Prose

     I keep thinking of this astonishing quote in Dilexi Te, “On the Love of the Poor,” an apostolic exhortation begun by Pope Francis just before he died and finished by Pope Leo.  It’s a quote from St. John Chrysostom, the archbishop of Constantinople in the fifth century:

Do you wish to honor the body of Christ?  Do not allow it to be despised in its members—that is, in the poor, who have no clothes to cover themselves.  Do not honor Christ’s body here in church with silk fabrics, while outside you neglect it when it suffers from cold and nakedness.  The body of Christ on the altar does not need cloaks but pure souls, while the one outside needs much care.  Let us therefore learn to think of and honor Christ as he wishes.  For the most pleasing honor we can give to the one we want to venerate is that of doing what he himself desires, not what we devise.  So you, too, give him the honor he has commanded, and let the poor benefit from your riches.  God does not need golden vessels, but golden souls.   (41)

     Do we really understand what the “real presence of Christ in the Eucharist” means?  Do we really understand what “traditional” Catholicism is?

     This is the fifth century.

     Pope Leo then adds this comment:  St. John Chrysostom “understood the Eucharist as a sacramental expression of the charity and justice that both preceded and accompanied it.  That same charity and justice should perpetuate the Eucharist through the love and attention to the poor.”

     Perpetuating the Eucharist.

     When we think of the Eucharist we think of it in much too narrow a way.  We think it only happens in the Church, but that’s wrong.  It happens everywhere, or should.  Our lives lead up to it and our lives flow out of it, and it all blends.  It’s all of a piece.

     A few sections later, Pope Leo, who is an Augustinian, after quoting St. Augustine, says this: “for Augustine, the poor are not just people to be helped, but the sacramental presence of the Lord.”

     The sacramental presence of the Lord.  

    

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Recently I got interested again in a family story, the story of “the fire,” and so I did a little digging.

     It was easy enough to find the article in the Spokesman Review, June 11, 1935:  a house in Spokane nearly burned to the ground, the children thrown out an upstairs window and caught in the arms of a neighbor, Clyde Ralstin.  My mom was four.  My Aunt Lettie died of burns.  The house was “a mass of flames,” the paper said.

    But the surprising thing is what I found out next, when I looked up Clyde Ralstin—a name I didn’t know before—because it turns out that in September of that same year, he murdered a cop in a little town north of Spokane.

    Clyde was a policeman himself, a detective on the Spokane police force, but he was also a thief, the head of a gang of thieves stealing milk and cheese from creameries all over Spokane and Pend Oreille counties to sell on the black market.  This was in the middle of the Depression, and milk and cheese were scarce.

     And one night that fall when a cop on the nightshift caught the gang robbing the creamery in his little town, Clyde pulled out his .32 service revolver and shot him four times, once through the heart—though no one could ever prove it, though the police in Spokane covered it up for years.

      The man who made it possible for me to exist took the life of another man, a good man, a family man, The Spokesman Review said, just trying to do his job.

     I wouldn’t be here without him.

       That’s the mystery.  That’s just how life is, and anyone who claims that God has a plan for his or her life in the sense that everything is clear cut and everything moves in a straight line from good to good is simply trying to explain away a complexity that should keep us all humble.  The rain when it falls falls on the good and the bad, and the sun when it shines shines on us all.  The truth is never must one thing.

     God is present in our lives, God is with us always, just not in the way we like to think.

     They only found Clyde’s .32 over half a century later when the Spokane River was low, caked in mud like an artifact, wedged between rocks beneath the Post Street Bridge where all those years the water surged over it towards the falls.

     God is in the rocks.  God is in the years.  God is in the river, and the mystery of the river can be solved.

            audio  

    The Jesus we meet in the Gospels, this lovely, kind, charismatic man, is our model and our inspiration.  He is the source.   The Jesus of the Gospels shows us that God is a person, too—though “person” in a large, mysterious sense.  And there are kinds of prayer that encourage us to imagine this figure in detail, to place ourselves in the scene, as in the Ignatian form of imaginative prayer known as “contemplation.”

 

     And yet Jesus—our idea of him, our image of him—can be a real problem in prayer.  Jesus can be an obstacle in our faith life.

 

     The problem is that most of us have never had a vision of Jesus the way some of the saints did and a few people still do, haven’t seen his face or heard his voice or felt his touch, and so we can doubt he exists at all.  The problem is that most of us can’t summon an image of Jesus in prayer or keep it for very long—we’re no good at Ignatian contemplation—I’m not—my thoughts and feelings are usually much fuzzier, more abstract—and it’s very important that we know that this is OK, it’s normal, it’s common, even with many of the saints.

      For some of us concrete images of Jesus are actually repulsive sometimes:  the Jesus in all the paintings, all those beards and ribcages and knees—the Jesus in all the movies, all those particular faces, all those robes and sandals.  That’s OK.  It’s fine.  This is an invitation to deeper, more mature, more genuine faith.

    In the twelfth century, for example, St. Bernard wrote that in his experience of Jesus in prayer, there was “nothing sensational.”  He didn’t see anything or hear anything.  What he felt was much subtler, something like “a warmth and glow” in his heart.

     In the sixteenth century St. Ignatius describes a moment when he seemed to see “something white, from which the rays were coming.’  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.

     This is tremendously freeing, I think.  We’re in good company.  We can relax.  We can open up.

 

      Ignatius uses the image of a “sponge” soaking up the divine presence, slowly, over time.  He is even suspicious of the dramatic and the vivid, of what he calls the big “splashes.”  They’re usually just that, splashes.  They quickly drain away.

     In the second Eucharistic Prayer, we pray the Spirit will come down upon us “like the dewfall.”   Soft. Fleeting.  Everywhere, on all the grasses.

 

    Thomas Merton says plainly that if imagining Jesus is a good thing and helps, by all means do it, but that for him it’s not the only way to pray or even the best way.              

     The danger is that if we get fixated on the historical Jesus we will fail to see, to sense, to discern, the presence of God everywhere in our lives.  We don’t even need to be thinking about God at all, Merton says, in any sense–and we shouldn’t try, because God is everywhere, deeper within us than we can ever be aware of.  God is not an object.  God is not an idea.  God is the ground of all being, including our own, the very essence of things, “so close that you simply live, and He is your life, and don’t see it.” 

.   Maybe we pray most deeply, Merton thinks, when we’re not thinking about God at all but living our own lives in freedom and with close, self-forgetful attention.

    For Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, God is woven into the very fabric of our lives.  We sense him as a “steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the center of everything that is.” 

 

     The danger in this other, looser way of thinking about Jesus, of course, is looseness, is vagueness, is having such a broad idea of prayer that prayer means nothing at all.  When does prayer stop being prayer?  I’m not sure.

     But I keep thinking of Jesus in the Garden of Stone on the day of the Resurrection when he appears before Mary Magdalene and she’s so happy and she tries to embrace him.  He says, no, don’t embrace me.  Don’t try to hold onto me.  I’m on my way somewhere else.

     At first Mary doesn’t even recognize him.  She thinks he’s the gardener.

     Jesus isn’t Lazarus, the one he raised from the dead.  The Resurrection wasn’t a mere physical resuscitation.   Everyone knows who Lazarus is, they recognize him, and one day he’ll actually die, just like the rest of us.  

     It’s the Risen Christ we sense in prayer, after all, not the historical Jesus, the Christ who ascended and then sent the Spirit to fill the Church and the world and us, in our own bodies. 

 

    Terrible things are going on in our country and in the world, unjust and violent and terrible things, loud, deafening, and the temptation now is to raise our voices, too, simply to react, and in a way we should.  Certainly we should resist.  We should stand up.

     But the real challenge even now and especially now is to listen for this quiet voice, this voice underneath, this voice that is not ours, this small, subtle thing that’s bigger than anything has ever been.

 

    “He Who Is,” Merton says, “is present in the depths of our being as our Friend, and as our other self.”  

     The idea isn’t to explain Jesus away but to encourage us to experience him more profoundly—not merely as an idea or a force or an energy, but not as a statue come to life either, not as an actor with a soft beard and an English accent. 

     The idea is:  rejoice.  The Lord has risen.  He has risen indeed.  And he always has been rising, from the beginning of time.

 

     Sometimes when I read the name “Jesus” or I hear it said aloud, I feel this kind of quickening in me, this catch of the breath.  

     Just the name itself.

     That’s it.  That’s the call.  That’s our hope.

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     My best advice for beginning writers and all writers is to stop trying so hard.  When in doubt, lower your standards.

     “Don’t have any standards outside the feeling you have as you write,” the Oregon poet William Stafford says.  “Permit yourself to like what you are doing.”

     “One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing.”

      Write the first sentence, and the next sentence.  Keep going.  Don’t worry about it.

     “If you feel any qualms, then veer towards what feels good—why oppose the only compass you have?”  

     Somehow writing brings out our fears and our sense of unworthiness.  We can’t stop thinking about sounding stupid or the mistakes we will make and so we get blocked.  We don’t write anything, or when we do, we’re using a lot of big words we don’t normally use, trying to sound like we’re going to college, and our sentences get all balled up and ungrammatical.

     Peter Elbow analyzes the psychology of this.  “Almost everybody,” he says, “interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil onto the page.”  This is partly because our grade school and middle school and high school and university English teachers seem to be obsessed with our mistakes, and so we get obsessed with them, too.  

    It’s not that we won’t need to revise or that we don’t need to conform to whatever the rhetorical situation is.  It’s just that all that comes later.

    The paradox is that when we do postpone the editor, what we write sounds like us and so flows out of us and ends up actually being better, as writing, than what we would have produced otherwise, once we edit and shape it to the purpose.  Now we have something to edit and shape, something authentic at least.

     The real problem is that “premature editing” doesn’t just make writing difficult for us.  It also represses our real voice, the natural way words come out of us, unique to each of us, our natural rhythm, our natural force.  Premature editing makes our writing “dead,” and writing doesn’t have to be that way.

    Maybe we don’t like our voice, Elbow says, but too bad.  It’s the only voice we’ve got, and we better step aside and let it come.

     Veer towards “what feels good,” Stafford says.  “Why oppose the only compass you have?”  That’s the question not just for the writing life but for the spiritual life:  why do we always doubt who we really are?

    Our sin in the garden wasn’t that we were naked but that we were ashamed to be.  

For this command that I enjoin on you today, Moses says in Deuteronomy, 

is not too mysterious and remote for you.  It is not up in the sky, that you should say, “Who will go up in the sky and get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out.  Nor is it across the sea, that you should say, “Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may carry it out?”  No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.

    We think that to pray or try to have a relationship with God means we have to be spiritual athletes.  We have to be saints.  We think holiness is something beyond us, something rarified—and scary too and unattractive, because it seems sterile or lifeless.

     We think we have to earn God’s grace and we can only do that by denying who really are.  We think we have to hide ourselves.  We think we can’t be ourselves.

     And this points to our sense of who God is, who we’ve been told God is:  he is the Great Editor, the Angry Editor, the Impatient and Unforgiving Editor.  Often this is an unconscious assumption, and that’s worse, because then it can operate on us without our knowing and its effects are even stronger and longer lasting.

     But that sense of self-loathing and self-doubt is never the voice of God.  Never.  “Have no anxiety at all,” Jesus says, “but make your requests known to God.”  God so loved the world.  Jesus never rejects sinners, Richard Rohr says.  He rejects people who don’t think they’re sinners.  He welcomes the poor and the outcast and the leprous.  He calls the disciples when they’re a bunch of clueless fishermen with all kinds of mixed motives.  He doesn’t wait until they’re good enough.  He says, “my yoke is easy and my burden light.”

*

     “This is how it is with the kingdom of God,” Jesus says in Mark: 

it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how.  Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.  And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.

     Let go.  Work hard and plant the seeds and tend the crops, but then let go.  Because the land yields “of its own accord.”  The grain grows when we’ve lowered our standards, lowered our defenses, fallen asleep, deeper than our conscious mind.  It comes.  It flows out.  All we have to do is get out of the way.

     A woman I know and admire, a wonderful yoga teacher, speaks simply and directly when she teaches and writes that way in her weekly posts for her newsletter.  Her natural voice is gentle and wise.  

    But when she wrote a cover letter to go with her application to offer yoga classes at the university, she wrote with the same “cloudy vagueness” George Orwell complains about in the writing of bureaucrats and politicians and academics, and I think it was because she felt she had to write that way.  It was what the situation required, but it wasn’t.  She needed to adapt a little and write a bit more formally, but her voice is her voice, and it’s a compelling voice, and that’s what would convince her readers.

    In her yoga classes she is always saying, trust yourself.  The perfect pose is the best pose you can do that day.  When you look in the mirror at your body, approve of it, whatever it looks like, give thanks for it, because it is a gift.  It’s beautiful.

    And yet here, as we all do in these situations, she lacked the courage of convictions.  She felt she wasn’t good enough just as she was.  She had to deny her real self and conform to exactly the kind of cold and humorless world her teaching of yoga is resisting.

    This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to strive for the virtues, that we don’t need to repent, that we don’t need to constantly reform our lives, seek out new disciplines, make an effort, just as we need to revise what we write if we want to share it with others.

     In some ways the life of faith depends on re-vision, re-seeing, re-penting, because most of us can hardly ever act with patience and love in real time.  We need to think back, and remember, and reflect, and amend.

   We all need to try to get the pose as right as we can make it—but that effort is a response to the fact of God’s love, not a condition for receiving it.   It should come out of confidence, and it should come out of joy, and it should come out gratitude.

    “If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others,” as Rohr puts it, “it is not likely the voice of God but the ego.”  Here’s the rule:

 If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God. 

     The self-loathing that afflicts all of us, Rohr points out, is literally Satanic:

If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks. 

     I think shame is our Original Sin.  This is how the serpent tempts Eve, by convincing her that what she has and who she is isn’t enough itself.   She has to be like a “god,” not like herself.

     This is what ruins writing and this what ruins faith, this voice of the Editor in its darkest version, the voice that says, be someone else.  Try to sound grand and noble and holy.  People will laugh if they know who you really are.  It’s the voice that is always whispering in our ear.

     Have you noticed that whenever people talk about God or about faith, they almost always lapse into the language of conventional piety?  It’s hard not to.  It’s hard to try to put our religious experiences into words.  They’re beyond words.  And we want to honor the Church and honor God and we want to avoid exposing ourselves as hypocrites, which of course we are, and we want to avoid letting anyone know our real selves.  But our real selves, our true selves, are loved by God, are infinitely loveable, however flawed.

     Sometimes we long for this language, we need this language, we feel such gratitude for the scriptures and the tradition, because it’s given to us, and it’s not our own language, and yet it is.

     Once a young writer in the MFA program took her own life, and a memorial service was held in her memory.  The grad students stood in a circle beneath the gazebo in a park and spoke from their hearts, each taking a turn.  I was asked to give a short blessing, because the young writer had been a believer, and when I shared the simple words of the traditional graveside service, eternal rest grant unto her O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her, suddenly the mood changed.  There was a new quality of silence.  May she rest in peace.  May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace.  We had been lifted out of the vague, sentimentality of the usual things we say into a genuine poetry, into something dignified and simple and beautiful.  You could feel it.

     This is what we felt, underneath, this is what was true:  that this young woman who had taken her life was infinitely loved, was precious, in herself.

    Jesus came into the world not to condemn but to save it, because it’s worth saving.  It’s precious in his sight.  It’s only we who don’t believe it, and that’s the sin, the most basic sin of all, to not believe in our own goodness, deep down, and the goodness of others.

     Anthony Bourdain said that “your body isn’t a temple, it’s an amusement park,” and so we should have fun, and I think that’s partly right—not “fun” in the sense of self-destructive and excessive fun, fun that doesn’t end up being fun at all, but fun in the sense of whatever leads to real pleasure, that doesn’t give us a hangover, that comes out of our real self.

*

     To lower our standards for ourselves is an act of humility, and of confidence.  It’s an act of faith.  It’s a radical letting go because it’s grace that saves us and lights up our world and gives us meaning, and it’s offered to everyone, everyone.  We’re not worms. We’re not disgusting.  We’re not unlovable.  We’re just small.  We’re just limited.  We’re made in the image and likeness of God but we’re not God.

    Ideally there comes that point for all of us, usually when we’re older, when we realize, hey, I’m just like everyone else, I don’t have to impress everybody, I’m just me, I can admit that, and maybe that’s depressing at first but finally, pretty quickly, it becomes a cause for joy.  It’s freeing.

     Our best writing comes when we no longer try to be God, and that’s how things open up, too, in our lives.  When we say, I can’t handle this myself.  I’m not capable.  I just need God.  All I can do is what I can do.  “If you can’t be brilliant,” to paraphrase Joseph Williams says, “at least I can be clear.”

     It’s not Paradise Lost, E.B. White once said of something he’d written, “but at least it’s shorter.”

    “Humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God,” Merton says.   

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 arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?  How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life?  

It takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the person God intended you to be. 

     And in the end this idea says something, too, about who God is.  This has to do most fundamentally not just with how we look at ourselves but how we look at God.

    In a sense we have to lower our standards for God, as God lowered his standards for us.

     We want fireworks and voices from heaven and miracles, we want the special effects, we want the CGI.  We say, well, I’ve never seen anyone walk on water.  I’ve never seen anyone the calm storm.  So those must just be stories.  God must not really be here.

    ( Although it’s important to notice that the people in the gospels get all those things and end up killing Jesus anyway.  Apparently, miracles don’t settle anything.) 

     But God reveals himself to us in subtle things, quiet things, gradual things.  Like seeds growing we know not how.  Tiny seeds.  We don’t even see them.

     Like waking up and working and going to sleep again.  All these quiet, tiny things.

     Like the body you see in the mirror.  Like the voice of the wise yoga teacher saying, you are here.  This is your body.

     Like the word that suddenly appears on the page when you’re writing, like the sentence, the paragraph.  It’s as if it’s quotation marks.  It’s exactly you, it’s exactly what you’ve always wanted to say, and at exactly that same moment, exactly that instant, you realize, wait a minute.  That’s God speaking. 

 

      When I first walked into the Church of St. Stephen in Rome it felt cool and calm, quietly beautiful.  It was built in the fifth century and in the round, which is rare.  On the inside you pass through several graceful columns, and there in the center, down several steps, is the golden altar.  The walls curve gently around you, the stone a warm, creamy gold.  There’s a sense of simplicity and space, very different from the elaboration and ornamentation we’d been seeing in other churches, though I loved those churches, too, for what they were.

     But when I looked more closely at the frescos on the walls, I noticed more and more of their details, and however muted they were, what they depicted was shocking, grotesque, panel after panel:

grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire.

This is how Charles Dickens put it when he visited the church in the nineteenth century.  St. Stephen’s is named after a deacon who is described in Acts as the first martyr of the Church, stoned to death by an angry mob, and in this spirit the frescos illustrate in gory detail the tortures and deaths of martyr after martyr, from St. Sebastian to St. Agnes to St. Artemius to St. Peter of Verona, thirty-four in all.  “Such a panorama of horror and butchery,” Dickens said, “no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper.”

    I had to turn away.  I couldn’t look.  I had to allegorize.  To laugh.

    But really, we are all being asked to martyr ourselves, every day, in small ways.  We are all being asked to die to our selves.  

    The blood and gore in the stories of the martyrs are just a way of getting our attention, as they are in Dante or Flannery O’Connor.  The violence in her stories, O’Connor says, jolts her characters into facing “reality” and so prepares them to accept “their moment of grace.”  Their heads are “so hard” that “almost nothing else will do the work,” and that seems to be describing the heads of her readers, too, the heads of all of us. 

 

     The paradox at the heart of Christianity, Dermott Lane says, 

is about the isolated ego becoming a relational being, the indifferent self becoming an active subject in solidarity with others . . .  It is this peculiar pattern of dying to live, of passing over, of letting go, that is at the heart of the mystery of Christ.  Being a disciple of Christ involves the living out of this paradox.

     Every day we struggle with our selfishness and our weakness.  Every day we try to rise above our ego.  Every day we try to be in right relation with others.  The difference isn’t in kind but in degree.  The logic of martyrdom is only an extreme version of the everyday logic of the cross.

     As Pope Francis says in Gaudete et Exsultate, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” we don’t have to be perfect, and we can’t be, because it’s not we who are ever holy.  It’s Christ in us. “When you feel the temptation to dwell on your own weakness,” the Pope says, “raise your eyes to Christ crucified and say: ‘Lord, I am a poor sinner, but you can work the miracle of making me a little bit better.”

     To be holy doesn’t mean doing grand and noble things that will get us a lot of attention.  It means slogging along in our ordinary life, not just at church but at home and in our jobs and in our hearts.

      Francis talks about the holiness of our next-door neighbors, of the woman, for example, who refuses to gossip in the checkout line, who cares for her family even when she’s completely worn out.  The Church is always being attacked for its hypocrisy and rigidity, and it should be, but everyday behind the scenes there are countless, quiet acts of heroism.  Of self-sacrifice.

     A writer makes the sign of cross before he opens her laptop.  A woodworker makes the sign of the cross as she enters her shop.  All work done with integrity and skill is holy, because Christ is present in all that is good.  Just being patient is an act of holiness, one of the hardest acts of all—with the telemarketer, with the tailgater, with the homeless person sleeping in the passageway.   “We are all called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves. “ 

     We are only the farmer, and the seeds we plant grow in the night, in the darkness, we know not how.

     We are not the source of holiness or of grace, God is, and He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

 

      I think of John Lewis, mowed down by the mounted sheriffs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the courage that required, to face that, to allow the sheriffs to flatten him with the others and fracture his skull.  I wonder if those of us in the comfortable first world who are never beaten on trampled on or even yelled at most of the time aren’t being asked to do more than think of the cross as a symbol.  If you want to follow Christ, Daniel Berrigan said, you better “look good on wood,” and John Lewis, in his faith and his conviction that he must live out that faith, he knew that.

     But Lewis was just an ordinary man, as Bonhoeffer was, too, as I think Stephen was and all the martyrs, drawn slowly by events and a series of single choices, buoyed up the commitments and energies and presence of others, until at a certain point they suddenly found themselves on the front lines, almost without a choice.  They found themselves standing on that bridge, sitting in that cell.  It all happened before they knew it.

     We can only make our own choices day to day and for most of us that final, climactic moment won’t come.  For most of us the challenge is much simpler:  not to post the angry rant or complain about a slight, to try to be patient when someone we love does the one thing that always drives us crazy.  To not take the credit when the credit is ours.  To listen to the person we most detest.  Even to show some kindness to person we see in the mirror.

     The problem with the sentimentalizing of martyrdom is that it reinforces the idea of a heroic, muscular Christianity, as if to follow Christ means to be a spiritual athlete, elite, exceptional, strong in ourselves—as if we are the ones who act. 

     That’s completely wrong.

     All we can do is what Mary does.  All we can do is say yes when the grace is offered us, and often we don’t.

     All is grace.  We can’t even hold our tongues or put money in the collection basket without grace.  Even those simplest things are beyond us most days.    

 

     St. Lawrence is my favorite deacon.  He’s depicted too on one of the frescoes, being roasted on a spit.  The Emperor had asked that he bring him all the riches of the Church, and St. Lawrence responded by gathering all the poor and the lame and the homeless in Rome and bringing them to the throne.  

     Legend has it that at one point he said to his tormentors, “turn me over, I’m done on this side,” which is why–and this is true—St. Lawrence is the patron saint of bakers.

      It’s a macabre joke in a way, this being done on one side, but maybe it helps us to shrink our own martyrdom to the proper scale.  

     I can be like Lawrence, through grace, if I value the poor more than my own comfort and wealth, if I measure my worth not by what I own or by my position in the world and for that matter not measure my worth at all.

     I can be like Lawrence, through grace, if I let myself be spoken to harshly or discounted or cut off in traffic or treated rudely by a cashier—if I stay silent and walk away–or, hardest of all, reach out.  Offer the kind word.  Say: peace be with you.

     If when things are too complicated and intense and everything goes wrong, I remember what matters most.  

     If I make a joke.  If I say, if only to myself, turn me over, Lord, I’m done on this side.

     I knew a man who was ninety-six.

     He had come up after mass and we met and talked now and then.  I was shocked when he told me how old he was because he didn’t look it.  He was upright and quick, with a fuzzy white beard, neatly trimmed.  

    He lived downtown next to the public library in a nice apartment with clean lines and wide windows.  Paintings of sailboats hung on his white walls.  He had painted many of them.  He was taking art classes at the community college and made pots, too, and small, clay sculptures.

     He had flown in a B-17 in the war and come back and worked for many years on the East Coast as a stockbroker and financial advisor.  He was a natty dresser.  He always wore ties with blue Oxford button-downs, his khakis pressed and creased. 

    He had an odd first name:  Ormond.  I never asked where it came from.

    One day he invited me for coffee, and we sat in his bright study and talked.  There was a signed picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall behind him.  He was talking about the League of Nations and the problems with internationalism and the welfare state and it suddenly struck me:  he wanted to be my friend.  He was ninety-six years old and he wanted to make a new friend.  He was insecure really and was trying to win my respect, as we all do when we meet someone.

      He wasn’t done being lonely.

     Outside the study window through the leaves of a rhododendron I could see the long back wall of the public library across the street.  It was solid brick, and there were no windows or doors, they were all on the other side, and as I sat there, I imagined all the rows of books inside, all the stacks and shelves, and the air, quiet and dim, and the smell of books, the rich, dusky smell of books.

     And I imagined a boy, maybe, wandering the aisles, searching the shelves for the book he needs.  He is wearing jeans.  A backpack hangs from his shoulder.

     He stops and reaches up.  He is maybe fifteen.  

     One paragraph follows another, page follows page, and he sinks to the floor and begins to read.  Nothing has changed.  The words are all there.

 

 

     When Mr. Rogers walked out to accept a lifetime achievement award, at the 1997 Emmys, he wasn’t wearing a zippered sweater but a crisp, black tuxedo.  He looked very handsome.

     He graciously accepted, but then he did something remarkable.  

     He stopped.  He paused.

     So many people have helped me to come here to this night.  Some of you are here, some are far away, and some are even in heaven.  All of us have special ones who loved us into being.  Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life?  10 seconds.  I’ll watch the time. 

     And he did.  Ten seconds is a long time in the world of television.  It’s an eternity.  But Mr. Rogers kept it, and the camera panned to the famous people in the audience, the great stars, tears rolling down their cheeks.  The silence seemed to go on and on.

     1997 is a long time ago now, and Hollywood is just as glitzy and corrupt as it ever was.  But that was a moment, and it happened, and it was beautiful, and we remember it now.  Mr. Rogers is gone, but that moment remains.

     Whomever you’ve been thinking about, he said, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they have made.  

     And then, as a Christian, as in fact an ordained Presbyterian minister, Mr. Rogers blessed them:           

           May God be with you.

    What can we do?  Remember.  Bless.

 

     A second silence.

     In 2020, during the pandemic, after the German government announced that the Berlin Philharmonic would be closed indefinitely, their conductor Kirill Petrenko added one more work to their final concert, John Cage’s masterpiece 4’33”—a work comprised entirely of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, as the musicians in the orchestra sat there in their tuxedos and black gowns, as the audience sat there in the darkened hall.   Silence. 

     Petrenko stood on the podium, all in black, raised his arms, and as if there really was music playing, as if this was like any other orchestral work, began to conduct, his hands waving back and forth with the baton.  He leaned in with his body.  He looked intently at the horns, then the strings.  His muscles strained.  His tempo changed, now fast, now slow.  He was like a dancer.  And the musicians were leaning in and looking, too, just as intense, just as poised as their conductor.  Their eyes never left him, they were holding their instruments with purpose, with intention, and the silence began to rise and fall, to reach a crescendo.

     What can we say?  What can be said?  What can we do in the face of illness and dread?

     We can open our arms.  We can sit together in silence.

 

     The third silence.

     Jesus, hanging on the cross.  He speaks several times—he cries out, my God my God why have you forsaken me—but for most of those agonizing hours, he simply hangs there, in silence, arms wide.

    And God is silent, too.  He doesn’t answer the one great question—his son’s great question.  

    God is in the question.  He is the question.  

    God is in the silence.  

    He is the silence.

 

     Charles Darwin, too, loved what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “dappled things”:  

. . .  rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, 

           finches’ wings . . .

The Origin of Specifies is a marvelous book, an endless catalog of tiny details.  The sensitivities of the foot-stocks of leaves.  The mutual fertilization of three varieties of gourds.  The way certain species of beetles blow away in the wind.  Orchid petals, barnacle shells, the twists and turns of worms in the rich earth—and finch wings, too, and the beaks of finches.

     Darwin and Hopkins loved little things.  They were “beholders,” Elizabeth Johnson says, they looked patiently and hard, and from the dappled and the tiny they inferred the presence of something far greater—for Darwin the vast sweep of evolution, for Hopkins the informing presence of God in the world.   

     It’s a startling comparison.  

 

     There’s no record of them meeting, but we can imagine it, Hopkins coming to pay his respects at Darwin’s rambling house in county Kent, say in 1880, Darwin an old man, 71, tall and a little heavy, with his famous white beard, Hopkins much younger, 36, slight and mercurial.

    The distinguished scientist, the great man of his age, and the obscure Jesuit priest, the poet, unpublished and unknown.

     Darwin had the biases of his class against Catholicism, but he was a gentle and courteous man, unfailingly gracious.  Hopkins was beloved by his friends, quick to laugh.    

      They were both upper-class Victorian gentlemen–though it’s in this that their real difference lies.

 

     Darwin was liberal in his politics and revolutionary as a scientist, but he was at home in the ordered world of upper-class Victorian England, he belonged there, and I think he couldn’t help but imagine God as a king.  That’s why he rejected him.   If God is a monarch, and a monarch reigns over an ordered world, and nature is in fact random and intricately branching, God must not exist.  

     It was a principled conclusion, a matter of intellectual integrity, given the evidence and the way Darwin believed he had to interpret it, whether he wanted to or not.

 

     But Hopkins believed he had experienced God, had known him, at least for brief moments now and then, and the God he’d glimpsed wasn’t a king at all or a king in the way Darwin seems to have assumed.

    Hopkins was an educated English gentleman, a product of the same world Darwin grew up in, and when he saw a sparrowhawk hovering over a field, and was struck by its beauty and its force, it was only natural for him to describe it at first as a “dauphin” or prince, a “chevalier” or knight.  

     But in that moment of recognition and connection, in his great poem, “The Windhover,” something radically different suddenly happens.  The hawk “buckles,” it dives, straight down to earth, and as it dives in the morning light, a fire “breaks” from it, a fire “a billion times lovelier” than all our conventional images and terms.  Suddenly the hawk becomes both the figure of Christ and Christ himself, breaking into the world, shattering all our expectations.

 

     Hopkins didn’t believe in God because of his power but because of his love, what in a letter to a friend he calls “the incredible condescension of the Incarnation”:

that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion, etc, or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc, but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”

God may be omnipotent, but he has descended from that height and obliterated that distance.  He has given away his power.  

     He doesn’t dominate our life.  He dies into it.

 

    Buckle:  both to collapse, to fall, and to bring things together.  To cinch.  

 

    There is great strength here, too, of course, “brute valour” and “act.”  The hawk is diving to strike its prey.  And we are the prey.

 

     At the end of the poem Hopkins describes the way a plow smooths the plowed-up soil in the furrows and causes it to shine–or the way the “blue-beak embers” in a fire “fall, gall themselves, and gash-gold-vermillion.”  In Christ God allows himself to be plowed up, galling himself, falling, and in that galling and “gashing” a red and golden light shines through the ashes.  

       The crucifixion and the resurrection.  Death leading to new life.  The joy of things and their sorrow.  All of it.

 

    God isn’t a monarch but a mother, Hopkins says in “God’s Grandeur,” and she “broods” over the world as a mother dove broods over her chicks, “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”  

     Brood:  a family of young.  

     To brood:  to think deeply.  To worry.  To grieve.   

       This isn’t a rational deduction, the result of careful study.  Darwin worked slowly and patiently amassing evidence, and his conclusions, when they finally come, are measured. Hopkins’ faith is instantaneous and ecstatic.  He believed he had encountered the Lord, had known him and been known by him, and the only way he could express his joy and his hope is through the richness of image. 

     He couldn’t explain it, he couldn’t prove it, he wasn’t always sure of what he had experienced.  He knew great sadness and loss.  He knew the darkness.  Sometimes he describes an indifferent universe, entirely unconcerned with us, the universe Darwin left us all to face.

     But then a sparrowhawk hovers above a field, in the bright morning light.  

     And then it buckles.  It dives.

     A billion times lovelier.

 

     It’s not true that there’s nothing we can do.  There are all kinds of things we can do. The situation isn’t hopeless.  All is not lost.  

     We can change the world, we can save it, if only we do what Jesus tells us to do.  He lays it all out.  It’s all there, right in front of us.

 

If you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother or sister has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.

If you right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.

If you right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

Let your Yes mean Yes and your No mean No.

When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.  If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him you cloak as well.  Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him two miles.  Give to the one who asks of you and not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

Be not afraid.

 

     What I’m tracking here are the many commands Jesus gives us.   I mean their syntax, their structure.  

     Sentences can be declarative:  We are walking down the road.  Sentences can be interrogative:  Who is that walking down the road?  And then there are these kinds of sentences, the imperative, the direct commands.

 

Judge not.  

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray so that others may see them, but when you pray, go to your inner room.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up treasure in heaven.

Do not worry about tomorrow.  Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Look at the birds of the air.  Learn from the way the wild flowers grow.  

Sell all you have and give to the poor. 

Feed my lambs.  Tend my sheep.

 

    Jesus is radically specific and radically open-ended, both very clear and maddeningly elusive.  Sometimes he’s concrete, directing us to act in certain ways towards others, and yet most of his commands have to do with our interior states, our attitudes, our dispositions.

     In a way what’s most remarkable are the things Jesus doesn’t tell us to do.  He never tells us to look out for number one.  He never commands us to ignore the poor and exclude the stranger.  He never orders us to make a lot of money.  

     His commands are never about governments or programs.  That’s not where their faith lies.  

     In the end they all become parables:  they leave us in “sufficient doubt” about how we should apply them that they “tease us into thought.”

 

Into whatever house you enter, first say, Peace to this household.  If a peaceful person lives there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you.  

Whatever town you enter, and they welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick in it and say to them, the Kingdom of God is at hand for you.

Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words, go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto to God what is God’s.

When you hear of wars and reports of wars, do not be alarmed.

Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.

Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believe.

Take this and eat, for this is my body.

Take this and drink, for this is my blood.

Do this in memory of me.

 

     There are all kinds of people out there telling us what to do and how to do it.  They’re very specific.  They’re confident.  They have all the answers.  There are all kinds of voices in our heads telling us that we have to be anxious, we have to be afraid, we have to shout and fight.  

     But the commands of Jesus are the commands of the heart.  The commands of Jesus plunge us deeper into the ordinariness and the mystery of the way things really are.  

The commands of Jesus draw us closer and closer to him, to the mystery of the God who loves us and suffers with us and is with us always, even unto the end of time.  

    When you’re worried about what you can do, when you feel hopeless, when you’re afraid, remember what Mary says to the waiters at the Wedding in Cana:  do whatever he tells you.

 

Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money.

Take courage.  Be not afraid. 

Put out to deep water and let down your nets.

 

     Listen, there is only one thing necessary:  Love one another as I have loved you.     

     There is only one great commandment:  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.  

     He told us these things, plain as day.

 

Come, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Come, have breakfast.

Come down from that tree.

Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world.