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My first car was a 56 Chevy, pockmarked
and rusted, faded red and white.
They only wanted three hundred dollars for it,
but Dad checked it out and it always ran great.
I could take you right now to the exact spot
along the river where the sheriff found it
the morning after it was stolen,
nose first, halfway down the bank,
and the river would still be flowing,
the beautiful, the beautiful river.
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What happens at mass is that a single point
explodes into a billion, billion pieces, and the pieces
fly away at incredible speeds, and they become
atoms, then gasses, then stars and planets,
and on one planet amoebas appear, and the amoebas
become fish, and the fish become dinosaurs,
and the dinosaurs become monkeys and dogs, everything
is always becoming something else, until finally
the universe comes to consciousness of itself
and we’re standing there looking around thinking wow,
this is really beautiful. This is really sad.
When Jesus appears in the flesh
we don’t recognize him at first.
We think he’s the gardener.
An old man and an old woman
walk down the breezeway with a baby.
They must be in their seventies, maybe their eighties.
The old man is bowlegged and wearing jeans.
He looks like he’s worked his whole life.
The old woman has wrapped a shawl around her head
and swaddled the baby, but it’s the old man
who is holding the baby as they walk.
She is four months old, they tell me.
Her name is Alice Rose.
You baptized her, the old woman says, smiling,
a couple of months ago.
The baby’s head is smooth and soft
and there is a band around it, and on the band,
in the center of her forehead,
there is a little white rose made of cloth.
What happens at mass is that I keep watching
the old man as he sits in the pew
looking down at the baby and smiling,
rocking her in his arms.
We were having mass on a hill above a bay.
This was after a storm, and through
the windows the rain still glistened on the alder.
And at just the moment of the consecration,
as the bread was becoming the Body of Christ,
a great flock of geese came clamoring
over us, honking and clattering.
It must have been enormous.
We could almost hear the words.
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A hundred years ago the smiling man
in the wheelchair wore the same gown
his great-grandson is wearing now.
It is made of white cotton, softened
and yellowed with age, and goes
all the way past the baby’s toes.
The family has been telling stories,
but quiets now and gathers around.
The mother holds the baby in her arms.
The old man is smiling, and his eyes
are clear and aware. He knows
what is going on, and for a moment
I do, too, and I stand at the font
and cup the water in my hand.
for a reading of the poem click here
Riding my bike to school I see a whale.
It surfaces quietly, sleek and black
in the oily water, broad back glistening.
I am standing on a metal gangplank.
In the distance the spires of the city.
I am waiting for the lock to fill and the boat
to rise before I continue on my way,
to my seminars and my books and all I am
trying to do. But now something sleek
and black has broken the surface—
a Pilot Whale, caught, big as a pickup—
curving and diving, curving and diving,
until the lock finally lowers and it can
swim away, back out to sea.
I am down on all fours on a paved path
just beyond the Benton County Fairgrounds.
Who knew how dizzy a dad can get?
I have a picture of Maggie as a little girl
riding in a kiddie car. She is slowly going
around and around. She is smiling the smile
I was always afraid
concealed her disappointment.
But we are older now,
and we’ve just been on the Tilt-a-Whirl,
and everything is spinning.
Please . . . no . . .
I tell the deputy sheriff. I’m OK.
As if that long, smooth path
were the only way
I’d ever make it home.
A hundred years ago
the smiling man in the wheelchair
wore the same white gown
his great-grandson
is wearing now as I get ready
to baptize him.
I’m not sure what we’re doing here
except that it’s beautiful.
A summer morning.
A breeze moves in the leaves
of the tree.
It’s too slight to sway
the windchimes.
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July 10, 2022
Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10: 25-37
I’ve always struggled with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Partly it’s because its message is so obvious: we’re supposed to stop and help people in need. Of course. What else is there to say?
But really the problem is that I don’t want to stop and help. I’m so sunk into myself and my own problems, so lacking in compassion and concern, I just keep on walking. I’m too selfish. I resist the parable because I’m the Levite. I’m the Priest.
Or I’m the man who has been beaten by the robbers and left by the side of the road. We all are. Anxiety has beaten us up. Struggle and work and the long, hard days have robbed us of our energy and capacity. Everything we read in the news, everything we know about ourselves: it all leaves us feeling stranded and abandoned.
We aren’t the Samaritan. We need the Samaritan.
And we just have to admit this, we just have to face this, because it’s God who works through us, it’s Christ who inspires us with his love. We can only love God if he gives us the gift of loving him. We can only love our neighbors if he gives us the gift of loving them. We can only love ourselves if he gives us the gift of that love.
Last week Barb and I spent a day at the beach. That evening we went to a nice restaurant for dinner. It was crowded and they had to seat us at the bar, and as we sat there on the stools we watched the bartender, a young woman, running back and forth trying to serve everyone.
There was a man at the bar, an old man, in his seventies or eighties, sitting by himself a little further down. After a while, the bartender stopped and asked how he was doing, and he said, this is the anniversary of my wife’s death, she died two years ago today, and this was her favorite place.
Then this busy young woman, this harried, overworked bartender, she stopped, and she stood there, and she talked to that lonely man. She listened to him. She didn’t say anything profound. She wasn’t a Levite. She wasn’t a Priest. She looked at him, and she stopped, she listened, and I thought, go and do likewise, go and do likewise, and for a moment the bartender’s kindness and the old man’s grief and the mystery of death and all the stories and the sadness in that crowded place, it all felt like grace, the Spirit was there, moving in others and moving in me, and it was a clear, warm summer evening, and the sun was setting into the ocean, and the waves were coming in and going out, and the love was in me, too, the kindness was in me, Christ was in me, and I was no longer trapped, I was no longer caved in on myself. I was free. I was free to love others.
My brother Ted has been diagnosed with Type Two Diabetes, and he’s taking it very seriously. He’s reading about diabetes. He’s managing his diet. He’s amazed at how addictive sugar is. He’s amazed at how his mind has cleared since he stopped putting all that sugar and all those chemicals into his body.
The other day he was sitting at his computer—he works from home—and he looked out the window and saw a hummingbird, hovering at his flowers, and the thought came into his mind: there’s the sweetness.
There’s the sweetness.
That thought, I’m sure, came from Christ. I know it did. That was Christ. All things were made through him and all things were made for him, hummingbirds and oceans and bartenders and you and me, all things continue in being in him, he is not far away, he is not in the sky, he is here, in every moment, and in that moment he broke through to my brother, he could feel it, and when he called and told me about it, when he shared this moment, Christ broke through to me, too, through my selfishness, my sadness.
The word is not far away. The parables are all around us. The word is in our hearts and in our minds. In our glucose levels. In the cells of our bodies.
I take the scholar as a symbol of those who think faith is just a matter of ideas, of being able to repeat back abstract, theological principles, and not a question of our own lived experience, of what actually happens in our lives, and maybe the Levite and the Priest have the same problem. They’re not just hypocrites, they’re intellectuals, as in a sense we all are when we argue and fight and beat each other over the heads with the Catechism. It’s the big irony, since in the end what the Catechism says again and again is that Christ is mystery, Christ is love, and his love is given, not earned. It’s beyond us.
When people talk to me about becoming Catholic, or about unbecoming Catholic, they usually want to talk about doctrines they can’t accept or do, but that’s not it. That’s putting the cart before the horse. “The secondary role of doctrine is vital to understanding biblical religion,” George Dennis O’Brien says.
What leads the religious believer is not a statement of belief, a dogma, but some lived actuality. We don’t start with theological doctrine and then instance reality; we start with the given reality and then try to understand what there is about it that the theologian may be pointing to. When the angels appeared over the stable in Bethlehem they did not say, “Behold, I have brought you a topic for discussion.”
Charity is a way of knowing. Whatever we do for the least of these, Jesus says, we do for him. Jesus tells the scholar to go and actually do something not just because it’s good for others but because it’s good for him, because in helping someone else he will know God in a way he never could in the abstract. He will touch him. He will feel his skin. His breath.
When Gerard Manley Hopkins was asked how we can better understand the doctrines of the Church, he said “give alms.”
When the angels appeared over the bar as the waves were coming in, when the angels appeared outside my brother’s window, hovering at the flowers, they were saying, behold, all things continue in being in him, and he is present in all things, he is the light, and the light is not overcome by the darkness. They were saying, this is love, not that you loved me but that I first loved you. They were saying, you are not abandoned, you are not alone, however dark the world seems and however overwhelming, I am here and I am with you. Open your eyes. Stop. Listen. And then go out into the world. Go out and serve.
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An old woman hired us to scythe
a vacant lot beneath a tall, white billboard.
Rusty scythes with wooden handles.
Dry weeds and dry grass and the sound
a scythe makes, and the leaping
of the grasshoppers, and the sun beating down
and the cars rushing by. The dark stilts
the billboard rose on smelled of creosote.
Lunchtime she brought us sandwiches,
spam on white bread, with catchup, wrapped
in aluminum foil, and we straightened our backs
and thank-you-ma’am-ed. I’ll never forget
that sandwich. That morning. What I can’t
remember is what the billboard said.
When in the fourteenth century
the priest said hoc est corpus meum,
this is my body,
what the people heard was hocus pocus—
they didn’t understand
the language—and I’m not sure
that’s such a bad thing.
I could tell you the names of all the birds
in the forest, just on the basis
of how they sing,
but it’s spring now, and today I walked
among the burgeoning trees,
and wherever I looked
there was nothing
but green.
