I was walking down a flight of stairs,
and an old woman was walking
below me, carefully, one-step-at-a-time,
arm-in-arm with a younger woman,
dark-haired and slim.
They were talking in low voices,
and I only saw them from behind.
I assumed the girl was leading,
helping the old woman down.
But when they reached the landing
and turned to leave, I saw
that I was wrong, as I often am.
The slim young woman was blind.
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.
for a video commentary and reading click here
Maybe I don’t have to be
roasted on a spit.
Maybe I don’t have to kneel all day
in a shaft of light.
I am walking down a gravel road.
I glimpse the mountains in the distance.
A woodpecker drums
in the top of a tree.
I have surrendered myself to you, Lord.
You have given me your grace
and your love.
You have given me this day.
You have given me my life.
I ask for nothing more.
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.
A few weeks ago I was asked to do a graveside south of Monroe. It was a beautiful drive on a beautiful day, through the trees and fields, and when I got to the cemetery the people were driving up and gathering around the grave, old farmers in their Sunday best and their children and their grandchildren. The man we were burying had died at 90 after a life of farming beans and corn and table beets. He was born on the farm he worked, and he worked it until he was in his eighties, when he could no longer walk through the fields, and as we waited everyone talked of his kindness and his gentleness. He worked hard, he was always working, but he was never too busy to stop and help someone else. Several people said this to me.
“Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies,” I read from the Gospel of John, “it remains just a seed, but if it dies it produces much fruit,” and this kind and hardworking man was the seed, and now he had gone into the earth, and now he was rising again into Christ, forever.
And the sun was shining, and the old people were gathered with their frank and weathered faces, and the young people, and the babies, and nothing else mattered, everything else fell away, and we were all together, and we were all rising, and we were all for moment really there, in that place, in that air, which is where Christ always is, where his endless grace is always pouring down on us, always pouring down.
If we listen to the Spirit, we will be 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.
Let us live in the present!
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. The Spirit reminds us of the grace of the present moment. There is no better time for us: now, here and now, is the one and only time to do good, to make our life a gift.
Pope Francis, Pentecost, 5/16/2021
A Clean, Gray Light
Last week I had the honor of saying the Prayers for the Commendation of the Dying over the body of a good friend. His wife had arranged for a hospital bed to be set up in the pleasant living room of their house and a clean, gray light shone through their picture window.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
Everything depends on whether we believe in the reality of that light, as Pope Francis says in Fratelli Tutti, and whether we believe that that light is eternal. Everything depends on whether we believe a body is just a body, death just death.
If we believe in nothing but matter, all we can do is consume. If we believe in nothing but the body, the body becomes disposable. If we believe in nothing but profit and gain, the person is no longer a person but a commodity:
A kind of ‘deconstructionism,’ [the pope says] whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero, is making headway in today’s culture. The one thing it leaves in its wake is the drive to limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism.
According to this logic, my friend was only important when he was important, when he was a distinguished scientist and academic, doing research and bringing in money and publishing papers in prestigious journals. He was nothing at all as he slowly lost his mind and then faded away. He was just a burden—as an unborn child is a burden, as the poor are a burden, as the foreign are a burden:
Some parts of our human family, it appears, can be readily sacrificed for the sake of others considered worthy of a carefree existence. Ultimately, persons are no longer seen as a paramount value to be cared for and respected, especially when they are poor and disabled, not yet useful—like the unborn—or no longer needed—like the elderly.
Our many political and social and economic problems require political and social and economic solutions, but if we see them as just political, just economic, even the best intended approaches lead to reductionism and despair. Even the problem of racism can’t be solved if we think that race is the central thing and the most important thing rather than a symptom of something far deeper.
As Christians we make a radically different assumption. We believe in the light. We believe in the fundamental dignity of the human person as created in the image of likeness of God, of all people and ultimately of all things, rocks and trees and birds and all the animals, because all the created world is created, is made, out of a wasteful and profligate love, out of tenderness and play, out of a hugely creative impulse, the creative impulse of God, his whim, his joy, and this impulse is eternal. It never ends. It’s the living water. It’s eternal life—and not just later, in heaven, but here and now.
The spiritual stature of a person’s life is measured by love, the pope says, which in the end remains the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life’s worth or lack thereof. This is the simple and radical logic of Christian faith. Everything flows from it. Social friendship and universal fraternity necessarily call for an acknowledgment of the worth of every human person, always and everywhere:
If each individual is of such great worth, it must be stated clearly and firmly that the mere fact that people are born in places with fewer resources or less development does not justify the fact that they are living with less dignity.
I would put the stress on the word “necessarily” and the “if/then” structure of these sentences. If we call ourselves Christians, and we demonize migrants or the homeless or Muslims or Democrats or Republicans, then we are simply being inconsistent. We are simply not being Christians. To be a Christian, we must, necessarily, begin with the assumption of dignity. The assumption of worth. The assumption of value. Then love follows, logically, inexorably, however hard that love is to carry out—love not as a feeling but as an action.
But not just a logic. Not just an action.
Because there is feeling, too, now and then, there is experience, there is this light we know and feel in this life, too, the clean, gray light coming the window of that pleasant living room where my friend’s body lay, quiet, at peace.
And from where his soul had risen, from where his spirit had been raised up and is now forever bathed in that light and that goodness and that love, the light that shines in all of us, all of us, however darkened or obscured. All of us.
Being Dogmatic
In the 12th century, in the time of the Crusades, St. Francis went to Egypt to visit the Sultan Malik-el-Kamil. It was a hard and dangerous journey, but St. Francis undertook it anyway, for the sake of love. He told his disciples:
if they found themselves “among the Saracens and other nonbelievers,” without renouncing their own identity they were not to “engage in arguments or disputes, but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake.” In the context of the times, this was an extraordinary recommendation.
I’m quoting here from the latest encyclical by Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship. He’s quoting from from St. Francis. It’s a remarkable, a wonderful document, issued in Assisi on October 3rd of this year, on the Vigil of the Feast of St. Francis, and though it’s been lost sight of in all the feeling and stress of our election, it has everything to say about the election. It’s a guide to our response to it as Christians.
“We are impressed,” the pope says, “that some eight hundred years ago Saint Francis urged that all forms of hostility or conflict be avoided and that a humble and fraternal ‘subjection’ be shown to those who did not share his faith.”
This is the call: to humility.
In fact, the pope tells us that he was particularly encouraged in his thinking for the encyclical by the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, whom he met in Abu Dhabi, where together they declared that “God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters.”
This is the call: to live together.
Even with the 73 million people who voted for President Trump.
Even with the 79 million people who voted for Joe Biden.
The other day I was Zooming with a friend, a good and faithful man, and he was saying that the consolation he’s been feeling in prayer lately starts to dissolve whenever he thinks about all the many people in the country who voted for candidate he believes was the wrong one. He’s just really disturbed—as I know many of us are, as I am—by the idea that so many people could make the wrong choice. He just doesn’t understand it.
But first, I think it’s always dangerous in our prayer life to move too quickly from the concrete to the abstract, from the personal to the political or the intellectual—and then to assume as we always do that the concrete and the personal are less important, that the moment is less real than the grand forces that move us, too. No. Stay in the moment. Trust the moment. Don’t believe that the outer life is more important than the inner life—watch for that slide, that shift, in your thinking, and pull back from it in prayer.
We still need to think, of course, and reason, and abstract, but that’s for later, and it’s important always to see it as secondary, as in support of the moment, not an exceeding of it. We reason so that we can return to Joy.
What the angels announced above the stable in Bethlehem, as George Dennis O’Brien puts it, was not a “topic for conversation”—and in fact this is what doctrine and dogma really are—a proclaiming of something beyond them, a singing with the angels above that miraculous stable.
“Dogma” has come to stand for all inflexible thinking, for all black and white thinking, for all judgmentalism, but really, it means exactly the opposite.
“Dogma is a gateway to mystery,” Flannery O’Connor says.
So how should we respond to the people we don’t agree with? Dogmatically, which is to say, as Christians, which is to say as followers of Christ, which is to say in the way of St. Francis on his journey to the Sultan, which is to say in the way of Pope Francis as he kneeled in the chapel of the Tomb of St. Francis at the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi on October 3rd, 2020, in the midst of all the vitriol, in the midst of all the violence and injustice, in the midst of the pandemic.
The mystery is within us, too, within all of us. We don’t know what was in the hears of people when they voted. To be a Christian is to be nuanced. To be a Christian is to embrace reality, the bad with the good but also the good with the bad. To be a Christian is to leave the judgments to God anyway. To be a Christian is to assume that the moments we feel in prayer are the moments others feel, too, even Republicans. Even Democrats. To be a Christian is to always keep in mind that we are not the only people loved by God.
“Francis did not wage a war of words aimed at impossible doctrines,” Pope Francis says; “he simply spread the love of God.”
He understood that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God” (1 John 4:16).
This isn’t soft. This isn’t fuzzy. It’s a discipline, and it’s ours.
Our dogma is love.
