Homily

September 24, 2023

Isaiah 55:6-9; Matthew 20:1-16

     A couple of weeks ago I was at a wedding reception, and a nice man sat down across from me at the table.  He wanted to talk about religion, and he said the same things people always say when they talk about religion:  that he was raised in the Church but grew out of it, that the Church is full of hypocrites, and that there isn’t one way to God.  

     I’ve heard this hundreds of times, exactly these three things:  I was raised in the Church, the Church is full of hypocrites, there isn’t one way.   It’s the new kerygma statement.  The new dogma. 

     And I don’t mean to be condescending, because the man at the reception is a good man, someone who is sincerely searching for God.  It just feels to me that talking in generalities like this is almost always an evasion.  It’s beside the point.   “Seek the Lord where he may be found,” Isaiah says, and I don’t think he can be found in abstractions.  

     So I listened, and I tried not to get sucked into a debate, and finally I asked him:  what makes you the happiest?  Where do you feel most like yourself? 

     This is the question, I think.  This is what really matters.

     And the man stopped, and thought, and then veered away again, back out into the memes, back out into ideas, and I don’t blame him.  It’s hard to talk about your deepest hopes and fears, especially with someone you don’t know.  It’s hard to face your own emptiness.  It’s hard to see the subtle ways God is working in your life.  

     And even when we want to, it’s hard to put what we feel into words.  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,” says the Lord in Isaiah, “nor are your ways my ways . . .  As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways, my thoughts above your thoughts.”  That’s why dogma is always secondary, why dogma is always limited, because God is beyond all language, including our own—and this is the dogma, this is what the dogma professes, that the God we believe in doesn’t follow good business practices, like the landowner in the Gospel today, that the God we believe in doesn’t reward us according to how long or hard we work but is loving and generous beyond all measure.

     Dogma, Flannery O’Connor says, is “the gateway to mystery.”

     God, Gerard Manley Hopkins says, is “an incomprehensible certainty.”

     But I wasn’t trying to tell this good man what the truth is.  I was trying to say that he already knows it.  I wasn’t trying to tell him that he needed to get God in his life.  I was trying say that He already is in his life.  What most deeply concerns me is how lost and lonely we all are, and that unless we have some kind of tradition and some set of spiritual practices and some kind of community to love us and hold us accountable, we’re going to miss entirely the one astounding fact:  that God isn’t dead.  He’s alive, in us and all around us.  “Seek the Lord where he may be found,” Isaiah says, “call him while he is near,” and he is always near.

        Didn’t Jesus perform his first miracle at a wedding reception, when he turned the water into wine—and where nobody could see it, nobody knew it was happening but Mary and the servants who served the others?

     And this isn’t just a one-way thing.  I get lost in the weeds, I get tempted into pointless arguments, all the time, and this man’s doubts were calling me to humility, and to listening, and to a deeper faith.  

     “Let us abandon our polemics,” Pope Francis says, in his new apostolic letter on Eucharistic renewal, “and listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Church.”  Jesus falls in beside us on the road, but we don’t recognize him at first.  We sit down at a table, at a wedding reception or coffee shop or in our own kitchen, and at just the moment of the breaking of the bread, we know:  it’s him.  Then he vanishes.

     This is one of the main reasons we go to mass, I think, to train our hearts, to help us recognize the Lord when he falls in beside us—though as the pope keeps stressing, we need more training to begin with, too, before we come to this table and stand at this altar.  The pope published his apostolic letter last year as the bishops of the United States began a three-year Eucharistic Renewal.  It’s called, in English, I Have Earnestly Desired, and this is one of its most important points.  We have to learn to think more imaginatively and creatively, the pope says.  We have to learn to move from the head to the heart.  The landowner’s wild and unexpected generosity can’t be understood according to our own narrow philosophical categories.  The Eucharist is entirely his gift.  Not something earned.  Not something predictable.  Not something we can put under a microscope.  A poem, not a formula.  An experience, not an object.

     A few days after my conversation at the reception, in the same week, I had exactly the same conversation again, at a lovely brunch in a big, beautiful house on a horse farm in the hills outside of Oregon City.  The husband and wife who hosted are kind and generous people, and we all had a wonderful time, and at the end, as were sitting at their kitchen table, the wife turned to me and began to talk about religion:  that she was raised in the Church but grew out of it, that the Church is full of hypocrites, and that there isn’t one way to God.  And I listened, as we need to listen, and after a while I asked her, what makes you most deeply happy?  Where do you sense the presence of the God?       

     And she answered, immediately:  with her horses.  

     This is a lovely, caring woman, and she has two rescue horses, one blind in one eye, one so old all he can do is lean.  Early every morning she gets up and pulls on her rubber boots and trudges down to the barn.  She shovels out their oats and brushes them down, and sometimes when she feels their warm breath on her face, she is so moved she cries, she said, and when I heard this, I was moved, too.

     Earlier she’d told me that she didn’t think “religion should be hard.”  But I said:  taking care of your horses sounds like a pretty difficult practice to me.  

     It sounds like a spiritual practice.

     Seek the Lord where he can be found.  Call him while he is near.   

     Isn’t this what we believe?  That all things were created through Him and in Him?  That the Lord himself was born into the world, in a little town in the hills?   That once in a stable a tremendous miracle took place—and is still taking place?  Is always taking place?   

Sunday July 9, 2023

Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9-13; Matthew 11:25-30

video

     Last Saturday Barb and I went down to the farmer’s market and met our son, Tim, and his family:  our daughter-in-law, Crista; our almost three-year-old grandson, Hank; and our new granddaughter, Emmy Margaret, who was born just three weeks ago.  Crista was carrying Emmy in a sling against her chest.  All you could see was her beautiful little face.  And the sun was shining, and the farmers were selling blueberries and raspberries, and there were people and dogs everywhere.  A band was playing: two guitars, a clarinet, and a kazoo.

    When St. Paul tells us not to live “according to the flesh,” he isn’t talking about the farmer’s market.  He’s talking about all the mornings and the moments we’ve corrupted with our selfishness and our greed.  He’s talking about the fallen body.  How can blueberries be anything other than good when God made them in their sweetness and made us to taste them?  How can even labradoodles be anything other than good, when as Zechariah says today, our king comes riding towards us on “a colt, the foal of an ass”?  To live by the Spirit means to love this Spirit-filled world, and to learn how to see it the way a child sees it, with openness and joy, because it’s through the world, through what we can touch and taste and feel, that the Spirit reaches out to us.

     “My dear souls,” Jean Pierre de Caussade says, “you are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: making use of whatever he offers you.”  De Caussade was an eighteenth- century French Jesuit.  “Everything leads you to union with God,” he says.  “The blood flowing through your veins moves only by his will.  Every feeling and every thought you have, no matter how they arise, all come from God’s invisible hand.”  We have nothing to do, as de Caussade puts it, “but love and cherish what each moment brings.”

     We think that prayer is too hard.  We think that to try to be holy means to spend our lives on our knees or in the clouds, despising everything that is warm and ordinary and real.  But that’s not what Jesus teaches.  “Come to me,” he says, “all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest.”  “For my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

     How can our Lord despise the world when he came into it?  How can he disdain the ordinary and the real when he lived it, when he came to the markets and walked through the fields and called the children unto him?

     We are all dualists.  Dualism is hammered into us from birth by the ideas we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment, from the age of de Caussade, the idea that what is real is only what can be measured, the idea that the inner life is not as important as the outer life.  But Jesus says no.  The truth has been hidden from “the wise and the learned” and “revealed to the little ones,” and so we have to be little, too.  Humble.  Ordinary.  Small.  We have stop getting lost in theological abstractions, however important theology is; we have to stop getting caught up in doctrinal disputes, however important doctrine is; we have to stop getting tricked into political debates disguised as discussions of faith, because debates like this are never anything but a waste of spirit.

     There’s a new book by a contemporary Jesuit, James Martin, called Learning to Pray.  One of the early chapters is called “Praying Without Knowing It,” and I love that, because we all pray at certain moments in our lives, as Martin says, instinctively, unconsciously, in moments of gratitude and joy, in moments of sorrow, and the reason to pray in more formal ways is to train our hearts to know this and see this.  The rest of the book is full of good, clear descriptions of the various methods the tradition gives us—lectio divina, the examen, the rosary, centering prayer, and all the others—but these aren’t meant to take us away from our lives but to bring us back into them more deeply.  It’s what the mass does most of all.  In the consecration of the bread and wine we are being taught to believe in the fundamental fact of the Incarnation, of God incarnate, here, not far above us, but here, in all that is good and healthy and right.

     “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” to quote a third Jesuit, the great nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.  “Generations have trod and trod,” for centuries beauty has been trampled down, “but there lives a dearest freshness deep down things,” Hopkins says, and he wants us to see that and feel that, because he believes that this what the Lord came to teach us.   I’m walking past the booths at the farmers’ market.  I meet a young colleague I haven’t seen since I retired, and I’m glad to see him again.  He’s a good man.  I look at all the people as they walk by, all the children and the parents and the grandparents.  “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,” Hopkins says in another poem, “lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his, / to the father through the features of men’s faces.”

     In a journal entry Hopkins talks about all this in theological terms, about what he calls the “incredible condescension of the Incarnation,” “that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion . . . but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”  He through whom all things were made lets himself be trained as a carpenter.  The Divine Reason, the Logos, lets himself be lectured to by the rabbis. Why is it so surprising, then, Hopkins asks, that our “reception” of his graces should also take place among ordinary things?

     The blueberries are a foretaste of his grace, and the children, and the light, everything, of a beauty revealed for us fully in the Eucharist, which in turn feeds and strengthens us and moves us to read the world differently, to see past its surfaces to what is shining through them.   How can blueberries be anything but good when in just a moment the Lord will once again give himself to us in a piece of bread, a little piece of ordinary bread, here and now, for all of us, we who are just living our lives and doing the best we can?

a homily from Sunday May 7, 2023

John 14:1-2

     I know a woman who had a remarkable experience the day her husband died.  He died in the morning, at home.  A few minutes later she was walking out of his room.  She had taken a couple of steps down the narrow hall when she felt something like a wind rushing by her, close to the floor, about knee-high, whooshing towards the front door, and it felt like joy, like glee.  It felt like freedom.

     That was several years ago, and the woman hasn’t had anything like that experience again. She’s still not sure what it meant.  She’s in her early nineties now, a little wobbly and frail, and every day she slowly walks to the mailboxes down the block, and as she walks, she prays the Our Father, line by line, again and again, Our Father who art in heaven . . .  Our Father who art in heaven . . .  She gets in about ten, up and back.  Sometimes it’s raining.  Sometimes the sun is shining.  Sometimes the trees are leafing out and everything is green.

     Today in the Gospel the disciples ask Jesus to show them the Father, to help them see God, and Jesus says, a little exasperated, I think, “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”  And sometimes in his company the disciples have felt something like a rushing wind.  They have witnessed the Transfiguration.  They have seen Lazarus coming out of the tomb.  And sometimes the days have just flowed by, one thing after another.  Jesus has lived among them like any other man, getting up in the morning and eating breakfast and going about the day, and he hasn’t done anything interesting at all.   He’s just like everybody else.

     And we believe that now, after all this, this Jesus who had a body and lived in a place and time rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sent his Spirit to fill the whole earth, and we believe as John says in his marvelous prologue to his gospel, in this great poem, that in another mode the Word was with God from the beginning of time and has always been filling the world with his life and still is.

     And for us, too, as for the disciples, but in this different, subtler way, in our own time and place, there is sometimes a flash, a single, vivid moment, and sometimes, and more often, there are weeks and months and years when nothing seems to be happening at all, we’re just living our lives, until finally one day we realize that Jesus has been there all along, woven into the fabric of things.  Not a particle, a wave.  Not a photograph, a video.  Every day we walk to the mailbox, up and back, saying the Our Father, and sometimes the trees are blooming.

     So many people say that they see no evidence of God in their lives, and I think they mean they haven’t felt a rush of wind, they haven’t seen a blinding light.  But the disciples have seen a blinding light, and they still don’t get it, as the old woman doesn’t know if what she felt in the hallway was true, if Jesus really was bringing her husband home, if he really has prepared a place for him.

     I think we all want things to be more obvious than they are.  We all want the fireworks and the special effects.  For several months I’ve been feeling tired and dull and sad, and I’ve been praying for a little more joy, a little more energy at least, and what’s helpful for me in times like this is to switch from thinking like that to thinking of the wave, of the river, the long haul.  In my journal I’ve simply been keeping track of my blessings, all the things that might not seem important and would otherwise slip by, and now and then I read back over the journal and realize how those little things add up, like pennies in a jar, and that the empty times are part of a larger pattern that tends always towards joy.

     It’s been helpful for me, too, to focus more in prayer on the resurrected Christ than on the historical Jesus.  It’s wonderful if we can imagine him in the flesh, if we can see his face or hear his voice.  I’m just not very good at that.  For me it works better to think of the Jesus who rose and sent the Spirit, of the Logos of the prologue, continually creative, and maybe that could help you, too, when you’re trying to pray.  As Thomas Merton says,

When God’s love begins to burn within us, there is no strict necessity for using our imaginations any more.  Some may like to, some may not.  Use whatever helps you, and avoid what gets in your way.

       He also says,

Every moment and event of our lives plants a seed in our souls.

 

      Mary Oliver puts it this way in a beautiful little poem called “Praying”:

 

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

 

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

 

into thanks, a silence in which

another voice may speak.

 

     And isn’t this what Jesus called us to?  Isn’t this how he taught us to pray?  Simply and directly and about our own lives?

     Our Father, thy will be done, on earth as it is heaven . . .  Our Father, give us this day . . .

 

      A few weeks ago I did my first emergency baptism.  The parents had been told that their baby had severe problems and wouldn’t live long after it was born.  So they called the parish, and I was the one who was available and could be on call.  And when I did get the call, and hurried over to the hospital, and walked into that room, everything happened so fast I couldn’t take it in:  the mother weeping in her hospital bed, and the father standing beside her, and the nurse in her scrubs, weeping, too, the baby in a bassinet among the monitors and tubes, wrapped so tightly you could only see her tiny face.

     It wasn’t until later that I remembered the most important thing that happened in that moment.  I had a squeeze-bottle of Holy Water, and when I tried to squirt a little of it into my hand, I squirted too much, and when I poured it on the baby’s head, it spilled onto her face and down her cheeks.  And the nurse came, and knelt, and folding a paper towel, gently wiped the water away.

     She came, and knelt.   She folded paper towel.

     “I have been with you so long, and you still don’t know me?”

 

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.

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.

September 25, 2022, Luke 16: 19-31

 

     As far as I can tell, the scriptures talk about hell directly only seven or eight times, and with the possible exception of Judas, and even this isn’t clear, no one in the scriptures is ever said to have been sent to hell by name.  No one.  There is a hell, according to scripture, but for all we know there may be no one in it.

     Today’s gospel is one of those passages, and it’s the only one in which somebody is sent to hell, but this is obviously a story, not a pronouncement, it’s a parable, as many of the passages about hell are parables, and like everything Jesus says about the afterlife, it’s admonitory.  He’s admonishing us.  He’s trying to get us to change.

      But I don’t mean that hell isn’t real or doesn’t matter.  It is real and it does matter, and in fact what I want to say today is that if we try to eliminate the possibility of hell from our faith, the real, objective possibility, if we try to explain it away, what Our Lord says about love and compassion doesn’t make sense anyone.  Hell is necessary for the Gospel.

     No hell, no dignity.             

     I take that powerful four-word sentence from one of the letters of Flannery O’Connor, the twentieth-century Catholic fiction writer.  Someone had written her arguing that the idea of hell was old-fashioned and out of keeping with who Jesus is, and O’Connor responds in this really remarkable paragraph.

     Hell is what God’s love becomes to those who reject it.  Now no one has to reject it.  God made us to love Him.  It takes two to love.  It takes liberty.  It takes the right to reject.  If there were no hell, we would be like the animals.  No hell, no dignity.   

 

     A huge amount of theology is compressed here:  that hell is necessary exactly because God loves us and wants us to love him, wants to be in relationship with us.  That friendship like this is always between persons, and to be a person we must have freedom, we must have the freedom to say no.  If we’re forced to love, that’s not love.  Love must be freely given, and when we say no, when we walk away, that’s hell, and hell on earth, not just in the afterlife.  We create it.  We choose it.

     We don’t have to be perfect and we can’t be.  Everything with God is grace.  We have only to make the slightest move towards him.  We have only to accept the gift of His Self.

     Don’t be fooled.  The rich man knew exactly what he was doing, despite his protests after the fact.  He walked past Lazarus again and again, and he had plenty of chances to change, even up to the end.  You can’t get to hell on a loophole.  You don’t get sent there on a technicality.  You have to want it.

     God doesn’t put people in hell.  They put themselves there.

     And too often we all walk past from the homeless man.  That’s the warning Jesus is giving us.  We all walk past.  Like the rich man we drug ourselves, we deaden our senses, eating and drinking and consuming everything around us until we no longer realize how deadened we’ve become.  This is the hell we create on earth, the hell of our own addictions, and these addictions have terrible consequences for others.  Our selfishness and pride create the political and economic structures that lead to the suffering of Lazarus and countless people all over the world.

     Jesus doesn’t want us to be scared.  He wants us to rejoice.  We are made in the image and likeness of God, and we are called to be confident and free.  But we can only be free after first recognizing that we are finite, too, we are limited, we’re no different than anyone else.

     Jesus doesn’t want us to be scared.  He wants us to pay attention.

     He wants us to stop judging and start serving.

     Start serving:  in your family and neighborhood and community, and in the parish through Alpha and Newman and Catholic Daughters and Knights of Columbus and Stone Soup and our own St. Vincent de Paul, which is having an open house today between masses—as so many of you are already doing.  I see so much quiet, selfless work behind the scenes, I really admire so many of you, and I think the rest of us should try to follow your example.

     Stop judging: this one is harder.  Because in the real world, outside of a story, we can never know what’s going on inside anyone else’s mind, especially in the very last moments of their lives.

     What does Jesus say on the cross when the thief on one side of him asks for forgiveness?  Today you will be with me in Paradise.

      I know a woman whose friends kept telling her that her son was going to hell because he wasn’t living a good, Christian life.  They were sure of it, and maybe they were right to be concerned.  But what Jesus is saying, I think, is mind your own business.  He’s saying what Flannery O’Connor says at the end of the letter I quoted:  Remember these are mysteries.  A God you could understand would be less than yourself.

     I know a man who has been very successful in his work.  He’s a good husband and father and has a nice house and a nice car, and he told me once that he doesn’t think that he has any sins to feel sorry for.  He grew up in a hellfire-and-brimstone church and as an adult has come to reject the whole idea of sin and hell.  He doesn’t believe in sin.  He doesn’t think he’s a sinner.

     And he’s a good man, I admire him, but I know that he’s a sinner, because I know that I am, and we all are, and I worry that comfort and success can sometimes deaden our senses and put us all in spiritual danger–and I think that this man knows this deep down, he knows there’s something missing, as we all do, and what I pray for him, and for myself, and for all of us is that we stop and realize that we’re not in control and that we need God, and that we see all the people on our doorstep, and help all the people who need us—that we face all the challenges in our lives and accept all the graces, the leaves turning on the trees, the stars in the morning, and feel grateful, and feel lifted up.  The acknowledgement of sin is an occasion for joy.  A great relief comes, and an energy and a hope, again and again, however many mistakes we make, however many times we fail.

     This, I think, is what Jesus is saying.  Hell isn’t proof that God is a tyrant but that he isn’t.  Hell isn’t proof that God is violent and angry but that he loves and cares for us.  Hell, too, is good news—serious, challenging, good news, news about the radical choices that we are called to make and are always making, choices with vast, eternal consequences.

     No hell, no dignity.

     If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.  For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  Colossians 3:1-3

“Think of what is above, not of what is on earth,” Colossians says.  “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Doesn’t that sound terrible?  That we have to be “hidden”?  Lost, unseen, unknown.  That we have to think not of the earth, of this world we love so much, with all its beauty and its people, but only of God, only of something that seems so distant and abstract?

But I don’t think that’s really what this passage means at all.  I think it means the opposite.  I think it means that we are all called to freedom and creativity and joy.  I think it means that we are called to be fully and completely ourselves.

I think we misread this imagery of up and down and above and below, as we misread Paul in Galatians when he talks about the “Flesh” and the “Spirit.”  If we take it face value, that kind of language can play into our natural dualism, into our either/or thinking, and we forget that in Christ all is paradox, that in him the logic is never either/or.  It’s always both/and.

For it’s in Colossians, too, that we have the glorious creation hymn, that all things were created in Christ from the beginning of time and all things continue in being in him, that all is Holy, all is good.  Jesus isn’t just divine.  He’s also human, always and at the same time, one without ever diminishing the other, and he doesn’t just die, he rises, and when we die into him we rise with him, into life—a new, warm, fully human life.  That’s what it means to be hidden:  not hidden from God.  God sees us always, he loves us and approves of us, as a parent loves and approves of a child.  It’s the falseness and the phoniness and the shabbiness that we’re hidden from now, that we’re free of, that we don’t care about anymore.

Anthony DeMello makes the brilliant observation that from birth we all given the same drug and we all become addicted to it.  “We are not allowed to enjoy the solid, nutritious food of life—namely work, play, fun, laughter, the company of people, the pleasures of the senses and the mind,” De Mello says.  “We are given a taste for the drug called approval, appreciation, attention.”  We are taught to define ourselves by what others think.  We are taught to let other people tell us whether we should feel good or bad about ourselves.

This is what we have to die to.  This is what Christ frees us from.  In another brilliant comment DeMello says that we’ve all misunderstood the famous prayer of St. Ignatius:  Lord Jesus Christ, take all 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.

I’ve always been frightened of that prayer, as lots of people have.  I’m afraid that if I give everything to God he will take it away.  But “that’s ludicrous,” DeMello says. “What is God going to do with an idiot, if we lose our memory and understanding?”  No, God isn’t going to destroy our gifts, he’s going to use them—and he’s going to use them, he’s going to decide what to do with them, not some boss or editor or YouTube follower.

I think Jesus is telling us not to put all our energy into preparing for the future because he wants us to pay attention to the present moment.  I think he wants us to be like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.  I think what Ecclesiastes says about the vanity of all our efforts is supposed to make us deeply happy.  It’s supposed to free us from all these stupid things we get wrapped up in.

Here’s a little poem by Kaylin Haught that captures what I’m trying to say.  I’m not sharing it because it addresses God as a “she,” although scripture now and then uses feminine imagery to describe God, and the Church clearly teaches that God is beyond all gender anyway.*  But that’s not what I love about this poem.  I love it because I think it shows what being hidden with Christ really means, the joy that comes from it and the confidence and the spontaneity:

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

The speaker in the poem isn’t worrying about what other people will think of her paragraphs or her fingernails.  She only cares about what God thinks, and God says “do whatever most kindles love in you,” as St. Teresa of Avila put it.

Do what you really want—not the sinful things, not the false impulses.  Those aren’t our real desires.  Do what you deeply, truly want, do what’s real, and you will be doing God’s will

Wear nail polish or don’t wear nail polish.  Paragraph your letters or don’t paragraph your letters.  All that matters is now.  All that matters is the moment.

Honey, sweetcakes, Jesus says.  What I’m telling you is: Yes Yes Yes

 

 —

     *At the same time, I don’t think we should disparage the more common masculine metaphors the scriptures use to point to God, because I think those images are revelatory, are part of what we glimpse about who God really is.  That’s what they give us, a glimpse, not a full picture—but a glimpse, and a glimpse of something we believe is true.  There is something fatherly, we believe, about the nature of the God who loves us.

     For that matter, we shouldn’t accept without thinking the usual assumptions about fatherliness itself—that “father” represents power and oppression—because in the Christian tradition, that’s not at all what fatherhood represents.  Power, yes, but not oppression.  Love.  Graciousness.  Self-giving.  Tact.  Hiddenness.  Gentleness.  God is a god who as father gives us freedom and who wants us to thrive.

Recently a young woman I know took her life, and with her mother’s permission, I am posting the homily I gave at her funeral mass,

 

In the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, in the beautiful poem we call the Beatitudes, Jesus says something that doesn’t make sense.  It seems to be the opposite of the truth.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” he says.   Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are we now in our shock and our grief.

How on earth can that be?

 

Because we thought we had everything figured out and now we realize we don’t.

Because now we realize things don’t make sense, at least in the way we thought they did.

Because we’ve been hiding from our fear and hiding from our emptiness, we’ve been living on the surface of our lives, and now our defenses have fallen away.

Now we have to ask the only question that really matters:  does God exist, or is this all just random and pointless and cruel?

There’s a mystery here, a great and terrible mystery, and we don’t understand it.

 

This vibrant, intelligent woman—she was a student of mine at OSU a number of years ago, bright and engaged and open—this bright young woman with the smart, knowing smile was finally so sad and anguished she lost all hope.

“Blessed are those who mourn,” Jesus says, who feel all this, who know all this, who don’t turn away from this.

 

But then he goes on.  That’s not all he says:  he says, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

They shall be comforted.

As in the other Beatitudes, Jesus turns everything upside down.  He takes all those things we think are valuable and throws them away.  He says no, humility is what matters, and tenderness, and openness, and we have to give up our pride and give up what we think we know, and then, then, God can come to us, God can enter into us, we can experience what is real:  a tenderness and a love and a comfort beyond all imagining.

We think, how can this young woman be gone?  How can her life be extinguished?  This can’t be true, and we’re right.  It can’t.  Because we are infinitely loved, we are precious in the sight of the God who made the stars, and in the end we will be comforted, we will be whole again, in Christ, in the mystery of God’s love and God’s mercy, and if not now, one day, and if not in this life, the next, and Stephanie has been taken up and she is loved and she is herself again, wholly and completely herself.  She has not been lost.  She has been found.

In the Gospel of Mark Jesus cries out from the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he is bereft, utterly bereft, and we are, too, we are desolate and grieving, and that’s a holy feeling, a sacred feeling.  When we feel that grief we are with Christ in his suffering, and he is reaching out to us—he is in us—and Jesus is quoting a psalm from the cross, he is quoting Psalm 22, one of the great psalms of lament, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” the psalmist cries, and then in the next stanza, and yet “I know that you live,” and again, a stanza of grief followed by a stanza of faith, and yet “I know you are God.”

And yet and yet and yet.

 

     “Maybe whatever seems to be so,” the poet William Stafford says,

we should speak so from our souls,

never afraid, “Light” when it comes,

“Dark” when it goes away.

Do not be afraid of the darkness.  Do not be afraid of your grief.   Do not be afraid.

The light will come, and it has come, and the darkness will never overcome it.

Look at this crucifix behind me, this great crucifix floating above the tabernacle, and how Jesus is floating, too, a few inches above the beams of the cross.  His eyes are closed.  His arms are outstretched.  We can’t tell if he’s rising or being crucified, if he is suffering or he is triumphant.  Because he is both:  he triumphs through the cross, and through the cross he brings us home.

We thought we had killed him.  We thought we had put him in a box.  But the tomb is empty.  He is not there, he has risen, and nothing is what we thought it was.  He is not there.  He is with Stephanie, and Stephanie is with him, and he is here with us even now, he will always be with us, in life and in death, in the darkness and the light, even unto the end of time.

for a video of this homily, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ZlE85_QGQ

Divine Mercy Sunday

Revelation 19:9-19; John 20: 19-31

The other day a friend of mine said something that’s really stuck in my head.

She said that she doesn’t feel that she should bother God now with her own small problems when the bombs are falling and the children are dying.

She loves to work in her garden, to put her hands in the dirt, but she knows that when she feels the joy of that, somewhere in the world, at that same moment, someone else is feeling terror, someone else is dying, and doesn’t that cancel out the joy?  Doesn’t the suffering of others expose our joy as foolish, as an illusion?

And I know how she feels.  I feel that way sometimes.

That’s why the vision of the twentieth century Polish mystic, St. Faustina, is so important to us now, on this Divine Mercy Sunday, the Sunday she inspired.  Because St. Faustina was born in Poland, next to Ukraine, and she was born in 1905, before the outbreak of World War I, and she died in 1938, as World War II was breaking out, and out of that experience of fear and death came this image of Jesus walking towards her, his infinite mercy raying out of his heart—a mercy stronger than fear and stronger than war and stronger than death.

“Be not afraid,” Jesus tells the author of the Book of Revelation, who is writing, too, in a time of great “distress”: “I am the first and the last, the one who lives,” and nothing is ever lost, and every moment is sacred and every moment is real.

“Peace be with you,” Jesus says to the disciples hiding out in their fear.  He says this twice: “peace be with you.”  And he doesn’t break down the door, he appears; and he doesn’t shout, he breathes.  And he comes into a room.  He doesn’t appear in the sky for everyone to see.  He isn’t generalized.  He comes into a room, into a moment, and now all rooms are holy, and all moments are holy, and all gardens.  And what he asks us to touch are his wounds, not his strong back or his strong shoulders, his wounds, the wounds in his hands and the wounds in his side, and so we know that God is present even in our terror, that all the children who die and all the mothers and all the fathers, they are never alone, they are taken up in his love, because the God we know is a God who dies into our death and who is suffering with us.

“For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”  This is the prayer we repeat in Faustina’s Divine Mercy Chaplet, on every decade bead of the rosary, and what could be more beautiful?  More profound?

So it’s not just that God is therefore present in the garden, too; it’s not just that any moment of joy is a sure sign of the presence of God—it’s that working in the garden and living the moments of our lives is exactly what we can do to oppose war and oppose the suffering and oppose the injustice.

“Any increase that I can bring upon myself and upon things,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “is translated into some increase in my power to love and some progress in Christ’s blessed hold upon the universe.”  “God awaits us every instant,” he says.  “He is at the tip of my pen, my spade, my brush, my needle—of my heart and of my thought.”  And this work isn’t just for us.  These small things somehow make a difference, invisibly, in some way we can’t measure, as Saint Faustina understood, too.  She believed in prayer and the power of prayer.  She believed in the quiet, the small, the interior.  She believed that tenderness conquers death, and Teilhard is saying that, too, in a different way. “We serve to complete the work of creation,” he says, “with even the humblest work of our hands.”

What can we do about war?  About the devastation of the earth?  About the suffering of the children?  We can send money, we can write congress, we can go to the barricades ourselves.  But most of all we can pray–and that’s not just a pious thing to say.  Prayer makes a difference, prayer changes things—and every creative act, and every act of kindness, and every job well done.

Where St. Faustina uses the beautiful language of traditional piety, Teilhard uses the language of contemporary science, of evolutionary biology and cosmology.  He was a twentieth century French mystic, and he was a scientist as well as a theologian, and for him the Christ who is the Alpha and the Omega is the Cosmic Christ moving through the life and death of the galaxies and the stars towards some ultimate fulfillment.  But he was a contemporary of Faustina’s—he was born in 1881and died in 1955—and as a young man he, too, had a vision of the sacred heart of Jesus, encompassing all things, and his joy in the boundless creativity of Christ was given to him in the midst of war, when he was serving as a medic in the trenches in World War I, and he knew in his heart what St. Faustina knew, too:  that we don’t have to hold the moments together.  God does.

“Jesus,” Faustina says, “I trust in you.”

“I’ve come to think,” Teilhard says, “that the only, the supreme, prayer we can offer up, during these hours when the road before us is shrouded in darkness, is that of our master on the cross: Into your hands I commend my spirit.”

To the hands that broke and gave life to the bread,
that blessed and caressed, that were pierced; . . .
to the kindly and mighty hands that reach down
to the very marrow of the soul and mold and create,
to the hands through which so great a love is transmitted,
it is to these that it is good to surrender our soul,
and above all when we suffer or are afraid,
and in so doing there is a great happiness and a great merit.

      Trust in him, St. Faustina tells us.  Trust in him.

“Eternal God,” she prays,

in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your Mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself.

     These are our prayers, now in this moment and in every moment, even if the world should end.  This is always our faith, whatever happens, now and forever.

“Jesus, I trust in you.”

for a video of this homily, click here

 

February 6, 2022

Luke 5:1-11

 

Lately I’ve been working on a writing project, but for a while it seemed that the harder I tried, the less progress I made.  I’d work all night and not catch a thing.

And then one day I lowered my nets and pulled up all these ideas.  My mind was full of them, and it wasn’t anything I did exactly.  I just let go a little.  I just put out to slightly deeper water.

 

It was that way when I was teaching.  One day I’d go in there and no matter what I did I just couldn’t get the students to respond.   Then another day I’d go in, and I’d relax a little, just wait to see what might happen, and gradually the class began to open up.  Ideas started flying, and there weren’t coming from me.

 

It’s that way in prayer.  Praying is like letting down our nets.  We sit in the morning in our favorite chair and wait for what might come, and sometimes nothing does.  There’s just emptiness.  And sometimes something does come.  There’s a fullness, an abundance.  Deep down in our lives, in what happens every day, there’s great energy and creativity and love, and sometimes we’re given an awareness of that.

The other day the thought of one of my oldest friends came into my mind as I was praying, and it had a different texture or quality than the usual random things that come to me.  It wasn’t overwhelming—it wasn’t like a great bulging net of fish.  It was more like a single fish I’d pulled out of the water.  It was like I was fly-fishing.  But that slight sweetness, that brief clarity:  that’s what we have to be alert to, because that’s a sure sign of the presence of Christ.

 

I think it’s always like this, up and down and back and forth—this is how we’re called—and the dark nights are just as important in this as the fullness and the gift.

It’s curious:  Simon and the others make this tremendous haul, they’ve caught enough fish to support them for months, and then Jesus asks them to walk away from it, to give it all up.

And think of what happened to the disciples in the rest of the gospels and into Acts, the hardships and struggle.  The journey doesn’t end on that one glorious morning.  There’s the next day and the next—and not everyone is called to walk away from their jobs.  Someone has to stay and do the fishing, and that’s a vocation, too.

Mary and Martha, Zacchaeus, Nicodemus—they are all called, but they are called in place.

 

The other day a former student got in touch with me, a wonderful young woman, in her late thirties now and living in Portland.  She’s a gifted writer, but she and her husband are struggling to make ends meet and she’s taken a nine-to-five job.  She’s been trying to write in the evenings and on the weekends but she doesn’t have the energy, and she’s depressed and wondering what’s happened to her life.

I tried to counsel her to do what I find so hard to do, to trust, to let go, even to let go of the writing for now, and to give it all to God, because without God, none of this makes sense.  None of this is worth it.  I know this woman doesn’t go to church anymore, though she was raised Catholic, and I thought she might be touchy about that, so I just suggested, as gently as I could, that she might think of the journaling she does every morning not just as self-reflection but also as a dialog, that she turn it slightly in her mind so that she sees the events of her life, even the ordinary things that happen in her job, as coming from God, and to reflect on what God might be saying to her in those moments.

 

There’s this wonderful prayer about the Eucharist by the German Jesuit Karl Rahner.  When we receive the Eucharist, he says, we receive the heart of a man who took upon himself what Rahner calls “a slow and toilsome life in a single corner of the world.”  And we receive our own lives, too:

When we receive you [Rahner says] we accept our everyday just as it is.  We do not need to have any lofty feelings in our hearts to recount to you.  We can lay our everyday before you just as it is, for we receive it from you yourself, the everyday and its inward light, the everyday and its meaning, the everyday and the power to endure it.

 

The call isn’t to do any particular thing.  It’s to pray, to let down our nets and see what comes, and even the emptiness when it comes is revelatory.  “We have to trust it utterly to God,” Ruth Burrows says.  “We must be ready to believe that ‘nothingness’ is the presence of divine reality; emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling.”  In fact, Burrows says, it’s only in our emptiness “that we really experience that we need Jesus,” and everything depends on this,

on letting go of the controls, handing them over to him and accepting that we have no holiness, no achievement of our own, to be before God as nothing.  This is to die so that Jesus becomes our all.

 

And not just the emptiness.  Not just the nights.  The days, too, and the light and the flow and all the lovely things.  All the lovely, ordinary things.

We don’t have to stop living our lives.  We don’t have to stop being human.  We do live our lives, but more deeply.

Maybe to surrender to God just means to walk down the street with a clear mind.  Maybe to surrender to God just means to be alert and aware.  To feel the sidewalk beneath our feet.  To feel the sun on our faces.  Maybe to surrender to God—to say, your grace and your love are wealth enough for me—maybe that just means, Lord, give me this moment.  Lord, help me be myself.

 

God created all these things in Christ, God loves all these things in Christ, in Christ all these things continue in being.  In him we continue to be.

We are walking down the street.  We are looking at the clouds.  We are looking at the faces of the people as they pass.

We are surrendering ourselves to Christ.  He has given us his grace and his love.  He has given us this day.  He has given us our lives.  We ask for nothing more, and we need nothing more, because this is everything.  This is the fullness.  This is the bulging net.  This is life and love beyond all telling.