deacons Archives - Deacon Chris Anderson

The Miracle of Making Us a Little Bit Better

Once a week I get up early and drive to church for an hour of Eucharistic Adoration. And promptly fall asleep. Nod off, before the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes I wake myself up with my snoring.

And what Pope Francis says in the first chapter of his most recent apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” is that I’m on the path of holiness. I don’t have to be perfect, and I can’t be. I just have to do the best I can and trust in God, 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.”

This is freeing advice, wonderfully freeing, but it’s also very challenging. For one thing, I don’t have any excuses anymore. I have to get going. And for another, to be holy doesn’t mean doing grand and noble things that will get me a lot of attention. It means slogging along in my ordinary life day to day, and not just at church but at home and in my job and in my own heart.

The Pope 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, and as deacons we all know women like this. The Church is always being attacked for its hypocrisy and rigidity, but when I think of the Church I think of all the people I know who are building wheelchair ramps, or stocking shelves at St. Vincent de Paul, or caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s or a disabled child. I think of countless, quiet acts of heroism. Of self-sacrifice.

The path is different for each of us. The Pope stresses this again and again: “each in his or own way.” I know a writer who makes the sign of cross before she opens her laptop. I know a woodworker who makes the sign of the cross as he enters his 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 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,” and this is a call that as deacons we are in special position to celebrate, as we are men who often have families and ordinary jobs and so know firsthand that prayer isn’t just kneeling in a shaft of stained-glass light, that we are always deacons, or are supposed to be, even when we’re not wearing our albs and stoles.

And so, still groggy, I stop for two Americanos with cream on the way home from Adoration, and when I walk through the door my wife is on the deck, watering the marigolds and the delphiniums. It’s a cool, summer morning, and suddenly I’m filled with joy, a quiet joy, because this is the point: that God exists, the Resurrection is real, here and now, and holiness is the stumbling, human effort simply to be aware of that, to glimpse that, if even for just a moment. Your life is a “mission,” the Pope says, the entirety of it, and “the Lord will bring it to fulfilment despite your mistakes and missteps.” We just have to try to stay awake a little bit longer each week, before the Blessed Sacrament. We just have to rejoice and be glad, for the marigolds and the delphiniums and all the things in our lives.

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.

August 10, 2018

Homily

Learning How to Lose

The Feast of St. Stephen

Acts 6:8-7:59; Matthew 10:17-22

It can be hard for us as believers at Christmas when our children come home or our friends come over and they don’t believe anymore. They don’t “rise up against us” and have us put to death but sometimes they argue or criticize, and their indifference can be hard for us, too, a kind of shadow over our holidays. There’s always some teeth-grinding when families gather, on all sides, and that’s not easy.

And arguing back doesn’t seem to do much good, no matter how eloquent we are. St. Stephen, the first deacon and the first martyr, is full of “wisdom and the spirit” in his debates, but that’s obviously not enough–or he would just be the first deacon, not a martyr at all. His stoning is only a more extreme version of our own failures as apologists.

Although unlike St. Stephen we usually don’t accept our failures. They bother us. They can undermine our faith and our confidence and our good will when really we should expect to fail, we shouldn’t be surprised, we should realize: this is it, this is the way it is. Do not depend on the hope of results, Thomas Merton writes, in “Letter to a Young (or Old) Activist”:

When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself.

This is what St. Stephen does. He doesn’t just concentrate on the truth of the work itself but he sees that truth, in the heavens, the “Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” He is focused on God, not on what the world thinks of him, and so he has the confidence to suffer not just rejection but even death.

You are probably striving to build an identity in your work [Merton continues]. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will not come from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. . . . The real hope is no in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.

So let’s not be surprised or depressed when our children don’t come to mass with us or our friends make fun of us or we can’t seem to convince the people we love of the great coherence and beauty of our faith. This is par for the course. This is the way it is and always has been and our role is to keep our eyes fixed on God, on the reality of God’s presence all around us, in the sky and on the ground and everywhere, whether or not anyone else can see this and feel this. It’s OK. It’s not up to us. It’s not about us. To be a deacon is to put ourselves second, in relation to something and someone always greater, and our challenge isn’t to convince anyone else of this but to convince ourselves, to battle our own egos and our own pride and our need to look good and be right. And since we can never win this battle on our own, since we can never on our own give up our need to succeed, to win, let us pray again and again to be filled with the Spirit, as St. Stephen is. Let us pray for grace, for ourselves and for our children and for our all our friends and families. For we are only conduits. We are only vessels. The work is not ours, it’s God’s, and He knows what he’s doing.

December 26, 2016