Tag

the examen

Daffodils: A Homily

March 26, 2017

Fourth Sunday of Lent

1 Samuel 16:1-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

Last week I was driving past the house of a man in the parish whose wife just died of ALS. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It’s a very hard way to die. In the end you can’t move. You can’t breathe. The last time I gave her the Body of Christ her gnarled hand was bent almost perpendicular to her wrist.

But in the house next door the daffodils were blooming, brilliant yellow, a whole row of them, right on the edge of the parishioner’s yard, and seeing them gave me a little feeling of lift, of joy, of light as I drove away.

Seeing them, I felt the presence of God.

And this was the most important thing that happened to me that day, that one brief moment, even though I feel a little silly talking about it. Daffodils? Along a yard? But yes, not the meetings and the classes and all the kinds of things we usually talk about, but this, this deeper story. “Because,” as the first book of Samuel tells us, “man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart,” and at the heart of those bright yellow flowers was spring, was hope, was the Lord himself.

You might say, wait a minute. Aren’t you being a little soft? Isn’t this just a subjective thing? Yes. It is. I don’t know what it means for sure.

“All I know is that once I was blind and now I see,” at least for a moment.

This is the idea of the examen of conscience, the prayer technique of St. Ignatius Loyola, that Jesus is the “light of the world” and that this light is always shining in our lives, though it’s often blocked or we don’t see it, so the way to pray is to pray our lives, to think back on the moments of light and to give thanks, and to think back on the moments of darkness and to face them, and then to give it all to God, surrender it all to Him to make sense of and hold together.

Most of us don’t see Jesus directly. An angel doesn’t land on our doorstep, complete with wings. But that’s OK. We can detect the presence of the Lord in other ways, in everything that happens, because the “light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth,” as Paul says, everything that is good in our lives comes from him, and so we just reason backwards. Whenever we feel goodness, whenever our hearts lift up, we think: God is behind that.

“Do you believe in the Son of Man,” Jesus asks the man he healed, and the man says, “Who is he sir, that I may believe in him?” All the blind man knows is what has happened to him, all he knows are the daffodils, and it’s only now, after the fact, that Jesus tells him how to interpret this. The daffodils: that’s me.

And of course this interpretation, this faith, will be resisted. All of the Pharisees outside us and inside us will come crowding in, ready to challenge the moments and demean the moments and finally throw them out. We want permanent, but the moments are fleeting; we want what we can measure, but the moments can’t be measured; we want obvious, but the moments are subtle, and easy to miss, and easy to talk ourselves out of. We do it every day.

We think it’s God who doesn’t exist but really it’s we who don’t.

In a way the very fact that we can’t prove the meaning of the moments is a proof. If we could manufacture grace we’d be doing it all the time.

But God is always a “surprise,” as Pope Francis puts it. “We don’t set the time and place of the encounter.”

And later Pope Francis says this. It’s a really striking passage:

In this quest to find God in all things, there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by some margin of uncertainty—that is proof that God is not with him. You must leave room for the Lord, not for certainties. Uncertainty is in every true discernment.

Darkness exists. It’s all around us. There’s not just the brightness of the daffodils but the grief of the man next door.

1000 children in the world died of malaria yesterday. 149 people died of starvation in South Sudan. Yesterday. And in a very important way that’s our fault, that’s the result of our own sinful selfishness and inaction, but in another way it’s part of the suffering of the world and the suffering that will always be there, and it leads to the biggest question of all: if there is a God, how can He let this happen?

Doesn’t the death of the woman cancel out the beauty of the flowers?

And there’s our own darkness, too, within, our own desolation often in prayer, the dryness day after day when nothing seems to be happening anymore, after all those days, maybe, of sweetness and conviction. Maybe we were deceived before, when we felt the first rush of joy.

That’s how the world sees it: that joy is naïve, faith always a delusion.

But here’s what I think Pope Francis is saying and what the readings are saying today, that we have to face the darkness and acknowledge it, we have to “expose” it, as Paul says, not pretend it isn’t there–we have to accept it, accept it all, honestly, with humility—but without rejecting the joy, too, without throwing out the hope, because hope, too, is real, it’s all real, and our call is to live with the contradictions, not to try to reconcile them, not to try to make sense of them. That’s beyond us. It’s arrogant, finally, to think that God has to obey our own rules for coherence. Our call is to do what Our Lady does in the stories in the first part of Luke and “hold these things in our hearts,” “treasure these things,” and as Luke says, “all these things.” Accept them. Take them in.

And trust in God.

And then a great freedom comes. The moments happen. The daffodils rise up, and they are beautiful and they are true, and spring is coming, too. Spring is here. There is crucifixion and there is resurrection, never one without the other, and in some paradoxical way we can never understand and don’t have to, the one who is God and man, both, not one or the other, the one who reconciles all things in himself, is reconciling all of us, too, all of the things in our lives, the children who die and the woman who dies and all of us who live, in every moment.

Every given, sacred moment.

March 23, 2017

Prose

Practicing Joy (from the Preface, LIGHT WHEN IT COMES)

Maybe whatever seems

to be so, we should speak so from our souls,

never afraid, “Light” when it comes,

“Dark” when it goes away.

–William Stafford

The shock of stars at five a.m. The bright belt of Orion and the arc and sweep of those other brilliant, nameless lights and even the blackness glittering.

The smell of wood smoke and fir. The cold, damp air.

I hear the voice of my wife calling from another room: “Do you know where I put my book?”

Standing at the sink rinsing out a bowl, I look up and see a strand of a spider web rising and falling, made visible by the wind. Then another and another, looping from the willow to the roof. Glinting on and off. As if all the shingles and boards of the house are secretly bound with thread.

We all have moments like this, moments that move us somehow, that seem to mean something we can’t quite put into words, but we are embarrassed by them or we doubt them or in the rush of things that happen to us each day we forget about them. For a moment we believed—in something—a presence, a beauty. But we let the moment pass.

“The believer,” Pope Francis says in The Joy of the Gospel, ‘is essentially one who remembers.”

My purpose in this book is to help you remember the moments, and to trust in those moments, to believe in them, by sharing moments from my own life, as a husband and father and grandfather, a teacher of English and a Catholic deacon. “I have said these things to you,” as Jesus tells his disciples, “so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” However small they are, however fleeting, moments like this can lead us to God.

And not just the moments of joy but the moments of loneliness and struggle and fear. Darkness is important, too, and in a way more important, because it’s darkness that teaches us the nature of light. In darkness, too, God is calling us.

This is the idea of the examen of conscience, the much-loved prayer of St. Ignatius, that God is always calling us, the Spirit is always moving in our lives. The examen is a simple but powerful way of remembering, and I mean the scenes and stories that follow to be examples of how it works, how it keeps deepening and opening up.

At the end of each day:

we remember the light and give thanks for the light;
we remember the darkness and ask for forgiveness, and refuge, and strength;
and we let it all go–we ask for the grace to follow the light, to know what we should do—but then we leave it all to God, trusting in his kindness.

The light of grace is always shining, it’s always pouring down, though it’s refracted and scattered and easy to miss, and so one way to pray is to look back on the moments of our day and recall when we saw the light breaking through, and when we didn’t, when we felt it being blocked or opposed.

This is the practice of joy: remembering.

And then releasing–waiting, too, for an idea to form or an intuition to emerge about what God is calling us to do—but waiting with the knowledge that these things are mysteries, beyond understanding, and trying to give up our need for control.

The moments are poetry, not prose. We are rarely given a single, clear message, an unmistakable sign, or at least a message or a sign we can explain in the abstract. The practice of joy is the practice of scene and the practice of story because joy is an experience, not an idea. The best we can do is describe what happened.

The moments are parables. The details are simple and yet there’s something “arresting” about them, as C.H. Dodd says of the details in a parable. We glimpse something, we encounter something, and yet we are left in “sufficient doubt” about what the image means or the details point to that we are “teased into thought,” just as we are by the stories Jesus tells.

The root of the word “parable” in Greek is paraballo, to place one thing beside another, to juxtapose, and this is what Jesus does. He puts images side-by-side. He leaps from one idea to the next. He brings things together and asks us to bring things, too, connecting what we can and accepting what we can’t—accepting everything.

Be not afraid, Jesus says. The light comes and the light goes and all we have to do is see that and name it.

We don’t have to resolve the tensions, and we don’t have to reconcile the opposites, and we can’t. All we can do is live with things the way they are, trusting the days to God–remembering the darkness and remembering the light, and holding them both in our hearts, together, side-by-side. Our only obligation is to speak what is so. Our longing. Our grief.

The stars and the web.

The voice of the one we love, calling from another room.

from my LIGHT WHEN IT COMES: TRUSTING JOY, FACING DARKNESS, AND SEEING GOD IN EVERYTHING (Eerdmans, 2016)

March 9, 2017

Prose

Everything Is Turning

My new book, Light When It Comes: Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything, has just been published by Eerdmans, and they asked me to write a blog post for their blog introducing the book to their readers for what they call a “Meet my Book” column.

Meet My Book

It was a foggy January day. I was walking across campus to my next class, and I saw a man pruning a plum tree, by the Life Sciences building. I had a lot on my mind. Students hurried around me. But I looked at the man in his overalls doing his clear, simple work, clipping here, then there, and at the dark structure of the tree, the wet trunk and the bare, wet branches, clear and clean against the fog, and I thought: No, I’ve not wasted my life.

I don’t know why that idea popped into my head—it didn’t make sense, really, didn’t follow—but I’ve learned over the years to try to notice moments like this and remember moments like this and to trust them, to see them as God speaking to me and the Spirit reaching out to me, and in Light When It Comes I encourage you to think of these moments in the same way, as the Lord speaking to you. Because He always is. God is always speaking to us, through the fog, when we’re on our way to somewhere else, though we’re usually so rushed and skeptical and discouraged we let the moments pass.

In a way we don’t want moments like this. They’re too small: we want big. They’re too subtle: we want clear, unmistakable. And we can’t control these moments or reproduce them or pretend that they have anything to do with our merit or worth or superiority, because they don’t.

But these are the moments when God is speaking to us, moments sometimes of joy, moments sometimes of sorrow or loss, and using “the examen of conscience,” the prayer technique developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola, we can learn to spot them and hold on to them. At the end of each day:

we remember the light and give thanks for the light;
we remember the darkness and ask for forgiveness, and refuge, and strength;
and we let it all go–we ask for the grace to follow the light, to know what we should do—but then we leave it all to God, trusting in his kindness.

This is what my book is about. It’s a collage of examples of how the examen can work, drawn my life as a husband and father and teacher and deacon. I tell stories, I share images, and I hope these stories and images will trigger your own memory and desire. I leave gaps between the stories, white space between the images, as a way of suggesting the presence we all sense sometimes, beneath the jumble of our lives, a tenderness, a gentleness, we can’t explain or describe.

The old woman meets me on the hill and takes me to where her boys are buried, in a single coffin—Davy with his head on one end, Mike with his head on the other. Elbows touching. They drowned, they pulled each other in, many years ago, and now the woman is old and gray, and she is telling me her story, and she is weeping.

It’s a beautiful sunny morning in early fall. I look out at the fields and trees, and everything is turning, the hay and the wheat and the leaves.

Everything is turning, amber and lemon and gold.

Our call is rarely clear, and what we glimpse we glimpse day-to-day, and all we can do is live with that uncertainty, trusting God to hold the pieces together. Our call is finally to the moment, because where God is calling us is deeper and deeper into the mystery of things.

September 29, 2016