Jim Leadon

March 16, 2012
Jim Leadon’s funeral

The language of Jesus is wonderfully direct and concrete. He doesn’t say “the objective consequences of economic marginalization can be indirectly causative of spiritual transformation.” He says “blessed are the poor,” as Luke tells us.

Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who weep.

And the actions that follow from those words are just as direct and concrete. In the way Jesus reaches out to the lepers and the outcast. In the way he treats women as equals. In the way he welcomes all of us, whoever we are. There is a coherence here. A logic.

Jim was a man of words, but a man of few words, and of precise words. He disliked jargon and cant. How are you, I’d ask him, and he’d always say “still kickin’.” That was Jim, in my experience, that precision, that dryness. And Jim was a man who admired the words of Jesus, and who took Jesus at his word. He was no literalist--his shelves were full of Biblical commentaries--but when Jim read the Beatitudes, he believed them. When he read the parable of the sheep and the goats, he did what Jesus commands us to do. He served the poor, as best he could, “the least of these.” In his commitment to racial equality. In his commitment to the rights of women. In his commitment to all the Church’s great teachings on social justice.

In a way Matthew’s version of the first beatitude fit Jim really well. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Matthew says, which is to say, blessed are the humble. And Jim was. He was a quiet and humble man. But he was also a man with a deeply-rooted sense of what is right, and he acted on that conviction, all his life.

Sometimes it’s hard for us to keep our perspective as believers, there’s so much phony language swirling around, so many false distinctions. What the press reports about faith is either scandalous or silly. What our friends seem to think about faith is often depressingly negative. What we often get caught up in ourselves is trivial, or divisive.

But Jim bought this coffin in front of us thirty years ago, Bruce told me, and he kept it in his bedroom. A plain, cedar coffin, with ropes for handles. In his bedroom. For thirty years Jim woke up every morning in the presence of his own death, and not because he was morbid or strange, but because he was Christian. Jesus says that we must die to our false selves before we can we rise into the freedom and grace of the Lord our God, and Jim really tried to do that, given all the failings he of course had, too, as we all have failings. At the end, Bruce said, when he had lost the ability to form sentences, he was still able to say all the words of the Our Father straight through. Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be by thy name. But this is where Jim was always tending, where his life was always leading him, towards these simple words and this simple faith: towards forgiveness, towards compassion, towards a living in the now. All his life he had been stripping things away. All his life he had been dying, and so all his life he had been rising, and in this sense his physical death only seems to complete a process—his rising wholly and completely into Christ, his fulfilling of who he really was.

Blessed are the poor and blessed are those who thirst for justice. Blessed was Jim and blessed is Jim and blessed are we who knew him. For now he has inherited the Kingdom prepared for him from the foundation of the world. Now he is one with the God he always knew and always served, the God of all justice and the God of all hope.

Convertible

March 18, 2012
Fifth Sunday of Lent
Romans 8:8-11 and John 11:1-45

I know two brothers who were estranged for years. There was a deep hurt there. But one day the younger brother felt something shift inside him, something move, and he called the older brother and apologized. He wanted to reconcile.

This is the resurrection: whenever something like this happens to us. Whenever something shifts inside us. Whenever reconciliation becomes possible.

I know a husband who lost his job. His wife had to work two jobs to survive. They had to sell their house. And yet even through the bad years there was always this odd cheerfulness in both of them, despite everything. There was this confidence, underneath.

This is the resurrection: this inner assurance, that no matter what happens, God is near.

Year after year we hear the voice of Jesus calling out his name: Lazarus! Year after year we see him stumble from the mouth of the cave, trailing strips of dirty cloth. But however dramatic this scene is in the gospel, it really doesn’t mean that much, except as a symbol of the deeper truth to come. It’s not as if Lazarus can walk through walls. It’s not as if he won’t have to die again. It’s not as if people don’t know who he is when they pass him on the street. His rising was a merely physical event. It didn’t change anybody else’s life.

But Jesus did walk through walls, and even his friends didn’t recognize him except through faith, and whatever happened on that day in Jerusalem, it changed the lives of people then and is still changing them. As the Catechism tells us, the resurrection wasn’t merely a physical resuscitation but a “transcendent event” “not perceptible to the senses.” History can record the remarkable behavior of the early Christians after the death of Jesus. And it does, clearly. Something really happened, and it had tremendous consequences. And yet the resurrection itself, the Catechism says, the rising of Our Lord, “remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history.”

The tomb is empty. Only Mel Gibson shows us what happened inside. The gospel writers never do, because they can’t. He is not here, they tell us. He is everywhere.

I think this is really, really important, that we not narrow down the idea of the resurrection. We’re talking about God himself here, the very nature of reality, not some weird, paranormal experience. Here’s how Pope Benedict puts it in his book, Jesus of Nazareth:

Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data. The Resurrection accounts speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented—a new dimension of reality that is revealed. Can there not be something unexpected, unimaginable, something new?

I love the Pope’s last question. It’s the question at the heart of our faith. It’s the question that defines who we are: Can there not be something new? And the answer is: yes.

The resurrection didn’t just happen once and didn’t just happen in Jerusalem but is best understood as the experience in the early Church of a radical new hope, a radical new confidence, something the people experienced not just in spite of the death of their beloved friend but somehow, mysteriously, because of it, a joy and an optimism so deep not even torture and death could shake it, a joy and an optimism that continues in all of us to this very day, this very moment, justifying and demanding our own courage, our own delight, our own steady, unwavering focus. Christ has died and Christ is risen. Is. In our families. In our jobs. In the Eucharist that celebrates and glorifies our daily lives, revealing what is always and everywhere working in them. This is what Jesus made happen and makes happen. This is the space he opens up and this is the power that pours through it, ever undiminished.

A few weeks ago Barb and I flew down to Los Angeles to see our daughter. The car rental place didn’t have the car we reserved, so they gave us a Ford Mustang convertible at the same price, and suddenly I discovered a whole new dimension of my personality. It was wonderful, driving around in the sunshine with the top down, the palm trees flying by.

I don’t mean to be glib. I mean this. This is the resurrection: whenever something new happens. Whenever we feel joy. Whenever the sun starts to shine again.

Actually, the logic of all this is explicitly stated in the reading from Paul today, both for this life and the life of the world to come. It’s a syllogism. An “if/then” statement:

if the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you.

Well, there it is. First, that the resurrection doesn’t just concern what happens to us after death but is a way of understanding the spirit that dwells in us now through faith. Here, with the top down and the palm trees flying past. Here, when the husband and the wife persevere. Here, when the brothers reconcile. This is the spirit of Jesus raising us from our psychological death, our moral death, our spiritual death, freeing us from all that binds us, releasing us from all our various tombs.

But then, given this, there must be an afterlife. There must be a resurrection after death, because how could this God we experience in our earthly lives, this God who is so loving and so pervasive, how could that God stop loving us and sustaining us and making us whole? If we experience this God in the flesh, and we know in the flesh what the Psalmist calls his steadfast love, his hesed, how could we ever doubt that he will be us even beyond the grave?

And note: when Paul talks about the resurrection he never talks about it as a single, isolated event. He never refers at all to the details in the gospel narratives. He’s talking about the energy, the principle, the reality that flows through that event.

And note, too: a reality. Not a symbol. Not an idea. A reality embodied once and for all in the life and the death of Jesus, and in the life that somehow continued, that somehow just kept growing and expanding, even after he died.

This is what Christianity calls us all to believe and this is what justifies the courage of the early Christians and the confidence that is available to all of us even now: not some isolated spookiness, not something exceptional and extraordinary long ago, but something in the very nature of the human person, something in the very nature of things, something we can believe in and hold on to no matter what happens: a love, a creativity, a mystery.

Here, with the top down and the palm trees flying past. Here, when the husband and the wife persevere. Here, when the brothers reconcile.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world. Jesus Christ. Our life. Our question. Our hope.

Hands

February 5, 2012
Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Job 7:1-7; First Corinthians 9: 16-23; Mark 1:29-39

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Jesus came into our house? If he approached us, and reached down to us, and lifted us up? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he healed us of our own fevers, of our anxiety, our sadness, our fear?

But he does.

Sometimes we feel like Job in the reading for today. Our days are drudgery, empty and meaningless, “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” “without hope.” Sometimes we look up at the night sky and we think about all the stars and all the planets and we feel so small. He calls each star “by name,” the Psalmist tells us today. But how can that be? How can any one of us matter at all?

Under the weight of all this, the gospels seem like fairy tales, odd little stories told by people long ago.

But the stories of the gospels aren’t just stories. They’re lenses, they’re tools, they’re windows. What they describe isn’t ancient. It’s new. Jesus didn’t just live and he just didn’t die. He rose from the dead and he ascended into heaven and then he sent his spirit into the church and into the whole world. He took everything up into himself and then he broadcast it out again, so that now he is everywhere, he is in all things, and he has always been everywhere and in all things. “In him all things in heaven and on earth were created,” Colossians says, “things visible and invisible. All things have been created through him and for him. In him all things hold together.”

And this creation is still going on. We may imagine that it was finished long ago, says Teilhard de Chardin, but it wasn’t. “It continues still more magnificently, and at the highest levels of the world,” and we are a part of it, “we serve to complete it, here and now, even by the humblest work of our hands.”

Jesus leaves the synagogue today, he leaves the church, and he comes into peoples’ homes. He enters all the nearby villages. He is present, Mark says, throughout “the whole of Galilee.” He rises early and he goes out into the desert, he watches the sun come up, because he knows that God is here, too, in the hills and in the sky, in all the beauty of the earth.

The role of the Church, Pope Benedict says, “is to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality for the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host.” This, the Pope says, is “the great vision” of Chardin, this vision of a “true cosmic liturgy.”

The Eucharist, in other words, isn’t something that just takes place here at St. Mary’s. What happens in the mass is that we are opened to the reality that is always, always true. We are changed, or can be. We are made aware. Every Sunday we bring up the gifts, the work of our hands, of our week, and this bread and this wine is brought to the altar and blessed and broken, and then it is given back to us again, as it was the week before, and the week before--we take it in our hands--and then we go away again, into the parking lot and into our lives, being who we already were, being the body of Christ, because that’s our name. That’s literally true. The mass is never ended. Not if we go in peace. Not if we love and serve the Lord.

And this is why the new program from the Paulists, “Living the Eucharist,” is so important. It’s a six week program for Lent, to guide small groups towards a deeper understanding of the mass. It’s a very good program, with very good, structured materials, and the archdiocese has adopted it for all the parishes in Western Oregon. The archbishop is urging all of us to become a part of it, and I am too. The signups are in the bulletin today. All the information you need is in the bulletin.

The best thing about it for me is that each of the six group sessions is grounded in the ancient practice of Lectio Divina, divine reading. The program teaches you how to do it, it guides you, and the key to Lectio is the step called meditatio. You slowly read aloud the gospel for that upcoming Sunday and let the words invoke in you whatever memory or longing. You don’t analyze it. You free associate. You don’t think. You imagine. And the idea isn’t to focus on what happened a long time to ago. The astonishing claim of mediatio and of Lectio is that these stories are happening now, that whatever the gospel is describing is true in your life, too, at this very moment, and that the words and images of the readings can be used as a way of looking at your life and seeing this. Lectio expands our understanding of miracle: not just that Simon’s mother in law was healed or anyone was healed or any storm stilled or crowd fed. We don’t need to prove that or worry about that one way or the other. The miracle is now. We are being healed, our storms are being stilled. In our village. Throughout all of Corvallis. Who says there aren’t any burning bushes anymore? We just have to know how to see them. “By virtue of the Creation, and still more, of the Incarnation,” says Chardin, “nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”

A friend put it to me this way in an email. His goal during Lent is to deepen his experience of communion, not just at mass, but everywhere, “to be in communion,” he said, with “every moment.” I’d much rather “live in my head,” he said, but he is committing himself to a deeper discipline: to living in reality.

The other day at OSU I got a little angry with another friend and colleague. We were standing on the stairs before classes, talking about a particular issue, and I let my irritation show. I had to go and teach, but afterwards I walked down the hall to my friend’s office and knocked on the door. She turned around in her chair, smiling, and I started to apologize. But she shook her head, and she took my hand in both of hers, and looking up at me she said, “Chris, it’s OK. It’s OK. Just be yourself. Just be yourself.”

Jesus does come to us, and he does take our hand, and he does forgive us and love us. Every day. We have all been given what St. Paul calls “a stewardship,” and that gift is our own brief lives. We just have to be ourselves, which of course is all we can ever be. History has been abolished. Time has been abolished. Distance has been abolished. As the Paulists put it in their brochure for this program, we need to “renew our experience of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, as a mystery to be believed, a mystery to be celebrated, and a mystery to be lived.” A mystery: something we can’t reduce to magic or to measurement. And a mystery to be lived, on the stairs, not just on the altar, in our offices and our kitchens and our bedrooms, not just in the pew.

Last week Fr. Ignacio preached on the authority of the Church, and he was exactly right. The Church, he said, is flawed, it’s even corrupt sometimes, but through all that the Spirit still speaks and the Spirit still moves, as the Spirit still moves in us, despite our own personal sinfulness. This is the authority of the Church: the authority of our lives, of our deepest hopes and intuitions. This is the authority of the Eucharist: the authority of the world, of the universe, of all that is and was and ever shall be.

This is where is where the Lord is, at communion--and everywhere else we live and move and breathe: He is in our hands.

The Way of the Child

January 8, 2012
Epiphany
Isaiah 60:1-6; Matthew 2:1-11

The stories of Christmas aren’t just stories. They’re theology. The stories of Christmas aren’t just children’s stories. They’re about a child, they use the image of the child, and that image is telling us something astonishing about the very nature of God.

*

There’s the way of Herod, the way of the King in the story today, the way of power and domination and lying and deceit. It’s the way of the dishonest politician. It’s the way of the corrupt corporation. It’s the way of competition and consumption and it’s in the culture, it’s outside of us, pushing in on us all the time, and it’s inside of us, too, in our own natures, in our own appetites and insecurities. It’s the way of the world, the world that slaughters the innocents, as Herod slaughters the innocents.

A child dies of starvation every three seconds on this planet. Every three seconds. Four out of ten young girls are sexually abused in this country. Four out of ten.

But also: that the world tries to exploit any simplicity or enthusiasm, that something is always trying to tear us down and use us and consume us.

*

And then there’s the way of the child, there’s Jesus the way the wise men see him today, in the story of Epiphany: kicking his little legs, balling his little fists. A baby, cradled in his mother’s arms.
And this, the story is telling us, is God.

We keep getting this mixed up in our minds, we keep thinking of God in Herodian terms, as a dominating King, as a being of power to beseech or condemn, to worship when He helps us and to abandon when He doesn’t. But these Christmas stories are giving us a completely different image to contemplate. God is a child, and the way of God is the way of the child, the way of gentleness, the way of powerlessness, the way of ordinariness, the way of obscurity, the way of spontaneity, and this should be our way, too. This is the way of wisdom.

What’s wise about the wise men is that they seek out innocence even in the face of Herod’s inducements and threats. They don’t act out of greed and they don’t act out of fear. They follow the star, and it leads them to a child, and when they see the child they do what we’re supposed to do, too. They kneel. They give up their own claims to power and privilege. In the presence of the child they become children themselves.

What defines us as Christians is what we do for the weak and the vulnerable--and an inner gentleness, an inner orientation, towards listening and openness and service.

*


Isaiah tells us that when we behold the splendor of the Lord our hearts shall “throb and overflow.” We shall be “radiant.” Matthew tells us that when the wise men see the star they are “overjoyed,” and we all have moments like this. When we feel happy and free. Maybe the way we felt this Christmas, with our families. Any moment when the burden seems to fall away.

And these moments are normative. It’s in moments like these that we can discern the will of God for us, because God calls us in our joy. God wants us to be who we are, the way we were as children, before we learned to doubt and hide.

What are the terms of this happiness? What are the conditions that obtain when we are able to come back to our “own country,” to our true selves, as the wise men do at the end of the story? And when we go back to work, when the term starts again, when we reenter the fray, how can we keep from forgetting our own truth?

And how should we act so that others can do this? What conditions must obtain in the world for everyone to have this freedom?

*


We have to come back, as the wise men do, “by another way. “

We have to stand up to Herod, and when we can’t, we have to avoid him, as the wise men do. We have to slip away. Turn off the screen. Walk away from the abuser. Avoid the friends who are not really friends. In our minds, if we can’t in fact. We have to just not listen to all the false voices.

*

Mr. Rogers was a wise man, I think, a wise man who sought out the child.

And once he went to Washington, to the Whitehouse, to give a speech. And in that speech he asked the audience to take a minute to think of someone who had made a difference in their lives.

Imagine all those dignitaries, sitting there in silence.

After the speech, as he was leaving, Mr. Rogers heard something from one of the military guards standing like a statue at the door. He heard the guard whisper, “Thank you, Mr. Rogers.”

So he stopped, and he went over to talk to the guard, and he saw that there were tears in his eyes. And the guard said he’d been thinking of a great-uncle he hadn’t thought of in years. How this man had given him a fishing pole when he was a kid, and how important that had been to him.

And here’s how Mr. Rogers concludes this story:

"As far as I’m concerned [Mr. Rogers says], the major reason for my going to Washington that day was that military guard and nourishing the memory of his great uncle. What marvelous mysteries we’re privileged to be part of! Why would that young man be assigned to guard that particular room on that particular day? Slender threads like that weave this complex fabric of our life together."

This is epiphany: the gift of moments. This is the way of the child: an openness to those moments.

Not the Whitehouse. Not the speech. The guard, and the tears in the eyes of the guard.

*

Let’s all of us take a moment now to think of someone who was important to us when we were young, someone who reached out to us and helped us. Let’s remember who this person was and what this person did, and the effect that it had on us, and that it still has.

For just a moment, let’s hold these people in our hearts.

What marvelous mysteries. What slender threads.

This is epiphany. This is the way of the child.

Home for the Holidays (homily)

December 18, 2011
Fourth Sunday of Advent
2 Samuel 7:1-16; Luke 1:26-28

My mother used to get so excited when she got new carpets or countertops or drapes. For a while she’d be so happy. But it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. Gradually the sadness would start to creep back in. The bitterness.

At Christmas Mom would work so hard to make the house cozy and warm, and Christmas morning there’d be all these presents beneath the tree. And we were all excited, too, for a while, the three of us boys. But it couldn’t last. No stereo or sweater or game could take away the sadness that was underneath us. The emptiness.

And I’m a lot like Mom. Barb and I have had to do some remodeling lately, we’ve been choosing colors and textures and buying things, and I get so wrapped up in all of it, so anxious, as if we’re on some show on HGTV and the goal is to have the perfect house. I’m like King David in the reading today. We all are. We’re sitting in our cedar houses, our perfect little cedar houses, and we think in our smugness that we can build a house for God, too. That we already have.

But the Lord says to David, a little amused, I think, a little impatient: you, build a house for me?

*

People in the media are talking again about “the war on Christmas.” They’re upset that we can’t say “Merry Christmas” anymore. We have to say “Happy Holidays.” Baloney. If there is a war on Christmas, Christmas has won—corporate Christmas, consumerist Christmas. All we hear on any street corner are silver bells, silver bells, silver bells, ad infinitum, in every store and every mall, on every radio station. It’s enough to drive you out of your mind. People who have never darkened the door of a church and never will suddenly have the Holy Family out on their front lawns, Mary and Joseph and the little baby Jesus, right next to the Santa Claus in the inflatable helicopter. With some of these houses you can see the lights from space.

Let’s keep Christ out of Christmas. That Christmas. That phony Christmas. Because He already is.

*

For one thing it’s not Christmas yet, it’s Advent, and both seasons are better spent in a stable or a cave, without any lights at all. Any holly or mistletoe. God didn’t come in the form of a president or a rock star. He came in the form of a fetus in the womb of a teenage girl, an unmarried teenage girl, and a Jewish girl, one of the oppressed, one of the despised, and when he was born he was born way out in the middle of nowhere, way out in the desert, where nobody was looking and nobody would know except a few ragged shepherds watching their flocks by night.

This is the true temple: not some big, spectacular building, but the body of this young woman.

When the angel first comes to Mary, in this story in the gospel today, she doesn’t run around decorating the house. She doesn’t throw a big party. She asks questions. She ponders. And then she chooses, in her courage and her faith, she chooses to let this mystery and this darkness and this enormous uncertainty come into her, come inside of her. There are so many things to admire here, but I think what I admire the most is Mary’s radical silence, her radical, creative silence, alone, in that room, that bare, ordinary room, and we should imitate her. We’re supposed to.

Christmas isn’t about what we say. It’s about what God says. Our role isn’t to walk around saying Merry Christmas and being mad when we can’t. Our role is to be quiet and to listen.

*

That’s what I loved about the Immaculate Conception mass last week. It was just the mass. No Immaculate Conception dinner to cook. No Immaculate Conception half-off sales event. It was the mass, lovely and quiet and sweet, and Fr. Steve’s homily was making exactly the point we all need to hear, that Mary’s birth was immaculate not because of any worth in her, not because of any virtue in her, but because of what God chose to do through her, because of the inventiveness and action and love of God himself from the very beginning of this little girl’s life, before she had the awareness or ability to do anything at all.

*

We keep forgetting this. We keep forgetting that Christmas takes place around the solstice, the shortest day of the year. We keep trying to block out the darkness, to overpower it with light. But the wisdom of the tradition, the great insight, is that the coming of the Savior and the coming of the solstice are intimately and necessarily connected.

Mary isn’t illuminated by the Spirit. She is overshadowed.

What we’re afraid of is death. What we’re afraid of is that we don’t really matter and we won’t really persist and so we construct all these fantasies to distract us from what we think is the truth.

But the truth is that the darkness is full of grace.

There’s a poem I love by the American poet Jane Kenyon. She died in her late forties, on her farm in New Hampshire, and in this beautiful poem she writes about her coming death with a calm and an acceptance that I think is very like Mary’s acceptance of what the angel tells her.


Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through the chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun goes down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in the long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.


Not a mansion, just an old barn. Just a stable. And not blinding, artificial light. The darkness. The coming of the evening, like the coming of the solstice just a few days from now. And we let it come. We let it be done unto us, because only then can the true joy come, the real joy. Fr. Ignacio’s homily last Sunday was exactly right, too: that lasting joy is possible only when we stop thinking about ourselves and start thinking about God. When we recognize once and for all that we can’t make a perfect house or a perfect room or a perfect self. That only God can.

That God is our true home. That we belong inside Him.

*

And so I ask you to pray for the repose of the soul of my mother, and I ask you to pray for all those so desperate for home, so desperate for comfort and peace.

And I say to you: let evening come.

This solstice, let’s each of us sit in a room, in the early evening, and watch the light fade away. Let’s each of us sit and watch the darkness come. And the next day, in the morning, let’s sit in that room again. Let’s just sit there, quietly, with Mary, and ponder what this greeting means.

Because slowly the sun will rise. Slowly the light will come again. Without us having to do anything at all. Without us having to think or act in any way. Each day will slowly lengthen, each day will get a little longer, until one day it will be spring, and then summer, and then fall again.

One day the child born into darkness will rise, and light will flood the world.

Notes from Underground

Thirty Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Psalm 128; Matthew 25:14-30

Last week in my Bible as Literature class at OSU we were talking about the idea of “fearing” the Lord. And my students were really resisting that idea. God is loving, they said. God is our friend. We shouldn’t be afraid of him.

And of course that’s right in a way. God is loving and God is our friend. But that’s not all He is. There are many, many images of God in scripture and tradition, as king and poet and lover, as mountain and whirlwind, and all of them are partial, all of them are limited. We can’t assume there’s only one.

And we can’t assume that the nicest image, the easiest image, is the best. That’s the underlying danger here, in this generation of students, a sense that the best thing is always what feels good. That we should always be able to put our feet up. We should always be able to walk around in our PJs. And I think that’s an attitude in us baby boomers, too. We’ve so thoroughly rejected the distortions of the hell-fire-and-brimstone approach that we’ve lost sight of something really important.

“Blessed are you who fear the Lord,” the Psalmist says today, and of course “fear” here means respect. It means to be in awe of. It’s like at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind when that giant space ship is hovering over the mountain. People go quiet. They’re stunned. It’s like going to the Grand Canyon. There’s something really there, objectively out there, and it’s so beautiful and so vast we naturally stop talking, and should. That’s what God is and who God is: He is the Grand Canyon and Michelangelo and everything vast and beautiful rolled into one, and the fact that this God becomes a child, is born into the world and walks in the world and reaches out to us and tells us to be not afraid, only makes him still more magnificent and deserving of awe. That’s why we don’t have cup holders in the pews. Why we don’t eat popcorn during mass. This is the Lamb of God here, this is He who takes away the sin of the world, not some guy we met at a party.

A student comes up to me at the end of a class, six weeks into the term, and asks when my office hours are. I say, they’re in the syllabus. And he says, “there’s a syllabus for this class?” A student comes up to me at the end of a class and says that she didn’t bring pen and paper and so couldn’t do the quiz. Could she come to my office and do it later? Well, no. Sometimes I teach an advanced course in grammar for student teachers. Once a student in that class emailed me after I handed back an exam and said that she didn’t like her grade. She said that she “felt” she’d done better on the exam.

But it doesn’t matter how she felt about it. A verb is a verb. A subordinate clause is a subordinate clause. I really like my students. I think they’re smart and try hard and are finally no different than I am. But sometimes there’s a truth out there. There’s just something that is, and we have to adjust to it. Modern people, C. S. Lewis writes, believe “that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important!”

The third servant in the parable today says he buried his master’s money because he was afraid of the master. But that’s not true. He’s lying. He’s projecting. He’s making excuses, and the master knows it. He instantly sees what’s really going on. The servant, he realizes, is “lazy.” He’s lazy. The servant is kidding himself and kidding us because deep down he just doesn’t want to make the effort that reality requires.

Next term in a survey class I will teach once again a long short story called “Notes from Underground” by the nineteenth century Russian writer Dostoevsky. It’s about this small-minded little civil servant who hides in his room all day and nurses his grudges against all the people who have hurt him. At the end of the story he has a chance at redemption. He’s humiliated this poor young prostitute named Liza, treated her very badly, but for a moment she rises above him and rises above herself and feels compassion for him. She reaches out to him, literally, holding open her arms. But the Underground Man says no, he turns away from the chance for love, and here’s why he says he does it. Here’s his reason: Should the world go to hell, or should I go without my tea? I say, let the world go to hell as long as I can have my tea.

Incredible. Stunning, in its own way. And yet deeply familiar. Because this is us, too. This is us. Maybe not to this degree, maybe not with this kind of directness and honesty. But this is us. “Which is better,” the Underground Man asks later, “cheap happiness or sublime suffering? Well, come on, which is better?” The Underground Man has buried his humanity the way the wicked servant has buried his talents, and they’ve both done it for the reason we all do it. We’d rather be comfortable. We’d rather have our tea—or our latte, or the X Factor, or the internet. We’d rather have a cheapness and a shabbiness than the real thing, because the real thing is always too much trouble.

No one in scripture is ever said to have been sent to hell by name, not even Judas. This is a parable, and it’s designed to scare us, to frighten us, into changing our ways, as I think “Notes from Underground” is designed to frighten and disgust us into change. The Church has never in all its two thousand years ever said that any one individual has been sent to hell. That’s for God to decide, not us, and anyone who has ever said to you or to someone else that so and so is going to hell for whatever reason is simply arrogant and presumptuous and wrong. That’s not our business.

But our own choices are our own business, and those choices make a difference. It’s not too late for the Underground Man, even after all those years of bitterness. Even at the very end, he can be saved, as we can all be saved. Grace is always abounding. But some things are wrong, they’re just wrong--sin is real--and we have the choice and our choices make a difference and our little choices have a cumulative effect over time, they color us, they change us, and at some point it’s too late.

No, God doesn’t send anyone to hell. But we do. We send ourselves.

It’s not about having just one talent. It’s not about failing or succeeding. The master wouldn’t have rejected the servant if he’d tried to do the right thing and failed. We are loved, infinitely loved, for exactly who we are, whether we have one talent or ten or a thousand. But we can choose to reject that love and we do choose to reject that love and we need to stop and admit that and do something about it before it’s too late for us and we get contaminated, warped, shrunk.

We have to make that tiniest little move. We have to move, and if we don’t, we’re in serious trouble.

We have to wake up. We have to wake up and look around. We have to change out of our PJs and put on our work clothes and get to work.

Stones to Build With

Thirty First Sunday in Ordinary Time
Psalm 131, 1st Thessalonians 2:7-13; Matthew 23:1-2

In September, as some of you know, about forty of us went on pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi. It was a wonderful trip for all of us, I think, full of surprises, and one of the biggest for me was that I got to preach at St. Peter’s.

I didn’t preach to the Pope or to the Cardinals, just to the people in our group, and we weren’t at the main Bernini altar, beneath Michelangelo’s magnificent dome. But we were directly underneath it, in the crypt, in the chapel of the tomb of St. Peter—of St. Peter himself--and the ambo was marble and the pews were marble and all around us were the marble tombs of the Popes.

And I stood there in that place, and I preached the gospel, in a quavering voice, and the walls didn’t come tumbling down and I wasn’t struck by lightning.

There was a tremendous thunderstorm that night—there really was—a tremendous storm, in the skies above Rome, but I don’t think that was because of me, and in fact, I think I was the perfect person to preach that day, in the church named after Peter.

Poor, manic-depressive Peter. Peter, who declares his undying faith, and then turns around and denies Jesus three times. Peter, who jumps out on the water, confident and unafraid, and then sinks like a stone. Peter, that flawed, ordinary human being. I’m exactly like him, I could be his twin, and so could you. We all deny Jesus, three times and more than three times, we all jump out and sink, and yet Jesus has chosen me in my ordinariness and my blockheadedness, as he chose Peter in his and you in yours, and he never stops choosing us.

We fit right in to St. Peter’s. We all did. We belonged there.

“We are frequently tempted to censor difficulties, to hide them even from ourselves,” Monsignor Massimo Camisasca says. But this self-censoring, he says, is a “diabolical act,” “born of the fear of losing the positive image that others have of us.”

Our stature before Christ has nothing to do with this image, nor can it be measured in terms of the mistakes that we make or avoid making. Rather, it is decided by Christ himself and by our belonging to him. So to hide your own limits, your own problems, really doesn’t make any sense. You do not find freedom from your own miseries by censoring them but by handing them over to Christ, which is to say, by letting him embrace them. This embrace is like the one with which the mother enfolds her child in her arms.

I love this. It’s not that we should stop trying to defeat our sinfulness but that we should admit we can never succeed—not without grace, not without Christ. It’s not that sin is a good thing. It’s that we must first admit to it, honestly, before we can understand our need for God. And in this sense our sins and limitations don’t have to discourage us anymore. We don’t have to despair of them. In this sense, Camisasca says, we can see our sins and limitations as the very “stones to build with.”

These are the stones that Michelangelo used to build St. Peters. These are the stones of the Church.

And notice how Camisasca’s other image, of the mother’s embrace, echoes Psalm 131 today. When we surrender to God, the Psalmist says, we are “stilled and quieted,” like a “child on its mother’s lap.” It’s not that we have to wallow in our sins or be full of self-loathing. It’s that we have to realize that we are loved, loved anyway, loved first, loved for who we really are, and so we don’t have to pretend, we don’t have to cover up.


Now, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I don’t mean to imply that the people on the pilgrimage were running around Rome and Assisi sinning all the time, because the best thing of all about the pilgrimage was being with these people and getting to know them better. It’s just like in the parish. When you start to talk to people and hear their stories, you realize what faithfulness there is and what heroism, going on behind closed doors: people taking care of their mothers or their disabled children or their husbands or their wives, really sacrificing themselves, quietly, heroically, when no one is looking. People working at the soup kitchen or St. Vincent De Paul’s or the homeless shelters, giving away their time and their money, and never calling attention to that, the way the Pharisees do, not preaching at all, just practicing.
I keep hearing people talk about how corrupt the church is and how terrible it is and I’m really getting tired of it. What do they mean by “church” anyway? Who are they talking about?

We had several afternoons of free time in Rome and Assisi, on our own, and I kept coming around corners and seeing people from our group, when they couldn’t see me, and they were helping someone get up the steps, they were praying the rosary, they were giving money to a beggar.

Sure, we are all sinners, sure, we are all hypocrites, but that’s not all we are. The best thing about Rome wasn’t seeing the Pope, though we did see the Pope, and that was great. The best thing was seeing Jon and Ann, and Joe and Sue, and Barbara and David. The best thing about Rome wasn’t the Pantheon or the Coliseum. It was Leleli, and Walt and Carmela, and Mary Alice, and Chuck. Everyone.

“I give thanks to God for all of you,” as St. Paul says to the Thessalonians, so “dearly beloved have you become to us.”

And it’s the parish, too.

I came around the corner once at St. Mary’s and saw a parishioner raking leaves and a homeless man sitting on the curb. I was at just the right angle so that I could see them but they couldn’t see me. And the man raking leaves was talking to the homeless man, pleasantly, the way he’d talk to anybody else. They were just passing the time of day. The homeless man had long, stringy hair and he was missing some teeth and he probably hadn’t showered in weeks. But the man raking leaves stopped and asked his name and chatted with him for a few minutes, just like he was anybody else. Because he was.

We all have one master.

And no one was looking.


It was a sunny fall morning, and the light that was falling through the leaves was just like the light in Rome, that wonderful light that fills up the piazzas.

There are fountains in Rome, too, everywhere. The water flows down from the Apennines, following the course of the ancient aqueducts, and it bubbles up in these beautiful stone fountains, on every corner.

But every place is holy, Rome is everywhere, and the water that wells up is welling up in us. It’s inside us all.

The sun is pouring down and the fountains are welling up and everything is grace.

Everything is grace.