Prose

     Jesus was a great traveler.  He was always moving from one place to another, and he called other people to move, too, from where they were to somewhere else.  Put down your nets and follow me.  Let the dead bury the dead.  Follow me.

     The gospels are organized around the journey Jesus made from Galilee to Jerusalem.  It’s only about as far as Corvallis is from Portland, but that’s a long way when you have to walk every step, as they did, from village to village, and of course in a deeper sense it was much further than that.  It was a journey from bondage to freedom, from death to life, and to make that journey you have to be open, you have to be humble, you have to be willing to trust, and to endure hardship, and to not know where you are most of the time.   You have to be willing to admit that you haven’t yet arrived, that you don’t have all the answers, that there’s something ahead greater than whatever you thought before.

     You have to repent: metanoia, to change your mind.  To move.  To risk.  And a lot of people in the gospels won’t take that risk, the Pharisees most of all.  They’re stuck.  They think the place they are is the only place there is.  The old has passed away, Jesus says–behold, I give you something new.  But you have to get in a boat and cross to the other side to see it, you have to get up off the couch, you have to get up out of bed on Sunday morning and drive down to church, and stand and kneel, and then get up out of the pew and journey forward to the front to receive the Eucharist, to receive the Body of Christ.

     In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is at the bottom of hell, and he’s stuck in ice.  He can’t move.  He’s a mindless animal, and he can’t move.  Everyone in the Paradiso is dancing.  Is flying.

     All her life Connie was a great traveler.  She went everywhere even into her eighties, from Asia to Europe and all over the country, but she was a traveler in this deeper sense, too, always on the way, always making this interior move, and it wasn’t out of restlessness.  It was out of enjoyment and curiosity and delight, and even more out of openness, out of humility.  There was a quiet calm about her, and a graciousness, but she always wanted to know more, and she wasn’t bothered by uncertainty, and she didn’t think she was in control of everything.   “In this quest to find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty,” Pope Francis says.

If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by some margin of uncertainty, then this is not good.  If one has the answers to all the questions—that is proof that God is not with him.  God is always a surprise.  You never know where and how you will find him. 

This was Connie.  Quietly.  Graciously.  God was with her.

     And it’s not that she was wandering either, was just roaming around.  Everyone says that the journey is more important than the destination but that’s not true at all.  As Christians we believe that we are part of a story, and that story has a beginning and a middle and an end, and now Connie has finally arrived where she was going.  She has laid down her burden, though in God we are always being swept up, into love, into beauty–the whole universe is moving towards Christ and into Christ.

     One of the ways that Connie traveled was as an artist, in her paintings and her art. She was very talented, and one of my treasured possessions is a small painting of hers.  There’s this kind of indistinct field of dark red, and against it at the top there’s a faint white outline of a dome, with a cross or a star above it to the right.  It’s a church, and at the bottom of it, spilling out of that red background, there is what looks like a river of white falling over a ledge.

     It’s a really striking image, and I think it’s an image of someplace she had been, and I think it’s an image of a place inside her, in her heart, and I think it’s the place where she is now, the place all those other places were just glimpses of.  It was the Eucharist she was always traveling towards, it was Christ, and now she has risen up and come forward and entered into it fully, she has received and been received, and all her journeying is at an end, and all her journeying is only beginning, is only opening up, is only moving towards a still greater beauty we can’t possibly imagine.

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

     Because it does.  Nothing matters more.

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

Records Kept:  34 years

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

            Records Kept: 15 years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith Over Fifty: The Grace of Growing Older

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

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

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

Cost: $330 Single occupancy; $480 double occupancy

Email retreat@mtangel.edu for availability.

see also the retreat house website 

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

     Last week I received two really remarkable emails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     This is how the email ends:

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

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

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

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

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

     I am the vine and you are the branches.

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

     I think it means everything.

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

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

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

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

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

            Do not let your hearts be troubled.  In my father’s house there are many dwelling places.

                        John 14:1

    In the Gospel of John Jesus gives us an image of the afterlife and of life and of the whole universe very different from the image that the culture teaches us.  The culture teaches us that matter is all there is, just the physical, and I think deep down that frightens and depresses us.  We look at the images of the galaxies and the stars that the new James Webb telescope is sending us and we think how beautiful the universe is, but also how vast and impersonal, just gases and forces and random events, and we are just particles, too, briefly winking in and then winking out.

      But Jesus says no, the universe is a great house, a mansion, a wonderful mansion, warm and safe and welcoming, and we all have a place in it, we all have our own dwelling places, and we’re not insignificant—we are precious and we are loved, forever.

     Imagine how different things would be if we could believe this!  How free we would be!

     Nothing comes from nothing, and the something that comes can never pass away.  We learn languages and fall in love and are full of talk and ideas and energy and creativity, and then we die, and maybe it seems that all of that is just gone.  It’s just disappeared.  But no.  No.  Every creative act, every kindness, every smile or glance influences all of us, flows out to us in ways we can’t measure, and none of that goodness and creativity ever dies.  What we love in others and what they love in us is something immortal.

     Look at the resurrection that occurs every day, Saint Clement tells us.  “The night lies in sleep” but “the day rises again.”  Look at the sower who goes out and casts each seed into the ground, and from those seeds rise up all that we need.  St.Clement’s image is of God holding us all in his hands:  “Where can one go, where can one escape to, from the presence of him whose hands embrace the universe?”

     In Dante, the great poet of the Middle Ages, the image is of a vast and beautiful rose, the Mystic Rose, in which all the countless souls of the just are arranged, tier upon tier, “mounting with the light,” as he puts it.  I love roses.  We have dozens of them on our deck where the deer can’t get them, and I especially love the yellows and the oranges and the creams, and when I delight in them as I do I glimpse heaven, I am in heaven, and whenever any of us are delighted, whenever any of us see beauty and feel love and are most ourselves, are most free, we glimpse heaven, too.  What we delight in is finally beyond all science and beyond all imagination.

     There, far and near cause neither loss nor gain,

     for where God rules directly, without agents,

     the laws that govern nature do not pertain.

Nothing comes from nothing.   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 got here.  To call consciousness an illusion is to be conscious of an illusion, and that consciousness is from God and returns to God, and deep inside the Rose there is place for each of us, it is vast and it is beautiful beyond all imagining.  “Into the gold of the rose that blooms eternal,” Dante says, every petal is “a throne.”

from Pope Francis (Pentecost, 5/23/21)

The Spirit 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 future.  Let us live in the present!

Only by emptying ourselves do we leave room for the Lord.  If we give priority to our own projects, our structures, our plans for reform, we will be concerned only about effectiveness.  We will think in horizontal terms.  The Church is human, but it is not merely a human organization.

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

            a reflection on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi

When I was going to Gonzaga I used to go to mass with Barb and her family.  I wasn’t Catholic then, but there was something that felt right about the liturgy.  It wasn’t any particular thing but more the cumulative effect of it over time. The tone.  The atmosphere.

When I decided to become Catholic it wasn’t mostly because of an intellectual shift or conversion, though the four years I spent at Gonzaga involved a great deal of philosophy and theology and writing and thinking about the big issues college students should be thinking and writing about, and I loved that, I was inspired by that—but it wasn’t finally because of ideas that I became Catholic.  It was because of Barb and her family and the Jesuits I knew and the feeling of sitting in the student chapel as the mass was being said and the light was coming through the stained-glass windows.  The ideas I was encountering helped me make sense of that experience, helped me to name it, although the biggest idea of all was that ideas are finally limited, are secondary.  That’s what dogma and theology are for, to proclaim that Jesus wasn’t just human.  He was divine.

Divine:  beyond our understanding.

For me it’s still primarily about the feelings I have at mass, to a greater or lesser degree, something in my chest sometimes, at the sternum, like a kind of slight pressure, and at the same time like a kind of hollowness.  It’s like butterflies in the stomach, too, or like a lump in the throat, and sometimes it lasts through the whole mass.  Or it’s a tingling.

More often it’s, again, a kind of cumulative sense of the mass and the Church, something that’s been building over the forty-five years I’ve been Catholic, a warmth or a feeling of rightness or a feeling of respect and admiration.  It’s a little like the feeling I have for Dante or Shakespeare or Keats and all great literature:  that it’s great, that it’s beautiful.  With St. John Henry Newman and others in the tradition, it’s possible to think of the mass as a kind of poetry, as a great work of art that keeps happening and that we’re inside of again and again.

It’s like the smell of the lilies at Easter.  It’s everywhere.

I don’t mean that we can prove the Real Presence by how we feel about it.  Feeling is just one part of the equation, and feelings come and go.  Ultimately, after we think through the theories and the terms, this is a matter of faith, of a leap we make from the limited evidence of our experience.  It’s an act of obedience.  It’s an act of surrender.  It’s an act of longing.

In fact, the going away of the feeling, the absence of the feeling, is a really important part of the process, too.  Because sometimes at mass, even often—let’s admit it—we don’t feel anything.  We’re preoccupied, or we’re bored, or we’re angry, or even more we’re despairing and empty and bereft and the consecration and the elevation of the paten and the chalice have no effect on us at all, and it’s then that the Real Presence really becomes defined for us, when we can choose to turn away and give up on it or turn towards the emptiness and enter into it.

Of course:  we need to prepare ourselves as best we can.  We need to be as open and engaged as we can be.  Of course.

But what did we think, that we could make the feelings happen whenever we want them to, just by being good–that the mass is a switch we can just turn on?  What did we think, that we could see Jesus whenever we want to, all the time, when even his disciples didn’t recognize him at first, after the Resurrection, when he would just appear, then vanish?  When even Mary Magdalene thought he was the gardener?

When we don’t feel anything at mass, we’re joining with Mary Magdalene, we’re talking with the Gardener, we’re being reminded that Jesus is hidden in all things and that all we can do is recognize our own finiteness and weakness and pray for him to fall in beside us on the road again, to sit down with us at table, to show himself for just a second, before he vanishes again.  Were not our hearts burning?  the disciples ask, after their encounter at Emmaus.

When we don’t feel anything at mass, we’re joining with Jesus himself, who was hungry, who was sleepy, who must have been just as bored and tired and distracted as we sometimes are.  Who was human, too.  Fully human.

It’s really a good thing that we don’t always feel wonderful at mass, because that’s a sign that the feeling isn’t coming from us.  If it were, we’d make it happen all the time.

The Risen Lord tells Mary not to hold on to him.  We can’t hold on to him.

We always think of the consecration from the perspective of the bread and the wine becoming the Body and Blood.  But it works the other way, too:  the Body and Blood become mere bread and wine, and this is just as much of a miracle and maybe even more of a miracle.

The miracle is that Jesus didn’t come down from the cross.  He emptied himself out.  He so loved the world he came into it.

When at the preparation of the altar the deacon pours a little water into the wine, he says this prayer: by the mystery of this water may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.

I’ve talked about this many times before.

See the two movements there, intersecting?  We go up, towards the divine, and Christ comes down, towards the human.

And then that water and that wine–water as a symbol of the human, wine as a symbol of the divine–they’re completely mixed up, they’re entirely blended together, we can’t separate them out once the water is poured.  They are one substance, one reality, and that’s the reality that saves us.  That’s the Beauty beyond all beauty.

It’s always all mixed up.

In the last scene of The Passion of the Christ Mel Gibson actually shows us the Resurrection, from inside the tomb.  We see the linens collapse, the ones that wrapped the body, and then we see the Risen Jesus, crouching on the floor, naked and handsome and strong, and all of us in the theater know who it is–there’s no question about it—it’s Jesus—it’s the same actor who’s been playing Jesus all along–and there’s this stirring, military music, and the drums are beating, and it’s all dramatic and cinematic and nothing at all like the Resurrection as it’s described in the gospels themselves, because the gospels themselves never describe the Resurrection.  They can’t.

In all four gospels we are always outside the tomb and the tomb is always empty—the angels keep telling us, he’s not here, he’s not here–and the emphasis is always on the act of seeing, on the act of interpreting, and the people who are seeing and interpreting are mixed up and afraid, and even when Jesus appears to them, even when he’s standing right in front of them, they don’t recognize him at first, they don’t know who he is, and they can never hold on to him when they finally do.  He always vanishes.

We could never have filmed the Resurrection.  It was too real.  It wasn’t just some strange thing that happened a long time ago but something that is always happening and is happening still.

To film it we’d have to show someone standing at the sink, doing the dishes.

To film it we’d have to show someone sitting in the living room, reading.

The clouds through the window.