Homily

July 18, 2021

Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

“Woe to the shepherds who mislead the flock,” says the Lord through Jeremiah.  “You have scattered my sheep and driven them away,” and we know these shepherds ourselves.  They’re all over the internet, all over twitter, and too often we’ve let them mislead and scatter us, too.

God doesn’t want us to be afraid, but these false prophets do.  They feed on it.

God leads us beside the still waters, the psalmist says in Psalm 23, maybe the most beautiful psalm of all.  We know he is present when we feel this peace, when we feel goodness and kindness within us, but the false shepherds want us to doubt this joy and doubt this peace.

There’s a beautiful moment in the baptismal rite when you anoint the baby on the head with the oil of chrism in the same way a king was anointed in the Old Testament, the way King David was anointed.  “You anoint my head with oil,” the psalmist says–some scholars think in the voice of David–and in fact this is what the Hebrew word “messiah” means. It means “the anointed one.”  In Greek that word is translated as “Christ.”

This is the amazing thing about baptism.  In the baptismal rite we are saying, “you, child, you are good, you are made in God’s image. Listen to yourself, trust yourself–listen to God, trust in God.”  The oil of chrism is the oil a priest is anointed with at his ordination, on the palms, and in this sense, through our baptism, we are all priests, we are all prophets and kings, or prophetesses and queens, and through our baptism, too, our families commit themselves and the community commits itself to protecting and nourishing that spirit, that goodness, within us.

So what happens?  All those sad faces we see every day, all those angry faces, all those lost and lonely and suffering people all around us?  They were all once children, too, and they still are, underneath, but they’ve let themselves be led astray.  As we all have.  We all have, all our lives.  It’s always a struggle.  Even the people in AARP magazine are all thin and good looking.  They’re always laughing.  They’re always running marathons or curing cancer and I think, really?  I’m finally retired, I’ve finally walked away from all those false pressures at OSU, as at any workplace, and now there are these new pressures?  I have to be the perfect old person?  The perfect grandfather?  And I fall for it.  I fall for it.

“O Lord, I have let myself be deceived,” Pope Francis prays.  “In a thousand ways I have shunned your love.”  Because of course these false shepherds are inside us, too.  They wouldn’t trigger us if there wasn’t something in us waiting to be triggered.   There are all kinds of voices inside us, and not all of them are from God.  The challenge is to learn how to distinguish our true inner shepherd from our false ones—the challenge is discernment.  And we have to try to surround ourselves with what is good and right and real, with the scriptures, with the Eucharist, with good friends and good food and literature and art and good things on our screens and good things on our phones, and we have to try to get away, too, now and then, come away to “a deserted place” and rest a while, as Jesus says to the disciples today when they’re so busy and beset they don’t even have time to eat.

It’s wonderful that the pandemic seems to be easing, at least for now, at least in this country, but I hope that we don’t just add back in all the stresses and pressures and false ambitions and empty busyness the pandemic forced us to give up.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” the psalmist says.  There’s nothing here about weight loss.  There’s nothing here about making a lot of money or impressing people.

“Live in the present,” Pope Francis said in his homily on Pentecost this year.  The Spirit, he says, “affirms the primacy of today against the temptation to let ourselves be paralyzed by rancor or memories of the past or by uncertainty or fear about the feature.”  The Spirit “reminds us of the grace of the present moment.  There is no better time for us.”  We don’t need anything else.  We don’t need all the stuff we buy and all the trouble we borrow.  And all the things we worry about?  Even theological issues, however important, even issues of social justice and action in the world for the poor and the oppressed–and these are crucial, these are essential–all these things however real and necessary are not the most important things and can even be temptations, away from the grace of the present moment and into abstractions.  Ideas can be false prophets.  Causes can be false shepherds.  Unless our engagement with these larger issues proceeds from the peace of the still waters, from the cup that overflows, they are dangerous.  They work against the Spirit.

“If we listen to the Spirit, we will not be concerned with conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and innovators, right and left,” Pope Francis says.  “When those become our criteria, then the Church has forgotten the Spirit.”

Or as Ephesians puts it today, “brothers and sisters, in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near.”  The author is talking here about Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians and how they’ve been battling each other, though he could be talking about warring factions in any time.  In ours.  “Christ came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” Ephesians says, “for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

I think of another moment in the baptismal rite, when one of the godparents lights a candle from the Easter Candle.   This light, we say to the parents, is “entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly,” because that light is Christ.  That light is the goodness burning in that child, and it’s such a touching thing, to see the godmother or the godfather walking back, cupping a hand to protect that little flame.  It’s so easily snuffed out.

This why we need the deserted places.  This is why I do.  This why I need community.  This is why I need to try to pray and pray, to try to keep myself as best I can in alignment with the force of Christ within me.  Only then, though I walk in the dark valley, will I fear no evil.

Only when we dwell in the house of the Lord.  Only when our cup first overflows.

O Lord, I have let myself be deceived;

            in a thousand ways I have shunned your love,

            yet here I am once more,

            to renew my covenant with you.

            I need you.  Save me once again, Lord,

           take me once more

          into your redeeming embrace.

Divine Mercy Sunday

1 John 5:1-6; John 20:19-31

I have never seen Jesus the way Thomas does in the Gospel today and the way the other disciples do.  But he has come through my walls.  He has stood in my midst.   I have felt a peace.  A breath.

I have never seen Jesus the way St. Faustina did in her beautiful vision, love raying out from his heart like light.  But I have felt that light within me.  I have felt my own heart swell.

I think this is the way it is for most of us.  All praise for all the visions and appearances down through the ages.  They are great gifts.  But I think that for most of us our experience of Christ is much subtler, much more diffuse, and nothing is more important than realizing this and accepting this, because otherwise we’ll think this is all made up, it’s not true, at least for us.  We’ll think that God isn’t here when he’s everywhere—he’s not obvious but he’s everywhere—and blessed are we when we finally know this and feel this.

It’s deep in our tradition, this sense of the presence of Jesus.  In the twelfth century St. Bernard wrote that in his own experience of Jesus in prayer, there was, as he put it,

nothing sensational.  I don’t see anything, I don’t hear voices.  I suddenly feel a warmth and glow in my heart and I know that the bridegroom is there.

A warmth.  A glow.  In the sixteenth century St. Ignatius describes a moment when he “seemed to see something white, from which rays were coming”—a vision a little like Faustina’s, in fact, but much less clearly defined.  It’s a “something” he sees.  It’s vaguely, if brightly, white, and even this is more specific than Ignatius usually is.  For him the experience of Jesus is much more a matter of feeling and intuition, he can never pin it down or put it into words, and like William Barry, a modern Jesuit thinker, I find this very consoling.  Very freeing.  “I have no idea how to describe the Jesus I contemplate,” Barry says, “yet I, too, believe that I have encountered him and gained some interior knowledge of him.”

Images like this keep coming up again and again, of a light, a fragrance, a stream.   A sense.

I used to think that it was easier to understand God from the perspective of the Holy Spirit than from the perspective of the Son, but I was wrong.  Because the Spirit is the Son.  The Father and the Son and the Spirit are one, and they are always coming into our lives and taking us up into theirs.   It’s the Spirit that “testifies,” the Letter of John tells us today, and “the Spirit is Truth.”

I have never felt the wounds of Jesus.  I have never touched the holes in his hands.  But I have felt my own wounds.  I have felt the wounds of others, and we have to feel them.   Blessed are those who mourn, Jesus says, because unless we acknowledge our grief, it consumes us.  Blessed are those who weep, because there is reason to weep and to deny that is to reduce the faith to something childish and false.

Recently I wrote a friend that all would be well.  She’s been struggling with health problems and problems at her job.  I knew that sounded too pious in a way, but I believe it, and when she wrote back she said something really profound, really insightful, and when I asked her she said I could share it.

“All will be well,” she wrote,

but I think that statement hinges on what we place within the word ‘all.’  If by ‘all’ we mean that our relationship to Christ cannot be broken by anything outside of us in and of itself—anything!—then yes, all shall be well.

And then she goes on,

‘All’ doesn’t mean that the pain caused by our sins and faults isn’t real.  It doesn’t negate the pain and upheaval brought to us by the decisions of others.  ‘All’ also does not mean that the events of this life will turn out in a way that is okay for us.

Our work is to hold the light and hold the darkness and not reduce the one to the other—or not to hold them ourselves, because we can’t, but to trust God to hold them, to make sense of them, to reconcile them, because in him all things hold together.  How, we don’t know.  That’s the mystery.  That’s what we must surrender to.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t exist.  It’s that he is always and everywhere present in a way we never expected.  He is far more pervasive.  He is woven into the fabric of our lives, what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, calls a “steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the center of everything that is,” and this comes close to it for me, too, when I look back on a day or a week and realize that God was always there, just beneath the surface, all around me.  In me.

This is the Divine Mercy: “a steady swell of loving presence.”

This is the Divine Mercy, and we feel it in our chest and behind our eyes, like the beginning of tears.

I sensed it between the lines of my friend’s email.  Underneath every word.

Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall. 

We may hear these words in a few minutes.  They’re from the second Eucharistic Prayer, at just the moment of the consecration.

The Eucharist is unique, it’s the source and summit, and yet somehow at the same time it’s like the morning dew.

I can’t explain it.  I can’t put it into words.

The dewfall.  Ordinary.  Beautiful.  On every blade of grass.

Arias

September 6, 2020

Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

Not long ago I got an email from an old high school friend I’d not heard from in years.  He was in a dark place, he said, and he wanted some spiritual advice.  And I was stunned.  We were on the debate team together—he was a year ahead of me—and I’d never known anyone so brilliant, with such verbal facility and intellectual quickness, and I still haven’t.  It was like listening to Pavarotti sing.  He was a virtuoso.

And he wanted my advice?

What I was being asked to do was not to confront my friend in his wickedness, as Ezekiel is asked to confront the nation of Israel, but to speak to him of my faith, to try to say what I believe is true—and that’s hard enough, especially with someone you’ve always looked up to, someone so smart and justifiably skeptical about churches.  I was afraid he’d think I was being naïve or preachy—he’d think, “oh, that’s just something Christians always say.”  Or, “he’s just one of those Christians.”

But I am just one of those Christians, at least on my good days, through grace.  The only wisdom I have is from the scriptures, is from Christ, and though I had to approach this indirectly, had to avoid the kind of churchy language I knew would turn him off, I had to try to share what I believe as best I could.

I had to try to say:  be not afraid.  The Lord is with you.

Not in ways we can prove.  Not in ways we always notice.  “If today you hear his voice, harden not your heart,” the psalmist says, because this is how God speaks, quietly and day to day.  In the roses on the deck.  In a passage in a book.  “Wherever two or three are gathered together” he is present, Jesus tells us, even over the internet, even in an email from a friend—but always, and quietly, and tenderly, in ordinary things.

“The Church has left the building,” a parishioner wrote in another email, when I asked how he was doing in the pandemic—“the Church has left the building, and we are being called to love the people he puts in front of us.”  I think that’s a wonderful statement.  I think that’s a theologically profound statement.  The Church has left the building—and love, love, another one of those words that Christians always use.  But that’s because it’s the right word, the true word, however soft or fuzzy or irrelevant it might seem in our violent and anxious times.

I notice that Jesus says “every fact should be established”; we shouldn’t just fly off our various handles before we even know what’s actually true.  We should be rational, he’s saying.  We should wait and consider the evidence.

But even more than that, we should treat our neighbors as ourselves, with respect, as St. Paul says today, even when we confront them with what we think is true or know is false—not call them names, not tweet insults or post further lies. Not shoot them.  This person we believe is wrong is loved by God, is no more sinful than we are, however wrong or misguided he or she might be.

In fact I don’t think these passages are really about what we say.  I think they’re about what we don’t say.  I think they’re about listening.

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but last winter, before the pandemic, I was talking with a friend who was having a serious crisis of faith.  He was really struggling, and we talked and talked, and I said things, and then more things, until I ran out of things to say.  And for a moment I just sat there.  I just stayed, in silence.  It wasn’t a strategy—I didn’t know what else to do—but it was the turning the point.   Gradually I began to feel something changing in the air of the room.  Everything grew still.  And then out of that silence something beautiful and gentle started happening, my friend started saying what was really in his heart, honestly and without filtering or performing, and I could feel the Spirit rising up, I could hear the voice of the Spirit, and there was nothing more I needed to say.  It wasn’t about me, and it wasn’t about him.

In a way it was very difficult, just to stay there.  Just to not turn away.  It was a kind of confrontation.  It wasn’t a saying of the truth, it was a waiting for the truth, but a hard waiting—and then it came.  It was there, deeper than words, deeper than tears.

A sequence of cartoons:  a woman is being burned at the stake and another woman says to her, “maybe you should take up yoga.”   A woman is drowning and another woman looks down from a dock and says, “focus on the positive in this situation.”  A woman is falling off a cliff and a man who is standing on the edge calls after her: “You need to speak goodness into existence.”

Maybe.  Maybe what I’m suggesting is naïve.  Is too fuzzy and intangible.

Jesus died for the truth—he died for who he was.

But there’s also this, this wonderful video I also saw the other day, on YouTube.  We’re in a busy shopping mall in Leeds, England, very crowded—this was before the virus—and an ordinary-looking man walks out of the crowd into the center of the atrium.  He’s middle-aged, wearing a leather jacket, hands in his pockets.  And he starts to sing.  He opens his mouth and starts to sing, loudly and clearly.  At first you think he’s crazy, he’s some kind of crank, but then you realize, wait a minute.  His voice is beautiful, it’s powerful—he’s singing a famous aria—he’s singing Nessun Dorma, from Puccini—this guy’s a tenor.  This ordinary man who has emerged from the crowd is a tenor, and he’s a great tenor, and his voice is building and rising, and people are stopping and looking, the expressions on their faces are changing, people who would never be caught dead at an opera, who don’t have any idea what opera is, they’re stopped in their tracks.  One little girl turns around and looks up at her mother, an expression of amazement on her face.  O look at the stars, he sings, that tremble of love and hope, and his voice builds and builds, it rises to its climax, and he hits that final, high note, and he holds it, holds it until it’s ringing in the air of that crowded mall, and something transcendent has happened, something wonderful has risen up out of that ordinary gray day, something excellent and pure, and everyone knows it, they can feel it, and they burst into applause.  They clap and clap.

And the tenor smiles, and looks around, then puts his hands in his pockets and walks back into the crowd.  He disappears.

If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

July 5, 2020

Matthew 11:25-30

We’re all feeling burdened right now.  We’re all feeling the weight of the world—of the pandemic and of the economic crisis and of the racism that’s been exposed once again, in our country and in our lives, this deep American sin.

And as Christians we have a duty to act—we have to act.  But how, exactly?  What are we supposed to do?  It feels so overwhelming.  So impossible.

And today, in the Gospel, Jesus says: “my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

All our problems?  They’re easy.  All our burdens?  They’re light.

I don’t mean how easy it is to wear a mask or maintain social distance, as both the governor and the archbishop have asked us to do—how really absurd it is to resist this and complain about this when we think about the real sacrifices, the truly heroic sacrifices that people have made in wars and famines and earthquakes and fires, and are still making, now, in the pandemic.

I mean that for us as Christians even real suffering and real loss are bearable, are easy, in some deep and fundamental sense, however hard they obviously are in other ways.

Almost exactly five years ago, on June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, took out his gun, and shot and killed nine black parishioners who had been praying and studying the Bible, including the pastor.

A few months later the new pastor, the Reverend Norvel Goff, climbed into the pulpit and preached about joy.

“I’m a little weary and worn,” he said, but “with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.”  With God there is joy, there is always joy—not just happiness.  There is no happiness in moments like this.  But happiness is finally trivial, happiness is finally fleeting.  Joy is deep and joy is enduring.  “Even in the midst of trials and tribulations,” Goff proclaimed, “we still have joy.”

We have joy because we have God.  We have joy because we believe in a love and a power greater than all our violence and all our hate.

This weekend we celebrate American independence and the great spirit of independence that has defined our country.  But as Christians we celebrate independence every day—our freedom from fear, our freedom from the false demands of the world, our freedom from all that makes us question our worth as human beings.

Or really, what we celebrate is our dependence, what we celebrate is our need:  our need for God, our need for grace.  Our yoke is easy and our burden is light because we don’t bear it alone.  Christ bears it for us and with us.  Christ gives us rest, Christ lightens our load, and so strengthened and so restored we can go out in his name and face what we must face, and not just that, not just endure, but work in the ways we’ve been given to work to ease the burden of others.

As Abbot Jeremy puts it in his latest newsletter and video, our best and first response to all that’s happening now should be “silence”—not the silence of indifference or inaction, but the silence of prayer, first and always—”prayer as the place,” Abbot Jeremy says, “where we let the work of God radiate outward into the world.”

This whole series of the Abbot’s newsletters is wonderful, I think.  You can find it on the Mount Angel Abbey website, and it’s life-giving.  Indispensable.  I can’t recommend it enough.

The meekness of Christ is a radical meekness.  The humility of Christ is a radical humility.  They might seem to have been defeated, these Christian virtues, by stupidity and ignorance and brutishness.  We might seem to be have been deluded, if we try to follow our Lord’s example.  God who is love is always being put to death.  But we know that his death is never the end.  We know that through his dying an even greater love is being released into the world.  It’s filling the world.  It’s the force that created the world, before time began, and it’s only when we let it come into us and let it flow through us that we can make the difference we are each called to make until the Lord comes again in his glory.

The burdens of poverty and injustice are too great to bear, and we are called to change that.  They’re crushing, they’re soul-numbing, and we are called to lighten the load and restore what is fair.  Christ gives us rest so that we can take his yoke upon us.

But first he gives us rest.  First he gives us strength.

It’s all grace.  Without him, we are nothing.

Last weekend Barb and I met our daughter and son-in-law at the Oregon Gardens, outside of Salem.  We’ve not seen them in person for a long time, and it was so good to walk with them through the roses and the Day Lilies and all the summer flowers.

Our son-in-law is Chinese-Indonesian-American–his parents immigrated from Jakarta when he was a little boy–and he’s grown up in Oregon with different skin and different eyes.  I love and respect him, and he’s Catholic, too, a deep and thoughtful Catholic, and so we have our faith to share.

But I don’t know what it’s like to be the only person of color in a room.  I don’t know what it’s like to be stopped by the police when you don’t look like everyone else.  I can only imagine, and I can only ask questions and listen.

And so we talked, and we listened, and we ate lunch together—we each brought our own.

We kept six feet apart, and we had our masks if we needed them.  It was the very least we could do—it’s what we had to do—and we did it not for ourselves, but for each other.

But we weren’t really at a distance.  We weren’t really far apart.  For a moment we were carrying the burden together, the four of us.  For a moment, together, we could feel the presence of Christ.  We were free.

As Archbishop Sample said last week in The Sentinel, there are vast structural changes that need to be made, there are systemic problems requiring systemic solutions, and as Christians we need to work to find them.  “It’s undeniable,” the archbishop says, “that there are still injustices that sicken segments of our society.”

But it’s to moments like this that all the changes lead and it’s for moments like this that we try to make them.  We work so that everyone has the capacity and the security and the opportunity to visit their families, or to eat a quiet lunch, or to walk in a garden on a morning in June.

And it’s from these moments that all our actions should proceed.  It’s where they should all begin.  Because this is where God is.  This is where he can be found:  when we are at peace.  When through him and with him we are free—when we are all free.

How quietly hard faith can be sometimes.

A friend of mine has been struggling.  She has this feeling of futility, as if nothing she’s done really matters, and now the pandemic is hanging over all of us and everything seems suspended.  No one knows what the future will be.

And I thought of Dorothy Day, the great American Catholic and founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, and of her wonderful diaries.

Day is always so realistic in her diaries, and yet, for just that reason, so encouraging:

Today I thought of a title for my book, “The Duty of Delight.”  I was thinking, how as one gets older, we are tempted to sadness, knowing life as it is here on earth, the suffering, the Cross.  And how we must overcome it daily, growing in love, and the joy which goes with loving.

This is from February 24, 1961, when Day was 64.

And this is from seven years later, Easter Sunday, April 14, 1968, when she was 71

Always when I awaken in the morning it is to a half-dead condition, a groaning in every bone, a lifelessness, a foretaste of death, a sense of “quiet terror,” which hangs over us all.  A sense of the futility of life and the worthlessness of all our efforts. . . .

I turn desperately to prayer.  “O God make haste to help me.”  And those magnificent psalms, and the prayer of the church, prayers which thousands, tens of thousands, are saying each morning all over the world, and I am saved.

This consciousness of salvation comes to me afresh each day.  I am turned around, away from the contemplation of the world of sin and death to the reality of God. . . .

Through this turning away, “all the way to heaven is heaven” to me, as St. Catherine of Siena said.  The sun has risen, the air is warmed, the birds are singing outside . . . .

     All the way to heaven is heaven, Dorothy Day believed, or tried to believe.  Hoped.  Prayed for.  This is the move, the turning around, we all called to make, every day of our lives, and the move that with grace we can always make, to turn from the world to God, and so to see God in the world, where he has always been.

April 26, 2020

Third Sunday of Easter

1 Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35

Like everyone else on the planet I’ve been spending a lot of time on Zoom.  I teach my classes on Zoom, I meet my friends on Zoom, I see my kids on Zoom.  I spend so much time on Zoom that when I look out the window I expect to see faces in the sky, laid out in a grid.

I miss touching people.  I miss smelling people.  I miss the bodies of people.

I miss the the Body of Christ–the knowing of Jesus in the breaking of the bread.  Not the seeing of an image of the bread.  Not the live-streaming of the bread.  The touching of it.  The swallowing of it.

But in another way our virtual lives this last month might be teaching us something about the Risen Christ.  They might be giving us insight into the Resurrection, and the Incarnation.

Our Lord isn’t virtual.  Our Lord isn’t just a shadowy square.  He’s real, completely real.

But he is real in a radically new way.

Abbot Jeremy talked about this in one of a lovely series of YouTube videos posted on the Mount Angel website during the Octave of Easter.  Again, he was broadcasting.  He was on a screen.  But he was talking about Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John mistaking Jesus for the gardener—and how Jesus tells her not to touch him when she finally recognizes who he really is:

     It’s as though [Abbot Jeremy says] they, too, were taking the COVID-19 precautions that prevent human touch today!  But that is not what his words mean.  He is telling her that they are now in a whole new realm.  It’s not like it was before—it’s more.  Jesus is no longer one among many material things.  His resurrected life is now invading us and the universe, entirely!

My heart burned when I heard this.  It leapt.  It’s true that Jesus allows Thomas to touch his wounds.  It’s true that Jesus eats in the presence of his disciples.  But he can also come through walls, and no one seems to recognize him at first, and he’s never present for very long.   Soon he vanishes, he disappears, he isn’t even a face on a screen, and that’s because he is now more fully and completely present in the world than he ever was in his one, historical body.  He is no longer obvious.  He is everywhere:

     Dear brothers and sisters [Abbot Jeremy continues], our Lord is living his risen life within us.  He is the hidden living force in    everything alive.  He is the secret life within every person who has ever lived, is alive today, and who ever will live. 

Or as the first Letter of Peter puts it,

     He was known before the foundation of the world, but revealed in the final time for you, who through him believe in God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God.

Maybe this is what we are being called to see in our present crisis:  Christ in the trees and Christ in the rain and Christ in the people we love, however far away they are.

On Holy Saturday a dear friend of mine died, Father Peter Ely, a Jesuit and one of my teachers at Gonzaga years ago.  He walked out into the garden of the Jesuit residence at Seattle University, where he had gone on to teach and serve for many years, and died, of a heart attack.  When they found him, they thought at first that he was just lying down on his side.

Peter was the one I went to when I realized that I wanted to become Catholic, and I’ll never forget his kindness and his generosity as he sat with me in the living room of the old house we were renting near campus and talked with me every week about the history and the teachings of the Church.  I’ll never forget my first communion, at a home mass where Peter presided, in that same old house, on Pentecost, 1977—he was the first person ever to give me the Body of Christ.  Later he baptized two of our three children.  He was the sort of friend you don’t think about very often but who is very, very important—the sort of friend you don’t really recognize, not fully, until he vanishes—vanishes into a new and fuller life—as Father Sundborg, the president of Seattle University, put it at Peter’s memorial, where the Emmaus story was also the gospel reading.

The memorial, too, was online, on Zoom—Peter had just learned how to use it himself, for a class he was teaching this spring—but it was very moving.

In the beginning there was a picture of the spot in the garden where he fell.  There were already flowers and cards and a cross there, a kind of shrine.  And there was also a picture of the last thing Peter may have seen in this life, given the way he was facing:  a cherry tree, in blossom, and the sky behind it.

Various people gave testimonials to Peter’s friendship and teaching and influence, one after the other, lay people and priests, and in all of them there was this strong Ignatian conviction that Christ is present everywhere in the world, that as the Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin once put it, “everything that happens is adorable.”

And near the end of the memorial, one of the older Jesuits read a poem by another Jesuit writer, the nineteenth century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.  It’s called “When Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and when I heard this old friend of Peter’s read the last few lines, in his strong, gravelly voice, the tears came into my eyes:

     For Christ plays in ten thousand places, 

     Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his 

     To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 We couldn’t gather around a coffee table in an old house near campus, we couldn’t stand together in a great cathedral, we couldn’t share in the breaking of the bread, the bread that Peter broke again and again in his fifty years as a priest.

But Christ was present in that moment.  I know he was.  All our hearts were burning.

     Even now, in the pandemic, even now, Christ plays in ten thousand places.  He is lovely in limbs and in the features of our faces, even in the faces we can only see on a screen, as he was lovely in Peter’s face, and still is, as he is lovely in yours, and in mine, and in all the faces in the world, now and forevermore.

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Psalm 34

There’s a beautiful line in the psalm today that I haven’t noticed before: “Look to him that you may be radiant with joy / and your faces may not blush with shame.”  I like that.  It’s nicely balanced.  It’s almost a kind of pun.

My wife is a redhead and she blushes easily, and I blush easily, too.  The blood just rises up into my face when I’m angry or embarrassed.  I can feel it happening, and everyone can see it.

What the psalm tells me is that my face should be glowing with joy.  My face should be turned towards God, reflecting his light.

We all know a few people like this, people with faces that seem to shine, who seem to radiate something healthy and good.  They’re persuasive not because of what they say but because of who they are.  We all know people, many more people, with faces full of worry or anger or shame.  People with drawn faces.  Tight faces.  Or I think of my students, who are good kids but who after growing up with smart phones don’t have the same expressions I’m used to, don’t have faces I know how to read anymore.  When they’re not looking down, their faces are often blank.

This Lent let’s look at ourselves in the mirror, and if we can’t see that joy, let’s reflect on why not.  Let’s connect again with our only true source.  And when we do, let’s show it.  Why are we such “sourpusses?” as Pope Francis asks.  We’re at mass–we’re in the presence of the Eucharist—Christ is giving himself to us!

Think of the difference it makes when someone smiles at us.  It lifts us.

At one point in the Paradiso, as Dante and Beatrice are flying up into the light of heaven, Beatrice even has to turn away from Dante, her smile is so radiant.  If Dante saw it, he’d be burned to ash.

It all depends on what we’re looking at.  That’s what our faces reflect.

Are we looking at God—at what’s healthy and right and good?

If we’re not, what are we looking at?  What have allowed to capture our gaze?