Chris Anderson's Blog

      When I first walked into the Church of St. Stephen in Rome it felt cool and calm, quietly beautiful.  It was built in the fifth century and in the round, which is rare.  On the inside you pass through several graceful columns, and there in the center, down several steps, is the golden altar.  The walls curve gently around you, the stone a warm, creamy gold.  There’s a sense of simplicity and space, very different from the elaboration and ornamentation we’d been seeing in other churches, though I loved those churches, too, for what they were.

     But when I looked more closely at the frescos on the walls, I noticed more and more of their details, and however muted they were, what they depicted was shocking, grotesque, panel after panel:

grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire.

This is how Charles Dickens put it when he visited the church in the nineteenth century.  St. Stephen’s is named after a deacon who is described in Acts as the first martyr of the Church, stoned to death by an angry mob, and in this spirit the frescos illustrate in gory detail the tortures and deaths of martyr after martyr, from St. Sebastian to St. Agnes to St. Artemius to St. Peter of Verona, thirty-four in all.  “Such a panorama of horror and butchery,” Dickens said, “no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper.”

    I had to turn away.  I couldn’t look.  I had to allegorize.  To laugh.

    But really, we are all being asked to martyr ourselves, every day, in small ways.  We are all being asked to die to our selves.  

    The blood and gore in the stories of the martyrs are just a way of getting our attention, as they are in Dante or Flannery O’Connor.  The violence in her stories, O’Connor says, jolts her characters into facing “reality” and so prepares them to accept “their moment of grace.”  Their heads are “so hard” that “almost nothing else will do the work,” and that seems to be describing the heads of her readers, too, the heads of all of us. 

     The paradox at the heart of Christianity, Dermott Lane says, 

is about the isolated ego becoming a relational being, the indifferent self becoming an active subject in solidarity with others . . .  It is this peculiar pattern of dying to live, of passing over, of letting go, that is at the heart of the mystery of Christ.  Being a disciple of Christ involves the living out of this paradox.

     Every day we struggle with our selfishness and our weakness.  Every day we try to rise above our ego.  Every day we try to be in right relation with others.  The difference isn’t in kind but in degree.  The logic of martyrdom is only an extreme version of the everyday logic of the cross.

     As Pope Francis says in Gaudete et Exsultate, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” we don’t have to be perfect, and we can’t be, 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.”

     To be holy doesn’t mean doing grand and noble things that will get us a lot of attention.  It means slogging along in our ordinary life, not just at church but at home and in our jobs and in our hearts.

      Francis 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.  The Church is always being attacked for its hypocrisy and rigidity, and it should be, but everyday behind the scenes there are countless, quiet acts of heroism.  Of self-sacrifice.

     A writer makes the sign of cross before he opens her laptop.  A woodworker makes the sign of the cross as she enters her 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 acts 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. “ 

     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.

      I think of John Lewis, mowed down by the mounted sheriffs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the courage that required, to face that, to allow the sheriffs to flatten him with the others and fracture his skull.  I wonder if those of us in the comfortable first world who are never beaten on trampled on or even yelled at most of the time aren’t being asked to do more than think of the cross as a symbol.  If you want to follow Christ, Daniel Berrigan said, you better “look good on wood,” and John Lewis, in his faith and his conviction that he must live out that faith, he knew that.

     But Lewis was just an ordinary man, as Bonhoeffer was, too, as I think Stephen was and all the martyrs, drawn slowly by events and a series of single choices, buoyed up the commitments and energies and presence of others, until at a certain point they suddenly found themselves on the front lines, almost without a choice.  They found themselves standing on that bridge, sitting in that cell.  It all happened before they knew it.

     We can only make our own choices day to day and for most of us that final, climactic moment won’t come.  For most of us the challenge is much simpler:  not to post the angry rant or complain about a slight, to try to be patient when someone we love does the one thing that always drives us crazy.  To not take the credit when the credit is ours.  To listen to the person we most detest.  Even to show some kindness to person we see in the mirror.

     The problem with the sentimentalizing of martyrdom is that it reinforces the idea of a heroic, muscular Christianity, as if to follow Christ means to be a spiritual athlete, elite, exceptional, strong in ourselves—as if we are the ones who act. 

     That’s completely wrong.

     All we can do is what Mary does.  All we can do is say yes when the grace is offered us, and often we don’t.

     All is grace.  We can’t even hold our tongues or put money in the collection basket without grace.  Even those simplest things are beyond us most days.    

     St. Lawrence is my favorite deacon.  He’s depicted too on one of the frescoes, being roasted on a spit.  The Emperor had asked that he bring him all the riches of the Church, and St. Lawrence responded by gathering all the poor and the lame and the homeless in Rome and bringing them to the throne.  

     Legend has it that at one point he said to his tormentors, “turn me over, I’m done on this side,” which is why–and this is true—St. Lawrence is the patron saint of bakers.

      It’s a macabre joke in a way, this being done on one side, but maybe it helps us to shrink our own martyrdom to the proper scale.  

     I can be like Lawrence, through grace, if I value the poor more than my own comfort and wealth, if I measure my worth not by what I own or by my position in the world and for that matter not measure my worth at all.

     I can be like Lawrence, through grace, if I let myself be spoken to harshly or discounted or cut off in traffic or treated rudely by a cashier—if I stay silent and walk away–or, hardest of all, reach out.  Offer the kind word.  Say: peace be with you.

     If when things are too complicated and intense and everything goes wrong, I remember what matters most.  

     If I make a joke.  If I say, if only to myself, turn me over, Lord, I’m done on this side.

The post The Miracle of Being a Little Bit Better appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

     I knew a man who was ninety-six.

     He had come up after mass and we met and talked now and then.  I was shocked when he told me how old he was because he didn’t look it.  He was upright and quick, with a fuzzy white beard, neatly trimmed.  

    He lived downtown next to the public library in a nice apartment with clean lines and wide windows.  Paintings of sailboats hung on his white walls.  He had painted many of them.  He was taking art classes at the community college and made pots, too, and small, clay sculptures.

     He had flown in a B-17 in the war and come back and worked for many years on the East Coast as a stockbroker and financial advisor.  He was a natty dresser.  He always wore ties with blue Oxford button-downs, his khakis pressed and creased. 

    He had an odd first name:  Ormond.  I never asked where it came from.

    One day he invited me for coffee, and we sat in his bright study and talked.  There was a signed picture of Ronald Reagan on the wall behind him.  He was talking about the League of Nations and the problems with internationalism and the welfare state and it suddenly struck me:  he wanted to be my friend.  He was ninety-six years old and he wanted to make a new friend.  He was insecure really and was trying to win my respect, as we all do when we meet someone.

      He wasn’t done being lonely.

     Outside the study window through the leaves of a rhododendron I could see the long back wall of the public library across the street.  It was solid brick, and there were no windows or doors, they were all on the other side, and as I sat there, I imagined all the rows of books inside, all the stacks and shelves, and the air, quiet and dim, and the smell of books, the rich, dusky smell of books.

     And I imagined a boy, maybe, wandering the aisles, searching the shelves for the book he needs.  He is wearing jeans.  A backpack hangs from his shoulder.

     He stops and reaches up.  He is maybe fifteen.  

     One paragraph follows another, page follows page, and he sinks to the floor and begins to read.  Nothing has changed.  The words are all there.

The post Library appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

    There’s a poem I love by William Stafford, “Why I Am Happy.”  I think it’s my favorite poem.  It always reminds me of what poetry can do:

            Now has come an easy time.  I let it

            roll.  There is a lake somewhere

            so blue and far nobody owns it.

            A wind comes by and a willow listens

            gracefully.

            I hear all this, every summer.  I laugh

            and cry for every turn of the world,

            its terribly cold, innocent spin.

            That lake stays blue and free; it goes

            on and on.

            And I know where it is.

     I love all the things the poem doesn’t say, how spare the lines are and the jumps between lines and across them.  I love all the white space.  I love in the second line how we suddenly move to a lake, not a particular lake but a lake “so blue and far nobody knows it.” 

      I especially love the big leap at the end, across the white space between the second stanza and the last line: “And I know where it is.”  There’s something so surprising and moving about that.  Emphatic.

     The poem in its clear, calm voice speaks of a beautiful place, and yet without denying the “terribly cold, innocent spin” of the earth.  The implication isn’t that the poet has retreated forever.  It’s not that he doesn’t care.  The suggestion is that the speaker goes to the lake in the summer, temporarily, and while he’s there he experiences a kind of detachment.  It’s “an easy time.”  

    The sadness and violence of the world exist, he knows about them, and yet they don’t shake this sense of freedom.  They don’t take away his sense of the lake itself, which by the end, I think, has become an inner lake, a source, a center from which he can act in the world—as Stafford himself did as a conscientious objector in World War II and a fierce advocate for nonviolence all his life.  

     Whenever I read this poem I think of a lake north of Colville, Washington where my father and grandfather used to take us fishing—Black Lake, in the mountains in the far Northeastern corner of the state, near the Canadian border.  

     Black Lake was black, not blue, murky and weedy on the edges.  But I remember the feeling of being far away and the clean smell of the lake mixed up with the sharp smell of gasoline in the thin, cold air.  I remember our boat bumping against the dock and the way it bobbed when we each stepped in.

     It’s morning, and I am snug in my bed in a corner of the cabin, and it’s mildewy  and dark.  Dad is frying the trout we caught for breakfast.  

     I think of Camp Baird, a big cabin the scouts had on Lake Thomas, one of the little Pend Oreilles.  One summer I learned to canoe there, j-stroking all day from lake to lake. 

     I loved how light a canoe is.  How quick to respond.  I loved gliding.  It was as if everything were mine.

     I loved to gunwale-jump:  standing on the gunwales in the stern of a canoe so the bow tips up and bouncing up and down to make the waves you then can ride on, scooting over the surface of the water.  Flying.

     Where I am going, Jesus says, you know the way.

The post Why I Am Happy appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

     When Mr. Rogers walked out to accept a lifetime achievement award, at the 1997 Emmys, he wasn’t wearing a zippered sweater but a crisp, black tuxedo.  He looked very handsome.

     He graciously accepted, but then he did something remarkable.  

     He stopped.  He paused.

     So many people have helped me to come here to this night.  Some of you are here, some are far away, and some are even in heaven.  All of us have special ones who loved us into being.  Would you just take, along with me, 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life?  10 seconds.  I’ll watch the time. 

     And he did.  Ten seconds is a long time in the world of television.  It’s an eternity.  But Mr. Rogers kept it, and the camera panned to the famous people in the audience, the great stars, tears rolling down their cheeks.  The silence seemed to go on and on.

     1997 is a long time ago now, and Hollywood is just as glitzy and corrupt as it ever was.  But that was a moment, and it happened, and it was beautiful, and we remember it now.  Mr. Rogers is gone, but that moment remains.

     Whomever you’ve been thinking about, he said, how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they have made.  

     And then, as a Christian, as in fact an ordained Presbyterian minister, Mr. Rogers blessed them:           

           May God be with you.

    What can we do?  Remember.  Bless.

     A second silence.

     In 2020, during the pandemic, after the German government announced that the Berlin Philharmonic would be closed indefinitely, their conductor Kirill Petrenko added one more work to their final concert, John Cage’s masterpiece 4’33”—a work comprised entirely of silence, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, as the musicians in the orchestra sat there in their tuxedos and black gowns, as the audience sat there in the darkened hall.   Silence. 

     Petrenko stood on the podium, all in black, raised his arms, and as if there really was music playing, as if this was like any other orchestral work, began to conduct, his hands waving back and forth with the baton.  He leaned in with his body.  He looked intently at the horns, then the strings.  His muscles strained.  His tempo changed, now fast, now slow.  He was like a dancer.  And the musicians were leaning in and looking, too, just as intense, just as poised as their conductor.  Their eyes never left him, they were holding their instruments with purpose, with intention, and the silence began to rise and fall, to reach a crescendo.

     What can we say?  What can be said?  What can we do in the face of illness and dread?

     We can open our arms.  We can sit together in silence.

     The third silence.

     Jesus, hanging on the cross.  He speaks several times—he cries out, my God my God why have you forsaken me—but for most of those agonizing hours, he simply hangs there, in silence, arms wide.

    And God is silent, too.  He doesn’t answer the one great question—his son’s great question.  

    God is in the question.  He is the question.  

    God is in the silence.  

    He is the silence.

The post Three Silences appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

     Charles Darwin, too, loved what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “dappled things”:  

. . .  rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim, fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, 

           finches’ wings . . .

The Origin of Specifies is a marvelous book, an endless catalog of tiny details.  The sensitivities of the foot-stocks of leaves.  The mutual fertilization of three varieties of gourds.  The way certain species of beetles blow away in the wind.  Orchid petals, barnacle shells, the twists and turns of worms in the rich earth—and finch wings, too, and the beaks of finches.

     Darwin and Hopkins loved little things.  They were “beholders,” Elizabeth Johnson says, they looked patiently and hard, and from the dappled and the tiny they inferred the presence of something far greater—for Darwin the vast sweep of evolution, for Hopkins the informing presence of God in the world.   

     It’s a startling comparison.  

     There’s no record of them meeting, but we can imagine it, Hopkins coming to pay his respects at Darwin’s rambling house in county Kent, say in 1880, Darwin an old man, 71, tall and a little heavy, with his famous white beard, Hopkins much younger, 36, slight and mercurial.

    The distinguished scientist, the great man of his age, and the obscure Jesuit priest, the poet, unpublished and unknown.

     Darwin had the biases of his class against Catholicism, but he was a gentle and courteous man, unfailingly gracious.  Hopkins was beloved by his friends, quick to laugh.    

      They were both upper-class Victorian gentlemen–though it’s in this that their real difference lies.

     Darwin was liberal in his politics and revolutionary as a scientist, but he was at home in the ordered world of upper-class Victorian England, he belonged there, and I think he couldn’t help but imagine God as a king.  That’s why he rejected him.   If God is a monarch, and a monarch reigns over an ordered world, and nature is in fact random and intricately branching, God must not exist.  

     It was a principled conclusion, a matter of intellectual integrity, given the evidence and the way Darwin believed he had to interpret it, whether he wanted to or not.

     But Hopkins believed he had experienced God, had known him, at least for brief moments now and then, and the God he’d glimpsed wasn’t a king at all or a king in the way Darwin seems to have assumed.

    Hopkins was an educated English gentleman, a product of the same world Darwin grew up in, and when he saw a sparrowhawk hovering over a field, and was struck by its beauty and its force, it was only natural for him to describe it at first as a “dauphin” or prince, a “chevalier” or knight.  

     But in that moment of recognition and connection, in his great poem, “The Windhover,” something radically different suddenly happens.  The hawk “buckles,” it dives, straight down to earth, and as it dives in the morning light, a fire “breaks” from it, a fire “a billion times lovelier” than all our conventional images and terms.  Suddenly the hawk becomes both the figure of Christ and Christ himself, breaking into the world, shattering all our expectations.

     Hopkins didn’t believe in God because of his power but because of his love, what in a letter to a friend he calls “the incredible condescension of the Incarnation”:

that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion, etc, or the insults, as the mocking, blindfolding, spitting etc, but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity.”

God may be omnipotent, but he has descended from that height and obliterated that distance.  He has given away his power.  

     He doesn’t dominate our life.  He dies into it.

    Buckle:  both to collapse, to fall, and to bring things together.  To cinch.  

    There is great strength here, too, of course, “brute valour” and “act.”  The hawk is diving to strike its prey.  And we are the prey.

     At the end of the poem Hopkins describes the way a plow smooths the plowed-up soil in the furrows and causes it to shine–or the way the “blue-beak embers” in a fire “fall, gall themselves, and gash-gold-vermillion.”  In Christ God allows himself to be plowed up, galling himself, falling, and in that galling and “gashing” a red and golden light shines through the ashes.  

       The crucifixion and the resurrection.  Death leading to new life.  The joy of things and their sorrow.  All of it.

    God isn’t a monarch but a mother, Hopkins says in “God’s Grandeur,” and she “broods” over the world as a mother dove broods over her chicks, “with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”  

     Brood:  a family of young.  

     To brood:  to think deeply.  To worry.  To grieve.   

       This isn’t a rational deduction, the result of careful study.  Darwin worked slowly and patiently amassing evidence, and his conclusions, when they finally come, are measured. Hopkins’ faith is instantaneous and ecstatic.  He believed he had encountered the Lord, had known him and been known by him, and the only way he could express his joy and his hope is through the richness of image. 

     He couldn’t explain it, he couldn’t prove it, he wasn’t always sure of what he had experienced.  He knew great sadness and loss.  He knew the darkness.  Sometimes he describes an indifferent universe, entirely unconcerned with us, the universe Darwin left us all to face.

     But then a sparrowhawk hovers above a field, in the bright morning light.  

     And then it buckles.  It dives.

     A billion times lovelier.

The post Darwin and Hopkins Talk About Life appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

     It’s not true that there’s nothing we can do.  There are all kinds of things we can do. The situation isn’t hopeless.  All is not lost.  

     We can change the world, we can save it, if only we do what Jesus tells us to do.  He lays it all out.  It’s all there, right in front of us.

If you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother or sister has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.

If you right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.

If you right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.

Let your Yes mean Yes and your No mean No.

When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.  If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him you cloak as well.  Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him two miles.  Give to the one who asks of you and not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.

Be not afraid.

     What I’m tracking here are the many commands Jesus gives us.   I mean their syntax, their structure.  

     Sentences can be declarative:  We are walking down the road.  Sentences can be interrogative:  Who is that walking down the road?  And then there are these kinds of sentences, the imperative, the direct commands.

Judge not.  

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray so that others may see them, but when you pray, go to your inner room.

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up treasure in heaven.

Do not worry about tomorrow.  Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear.  Look at the birds of the air.  Learn from the way the wild flowers grow.  

Sell all you have and give to the poor. 

Feed my lambs.  Tend my sheep.

    Jesus is radically specific and radically open-ended, both very clear and maddeningly elusive.  Sometimes he’s concrete, directing us to act in certain ways towards others, and yet most of his commands have to do with our interior states, our attitudes, our dispositions.

     In a way what’s most remarkable are the things Jesus doesn’t tell us to do.  He never tells us to look out for number one.  He never commands us to ignore the poor and exclude the stranger.  He never orders us to make a lot of money.  

     His commands are never about governments or programs.  That’s not where their faith lies.  

     In the end they all become parables:  they leave us in “sufficient doubt” about how we should apply them that they “tease us into thought.”

Into whatever house you enter, first say, Peace to this household.  If a peaceful person lives there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you.  

Whatever town you enter, and they welcome you, eat what is set before you, cure the sick in it and say to them, the Kingdom of God is at hand for you.

Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words, go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto to God what is God’s.

When you hear of wars and reports of wars, do not be alarmed.

Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.

Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believe.

Take this and eat, for this is my body.

Take this and drink, for this is my blood.

Do this in memory of me.

     There are all kinds of people out there telling us what to do and how to do it.  They’re very specific.  They’re confident.  They have all the answers.  There are all kinds of voices in our heads telling us that we have to be anxious, we have to be afraid, we have to shout and fight.  

     But the commands of Jesus are the commands of the heart.  The commands of Jesus plunge us deeper into the ordinariness and the mystery of the way things really are.  

The commands of Jesus draw us closer and closer to him, to the mystery of the God who loves us and suffers with us and is with us always, even unto the end of time.  

    When you’re worried about what you can do, when you feel hopeless, when you’re afraid, remember what Mary says to the waiters at the Wedding in Cana:  do whatever he tells you.

Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money.

Take courage.  Be not afraid. 

Put out to deep water and let down your nets.

     Listen, there is only one thing necessary:  Love one another as I have loved you.     

     There is only one great commandment:  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.  

     He told us these things, plain as day.

Come, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Come, have breakfast.

Come down from that tree.

Come, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world.

The post What Jesus Tells Us to Do appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

    Grace is the law of descending movement.

          Simone Weil

You think it’s like that night the bioluminescence 

shone in the dark wake of a ship— 

or like that day in a dim church when the monks 

began to chant.  You were elated.  

You knew then you were part of something greater.

But moments like this only happen 

now and then, and in a way they don’t matter.

Every day a woman sits in a room in her quiet house. 

Sometimes she notices the rain.  Sometimes she doesn’t.  

She sits for twenty minutes.  Sometimes thirty.  

Later, at the edge of the protest, 

where a man in a red bandana is shouting at her 

and her friends, and people are taking out 

their phones and making videos and shouting back, 

she walks over—she doesn’t think 

about this—it’s not a choice—

she walks over to the man on the edge, 

who is pacing now, yelling louder and louder,  

and reaches out her hand.   

The post Grace is a Descending Movement appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

     Freud wasn’t surprised when Hitler marched into Austria in 1938.  He thought we all secretly long for a tyrant and that sooner or later a tyrant will come, if not Hitler someone like him.

     As Mark Edmundson points out in The Death of Sigmund Freud, Hitler and Freud actually lived in Vienna at the same time for a few years in the beginning of the century, though there’s no record of them meeting—Freud an up-and-coming doctor and intellectual, Hitler a down-and-out artist sometimes living on the street.  Maybe Freud passed Hitler on the curb once and tossed a coin into his hat.

     Freud wasn’t surprised that so many Austrians would cheer and cry, joyous, when Hitler returned and took over the country, because he knew that deep down we all long for a strong man, a leader, to think for us, to relieve us of the strain of living with the complexity of our lives.  

     We want someone we can put our absolute trust in so that we don’t have to think anymore.  We want a leader, Freud thought, who gives us permission to release our basest impulses, our strongest feelings, because then we don’t have to work so hard to restrain and channel them.  We want someone to lift us out of the ordinary, day-to-day work of living in the world the way it really is.  We want more excitement.

    For Freud the work of psychoanalysis is to make that desire known, to bring it out into the open, so that it won’t act on us unconsciously.  There is no magic solution.  There is no hero.  

     Freud argued, too, that the God of the Judeo-Christian religion is much the same kind of tyrant, an all-controlling father who both represses and frees us, a Sky-God who doesn’t want us to think for ourselves—and too often Freud is right.  Too often Christians believe that when they surrender their will to God, they are forever absolved from responsibility for their own freedom, intellectually and morally.

     But this isn’t the God at the heart of the Gospels.  This isn’t the God who hangs on a cross.  

     German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and German Jesuit Alfred Delp were both arrested and executed for their resistance to the Nazi regime–they sacrificed their lives–and not out of faith in a monarchical God but out of faith in a God of such fierce and courageous tenderness that he gave himself entirely away.  To follow Christ, they believed, they had to give themselves away.

     Bonhoeffer and Delp didn’t fight tyranny on behalf of a tyrannical God who dominates and controls us but on behalf of a loving God:  on behalf of Christ, our true and gentle brother, who even when he rose and appeared to his friends appeared so subtly and fleetingly that in his generosity and tact he gave us the freedom to ignore or forget or misinterpret him, and then to walk away.

     God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross, Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, as we awaited execution:

He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . . Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.  

This is a remarkable insight, born out of Bonhoeffer’s own suffering in the face of the false God of Nazism, exactly the God that Freud analyzes and urges us to reject.  Bonhoeffer rejects the Fascist oversimplification, too, and by grounding himself in the Gospels, in their plain narrative of the Passion, of what exactly happens on the Cross:

Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God.  God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.  The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us.  The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.  The God and with God with live without God.

Taken out of context this could almost be seen as an affirmation of atheism.  What Bonhoeffer is describing is not a ruthless king, not the repressive father, but a man, the true man, the real man, who allowed himself to die.

     Bonhoeffer didn’t believe that Christ had abandoned him.  He believed that Christ was with him even in prison and especially then, and that he would always be with him, in death as in life, and finally beyond death, forevermore. 

     “Surely this man was the Son of God,” the centurion says in Mark, when he sees “how Jesus breathed his last.”  

     Jesus is the Son of God not because he got down from the cross but because he didn’t.

     What does this mean?  What does it mean for those of us who are anxious and afraid because of what’s happening now in our country and all over the world?

     That the Incarnation is real and complete.  That the Lord will be us even unto the end of time–not a God who will solve all our problems, not a God who will always give us what we want, not a God who will love only us worthy few, but someone far greater and more marvelous still:  Emmanuel:  God with us.  All of us.  In our sorrow and our joy.  In our triumph and our grief.  Not thinking for us but thinking with us.  Not ignoring our suffering but sharing in it.

     The God who in his love will never restrict or coerce or force us.

     The God who in his love will never leave us.

The post Freud, Hitler, and the God of Love appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

This Joyful Uncertainty 

    When you look at the gospel accounts of the Resurrection, at the details themselves, it seems to me there are several implications.

     The first is that we have to live with uncertainty and ambiguity.  

     I could ask you, how many of the gospels describe the Resurrection itself, whatever really happened in that moment, inside the tomb, and there could be only one right answer.  None.  

     The words are the words.  They only say what they say.

     I don’t mean that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.  I just mean that the Resurrection itself, as an act, is never described.  We only get there after the fact.  All we see is the empty tomb, the bare, hewn rock, the great stone rolled away, and we only see it from the outside, through the eyes of the dear, believing women, who are both astonished and afraid.  

     “He is not here,” the angels say.

      Those moments Jesus comes as a gardener, a traveler, a man broiling fish, all those happen later and happen fast.  Jesus disappears.  At first we’re not sure who he is.  We never are.

     Most of the mystics, most of us ordinary people who pray, we never actually experience Jesus in the flesh, in person.  The word many of the mystics use is a feeling of “presence.”  Or often the image is of something like a feeling of “warmth,” or a “glow.”  Is this Christ?  This intuition?  This sudden thought?  Is this the Risen Lord?  

     Yes.  No.  Yes.

      In a way everything has changed because of the Resurrection and in a way nothing has.  The disciples still suffer and die—that’s the story of Acts.  There are still wars and sadness and grief.  

      For us, too–and we just have to live with that.

     The second implication, I think, is that there’s something greater than what we see, a “kingdom stronger than war and terror,” in the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a life beyond this life.  Christ in the Resurrection gives us a glimpse of a love and joy vaster than the stars, vaster than the galaxies, a love that will never die, that will over countless billions of years unfold, will tend always towards love and will in the end find fulfillment in Christ, in the Omega—and we are caught up in that, we are a part of that evolution, we are a part of what so far 14.7 billion years have been leading up to.

     Go out and look up at the stars.  Feel that sense we always have of being both overwhelmed and exalted, flattened and lifted up.

     The light of the stars has been reaching us forever, the universe is vast beyond imagining, but this is a moment and we are in it.  We are aware of it.  We are standing by the mailbox at the top of the driveway.  It’s very early, still dark.  We smell the earth, the leaves.

     Stars die and give rise to new stars.  There are great explosions, and all those atoms are scattered across space.

     Maybe we feel this affinity for the stars because we are made of them.  They are our mothers and fathers.  Our brothers and sisters.

      Astronomically speaking, as a friend puts it, we are insignificant.  But astronomically speaking, we are the astronomers.  

      The third implication is that here and now and every day we glimpse the Resurrection—just glimpses, just flashes, but they are everywhere, and they are glimpses of something.  It’s good news/bad news.  The bad news: the triumph and creativity of God aren’t obvious and beyond doubt.  The good news:  the triumph is all around us in tiny pieces, there are lovely hints and echoes and anticipations of this triumph in every beautiful thing we see, in the spring, in the leafing out of the trees.  In laughter.  In a loving touch.  

    “God is beyond in the midst of our life,” Bonhoeffer wrote in prison a year before he was hung by the Nazis.  That’s the paradox: “beyond” and “in the midst.”  

    As my friend the poet Lex Runciman puts it:

            We have the word for it,

            here and after:  two words, one idea.

     “The politics of illusion, of death’s money, possess us,” Wendell Berry says in one of his Sabbath poems.  

     In our current context, it’s not hard to understand what that means.  It has a special resonance for us now.

     But then Berry goes on, alluding to the story in John of Mary Magdalene outside the tomb on Easter morning.  

The politics of illusion, of death’s money,

possess us.  This is the Hell, this

the nightmare into which Christ descended

from the cross, from which also he woke

and rose, striding godly forth, so free

that He appeared to Mary Magdalene

to be only the gardener walking about

in the new day, among the flowers.

This is the Good News, that every day we glimpse the gardener, in all the ordinary people we meet.  This is the Good News, that we are the gardeners, only the gardeners, and that through grace we too can rise, we too can be free, we too can walk among the flowers in the light of day.      

*

     In the Passion narrative in John, the one we read on Good Friday, Pilate asks the people, “do you want me to crucify your king?”

     And they answer: “We have no king but Caesar.”

     We answer–the congregation answers.

     For a moment it’s as if the president is the only the king, the congress, the judges, all the rulers of the world:  they are the only reality, the reality of the country, the state, the reality of this life on earth.  For a moment we lose sight of the greater reality, the greatest reality, the reality of God, whose love endures forever.

     That’s when we panic.  That’s when we are afraid.  That’s when we think there’s no hope:  when we let our Caesars be our only kings.

     But they’re not. 

     However fleetingly we glimpse him, however subtle he is, however hidden in our own lives, the Lord Jesus, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in his great tenderness and compassion, is the reality that endures.  Forever.

    And when we know that, when we choose to believe that, when we hang on to that conviction, however pressing the problems of the world, we are free.

     “We shall not seek to escape,” Teilhard de Chardin says, “this joyful uncertainty.”

The post This Joyful Uncertainty appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.

     On Palm Sunday we celebrate great joy and great grief, consolation and desolation, and the question is:  how do they go together?  Does one cancel out the other?

     Jesus rides in on a donkey and everyone is singing and throwing down their cloaks and waving great branches, and by the end of the reading the disciples have abandoned him and he is hanging on the cross.

    I run into a friend as Bumble and I are walking in the woods.  She’s walking her dog, too, and we stand on the road and talk about the country, our anxieties, our worries, our outrage, and we agree.  We’re on the same page.  But no matter how much I try to nudge the conversation in another direction, no matter how I try to change the subject, my friend insists on being outraged.  She insists on not being there.  She’s in Washington D.C.  She’s on the border.  

     All the while the trees have leafed out and the cherries are blossoming and a purple finch is singing.  The sun has broken through the clouds.  

    Who are we to say?  Who are we to refuse the gift we have been offered?   And to ask this isn’t to avoid compassion or obligation.  Not at all.  To ask this is an act of humility.  “We have to remember the principle,” Thomas Merton says, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “that certain desires and certain pleasures are willed for us by God.”

     Merton frequently comes back to this issue in this book.  As a contemplative it haunts him:  what value is there in living the solitary and hidden life of a monk when the world is falling apart?  As a monk is he a guilty bystander?  

     But “why can we not be content with an ordinary, secret, personal happiness that does not need to be explained or justified?” Merton asks.  Why do we feel guilty “if we are not happy in some publicly approved way?”  God gives us the gift of every moment, “the gift and capacity,” as he puts it, “to make our own happiness out of our own situation.”

It’s not hard to be happy, simply by accepting what is within reach, and making of it what we can.  But if we do this . . . we still wonder if there is not something wrong.  Are we getting something that others cannot have?

Everything we need is right here, he says, and yet we worry, 

as if it is not allowed.  As if we could not be happy without the sanction of Madison Avenue, or Washington, or the FBI or somebody.  And yet this, of all things, is precisely that for which no permission is needed.

Joy is a gift, a grace, given to us in one particular moment, on a road, or in a coffee shop, or at home reading a book, as who knows what gift the poor woman at the border is given, too?  The civil servant, just fired from his job?  What glimpse?  What memory?

     I think Jesus felt joy as he came into Jerusalem.  I think he felt the sun on his face.  I think he heard the shouts of the crowd.  I think he felt the swaying of the donkey beneath him.  My dad always said, “be where you’re at,” and Jesus always was.  He was always in the moment.  He was never too busy to stop and talk to the people who came up to him.  He had no big projects to distract him, as Luke Timothy Johnson says.  He was remarkably available.

     And I think he was bereft when the time came.  I think he was afraid, he was grieving, as he also knew he would be.  He suffered.  He hung on a cross.

     I don’t see how anyone can get the idea of Christian Nationalism out of the gospels. We can do it only by reading the story of the entry into Jerusalem out of context, without the story of the upper room, without the crucifixion, and then by misinterpreting that first moment, when Jesus comes through the gates.  He’s on a donkey, after all.  Not a tank.

     He hangs on a cross. 

     Did we really think we wouldn’t have to suffer, too?  Nothing is different now than it ever was.  We always have to die to ourselves.  Now we just may have to do it more, and in solidarity with so many others who have been dying for a long time.  One day some of us may even have to die in the flesh for our faith, as the martyrs did, as we all have to die anyway sooner or later, even if only in our sleep. 

     What did we think, that we would never have to die?

     In a way we all have to be dualists, radical dualists, whatever our call.  Nothing matters more than God.  

     In a recent interview, the poet Li Young Lee puts it this way:

I’m telling you, all that is left are love songs to God.  With all the world’s conflict, motion, and noise, none of these things are as important as love for the one who accomplished everything.  I’m going to write love song after love song to God.

And yet at the same time, Lee is saying, we have to reject dualism entirely, avoid otherworldliness completely, because the kingdom is here and now, in this moment and every moment. 

     It’s because Jesus observed the birds of the air and the flowers of the field that he could hang on the cross.  

     Be here, he says.  Let tomorrow come tomorrow.

     It’s because we hear the purple finch that we can act.  It’s because we rejoice in the blossoming cherry that we know what to do, and why.  

    And hearing the finch is an act.  Of defiance.  Of hope.  Who knows what benefits flow from our quiet thinking and feeling, out into the world of violence and stupidity?

The post Thinking About Joy and Grief appeared first on Deacon Chris Anderson.