Another Word for Worry

June 16, 2013
Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time
Second Samuel 12:7-13; Galatians 2:16-21; Luke 7:36-8:3

Once at a retreat we were asked to put ourselves at the foot of the cross and really see Jesus hanging there, in his body. But all these movie images kept getting in the way for me, all these Hollywood actors with beards, so I started substituting people I know and putting them on the cross as a way of feeling a deeper connection to our Lord.

I put Barb’s grandfather on the cross. I put a woman I know. And suddenly I saw my youngest son hanging there, in his red and black soccer uniform. He was about ten then, this wonderful little boy, and suddenly he was hanging there, nailed to a cross, and for a moment it just overwhelmed me.

I thought, so this is what God the Father felt that day.



I don’t know why when we think of the metaphor of God the Father we always think of power, of God as tyrant or dictator, because my experience as a father hasn’t been of power at all. Not on the nights when I used to wait for my kids to come home. Not when I have to watch them struggle and suffer now, as adults, and there’s nothing I can do.

“Another word for father,” says the poet Li-Young Lee, is “worry.”



All three readings today give us perspective on fatherhood, here on Father’s Day.

Fathers should be like kings in a way, they should have a certain authority, as mothers should, too, and I really worry when I see how reluctant many fathers are to set boundaries, and how little respect children show their fathers, and what misery results, for everyone. But the first and second books of Samuel are in part a critique of kingship, of how power can corrupt, as it has corrupted King David, who is guilty here of adultery and murder and deception, and what’s most kingly about David, really, what’s most manly, is how quickly he humbles himself and admits his sinfulness, how sincerely he asks for forgiveness.

Paul’s great insight in Galatians is that the pattern of the life of Christ should be the pattern of our lives, too, and what defines this pattern is powerlessness, is the crucifixion. “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul says, “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Christ who turned manhood upside down. Christ in his gentleness. Christ who gave himself away.

What’s so interesting about the gospel reading today is that it’s the woman who is finally the model, the sinful woman who bathes the feet of Jesus with her tears.

This isn’t Mary Magdalene. The story doesn’t name the woman. Mary Magdalene is elsewhere singled out in Luke as one of the women who “accompany” Jesus and the twelve apostles on their journey, “providing for them out of their resources,” and in all four gospels she is the first person at the tomb, the first post-resurrection disciple. It’s only later tradition that makes her the prostitute, and maybe as a way of trying to diminish our sense of the power and authority of women.

But even if Mary is the prostitute here, the point is only stronger. Matthew was a tax collector. Peter was a liar, a traitor. In the gospels everything is inverted, everything changed, and what this woman does, Jesus says, we should do, too: we should welcome, we should serve, we should get down on our knees.



I think of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, this great twentieth century Catholic leader. I’ve been reading her diaries the last few weeks, and what strikes me most is her realism and honesty—how she is willing to admit to her fatigue and her discouragement, in her work for the poor—and how she always sees these challenges as graces:

I need to overcome a sense of my own impotence, my own failure, and an impatience at others that goes with it. Such a sense of defeat comes from expecting too much of one’s self, also from a sense of pride. More and more I realize how good God is to me to send me discouragements, failures, antagonisms. The only way to proceed is to remember that God’s ways are not our ways. To bear our own burdens, do our own work as best we can, and not fret because we cannot do more or do another’s work.

Being a father is a wonderful thing, too, of course, happy and fulfilling most of the time. I love being a father. But I think any family is a lot like one of the Catholic Worker houses Dorothy Day founded, and I think her attitude here is exactly the attitude Christian fathers should have. We should surrender our pride. Bear our own burdens.



Last week I had lunch with a young father. He was a student of mine years ago and has now become a close friend--he’s a good, kind man--and he was worried because his ten year old son had been lying to him about a series of little things. My friend was angry at the lies, and that made him feel guilty, and he knew that there had to be some kind of punishment, though he hated the thought of making his son suffer.

What I told him was not to feel guilty about anger. Sometimes fathers need to get angry, if they do it in the right way. What I told him was not to feel guilty about punishment—he had taken away his son’s computer for a couple of days—that was good, I said—stick to it—though I liked even more that he was planning to soften the punishment after the first day, to let his son have the computer back sooner, once the point was made.

But what I really wanted to say was that to be a father is to feel love and pride, yes, but also worry and doubt, and that in our worry and in our doubt we share as fathers in the suffering of Christ and in the suffering of God himself. What I really wanted to say was that as fathers we of course want our children to be happy and we will of course do anything we can to make them happy, but that we need to give our children the freedom to suffer, too. We need to allow our children to join us on the way of the cross.

I wanted to say something about the great mystery of free will. That God the Father doesn’t compel our obedience. That God the Father gives us the freedom to disobey, to turn away, and that in that space, in that gap, is all our humanity and all our grace and all our opportunities to learn and grow and to become the men and women we can truly be.

I wanted to say what Li Young Lee says, in his lovely poem.

Another word for father is worry.

Worry boils the water/ for tea in the middle of the night.

Worry trimmed the child’s nails before / singing him to sleep.

Another word for son is delight. / Another, One-Who-Goes-Away.

So many words for son. / But only one word for father.

And sometimes a man is both. / Which is to say, sometimes a man

manifests mysteries beyond / his own understanding.

Passing Through

April 21, 2013
Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 13:14-52; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:27-30

I know a woman. A good person. A smart person. But a few years ago she was taken in by this meditation teacher who promises people that if they follow his techniques, if they do what he says, they’ll always be happy, they’ll always be at peace--they won’t hunger or thirst anymore, nor will the sun or any heat strike them--and of course as Christians we know that that’s not true.

We can test that claim and any claim like it: only Jesus is one with the Father. Only in relation with him will we ever experience the kingdom, and only in glimpses, in the middle of all our problems and struggles, at least in this life.

*

We read about people who follow dictators, now and in the past, and we think, how could they do that? But we all long for dictators, as Freud said, if in subtle ways. We’re all trying to find a person or an idea or a system to take away our problems and free us of life—the perfect house, the perfect job, the perfect body.

*

But what strikes me most in the reading from Acts today is that even after being persecuted by the people of Antioch, the disciples are “filled with joy,” they are filled with the Spirit, and in a way I think it’s because they are persecuted, because they know that life is hard and life is complicated and that whenever they accept this hardship and enter into this complexity they are following the way of Christ.

Freud thought that Christianity took advantage of our desire for dictators, but he obviously hadn’t read the book of Acts. He obviously hadn’t understood the cross. To follow Christ isn’t to acquire power but to lose it. It’s to empty the self.

*

You could see all this playing out in the media coverage of the election of Pope Francis, and in his response. Because the press wants to make him into a superstar, a superhero, and he just won’t have it. As he put it in a talk to journalists, “Christ is the center, not the Successor of Peter.” And again, with more emphasis, “Christ, Christ is the center,” not the Pope, not the cardinals, not any part of the church as human institution, which can only serve Christ, after all, which can only try to reflect Him, and always imperfectly, partially. The presence of Christ in the world “passes through the freedom of human beings,” Francis says—I love this phrase--and so our spiritual lives are always going to be messy and frustrating and full of ups and downs, and we have just have to learn to accept that.

*

Here’s how Pope Francis gave his final blessing that Saturday, to this group of journalists from all of over the world. He blessed the people there in a way that both respected them and proclaimed, simply and joyously, the truth that sets us free:

I told you I was cordially imparting my blessing. Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each, but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God. May God bless you!

Jesus says that we hear his voice. “I know them and they will follow me. “ But how do we know that what we’re hearing is really the voice of Jesus?

Any voice that promises power, any voice that promises we can be better than others, any voice that promises endless ease here and now: that voice is never the voice of God.

Confidence, yes. Joy, yes. But humbled. Grounded in the real. In service of others.

*

The last few months I’ve been trying to get some clarity about the direction my life is going, and over Holy Week I think I did. One day I was walking and I just had this sense of what I was supposed to be doing and how my projects were lining up in the near future—and that there was still his gap, this opening, and that I should just wait and see what might come to fill it

Later that day I got a phone call from someone back East asking me if I was interested in getting involved in a new project. I heard a voice, on the phone.

In the morning I think, wait for what comes, and in the afternoon, something does.

But I don’t think it’s finally that simple.

I believe that people hear the voice of Jesus directly, or see him, or touch him. I just don’t think it happens very often, and it certainly hasn’t happened that way for me. I touch Jesus in the Eucharist, I take him into me, and I touch him when I read the scriptures, too, and pray, but however nourishing this is and necessary and wonderful, the Spirit is still working indirectly here, and working through me, with all my limitations, passing through my own freedom.

But if I’m following what I think Acts is saying today, if I’m following the example of Jesus, the example of Pope Francis, this very uncertainty is one sign of the authenticity of the call, and the call is maybe not to success and accomplishment anyway and probably isn’t but to more messy dealings with people and more ups and downs.

And besides, the success or failure of this or any enterprise doesn’t finally matter. Nothing else matters, neither success nor failure, life nor death, St. Ignatius says, because this life isn’t the only life, because in the end our destination is the heavenly liturgy where we will join the multitudes who worship the Lamb and all our tears will be wiped away, really wiped away, once and for all and forever.

*

“I can well believe,” says Blessed Cardinal Newman, “that you have hopes now, which you cannot give up, and even which support you in your present course. Be it so; whether they will be fulfilled or not, is in his hand. He may be pleased to grant the desires of your heart; if so, thank him for his mercy; only be sure that all will be for your highest good.”

This is the voice of the Good Shepherd. This is how we know: when it sounds like this.

“Be not afraid,” Newman says: “it is but a pang now and then, and a struggle; a covenant with your eyes, and a fasting in the wilderness, some calm habitual watchfulness, and the hearty effort to obey, and all will be well.”

“Be not afraid.”

Pope Francis

March 20, 2013
Daniel 3:14-95; John 8:31-42


It strikes me in John this evening that once again the people read Jesus literally and that once again Jesus he has to explain what he really means.

You are slaves, he says.
But we’re not slaves to anyone, the people reply. We’re free.
No, Jesus says. No. I mean you are slaves spiritually.

I’ve been so impressed and moved by our new Pope, Pope Francis, and one of the things that has struck me the most in the last few days was a short statement he made last Saturday, the 16th, to the people in the press who covered the conclave. It’s really a remarkable statement.

Here’s a part of it.

I would like, then, to thank you in a special way for the professional coverage which you provided during these days – you really worked, didn’t you? – when the eyes of the whole world, and not just those of Catholics, were turned to the Eternal City and particularly to this place which has as its heart the tomb of Saint Peter. Over the past few weeks, you have had to provide information about the Holy See and about the Church, her rituals and traditions, her faith and above all the role of the Pope and his ministry.

I am particularly grateful to those who viewed and presented these events of the Church’s history in a way which was sensitive to the right context in which they need to be read, namely that of faith.

Historical events almost always demand a nuanced interpretation which at times can also take into account the dimension of faith. Ecclesial events are certainly no more intricate than political or economic events! But they do have one particular underlying feature: they follow a pattern which does not readily correspond to the "worldly" categories which we are accustomed to use, and so it is not easy to interpret and communicate them to a wider and more varied public. The Church is certainly a human and historical institution with all that that entails, yet her nature is not essentially political but spiritual: the Church is the People of God, the Holy People of God making its way to encounter Jesus Christ. Only from this perspective can a satisfactory account be given of the Church’s life and activity.

Christ is the Church’s Pastor, but his presence in history passes through the freedom of human beings; from their midst one is chosen to serve as his Vicar, the Successor of the Apostle Peter. Yet Christ remains the centre, not the Successor of Peter: Christ, Christ is the centre. Christ is the fundamental point of reference, the heart of the Church. Without him, Peter and the Church would not exist or have reason to exist.

All of this leads me to thank you once more for your work in these particularly demanding days, but also to ask you to try to understand more fully the true nature of the Church, as well as her journey in this world, with her virtues and her sins, and to know the spiritual concerns which guide her and are the most genuine way to understand her.

How simple and sincere. The Church is like the men in the furnace in the book of Daniel. There’s an angel there, too, there’s the spiritual dimension, and that’s the call for all of us: not to mistake the realm of Nebuchadnezzar for the realm of the one true King.

And here’s how Pope Francis gave his final blessing last Saturday, to this group of journalists from all of over the world. He blessed the people there in a way that both respected them and proclaimed, simply and joyously, the truth that sets us free.

I told you I was cordially imparting my blessing. Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each, but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God. May God bless you!

Again, how simple. How sincere. How marvelous.
This is our call: to silence. To respect. To blessing.

Some Other Level

Third Sunday of Lent
Romans 5:1-8; John 4:5-42


More and more as I walk around campus I hear students telling their stories of getting drunk. Their narratives of inebriation.

I heard four or five the other day as I was walking to my office. “I got so hammered last night,” a young man said. And another: “when I woke up this morning I didn’t even know who she was.” Or I heard a young woman say this, to another young woman. “Dude,” she said. “I was on some other level.”

I don’t mean to eavesdrop. These stories are just in the air. They’re everywhere. We seem to need to tell them, they seem to be very important to us, and I think it’s because deep down they’re really stories about our thirsting for God. There’s something missing in our lives and we know it. Deep down we really do want to be on some other level.


Natural Law theory is at the heart of our Catholic tradition and what Natural Law theory says is that human beings are naturally good and so human beings are naturally drawn to what is good, the way plants are drawn to light. In a way what Natural Law theory says is that the key to living a good life is to do what we really want to do, to follow our bliss.

The problem is that often we’re confused about what will make us happy. Our desire is mistaken. We think that drinking will make us happy, and there’s some truth in that. It’s good to relax. It’s good to be with friends. But of course when we lose control and go too far all we really get is a hangover. Like the woman at the well, our real thirst isn’t quenched.

The woman in the gospel today is a Samaritan, and she has had five husbands, and she is living now with a man who isn’t her husband, and I think her going to the well every day in her weariness and despair is an image of how futile her life is, and empty, and sad. And I’m no different, not from her or from the students I overhear.

I thirst for fame: for attention, for praise, for reputation. But fame doesn’t satisfy. I thirst for order: for my life to be neat and clean and perfectly arranged. But order doesn’t satisfy. I thirst for certainty: never to be troubled, never to be confused, never to have to wrestle with things in my mind. But certainty doesn’t satisfy, not really, and it’s not possible anyway.

None of this water is clean and pure. None of this water is the living water.


So the first thing, I think, is to stop and be scientific about our lives. To stop and be empirical about all these experiments we’ve been running. Let’s ask ourselves, honestly, what’s really happening here? And then let’s think about what is working, what really does give us happiness. Because the fundamental assumption of Christian faith is that we’re supposed to be happy and that we should follow our happiness and that happiness, true happiness, is itself a sign from God, is evidence of the presence of God.

For me that’s the only question: does God exist, and how do we know that God exists? And the answer, as Paul says to the Romans, is that God is in us. “The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit,” he says. So it follows: when we feel love, that’s the Spirit.

And I think that’s what’s going on with the Samaritan woman today, in this long, wonderful dialogue. I think she knows somehow from the beginning that this man is special, is unique. She intuits this, even though she doesn’t understand until the end, but she feels it, as we often do when we’re talking to certain people or doing certain things, and she follows that feeling, as we should, she keeps talking, she keeps going deeper and deeper, and the feeling builds and builds, and finally the woman gets it, she is changed, she becomes joyous and confident and clear, as we can be.

It’s a paradox, isn’t it, because really what Jesus is giving her is inside her. She’s had it all along. Everyone who drinks the water from the well, Jesus says, will be thirsty again, but “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” That spring is in us. It wells up in us. It responds to whatever is really good in the world and in people, it begins to flow in us whenever we come into contact with beauty, with excellence.


So what should we do?

Whatever makes the water flow. Whatever really works.

And that means reading the scriptures, of course, always the scriptures, and going to mass and entering into the Eucharist--we feel it here, we know it here--and participating in all the sacraments, in the whole sacramental life of the church, from baptism to confirmation to reconciliation. And it also means paying attention to our own lives, to what happens to us day to day. Because that’s finally what the sacraments are for: to make us more aware of what is always already true.


Another drinking story.

The elderly father of a friend of mine has moved in with her, and at first he was driving her crazy.

My friend is a busy, driven, accomplished woman, she has a lot to do, but her father, though he’s in good health, takes a long time to get in up in the morning. To put on his slippers. To walk down the hall. He’s 86 years old. He’s careful. He’s deliberate.

And then—this really bothered my friend at first—and then he slowly starts to make his tea. He fills the kettle with water. He puts the kettle on the stove. He puts the tea bag in the cup. He gets the milk from the refrigerator. All of this slowly. Carefully.

And then he stands there and he waits for the water to boil, looking out the window. He notices the birds. He looks up at the clouds.

Half an hour to make a cup of tea! I don’t have time for this, my friend said.


But then she realized. She does. This is good. This is what she’s been thirsting for all along and didn’t know it: not the tea but the silence. The awareness. What her father is teaching her is a careful attention to the things around us, and a pleasure in them, a joy, and what could be more important? What could more important than chatting over tea on a rainy winter morning?

Suddenly, my friend understood, and she felt it herself.

Dude, she was on some other level.

The Spiritual Success of the Universe

January 20, 2013

2^nd Sunday of Ordinary Time

Isaiah, 1 Corinthians 12:4-11, John 2:1-11

     Every day water and matter and light come together and become food.

     Every day we take that food into our bodies and it becomes energy.  It becomes thought and language and action.

     Every day we turn fabric into clothes and trees into buildings and sounds into songs.

     Every day morning becomes afternoon and afternoon becomes evening.

     And this is all miracle.  This is all the work of God.    

     Christ is always turning water into wine and matter into energy and energy into matter and has been since the Big Bang, since the creation of the world, right down to this very moment.  We are the universe come to consciousness of itself, through Him and with Him, and every thought we have and every action we take are the newest things to come into being since the beginning of time.

     It takes an entire universe to make an apple pie, Carl Sagan says.  Or as a blurb I saw put it, on the cover of Michael Dowd’s Thank God for Evolution:  “it took the universe 13.7 billion years to produce this amazing book.” 

     And it did, of course, because it takes 13.7 billion years to produce every book and every object and everything we ever do or feel, and in every atom of it, every particle, the Spirit is at work, continuing to create the world.  “The Spirit produces all of these,” Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians, “distributing them individually to each person as he wishes.”

     “A thought,” says Teilhard de Chardin, “a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance, all these new beauties that appear for the first time, in me or around me, on the human face of the earth—the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it.”

     I know we all feel small and insignificant.  I know we all feel invisible. 

     But what could be more ordinary than a wedding feast?  What could be more ordinary than sitting together and drinking wine?  Most of the people at that wedding in Cana don’t know that a miracle has occurred at all. 

     But it has.  In some profound and invisible way Jesus has transformed their lives, and this is always going on, this is always happening, and it happens through us, or can.    

    The other day I saw a man go up to another man and pay him a compliment, he put his hand on the man’s shoulder and spoke a kind word to him, and I saw the man’s face light up, transform, and I felt the air in that room change, I felt some increase occur inside of all of us. 

     Just a look.  A gesture.

    “Any increase that I can bring upon myself or upon things,” says Chardin, “is translated into some increase in my power to love and some progress in God’s blessed hold on the universe.  With every creative thought or action, a little more health is being spread in the human mass, and in consequence, a little more liberty to act, to think, and to love.”

     This can work the other way, too, of course.  We can turn wine into water, through our anger or cruelty or selfishness or neglect.  But whenever we pray, whenever we think in reasoned ways, whenever we make something real and good, whenever we touch someone or help someone, it’s as if we contribute to some vast and invisible ecology, some vast and invisible organism, in ways we can never really understand, and slowly, without our even knowing it, a land that was “desolate,” in the words of Isaiah, a land that was “forsaken,” becomes a “delight,” becomes espoused, beloved.

     “We serve to complete the work of creation,” Chardin says, “even by the humblest work of our hands.”

    

     So if like me you sometimes feel that no one knows or cares what you’re doing, think of this:  that God knows and God cares--and your family and your friends--and what could be a better or more important audience than that?            

     Or if like me you fear growing older, if like me you fear death, if like me you fear things changing in your life, think of age and of change as water becoming wine.  As transformation. 

     And there’s another consequence of thinking in these ways, another effect, because to believe this is to believe, too, that Christ is present not just in us but in other people.  It’s to believe that other people are loved by God, just as we are.  Other people are filled with the Spirit, in their own particular ways.

     We are no less than they are, but also no greater.

     How would all our lives change if we kept this in mind—even when someone hurts us or disappoints us or makes us angry?  How would the world be transformed if we all acted on the assumption that everyone we see is beloved—however blocked or distorted their light might be?

    We each have our own small part to play.  That’s all.

     But that’s everything.

    

     “Next to the Blessed Sacrament,” says C.S. Lewis, “your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses, for in him also Christ, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”

     Of course the bread and the wine become the body and blood.  On some deep level everything does and always has done, and so do we.  In the Eucharist we become the Eucharist, or can, we become what we receive, every one of us here, you no less than me, and if we believe this and if we act on this, everything changes, in us and around us. 

     This is of infinite importance.  On this transformation within us—on this conversion--everything in the universe depends.   

    

Americanos

December 9th, 2012
Second Sunday of Advent
Baruch 5:1-9; Philippians 3:1-11; Luke 3:1-6


Barb and I really like Americanos with cream—we usually have one or two a day—but we’ve decided to give them up for Advent.

Oh the sharpness of the espresso against the smoothness of the cream!

But Advent like Lent is supposed to have its penitential aspect, too, and giving up Americanos is easy enough to do, and it saves us quite a bit of money over the course of the month. It’s a small way of making straight the paths for the Lord. Of preparing for the future that the scriptures promise.


Advent is all about waiting, it’s all about the future, and I worry about the future, the way I think a lot of us do. I fear it. I fear all the challenges of growing older and I fear all the challenges my children will face and in general I fear all the bad things that might happen.

But the readings today are calling us to be “confident,” to use Paul’s word from Philippians, and that’s a challenge, too, a discipline. To be joyous. To take off “the mantle of mourning and misery,” as Baruch says, and put on “the splendor of glory from God forever,” even though we know we will have to suffer, as Mary suffers in her life as the mother of Jesus, seeing what she sees, pierced as she is by the sword. But the child is born, and the child is beautiful and good, and in the end he rises from the dead and leads us all to eternal life so that not even death should frighten us anymore.

This is the pattern our thinking should take. Whenever we feel this anxiety we so often feel, whenever we feel this fear, we should say to ourselves, no, no: whatever happens, Emmanuel, God with us.


And in the meantime life without Americanos isn’t really so bad. I’m saving a few minutes each day, and I’m not wasting energy with anticipation, and I’m taking just a little more pleasure in the things that remain. The taste of an apple. A word from a friend.

Life is good. If what I worry about is losing things, if what I worry about is loss, maybe I should just relax. Maybe it’s all going to be OK.

Less is really more.


“This is my prayer,” Paul says: “that your love may increase ever more and more in knowledge and every kind of perception, to discern what is of value.” The root of the word “discern” means to “cut away,” and I think that’s the key. We can’t see what’s important until we clear away the clutter. We can’t hear the still, small voice until we turn off the noise. We prepare the way by straightening things out—making them simpler, plainer, less encumbered.

Even as the world is telling us to go in the opposite direction. To pile up the presents. To bury ourselves in things.

It’s not an accident that John the Baptist comes out of the wilderness. He has to. It’s only in the wilderness, in the desert places, far from all the pretensions and abstractions, that he can make contact with the real, and this is where he wants us to be, too. Out in the open. Out where life is simple and spare.

You know how when you’re talking to somebody and they’re looking over your shoulder at someone else? That’s what it’s like when we’re preoccupied with the future. We can’t see the people right in front of us. There are all these tags still left on the giving tree, all those presents that people need, and I bet most of us didn’t even notice them, we’re so busy planning the perfect Christmas. We still need two more people to serve at the women’s homeless shelter—we don’t have enough. How many of us even realized there was this gap, this need?

We have to cut away what’s not important so we can see what is, again and again. Paul prays that we increase in “every kind of perception,” and that’s another way of putting it. We need to learn to see in a new way. We need to learn to recognize what is truly “of value.”

“Repent,” John the Baptist cries. Metanoia. Which is to say: change your mind.


I guess there’s a contradiction here, and it’s at the heart of everything. Advent is about the future, it’s telling us that there’s something better to come, which is also to acknowledge that there’s something missing in our lives right now, something not quite enough, and that’s true, of course. We are always longing for something else, longing for God.

But on the other hand Jesus teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount that we shouldn’t worry about tomorrow, that we should live in the moment, the way the birds do and the lilies of the field. In the Eucharistic prayer we pray to be “free of all anxiety,” as Paul does, too, later in Philippians. “Have no anxiety at all,” he says, and what’s anxiety about if not the future and an obsessing about the future?


But maybe these two ideas come together, maybe they’re not a really contradiction after all, because in the very act of preparing we often become aware that God is already all around us. This isn’t the first Christmas that’s ever happened. It’s happened 2011 times already, and it’s always happening. The liturgical calendar only separates out what is always going on.

Christ is always being born and Christ is always being crucified and Christ is always rising.

Eternal life isn’t just in the future--though it’s there, too, and that should give us courage and that should give us hope—but it’s also here, in the present. When we get to heaven we will recognize it. We will have already been there, for whole minutes at a time.


Or is it this? Is this the idea?

That we need to be present in the moment in order to be present to our own emptiness and longing and desire?

Not to run away from our loneliness. Not to try to hide from what we lack. The reason to focus on the present is not just because it’s fulfilling in its way, though it is, but because finally it’s not and never can be. Nothing we can ever eat and nothing we can ever drink can take away our real hunger and our real thirst, and we have to sit with that and be with that and acknowledge that or we will never be free.

The only cup that can fill us is the cup of his blood. The only cup that can fill us is the cup of the new and everlasting covenant.

All that we long for and all that we need is the child who was born in that manger long ago. Is that little baby. All that we long for and all that we need is the child who will be born and who is always being born, in every atom and in every cell, the alpha and the omega, now and forever.

Here is Quite Enough

October 21, 2012
Twenty Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Mark 10:35-45

In my last homily I quoted from the contemporary mystic Ruth Burrows, and I want to quote from her again today, because she is so simple and direct, so wonderfully cranky, and because everything she says seems to be a commentary on today’s gospel.

Burrows is in her eighties now, a Carmelite nun living in England.

Here’s a passage that really spoke to me, from her book To Believe in Jesus:

"When we come to the spiritual life, when we bend ourselves to prayer, as often as not what we are wanting is that it will make us feel good, that it will change the whole feel of our life and that an aura will be cast over us and all around us. This does not happen. On the contrary, we are likely to feel even less colourful than before. Can we take this?"

I think this suggests something of the attitude of James and John in the gospel today, their mistaken belief that to follow Jesus means to become spiritually powerful and spiritually important when in fact it means obscurity and hiddenness and suffering. I know this passage applies to me. I want joy in prayer and only joy, and I want people to see me and admire me being prayerful, see me and admire me being humble and serving others. “Over and over again,” Burrows says, bluntly, “we must realize how in what we think of as our love and service of God, lurks a ravenous self-seeking which would use God to inflate self.”

But when God really touches us in prayer, when we really begin to move deeper, we begin to “shrivel up,” as Burrows puts it, to feel like “empty husks,” because we finally, if we’re honest with ourselves, we finally begin “to feel something of our sinfulness and total helplessness,” or we should. This is necessary. This is good. It’s only in moments like this, Burrows says, “that we really experience that we need Jesus,” and “everything depends on our living this out,” on our “letting go of the controls and handing them over to him.”

I mean, do I believe in Jesus or not?

Here’s a simple statement from Burrows: “Faith is a gift that we will be given if we choose to take God at his word and stake our lives on it.”

But then this straightforward question, this challenge: “Do we take him at his word?”

And Burrows’s answer is, no. Again, very bluntly, no: “It is simply not true of the majority of us, and I mean good, spiritual people, that we believe in Jesus and make him the centre of lives.”

The disciples certainly don’t in the gospel today, or they wouldn’t be fighting over who comes first. And I don’t. Too often I don’t. I question. I intellectualize. I try to explain things away and make them complicated and metaphorical, partly because I’m arrogant and want to be in control, but really because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the emptiness and I’m afraid of the trust it requires. “Everything depends,” Burrows says, “on our believing God is Love, utterly faithful, good and generous. Everything depends, too, on our handing ourselves over to God’s loving designs, asking for no tangible certainties.”

The absence of tangible certainties: that’s the hard thing for all of us, I think, but that’s the fact, the reality, and that’s exactly why all we can do is throw ourselves onto the mercy of the Lord, throw ourselves onto Him. There’s nothing else.

This particular gospel, this gospel today, tells us clearly and straightforwardly that we should be servants. We stop thinking about ourselves and serve others. Well, do we?

Because if we do, everything changes. Everything.

“By nature,” Burrows says, “we stand on the viewpoint of the self and judge other people, things, what is happening from that stand.” Yes, like the disciples today. Me. You. All of us. But faith, in contrast, faith “demands that we deliberately get off that stand and move to another, the viewpoint of Jesus”--and then, from this viewpoint, “how different everything looks.”

And something really practical follows from all this, necessarily, something really down to earth, and it’s what the disciples today are trying to evade. They want something better than they have. They want a more heroic adventure, a bigger stage, and so do we. But as Burrows puts it, “the truth is so devastatingly simple we are tempted to shirk it. The stark, overwhelming reality is that God is giving himself to us in the stream of the ordinary, mundane events of our ordinary, mundane life.”

We die to ourselves by living in the moment, the moment we have actually been given, and it’s sinful to want more.

This is it, this is now, this is what there is.

A few weeks ago, after I preached at the 5 o’clock Saturday mass, a woman about my age came up to me. I thought she was going to tell me what a wonderful homily I’d given, but instead she said that she was homeless and that she and her boyfriend had just hitchhiked here from the coast. Did I know of a place where they could stay?

So I did what any self-respecting deacon and spiritual leader would do. I said, go talk to that woman over there—go talk to Barb Anderson. She’ll know what to do. And she did. The problem was that this involved us piling all of the gear of these two people into the trunk of our little car, the giant backpacks and the sleeping bags, and giving them a ride up to the fairgrounds, where there were some camping spaces, and having to talk to them and be nice to them on the way. And the car started to smell a little different after a few blocks, and I was pretty sure this woman and her friend were manipulating us, and when the time came for them to leave I didn’t know if I should give them any money or not. So I didn’t.

And I should have, of course. I should have, even if they were manipulating us. So what?

“The life of every one of us,” Burrows says, “contains everything that the Holy Spirit needs with which to purify us of our selfishness. There is no need to look for more.”

This is the answer: to live the lives that we’ve been given, and to do the best we can each day with what comes, and to admit when we have failed, in our selfishness and our lack of faith, and again and again to take Jesus at his word. To die to ourselves. To serve others. And first to ask for the grace to die to ourselves and serve others, because we surely can’t do it on our own.

And to give up everything else. All this self-centeredness and anxiety. All this silly, useless striving.

“Divine love,” Burrows says,

"meets us in this real world and nowhere else: in this moment; in this circumstance, painful and humiliating though it may be; in this person; in the daily unexciting round of seeming trivialities which afford no measure of self-glorification. Divine love meets us here in our flawed, suffering, human condition, and nowhere else."