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On the Real Presence of Christ in Our Lives video

    I’m teaching a class in the parish on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the other day a woman in the class made a really interesting comment.

     She loves the way Hopkins celebrates the presence of God in nature—in hawks and stars and ordinary things.  But growing up she was taught something different.  She was taught that we properly worship God only inside a church, when we’re down on our knees.

     That someone so literate and intelligent could say such a thing shows how deeply embedded this misconception is.  And it is a misconception.  The Church doesn’t teach that God is present only in the Church, and more importantly, Our Lord doesn’t teach that—Our Lord who roamed the hills and fields, who urges us to observe the birds of the air and the flowers of the field (Matthew 6:25-34).  This isn’t what the scriptures teach us, from Genesis to the Psalms to the prophets.  This isn’t what’s celebrated in the great creation hymn in Colossians, that in Christ “were created all things in heaven and on earth” and that in him “all things continue in being” (Colossians 1:15-21).

     The Big Bang is the first Incarnation, and all creation is incarnational from that point forward, and the work of the Incarnation is fulfilled in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  “All fullness” resides in him, Colossians proclaims.  Which is to say, if Christ came into the world and “charged it” with “his grandeur,” to paraphrase one of Hopkins’s most famous poems, how can the world be anything other than sacramental?

     Just look at the Nicene Creed itself, for that matter, this canonical summary of all that we believe, a summary that we profess together every Sunday at mass and that defines what is doctrinally valid:  that we “believe in one God, / the Father almighty, / maker of heaven and earth, / of all things visible and invisible.”  All things.  In heaven and on earth.  As Vatican II puts it, there are many “modes of presence.”    

     That’s why in the reading from Philippians at mass last Sunday, Paul can urge us to think about whatever is “honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious” (Philippians 4:6-9)—whatever, not just things in a church, not just things we think of as “holy,” but everything in our lives.    

     Which is not to say that the mass is therefore secondary or merely symbolic, that we don’t need it, because we do, because in the mass the Incarnation is fulfilled and enacted and brought into being anew.  This is what the Church teaches.  The liturgy, Vatican II tells us, is “the source and summit” of our faith, the preeminent mode of presence, and it gathers everything in the world into its creative actions, as when the deacon receives the gifts of the bread and the wine–the work of our hands, the fruit of the earth–and carries them to the altar to be transformed, and elevated, and revealed.  

     In fact, the language of the mass makes this point as clearly as possible, it denies our somehow habitual dualism with lyricism and force, as for example in the second Eucharistic prayer:  

            You are indeed Holy, O Lord,

            and all creation rightly gives you praise,

            for through your Son our Lord Jesus Christ,

            by the power and working of the Holy Spirit,

            you give life to all things and make them holy.

We don’t pay enough attention to the language of the Eucharistic Prayers, to what is actually said in the mass, and we should, because the mass is the dogma, all of it, the whole action and arc of it.  We don’t need to theologize about it.  It’s all there, and what it says is just as plain as day:  that through Christ “all things” are “made holy.”  

     The bread and wine, after all, are just ordinary bread and ordinary wine.

     Except that they’re not:  they are the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

     And we should carry this faith right into our everyday lives, to see and come to appreciate all the bread and all the wine of our experiences.   “Everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty,” Hopkins writes in a notebook entry: “to lift up our hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.”  

     And when Hopkins says this, he’s being absolutely orthodox.  He’s speaking both from his heart and from the heart of the tradition.

     In a recent poll of Catholics, not many of us say we actually believe in the “Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” and that’s a cause of great concern.  That’s why the bishops of the United States have declared a three-year period of Eucharistic renewal, to help us return to our faith in what really happens at the mass.  That’s why Pope Francis has recently issued an apostolic letter on the Eucharist, I Have Earnestly Desired.

     What I propose is that we begin to renew our sense of his presence by learning to see God in nature, too, and in everything else. 

     This is exactly the logic of the second Eucharistic Prayer—this is exactly what the priest says, right after proclaiming that all things are holy in Christ.  

            Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you,

            by the same Spirit graciously make holy

            these gifts we have brought to you for consecration

            that they become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

That therefore is incredibly important, because saves us from our either/or thinking, and the phrase by the same Spiritnecessarily follows it, because this Spirit is the same Spirit that charges our lives with grandeur.  This is the key.  It’s exactly because the Spirit is present in nature and in all things that we are inspired to go further, to ask the Spirit to transform these particular things, the bread and the wine, in this fuller, this extraordinary way.  

     And there’s even more, there’s a tremendous encouragement and challenge, because as the final prayer at last week’s mass makes clear, when we receive the sacrament, we ask to be “transformed into what we consume.”  

      How can we all be such dualists, how can dualism be our default setting, when through grace we ourselves become the Body of Christ—when at the end of each mass we are dismissed (again by the deacon!) to “go in peace” into the world, to let the Lord charge the world with his grandeur through us and our actions?

     This is what I’m trying to say, however vaguely and imprecisely.  This is the little piece of the mystery that I think I glimpse:  that we can’t understand the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist unless we first understand the Real Presence of Christ in our lives.

The boy who lived a day died years ago,

and now his mother has died.

We buried her last month.

This morning we dug a hole almost to the lid

of her coffin, then lowered the baby’s coffin in.

It was sitting in the wet morning grass,

a small white box, exhumed and flown to us.

His father is shoveling back the muddy earth.

It’s spring, quiet and green.  In the woods,

the wild iris is blooming.

And on every purple petal there is a white

feather, and on every white feather

there is a stroke of yellow, as if someone

has quickly brushed it on.

Please join me for a short course on Augustine’s Confessions.

Augustine believed that God speaks to us through certain key moments in our lives–reading him can be a way for us to reflect on those moments in our own lives.

• Five Wednesdays, beginning October 12th at 11 am
• The Upper Social Hall, St. Mary’s Parish Corvallis
• The course is free, just come
• recommended translation:  Rex Warner (Signet Classics), easily available on Amazon

I invite those of you in the area to join me in reflecting on what aging means for us as believers—how growing older can be a spiritual practice, a way of entering more deeply into the mystery of Christ.

Cost:  $290 for a single, $420 for a double.

Register at the retreat house by March 6th
by phone: 503- 845-3025 or email: retreat@mtangel.edu.

For more information, contact me at deaconcanderson@gmail.com

For a short video about the retreat click here.

Dorothy Day famously said, quoting Romano Guardini, that “the Church is the cross on which Christ is crucified.”

As if that’s a bad thing.

Which of course it is, in the sense of the terrible abuse that has gone on in the Church, and the violence done in its name, and the corruption, and the hypocrisy.

 

But I think the biggest danger for many of the good and sincere people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” is the unspoken assumption that there’s a way to be happy all the time, and avoid boredom, and never have to face the darkness inside them, and the emptiness, and the need.

In that sense the tackiness of the Church, and the tedium of the Church, and the ordinariness—the threadbare carpets, the bad singing, the bumbling liturgies—all of that is to the good.  It humbles us and it crucifies in small and necessary ways, because it’s only in the ordinary and the everyday, only there, in the moment, that Christ appears.

 

Sometimes people who think of themselves as spiritual-but-not-religious live lives of committed spiritual practice and charity towards others.

But sometimes to be spiritual-but-not-religious really means keeping everything in our heads where it doesn’t have to be acted out and so compromised.  We can avoid making fools out of ourselves and avoid making mistakes because we haven’t tried to do anything in the first place.

It’s like deciding to be a musician and never picking up the guitar.

 

I know a man who travels thousands of miles every year, and climbs mountains, and visits  monasteries, and prays and fasts, and who reads book after book about theology and world religions, and who talks about Christianity and about faith from that pristine and temporary distance, as if the life in the pews is somehow not good enough, not aesthetically and intellectually pleasing enough, when if he would stay on the mountaintop a little longer, for more than a week or so, if we would actually live in a monastery, over time, he’d get tired of the food and bored with the clouds and irritated with this monk or that, as they would get irritated with him.

Life.  Ordinary life.

 

Michael Casey says that the reason to go to a monastery is to discover that God can’t be found there.

He means:  it’s not magic.  God is everywhere, on the mountaintop and in the valley and in the drivethru at Starbucks, and especially when we’re so bored and tired and emptied out we realize that the grace when it comes, the light when it comes, isn’t our achievement but a gift given to us freely as it is given to everyone.

God is in the monastery, too, of course.  But in just this sense.

 

An ordinary daily mass.  A Wednesday morning, say.  The same scattering of people.  The same white running shoes.  The same rumpled khakis.  The old lady in her walker.  The fervent college student.

The same hurried prayers.  The same mechanical recitations.

In the corners, in the silence, all the familiar shadows.

 

Caryll Houselander once wrote:

     Every day crowds of unknown people come to him, who feel as hard, as cold, as empty as the tomb.  The come with the first light, before going to the day’s work, and with the grey mind of early morning, hardly able to concentrate at all on the mystery which they themselves are part of:  impelled only by the persistent will of love, not by any sweetness of consolation, and it seems to them as if nothing happens at all.  But Christ’s response to that dogged, devoted will of a multitude of insignificant people is his coming to life in them, his Resurrection in their souls.  In the eyes of the world they are without important, but in fact, because of them and their unemotional Communions, when the world seems to be finished, given up to hatred and pride, secretly, in unimaginable humility, Love comes to life again.

 

     Sometimes I get so impatient with people, and with myself, so tired of all of us who say the Church doesn’t speak to us, who turn up our noses at it because this or that particular doctrine doesn’t suit us, or because of some simplistic or sentimental or offensively dogmatic thing some poor priest or believer says who can’t put into better words the love or hope or despair they feel.

As we can’t either.

We judge by the way people look. We judge by what people say.  We judge.

 

I wonder how much of the resistance of many intellectuals to institutional religion doesn’t really have to do with class and race.

 

But deeper than the funny hats or the pious platitudes, underneath the skin, is a mystery we can’t fathom and are wildly arrogant to think we can.

Is Christ.

for a video of this homily, click here

 

September 19, 2021

Mark 9:  33-32

 

Because the parking was always bad, I used to park at St. Mary’s when I was teaching and walk the five or six blocks to campus.

And I saw a lot of things on those walks over the years.

One beautiful sunny morning in the fall, as I was nearing the English Department, I saw a young woman in a wheelchair who had paused on the sidewalk about a block away.  I think she had cerebral palsy.  And as she waited there, she dropped her water bottle, and it rolled off the curb into the gutter, where clearly she couldn’t reach it.  She couldn’t bend over from her wheelchair.  She could barely move.

And before I had a chance to react, a young man with a beard came riding by on his bike, in a hurry.  But as he approached the intersection, he seemed to see what had happened, and he stopped, and he got off his bike, and he bent over and picked up the water bottle and handed it to the young woman.  They exchanged a few words, and then he hopped on his bike again and shot away.

It was just a moment, on a sunny morning, in September.  But it moved me.

 

“God comes, and his ways are near to us,” St. Oscar Romero says:

Each person’s life, each one’s history, / is the meeting place God comes to. / How satisfying to know one need not go to the desert to meet him.  / God is in your own heart.

 

I don’t think a university is any better or worse than any other world, but it’s the world I happen to know, and I can tell you that the idea of the first being last and the servant of all wouldn’t really work on a tenure and promotion or a scholarship committee.  The rule in a university is competition, the rule is trying as hard as you can to be the first, not the last, and to fill up your classes, too.  Receiving just one child, as Jesus urges us to do today, wouldn’t be enough–it’s all about numbers–and taking the Letter of James as a guide for recruiting would never work.  Come to OSU and learn “wisdom?”  Come to OSU and learn to be “pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant”?  No one would sign up.  We have to promise money and status and prestige.

Becoming a deacon sidetracked me in the English Department, it took me out of the game, and I have to admit that I always struggled with that.  I wanted to surrender to God’s will, I prayed for the grace to let go, but again and again I found myself still trying to impress everyone—sometimes, in fact, by trying to show them how humble I was.  See?  Look at me not caring about what you think.  I’m way better than you.

 

And now I’m retired, and retirement is a kind of dying, too.  It never ends.  I’m so glad to be away from OSU and the pressures of it, I’m so glad to be retired, but aging is a spiritual practice, too, or can be, and what it involves is a slow stripping away of whatever authority we might have, whatever power, and everything depends on how we face that or whether we do.

 

But isn’t this what it means to be a deacon?  Isn’t this what being a deacon has always been about?

“Be humble,” Pope Francis told the deacons of Rome this June.  “Let all the good you do be a secret between you and God. And so it will bear fruit.”

Like the boy on the bike.  He didn’t know I saw him do what he did.  He couldn’t put that on his resume.  It was a secret, between him and God.

 

The boy on the bike is the figure of the deacon.  The boy on the bike shows us what we should do.

We have to stop.  We have to climb down.  We have stoop.  And in the world, on the street corners, on the curbs.

We have to help those who need us to reach what they cannot reach on their own.

 

The logic of the diaconate, Pope Francis says, is the “logic of lowering oneself,” as Jesus lowered himself, as Jesus stooped.  “If there is one great person in the Church,” Francis says, “it is the one who has made him or herself the smallest,” and it’s in this sense that the diaconate is prophetic.  “Deacons,” the Pope says, “precisely because they are dedicated to the service of the people, remember that in the ecclesial body no one can elevate himself above others.” Deacons, he says, can help overcome “the scourge of clericalism,” the idea that priests are a special “caste” of people, “above the People of God.”

This has to stop, and deacons can help stop it—but only by being deacons, by resisting our own clericalism, our own deep desire for status and prestige within this institution we so love.  We have to try to see all the embarrassments we suffer, all the ways priests and laypeople misunderstand us or dismiss us or leave us out, we have to see all these things as maybe the most important, the most central part of our ministry.

 

We have to be willing to be mistaken for the gardener, again and again.  Jesus was, in the garden of the tombs, in the garden of stone, and in this is all our freedom, all our joy.

 

“Who will put a prophet’s eloquence into my words,” St. Oscar Romero says,

to shake from their inertia / all those who kneel before the riches of the earth– / who would like gold, money, lands, power, political life to be their everlasting gods! / All that is going to end. / There will remain only the satisfaction of having been, / in regard to money or the political life, / a person faithful to God’s will. / We must learn to manage the relative and transitory things of earth according to his will, / not to make them absolutes. / There is only one absolute:  he who awaits us / in the heaven that will not pass away.

 

We are just the boy on the bike, all of us, and no one will see us, and that’s enough, that’s everything, because it’s morning, it’s a beautiful September morning, and the sun is shining, and God is here.  He is always here, on every street corner.  He is here, at every intersection, at every crossing.