Uncategorized

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 12^th 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 3^rd 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 3^rd, 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.

 

Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Psalm 65; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

 

The other day someone posted this on Facebook: “I’m just wondering why none of these televangelists have been showing up at hospitals and performing miracles on all these Coronavirus patients.”

It really struck me, and I want to think aloud about it for a while, because I think it both raises a really important theological question and at the same reduces that question to something magical and absurd.

There’s a much more profound way of thinking about this: that even quarks have free will.

I first came across this different way of thinking in the work of the great contemporary Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson, who summarizes the thinking of what she calls the new “ecological theologians”:

     They shun an explicitly interventionist model of divine activity.  They seek to make intelligible the idea that the Creator Spirit, as ground, sustaining power, and goal of the evolving world, acts by empowering the process from within.  They see divine creativity active in, with, and under cosmic processes.  God makes the world, in other words, by empowering the world to make itself. 

(All these quotes are from Quest for the Living God.)

It’s not magic, it’s love.  God isn’t some wish-granter and favor-giver, Johnson is saying, but a loving creator who so loves his creation he dies into it and rises with it, every second.

 

Another quote:

     Ecological theology proposes that as boundless love at work in the ongoing evolution of the universe, divine creativity is the source not just of cosmic order but also of the chance that allows novelty to appear. . . Unpredictable upheavals might be destructive, but they have the potential to lead to richer forms of order. 

I find this really exciting.  It’s not that God is a clockmaker God who winds things up and just walks away.  He’s present in every moment and in every thing, but with tremendous tact.  He allows things to happen, to take their own way, and doesn’t intervene to change them—though he certainly could—he is omnipotent—but he stays out of it, he restricts his own power, and he does this out of a desire to share in the day-to-day vulnerabilities of the creatures he’s created, right down to rocks and birds and trees.

*

     This really isn’t a new idea.  It’s classic Thomism, which teaches that there are primary causes and secondary causes.  God is the primary cause.  He makes everything happen.  But he also allows all kinds of secondary causes to cause all kinds of things:  wind, rain, the shifting of tectonic plates–whatever we choose to do any given morning:  to do this or to do that.

It’s in this sense that the new ecological theologians suggest that even subatomic particles have a kind of free will, at least infinitesimally, that even quarks have a kind of subatomic choice.  It’s as if God’s relationship to the whole of creation, to all matter and energy and living things, is exactly like his relationship with human beings.  God gives we human beings free will so that we can choose to freely love him.  In the same way

     the ever-faithful God is graciously courteous toward the freedom of the natural order.  Rather than intervening from the outside, the Creator Spirit enables ongoing creation from within by endowing the universe with the capacity to transcend itself toward ever greater forms.

With nature, with forces, with particles, this power of “choice” is really more a matter of randomness or chance.  A particle could have moved there, or there, or somewhere else.  It could have moved anywhere.  But it didn’t.  It moved here.

 

And here’s the really exciting thing to me, the thing that makes me trust this and think of it as fundamentally Christian:  all of this flows from and is the inevitable consequence of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.  As with human beings, God gives himself away.  He is the all-powerful God who chooses, out of love, an infinite and purely gratuitous love, to give that power up:

     Rather than acting like Caesar writ large, Jesus did not cling to godly dignity but “emptied himself out,” foolishly, thereby opening up new life for others (Phil 2:5-11).  This enacts a kenotic form of divine power. . . .  [“Kenosis”:  self-emptying]

     [In other words] As on the cross, so too in the universe:  ecological theology proposes that divine kenosis did not happen only once at Jesus’ death but instead is typical of God’s gracious action in the world from the beginning.  Allowing the Christic pattern of self-giving to interpret the Spirit’s creative action within the evolving universe means that divine agency does not have the character of determining, even dictating, all occurrences.  Rather, divine kenosis opens up space for the genuine integrity of finite systems, allowing chance its truly random appearance. 

 I’m not sure I understand all of this—how, for example, we can account for miracles in this framework, for the specific interventions of God into our lives; or how, in the same way, we can account for the validity of personal prayer, for the clear invitation in scripture to pray for what we need.  But intuitively at least, I find this really exciting and freeing.

It exactly solves the problem that the Facebook post both raises and reduces, which is the central problem in all of religious thought:  if there is a God, why does he allow suffering and death?

*

     If you’ve stayed with me this far, let me make the final connection I have to make, because all of this—the Facebook post, Elizabeth Johnson, the new ecological theology—all of this flashed through my mind as I was reading Paul’s letter to the Romans last Sunday.  I thought:  Paul is talking about exactly the same thing the ecological theologians are talking about, but in his own, first-century terms.  He’s intuited exactly this insight.

Paul says that “the sufferings of this present time are nothing compared with the glory to be revealed to us”—that there is some larger purpose to what we’re experiencing now, that our suffering and dying and even our experience of Covid-19 are part of some larger evolution towards Christ.

And, Paul says, this isn’t just a question for us as human beings but even for nature, for the created world: “for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.”  This a puzzling, knotty, difficult sentence, but I think the Christian ecologists may give us a way to understand it.

Isn’t Paul saying, when he says that creation was “made subject to futility,” that God in his love lets all things live and die without interfering in that process but at the same time participating in it, being present to it, from within?  That he lets “corruption” happen, for some larger purpose, so that we can “share in the glorious freedom of the children of God”?  And note especially the word “freedom” here:  that it seems to apply to creation itself, not just to us as human beings.

Stars live and die so that other stars may live and die.  Flowers live and die so that other flowers may live.  Labradoodles.  Whales.

Why does God allow the virus?  Because he loves us.

*

     I know this a long and abstract post, but maybe that’s another way of saying that Christian faith is much more interesting and complex than a bumpersticker or a meme.

Although in another sense it’s really very simple, and foolish, and wonderful.  It’s what Psalm 65 proclaimed last Sunday: “rejoicing clothes the hills.”  The fields and the valleys “shout and sing for joy.”  They really do.

Or it’s what the gospel for last Sunday implies, this wonderful gospel from Matthew, the Parable of the Sower.  The sower goes out and broadcasts the seeds, wildly, indiscriminately—it’s a terrible agricultural practice—and the seeds fall wherever they will, on all kinds of different rocks and soil.  Some are choked and some thrive, and the sower doesn’t intervene.  He could.  He could plant in straight rows.   He could tend the seeds every hour.  But he doesn’t.  In his great graciousness and courtesy and goodwill he gives even the seeds the dignity of growing as they will or dying as they will, and all for a greater, glorious end—for, in the end, some of that seed falls on rich soil, and produces fruit, “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

All praise to you, Lord, Psalm 65 sings, for “you have crowned the year with your bounty.”

 

 

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Luke 10:38-42

 

Lord, don’t you care that I have to prepare for my class tomorrow?

Don’t you care that I have to reorganize my PowerPoints?

 

Lord, don’t you care that our stove stopped working and we have to get a new one?

Don’t you care that I’m covered with poison oak and itch all over?

Don’t you care that I have to drive up to Portland on Thursday and I don’t want to go?

 

Don’t you care that my father-in-law is on Hospice and that we’re so worried about him dying peacefully and without pain?

Don’t you care that my best friend died a few months ago?  How much I miss him?

 

Don’t you care that I’ve gained a couple of pounds?

Don’t you care that there are squirrels in the attic and they scratch and scratch at night and we can’t seem to get rid of them?

 

Don’t you care, don’t you care, don’t you care?

 

Chris, Chris!  You are worried about many things.  Too many things.

    Of course I care about the squirrels, of course I care about the stove, of course I care about your father-in-law dying peacefully and without pain.  I care about every part of your life.  Every hair on your head.

     But there is only thing to be anxious about, only one thing really to worry about, and that’s God, that’s the presence of the Father, in every moment.  That’s me, here and now.  Slow down.  Listen.  Be.  All those other things will take care of themselves, and they’re far less important than you think they are anyway.

     Breathe.  I am here.  I am here.  That’s all that really matters.  That’s all that counts.  That’s all.

     Let go.  Trust in me. 

 

JDecember 30, 2018–The Holy Family

Luke 2:41-52

    My kids used to go into the living room and move things around a little.  They’d move a vase an inch to the left.  A photograph an inch to the right.  Then they’d wait for me to come into the room and put everything back.  I’d move the vase back to where it belonged.  The photo back to where it belonged.  I didn’t even know I was doing this.  It was unconscious.  I didn’t know the kids were tricking me—they just told me recently. 

     They laughed and laughed.

     Just an inch.

     I’m a little OCD, a bit of a perfectionist, as a lot of us are, I think.

     It’s interesting to track that word—perfection or imperfection, perfect or imperfect—in the writing of Pope Francis.  It’s really his central theme, that we have to accept the fact that we’re imperfect and forgive others for their imperfections–especially, he says in The Joy of Love, in our families.  “At times,” he says, “we have proposed a far too abstract and almost artificial theological ideal of marriage, far removed from the concrete situations and practical possibilities of real families.” “Our excessive idealization,” Francis says, “especially when we have failed to inspire trust in God’s grace, has not helped to make marriage more desirable and attractive but quite the opposite.”

     The Pope isn’t on the side of perfection, he’s on the side of imperfection, and in a way this is the teaching of the gospel today, on the Feast of the Holy Family. Mary was made immaculate from birth, not from anything she achieved herself.  Her achievement was to be true to this gift, radically open.  Joseph was given the gift of a dream, and he honored it. He answered it.  In this sense both Mary and Joseph are exactly like us, completely dependent on grace, completely in need of Christ—they are saved by their son even before he came into the world–and their family life day-to-day was just as full of “anxiety” as ours is, just as full of struggle and stress, as Luke makes clear in this story of the Finding in the Temple.  Even Jesus had to slog through the days.  He was fully human, too, not just fully divine, and so he, too, must have been anxious sometimes, and distracted, and disappointed. 

     The point of taking the Holy Family as our model isn’t to make us rigid and self-righteous but to teach us humility and teach us compassion and most of all to teach us patience, the capacity to live with people the way they really are.

     I’ve just finally read Father Gregory Boyle’s, Tattoos on the Heart, the famous story of his work with gangs in Los Angeles, and what’s most remarkable about this work isn’t his success but his repeated, constant failure.  Father Boyle started Homeboy Industries, and he’s made a big difference in the lives of many people, but he doesn’t like to talk about success and he resists measuring success, because to talk about success is to obscure the fact that this is all up to God, who loves us first, tattoos and all, addictions and all.   Boyle’s theme is the “no-matter-whatness” of God.  His motto, he says, should be “You Can Never Disappoint Us Enough,” because people do, again and again.  He keeps saying mass in prison because his gang members keep going to prison, and going back to prison, making the same mistakes over and over.  He’s buried hundreds of people, teenagers, most of them, victims of shootings or overdoses.  But he never stops loving them, or trying to.

     At the funeral of a gang member named Jason, Boyle preaches this:

Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” He doesn’t say, “One day, if you are more perfect and try really hard, you’ll be light.”  He doesn’t say “If you play by the rules, cross your T’s and dot your I’s, then maybe you’ll become light.” No.  He says, straight out, “You are light.”  It is the truth of who you are, waiting only for you to discover it. So, for God’s sake, don’t move. No need to contort yourself to be anything other than who you are.  Jason was who he was.  He made a lot of mistakes, he was not perfect.  And he was the light of the world.

God’s love is first, and it’s endless.  This is what Boyle tries to get the gang members to understand, their own goodness, and this is what they just can’t believe, they’ve been so abused and tortured and neglected by their addicted parents.   

     And abuse like this is different from imperfection—let me be clear about this.  It’s sin, deep sin, it has to change, and it’s not something limited to the ganglands of LA.  It’s right here, in Corvallis, behind the closed doors of our nice, middle-class houses.  You have no idea, the spousal abuse and the elder abuse and the child abuse, and for this there can be no tolerance.  Forgiveness, but no tolerance.  This is not the Gospel.  This is fundamentally wrong.

     But for everything else:  patience. Compassion.

     As parents so many of us are saddened that our kids don’t go to mass—I am—I feel it very deeply—but I take heart from Boyle.  If he can keep loving those gang members, not lecturing, not preaching, just being with them, we can love our kids anyway and believe in them and in the infinite love of God.  “We encounter problems,” Pope Francis says inThe Joy of the Family, “whenever we think that relationships or people ought to be perfect . . . . Other people also have a right to live in this world, just as they are.”  

     All we can do is pray, and not just for the conversion of our children or even mostly for that but for our own conversion.  We have to be selfish in a way.  Nothing is as persuasive as joy, and we can’t have joy unless we pray, unless we put ourselves in contact with God, and when we are, when we are in relationship with Jesus, our kids will feel it, they will know it, whatever we say.  We keep inviting them to Church, gently, and then we let it go.  If we have to suffer in the meantime, in a smaller church, a misunderstood church, that’s a small price to pay, and it shouldn’t bother us anyway.  The Lord is here, among us, and he’ll take care of the rest.  Let us do him the courtesy of actually believing in him.

     We wait.  We trust.  And we do the best we can.  

     The biggest problem with trying to be perfect is that we can’t be.  So we give up.  We don’t do anything.  But that’s arrogant on the one hand and lazy on the other.  It lets us off the hook when the challenge, and the achievable challenge, it to respond to what comes to us each day.  We have to strive to be saints and we have to strive to be heroes and we can do that right now.  By holding our temper.  By saying, “I love you.”  By laughing.   By trying to be a little less focused on whatever we’re too focused on.

     It’s what Pope Francis calls “the miracle of being a little bit better.”  

     We don’t have to move very far, and we can’t.  We just have to move an inch.  

     Just an inch.