have to die?

 

     In a way we all have to be dualists, radical dualists, whatever our call.  Nothing matters more than God.  

     In a recent interview, the poet Li Young Lee puts it this way:

I’m telling you, all that is left are love songs to God.  With all the world’s conflict, motion, and noise, none of these things are as important as love for the one who accomplished everything.  I’m going to write love song after love song to God.

And yet at the same time, Lee is saying, we have to reject dualism entirely, avoid otherworldliness completely, because the kingdom is here and now, in this moment and every moment. 

 

     It’s because Jesus observed the birds of the air and the flowers of the field that he could hang on the cross.  

     Be here, he says.  Let tomorrow come tomorrow.

     It’s because we hear the purple finch that we can act.  It’s because we rejoice in the blossoming cherry that we know what to do, and why.  

    And hearing the finch is an act.  Of defiance.  Of hope.  Who knows what benefits flow from our quiet thinking and feeling, out into the world of violence and stupidity?

February 2, 2025

     I’ve been struggling lately with what to listen to and what not to listen to.  What to pay attention to and what to ignore.  

     Last week in the Liturgy of the Hours this passage jumped out at me, from Isaiah.  Who can live with “the consuming fire?” the speaker asks, and then answers:

            He who practices virtue and speaks honestly,

            who spurns what is gained by oppression,

            stopping his ears lest he hear of bloodshed,

            closing his eyes lest he look on evil . . .  

           He shall dwell on the heights,

            his stronghold shall be a rocky fastness.   (Isaiah 33:13-16)

Stopping my ears.  Closing my eyes.  That’s what I’ve been doing the last few months, like quite a few others I know:  not reading the news, not watching the news, not listening to any news.  Not paying attention.  

     I just can’t handle the constant jolts of it anymore, the shots of adrenaline whenever I see a headline.  I can only take so much of my own outrage.  “I get all the news I need from the weather report,” as Paul Simon sang years ago.  

     Sometimes it’s been sunny.  More often it’s rained.  It’s been quiet.  Winter has been proceeding.  Spring is not far away.

     And yet one of the biggest problems we have right now is people who don’t know the facts and don’t want to know, or who have the wrong facts and are fine with that, or who don’t know what’s going on and don’t think we can know.  That’s one of the reasons we’ve ended up in the situation we’re in.  How can we act rightly when we practice willful ignorance?  

    Is that what I’m doing?  When is silence and withdrawal a good and proper thing, a way of praying, of following where the Spirit is leading us, and when is it refusing to face reality?  

     Am I dwelling on the heights, in a rocky fastness, or am I sticking my head in the sand?

 

     I know that sooner or later I’m going to have to come out of the woods and click on the news and decide what I will say and how I will act.  “Whatever you do for the least of these,” Jesus says in Matthew, “you do for me” (25:40).   It couldn’t be clearer.

 

     But I wonder, too, how much difference it’s made for me not to know what’s been going on.  What has been the detriment?  What have I lost?  What have I failed to do?

     I know the gain:  a greater centeredness.  A sense of ordinariness.  Of presence.

     Is there someone I could have helped and didn’t?  I’m not sure.

 

     When Jesus approaches the house where a young girl has died, he ignores all the “commotion,” Mark says, and goes in, quietly, and heals her.  He raises her up.  “Rise, little girl,” he says.  “Rise.”  (Mark 5:21-43)

 

    Isn’t prayer itself an act?  Isn’t silence?  “With every creative thought or action,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.”  Doesn’t prayer make a difference, too, however invisible?  However small?

 

    Satan tempts Jesus in the desert by saying three times it’s not good enough to be in the desert, not good enough just to be walking around for forty days all alone.  He has to make stuff happen:  turn rocks into bread.  Stand on top of the parapet and make his power known to the world.   

     Jesus says no.  Rocks are enough.  Wind is enough.  The stars in the night sky.

January 5, 2025

The Epiphany:  Matthew 2: 1-12

 

   They were overjoyed when they saw the star.  (2:10)

 

     I’ve always resisted the idea that we can be “spiritual but not religious,” it’s always seemed too easy to me, but after reading The Afternoon of Christianity, by the Czech priest and theologian, Tomas Halik, I’m starting to change my mind.

    I think I’m spiritual but not religious, too, and always have been.

     Everyone seems to be spiritual but not religious now—everyone seems to be saying this—it’s a meme—and Halik agrees that it’s often superficial, just an excuse for not doing the hard work that every spiritual practice demands.  But it’s not only that.  It reflects something deep in our culture, he believes, something we have to take seriously, as many people are.  Many, many of the people who have left the Church or never joined are doing the hard work, they are thoughtful and sincere, and they’re facing in their own way the problems we all have to face in the Church as an institution.  They’re following their consciences.  They’re trying to go where they believe the Spirit is leading them.

     God isn’t dead anymore.  There’s a deep, spiritual longing in the world, and the traditional religions are not meeting that need, and what Halik argues is that the Spirit is trying to speak to all of us through this crisis, calling the whole Church to be spiritual but not religious, too.

 

     A few weeks ago I did a memorial in a small town up the valley for the family of an old man who had died.  A friend asked me to help them.  There were just a few people there, working class people, hardworking people, none of them practicing Christians or with any religious background at all, and I had to be careful to adapt the prayers to respect that.  I wore a dress shirt and my good jeans.  I couldn’t fall back on the usual things.  It was tricky.       

     One young man was in his early thirties maybe, well over six feet tall, with a big bushy black beard, and he really intimidated me at first.  But he sat down next to his grandmother, and he held her hand, the whole time, and after a while the tears began to flow.  His voice broke as he talked about the kindness of the man who had died.  Everyone there was emotional, they were all good, loving people, you could feel it in the air of that funeral home, and I thought, God, you are here.  Whatever name they call you, you are here.  Whether I wear a collar or not, whatever words I say, you are here.

     It was a humbling moment.  A gift.

 

      “Religion” in the sense of institution and of organization isn’t bad.  We need it.  It just has to come later, in second place, and as a way of helping us enter more deeply into the mystery.  The Church has to focus first on the experience of God, focus first on prayer, not on dogma and institutional practice.

     This what I was being taught that day in that little town, and what I’ve been taught every day I’ve served as a deacon: “divine love meets us in the real world and nowhere else,” as Ruth Burrows says: “in this moment, in this person.”

     What Halik argues is that the Church must “transcend” itself–and not just the Catholic Church but all the churches, and not just Christianity but all the major world religions.  The call is for the great traditions to come together, and with mutual respect, each in its own way, offer the world the spiritual resources it desperately needs, teaching us how to separate the valid and good from the kooky and crackpot, how not to read literally, how not to oversimplify, how not to fear the darkness and the complexity of things but to face it.

     This is what Jesus does:  he teaches us how to pray:  Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .  This is what Jesus does:  he teaches us how to be:  Blessed are the poor in spirit . . .  blessed are the meek. . .   This is the great treasure of the Catholic Church.  Its great gift is the gift of prayer, of the long practice of being in the presence of God–or of recognizing that we’re not, that we are all in constant need of grace.

 

     And since a church like this won’t come into being anytime soon, or ever—since there has never been a perfect church, free of human distortions—we have to make peace with the way things are, if we can, or if we can’t, find spiritual strength in other ways, in alternate communities, often on the margins and in the cracks.

 

     “If Christianity wants to help foster a global society,” Halik says: “it will have to be a ‘kenotic’ Christianity, free of any claims to power and free of clerical narrow-mindedness.”  It will have to be “a Christianity that is ecumenically open and ready to serve all those in need.”  

     Self-emptying:  kenosis.   Have in you the “same mind” as Christ Jesus, St. Paul says in Philippians, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something be grasped, but rather emptied himself.”  

     The Church is being called to grow up, in short, to enter into what Halik, borrowing a term from Carl Jung, calls the “afternoon” or the maturity of faith: “if the Church today can attest to this trust in a God who is greater than all our ideas, definitions and institutions, something new and significant happens:  we enter the afternoon of faith.”

     In many ways Halik is simply saying that the Church needs to fulfill the promise of Vatican II.

    The Wise Men didn’t belong to the established community, they came from somewhere else, and they didn’t follow an idea.  They followed a star.

    When they found the child, they didn’t stop to debate.  They didn’t try to capture him and take him away.  They knelt.  They gave him all they had, all their gifts.

    They weren’t angry and they weren’t afraid.  

    They were overjoyed.

Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 22, 2204

     Apparently, some people are worried about “the feminization” of the Church.  I came across this phrase just the other day.  Apparently, there are Catholics in this country who want the Church to be more “manly”—who want it to be “hard,” not “soft.”       

     I guess this is a thing, and I think it’s crazy.  It’s wrong.  It’s completely contrary to the gospels and certainly contrary to Luke, who frames his account of the life of Jesus with the stories of Mary–today, of Mary and Elizabeth, in this beautiful scene we call the Visitation.  Luke wants us to see Jesus through the eyes of women.

1.  

    For one thing, Mary hastens to the hill country, hurries up and down the rocky hills, and that requires a strength, a “hardness,” of muscle and of will.  Elizabeth lives in those hills, and every day they both do the backbreaking work all women did in that time before electricity and running water, and still do in many places—not to mention the fact that they are both pregnant, and will both endure the pain of childbirth, one of the most painful things a human being can endure.

     And what of their spiritual hardness, their spiritual strength, to believe in the face of the disapproval of all those around them, to trust when there is only hardship, only the desert?

     But let’s accept the stereotypes for a moment:  that women are weak and men are strong.  That women are soft and men are hard.  

     Who could be more womanly, then, than Jesus himself, who did not deem equality with God something to be grasped but rather emptied himself?  Who said blessed are the meek?  Who never once in all the gospels clenched his fist or raised his hand?  Who died, and let himself die, and called us to die, too?

     Who could be softer than Paul, who boasted of his weakness?

     Or like Sarah Coakley in The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God, let’s accept for a moment the biological difference between male and female and use that as the metaphor:  that the male givesand the female receives.

     In the story of the Visitation there’s all kinds of giving and receiving, and the women are doing both.  They keep exchanging roles.  Mary has received the Spirit and become the mother of the Lord, just as Elizabeth has received from her husband and become the mother of John the Baptist.  But isn’t giving birth a giving, too, a producing?  And Mary gives Elizabeth a greeting, and Elizabeth receives it—and then Elizabeth gives Mary a greeting in return, “Hail Mary, full of Grace,” and Mary receives it—and then Mary responds again, with the great poem of the Magnificat, and we all receive it: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.”  It’s a festival of giving and receiving.  A cycle.  An ecology.

     Here’s Blessed Isaac of Stella, from the 12^th century:

Every Christian is also believed to be a bride of God’s Word, a mother of Christ, his daughter and sister, at once virginal and fruitful.  These words are used in a universal sense of the Church, in a special sense of Mary, in a particular sense of the individual Christian.  They are used by God’s Wisdom in person, the Word of the Father.

The Church has always thought of Mary as the icon of the Church.  The metaphor has always been of the wedding, with Christ as the groom and the Church as the bride.  And we are all like Mary, we are all the Church, “every Christian,” the ordained and the lay, all “virginal and fruitful.”  Both.  At the same time.

•  

     God is beyond all sexuality and gender, as the Catechism makes clear–there are images in the scriptures and the tradition of God as mother, too–but an image has some meaning, it points to something, and the dominant image in the tradition is of God as father, and that image suggests something very important, however partial, something that shouldn’t be erased or explained away:  that salvation is a gift.  We receive it.  It’s given.

     Without God we are lost.

     The solution to the problem of exclusive language isn’t to make everything so general that it doesn’t mean anything.  Jesus was a man, he was our brother, and we would never want to do away with his blessed masculinity, his dear manliness, exactly because it’s the opposite of the kind of masculinity we see all the time in popular culture.

     It’s true that there are many images in the psalms and the prophets of God as powerful king and warrior, images that are sometimes used in the New Testament to describe Jesus, and these images are important, too, because they assure us again and again of God’s power, however things seem, that the darkness will not overwhelm the light.   

     We don’t want just one image of who Jesus is.  We want all the images we can get.

     But Jesus is the only man we are called to imitate, all of us, whatever our gender, and always in his gentleness, his compassion.  

    And always and again:  God is beyond all gender, God is beyond all metaphor, and the worst thing we can do is take any one image and freeze it, think of it as fixed, exhaustive.

•   

     Think of the Trinity:  the Father gives to the Son and the Son gives to the Spirit—and both the Son and the Spirit give to the Father—the masculine roles and the feminine roles are continually shifting, joyously.

     Think of the image of the “persons” in the Trinity, as Tomas Halik does in I Want You to Be.  It’s terribly important.  It suggests that whatever we sense when we pray isn’t just an impersonal force but a love, a tenderness.  Somehow, Someone.

      But at the same time “persons” is only an image.  It only suggests, and it only suggests that God is like this, which is to say, also unlike this.  God is always beyond.  Always other. 

      The Greek word for “person,” in fact, is persona–literally, mask.   

      All language is mask.       

•  

      As Coakley points out, this is exactly like the dynamism and fluidity of the role of the priest in the mass, who in the Eucharistic Prayer first receives the action of the Holy Spirit (and so is feminine) which then, through him, makes holy the bread and the wine (and so is productive, is masculine).

     But then it shifts again.  The priest, after all, receives the Eucharist, too.

     And then we all receive the sacrament, as a woman receives, and then we all go out to love and serve the Lord, which is to say, we create.  We give.  It’s wonderfully blurry and circular: in the Eucharist, as St. Augustine says in fifth century, “we receive who we are.”

    What is it that Elizabeth proclaims in the Magnificat?  That all the binaries are reversed, turned upside down:  the mighty are cast down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up; the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.

•  

      This is how the Lord speaks to us every day.  He greets us—softly, quietly, in everything that happens, in the things we see, in a memory, in a song we hear, a child we love, in the rain, the trees—and sometimes, if we’re paying attention, if we’re listening, our hearts leap up.  We feel this quiet joy.  Our breath catches.  And then we ring out our praise, as Mary does.  We sing our song.  We proclaim our faith.

     Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband, is taking his turn serving as a priest in the temple, and the angel comes to him, too, and says these wonderful things are going to happen, and unlike Mary when the angel comes to her, Zechariah questions the angel, he wants proof–hard proof, nothing soft or fuzzy or touchy-feely–he wants to nail things down once and for all, and the angel does what angels do in these situations:  he strikes the man dumb.

    It’s only later, when his son John the Baptist is born, that Zechariah is able to open his mouth again, and what he proclaims is the Benedictus, is praise:  Blessed be the Lord. 

    This is what Zechariah finally understands.  This is what we all need to understand this Advent and Christmas–particularly this Advent and Christmas.  

     Jesus doesn’t come into the world as a soldier or an athlete or a hero or a president or a king.  He comes as a little boy, rocked in his mother’s arms.

for a recording of this homily: https://soundcloud.com/smcc-14184039/september-8-2024-23rd-sunday-in-ordinary-time-dcn-chris-anderson?si=0fbd2da7d98c4e75a5a5b4bac36b914e&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

September 8, 2024

James 2:1-5; Mark 7:11-37

     One day I get a call to drive over to Lebanon to visit a woman who is dying.  It’s a gray, overcast day and the house is dark and dirty.  A little dog barks at my feet.  The woman is leaning back in a bulging recliner held together by duct tape.

     But then we start praying the Rosary.  Hail Mary, I say, full of grace, and the woman answers me each bead, Holy Mary, Mother of God, back and forth, and she has this beautiful voice, deep and silky, like a contralto.

     God is always speaking to us, and sometimes his voice is a deep contralto, but our ears are closed and our hearts are closed and he must reach out first and touch us:  Ephphetha.  Be opened.

     God shows no partiality, as the Letter of James says.  The poor person in shabby clothes is just as beloved to him as the rich man with golden rings.

     The Ephphetha is built into the Baptismal rite.  It’s part of our lives from the beginning.  The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak, the priest or deacon prays, and then, as we sign the baby’s ears and mouth:  may he soon touch your ears to receive his word and your mouth to proclaim his praise.

     This is what we try to teach our children and what we keep trying to teach ourselves:  how to hear the Word of God.  How to listen to our lives.

     There are so many other voices in the world, voices of hatred and judgment and condemnation, and they can drown out the goodness in a child.  They can overwhelm us all.  There are so many other voices within us, voices of anger and violence and self-loathing–they just seem to be a part of who we are, they might be underneath what we call Original Sin–and we have to learn what they are and separate them out.   Whatever leads to freedom, whatever leads to peace, whatever makes us feel loved and able then to love others:  that’s the voice of God.

     This what we have to teach our children, and we have to make sure that our own voices don’t add to the clamor, don’t add to the vitriol and the lies, because whatever comes out of our mouths goes into the ears of our children and into the ears of many, many others, and then it comes out of their mouths, too, again and again, in an endless cycle.

     We’re all so closed off.  We’re afraid to the face the facts, because sometimes they’re complicated and hard and they might force us to change our minds.  We’re afraid to face the tensions inside of us, the ambiguities and the sadness, and so we blame others and cling to false, easy answers, to oversimplifications that free of us from thinking for ourselves, free us from taking responsibility.  We eat too much, drink too much, buy too much.  We’ll do anything to distract ourselves from what’s going on in our own souls.

     Ephphetha, Jesus says.  Be opened.  Be not afraid.  Trust in me.  Risk believing.  Today, listen to the voice of the lord.  Do not grow stubborn as your forbearers did in the wilderness when at Meribah and Massah they challenged me and provoked me, although they had seen all of my works.

     I’m walking back to my car after another thesis defense, and a homeless man in the parking lot asks me what time it is.  Bearded.  Gap-toothed, wearing an old bomber jacket and black watch cap.  I don’t believe in time anymore, he says, and now I’m always late.

     And I laughed.  I thought that was a profound thing to say, and told him I did.  Was that man’s voice the voice of the Lord?  What was God telling me?  What did God want me to hear?

     Ephphetha:  be opened.

     Think of the ripple effect of our words.  How what this man said stayed with me, and I told Barb about it, and she told others, and they told others.  How what I said might have stayed with him, and how he might have told others, and they told others.  With every creative thought and action, Teilhard de Chardin says, a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to think, to act, and to judge.

     O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise.

    Sometimes there’s only silence, only emptiness.  No birds sing.  No children play.  We are desolate, we are in desolation, and we have to learn hear those moments, too.  God is present even when we don’t feel that he is.  Desolation is just part of the process, just part of the journey.  However terrible it is, however long it lasts, it doesn’t mean that God is a lie.  It doesn’t mean that joy is a delusion.  Hold on.

     We must be ready to believe that nothingness is the presence of divine reality, Ruth Burrows says, that emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling.

     Hold on.

     I once married two people in their mid-seventies, Patty and Joe.

     Both had lost their spouses, and in their loneliness they’d become friends.  Joe had worked for the Forest Service and been a cook and done odd jobs.  He’d had a hard life, and Patty had, too.  They were wonderful people, generous and kind.  Neither had very much money–they were both just getting by.

      I’ll never forget the moment of their wedding.  This was when the tabernacle was still over on the side of the church, and we just stood there, the three of us, and a couple of Patty and Joe’s children.  Patty wore a simple print dress, Joe a straw cowboy hat with a feather in the band.  It was quiet.  I was saying the words of the marriage liturgy.

     And then, out of the blue, Joe interrupted and asked if he could say something.  He just stopped the flow of the rite.  And taking Patty’s hand, and looking into her eyes, he said, haltingly:

ain’t no mountain high enough   aint no valley low enough

aint no river wide enough    to keep me from getting to you     

     I wasn’t expecting this.  It embarrassed me at first.  But then I realized, what a minute, this is beautiful, this is important—this is the voice of the Lord.

     Ephphetha.  Be opened.

     God is always speaking to us, in time and out of time, whatever time it is.

     Last week a man wrote in an email that when he went out in the morning to listen, there were so many Swainson’s Thrushes calling and flying overhead it was like a “river of thrushes.”

     Weep weep weep.   That’s the flight call of the thrushes as they fly home to the Amazon every fall.  But we have to listen for it.  We have to get up early.  It’s still dark.  The stars are out.  We have to stand on the porch and strain to hear it, above the sounds of the semis going down the road.   

            weep   weep   weep

 

            Hail Mary, full of grace

     Be opened:  aint no mountain high enough     aint no valley low enough

   aint no river wide enough

video

June 16, 2024—Father’s Day, Mark 4:26-34

     Happy Fathers’ Day to all fathers out there.  I’m a father, too, and I know what it’s like.

     When my son Tim was around ten, I picked him up from soccer practice.   A couple of the boys were talking tough about their next game.  “We’re going to kick their bottoms,” they said, or words to that effect, and Tim said “yeah, we’re going to kick their bottoms.”  Then he turned and saw me and burst into tears.  

     He knew what he said was wrong.  He knew there would be consequences.

    This is what it’s like to be a father.  In a way we have a lot power.  We have the power to set boundaries, and we should exercise that power, and there should be consequences when the boundaries are crossed.  But in another way, we don’t have much power at all.  We’re vulnerable.  We can’t keep our children from rubbing shoulders with the world, we can’t keep them from being hurt, and that’s really hard.  We love them.  When they burst into tears, we burst into tears.

   I love the word “scatter” in the first parable in the Gospel today, how it implies the hard work of sowing but also a letting go.  I love the idea that the seed grows “we not know how,” because God is a mystery.  I love the idea that the seed grows “of its own accord,” because grace is a gift.  We can’t earn it or control it.  

     And our children are gifts, our children grow of their own accord.  We work and work to support them and teach them, but they have free will, they make choices, and they’re their own people from the beginning, even from birth.  They’re not us.  We have to tell them things, important things, but we also have to learn who they really are, uniquely. God is in their lives, too.       

     Tim has grown up to be a wonderful man, and my son, John, too, and Maggie has grown into a wonderful woman, and I had something to do with that, but looking back now I realize how much was grace, how much was given.

     Later that day, after Tim said the bad word, I dropped something heavy on my foot and said a couple of bad words and had to wash my own mouth out with soap.

     And we can take this further, we can turn this around, because we are taught to call God Father.

     The scriptures describe God as mother, too, in Psalm 131, several times in Isaiah, and in a couple of other places in the Old Testament.  Jesus compares himself to a mother hen gathering her brood.  And as the Catechism tells us, God is beyond all language, including our own, and so is beyond all gender.

    But “father” is the most common image in the scriptures, it’s the word that Jesus uses most often, and that’s really important.  It means something.  God is all-powerful, so this comparison breaks down at a certain point, but if he is anything like human fathers he can also be hurt.  He’s vulnerable.  In a sense he expresses his power most fully by giving it away, out of love, out of tenderness, and he enters into our lives, and he feels what we feel.  He cries when we cry.  

     And above all he gives us freedom.  He lets us grow of our own accord.  He sets us down in a garden and then lets us ruin it, and there are consequences, we are expelled, but he never stops caring for us, never stops loving us.  It’s his love that is unending.

     Someone told Barb the other day that she couldn’t believe in a God who would sacrifice his own son, just give him away to be killed.  But she’s gotten that wrong.  Jesus gives himself freely.  The scriptures make that clear more than once.  And though Jesus cries out on the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” if the Father and the Son are one, as we believe, isn’t the Father somehow there, too, suffering with his son, and suffering with us, and for us?  

    In the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, the father lets his son waste his inheritance and fall among the pigs, but when his son comes home, he runs out and embraces him.  He throws him a party.  The father is prodigal, and the father is God, pouring out his love.  All we have to do is come home.

     Power and vulnerability.  Authority and letting go.  Both.

     The father didn’t approve of how his son had chosen to live, and the son knew it.  The father tried to guide the son, until he couldn’t.

      I saw a young father the other day.  His three or four-year-old son was driving a little child-sized bulldozer, self-powered.  He could steer it.  It was like the real thing.  And the father was walking along beside him, looking at his phone.  He never looked up.  He never looked at his son.       

     It was just a moment.  Who knows what happened the rest of the day?  But that image really stays with me—I think it’s representative—and it really saddens me.

      Parables like the parables in the Gospel today are simple stories drawn from everyday life, as C.H. Dodd says, but stories that “leave us in sufficient doubt” about what they mean that we are “teased into thought.”  This is how Jesus taught.  It’s the at very heart of the Gospel.  This is why the scribes and the Pharisees had him killed, because he wouldn’t spell everything out.  He wanted them to think for themselves.

     Maybe the image of God the Father is the biggest parable of all.  Maybe that’s what God the Father really does:  he calls us to think.  Maybe that’s what all of us who are fathers should try to teach our children:  to read between the lines.

     In the last few years of his life my father had aphasia.  He knew what he wanted to say but he couldn’t find the right words.  One of the last times I saw him before he died, we were standing in his carport.  We were saying goodbye.   When he hugged me, I heard his hearing aid buzzing.  He said, “Chris, I will never forgiveyou.”

     But I knew what he meant:  he meant, “I will never forget you.”

    God the Father never forgets us, and he always forgives.  Always.

     My mom and dad didn’t belong to any church, they were very skeptical about religion—and about me being Catholic, and about me being a deacon–and I always worried about what I would say as they were dying, whether I would be able to give them any comfort.

    My mom died suddenly, so it wasn’t until my dad was in the hospital at the end that I had a chance to say something.  He was frantic and irrational.  He thought I was his brother.  And he was afraid, he seemed lost, like a little boy trying to find his way home.           

   And I knew what to say then.  I had to shout it, but I knew what to say:  don’t be afraid, Dad.  God is with you.  Don’t be afraid.    

     The Father is waiting.  The Father is here.

The Double Rainbow and the Yellow Plane

     The other day I went to see an older man whose wife died last summer.  His son was there, too, and it was obvious as they talked what a remarkable person this woman was and how much they loved her.  

     The son told me this story—that not long after his mother died, he was driving down a road.  And he looked up at the sky, and there was a double rainbow, very bright, every band of color in both of them clear and shining and distinct–it was beautiful, and sudden, and his heart lifted up.  He thought, mom.  Mom.

     This is how I think joy is.  This is how it works.

     The gospel today is about joy, as every gospel is–Pope Francis called his first exhortation The Joy of the Gospel–but today the gospel describes joy itself, the joy of the disciples when they see the risen Lord, a joy so intense they can’t believe it at first.

     And this is really important.  “Joy is an infallible sign of the presence of God,” as Teilhard de Chardin puts it, and today’s gospel describes the circumstances of joy and the qualities of joy, not just for the disciples but for us.  

     Let me just make a list.

     Joy isn’t something we can schedule.  It’s not something we can produce.  It just happens, it just appears, as Jesus just appears to the disciples, out of the blue, when they least expect it.

     Joy isn’t something we can earn.  We don’t deserve it.  It comes to us even when we’ve not been doing too well, like the disciples today.  They’re a pretty unimpressive bunch so far, and yet Jesus comes to them anyway.    

     Joy isn’t happiness, because we can do things to be happy–we can make ourselves happy—but joy is always a gift, always a surprise.     

     Joy comes even in the midst of darkness and suffering and grief, as Jesus comes to the disciples today in their fear and confusion, and the joy they feel doesn’t take away all the pain or remove all the challenges to come.

     Joy doesn’t make things easy.  It gives us strength.  

     Joy is deeper than pain.  Joy survives even suffering and doubt. 

     Joy can be intense, as it is today for the disciples.  We might feel joy like this only once or twice in our lives.

    And joy can be subtle, too, soft, elusive, woven into everything that happens to us.  A man falls in beside us on a road.  We sit at a table with friends.

    Joy is something we often forget.  Even those intense moments fade, and the subtler moments, the everyday moments–we forget them all the time.  We’re too busy.  We’re preoccupied.

     Joy is something we can misinterpret, we mistake joy for a ghost, we think it’s unreal.    

    Joy is something we always doubt, even when it’s overwhelming—the disciples are so joyous today they’re incredulous.  They can’t believe what they see.  It’s all too good to be true.

     Joy is fleeting–we only just glimpse the Lord and he’s gone–the way he disappears in the story of Emmaus, before this in Luke, vanishing at just the moment the disciples finally recognize him.  

     And yet joy never dies, it never fades—if we learn the discipline of remembering it, if we make a commitment to it and choose to trust it even in the darkness.

     Joy is one of the nine fruits of the Spirit, the theme of our series of homilies this Easter season.  Paul lays them out in Galatians.  Last week we talked about peace, and next week we’ll talk about gentleness and patience, and later the others, and nothing is more important than knowing what these are.  Because it’s from the fruits of the Spirit that we can reason back to their source.  Joy is a sign of the presence of God, Chardin says, and we need signs.  We’re not the disciples.  We don’t get to experience Jesus directly the way they did.  Jesus is present to us indirectly, in the Spirit he left us, and the Spirit is quiet, it moves “between the lines of persons and things,” as Abbot Jeremy Driscoll puts it, and so we need to pay attention to what’s going on in our lives and to what’s going on inside us.  

     God isn’t dead.  He’s here and all around us.  We just have to learn what to look for–we just have to learn discernment.

      The disciples are terrified of Jesus at first today, but fear like that is never from God.    

     Anger, hatred, envy—all “the fruits of the flesh”–they are never from God.

     That sense of worthlessness so many of us feel, or that sense of hopelessness we sometimes feel—they are never from God.  

       Joy is a going out of ourselves, a being swept up into something beyond us.

       Joy is an awareness of a beauty within us.  Joy is an awareness of a beauty in others.  Joy is an awareness of a beauty and a goodness coursing through the world, however terrible things seem, a light that the darkness can never finally overwhelm.

       Joy gives us courage, but it asks for courage, too.  We first have to trust it.  We first have to risk it.

      By his Resurrection, the Catechism tells us, Jesus opens for us the way to a new life.  The Resurrection reinstates us in God’s grace, it says, quoting St. Paul, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

     Joy is the gift of the Resurrection, and it changes us.  It transforms us.  It enables us to live in a radically new way, with confidence and creativity and compassion. 

     Joy is the proof of the Resurrection,  because the Risen Christ is here, in this very place, right now, in us.  

     Last week, as we were sitting at the kitchen table eating cinnamon rolls and drinking coffee, the man whose wife died got up and brought back this wonderful picture of the two of them many years ago.  A yellow Cessna 180 is floating on a mountain lake, and they’re standing beside it, on one of the pontoons.  He is young and handsome, and she is young and beautiful, the wind has just ruffled her hair, and she’s looking at the camera with this love and this life and this joy in her eyes, and that love and that joy were still there, they were moving in the air of the room, even though the man was choking up as he talked.  They were both bush pilots in Alaska, he said–his wife was a doctor–and this Cessna was their plane, it was their honeymoon plane, they were always flying, and this was the way his wife was–she always had a spirit of adventure, her whole life was an adventure, and it still is, he said.  The adventure, he told me, is still going on.

     This is joy.  This is the sign of the presence of God.  Deeper than tears.  Something remembered.  Something held onto.  Something believed:  that this woman is flying still, in that bright yellow plane, she is soaring, as one day we too will fly.  We too will soar.

January 28, 2024

Psalm 95, Mark 1:21-28

     The psalm today, Psalm 95, is one of the best-known psalms in the Bible, and it does what in one way or another all the psalms do.  It praises God and asks us to praise God.  “Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord,” the speaker says.  “Let us joyfully sing psalms to him.”

     And we don’t want to.  We don’t want to praise God.  We’re too wrapped up in ourselves, we’re too interested in our own lives.  We’ve got things to do.  And besides, what has God done for us lately?  Our days are empty and gray.  Violence and injustice are all around, as the psalmists knew, too.  They weren’t naïve.  What is there to praise?

     Even if God does exist, why would he want us to praise him?  How big is his ego?

     Thomas Merton puts it this way in a little book called “Praying the Psalms.”  “It is quite possible that our lack of interest in the Psalms conceals a secret lack of interest in God.  For if we have no real interest in praising Him, it shows that we have never realized who he really is.”  

     These two sentences really bring me up short.  They really hit home.

     When we become aware of God, Merton says, of his holiness and love, of all that he has created and intends, “the only possible reaction” is thanks and praise.

     A few weeks ago I was walking with my labradoodle in the woods.  We were walking along Cronemiller Lake, and I saw a young man standing by a tree touching the moss on the branches with his fingertips.  He was deaf and blind, and he seemed to be exploring the texture and feel of it.  There were two women helping him, and when they guided him back to the road, I let them pass.  I was thinking my own thoughts.  But then I thought, no, no, and I stopped, and turned, and I called after them and asked if this young man, this boy really, might want to meet my dog.

     And she tapped out my question on his arm, and he nodded and smiled, and Bumble came wriggling up to him.  The women helped him bend, and when he reached out and touched Bumble’s curly fur with his fingertips, he laughed out loud, this beautiful, openhearted laugh.

     It was a wonderful moment.  It took me out of myself, it made me forget about my own life, and yet somehow I felt more like myself, too, bigger somehow.   This is the paradox:  that it’s in our own experience that we glimpse the divine.  The people are “astonished” by the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel today, as the young man seemed to be astonished by the feel of Bumble’s fur.  I think astonished is too strong a word for what I felt, but something like that–moved, maybe, by the man’s delight, by the women at his side, by the lake and trees, and moved to thanks and praise, just naturally.  Spontaneously.  I didn’t feel coerced.  I felt free. 

     We all have moments like this, if only we stop, if only we remember, and this is the leap that we are all called to make, to choose to see these moments as moments of grace, as moments when God is reaching out to us, and to hold onto them in the dark and empty times, and to leap even then.  “Do not grow stubborn,” Psalm 95 tells us.  “Today, listen to the voice of the Lord.”

     It’s what the first disciples do in the gospel last week when Jesus walks by and says, follow me.  They get up and go.  I don’t think Mark has left anything out.  There must have been something about Jesus to draw the disciples, something powerful and good, but in the end they just had to decide.  First comes obedience, then comes grace, not the other way around—or rather, first comes obedience, and then we become aware of the grace that has always been there.  

    Obedience.  That’s a word we don’t like anymore.  We’re skeptical about authority, and when it comes to human authority, we should be.  We should never blindly follow any other human being.  But with God it’s the only way.  We have to.  First comes faith, then comes proof, not the other way around—though proof isn’t the right word either.  Intuitions.  Glimpses.  

     Sister Ruth Burrows is straightforward and blunt: do you believe in Jesus or not?  Because of course as Christians when we pray the psalms it’s Jesus we are praising.  Forget all your theological scruples, Burrows says.  Stop trying to make God into a God you can be comfortable with, a God who agrees with all your views.  Leap.  “Faith is a gift,” she says, but a gift that will be given “only if we choose to believe, choose to take God at his word and stake our lives on it.”  

      “Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord,” Psalms 95 says.  “Come, let us bow down and worship, / bending the knee before the Lord, our maker.”  Lately I’ve been renewing the commitment I made as a deacon to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day, the Church’s ancient book of psalms and prayers, and every morning begins with this psalm.

     Sometimes I still struggle, as I always have, sometimes I resist, but I’m trying to change the direction I’m looking in, to focus on God and not myself, and I’m trying to use the language of the scriptures, not my own language—to use the words that Jesus used, because Jesus was a Jew, and the Jews prayed the psalms, morning, noon, and night.  In the Gospels Jesus quotes the psalms more than any other part of the Bible.  Whenever I hit a rough spot, whenever my mind gets in the way, I say, “leap of faith,” “leap of faith.”  I remind myself that whenever we pray the psalms, Jesus is praying in us, or we are praying in him.

     “O Lord,” the speaker says in Psalm 131, “my heart is not proud, / nor haughty my eyes.  / I have not gone after things too great / nor marvels beyond me.”  We are all deaf and blind.  We all have to humble ourselves.  “Truly I have set my soul / in silence and peace,” the psalmist says.  He has set it, as in he has decided, as in he has made an act of will–and then, sometimes, “as a child has rest in its mother’s arms, / even so my soul.”  When we trust, we can breathe.  When we trust, we can be confident and unafraid.  

     We don’t love God because he forces us to.  We love God because he loves us—loves us as a mother loves, tenderly and completely.  We praise God because he is wonderful, and sometimes, for a moment, we glimpse that wonder, we sense that mystery.

     Sometimes we stop, and we bend down, and we reach out our hand, and like a child we laugh, we laugh out loud, and our laughter rises up like a song.