Prose

Jesus Must Have Been Distracted, Too

A Reflection on the Solemnity of Christ the King

for a video of this, click here

November 21, 2021

Revelation 1:5-8; John 18:33-37

Jesus was fully human and fully divine and we make a mistake when we think he was one and not the other—usually that he was just divine.

We are fully human and partly divine and we make a mistake when we think we are one and not the other—usually that we are divine.

All our problems and struggles come from the assumption of our own divinity. We think we are in charge. We think we are in control. We think we are the king.

Jesus isn’t divine in spite of his humanity. He doesn’t have to escape his humanity in order to become divine. His humanity and divinity so intersect we can’t separate one from the other.

Jesus tells Pilate in today’s gospel that his kingdom “is not of this world,” and it isn’t. And it is. He is the king of all creation, the first born of the dead. He could call down all the armies of the angels. But he doesn’t. He is the Alpha and the Omega, through him and in him all things were made, and yet there he stands, in his body, on that cold marble floor, as Pilate sentences him to death.

He is not a king in the way we understand kings. He is not divine in the way we understand divinity.

Lately in prayer I’ve really been struggling with distractions. My thoughts are all over the place, and they’re mythoughts, about my plans and my projects. It’s as if the conversation between Pilate and Jesus is going on in my head, and Pilate is winning.

I want to be the king of my own mind, I want to be my own master, and yet I can’t even manage that.

But I take solace in the thought that Jesus must have been distracted, too. When he woke up in the morning and sat down to pray, he must have found himself thinking about all kinds of things. He must have struggled as we all do to let go and be in the moment.

I don’t mean that he sinned, because he was without sin.

But being distracted isn’t sinful. It’s human. It’s the way we are.

What I imagine is that when Jesus was praying and his mind began to wander, he did what he calls us to do.

He smiled, he opened his hands, and he said, “here I am, Lord. I come to do your will.”

November 19, 2021

Prose

Saying No to God

I’m still thinking about last week’s gospel about “The greatest Commandment,” that we should love God with all our hearts and our neighbors ourselves (Mark 12:28-34). For me there’s a difficult paradox here.

One the one hand I think a lot of us have trouble loving our neighbors as ourselves because we don’t really love ourselves. And yet at the same time the reason we can’t really love God is that we’re so caught up in ourselves. We’re so self-centered.

It’s a real problem.

But the other day I was rereading a book by Anthony DeMello, Seek God Everywhere, his book on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and he says something that really consoles me and gives me hope. Sometimes, he says, God asks us to do something that we’re just not ready to do. And that’s OK. We just have to say to God:

Sorry, Lord, you want that? Increase the love in my heart so that I may give it joyfully. For the time being I am saying no. I would like to give it, but make me love you more. Increase my love. Give me your love and your grace.

I like this very much. Our spiritual lives are not about what we can achieve ourselves but about what God can do in us if we let him. DeMello doesn’t even say that we should pray to be able to accomplish something difficult, just that we should pray to want to in the first place, and this is a good prayer, I think, and a real prayer, and in a sense the only prayer we can pray, because it’s at just that moment, as we’re praying for this love, that we let go. It’s at just this moment that we open ourselves up, just a little, and then everything else comes rushing in. Grace comes rushing in.

November 5, 2021

Prose

Assurance

It’s interesting and useful for us that the scriptures come out of a desert culture and so often describe deserts and droughts and the blazing sun, and the miracle of water—God as the water, God as the spring, God as the rain. We can take heart from this, because the water is inside us, not outside; the spring is the Spirit, is Christ, welling up in us always.

Yesterday when Bumble and I walked to Cronemiller Lake, I ran into a friend. Her dog was chasing a ball, diving into the water and coming out, dripping. I started talking about the weather and the drought and the virus, and my friend said, just matter-of-factly, “God is with us. Everything is OK.”

This didn’t seem foolish to me or too easy. It seemed true. It was true.

When you went forth, O God, at the head or your people,

when you marched across the desert, the earth trembled;

the heavens melted at the presence of God,

at the presence of God, Israel’s God.

You poured down, O God, a generous rain;

when your people were starved you gave them new life.

It was there that your goodness found a home,

prepared in your goodness, O God, for the poor. Psalm 68

Deliver us, O Lord, from our bondage,

as streams in dry lands. Psalm 126

—

A beautiful poem by the Oregon Poet William Stafford

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names- and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles- you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head-
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

August 14, 2021

Prose

I Shall Not Want

I Shall Not Want

I look at the weather report and see another 100 degree day in the forecast and I feel the dread rise up in me again.

I read about the drought. I feel how tinder dry the woods are.

I read about the fires. All the fires.

I see pictures of the flames.

I read about the spread of the Delta variant and the anxiety of public health officials, and I think of all the people in the country and in the world who are not vaccinated.

And I feel the dread flow into me again, and deepen. The fear. Into my bones.

I keep thinking of the 23^rd Psalm—the Psalm for mass last week: the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

But this feels different to me. It feels bigger, much bigger. Entirely beyond my control. And structural, fundamental, in the nature of things, and in the case of the weather, not a series of single events or unusual events but omens, harbingers, the beginning of something permanent.

Inexorable.

This isn’t something we can allegorize, make into a symbol of our own inner dryness or private desolation. This is outside. It’s external. Stubbornly physical.

I just feel helpless sometimes. It just hangs over me: this sense of not being in control all, of anything. Of something terrible about to happen.

What does it mean to say that the Lord is my shepherd in the summer of the virus and the fires and the heat dome? What does it mean to say that I shall not want when the weather itself is forever changing, the clouds and the rain and the seasons?

It means just what it’s always meant.

Yes, this feels different, and it is different. But God isn’t different. God isn’t engulfed in flames, God isn’t uncaring, God isn’t parched and empty and dry. God is God, and he loves us as he has always loved us, he is real as he has always been real, and the call now is to still deeper faith, to renewed commitment, if not as a matter of feeling as matter of choice, a matter of thought and of discipline: when we feel the dread spreading through us again, we remind ourselves: yes, this is true, it’s all true, but in God we are safe, in God all is well, though the mountains may fall and the hills turn to dust.

And since we can’t do this on our own, since our faith is so weak and so small, we pray for the grace of faith. We ask for the grace to see these moments of dread as moments to recognize our weakness and recognize our dryness and to call out to God for the hope only he can give us, the confidence and the courage only possible in him and through him and with him.

And we pray, too, for the grace of perspective: that this is not the only world, that this is not the only time, that this is not the only life. We are part of vast processes, we are a speck in the universe, and there is an afterlife, too. There is eternal life. Death is not the only thing and death is not the last thing.

And we pray, too, for the grace of the present moment. We pray to be here, now. To notice. To see. The roses even in the drought. The sky. The stars.

July 28, 2021

Prose

You Reading This, Be Ready

One of the wonderful and puzzling things about the Ascension is that it’s about both heaven and earth, at the same time. Both rising up and looking down.

We don’t want to ignore the fact that Jesus rises up into heaven, that he is taken into another, higher real. We don’t want to empty that moment of its mystery or flatten it out, because heaven is our destination, too, and this moment is not the only moment and time isn’t linear anyway. This is a big deal. We should all be looking up.

And yet at the same time the angels come up to the disciples and ask them, “why are you looking up in the sky,” as in, “why do you have your head in the clouds,” why aren’t you paying attention to the here and now, because every moment is eternal, every moment is sacred, and time isn’t linear anyway? In Christ everything comes together, is fused and opened up. At the same time.

As soon as Jesus disappears from sight he fills the whole world with his presence in a profoundly new way. And he has always been filling the world, and always will be. I can’t figure that out, how the horizontal and the vertical somehow come together, the in-time and the out-of-time, except that I know they do. They form a cross.

And I know that the week after the Ascension we celebrate Pentecost. This week. Pentecost: when without question the Holy Spirit comes and charges every heart and every mind and shines through all things forevermore. (And always has: again: that mystery of time and timelessness. The linear and the nonlinear.)

All of which leads somehow to this wonderful poem by William Stafford, a poem that doesn’t use any religious language at all, doesn’t seem to be about the Ascension (though notice the idea of “lifting up” the moment) or about Pentecost (though of course the whole point is that every moment is precious, is mysterious, is beyond all value). It’s just a wonderful poem. In some way I can’t quite figure out or explain, it’s about heaven and it’s about earth. About rising and entering in. About looking up and looking around—looking in, looking deeper.

We should be genuflecting all over the place.

You Reading This, Be Ready – William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

May 17, 2021

Prose

How to be a Christian on Campus

Last month I revised and updated this website. It still has the same great design my daughter created five years ago, but it’s streamlined now to reflect the fact of my retirement and how things have shifted for me, and I’m really pleased with the results.

All I’m trying to say on my website and in my blogging and my preaching and in everything else is that God is with us.

There’s a beautiful prayer I get to say as I prepare the altar during mass that I think has meaning not just for deacons or for Catholics. I pour a little water into the pitcher of wine and I say to myself, “by the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

I’ve always thought these words were powerful, but until the other day I hadn’t thought about the meaning of the water and wine themselves, how, as Deacon James Keating says, the water so mingles with the wine that you can’t tell one from the other.

This is how it is. For all of us. Christ is everywhere in our lives.

Recently I had a conversation with a young faculty member who had asked my advice about how to be a person of faith on a university campus. It was a good conversation—I really admire this woman’s faith and commitment—but as usual I stumbled around and wasn’t clear. I said too much and not enough.

When I mentioned this conversation to a wise and experienced friend, he said the way to be a Christian on campus or anywhere else is this: spend the first five years loving everyone you meet unconditionally, as Christ did, accepting everyone without judgment. Then, when that five years is over, see what else you are called to do.

Though of course, those five years are never over, because we can never love others unconditionally, not on our own. All we can do is pray for the grace to love, pray to be open enough that now and then God’s love and God’s joy can flow through us despite all our baffles and walls.

In The Joy of the Gospel Pope Francis puts it this way, that other people should know we are Christians by our joy. It’s joy that persuades. It’s joy that converts. It should shine out of us. People should see it in us.

How to be a Christian on campus? Be joyful.

Or I think of this, of Teilhard de Chardin on the value of all our small acts—a conversation, a website, a kind word, a silent prayer.

I’ve blended this together from several passages from The Divine Milieu:

A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance, all these new beauties that appear for the first time, in me or around me, on the human face of the earth—the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it.

Our smallest tasks contribute infinitesimally, at least indirectly, to the building of something definitive.

That, ultimately, is the meaning and value of our acts.

Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things is translated into some increase

in my power to love and some progress in God’s blessed hold on the universe.

With every creative thought or action, a little more health is being spread in the human mass,

and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.

We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands.

WordPress and Facebook and Mailchimp want to track how many clicks we get. The world wants to monetize us. It wants us to be continually in the act of presenting ourselves. But this is the world of the flesh, this is the culture of death, this is the world we are called to resist: by believing in the small. By believing in the hidden. By believing in the gentle.

By believing in Christ—no, by knowing Christ.

May 5, 2021

Prose

A Quick Word for Catholics About the Vaccine

The Church has raised concerns about the morality of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, but the Vatican and the US Bishops and our own Archbishop Sample have all said very clearly that the other vaccines are fine and that even the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is permissible if there’s no other choice. The Pope has been vaccinated. Archbishop Sample has been vaccinated.

In fact, the Church has said that getting vaccinated can be understood as moral act itself. Here’s how the US Bishops put it:

While we should continue to insist that pharmaceutical companies stop using abortion-derived cell lines, given the world-wide suffering that this pandemic is causing, we affirm again that being vaccinated can be an act of charity that serves the common good.

In any event, I’m very grateful that I was able to get the vaccine, and that so many people are getting it now, and I pray that soon all of us will be able to gather together again.

April 11, 2021

Prose

For Someone Who Believes in the Mystery

For someone who believes in the mystery, I sure spend a lot of time trying to understand everything.

For someone who believes in complexity, I sure do a lot of black and white thinking.

For someone who believes in living in the moment, I sure spend a lot of time trying to determine the future.

Let’s give up all this investigating, as St. Ephrem the Deacon puts it.

He’s talking about the Eucharist:

Our Lord has become our living bread,

and we shall delight in our new cup.

Come, let us then eat it without investigation,

and without scrutiny let us drink his cup.

Who disdains blessings and fruits

and sits down to investigate their nature?

A human being needs to live.

Come, let us live and not die in

the depth of investigation.

Walking through the house I slam into a corner of the wall.

That corner was always there.

But now I know it.

The coal used to slide down a chute into a bin in the basement and now and then Dad would shovel it into the glowing furnace. When he opened the hatch we could see into the fire.

It’s like that.

March 25, 2021

Prose

Something Far More Deeply Interfused

I wanted to say that I’ll be returning to serve at Sunday masses, after a five-month absence, starting March 21^st, the Fifth Sunday of Lent.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been staying away from mass this Covid winter to minimize the risk to my new grandson and my mother and father-in-law. I know many of you have been staying away, too. But Barb and I have just gotten the second dose of the vaccine and are now waiting the two weeks for it take full effect, and then, though I’ll keep masking and social-distancing, I’ll feel safe coming back.

We were able to get the vaccine so early, in fact, because we’re taking care of our now five-month-old grandson during the week, now that our son and his wife have gone back to work.

We qualify as childcare providers!

I urge all of you to get vaccinated as soon as you’re eligible, for your own sake and the sake of others. My experience getting it was really quite good. It was an experience of democracy, of all these people coming together, and of the skill and generosity of doctors and nurses, and of organization and good planning and efficiency. I’m very grateful for it, and I pray that soon everyone will get vaccinated and we can all turn the corner on the pandemic.

I also wanted to share something else.

In these several months away from mass, a phrase has been coming into my head, again and again, a phrase from one of my favorite poems, Wordsworth’s great Tintern Abbey. It just keeps occurring to me:

and I have felt a presence . . . a sense sublime

of something far more deeply interfused,

whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

and the round ocean, and the living air,

and the blue sky, and the mind of man,

a motion and a spirit that . . .

rolls through all things.

Something far more deeply interfused.

My sense of this has been much quieter than Wordsworth’s, and only off and on. It’s like a warmth sometimes. A glow. But it’s there, and it’s real, and as a Christian I believe it’s a sign not of something but of someone, a sign of the presence of Christ himself, in whom “we live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul says in Acts—in whom “everything continues in being,” as Colossians puts it, in that great hymn:

All were created through him;

all were created for him.

He is before all that is.

In him everything continues in being.

This has been the gift of these last several months for me, this sense of Christ present in all things, in every moment, this sense of a love that binds all things together, rocks and birds and trees, and you and me and my new grandson, and all who have died and all who are living.

This is what the Eucharist celebrates and this is what happens through the Eucharist and what spreads out from the Eucharist, this creativity and this power and this love, and this is why we all long to return to mass, why we all long to join in the liturgy again, where we can enter into the very heart of this.

In the words of the preface to the second Eucharistic Prayer, “it is truly right and just . . . always and everywhere to give you thanks, Father most holy, through your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, your Word through whom you created all things.”

And then the Sanctus follows, right after this: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory!”

We all proclaim this, the sacramentary says, “with one voice.”

March 25, 2021

Prose

In God There is No Shame

A friend of mine told me that he’s been thinking a lot about his past lately and what he feels more than anything else is shame. Not guilt. Shame.

I’ve fallen in love with the psalms again this winter, and I’ve been noticing how the word “shame” often appears and how it’s never seen as coming from God—how God is always taking our shame away:

O my God, in you I trust; / do not let me put to shame. 25:3

In your O Lord, I seek refuge, / do not let me ever be put to shame; / in your righteousness deliver me. 31:1

Look to him and be radiant, / so your faces will never be ashamed. 34:5

(these are all from the New Revised Standard Version)

Somewhere I read that guilt is when we’re sorry for what we’ve done but shame is when we’re sorry for who we are, and shame in that sense is never right, is blasphemy, for we are made in the image and likeness of God and God loves us, with all tenderness and joy. When in the psalms the speaker confesses his sins, admits his guilt, God doesn’t say, “you’re a terrible person, you’re awful, go away.” God always welcomes us. God always frees us:

I said, ‘I confess my faults to the Lord,’ / and you took away the guilt of my sin. /

Be glad in the Lord and rejoice! 32:11

We are glad in the Lord, we rejoice in the Lord, because we know that he really knows us, the true us, the true self.

Shame is never the voice of God. Never. We can take that as a rule for the spiritual life. Whenever we become aware that shame has been working in us again, we should name it and then reject it. We need to notice it, we need to acknowledge it, but we should try never to give in to it.

“Be strong,” Psalm 31 concludes, and “let your heart take courage.”

This is when we know that we are being led by the Spirit. When we take heart. When we feel our strength. Our joy.

Sin is not the deepest layer in us, however deep it is.

Beneath it there is a mystery far greater still.

There is beauty, there is freedom, there is love.

There is Christ.

March 25, 2021

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