Geoff Wood Reflections

Reflection for February 5, 2012

2012-01-31T15:11:00.000-08:00

The Blue Mesa

I’ve never been to Mesa Verde (the Green Mesa or Table) in Colorado – but I have recently been to the Blue Mesa (a fictional version of Mesa Verde) in Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House. Like the actual Mesa Verde (which is now a national park) Cather’s Blue Mesa was a prominent feature of the flat landscape of the Southwest. It jutted up, “a pile of purple rock, all broken out with red sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs.” Thus it appeared to a young cowpoke named Tom Outland and his sidekick as they grazed cattle in the region over several months. “The mesa was our only neighbor (he wrote), and the closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was.” Even their cattle were seduced by it – for other cattle had crossed over to it in the past to become permanent strays amid its upper recesses.

He goes on to write: “It was light up there long before it was with us . . . the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim cedars along the rocks would be gold – metallic, like tarnished gold-foil.” As evening approached “the sunset color would begin to stream up from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great black-ink rock against a sky on fire. No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us, and was always changing. Black thunder-storms used to roll up from behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning would play round it and jab into it . . . I’ve never heard thunder so loud as it was there. The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though it seemed solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account for the . . . growl and rumble that followed each crash of thunder.” It makes you understand why God drew the ancient Israelites into the Sinai desert to snap them out of their nostalgia for the fleshpots of Egypt.

But that was not all. Tom went climbing into the canyons of the mesa. “I was soon in a warm sweat . . . In stopping to take a breath, I happened to glance up at the canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it . . . through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was like a sculpture . . . pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other . . . narrow windows . . . a round tower.” It was red in color – or like winter oak-leaves. Silent, in immortal repose. The village “sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.”

Soon Tom, his companion and a friend named Father Duchene studied the place – found artifacts spanning perhaps 800 years of habitation, which revealed the inhabitants (according to Fr. Duchene) to have been a provident people. “There is evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and shelter . . . I see them here making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man, purifying life by religious ceremonies . . . entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this stronghold . . .” Indeed, says the priest, as they advanced as human beings they “declined in the arts of war, in brute strength and ferocity.” (Could that be why they disappeared a thousand years ago?) Willa Cather became an Episcopalian in her mature years and was sympathetic to Catholicism – so that I wouldn’t be surprised if for her the novel’s Blue Mesa were a metaphor of the Church in some ideal way – a nest within which a sane, productive, creative humanity might grow – at least in its innermost recesses. Even today – in that sense of a sane, peaceful humanity nurtured upon the grace of God – it seems hidden to many people behind a formidable façade. But to those of us, who share Tom Outland’s curiosity about its innermost recesses, the arduous trek to its grottoed City of God continues to entice us.

Reflection forn for January 29, 2012

2012-01-25T10:43:00.000-08:00

It takes a while

Everyone must remember that story about young Francis Bernardone who, while reconsidering his profligate life, paid a visit to a run down chapel outside Assisi in Italy, knelt to pray before a painted crucifix and thought he heard Christ’s voice saying, “Go, Francis, and rebuild my house for it is falling into ruins.” So Francis bought materials and labored to refurbish the chapel. He did not realize the full scope of Christ’s words: that he rebuild the universal Church itself, as a whole; that he revive it from the complacency and politics and mere ritualism into which it had fallen. In other words, the message from the cross had a slow fuse as far as Francis was concerned; it took a while for his response to match the magnitude and depths of its intent.

The Gospel of John especially illustrates this tendency of ours initially to fall short of grasping the wider intent of Christ’s discourse, the Holy Spirit’s influence in our lives. For instance when Jesus says to the Samaritan woman by the well of Jacob: “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Taking him literally she says in effect, “How can you do that, since you have no bucket and this well is deep?” OK, the well might have been deep, but she was shallow – not deep enough into her spiritual life to understand the kind of depth perception, freshness, vitality the presence and words of Jesus could bestow on her. The same misunderstanding was shown by the Pharisees when Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” In effect they immediately thought, “There’s no bakery around for miles; where will he get sufficient literal bread for this crowd!”

Even the saved in Matthew’s parable of the last judgment struggle when Jesus says, “I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me.” They reply, “When was that? When did we see you hungry, thirsty, an alien . . .?” They couldn’t see past the faces of the poor they served to detect the face of Christ in each of them - and the presence of Christ in their own behavior.

In his poem about the journeys of St. Brendan John Savant writes of one monk showing dismay over the whales swimming just beneath the surface of the sea: . . . the young monk cries / “Whales!” And then fearfully, / “Many whales – one / a wee fathom under!” // And Brendan: “Why do / you fear? It’s shadows / that guide us, our dreams / that drive us, more / than ordinary light.” As Christians, of course, we trust that it is more than shadows, dreams – but the intervention of God as an undercurrent in our lives, bringing us with each revelation closer to him.

I have spoken in the past of an incident in my teen years when I was in high school. It happened during a music appreciation class – in which we bored freshmen had to listen to classical music instead of Glenn Miller. Then one day the brother played Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The melody woke me up, I snapped out of it, listened, felt carried away – I had crossed a horizon into a world of heartfelt experience. But you know what? The experience of something special, hidden in that music, only burst into bloom a few days ago when, during a discussion with some retired ministers, that high school experience came back to me with the message I didn’t quite get 70 years ago. It dawned on me that what the moment was saying to me, what Schubert was saying to me, what the Holy Spirit was saying to me was: I myself am an Unfinished Symphony; everyone of us is an Unfinished Symphony! A divine composition that shall never end! One could say with regard to that freshman moment in my life that Jesus got through to me - after all - with living water – having no need for a bucket.

Reflection for January 22, 2012

2012-01-18T11:20:00.001-08:00

Verifiable

Often when I meet with people to discuss Scripture the question arises: did this really happen. Take for instance last Sunday’s account of Samuel’s being awakened by a voice calling to him – so he goes to the priest Eli (his mentor), wakes him up and asks what he wants. Eli – probably disgruntled over being awakened – says he didn’t call him and that Samuel should go back to sleep. This happens three times before Samuel realizes God is calling him directly – and pays attention. Then there is the Gospel of last week in which the first disciples begin one by one to respond to Jesus’ invitation to come and see where he lives – and pretty soon we have a little procession of followers trailing behind this unusual Pied Piper.

Then there is today’s first reading about Jonah – being sent to Nineveh (a ruthless city) to demand repentance – and the Gospel reading about Jesus calling Simon and Andrew and then James and John to leave their fishing nets to join Jesus in “fishing for men”.

So it’s back again to the question that comes up: did these events really happen or are they fables. Well, I trust the integrity of the ancient writers – they are writing about things that radically changed their lives, recording moments that added up to great significance for them and others. To fabricate would only be to fool themselves as much as others. Of course such events are told with embellishment or a succinctness that captures the essence of what happened. But many people, because the Scripture is so ancient, wonder how you can verify these episodes.

Well one way of verifying them, trusting that they really happened is to study the course of your own life. All these events are verifiable in my own life; they have happened and continue to happen to me (and you?). The voice of God has intervened in indirect ways in my life since my childhood – even as it woke up Samuel in the night. Often I did not quite hear it right, went running to someone else for answers to the questions it raised and was just as often told by “people in the know” like Eli to go back to sleep. But sooner or later that “sacramental” voice really woke me up – in this classroom or in some startling or even ordinary experience. The same goes for the Gospel account in which Jesus invites his first disciples to “come and see” where he lives, how he lives, why he lives – and in the supplementary account in which he disentangles his disciples from their nets. The same beckoning, seductive voice caught my attention (and yours?) at several stages of my life, each adding up to a deeper knowledge of who Jesus is and what he’s about. That same beckoning voice disentangled me (and you?) from distorted notions of what’s right and wrong, from a sick sense of low self worth, from biases that I thought were virtuous – and so on.

Of course biblical scholars do hold the Jonah story (with his being swallowed by a whale) to be an inspired piece of fiction with a moral. But I can say, and so can you if you think about, that that whole story has happened to me. How often have I run away from God’s command to do something heroic, how often have I allowed myself to be swallowed up by fear, by self-preservation only to find my condition stifling? And how often have I with the help of God been thrown up out of the belly of that “whale” to follow God’s way as I was first commanded? So you see – every event – even the more imaginative ones – in Scripture is verifiable – both back then in many cases and certainly now, as I myself experience every moment of that ancient biblical drama.

Reflection for January 15, 2012

2012-01-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

Not always so prompt but - persistent

The Church has been compared to many things: a Mother, a City built upon a hill, a Sheepfold. The early Fathers of the Church sometimes compared it to the ship of ancient Ulysses, which wandered sometimes too close to hazardous rocks and whirlpools or whose crew let itself be seduced by siren songs of wealth and power or lolled away its time ultra-piously among the lotus-eaters – or (bedeviled by single-eyed Cyclopean giants) let itself become obsessed with “single issues” and thus apt to apply simplistic solutions to complex problems. Yet, whatever the winds that have assailed it, Christ has somehow always appeared out of the night walking on the waters to set us once again on course toward home.

It’s true that in these Gospels of January we hear tell of the first apostles responding immediately to the call of Christ – not hesitating for a moment. We hear they abandoned their nets, the many ties that entangled them, and followed him. But there are other episodes in the Gospels where, when Jesus summons people to follow him, they drag their feet, think of ingenious excuses to delay their response. In other words they are slow about it. And insofar as that also could be said about the Church as a whole down through history, it makes me think of another (and not entirely negative) metaphor applicable to the Church, namely: the turtle!

John Steinbeck must have studied a turtle quite thoroughly to come up with his wonderful description of one crossing a road in The Grapes of Wrath. The scene is a concrete highway in Oklahoma; a summer day. “And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass. His hind legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along.” Steinbeck notes how “his fierce, humorous eyes . . . stared straight ahead.” The turtle then came upon a steep embankment, which he investigated with head held high and then clawed and pushed his way up. Then came a new obstacle: the four-inch high shoulder of the road itself. Laboriously the turtle shoved itself up against this barrier until its shell stood at an angle whence its front legs could not touch the ground. But its hind legs kept pushing and pushing until the shell was high enough to plop over flat on the roadbed.

Now all seemed easy as, with all its legs working, the creature waggled from side to side - until one car just missed it, causing the turtle to withdraw its head, legs and tail tightly within its shell. But no sooner did it venture forth again than a truck grazed it, spinning it like a coin right off the road, where it landed on its back - all its feet waving in the air, “reaching for something to pull it over.” Somehow it righted itself and continued on until Tom Joad found it and wrapped it in his coat as a gift for his little brother. But in the end the turtle worked its way out of the coat, hid for a while within its shell to avoid the pestering of a cat, and was last seen walking “southwest as it had been from the first.”

The Church! Considered a slow moving phenomenon by many, but obstinately aimed at a destination of which this world seems so ignorant, carrying a heavy shell of tradition within which it retreats occasionally when under pressure but whence it emerges again under its compulsion to keep advancing toward its rendezvous with the Source of its being. The Church! Running into roadblocks, tossed about by the violence of controversy - but driven by the Holy Spirit to waggle on, bearing ever so awkwardly the burden of the Gospel. The Church! Namely, you and me, ridiculously slow to catch on yet likely to cross the finish line before Bugs Bunny - by sheer tenacity if not by speed.

Reflection for January 8, 2012

2012-01-09T10:13:00.001-08:00

A Winter’s Tale

What’s behind the title of Shakespeare’s play A Winter’s Tale? Unless I missed it, it says nothing about winter as a season. I’ve also heard it’s called A Winter’s Tale because winter was a favorite season for telling stories, what with being cooped up by the fireside for weeks on end. But I’m sure there are experts out there who would agree with me that it is called A Winter’s Tale because it starts out with dark, chilling events, the kind that makes our liturgy refer to winter as symbolic of how darkness (in the moral sense) always tries to quench the Light of the World, the infant Christ – even as Herod tries to do when he massacres the infants of Bethlehem or as tyrants down through time try to do – initiating such dark times (be they holocausts or cold wars) that have punctuated the century into which I was born.

Look how the play starts out. Suddenly congenial people like the King of Sicily (Leontes) and the King of Bohemia, friends since boyhood, have a falling out. The King of Bohemia (after a longer than 9 month stay with Leontes and his pregnant wife Hermione) is about to go home – when Leontes begins to brood. He lets his imagination suspect that Hermione’s child, recently born, is the product of an affair between her and the departing King of Bohemia. Things then get darker. Immediately he plans to assassinate his “rival” and execute his wife (remember, Henry VIII and his unfortunate wives were still a relatively current event).

Well, the King of Bohemia escapes back to his homeland – Hermione falls into a swoon and is declared dead; her newborn infant is spirited away to a foreign coast and left to die . . . all sorts of bad things flow out of one man’s sick imagination. The play is indeed rightly called A Winter’s Tale because it issues from a wintry, cold hearted, dark mindset – the characteristics of winter.

But what happens? After winter comes spring! The infant daughter who was left to perish on a foreign shore (hence her name is Perdita, meaning lost) is rescued from death by a shepherd! After a passage of 15 years she meets the crown prince of Bohemia, Florizel (note the allusion to flowers in his name). They fall in love and return to Sicily where Leontes has long since repented of his evil thoughts and deeds. They are welcomed by Leontes who is then reconciled with the King of Bohemia, a wedding is planned – and the play climaxes when Hermione is discovered to be alive after all. A friend has housed her in secret over all these years. She pretends she has commissioned a statue as a memorial of her – and now invites all the players to view the statue. The veil is drawn and Hermione comes to life before them (never having been dead) – much to the joy of everyone – even as the revival of springtime and flowers serves us as an Easter reminder of God’s wedding with Israel, with Mother Earth, with Mary, with Mother Church (as celebrated in our biblical Song of Songs).

So many parallels to our liturgical use of the seasons (passing from winter to springtime, from the King Herods of history to the risen Christ) – hidden within this play for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear! It says, all our long winter’s tale of history, of wars, corruption, death, greed, hatred must give way to a rebirth of light under the influence of the infant Christ at the Easter moment of his resurrection from the dead.

Reflection for December 18, 2011

2011-12-15T09:13:00.001-08:00

The shorthand image is that of the Annunciation, or a “terrible beauty” . . . breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. (George Steiner in Real Presences)

Back in the early 1950’s another seminarian and I were sent from Rome to the Catholic canton of Fribourg in Switzerland to learn French. During our weeks there I was once invited by a local family to spend a weekend at a mountain chalet near the village of Plaffeien – in the kind of world we find described in the story Heidi: “open to every ray of the sunlight and with a wide view of the valley below.”

Now this chalet was not the picturesque kind you find in travel folders. It was a rough wooden building partitioned into a limited space for the family and, under the same roof, a barn for their goats, cows and chickens. I can still remember as I tried to sleep in the hayloft above the animals at night how I could hear the shuffling of hooves, the lowing of some cow, the smell of their hides – as if the straw I slept on was not enough to keep me awake.

There is an opinion that it was just such a building in which Jesus was born. In olden times (even as today in Switzerland) herdsmen housed their animals along with their feeding troughs (mangers) not in exterior sheds but inside the house, a mere wall separating them from the human quarters. This may be why one English version of Luke’s account says Mary “laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them to lodge in the house.”

Is there any room in your soul for Christ to be born – or do you partition him and his mother off into some remote part of your being, far from the things you customarily dwell upon? Apparently the owner of the “chalet” where Christ sought entry was not ready or capable of taking him in – and so walled him off as if he were something less than human. We do that to a lot of people in our society (with whom the Christ of Christmas can identify). How much do you allow Christ to be a welcome guest within your living quarters, to illuminate the windows of your house for all to see?

In speaking of the lectionary readings for this Advent we dwelt upon the image of the Annunciation – suggesting that angels approach the quarters within which we confine ourselves (our cautionary abode) announcing Christ’s desire to “enter under our roof”. We mentioned the account about Joseph and how he was reluctant to receive him as he was conceived in Mary – but how he finally agreed and thus made of carpentry an immortal trade! We also mentioned Gabriel’s entry into Mary’s dwelling, asking her to take Christ within her womb. She too was astonished by the request but gave Christ the space to acquire a heartbeat within her and thanks to her within each of us.

How often does Gabriel come to you; how often does Christ seek shelter in this chaotic world within you as his means of reversing all that chaos? Most of the time he will come gently, quietly as at Christmas, most of the time in a thought, an insight. But he is not beyond coming violently, to sweep us off our feet. I mean he mentioned his having that option – as when in Mark’s Gospel he described himself as a housebreaker, as someone determined to break into every “strong man’s” house to tie him up (by way of miracle and word) and ransack all his goods. That’s how much he loves us – that if he can’t enter gently with the angel Gabriel as his herald, he may bowl you over, break down your door with the intensity, the relentlessness of his grace, his graciousness.

Reflection for December 11, 2011

2011-12-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

Bethlehem Round the Bend

It was with much anxiety that the adolescent Marcel (in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time) boarded a train in Paris and set off on his first journey to the seaside resort of Balbec. He was a boy who depended on a familiar environment and predictable routine to feel secure and this excursion to a strange location threatened to trigger one of his asthma attacks. Nevertheless Marcel spent a peaceful night in his compartment and awoke to see the sunrise through the square of his window. Slowly the train came to a temporary stop at a little station between two mountains and Marcel caught sight of a tall girl emerging from a house and climbing a path bathed by the slanting rays of the sun. She was approaching the station carrying a jar of milk. “In her valley from which the rest of the world was hidden by these heights, she must never see anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She passed down the line of windows, offering coffee and milk to a few awakened passengers. Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky.”

Marcel goes on to recall, “I felt in seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and happiness.” Normally his routine way of life would have insulated him from noticing anything or anyone beautiful – but here at a remote train stop situated in a strange landscape his insulation had given way. He was open to the impact of this apparition. He was ready to get off the train of habit and spend the rest of his life with this lovely apparition. He signaled her to bring him some coffee. “She did not see me; I called to her . . . . She retraced her steps. I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a sun . . . dazzling you with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating gaze, but doors were being closed and the train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn.”

I can’t help but think of Marcel’s train as an image descriptive of my life and perhaps yours. Doesn’t life for all of us become in some way a narrow corridor of habit – set upon wheels that convey us rapidly through time, equipped, yes, with windows through which we can catch a glimpse of the passing years, a passing landscape – of other people and an occasional sunrise? Otherwise our consciousness is confined – like that of the captives in Isaiah’s first reading and the Levites of today’s Gospel - to the familiar enclosure wherein we are lulled to sleep by the clickety clack of those wheels that relentlessly carry us through one day after another.

Until, thank God, we slow down enough to arrive at a station called Christmas, where we have at least a chance to stick our heads out the window and see the Virgin Mary, “flushed with the glow of morning”, offering us, if not a pitcher of milk, then a nourishment even more profound: her newborn son, destined to become one day our eucharistic bread and wine! But do we allow ourselves to savor this season of spiritual sunrise? Do we stay long enough in Bethlehem to allow Christmas to do for us what Marcel’s experience of that milkmaid did for him? How does he describe it? “It gave a tonality to all I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe, . . . from which to emerge now would be, as it were, to die to myself.” - - Time to sit up now! The narrow coach of habit that so confines your limbs and vision and mind and soul is coming round the bend. Bethlehem lies just ahead, offering you the vision of a real Sunrise and of a lovely lady dressed in blue and the experience – if only for a moment - of a world permeated with the poetry of God’s Word made flesh.

Reflection for December 4, 2011

2011-12-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

Continuity

It was – I must say – funny to hear ourselves mixing reflexes with will power last Sunday as some of us responded to familiar expressions of the celebrant like “The Lord be with you” with our habitual response of “And also with you” becoming entangled with the new response “And with your spirit” – creating a audible traffic jam that took the edge off the change, making for laughter instead of aggravation. Laughter is often the Holy Spirit’s way of resolving differences. I’ve lived long enough not to be disturbed by such changes in the Church – so many have come and gone. The Mass is the thing, its continuity; indeed continuity is the thing! As Catholics we value continuity – and if the intent of the language change in our English liturgy has to do with the continuity of essential beliefs – then so be it.

Why last week I happened to catch on TV a Charlie Brown film in which Charlie wins a local spelling bee and from there gets caught up in a series of regional spelling bees until he’s a competitor in a national one – limelight and all. His life has changed; great pressures promising great rewards or public ruin – the consequence of our modern quest for upward mobility. Of course, he misspells the word “beagle” much to Snoopy’s dismay. Charlie feels ruined, brought down to earth. Things will never be the same again. And then back in his own neighborhood he sees Lucy handling a football, teeing it up, apparently oblivious of Charlie’s seeing her. He approaches stealthily and makes a sure fire run at the football, only to have Lucy lift it up as usual. Nothing has changed – he has returned to a continuity that may be stressful but keeps us as viewers always happily expecting Lucy’s guile and Charlie’s gullibility.

I’ve been reading Henry James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady. It’s all about a late 19^th century young woman who wants to break out of the mold into which all such young women were destined to be wed: to be domestic, relatively uneducated, raise kids, serve as their husband’s trophy wife and so on. And she is determined to break out of that mold; she refuses marriage to an aristocrat, to an American industrialist – both real catches. She must expand her mind, experience life to the nth degree. In this quest she marries an American expatriate in Rome who is a connoisseur of art, seemingly wise, a likely source of insights that could broaden her mind. He turns out to be a tyrant, expecting her to abide by his likes and dislikes; he only married her for her money.

Desolate, Isabel (for that was her name) finds comfort in Rome itself, takes drives among the relics of antiquity, the old churches, St. John Lateran, ancient ruins. “She had long before taken this old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her own happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe . . . She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion . . . This is what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship of endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers . . . the firmest of worshipers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation.”

Now this is said by a writer of Protestant background and of a story character of similar background who find in ancient and Catholic Rome’s long accumulation of human experience a grounding that does not resist new experiences but enters into them as remembered as much as new. That’s called “continuity” – a Catholic value.

Reflection for November 20th, 2011

2011-11-18T09:40:00.001-08:00

There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility. Wallace Stevens 1942

In the days before television the trends of current events were presented to the public at the movie theater in a 20 to 30 minute documentary called The March of Time. The title must have been taken from that old saying, “Time marches on.” And so it does until whatever events were shown in that documentary have long since been swallowed up by time – indeed, even Time Magazine is getting slimmer and slimmer and may one day disappear like the people and events narrated in its contents.

You will hear Time’s relentless pace tolled out every day on our obituary pages – as in John Donne’s famous line: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And this relentlessness, this seeming inevitability of change, nothing holding firm, tends to get people down – so much so that in his Sonnet 65 Shakespeare can speak of Time as a kind of raging force which neither brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor . . . sea can withstand. And if that be the case, he asks, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower? / . . . how shall summer’s honey breath hold out / against the wrackful siege of battering days, / When rocks impregnable are not so stout / Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?

And yet thanks to our Christian heritage, we defy Time’s rage even as St. Paul defies it in today’s second reading where he says of the risen Christ: For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet and the last enemy to be destroyed is death. As Christians we believe that time need no longer be synonymous with death but experienced as a crescendo, as an overture to our living forever – somehow! And as such, each day becomes – no longer a roadblock – but a gateway to wider horizons. Time is redeemed. Indeed, if we are true Christians, really moved from the depths of our Scripture, we should confront the so-called rage of Time with a rage of our own. Or as the poet Wallace Stevens has written, we must confront the violence of meaningless Time with our own violence from within – which he defines as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality”. Translate “imagination” as creative faith, hope and love.

And so to Shakespeare’s complaint how with this rage of time can beauty hold a plea Stevens looks to art, poetry, and I might add the beauty of today’s Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Specifically Stevens refers us to the rage evident in the watercolors of the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whose flowers “make no pretence to fragility. They shout, explode all over the picture space and generally oppose the rage of the world with such a rage of form and color as no flower in nature or pigment has done since Van Gogh.” (Look up Epstein’s flower images on Google.com.)

As Christians we are often encouraged to be gentle, sweet, calm, pious amid the storms of life. But maybe rage should be the better expression of what we believe (as it was in subtle ways in the writings of Flannery O’Connor). Like Christ (whom we honor as so much more noble than monarchs of old, whose noble rage was shown when he chased the money changers from the Temple) we ourselves should live nobly, defiantly in the face of all that would reduce us to timid souls, cringing within an ominous universe. We should affirm life and beauty, stand up to all that has made of Time a dead end against which beauty cannot hold a plea, being so fragile. But what was Christ raised upon the cross but someone fragile – and yet he rose again as someone of whom the Book of Revelation says: His eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. Like an Epstein dahlia?

Reflection for November 13th, 2011

2011-11-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

“I will open my mouth in parables, I will announce what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.” Matthew 13:35

I never did enjoy John Fowles’ novel: The French Lieutenant’s Woman. You follow the story looking forward to its conclusion and what happens? Fowles offers us a choice of three endings: 1. the hero marries his fiancée and not “the other woman” and the marriage falls flat; 2. the hero drops his fiancée and goes for “the other woman” who then takes off and disappears; 3. the hero finds “the other woman” again but things turn sour, so off he goes to America.

As passive readers we don’t like to have to choose between such alternatives and especially when each leaves one hanging! We expect the author to finish the job. We feel he owes us an ending without our having to work at it. We expect stories to end in a standard pattern - with the good guys winning and the bad guys losing as exemplified in last week’s parable of the ten virgins and this week’s parable of the talents.

Both live up to what we expect of a story. In the one the five wise virgins retain a supply of oil for their lamps and gain access to the wedding feast while the other five, foolish enough to have no reserve, end up outside. In the other, those who increased their talents are promoted while the fellow who buried his ends up gnashing his teeth. Nicely symmetrical, wisdom rewarded, stupidity punished!

But then I wonder! Are we to read these parables passively or does Jesus (and the Church) challenge us to come up with alternative endings to each, even as John Fowles does for his story? I mean, may we not rewrite the parable of the ten virgins so that we, as the wise virgins, share whatever surplus of oil, of luminosity we have with those who for whatever reason have exhausted their fervor, their capacity to brighten the world around them with faith, hope and love? Must those whose souls are empty have doors shut in their faces, never to share in the wedding feast of the Eucharist?

Or to switch to the parable of the talents – must it end with the poor fellow who buried his talent left to wail and grind his teeth in an anguish of crippled self-esteem? I mean, why can’t we change that, to intervene, to say to him, “We know that you are an anxious fellow when it comes to responsibility; that you impose on your master a stern visage even though he has already shown you confidence enough to bestow upon you a worth that’s meant to grow. So snap out of it! Step out of your intimidation; trust that whatever spiritual initiatives you may undertake will widen and deepen your experience of life. So here! We now give you two talents, as evidence of our faith in you and in the Holy Spirit to inspire you. Try again!”

I mean, may we not say that Jesus, having closed these two parables within the standard endings we expect, only did so to challenge us to rewrite their endings in ways that correspond to the behavior he describes in his Sermon on the Mount and to the way he himself behaves with people who are lame, paralyzed, immobilized, foolish, hesitant - mercifully?

Certainly, as far as our own lives are concerned, these parables are presented to us at our liturgies to encourage us to change the ending of our own stories. To encourage us to acquire a surplus of warmth and light to share with others; to be cognizant of the worth God has already bestowed on us and ever ready to multiply that worth by the graciousness we show to others.

Reflection for November 6th, 2011

2011-11-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

“It is a good and holy thing to think of the dead rising again.”

“I never saw color as this year; the trees are like lamps, with the light coming from within.” So thought Cleotha Powers - in Paul Horgan’s story “The Peach Stone” - about the passing of peach orchards as she along with her husband began the long drive from their ranch amid the tumbleweed of New Mexico to transport the body of their two year old daughter (contained in a sandpapered wooden box) to the family burial plot in Cleotha’s girlhood town of Weed. The orchards reminded her also of how as a girl she used to catch up the peach petals by the handful, crush them and wrap them in a handkerchief to place in her bosom so that she might smell like peach blossoms – and of how her girlfriends used to say that if you held a peach stone in your hand long enough, it would sprout. But then no one wanted to hold a peach stone that long to find out and so they would laugh about it. But Cleotha believed the saying – and she especially believed it now in her bereavement.

Indeed, ever since she woke up that morning a spell had come over her. She had done all her weeping the night before. And now she never wanted to merely look at anything anymore; she wanted to see, to watch for any signals of something grand and eternal within the ordinary contours of reality – so much so that instead of relaxing for the journey ahead she felt herself leaning forward in the back seat – reaching with her eyes beyond the windshield - singling out things like this unusual beauty of the peach orchard. Or look - that dead tree! But still there’s that little swarm of green leaves on its top branch. And what’s that dazzling light on the road – like a ball of diamond light which danced and quivered so far ahead? Could it be a daytime star, sent to guide them? That it might only be sunlight reflected off the metal of an oil truck made no sense to her because, as I have said, Cleotha was trying to see! She wanted to catch a glimpse of where her daughter, whose inert form lay beside her, had gone.

And hasn’t that been the question that has preoccupied us ever since the dawn of our species? Our appetite for life and love, our insatiable curiosity bridles at the thought of our being ultimately and forever confined within a space of six feet by two. We want to know! And it was this need to know that now possessed Cleotha. Or to put it theologically, she was operating now out of faith and hope – that pair of eyes with which sorrow and love endows us. And so the most consoling thing she finally saw, once she and her relatives and friends knelt by the burial plot halfway up Schoolhouse Hill, was a boy coming down the hill from the school. He was framed in sunlight and she couldn’t help but notice his wonder at the people kneeling mournfully around a grave. So innocent of death, discretely coming down the hill shying away from the mystery and yet large eyed with a hunger to know in ways his schoolhouse will not teach him. And Cleotha found in his respectful curiosity confirmation of her own and all humanity’s need to know, to envision that “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns” that she cried out, “I believe, I believe” and she said it “as if she were holding the peach stone of her eager childhood in her woman’s hand.”

I’ve been holding a peach stone in my closed fist for 18 years now. And I’ve been leaning forward, not just looking but trying to see amid the unfolding wonders of Autumn signals of an even greater glory to come – somewhere beyond the windshield of my mind. And what I’m precisely looking for is the gradually unfolding presence of the son I knew, who I hope has had the patience to wait for me upon whatever path he has been traveling since his death, so that together we may continue what – so many years ago – was just beginning to be fun.

Reflection for October 30, 2011

2011-10-31T10:04:00.001-07:00

You have but one Father in heaven and one master, the Christ (Gospel Acclamation)

When I was a minor seminarian (the stage of training that covered our high school education and first two years of college in a residential environment) – we were required to spend our afternoons and evenings in “study hall” in silence, preparing for the next day’s classes. (As a result I received good grades in this phase of my training because I HAD to study! If I had been on my own in a loose set up at home, I would have fallen so far behind that – well, one semester prior to my entering the seminary (while I was in first year high school, after three semesters) I received the Distinguished Flying Cross in Latin – i.e. a D an F and a C!

But getting back to my minor seminary days, there came a time, when I became an upper classman, that I was assigned to monitor the study hall – sit up front at a high desk and make sure that people were studying, that no passing of notes or monkey business was going on. I was, therefore, no longer among the peons but placed in charge! What a change in my personality! As soon as I saw or thought I saw any of the underclassmen giggling or whispering from desk to desk – in other words, challenging my “authority” (in other words trying to “make a fool of me”), I shouted out like some top sergeant – frightened even myself – in order to enforce order, to get people back to their books.

I didn’t like what I did; it seemed to have to do mainly with my ego – I wasn’t getting the respect I should get as study hall monitor and I soon abdicated the role – again probably to conceal my vulnerable ego under a low profile. Rising to a position of authority, therefore, has its risks; it can detach one from a sense of solidarity with others with whom you were so recently rubbing shoulders. Today’s readings – if read closely – deal with the importance of our not forgetting our sense of solidarity, of our sibling relationship – even when it is necessary for someone of us to be “in charge”.

The theme of this Sunday is stated in “Have we not all one father? Has not the one God created us?” and “Call no one on earth your father; you have but one Father in heaven,” which Gospel statement is repeated as our Alleluia refrain, if you listen closely. In other words, it is imperative that both those in charge of the community (at all levels down even to study hall monitor) not let the distance of their status elbow out the fact that we are all brothers and sisters of God’s family and should treat each other not as inferiors but as kin, even as peers, personally, as members of a family of faith that’s buffeted enough from the world at large not to need aggravations from within.

That’s a hard thing to maintain, a family tone to our interactions. The scribes and Pharisees whose authority still intimidated many a Jewish Christian in the days of Matthew seemed to have forgotten that sense of family; tended to embarrass God by their “shouting for order in the study hall” (which so often begets a shouting match among their subordinates) - instead of all members of the family valuing, loving one other as siblings under God.

To which the prophet Malachi pleads, “Why then do we break faith with one another, violating the covenant of our fathers” or of our one Father – whose presence is made sacramentally manifest at the head of our one table - in the Christ of the Eucharist?

Reflection for October 23, 2011

2011-10-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

Declining the Frisbee

Toward the end of the Gospel of Saint Matthew (which is the Gospel from which our lectionary readings for this year are selected) Jesus is confronted by priests and scribes (experts in the Law of Moses) relative to the major topics of 30 AD – whether there is a resurrection from the dead, whether Jews should pay taxes to Caesar, what is the relative importance of the many commandments of Jewish Law. By the way, according to scholars, the Law was not simply the Ten Commandments but included an additional 613 other commandments, 365 interdictions and 248 other prescriptions – so that the question of priorities was bound to arise.

Many rabbis underscored the equal importance of all the maxims in expressions like: whoever transgresses but one of the commandments breaks his relationship with God just as much as anyone who transgresses all the commandments. Or: the lightest commandment should be held as important as the gravest commandment. Or: if anyone transgresses loving one’s neighbor as oneself, he will soon wind up hating his neighbor even to the point of bloodshed. Not much room for latitude in any of these cases. So something of these extreme interpretations of the Law lay behind the question put to Jesus: “Teacher, which commandment of the Law is greatest?”

But is this question sincere? So often in an argument someone will ask a question, pretending to seek information – no ulterior motive. But just as often, if not more often, someone asks a question already knowing the answer he wants! He does not really seek information but wants to test someone, wants to catch someone in his speech (as might happen at an Inquisition). Jesus seems to have detected this motivation among the authorities that question him in Matthew. It’s as if they launch a Frisbee at him and every time he refuses to catch it and get trapped in a give and take that leads nowhere. No, rather he always lets the Frisbee fly past his ear as he lifts the discussion to a higher plane.

In this case, Jesus doesn’t get lost among the trees of the scribal forest – to select this commandment or that. He simply sums up the whole law in a combined quote from the Old Testament books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is its equivalent: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” He concludes: the whole of Scripture (and your life) pivots upon these two commandments – to love.

In effect he seems to say, stop becoming unhealthily scrupulous over things like gleaning wheat on the Sabbath or touching unclean people like a leper or Gentile. Reach down deep into the love that made you and let that flow forth – even as that wonderful river in the Book of Ezekiel flowed forth from the Temple and turned the Salt Sea into something sweet. If you adhere to this principle, the details will take care of themselves.

Spontaneous goodness – such as characterized Jesus – will prevail. Become a virtuoso when it comes to virtue and not forever an amateur.

There follows in Matthew then a whole chapter in which Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of the scribes – in terms like “Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.” Which leads to the question: are you as scrupulous about love and a deeper exploration of your faith as you are about your posture in church?

Reflection for October 16, 2011

2011-10-13T16:26:00.001-07:00

Free at last!

I think it was in the autumn of 1941 (when I had entered first year high school) that the popular painter Norman Rockwell came out with his now famous illustrations of the Four Freedoms. We were not at war yet but we were sympathetic to Great Britain in its stand against the totalitarian system of Nazi Germany. Indeed President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had met on an American cruiser in a bay up in Newfoundland in August of that year to frame what has been called the Atlantic Charter – a declaration of Four Freedoms to which the democracies of the West were dedicated.

Now “freedom” was something the United States embraced way back in 1787 when Congress approved what is known as the Bill of Rights. The first two clauses speak of the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, of the press, the right to peaceable assembly and the right to retain arms. But when President Roosevelt first stated the Four Freedoms of 1941 in his State of the Union address he repeated the ideal of freedom of speech and worship (in keeping with the Bill of Rights) but added two more: freedom from want and freedom from fear. The freedom from want no doubt expressed his political philosophy embodied in such programs as Social Security. It meant that nobody should be subject to extreme need anywhere in the world. Freedom from fear meant nobody should have to put up with ruthless dictatorships, for example.

I remember well Norman Rockwell’s paintings – especially the freedom from want illustration showing an extended family on Thanksgiving Day, the aging parents laying down a platter containing a huge turkey upon a table full of other traditional foods and surrounded by the smiling, laughing younger members of the family.

But if we ponder our heritage of all such freedoms it comes across more often as having to do with “my rights” or as “freedom from” something. We don’t want to be oppressed. We want to be valued. Often in the last 70 years if comes across in terms of such songs as “I did it my way” or expressions like “I gotta be me” or in spiritual quests that take one far away “from the madding crowd” – like to India or Antarctica! Freedom seems to mean don’t crowd me; I should be able to do as I d----d please. It seems almost anti-social.

Is this what the Bible, what the Gospel mean by freedom: “Don’t tread on me”? The freedom to which the Gospel calls us is the freedom to love, to care! I mean I look at myself. In what way am I really in bondage? In what way am I kept bound, restrained, enslaved? I want to love, to break loose, to care but how much am I handicapped by the inherited prejudices of my ancestors, the party politics of my environment, my parents’ constant warnings not to trust anyone, the paranoia I pick up reading the news, the threat of failure in school, the presence of competitors who are more savvy than I, the precarious nature of my economic existence, my own sloth . . . I could go on listing the things external and internal that hold me back from doing the thing I really want to do which is ultimately to love, to care, to relate, to be generous, to be courageous, to be my best self, to be Christ.

May that not be the freedom that Martin Luther King longed for when he cried out “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty I’m free at last!”

October 9, 2011

2011-10-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

Il Sacro Speco (The Holy Cave)

About forty miles east of Rome you run up against the mountains around Subiaco, the region to which a young St. Benedict retired around 500 A.D. to live in solitude and contemplation. An older hermit showed him a cave high up on the cliff of a canyon and there he remained until, drawn by appeals of others, he emerged to found the present monastery at Subiaco and the Benedictine Order which went on to civilize Europe’s barbarian ancestors. The original cave can still be seen within the walls of the precariously perched priory that was built around it ages ago. It has been incorporated into a series of three chapels dating from before 1100 A.D. There is a large upper chapel from which a stone stairway leads to the chapel built around the cave itself. Each chapel is a jewel. There are arches and slender columns, a marble altar covered with gold, blue and crimson mosaics. But most overwhelming are the frescos dating from as early as 700 A.D. which cover every square foot of wall and ceiling.

Obviously the monks who created these chapels were not content to hear the Gospel. They needed to see it happening all around them. And so they painted the walls and ceilings with splendid impressions of Gospel events. The upper chapel portrays the whole climax of Christ’s life, from his entry into Jerusalem, the kiss of Judas, the flight of the disciples, his crucifixion, the meeting with Mary Magdalene in the garden, his confrontation of doubting Thomas, to his ascension into heaven. There it is in reds, blues, purples, silver and gold. And then there are iconic images of Mary and saints. In the lowest chapel there’s even an image of St. Francis, painted from life when he visited the place in 1223. It’s tucked behind a corner at shoulder level and when you stumble upon it in all your vulnerability, his wide open, gracious eyes look right into your soul.

Well, as if the art weren’t enough, when Jane and I visited this treasure there was a wedding in the upper chapel. In other words, we were lucky enough to experience the place not as a mere museum but as an environment alive with faith and love. It was as though all those frescos were hardly relics of the past but beautifully present participants in the current event, beaming down with eyes strangely alive upon the equally beautiful bride and groom, family and friends - who were also beautifully attired. (Looking at them I understood why Italians rank among the foremost fashion designers in the world!)

Bellezza! Beauty! That’s what summed up for me the whole experience of that place and moment. Beauty. And after all, isn’t that what religion is ultimately about: becoming beautiful, perceiving and creating beauty everywhere, behaving beautifully and not just puritanically? And then I shuddered - for, standing there amid all that beauty dressed as I was in the khaki trousers, sports shirt and hiking boots of your standard American tourist, there came to my mind today’s Gospel about a wedding feast and I expected someone at any moment to approach me like the king in the parable and ask: “My friend, how is it you came in here not properly dressed?”

And I thought, “By golly, I’ve got to acquire a change of wardrobe. Not only literally but spiritually. I’ve got to divest myself of all the sourness and whining and grinding of teeth, the resentments, anxiety, excuses - the things that perpetually mute my beauty. I’ve got to get more joy, faith, love, vision, grace - in a word - more beauty into my life if I am ever to become eligible to enjoy the world of Christ so beautifully reflected here within this Sacro Speco of Subiaco.”

Reflection for October 2, 2011

2011-10-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

A vine from Egypt you transplanted; / . . . It put forth its foliage to the Sea, / its shoots as far as the River. Psalm 80.

It’s good to get away. Jane and I decided, before the cold weather sets in, to return to Italy for a couple of weeks this past September. We chose the town of Spello, which is not far from Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis whose feast occurs on October 4^th. Spello is a hillside town, not large, built within an ancient wall, narrow streets, tile roofs, a parish church with a threefold fresco of the Annunciation, Birth of Jesus and the boy Jesus instructing the doctors in the Temple – done by Pinturicchio around 1500 AD. I must say, surveying these magnificent paintings with all their detail, contemporary faces, garments, landscapes, angels, golden haloes, colors, with all the imagination and work that must have gone into them . . . (my apologies to devotees of modern art) but they make Picasso look like a scribbler.

And what I mean by its being good to get away to a place like Spello and surrounding medieval towns like Deruta and Montefalco is – it revives one’s appreciation of the beauty all around us here and now; it rinsed my own vision of the familiarity that beclouds my appreciation of our Sonoma Valley – makes it come alive, fresh again even as the Valley of Umbria seen from our Spello window appeared so fresh, so much a painting, a work of art in itself.

Which ties in with our readings about vineyards for today. Our biblical writers use the metaphor of a vineyard to describe the world as God made it, as God wants it to be, as we should cultivate it. But familiarity, the distractions of politics, of commerce, of gossip, of self-interest – all those things that blind us to the deeper meaning and beauty of creation – turn this vineyard world (and valley) into a blur as we speed down Highway 12 or Arnold Drive – turn it into something that (figuratively speaking) might as well be unpruned, overgrown with thorns and briers, parched, open to trespass by every passerby or “beast of the field” as far as our notice is concerned.

For you see, it is not God (as the biblical readings suggest) who lays our vineyard world waste, but we in so far as we live detached from God, each other, the landscape out of which we were born, of which we are meant to be not just spectators but participants – even as St. Francis saw in the Sun, Wind, Air and Fire brothers; in the Moon, Water and Death sisters, in the Earth itself a Mother – in the whole of the universe around us on and beyond the reach of this globe – a Family of which we are the Care-Takers (the people who should Care!).

Why I reaped the reward of our trip to Spello this very morning when, in walking around the Plaza at dawn, the eastern sky, the silent trees, flowers, the chill in the air, the shops, the lamplights – after having become somewhat strange from seeming outside me for so long - quietly greeted me personally – you might say as a quiet vineyard, an environment no longer laden with sour grapes.

And so may we not make our prayer that of the Psalm for today: Once again, O Lord of hosts, / look down from heaven, and see; / take care of this vine, / and protect what your right hand has planted. // . . . give us new life, . . . / O Lord, God of hosts, restore us; / if your face shine upon us, then we shall be saved.

Reflection for September 4, 2011

2011-09-06T10:59:00.001-07:00

God would never make it as a CPA.

At the end of James Joyce’s short story “Grace” a congregation of Dublin gentlemen has gathered in the Jesuit Church in Gardiner Street to attend a retreat service led by an imposing preacher named Fr. Purdon. The men were mostly dressed in black, relieved here and there by tweeds. They included mostly commercial people, city clerks, moneylenders, even the owner of three pawnbroker shops – men of business (some with alcohol problems). The text chosen by the preacher was Luke 16:8: For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the Mammon of iniquity.

The preacher went on to say that this text was a text for business and professional men – like his congregation. He said he was there in the pulpit for no terrifying purpose (he wasn’t there to scare them into virtue) but as a man of the world, familiar with money, speaking to his fellow men. And so, even as they believed in tallying and verifying their accounts in every point, so they should rectify their accounts in this and that, balance discrepancies and come out even with God. (A celestial version of the Income Tax?)

That’s a smart way of getting through to commercial fellows; it talks their language. But if accountability is Fr. Purdon’s take on the Gospel, it doesn’t quite measure up to God’s way with us in September’s Gospel readings. There we hear Peter ask, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” And Jesus answers, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.”

He then tells of a king who wrote off a cheating servant’s debt out of compassion only to hear that this same servant squeezed the last drachma out of a person indebted to him. Rigid accounting despite experienced generosity! “All right,” says the king. “If you insist on a strict quid pro quo way of life, you shall henceforth live under the torture of a relentlessly quid pro quo concept of God – a creed without grace, compassion, forgiveness.

Then there’s that other parable in which a landowner hires early birds at $10 dollars an hour. In the course of the day he hires others at noon, three, five . . . When eleven hours are up he pays the early birds their $110 but grants a full day’s pay to the latecomers as well. That’s bad accounting. In a world of exact accounting some get more and others get less – which helps maintain the caste systems of history. But all the parable tries to do is introduce largesse, magnanimity into our world – making it more human, more divine. Of course we say such largesse is excessive, disruptive of an orderly commercial life – except when it’s you and me – when it comes to moral discrepancies – who need, who welcome such graciousness.

So again, would God pass a course in accounting? He’d probably be expelled – as in fact he so often is in our world of relentless, impersonal (yet often ineffective) quid pro quo accounting, a world always preoccupied with debt, ignorant of grace.

Reflection for August 28, 2011

2011-08-29T10:03:00.001-07:00

But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart . . .” (Jeremiah 20:7-9)

We live in an age when many an intellectual dismisses religion as “pure myth” meaning untrue. They go even farther and claim there is no meaning to life – we are as pretty and as fragile and meaningless as the butterflies that last a season or so and then dissolve into atoms. Some of these intellectuals are depressed about this – but steel themselves to make the most out of the time allowed us. Other intellectuals rejoice over such a meaningless world because it relieves them of bearing the burden of taxing creeds that – in their opinion – deprive us of the “freedom” to enjoy the here and now – fleeting though it may be.

Of course we ourselves hold on to our ancient creed, our faith, our hope that this world, that our lives do have meaning. The Bible is loaded with episodes and poetry and of course the presence of Jesus and people like St. Paul who tell us about where we come from and where we are going – and the truth about what handicaps us (like greed, pride, sloth, fear). And beyond the Bible there are the poets, people like Dante, Shakespeare, the great stories of our culture that reach confidently toward a happy ending to our lives, our universe.

Indeed, one of my favorite writers nowadays – named George Steiner – argues that underlying the material world we live in is a kind of musical composer who endows all creation with meaning – and inspires every human work of art, music, poetry, theology, even those everyday hopeful conversations we have that demonstrate how much more we are than “nothing at all” – as the cynics would have us believe. Indeed, Steiner uses the metaphor of the “visitor” – that from behind or beneath every story, every parable, every proverb, symphony or even folk song we encounter, every wish we wish there is someone knocking at our door, wanting to become a enduring tenant within our soul, our very body.

And given this faith, what should be our response to such knocking – sometimes a quiet tapping? Steiner says – courtesy! We should read things, hear things, study events in our lives, in the Bible and the world around us with courtesy – which means seriousness, taking our time, postponing the haste that has us running from pillar to post, running away from that deeper meaning that can make our lives more profound, more real. Which – as usual – reminds me of a poem by Walter de la Mare called “The Listeners”: “Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, / Knocking on the moonlit door; / . . . And he smote upon the door again a second time; / “Is there anybody there?” he said. / But no one descended to the Traveller; / No head from the leaf-fringed sill / Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, / Where he stood perplexed and still. / . . . “Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word,” he said. / . . . Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, / And the sound of iron on stone, / And how the silence surged softly backward, / When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Do you sometimes feel your life is meaningless, this world is meaningless? Maybe you should show more courtesy toward that knocking on your door that resonates from every biblical event, every worthwhile work of art, every kind word you come upon.

Reflection for July 31, 2011

2011-07-29T14:41:00.001-07:00

O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! / Then I, and you, and all of us fell down.

In Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana a British citizen named Mr. Wormold is invited to the hotel room of a man named Hawthorne (a member of the British Secret Service). Wormold runs a not very prosperous vacuum cleaner shop in Havana – and so he becomes interested in a proposition made to him by Hawthorne to become the Secret Service spy in Havana – working under the cover of his shop. Wormold is reluctant, he’s not into politics – but he could use the generous salary offered by Hawthorne. To prepare for his clandestine work he is first given a copy of Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare – designed for children – which retells the plot of Shakespeare’s plays in plain English, thus freeing the child from the archaic and demanding language (and thought) of Shakespeare himself.

When Wormold asks Hawthorne why he needs this book, Hawthorne says it’s to be used as a codebook. All Wormold has to do when he sends “secret” information to London is to choose a page and a line randomly from which to encode a message – and simply let Wormold know the page and line number. Other intricacies to confuse potential counterspies include the elimination of personal names. In so far as Hawthorne is known within the spy network as 59200, henceforth Wormold will be known as 59200/5 and Wormold’s future agents will be known as 59200/5/1, 59200/5//2 and so on. In other words Wormold by joining the Secret Service (for a better income) crosses over from the language of business, of vacuum cleaner sales into the obscure discourse of espionage which remains impersonal, digital, designed to communicate only to a few cryptologists in England.

One could say that in modern times we have all made a similar cross over from common sense discourse to a language universe characterized by tweets, microblogging, no more than 140 characters to a screen, 40% of which discourse has been classified as pointless babble. Are these signs of a declining culture? Language has been the repository of our most treasured, motivating human ideas, poetry, wisdom – yet of late so much of public and private discourse has none of the discipline of – for instance - the real language of Shakespeare, which by the way seems easily understood by even the uneducated listener.

I mean let’s look at Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar” out of all his masterpieces. Listen simply to some classic phrases like Caesar’s remark: Let me have men about me that are fat / . . . Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. / He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. Or consider Portia’s complaint to her distracted husband Brutus: Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure? Then there is Caesar’s response to concerns about his safety: Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once. Then there is Brutus’ reaction to the anger of Cassius: There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats; / For I am arm’d so strong in honesty / That they pass me by as the idle wind. And here is Brutus again: There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries. / On such a full sea are we now afloat,  / And we must take the current when it serves /  Or lose our ventures.

Taking Brutus’ words out of their context in the play, should they not be spoken to every young man and woman starting out in life – to catch the tide of discourse our biblical writers and our Shakespeares caught and thus avoid the shallows and consequent misery of our contemporary world?

Reflection for July 24, 2011

2011-07-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

You don’t mess with Mother Nature

Our parish matriarch, Lillian Garrison Sanders, died this week, having reached close to 100 years of age. I call her our matriarch because, if for nothing else, a grandmother of 14, the great grandmother of 23 and the great, great grandmother of 3 and a woman remembered by her family as the “glue” that keeps them together deserves the title of matriarch. But to be a matriarch means a lot more than being the fountainhead of so many descendants. It has to do with being a dominant woman, self-possessed and of long experience who feels subordinate to no one but God alone and even then there may arise some differences of opinion! As I reflect back, there was something about Lillian akin to my probably faulty memory of a Land o’ Lakes butter commercial of many years ago in which a goddess, appalled at the thought of anyone using oleo-margarine, says amid thunder and lightning, “You don’t mess with Mother Nature.”

Or better still, I like to locate her within the grand tradition of the matriarchs of the Bible. For instance, with Eve to begin with. I can’t help but feel that Lillian, if she were with Adam in the Garden of Eden, would have bridled, like Eve, at God’s command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I can hear her saying to Adam, “Why not? Who’s he to tell us what to eat and not to eat? Here! It’s quite tasty. Give it a try.” Of course she got them thrown out of the Garden of Eden for disobedience but they did leave with their eyes wide open and the whole of sacred history unfolded from that “happy fault”.

And then there was Rebecca, the patriarch Isaac’s wife. The rules of a masculine dominated society in those days required that the firstborn son be heir to the father’s wealth and in this case to God’s promise of a blessed destiny. And what happens? Rebecca gives birth to twins; Esau emerging first and then Jacob. So by law it’s Esau who inherits the destiny of God’s chosen one. But Esau grows up a hippie, shaggy, tattooed, the head of a motorcycle gang - hardly worthy of his privileged status. So what does the matriarch Rebecca do? When it’s time for old Jacob to ritually pass on God’s blessing to his oldest son, Rebecca dresses up Jacob, the gentler, civilized son, in rough skins, makes him kneel before blind Jacob and thus usurp Esau’s primacy. Jacob of course is scared, hesitant, fears being discovered and cursed instead of blessed. But Rebecca, in the tradition of our biblical matriarchs, says, “Snap out of it. If there is any fall out, I’ll take the impact. As for you, just get on with it.” Regardless of the established rules of the game, a self-possessed, insightful, dominant woman diverts the history of the world in a way that led to Christ. We could go on to talk of Judith and Esther who successfully took matters into their own hands, fully confident that they were agents of God’s doing.

In that context I see a lot that resembles Lillian. Notes given me by her son recall how in the early days of St. Leo’s parish, Lillian “instructed the new priest on how to do things”! I myself remember her often, as she “presided” at Mass from her usual perch in the front pew, talking back to Monsignor O’Hare as he ad libbed from the altar. On one occasion she was invited to speak on some anniversary and instead of doing so from the lectern, placed her cane on the altar and did so from there, even turning to exchange remarks with the visiting bishop. The notes also remember her as “the unofficial funeral director of St. Leo’s, telling people when to stand and when to kneel.”

An obituary, of course, should focus, I suppose, on the biographical data of the deceased. But in Lillian’s case I think it important to place her among the stalwart women of our tradition – to bring out the true stature of her presence among us.

Reflection for July 17, 2011

2011-07-18T12:52:00.001-07:00

And the Beat Goes On

(1991)

Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated with premature burials, with characters who felt some need to bury people alive. For instance, there’s the story entitled “The Cask of Amontillado” in which, for some past slight, Montresor invites Fortunato to descend to his cellar to sample a special wine. There Montresor chains his guest to the back wall of an alcove and slowly seals up the opening with masonry. “I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. In pace requiescat. ” Then there’s the character Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” who prematurely entombs his twin sister in a basement vault, only to hear the vault’s iron door clang open; to hear her footsteps on the stairs; to behold her standing enshrouded upon the threshold of his study!

And then there’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Of all the movies and plays I’ve seen in my lifetime, my high school’s dramatization of that Poe tale remains memorable to me - particularly its special effects. You know the story. The main character couldn’t stand the presence of an old man who shared his house. “One of his eyes,” he complains, “resembled that of a vulture - a pale blue eye. Whenever it fell on me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees I made up my mind to rid myself of the eye forever.” So he did away with the old fellow, took up the floorboards, deposited the corpse and “replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye . . . could have detected anything wrong.” No sooner had he finished the task than three policemen knocked at his door responding to a neighbor’s report of a scream during the night. “I bade them search - search well,” he says, for he was quite confident no trace of the deed would be found. Except that, while he conversed with the police, a low, dull, quick sound began to pulsate throughout the room.

This is where our special effects crew riveted the audience’s attention. From a low, barely perceptible thump, thump, thump, thump to an ever-louder THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP the buried heart crescendoed throughout the theatre - while the main character became increasingly mad! “O God! what could I do? I foamed - I raved - I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise continually increased. I felt that I must scream!”

Beyond mere entertainment, Poe had a far deeper intent in telling such stories. Some think he was anticipating modern materialism’s effort over the past two hundred years to bury both God and the human heart - to evaluate everything in terms of “profitability” and to repress such things as conscience and sentiment as romantic nonsense - to bury them well beneath the floor boards of our psyche so as not to impede “progress”. But note how in most of these stories the beat goes on! The buried person revives, even as God and the human heart will revive, no matter how much a cynical society would stifle their influence.

In such stories Poe stands well within our Gospel tradition, which pivots upon another premature burial - the attempt of a totalitarian Empire to entomb Christ, only to be foiled by his resurrection on the third day. And what was Christ’s resurrection but overture to our own resurrection every time Christ summons us (as he summoned Lazarus from his tomb) to emerge from all that would suffocate our bigness of mind and heart. Could it be that, consciously or unconsciously, all those Poe stories were ultimately influenced by passages from our biblical heritage like: “You were buried with him in baptism, . . . you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God who raised Christ from the dead.”

Reflection for July 10, 2011

2011-07-06T10:58:00.000-07:00

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . . . Part 2

Since we are still within the octave of July 4^th, Independence Day, I’d like to stretch the thoughts offered last Sunday about the dilemma facing the founding fathers in early July 1776. Last week we mentioned the logic followed by John Dickinson for NOT signing the declaration – cogent reasons for remaining within the British Empire. His reasons did not prevail because his fellow members of Congress had already been influenced by another list of reasons, quite logical, laid out by Tom Paine in the same year. I won’t go into all of them; just offer a taste:

1. It was absurd for an island like Britain to rule a continent like America.

2. America was no longer British; its population was already composed of people from all over Europe.

3. Remaining a part of Britain would only drag America into unnecessary European wars . . . and so on.

What I’m saying is that the members of Congress were faced with the logic of Dickinson (don’t sign) and the logic of Paine (sign). But was logic enough to do the trick? Does mere reasoning get us anywhere? Look at Hamlet: to be or not to be! Both options lead us to a fork in the road where we might be stuck – either/or; should I or shouldn’t I. After all the founding fathers were children of what we call the Age of Reason. One was not to be moved by fantasies, gambles, emotions, old myths. As far as the Bible being a motivator, the Age of Reason had dismantled that for over a century. A rational person couldn’t be motivated by such a book of fairy tales. I mean Thomas Jefferson produced a version of the Gospels that left out all the miracles, virgin birth, walking on water . . . He felt the only useful stuff in the ancient book was the Sermon of the Mount, the ethical, quasi-rational content.

And yet I think the reason the founding fathers got past any indecision, the fork in the road proffered to them by Dickinson on the one hand and Paine on the other, was a glimmer, a vestige, a trace of our civilization’s biblical heritage. They felt (and did not just think) that in declaring independence they were riding upon the wave of what they blandly called “providence” – they clung to the idea of a Creator, as in: We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our biblical heritage insists that history has a destination and, still sensing that, these men felt the declaration of independence to be a step toward that destiny, the improvement, the salvation (if you will) of the world.

But what I ask is: How much more profoundly would they have been moved to overcome that rational fork in the road, if they had not only been moved by a bland notion of “providence” but had let their imaginations be exposed to the graphic drama, the poetry of Scripture as in God’s call to Abraham to leave his father’s house to go to the land he would show him; God’s call to Moses to confront an earlier King George III to demand liberty, then cross a sea and wilderness en route to a Promised Land; Jesus’ constant invitation to “Come, follow me”; his challenge made to Peter to walk on water – contrary to all common sense, all logic?

In the long run, it is not reason, logic alone that moves our will to act. It is our drama, stories, especially our longstanding biblical story that appeals to the whole of our mind and imagination, our whole being, to cross one horizon after another – with faith, hope and even love. The Bible teaches us that history, collective and individual, has a meaning, that we are en route to a maturity that encompasses freedom and justice and even grace. In that context July 4^th indeed becomes something to sing about.

Reflection for July 3, 2011

2011-06-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary . . .

It being the 4^th of July weekend, I picked up our home volume (VIII) of the History of the United States written by George Bancroft way back in 1863. I wanted to review all the reasons Pennsylvania’s delegate John Dickinson gave for NOT declaring Independence in 1776. By July 2^nd of that year all 13 colonies had allowed their delegates to support the declaration, even though the revolution was not going too well. An American army had been thwarted in Canada and even more threatening, a British fleet had arrived outside New York harbor, landing 32,000 hardened soldiers on Staten Island – and Washington’s army was still a hardly organized militia.

So Dickinson had good reason to be cautious. Indeed, his reluctance to sign made sense:

1. A declaration of independence would not add one soldier or any amount of supply to the small and poorly equipped American army.

2. To win in the field we would need experienced allies, like France and Spain with whom we had hardly begun to negotiate.

3. And why would they gamble on us in our present state of unreadiness, with no real victories to speak of?

4. And do we really want to lose our privileged place in Britain’s

world wide commercial empire?

5. If we break with England we may only unify against us British public opinion, much of which is now sympathetic to our grievances.

6. Indeed a declaration of independence will alienate many of our own countrymen.

7. Is it prudent to declare independence when the various governments of our states differ in so many ways? Don’t we need some uniformity, a constitution before we launch out into the unknown?

8. What about the boundaries of the thirteen states - as we advance west? Won’t there be competition, some expanding and others confined - without some rules of the game after we leave Britain behind? Will we end up at war with one another?

Obviously Dickinson was a man of logic. Impetuosity in the midst of vast uncertainties hardly seemed the right course to take. Like many down through history he used reason to erode the enthusiasm of his peers. He absented himself from signing the declaration. True, he contributed to the revolution in other ways and eventually helped frame the Constitution – but he anticipated he would forfeit the esteem of his countrymen when he wrote, "My conduct . . . , I expect will give the finishing blow to my once too great and . . . now too diminished popularity."

All of which reminds me of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles – when the original disciples of Jesus still were a hesitant bunch, attending services at the Temple, requiring that Gentile converts go through the hoops required to be Jewish first – when almost out of nowhere came St. Paul to snap them out of their tentative selves – to see that the time was ripe, that the Church must be a universal community where neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female distinctions should prevail – for all were one in Christ. Indeed, may we not say that in some way the 4^th of July was triggered by the Gospel movement of long ago?

Reflection for June 26, 2011

2011-06-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

Inebriates of Christ

The Book of Daniel opens with a story about four Jewish youths who are supposed to have lived back around 580 B.C. They were exiles, whom the Babylonians transported to Shinar (Iraq) after destroying Jerusalem in 587 B.C. Now these four young men were chosen by the Babylonian king to learn the language of their captors and serve in the king’s palace. It wasn’t uncommon for a conqueror to take young captives and assimilate them into their culture to fill various bureaucratic jobs. The Egyptians did that with young Moses. And I think of our own country’s “Indian Schools” like the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Native American boys were required to wear trousers, boots, shirts, ties, jackets and caps and sit row upon row in classrooms whence they were supposed to emerge indistinguishable from their Euro-American counterparts in everything but complexion. Jim Thorpe, the All American athlete, was a Carlisle product. As selected aliens, these Jewish lads were privileged to dine on the very food and wine served at the king’s table. But they abstained from what to them was non-kosher fare. This worried their Babylonian mentor who said, “If you don’t eat, you’ll lose your ruddy complexions and weight and the king will have my head!” “Don’t worry,” said Daniel, one of the four. “Just serve us vegetables and water and we’ll be fine.” And in fact, after ten days, “they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youth who ate the king’s rich food.”

This story was written around 167 B.C. to encourage Jewish youth then living under Greek oppression to emulate ancient Daniel and his friends. On the face of it, it encourages Jewish youth to abide by kosher food laws. But on a deeper level it says, “Don’t become consumers of Greek culture; don’t accept the stuff your conquerors dish out to you. Eat their cuisine and you’ll soon be consuming their ideas, their polytheism, their purely rational philosophy.”

There’s a German saying: “Man ist was er isst.” - a man is what he eats. Consume the junk food served up to you on every channel of television or radio (the commercials; a comic’s cynicism and scapegoating; the “philosophy” inherent in the pop lyrics; the celebrity cult; the paranoia of the news and talk shows; the vindictiveness of politics) and, far from your being the consumer, it is you who will be consumed, swallowed up by a culture that can chew you up and spit you out as it does all the natural resources of the world around you. Assimilate whatever a marketplace of shallow taste and ideas feeds you and ultimately it is you who will be assimilated. Christianity supports the position taken by Daniel: “I will not be assimilated; I will not be enticed to give up my identity, my tradition, my faith in God and the sacredness of nature and the worth and creative potential of every human soul. I will not be used and manipulated; I will not be taken for granted, reduced to a statistic or commodity.”

But won’t we starve if we ignore modern culture’s vast display case? No, because like Daniel, we have an alternative diet to insure our spiritual (and physical) well being. We dine at the table of Christ. Every Sunday we first assimilate his Word, served up to us by our lector and homilist and then partake of a special bread and wine which in a mysterious way contains Christ’s very Being. In the process we who assimilate Christ and his mentality are assimilated by him. We begin to share his vision of reality. We become his Body, his poetic Presence in the world, ruddy, potent, a manifestation of what a free, divinely radiant humanity must be. Emily Dickinson, intoxicated by Nature, boasted: “I taste a liquor never brewed - / From Tankards scooped in Pearl - ”. And so say we, inebriates of Christ.

Reflection for June 19, 2011

2011-06-15T11:44:00.001-07:00

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” William Blake

For those parishioners who could not attend the parish education session which reviewed the Sunday lectionary readings for this month of June (or have not as yet picked up a copy of the session’s content) we spoke of a thing called the iconostasis – the image stand.

For those of you not familiar with Eastern Orthodox services, the iconostasis or image-stand is a high partition built between the congregation and the church sanctuary and altar. It’s designed to quasi-block the view of the congregation from the central action of the Eucharist. In other words you have to peek through its central door to see what’s going on, granted that at communion time the priest comes out to the people with the bread and wine.

It seems to resemble the set up of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem where the Holy of Holies (God’s inner sanctum) was hidden behind a veil and the altar of sacrifice itself was isolated from the courtyards of the Temple where men and women and visitors were kept at a reverent distance from the rituals at the altar.

What people do see, as they look at this iconostasis or image-stand or partition, were icons – colorful, beautiful full length paintings – panel by panel – of Mary, the mother of God, Jesus as Creator of the world, the angel Gabriel (of the Annunciation), various saints – all with eyes fixed upon the worshipers. And what eyes - wide, serious, deep, gazing into the eyes of every worshiper!

And why these stares? To communicate to each of us something of each image’s power of perception, to help us see the way Mary sees, Jesus sees, saints and angels see. To help us see all that we cannot see because of a spiritual glaucoma that dims our vision – our eyes and minds being so clouded by the news of the day, pettiness, contentiousness, distractions, prejudices. And so thus, in a way, these icons on the iconostasis do not block our vision of the Eucharist that goes on behind it but invite us toward a deeper appreciation of the breaking of the bread, cleanse us of our obstinacy, our vagueness so that Christ might gain access to our souls and bodies – as the poet William Blake once said: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

In seeing one of these Eastern Orthodox iconostases, we members of the Roman Church might feel a bit deprived, because we don’t have such a lively, colorful structure offering us a spiritual portal into the banquet of God. But as we discovered during that lectionary session, we do have our own iconostasis. It’s built around the lectionary and psalm readings that are recited before we bring forward the bread and wine and sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” as we pass on to the heart of the Eucharist. For don’t these readings “precede” the central part of the Mass? And don’t they give us a glimpse of God’s way of seeing, biblical moments of insight, miracle, words that enlighten us – deepen our powers of perception, if we but heed them? Try as time goes on to see the lectionary readings as standing, like the Greek iconostasis, between you and our communion table magnetically drawing you toward a deeper experience of God’s presence in our midst.

Reflection for June 12, 2011

2011-06-07T14:11:00.000-07:00

Frustration

The Vigil Mass for Pentecost Sunday, celebrated on the day before, begins with the Tower of Babel reading from the Book of Genesis. You recall what it’s about: an effort of the human race to build a tower to the sky and “so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.” The story also notes that everyone spoke the same language – so coordination was guaranteed. Bricks and mortar were prepared and work begun. Except that, part way up, the whole effort became a divine comedy. God diversified their language – this fellow speaking let’s say Greek, this one Persian, this one Japanese. The project collapsed into the state of affairs we have today where differences of language (and ways of thinking) often isolate people from one another, polarize them, contributing to misunderstandings, even war. So what’s the message of the Babel story? Efforts on our own to attain some kind of supremacy in this world can often lead to frustration, confusion – to wit: look at all the Empires that collapsed since 1900 – including that once powerful Soviet one.

There is a Greek version of such frustration - called the Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a practical joker, liked to undercut the doings of the gods. So he was condemned to push a huge boulder up a hill, only to have it slip his grasp and roll down again – whence he must push it up again and again forever. The philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) saw in Sisyphus the fate of the human race – condemned to aspire to a kind of divine power and independence only to find itself at the bottom over and over – hopeless but ever aspiring to someday know and control everything. Exhaustion – from generation to generation! Human existence as no comedy at all but forever tragic!

But then we have another story of upward ambition that’s a bit comical perhaps because it is influenced by our Christian belief in a God who does not play games but is ever ready to support our efforts with grace. It’s the famous 1931-32 Academy Award winning short film featuring Laurel and Hardy – called The Music Box. The Music Box is a player piano that Laurel and Hardy have to deliver to a home situated at the top of a high outdoor concrete staircase. No problem. They unload the piano and begin lifting it from step to step – one in front, the other in back. And then commences their Sisyphean adventure. They meet a woman coming down the steps and have to come back down to the pavement; they meet a mother with a baby carriage (as I remember) and have to come back down; they lose their grip and the thing goes banging down into the street below. It’s all so human – the human comedy of Nature not cooperating with our proud minds and plans. The force of gravity not conducive to our reaching whatever top we strive for. They finally get it into the house above the steps – but only after wrecking things working the piano through the doors and windows. And the homeowner gets so mad he goes after the thing with an axe. The effort ends in a shambles. And all the while, as I recall, there was a driveway up to the house Laurel and Hardy could have used!

Could it be that all the frustration we experience in life trying to “reach the top”, be it spiritually or in the affairs of business, politics, some quest for perfection, is a message from God saying: you can’t do it on your own. You need the Holy Spirit – who knows your frustration, shares your labor and as St. Paul says stands ready to “come to the aid of our weakness.” Look at the disciples after Jesus’ Ascension. Fishermen, hardly cosmopolitan, maybe hardly educated. No wonder they were intimidated by the mission Jesus gave them: to preach his good news to the farthest ends of the earth. And then came that wind and those tongues of fire – and they were now ready not to climb mountains but to move them!

Reflection for June 5, 2011

2011-05-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

Ascension

(1994)

We’re all familiar with Gulliver’s sojourn among the Lilliputians, a people who stood only six inches tall. We’re not so familiar, perhaps, with the reverse experience he had when he found himself among the Brobdingnagians, who averaged seventy feet tall! There he stood in a field of wheat forty feet high, while a line of Brobdingnagian reapers approached wielding seven foot sickles. Realizing he could be squashed under foot or cut in two, Gulliver screamed as loud as he could, whereupon one of the reapers stopped short. He looked at Gulliver as we might view a mouse and then bent over, picked him up and held him within three yards of his eyes.

The Brobdingnagians treated Gulliver gently as a curiosity. Eventually he was able to converse with their king and boast about England’s empire and political institutions. He failed, however, to realize that this gigantic king could evaluate all Gulliver said from a much higher vantage point. And so, far from being impressed by Gulliver’s account of English history, the king was appalled. To him it appeared to be nothing but a petty “heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, hypocrisy, cruelty, envy, lust and ambition could produce!” He could only conclude Gulliver’s countrymen “to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth!” Embarrassed by this assessment, Gulliver tried to impress him with the achievements of European science and technology, inventions such as gunpowder and cannonballs (and we might add hydrogen bombs). This too left the king amazed at “how so impotent an insect would entertain such inhuman ideas.” He then ordered Gulliver, “if he valued his life, never to mention these things again while in his kingdom.” Gulliver privately ridiculed the king’s reactions as shortsighted, forgetting that it was he who was short and therefore shortsighted in this land of benign giants.

Which brings us to this matter of Ascension Thursday coming up. In our creed we say of Jesus: “For us and our salvation he came down from heaven.” We believe that Jesus came into our world possessing a much higher vantage point from which he could well perceive how small we are and how small we often behave - our human pettiness and its often vicious consequences. He came to unmask these limitations, to lift us up out of all this lethal pettiness and myopia, to share with us his higher and therefore more profound vision of reality, his bigness of mind and heart.

“And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself,” he says in John’s Gospel. And St. Paul plays upon this same theme in his Letter to the Ephesians, where he prays that we may all “grasp what is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s way of loving”, where he speaks of our attaining a maturity “measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ.”

And have you ever noticed how often Jesus takes his disciples up to a mountain top - to pray, to deliver his Sermon on the Mount, to be transfigured before them, to be elevated on his Cross (which becomes for us our ladder to heaven), and finally to carry our gaze even higher as he ascends into the heavens themselves? All in his effort to entice us toward a taller, wider, all encompassing, compassionate view of things - to make of us a race of spiritual giants similar to those Gulliver ran into. You know, of course, where Gulliver ran into them - along the coast of northern California near a place called Cape Mendocino, which leaves all of us who live in this region today with some pretty big shoes to fill.

Reflection for May 29, 2011

2011-05-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

Our feet reluctant . . .

Last Sunday the lectionary spoke of the first seven deacons, the first in the list being Stephen. The Acts of the Apostles goes on to tell of Stephen’s long public speech in which he spoke up boldly for Jesus until his enraged audience, as one translation says, “dragged him out of the city” and stoned him to death.

But who was dragging whom? Because Acts also says that a man named Saul was present at this execution only later to be dragged – himself - out of his role of persecutor to become the martyred Stephen’s successor, the Apostle Paul. And from then on what did Paul become? A drag upon the original apostles who at that time had a limited, even timid sense of the scope of the Gospel – until Paul confronted them with the equal inclusion of Gentiles around the table of Christ.

Sometimes (or maybe more often than not) we ourselves have to be dragged toward our Christian destiny – dragging our feet in the process. As I look back over my own life (and you can do the same) there was a time when I had to be dragged out of my reluctance to BE, to engage wholeheartedly with Christ’s call. Oh, I followed – but with baby steps, hesitant, never in full stride! Like Peter, like the first disciples, we are all like that.

And then, having completed seminary training, six long years to say nothing of six prior years in a minor seminary, I was sent on to study Sacred Scripture. Graduate school! After so many years in a classroom! My heart wasn’t in it – or my brain. But I had no choice, being under a vow of obedience. So I went half-heartedly to classes in the Semitics Department at Catholic University until my major professor (a real Prussian) shook me up with a phone call saying, “If you are not into this in earnest why waste my time and yours? Drop out!”

Suddenly to save face or to please I began to concentrate – but once I advanced to studies in Rome, the subject matter of Scripture had become so fascinating, so redeeming, so liberating, so energizing! I who had been dragging my feet (perhaps like Saul before Stephen’s execution) was now being dragged out of my hesitation by the depth, vision, experience of God’s Word. I felt like I had come of age, stopped being a child. No more baby steps. Now it was a matter of strides down an endless passage of ever new transforming vistas.

Often we need a jolt like the one my “Prussian” professor gave me – to get serious about life, about our creed, about why we are here in this world. In that scene where Stephen is dragged out of the city to lay down his life for the Gospel it says the people throwing stones “laid down their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul” (the future Paul). I wonder, when he later thought of that moment in his life, whether he may have had thoughts (as I do) along the line of Emily Dickinson’s – expressed in her lovely poem:

Our journey had advanced / Our feet were almost come / To that odd fork in being’s road / Eternity by term // Our pace took sudden awe. / Our feet reluctant led: / Before were cities, but between, / The forest of the dead. // Retreat was out of hope; / Behind, a sealed route, / Eternity’s white flag before, / And God at every gate.

Reflection for May 22, 2011

2011-05-18T09:40:00.001-07:00

The Image

“As I sit at my desk, I know where I am. I see before me a window; beyond that some trees; beyond that the red roofs of the campus of Stanford University; beyond them . . . the roof tops which mark the town of Palo Alto; beyond that the bare golden hills of the Hamilton Range. I know, however, more than I can see. Behind me, although I am not looking in that direction, I know there is a window, and beyond that . . . the Coast Range; beyond that the Pacific Ocean. Looking ahead of me again, I know that beyond . . . my present horizon, there is a broad valley; . . . a still higher range of mountains; beyond that . . . the Rockies; . . . the eastern seaboard; . . . the Atlantic Ocean; . . . Europe.”

Thus begins a book called The Image by a noteworthy economist and Quaker mystic named Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993). He goes on to extend his image of the world, visualizing it as a globe and then a small speck circling around a bright star, which is the sun, in the company of many other similar specks. And of course he sees the sun as one of millions of other suns or stars in one galaxy among millions of other galaxies. Beyond placing himself within his knowledge of space, he can locate himself in time as well. He lives amid milestones of dates like his birthday, 1776, 1066, the span of civilizations like Rome, Greece, Assyria . . .To sum up, he has a sense of where he is in space and time – that goes far beyond that known by even his great, great, great, great grandfathers. And how does he arrive at his sense of where he is in space and time? By way of messages delivered in so many ways – via science, religion, literature and history.

He is also aware that at any time new messages might stretch his current image of the world, so much so that he might be severely shaken before he can assimilate the change and regain his equilibrium (as when Columbus discovered America and Galileo proved the earth circled the sun and science denied the world was created in seven days and the Church switched to the vernacular Mass and I took courses at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome).

But isn’t this what happens throughout biblical writing? Take the Tower of Babel story. Everyone spoke the same language, which means they lived in a closed universe, so sure of themselves that God made their world multi-lingual so that their cohesiveness disintegrated. Yet out of that confusion came Abraham to open us up to a new, more profound vision of who and where and what and why we are.

Or take the character Job. He conceived of his world as a courtroom. God was the judge, Satan the prosecutor, and human beings liable to punishment if they went astray. Then what happened? Job had never gone astray and yet he suffered drastically. As a consequence his understanding of his world collapsed. He fought hard to maintain it, demanded a hearing before God to protest the injustice of his plight. What happened? God became a tornado that whirled Job about amid so many strange, new images of the universe that Job shut up and, taking in the magnificence of it all, bade a silent farewell to the cramped quarters of his courtroom world. He was ready to submit to a whole new image of God and creation that would require a heart, an awe, an imagination as big as both!

Reflection for May 15, 2011

2011-05-10T11:36:00.001-07:00

Camouflage

(from 2003)

Jane and I had just begun to climb the path to the summit of Corona Heights in San Francisco. Corona Heights is a low hill topped by prominent rocks above Market Street which presents the viewer with a grand display of the Mission district, the Bay and, to the left, the skyline of San Francisco, which on this day in the strange light of a sunless sky looked like a vast Cubist painting, what with its rectangular buildings of every size and shade and its Transamerica pyramid. Jane and I go there on every anniversary of our son Philip’s death because it overlooks where he lived and died on Duboce Street and because the last time we saw him we were driving up Market Street and he pointed to the Heights and said that was his favorite place of retreat and if he ever had to live on the streets that’s where he’d stay.

Well, back to our ascent of the Heights last Sunday. To make the climb easier the park people had cut some steps into the soil at the path’s lower reaches and reinforced them with wooden four by fours to prevent erosion. We had only climbed a couple of steps when Jane said, “Look, a butterfly.” She was pointing directly to the step in front of us. I couldn’t see anything but she insisted there was a stationary butterfly, which had just closed its wings. Of course that’s why I couldn’t see it – because with its wings closed the butterfly was so camouflaged we could hardly distinguish it from the soil, pebbles and sticks at our feet. As Jane pointed, I looked hard and said, “Where?” And she said, “Wait.” And then the butterfly’s wings opened and I beheld the sudden splendor of a new monarch butterfly in all its orange, black, red and white spotted symmetry! It was like an apparition out of nowhere.

It then took flight but only to alight upon the next step where it again folded its wings and disappeared, became what looked like a sliver of wood. We waited and watched and again it opened its wings and transfigured the ground and repeated this ritual for several steps upward until I got the message and said to Jane, “The butterfly is telling us that Phil is here. We can’t see him but he’s here and if he were to open his wings we’d see him in all his splendor.” And so we continued our ascent sensing that Phil was with us all the way – camouflaged by death but still present with a transcendent beauty.

Is that not what happened to the apostles after the death of Jesus? I mean even when Jesus was alive they failed to perceive who he really was. They imposed on him the camouflage of their own presuppositions. Or take the experience of those two disciples on the road to Emmaus after the death of Jesus. Here they were walking beside him, engaging in conversation with him, but did they see him? No – not until he sat with them at table and broke bread and gave it to them. That’s when he opened his wings and displayed for a moment the monarch he really was! And so it was with all his apparitions to his disciples. Were they not moments when, by opening to them the deeper meaning of the Scripture, he opened to them the essence of who he really was – the Grace of God Incarnate? And in opening his own wings throughout all those resurrection episodes, did he not compel his apostles to lay aside their own camouflage, to open up their own wings, to reveal their own capacity for gracious being? And do not all these Gospel episodes we listen to throughout this Easter season demand that we too lay aside the camouflage by which we conceal (even from ourselves) our own redeemed beauty? I must say, last Sunday’s experience with that monarch butterfly helped me feel (in relation to Philip) something of the joy Mary Magdalene experienced when, assuming the risen Jesus to be only a gardener, she heard him simply say “Mary” – saw him simply open his wings - and realized he wasn’t dead after all.

Reflection for May 8, 2011

2011-05-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us!

Way back in the late 1950’s a priest friend of mine told me of a recent pilgrimage he led to Rome – by charter flight. The plane was not a jet but a Lockheed Constellation model with four propeller engines and its well-known twin tail. It was an evening flight and the cost was cheap and my friend and his flock soon found out why. As they settled into their seats, the passengers next to the curtained windows on either side drew back their curtains only to find there were no windows at all. They were in a disguised flying boxcar. They were overcome by claustrophobia, felt trapped – and for how many hours?

What a metaphor for our own journey down through time! We are no sooner born into this world and into a particular culture of this world – be it high society, the working class, secularism, agnosticism, nationalism, tribalism of one sort or another – and without realizing it we are flying through time in a boxcar without windows – the interior of which is the only world we know. Or you could say we are deposited into a corridor of time, a compressed expanse of thought and experience that is ignorant of the wider expanse of God’s creation wherein we may find “fullness of life” instead of cramped minds and imaginations.

You may remember my mentioning Lily Bart, the main character of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Lily was born into one of those narrow corridors known as high society, grew up to seek a wealthy husband and live off the dividends of prosperous ancestors, play bridge, visit the casinos of Monte Carlo, live from one weekend party and opera season to the next, enjoy fancier curtains to cover the non-existent windows of her set’s flying boxcar. And when the blessed opportunity to break out of her containment came along, she couldn’t do it.

As she says to the man who could open up her world: Once – twice – you gave me the chance to escape from my life . . . I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late . . . I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one fits into one hole? One must get back into it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap.

This Easter Season gives all of us a chance to step out of our narrow corridors, our narrow-mindedness into the big world of our Risen Christ – a world of grace and constant revelation. A great theologian of the 20^th century once described the 40 days of Christ’s appearances to his disciples as the intrusion of real time and space into our narrow corridors of time and space, where like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus we fret about recent events, the frustration of our narrow hopes, our preconceptions, even the petty things that bug us.

And along comes Jesus on these Sundays to walk with us, to draw us into his world beyond the shadow of death. He speaks to us in our Scripture readings, he dines with us at our Eucharist, he breaks bread with us – in hopes that in this breaking of bread we may experience a breakthrough into a world of universal grace and beauty – uncurtained, uncramped, uncoffined from this day forth.

Reflection for May 1, 2011

2011-04-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

Look before you leap?

As a member of a research firm many years ago I was part of a team assigned to produce a consumer guide for homebuyers. The idea was to get people to look before they leaped, to spend time drawing up a precise list of their housing needs before making a commitment. The list might include: size of the house, size of the lot, style of house, garage space, ground maintenance, commuter distances, proximity to schools, quality of schools, proximity to markets and churches, price, lenders, points, utility costs, crime rate, future development, etc.

In other words buyers were to spell out every residential concern they had, even to the point of square footage, mileage distances, traffic decibels! Of course, once you had people thinking this way it’s not inconceivable that they might even want to inspect the resumes of local elementary school teachers - but we never encouraged them to go that far. But, then again why not? Because, after all, we were trying to get them to think like researchers, to go about purchasing things in a scientific way - to diminish their chances of making a mistake, a bad investment.

Now while the logic behind this approach to home buying was beyond dispute, I don’t think our consumer guide had a snowball’s chance in hell of being of any ultimate use to most human house hunters. I mean, I could just picture a couple (the wife with a thumb worn checklist of rational criteria open on her lap) turning down a shady lane and coming upon a “For Sale” sign in front of an ivy-covered cottage right out of Peter Rabbit - and exclaiming: “This is it! We love it!” And the basis for their judgment? Not the checklist but the charm of the place, its appeal to a need deep within them that made all their rational requirements irrelevant.

We never produced such a consumer guide for fellows looking for a wife. You know: getting him to develop a similar checklist defining the precise woman he might need to suit his temperament, career ambitions, etc., like five foot two, eyes of blue, college degree, a touch of Irish, a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad! Again, what would be the use! Love can never be reduced to a science. Into the lobby walks this girl who in no way conforms to the fellow’s checklist. She speaks “and the angels sing” and the checklist is last seen bobbing in the wake of a cruise ship en route to Paradise.

Thomas the Apostle would have loved to have been a member of our consumer guide team, because from what we know of him he was the type who preferred to look before he leaped. He had to see, to touch, to examine those wounds before he would invest in the tale told him by those starry-eyed disciples. But like all such folk who insist that reality bend to their requirements before they accept it, Thomas felt his checklist slip from his fingers to the floor (a dead letter) in the presence of the Jesus who confronted him. There’s no suggestion that he even thought of inspecting his wounds, for the Jesus he saw probably looked to him more like the Jesus in the opening chapter of the Book of Revelation: “The hair of his head was white as snow-white wool, and his eyes flamed like fire; his feet gleamed like burnished brass; his voice was like the sound of rushing waters; out of his mouth came a two-edged sword and his face shone like the sun.” And all Thomas could say in the face of such a reality (which appealed to a need so deep within him, far deeper than his quibbling mind) -- all he could utter was: “My Lord and my God.”

Reflection for April 24, 2011

2011-04-19T11:19:00.001-07:00

Tenebrae

It was Holy Week and darkness had fallen upon the monastery perched atop Graymoor Mountain in the Catskills. The only light came from the windows of its chapel where the friars were chanting back and forth across the aisle the psalms of the ancient rite of Tenebrae. The Latin word means darkness and the rite, repeated on the three nights prior to Good Friday, laments the imminent death of Christ.

In the chapel sanctuary stood a large triangular candelabrum with seven candles ascending its right and seven its left arm, converging upon a fifteenth candle at its apex. As the friars completed each of the rite’s prescribed fourteen psalms or lamentations, an acolyte extinguished one of the candles until only the fifteenth at the top (symbolic of Christ) dimly lit the chapel. A closing prayer was recited and then the acolyte lifted the lone candle from its holder and carried it solemnly out of sight behind the high altar. The chamber was now absolutely dark; silence prevailed. And then (to the surprise of any guests present) all the friars pounded the oaken choir stalls with their heavy hymnals, creating a sound equivalent to thunder itself - to symbolize the cataclysmic nature of what we had done to the Son of God. Only when the echoes had died away was the hidden candle returned from behind the altar and replaced at the top of the candelabrum - to forecast the good news that the light of life and love can never be fully extinguished, that Christ will rise again and again and again!

As often as I participated in the Tenebrae rite as a young man, I was deeply moved by it. What moved me most was that slow, one by one extinguishing of the fourteen candles and the loneliness of that final candle until it too was withdrawn. It seemed to illustrate so poignantly what happens to Jesus in the Passion story: Judas and Peter, Caiaphas and Annas, Pilate and Herod, the mob and soldiers converging on Jesus one by one to quench the radiance of his presence.

And who (I thought) was this cast of characters but me and you! For we play out the Passion story not only during Holy Week but every week of our lives. I mean, the presence of Christ within me struggles with a Judas within me who pretends to love him but really is engaged in arresting his development, handcuffing my Christic potential. The presence of Christ within me looks with sadness upon a Peter within me who’s ready to deny him at the drop of a hat if it means sticking my neck out. The presence of Christ within me has to face up to an interminable trial before my Annas and Caiaphas dimensions who insist that he prove beyond a doubt the validity of his Gospel of Love before I make any commitment to him. And then there’s Pilate, the ambivalent me, who would just as soon wash his hands of the whole affair - and Herod, the voyeur, who likes the promise of miracles but not the hard stuff about turning the other cheek, forgiving one’s enemies, caring with all one’s heart and mind and strength. And then there’s the mob within me, quick to opt for some current fad or TV guru as more compatible to my modern tastes than that depressing figure in crown and purple displayed on Pilate’s balcony.

Yes, for as long as I can remember, Christ’s Passion has been billed as “Now Playing” within the theatre of my mind; the luminous Christ often reduced to a hardly perceptible taper within the sanctuary of my heart. But thank God for Christ’s survival skills! Because the play never quite ends with him simply dead and buried; the acolyte always returns with that solitary candle - this time to start within me (at long last) a conflagration of pentecostal magnitude?

Reflection for April 3, 2011

2011-04-01T09:59:00.001-07:00

A Room with a View

“The Signora had no business to do it,” complained Charlotte Bartlett in E. M. Forster’s novel A Room With A View. “She promised us south rooms with a view, instead of which here are north rooms, looking into a courtyard.” Miss Bartlett had good reason to be upset. As chaperone to Lucy Honeychurch, it was her job to insure that Lucy’s first trip to Italy be a pleasant change from foggy old England. And yet here they were, assigned to lodging that looked out not upon a panorama of Florence’s domes and towers and ancient bridges but upon a back yard. Miss Bartlett’s complaint was overheard by Mr. Emerson who shared their breakfast table. “I have a view,” he said. “This is my son . . . He has a view, too. You can have our rooms. We’ll change.” Well, much as she disliked their assigned rooms, Miss Bartlett had no wish to be under obligation to total strangers. Her British propriety required that she refuse the offer, which she took to be an invasion of her privacy. “Thank you very much,” she replied. “It is quite out of the question.” Mr. Emerson was not the type to give in so easily. Placing his fists upon the table, he asked, “Why?” - which only made Miss Bartlett redden with displeasure.

Well, did she or did she not want a room with a view? Having traveled so far, did she or did she not want to experience Italy? Her very choice of a place to stay in Florence makes you wonder. The Pension Bertolini was a thoroughly British “island” in the midst of Florence. All the guests were English ladies and gentlemen. The “Signorina” who managed the place had a Cockney accent. The dining room was graced with a portrait of Queen Victoria and a schedule of services at the local Anglican Church - all of which compelled Lucy to remark, “Charlotte, don’t you feel . . . we might be in London? I can hardly believe that all kinds of other things are just outside.”

But before we condemn Miss Bartlett’s ambivalence about truly experiencing Italy, let’s consider our own when it comes to Christ’s offering us by way of his Gospel “a room with a view.” We live such enclosed lives. We long to escape the confinement of our pettiness, our egocentric worries and biases for a fresher view of reality. And along comes Christ with a Gospel that can open us up - the way a view of Florence in all its splendor might - and yet we hesitate; we rationalize ourselves into remaining stuck right where we are. Like Miss Bartlett, we close the shutters upon a view and a way of being too potentially wonderful (and demanding) to be tolerable.

Not so with Lucy. When at last Miss Bartlett gave in to the Emersons and accepted their “rooms with a view”, while Miss Bartlett spent her first moments investigating her own room’s interior to make sure all shutters and doors had locks, Lucy, yielding to her inner need to be free of “Britain”, flung wide the windows to her room and leaned out into the sunshine to take in the beautiful hills, the marble churches, the gurgling Arno, the crowded trams and somersaulting children, the band and comic opera soldiers and the white bullocks coming out of an archway. Life, world, people in all their wonder and worth - releasing Lucy’s repressed capacity for universal love!

Is there a shuttered window within our psyches behind which, like Miss Bartlett, we repress our yearning for light and beauty, insulate ourselves from all surprise? We must let Christ open those shutters, touch our eyes, our souls as he did Miss Lucy’s (whose name implies light) and the young man in today’s Gospel. Or to put it in an even more profoundly Lenten way: we must let him and his angels roll away the stone behind which we have lain buried in the dark for far too long.

Reflection for March 27, 2011

2011-03-24T10:08:00.000-07:00

A stream was welling up out of the earth and was watering all the surface of the ground. Genesis 2.

There is water and there is water. There is water as a destructive force (as seen in the tsunami that struck Japan) and water as a refreshing, cleansing, thirst quenching element.

So let’s switch to the subject of books. Once upon a time the Bible was the book with which most people were familiar – normally as read to them in church. Then as Marshal McLuhan has shown along came the printing press which has created such a deluge or we might say a tsunami of information and opinion over the past few centuries that the Bible has been tucked away in motel room drawers as of little relevance to our modern world or left in the hands of many preachers whose literalism discredits it even more.

And yet listen to how the Bible itself refers to its collection of stories, songs, oracles, proverbs, gospels and letters as a fountain of fresh water, a river of life that can revive one’s soul. The author of the book of Sirach says that whoever imbibes his wisdom will thirst for more. Familiar with how the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile and Jordan rivers overflow their banks to irrigate the countryside and make it flourish – he speaks of the Bible as overflowing with the wisdom, understanding, knowledge that can produce a fine vintage, a rich harvest within your soul – and throughout society.

Given these images of refreshing, productive water you can understand how Psalm 42 can say of you and me: As the hind longs for the running waters, so my soul longs for you, O God; athirst is my soul for God, the living God – while Isaiah can appeal to us in similar terms: All you who are thirsty, come to the water. Proverbs celebrates biblical wisdom as something fluid as in the verses: The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life . . . the words of a (mere) man’s mouth are deep waters (hard to fathom) but the source of wisdom is a flowing brook (ready to hand). And of course there is that wonderful vision of Ezekiel 47 which shows an ever deepening river of life flowing from God’s Temple along the banks of which all kinds of fruitful trees grow – sweet water that transforms the salt waters of the Dead Sea even as it can sweeten your own saltiness. So, given that heritage in which the metaphor of fresh water reflects the influence God’s grace can have upon our parched lives, is it any wonder that Jesus in today’s Gospel offers to release a wellspring, a fountain of grace and graciousness within the otherwise dormant well of the Samaritan woman? Or is it any wonder that Jesus identifies himself with the source of such refreshment, so refreshing an understanding and experience of God, when he says later in John’s Gospel: Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture says, rivers of living water will flow from within him.

In our world of pure secularism, loud commercials, electronic sales pitches, trivial information, in-your-face assertions, unintelligible economics, a veritable tsunami of aimless, relentless, political discourse – isn’t it about time to return to the wellspring of the Gospels; isn’t it about time to make at least some effort to understand our Scriptural heritage – before you lose your sanity, before you run out of life? I’ll never understand how modern folk feel no urgency even to sip of that fountain which we left behind in the Garden of Eden, where Genesis says that even before we were created: A stream was welling up out of the earth and was watering all the surface of the ground . . .

Reflection for March 20, 2011

2011-03-18T12:35:00.001-07:00

Awake, O Sleeper, . . . rise from the dead.

In classical times actors wore masks while on stage – the Latin word for mask being persona. You could say that even today actors wear masks while on stage or in films insofar as they lay aside their real identity to take on a temporary persona or personality while on stage. Indeed many, upon choosing a theatrical career, even change their birth names to something catchier like John Wayne (Marion Robert Morrison). Often, too, they become so identified with one role in films that Sean Connery (if that’s his real name) will always be James Bond to me. In the realm of theatrics to be a person or “personality” is to wear a false face. Yet strangely enough we also use the terms person or personal to mean the very opposite of a theatrical persona or personality. We use it to refer to one’s authentic, genuine self as when we say, “That fellow is a real person; direct and honest, sincere when he relates to people – not just “sociable”.

The parables of Jesus are full of such “persons”, like the Good Samaritan. Indeed, stories in general give us a better sense of personality in its deeper sense. Take, for example Mrs. Loftus in whose home Huckleberry Finn takes refuge disguised as a girl named Sarah Williams (and later Mary Williams!). Mrs. Loftus goes along with the disguise until at last she says: What’s your real name? I ain’t going to hurt you and I ain’t going to tell on you nuther. You just tell me your secret and trust me. I’d keep it and what’s more I’ll help you. Why I spotted you for a boy when you was threading that needle; now you just trot along to your uncle [or to wherever you’re going] and if you get into trouble, you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, WHICH IS ME, and I’ll do what I can to get you out of it. There’s a truly personal being who wears no mask and, like God, is not taken in by masks.

Our Lenten biblical readings seem to include this theme of genuine personality – laying aside the masks we wear. The first reading for the fourth Sunday of Lent has God saying to the prophet Samuel as he is commissioned to choose a king for Israel: Do not judge from his appearance . . . not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance, the mask, but the Lord looks into the heart.

And next Sunday we shall see Jesus engaging in dialogue with a Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well. He asks her in a very personal way, transcending the protocol of the times: Give me a drink. And she sees what we all see when we meet somebody: she sees only a mask. She sees him as a Jew and a male and says, How can you a Jew ask me a Samaritan woman for a drink? A Samaritan woman – that’s how she also identifies herself – stereotypically – and thereby blocks the interpersonal engagement Jesus has initiated. And all the while he simply wants to break through the masks she has inherited to release within her a fountain of freshness, her genuine, sincere, fearless self, that PERSON which until now has lain so stagnant at the bottom of Jacob’s well.

The world in many ways would like to make us all look alike, the standard frowns or Mona Lisa smiles or blank stares dictated by the abstract ideologies, the biases, the politics of our age. However, Christ came to revive the unique persons God created us to be. He wants to take each of us up to that mountaintop where the disciples saw not simply Jesus as he was visible to them upon the level plain, but that radiant one of whom God said, THIS is my beloved with whom I am well pleased.

Reflection for March 13, 2011

2011-03-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

One Obvious Form of Penance

Whenever the maitre d’ of a restaurant would ask the late comedian Henny Youngman which table he’d prefer, he would say in his abrupt New York manner: “I’d like a table near a waiter!” We all know what he meant. Granted there are many waiters in the restaurant business who are true professionals and perform their important role efficiently and attentively (like my mother in her younger years and my Uncle Gene who made a lifetime career of it), what with the vast expansion of the restaurant business, you do often find yourself at the mercy of someone who has an uncanny ability to avoid eye contact with the customer - even when the customer’s pleading gaze is supported by much waving of hands and vocal tactics like: “Hey, waiter! Over here!”

Now it’s my guess that the reason a particular waiter or anybody employed in industry or bureaucracy is inattentive to his work is his underlying wish to be elsewhere. So often in this era of upward mobility the work at hand remains secondary to other ambitions. It’s done to support one’s education or family. It’s a necessary prelude to an early retirement. It’s a way of acquiring sufficient revenue to spend on a date or invest in a less laborious future scanning the stock market. In other words, it’s a job; it’s rarely an end in itself.

How differently Caleb Garth approached his work. He wasn’t a wealthy man. Indeed he had no knack for making a profit. He was what we’d call a soft touch when it came to money. But he loved his work - and not only his work (which was to manage several estates) but the world of work in general. As George Eliot describes him in Middlemarch: Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labour by which the social body is fed, clothed and housed . . . The echoes of the great hammer where roof or keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to him; . . . the crane at work on the wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out - all these sights . . . acted on him as poetry without the aid of poets. . . . His early ambition had been to have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labour, which was peculiarly dignified by him with the name of ‘business’; . . .

His classification of human employments was rather crude, . . . He divided them into ‘business, politics, preaching, learning and amusement’. He had nothing to say against the last four, but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than his own. In the same way he thought well of all ranks, but he would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such close contact with ‘business’ as to get often honorably decorated with marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of the woods and fields . . .Though he had never regarded himself as other than an orthodox Christian, . . . his virtual divinities were good practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman. (10)

The reason I quote this is: often when Lent comes around we have a hard time thinking up something ascetical to do, some sacrifice to make. Why not just decide to focus on whatever job or tasks we actually have to do - with all our heart and mind and soul? We may indeed discover our work to be more sacramental than we realize, a veritable rendezvous with God we’ve overlooked too long.

Reflection for March 6, 2011

2011-03-02T11:30:00.000-08:00

Can a mother forget her infant? And if she should, I will never forget you. Isaiah 49:14

(from the 1990’s)

In one of Kenneth Grahame’s episodes in The Golden Age the boy-narrator tells of his being introduced by his uncle to an attic in his aunt’s house. Among the things stored there was an old writing desk. “H’m! Sheraton!” remarked his uncle, referring to the desk’s 18th century make. He then let down the flap to reveal the desk’s many pigeonholes and drawers. “Fine bit of inlay,” he said. “Good work, all of it. I know the sort. There’s a secret drawer in there somewhere.” The uncle then left the room, but the boy’s whole being began to vibrate “to those magic syllables - a secret drawer.” They conjured up images of a sliding panel, ingots, Spanish dollars, treasure. The boy thought of all the things he might do with such treasure: pay back Edward the four pence he owed him, buy young Harold a toy battleship, now lying in dry-dock in the toy shop window. And then there was that boy in the village who had a young squirrel he wanted to sell. The boy had “wants enough to exhaust any possible find of bullion, even if it amounted to half a sovereign.”

Later the boy returned to the attic alone and approached the desk. He “explored the empty pigeon-holes and sounded the depths of the smooth-sliding drawers.” He let his fingers probe every smooth surface in search of some spring that might release the secret drawer. Unyielding, the old desk stood, stoutly guarding its secret. He grew discouraged and paused to lament his bad luck. This wasn’t the first time Uncle Thomas had proved uninformed, a guide into blind alleys. But try again he must and hardly had he put his hand “once more to the obdurate wood, when with a sort of small sigh, almost a sob of relief, the secret drawer sprang open.”

Excited he carried the drawer to the light by the window. But his excitement gave way to disappointment for the drawer contained no ingots or silver but only two tarnished gilt buttons, a crayoned picture, some foreign copper coins, a list of birds’ eggs and where they had been found, and one ferret’s muzzle. Nothing of any worth at all! And yet as the boy viewed the drawer’s contents a “warmth crept back into his heart,” for he knew them to be the hoard of some long forgotten boy like himself - “treasures he had stowed away one by one and had cherished secretly awhile”: and then - what? “Well,” thought the boy, “one would never know why these priceless possessions still lay unclaimed; but across the void stretch of years I seemed to touch hands a moment with my little comrade of seasons long since dead.”

Don’t we all have a secret drawer somewhere that contains things, worthless to everyone but ourselves? In my own house we have a secret closet full of toys and bedtime story books and a silent guitar and even a guitar pick of my now deceased son that are worth more to me than all the tea in China. And if we no longer have some literal secret drawer somewhere, don’t we all have one deep within our psyches, filled with personally joyful and tragic memories, hurts and hopes, a cherished anxiety or two and perhaps no little remorse? Don’t we all have an inner sanctum no one else knows about or even cares about? And isn’t this what our Christian tradition is ultimately about: that we all become sensitive to that inner sanctum within each of us that somehow makes each of us a “person” and not a statistic? As the boy in our story remarked: “I restored the drawer, with its contents, to the trusty bureau, and heard the spring click with a certain satisfaction. Some other boy, perhaps, would some day release that spring again. I trusted he would be equally appreciative.”

Reflection for February 27, 2001

2011-02-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story / . . . then the light and glory . . . more doth win: Which else shows watrish, bleak and thin. George Herbert

During these days of late February the religious of our monasteries, who recite or sing the psalms and prayers assigned for each day by the universal Church, dwell in part upon passages from the Book of Job.

Now Job has to be a fictitious character because nobody could possibly be as perfect as Job. He has no doubts that he is in fact perfect – and he expects to be blessed for it. And yet he has lost everything; experienced nothing but catastrophe, and so he complains: “Let God weigh me in the scales of justice; thus will he know my innocence! If I have walked in falsehood and my foot has hastened to deceit; if my eyes have turned out of the way, and my heart has followed my eyes, or any stain clings to my hands . . . If I have denied anything to the poor, or allowed the eyes of the widow to languish while I ate my portion, if I have raised my hand against the innocent . . . then may my arm fall from the shoulder, my forearm be broken at the elbow.” And so he goes on and on declaring his goodness – challenging God to a court hearing where he might convince God of his perfect behavior.

Yet in another selection of that same daily monastic ritual we read from a sermon of Saint Dorotheus, “Certainly if someone examines himself carefully and with fear of God, he will never find himself completely innocent.” In other words, nobody is perfect and if he were, he would, according to the Book of Job, still fall myopically short of the awe he should have for God and people and the universe around him. So being imperfect goes with the territory; we are flawed by any moral standard. But realizing that we are flawed, stained, may we not have stumbled upon a blessing?

When did you last use the word “anneal”? I don’t think I have ever used it. That’s because it’s a technical word related to the making of stained glass windows. Stained glass (such as we look upon with wonder in cathedrals like Chartres) is made by reheating your normal glass (such as the clear glass behind our altar at St. Leo’s) and then annealing or adding elements to it that stain the glass into blues, purples, reds, greens, yellows or golds; which is then recooked and later cut to fill out those arched and Rose windows of our cathedrals with a colorful rendering of the life of Christ and other biblical stories and personalities. And even though we call such glass stained, we value it immensely for how it reflects the otherwise white light of the sun.

So also with our flaws. Or that’s what the 17th century poet George Herbert imagined when he wrote a poem called “The Windows”: Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word? / He is a brittle crazy glass: / Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford / This glorious and transcendent place, / To be a window, through thy grace.

As Malcolm Guite comments on this poem, “When we reflect on how the darker colors of our sins and failings, if given to God, annealed and remade by him, can still transmit his light, it is interesting to reflect that ‘stained glass’ [becomes a phrase] in which the word “stained” is redeemed of all its dark connotations to mean something unambiguously beautiful.” Do you feel imperfect, stained in some way or other – and thus bemoan your flaws? Then allow the light of Christ and his Gospel to flood your being and thus transform you into a unique “stained” glass window of God’s Temple.

Reflection for February 20, 2011

2011-02-18T14:01:00.001-08:00

Metaphors are transfers for use on a Streetcar named Desire.

Public transportation was the thing in the 1940’s. I traveled to and from school way across town by trolley and bus – and to the bookstores downtown by elevated train. Fares were cheap. Pick up a transfer as well, and you could travel pretty far. Even when we boys had no carfare, a transfer thrown away by another traveler would serve us well – if the time limit were still valid.

Which brings me to the word metaphor, which has a Greek root to it. If you give it a Latin root it becomes the word transfer. Metaphors are transfers that transform one thing into another. For instance, take the word rose. As Gertrude Stein once insisted “a rose is a rose is a rose . . .” and it can’t be anything else. But that doesn’t prevent a fellow from transferring the word to his sweetheart – transfiguring her, making of her a rose (as in the song The Rose of Tralee). Indeed, her parents may have already named her Rose out of the same desire.

Or take a river, a flowing mass of H2O; and to echo Gertrude Stein: a river is a river is a river. But that doesn’t prevent us from turning it into a metaphor, transferring it with all its characteristics to describe life itself – as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein did with their classic song Ol’ Man River – turning the relentlessness of time into an experience that makes one weary and sick of trying, tired of living but feared of dying – but Ol’ Man River he just keeps rolling along. And what about our recent St. Valentine’s Day when the word heart doesn’t simply describe the pump that keeps our blood flowing but becomes an image of the heartfelt love we feel for a special person.

Of course not everything lends itself to a metaphor. Some things will not allow us to board them with a transfer; they are too sublime; they resist such elucidation by means of another object as in Ira Gershwin’s lyric: It's very clear / Our love is here to stay; / Not for a year / But ever and a day. // In time the Rockies may tumble, / Gibraltar may crumble, / They're only made of clay, / But our love is here to stay.

By transferring the durability of the Rocky Mountains or the Rock of Gibraltar (using them as metaphors) a fellow may want to bring out the durability of a couple’s love for one another – but no! He corrects himself. The durability of their love surpasses even those monumental objects. It’s the same with mystics. Many of them avoid speaking of God metaphorically because strictly speaking God is beyond the grasp of language, images. God is ineffable. Strictly speaking, God’s nature transcends God’s being even a he or a she. With God (strictly speaking) we are at a loss for words.

Yet that hasn’t prevented God from speaking our language, becoming one of us in Christ – whereby he adopts our way of transferring images to achieve his aim of human transformation. Indeed Jesus uses what can be called extended metaphors as in his Parable of the Good Samaritan. Here a whole collection of words would make of you a Good Samaritan – and indeed have the sacramental power to make you a Good Samaritan. Or recently we heard Jesus transfer to us the qualities of light and salt. “You are the light of the world,” so why not illuminate the world around you? “You are the salt of the earth,” so why not make this world more palatable? God’s Streetcar named Desire passes through our valley every Sunday by way of the Scriptures we read – distributing transfers that can carry you far away.

Reflection for February 13, 2011

2011-02-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees . . .

When I was in high school (a Catholic one) we didn’t read the actual books of well-known writers; we were given textbooks, which contained portions of such classics. At my age I faintly recall some of the poems and narratives to which I was exposed – but the one that registers most in my memory is a short story by Saki, the pen name of H. H. Munro – a British author and journalist who matured at the beginning of the 20^th century (and who was killed by a sniper one early dawn during World War I, his last words being, “Put out that bloody cigarette!”).

I remember it especially nowadays because so many people, be they ordinary men and women or academics or pundits of the radio and news channels or politicians, seem so sure of themselves – when it comes to righteousness. I mean as Catholics we have been told that only the Pope is infallible – and only then when he speaks on matters of faith and morals. But nowadays everybody seems infallible and righteously so when it comes to issues. Of course, when one confidently claims to be right about something, there has to be somebody who’s wrong! And so the world is divided into the correct and the incorrect as in that old Gospel parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector – where the Pharisee – from the front pew of the Temple – says, “'God, I thank you, that I am not like the rest of men, extortioners, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like that tax collector in the back pew.”

So Munro’s story (called “The Story Teller”) comes to mind. It begins with an elderly aunt trying to manage two small girls and a boy while traveling in a railway compartment. The children are restless, want to know everything about the farm animals they see from the train window; are never satisfied with her answers. So she tries to engage them with a story about a very good girl who made friends with everyone and was saved from a mad bull by her admirers. “That was the stupidest story I ever heard,” said the older girl.

There was another passenger in the compartment who had been observing all this and volunteered to come up with his own story. It was about a girl named Bertha “who was extraordinarily good.” (“Not again!!” thought the children.) The man went on about how good she was and how she merited three large medals, which she wore at all times – one for obedience, one for punctuality and one for good behavior. Her goodness was rewarded in another way as well. The Prince of the country heard about her and allowed her the privilege of walking in his beautiful palace park. There were ponds with gold fish and trees with parrots. And she thought if she hadn’t been so good she would never have gained entry into all this loveliness.

But then a wolf entered the park – with pale grey eyes that gleamed with ferocity. The first thing it saw was Bertha. “Her pinafore was so spotlessly white and could be seen at a great distance.” The wolf went after her and she ran and finally hid among the myrtle bushes. The wolf came sniffing around but couldn’t track her and was about to go elsewhere when – “the medal for obedience clinked against the medals for good conduct and punctuality.” The wolf dashed in, caught her and “devoured her to the last morsel.” “It’s the most beautiful story that I ever heard,” said one of the girls. Of course it IS a story and so a wolf did not really eat up our fictitious Bertha. But if she had been real, she might have been consumed by something else – self-righteousness – by which so many people seem to be consumed today.

Reflection for February 6, 2011

2011-02-02T15:11:00.000-08:00

God’s Unconditional Ought
(dedicated to our St. Vincent de Paul people)

A lot of people link God’s commandments to his appearance amid thunder and lightning on Mt. Sinai whence he delivered the ten commandments to Moses along with a host of other regulations dealing with worship, diet, leadership, relationships and so on, throughout the books from Exodus to Deuteronomy, otherwise known to Jewish people as the Torah (the Law). But God starts giving commands way back in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible: Genesis. What commandments are these? Well, out of darkness God commands, “Let there be light!” And then come “Let there be sky, sea, land, vegetation, birds, fish, animals.” And in obedience to these commands our world comes into being – nature obeys – even though humankind soon decides to disobey and we wind up the way we are instead of the way we ought to be.

And what is the way we are? Well just reverse some of the commandments that lace the Old and New Testament readings of this month of February and what do you get? “Don’t share your bread; don’t shelter people; don’t clothe them; turn your back; permit oppression to happen; engage in false accusation; allow malicious speech; be “wise” in the ways of the world; follow the letter of the law and reduce its spirit to standardized practices that breed hypocrisy.” And so on. And isn’t that the way we are – caring only about ourselves? And how long have we been around since the creation of the world!! Nature obeys God’s laws – we don’t.

And so in contradistinction to the way we are our lectionary readings for February remind us of the way we ought to be, God’s unconditional ought, the Must whereby we will not only survive but flourish. It’s a way that reaches to the heart, the essence of God’s law as expressed in the words: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and soul and mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” And how does that essential command break out into detail? Well again pay attention to the readings of February (from Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount): “Share your bread; shelter others; clothe others; do not oppress or falsely accuse or speak with malice; let the spirit of the law preside over the letter; don’t be angry; be reconciled as soon as possible; mean Yes when you say it; bear no hatred; take no revenge, don’t be partisan; turn the other cheek; go the extra mile; love your enemies; love as God loves (to excess); pass no judgment; don’t worry over material things; live for today.”

Throughout your life you must pass from the way you are (which you have inherited from generations past) to the way you ought to be. That’s all that Law asks of us in small or greater ways. Even as God commanded light and sky and sea and the whole of nature to BE and nature has obeyed to this very day, so also he would have us respond wholeheartedly to his command, to his request for a command performance from us – to be the way we ought to be. And to stimulate that destiny, he sent us Christ as our exemplar and sacrament.

And what will happen whenever we behave the way we ought to be? Well as the first reading for today says: “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn . . . the light shall rise for you in the darkness and the gloom shall become for you like midday,” an effect Christ plays upon in the Gospel reading when he says in so many words “Stop hiding your light under a basket; place it on a lampstand where all can bathe in it.” All of which seems to say that every time we behave the way we ought to be, we reenact that very first day of creation when God said, “Let there be light” – and there WAS light!

Reflection for Jaunary 30, 2011

2011-01-31T10:15:00.001-08:00

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?

When I meet with retired ministers in town each week to discuss the lectionary readings for the coming Sunday, we often focus on a selection of readings that differ slightly from our Catholic selection. For example, a week or so ago we surveyed the readings from the Episcopal lectionary – a most interesting selection. The Gospel reading was about Jesus summoning Peter and Andrew, James and John from their fishing chores, saying “Follow me.” That Gospel selection harmonized with our Catholic one for that Sunday. But the Old Testament reading and the Psalm differed.

The Old Testament text was from the prophet Amos and went in part: Do two walk together unless they have made an appointment? Does a lion roar . . . when it has no prey? . . . Does a snare spring up from the ground, when it has taken nothing? Is a trumpet blown . . . and people are not startled?. . . The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?

Then there are these verses from Psalm 139: Lord, you have searched me out and known me . . . You trace my journeys and my resting places . . . You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me . . . . Where can I go then from your Spirit? . . . If I climb up to heaven, you are there . . . If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there you will lead me . . . you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

And then there is the Gospel in which we read: As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea . . . And he said to them, “Follow me . . .” Immediately they left the boat . . . and followed him.

All of which raises the question: why do you come to Church on Sunday? What compels you – or is it simply a reflex?

Or could it be because (as Amos says) you sense that you have an appointment or have heard perhaps ever so faintly a lion roar or a trumpet sound? Do you do it because your whole life long (as the Psalm says) you’ve sensed someone both leading you and pressing you from behind, someone searching for you, tracing your steps, driving you out of your hiding places, someone who knit you together in your mother’s womb – known you from before your birth, guiding you toward the Eucharist as if it were a snare whereby he might captivate you with his personal way of being and behaving? Or is it because every day of your life the Christ of the Gospel passes you by under one guise or another, saying, “Give up your shallow preoccupations and follow me into deeper waters. Get to know me – the way I know you”?

Think about it. Scripture is telling you someone is so interested in you that hiding in the dark won’t save you from his intensity, for (as the Psalm says) darkness is not dark to him; even the night is as bright as day. Scripture says someone is after you – to win your attention, to alert you (like Amos) to your prophetic, poetic destiny.

So why do you come to Mass? Maybe it should be because you are fully aware that you have an appointment with this God, who (as the Psalm says) “beheld your limbs, yet unfinished in the womb” and values you and what you have to offer to his world more than you value yourself.

Reflection for Jaunary 23, 2011

2011-01-24T11:19:00.000-08:00

Whoever loves me . . . we will come to him

(from 1995)

When I was twelve years old and a mere tenderfoot boy scout, our troop went on a trip to Treasure Island. Not the one in San Francisco Bay but a scouting reservation situated in the middle of the Delaware River between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The island lay just a few miles above the place where George Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas Day in 1776 to surprise the Hessians at Trenton.

It was a similar wintry day when we rowed across to the island to spend a weekend in its big, cold lodge. I remember only two things from that weekend, aside from almost freezing to death. I recall how we pious Catholic boys rose early on Sunday morning, rowed across to the Pennsylvania shore, hiked on empty stomachs to Frenchtown, went to Mass (to avoid committing a mortal sin), hiked back to our boats, rowed back to the island, arriving about noon - only to find all the Protestant boys still in bed and no breakfast made! And they seemed to feel no remorse over this; one more proof of the inferiority of their creed. (We Catholics were quite superior when it came to remorse.)

The second thing I remember is my being taken aside by some older scouts just prior to our departure for home and told to go fetch a bucket of steam. They told me where generally to look and I naively went off, spending about an hour in the snowy woods, and then gave up. When I returned they said, “No matter, we don’t need it now; what we need are some skyhooks, which you’ll find up along the shore.” Off I went again. After about a half hour I came upon a narrow pier and decided to look beneath it. And there they were, about twelve skyhooks tightly tied to an iron bar. I returned just as the last boat was leaving and said to my mentors, “I found the skyhooks but I couldn’t cut them loose.” The eyed me curiously and told me to get into the boat.

It wasn’t till some time later that they let me in on the joke. And I, too, was amused at how gullible I had been (though I had the satisfaction of leaving them wondering about the skyhooks, which were probably canoe anchors). And later on in life I thought back to that incident as perhaps part of my initiation into this modern world of ours, where doubt is more fashionable than faith; where we learn not to believe everything we hear. No bucket of steam? Then perhaps no angels, no heaven, no miracles, no God?

But as time went on I came to realize that God (and that hidden dimension of reality that God represents) is not really something we go looking for like some bucket of steam or hidden Easter egg or new continent. God is something we “experience”, someone who finds us. God is a “need” we feel when those inevitably difficult, even tragic moments in life strike home. Robert Service says as much in his poem “The Quest”. He speaks of searching for God on purple seas, on peaks aflame, amid the gloom of giant trees. The wasted ways of earth I trod: / In vain! In vain! I found not God. He sought him in the hives of men, in cities grand, in temples old beyond his ken. Alas, I found not God. Until (and I can swear to this!): . . . . .after roaming far and wide / In streets and seas and deserts wild, / I came to stand at last beside / The death-bed of my . . . child. / Lo! as I bent beneath the rod / I raised my eyes . . . and there was God.

Reflection for January 16, 2011

2011-01-12T10:39:00.001-08:00

Seeing The Dove

In today’s Gospel reading John the Baptist admits that he did not know Jesus, couldn’t distinguish him from the people crowding around him to be baptized. And then he saw “a Spirit come down like a dove from heaven” and linger over Jesus – as an indicator that this Jesus was someone special.

How come the others in the crowd didn’t see this dove? For that matter, how come only the Magi saw the star of Bethlehem pointing out the otherwise indistinguishable hovel where Jesus lay? How come foreigners could see it while those roundabout him couldn’t? How come, when Jesus cleansed the Temple precincts in John’s Gospel and Jesus indicated that he was himself a Temple, the priests thought he was referring to the physical Temple; how come they couldn’t see Jesus as the residence of God? Indeed, how come we are so often incapable of seeing ourselves as God’s temples, places wherein God is ever present – otherwise how could we exist? How come when Jesus offers to quench the thirst of the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob, she thinks he is talking of the well itself, while all the while he is offering to release a wellspring (of faith, hope, love, Spirit) deep within her?

This inability to see doves descending from heaven or stars signaling the presence of God among us or to recognize in a mirror one’s face as the façade of a Holy Place, a residence of God, is due to a forgetfulness of our origin, our grounding in our Creator God, of our inhaling from the beginning of our lives (even as Adam did) the breath of God as much as the oxygen that keeps us alive.

Or to put it another way, we have as a race allowed a flame within us, lit by God, to smolder, even die out. Yet without that light (of faith, hope, love and Spirit) to brighten the capacity of our eyes and minds and imaginations we can’t see doves descending or beckoning stars.

Melissa Kay wrote a Christmas poem this year that speaks of that light within us and prays that it be rekindled. It goes: There comes a light at Christmas / Invisible to eye, / But to the heart, a sunrise . . . // Our Christmas candles herald / This holy light of love, / As angels bending near the earth, / Sing blessings on his birth. // Let us, as lamps, be ready - / Trimmed and oiled in prayer – / To offer him our inward wick / When he, the flame, comes near.

Once we allow that wick to revive or be reignited, the faith, hope, love and Spirit that will flood our inner being will brighten up the world around us – so that we may see more than the mere eye can see. Take for example that beautiful Christmas tree that stood in our church sanctuary at Christmas time! Lights of every color, ornaments, symmetry, an angelic tree, startling, delightful to behold, full of redemptive meaning! We take a bare tree and, from out of the light of the faith within us, we bring out to the surface of that tree an inner beauty that our “objective” eye may miss – and we say: this is how every tree appears to one who sees from the depth of one’s being, one’s source in God – and similarly so does the whole universe, of which our Christmas tree is a symbol, loaded with meaning. Think about this – and perhaps you won’t literally see doves descending upon others or strange stars serving as beacons toward beauty (though perhaps you will!) – but you’ll soon understand that the world around us is not as empty as it looks.

Reflection for January 9, 2011

2011-01-10T15:48:00.001-08:00

Out of the depths I cry to thee; Lord, hear my voice. (Psalm 130)

“The wave that came upon me . . . buried me at once twenty or thirty feet deep; . . .I was ready to burst with holding my breath, when, to my immediate relief, I found my head and hands shoot out above the surface of the water. . . .I felt ground under my feet and took to my heels . . toward the shore. But neither would this deliver me from the fury of the sea which came pouring after me again . . . and dashed me . . against a piece of rock, with such force, that it left me senseless . . . ; and had it returned again immediately, I must have been strangled in the water.”

Thus does Daniel Defoe describe Robinson Crusoe’s eventual escape from the clutches of an ocean that consumed all his shipmates. How often has that story been told, with some surviving the ordeal and many never retrieved? The same scene is played out in Melville’s Moby Dick and Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Milton’s famous lament (called Lycidas ) over a college friend who drowned in the Irish Sea. The tradition goes all the way back to the biblical Jonah , who, having been tossed overboard in a storm, remembers how the flood enveloped him; breakers and billows passed over him. “The water swirled around me . . . seaweed clung round my head. Down I went to the roots of the mountains.”

I suppose such stories fascinate us because they often aptly portray (metaphorically) our own situation. How often do we describe ourselves as deluged with bills or work; washed up; caught in the undertow of a friend’s addiction? Sometimes, day after day, it seems like we’re constantly having to come up for air lest we be dragged down not just by the ordinary demands of life but by all those more ominous denizens that dwell beneath the shadow of our smile: things like resentment, envy, sloth, vindictiveness, greed, doubt, despair.

Perhaps it’s because we all do at times experience that “sinking feeling” that the Bible often chooses to describe our ultimate redemption in terms of a rescue from deep water. Think about it. God doesn’t leave Jonah submerged but deposits him upon dry land to commence his life anew. Nor does God allow the infant Moses to perish in the waters of the Nile but rescues him to lead his whole nation out of the Red Sea. Nor does God allow Noah to drown in a sea of troubles nor Joshua and his people to be swept away by the current of the Jordan River but insists that the river part to allow Israel to walk dry shod into the Promised Land. Nor, at the very beginning of the Genesis, does God allow the primeval deep to prevail but, having breathed over it, cries out: “Let the dry land appear”; thereby giving humanity a foothold whence it might evolve.

Today’s Gospel reading offers us a climactic sequel to all those other biblical episodes of marine rescue, for in it we behold Jesus (like a new Moses or Joshua) rising out of the depths that would drag us down - waters that symbolize ignorance, depression, meanness and - yes, our very mortality - that would suffocate us; but from which Christ and his Gospel have the power to deliver us and send us on our way - hopeful and thereby as dynamically creative as Christ himself. Such was the Christian faith John Milton expressed when he consoled himself over the drowning death of his young friend in those forever memorable words: “Weep no more . . ./ For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,/ Sunk though he be beneath the wat’ry floor; / So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,/ And yet anon repairs his drooping head,/ And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore/ Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:/ So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,/ Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.”

Reflection fo January 2, 2011

2011-01-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

Christmas Comes but . . . Fifty Two Times a Year!

With the departure of the Magi the Christmas season comes to an end - setting us up for that inevitable post-Christmas let down. Or as the English/American poet W. H. Auden aptly put it many years ago:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted - quite unsuccessfully -
To love all of our relatives, . . . .
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And . . . for the time being, here we all are,
Back in the moderate Aristotelian city
Of darning and the Eight-Fifteen . . .

Auden goes on to describe how shrunken the world seems, what with the passing of that more magical interlude of Christmas; how the streets seem narrower, the office more depressing. He speaks especially of a sense of disappointment, of how Christmas seemed to present us with a chance to emerge from our tentative attitude toward religion and fully believe in the presence of God among us - a chance we let slip by: Once again / As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed / To do more than entertain it as an agreeable / Possibility, once again we have sent Him away . . .

But the post-Christmas blues are only justifiable if we suffer the illusion that “Christmas comes but once a year”. It may come but once a year for Macy’s and other commercial enterprises for which the word Christmas means sales. But the obvious meaning of the word we use to mark the birth of Christ is The Mass of Christ, a term applicable to every Mass ever sung or spoken. So that it may be accurately stated that for some people who attend Mass daily, Christmas occurs daily - and for most of us, a minimum fifty two times a year! So, why the blues, why the let down?

And if Christmas doesn’t occur every week of the year, how do you explain all those dromedaries I see every week crowding our parish parking lot? They may not be literally dromedaries but they’re the modern equivalent: the vehicles whereby we modern Magis come from near and far, drawn out of the darkness of depression and fog of secular politics by a star otherwise known as the Scriptures which are read to us every Sunday. And toward what do the Scriptures point us but that same old Bethlehem (the House of Bread), which becomes for us the table upon which Mother Church gives birth to Christ every Sunday, to lay him within our hearts as in a manger, to be borne beyond the portals of our church, lovely in eyes and lovely in limbs not his?

So cheer up! The challenge of Christmas abides. The opportunity is there for you every time you come to Mass; not only to “observe” the ancient story but to experience it, to make your own the journey of the Magi, to lay before Christ the treasures of your own personality and to receive in turn Christ’s capacity to dream dreams that will save you from the lethal Herods of this world and help you reach wherever you’re going (as the Magi did) “by another way”.

Reflection for December 19, 2010

2010-12-15T12:04:00.001-08:00

Poetic Arithmetic

Normally mixing poetry with arithmetic would be like mixing oil and water – they somehow resist each other. But the now long deceased Spanish poet Antonio Machado came close to mixing them in his poem that begins: “Anoche cuando dormia” (translated by Robert Bly as “Last night as I was sleeping”).

The poem contains four stanzas, the first three containing eight lines each and the fourth only four. It deals with the poet’s dreams as in Last night as I was sleeping / I dreamed – oh happy illusion! / that a spring was breaking / out in my heart . . .

In the next stanza he dreams that he had a beehive / here inside my heart; and in the third stanza he dreams that a fiery sun was / giving light inside my heart. Spring, beehive, sun – different things.

And each seemed to be having an effect upon him. The spring coursed into his heart along an aqueduct, bearing a lively refreshment that he had never tasted before. The beehive was buzzing with golden bees making sweet honey out of his old failures. And the fiery sun not only enlightened his heart but warmed it and somehow brought tears to his eyes.

And just as when we do arithmetic we line up digits vertically, draw a line underneath the last digit and generate a sum – as in 1 + 2 + 3 / 6 – so the three dreams of a spring, a beehive and a fiery sun add up to the last and summary stanza: Last night as I slept, / I dreamt – oh happy illusion! / that it was God I had / here inside my heart.

I think this little piece of poetic arithmetic tells us that whatever we behold in the universe around us – be it a spring of water, bees busily making honey, the fiery sun, the symmetry of maple leaves, the majesty of towering white clouds, the air we breathe, the whispering of a breeze, the grandeur of a mountain, the fragile beauty of a rose or a wild flower, the vastness of the sea . . . everything in creation offers us a vision, an image of some quality of our Creator. In other words the world around us amounts to a cosmic mosaic made up of bits and pieces that sacramentally reveal the beauty, bounty, power and grace of God. And, of course, the more we allow our imagination, our dreams to embrace this cosmic mosaic in its manifold detail, as poets do, the more the presence of God begins to well up within our hearts and minds as much as it is reflected in the infinite number of things that surround us.

This is true of not only things in creation but of situations that we meet. For instance the more we contemplate imaginatively the story of the Exodus of Israel from their slavery in Egypt; or of Noah’s riding out the deluge of Genesis; or the healing of a blind man by Jesus – the more the Exodus, Noah’s odyssey, the blind man’s cure takes place within our hearts and minds – and we are saved and cured, increasingly made well from inside out. The same goes for the birth of Jesus in that stable in Bethlehem – ingest that and your heart becomes his birthplace, a gathering place of shepherds and Magi from afar. You become a metaphor, a stable, a sacrament where others may witness the birth of Christ. See? It’s as easy and one and one make two!

Reflection for December 12, 2010

2010-12-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Conceiving the Inconceivable

It’s 735 or so B.C. Young king Ahaz of Jerusalem is worried sick – so sick that he will try anything to ward off the siege of his city by neighboring kingdoms, even child sacrifice! In other words he’ll fall back on pagan superstition (any tried precedent) to insure the survival of Judah’s dynasty – indeed even seek an alliance with the ruthless Assyrian empire.

It’s at this point that the prophet Isaiah confronts him, saying in effect, “Why are your resorting to everything else but the God of your fathers? Ask for a sign from the Lord, your God; ask for a guarantee, whether it be as deep as hell or as high as the heavens!” In other words ask for an assurance from God that has been heretofore unimaginable; conceive the inconceivable!”

But Ahaz won’t dare. “I will not ask! I will not put God to the test.” How pious of him! How respectful of God! What he really means is he prefers to stick with his alliance with the proven might of Assyria. He’s not being pious at all; he prefers pragmatism to faith. So it’s here where Isaiah goes ahead and gives Ahaz a sign anyway: “A virgin will conceive and bear a son and name him Immanuel (God with us).”

Now that prophecy meant something pertinent to Ahaz’s own situation, the birth of an heir (despite the current crisis) as a sign that his dynasty would survive. But it means so much more to us now that we are in the New Testament – it means the birth of the Creator of the Universe out of a human mother – who when approached by the Angel Gabriel conceived the inconceivable! God with us, God one of us. How’s that for unimaginable!?

In essence this is what makes us Christian – our ability, like Mary, to conceive the inconceivable. With her and with her son we have learned not to doubt the way John the Baptist does when confronted by a gracious instead of dour Jesus or like Joseph when finding his espoused partner pregnant Lord knows how! Freed from our hesitancy to trust in a reality beyond our comfort zones, our intellects, our past experience; beyond our wariness of things outside the perimeter of our circled wagons -- we can now walk into the unknown, the absurd, over horizons beyond even the “finality” of death. We can believe that Christ is indeed literally God with and within us. We can believe in his presence in bread and wine. We can believe in the world around us as a divine masterpiece and not just a collection of atoms and gasses. We affirm that the inconceivable has literally happened in Christ’s incarnation and from there on the inconceivable remains ready to surprise us in everyone and everything we meet. This is what it means to be Christian, to be Catholic.

In her poem “When Death Comes” Mary Oliver shows the influence of that Annunciation of long ago when Mary conceived (and later gave birth to) the inconceivable. She writes: When death comes // . . . I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: / what it is going to be like . . . // And therefore I look upon everything / as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, / and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, // and I think of each life as a flower, as common / as a field daisy, and as singular // and each name a comfortable music in the mouth . . . // When it is over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement . . .

Reflection for December 5, 2010

2010-12-13T14:14:00.000-08:00

The Peaceable Kingdom

The Advent readings this year include a dream of the prophet Isaiah anticipating a day when “the wolf will be the guest of the lamb and the leopard will lie down beside the young goat and the calf and the young lion will graze together” - in other words, a day when animals will no longer relate to each other as predator and prey but live in playful harmony. And no! He’s not anticipating our modern zoo where an appearance of neighborly relationship takes place - thanks to iron bars! As a matter of fact, he’s not even talking about animals literally; he’s talking metaphorically about human beings who have been known to relate to one another as predator and prey.

It was Charles Darwin who startled our complacently “civilized” world with a reminder that we human beings are of animal origin - rational, yes, but possessed of all the characteristics of an animal: susceptible to scent, content to eat meat or masticate granola, instinctively equipped to engage in fisticuffs or flight, inclined to hibernate in November and marry in May. Indeed, whenever we ourselves wish to describe a nasty person we refer to him as a beast or - if clumsy - an ass. For example, in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Scrooge’s nephew Fred initiates a charade in which his family must guess what animal he’s thinking of. Gradually he’s forced to admit it’s a live animal, a disagreeable animal, an animal that growls and grunts, lives in London, doesn’t live in a menagerie. Then the family comes up with a litany of possibilities: “Is it a horse, a cow, a bull, a tiger?” Finally Fred’s sister cries out, “I know what it is, Fred! . . . It’s your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!”

Or consider that San Francisco writer, Frank Norris, who throughout his gripping story of life on Polk Street in the 1890’s (entitled McTeague) insinuates that human beings - beneath a veneer of civilization - still reflect their animal origins. For example, there’s a description of one greedy character as having “thin, cat-like lips . . ; eyes that had grown keen as those of a lynx . . and clawlike, prehensile fingers.” He speaks of McTeague himself as possessing the qualities of a draught horse: “immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient” or at other times behaving like a panther, “lips drawn, fangs aflash”. Unable to think of what to call a man who insulted him, McTeague finally comes out with: “I’ll thump you in the head, you little-you little-you little-little-little-little pup.”

From page to page of his novel Norris underscores his conviction that humanity has hardly begun to phase out of its primeval ferocity - as when, in anticipation of a falling out between McTeague and his bosom buddy Marcus, Norris describes two fenced in dogs trying to get at each other in a back yard: “Suddenly the quarrel had exploded on either side of the fence. . .Their teeth gleamed. They tore at the fence with their front paws. They filled the whole night with their clamor.” And Marcus cries out: “Just listen; wouldn’t that make a fight if the two got together? Have to try it some day.”

“Have to try it some day.” How prophetic, because doesn’t that back yard episode pretty much describe how the nations of the world (despite their civilized ways) have behaved toward each other over this past century - from the trench combat of the Great War to the current ferocity of the Middle East? No, it wasn’t about harmony between literal wolves and lambs that Isaiah was dreaming when he spoke his prophecy, but about us, about a day when, under the influence of a radically new kind of humanity embodied in the Christ of Christmas, we might someday cease preying upon each other and begin praying and playing together as fully human beings.

Reflection for November 28, 2010

2010-11-27T14:14:00.000-08:00

The Nativity: A Time to Consult the Ledger

The New Testament evangelists offer us not only beautiful descriptions of the birth of Jesus but a contrast to ponder.

On the one hand : we have King Herod who feigns interest in the arrival of Jesus but actually feels threatened by the news and immediately conspires to erase Jesus as disruptive of the status quo - even if it takes overkill: the massacre of every infant boy born in Bethlehem.

Then there’s Zachary. He’s certainly not a ruthless man like Herod, but he is cautious. The news that his aged wife is pregnant with John the Baptist as prelude to a radical change within Judaism makes him balk instead of rejoice. After a long career as a priest at the Temple, Zachary is not enthusiastic about novelty. All his life he has kept to a routine, presiding over a predictable cycle of sacrificial services guided by rubrics designed to standardize his every gesture and word - relieving him of any necessity to think. And he has come to enjoy being a maintenance man, a cog within a smooth running machine. Ever preferring a low profile to any kind of troublesome notoriety, he is now shaken by the sudden attention of an angel who, regardless of the rubrics, interrupts Zachary’s service and invites him to become involved in events of cosmic impact. “Pardon me,” says Zachary, “I’d rather not.” The consequence? The angel says, “O.K., you prefer a quiet life to one of adventure? Then quiet, mute you shall remain. Your potential for an eloquent existence will remain bottled up within you until at times you will feel like you are about to burst!”

And then, of course, there’s Joseph whose hesitancy to be involved in something marvelous is due more to his sense of propriety. To engage a girl who is already pregnant is simply asking for trouble. The prudent thing to do is disengage and return to his prior and tranquil anonymity. So there you have one side of the ledger (Herod, Zachary, and Joseph) to remind us of our own tendency to retain absolute control over whatever happens within of our petty domain; to cling to a comfortable routine; to “appear” proper rather than risk participating in a drama, a tragicomedy bigger than ourselves.

On the other hand : the Gospel writers present us with the Magi who are not at all reluctant to follow a star across miles of desert in expectation of some grand discovery - to risk their lives and invest their treasure in something that seems pregnant with good for the whole of humanity. And then there’s Joseph, again, whose dreams finally overrule his prudence to make of him a source of benevolence toward nations not yet born.

And of course there’s Mary, the truly pivotal character of the whole account. In contrast to Zachary she is simply an affirmative soul: “Be it done to me according to your word.” Though it promises to break her heart, she’s quite ready to let God’s Spirit infiltrate her very being to make of her a means whereby the world will be turned upside down; where grace will have begun to overrule our instinct for mere survival.

Confronted by these different responses to invitations to come out of our precious privacy, to go that extra mile and save a world, where do we see ourselves - on which side of the ledger? Frankly, while I don’t think I’ve ever been as paranoid as King Herod, Zachary fits me to a T. But then it’s never too late, for eventually Zachary did begin to believe in miracles and not only recovered his voice but found out he could even sing!

Reflection for November 21, 2010

2010-11-18T16:02:00.000-08:00

A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb

We watched a re-run of the 1942 film Mrs. Miniver the other night. It’s about a family living comfortably (suburbanly) in England when the Second World War breaks out and changes their routine. Although the war intrudes upon their domestic space in the wail of sirens and the discovery of a downed German airman and the husband’s summons to contribute his recreational boat to help rescue British soldiers from Dunkirk, the home setting remains the location of the story – which includes their local church where we witness a wedding in peaceful times and the funeral of a bombing victim in wartime. By that time the church itself is open to the sky due to an air raid.

Which reminds me of the condition of my old 1930’s parish church in inner city Philadelphia when I visited it several years ago. I had gone to parochial school there, attended Sunday Mass and festive services. It was gothic in style, stained glass windows, arches, statues . . . a replica of ancient Catholic tradition. It offered me access to things sublime as an alternative to the drabness of a Depression ridden city. I had fond memories of it. That’s why I paid it a visit so many years later. But what I found was a shell – the gothic tower was there, the window frames (but without any glass at all). It was vacant – after once having been used as a Baptist church. The doors were off the hinges. It looked like it was ready for demolition - a place once so inspiring to me.

The agnostic English poet Philip Larkin once wrote (in 1943) a poem which reminded me of that old gothic parish. It’s called A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb. Some people think that lingering under Larkin’s agnosticism there remained some nostalgia for his English Christian heritage. The poem begins: Planted deeper than roots, / This chiselled, flung-up faith /Runs and leaps against the sky, / A prayer killed into stone / Among the always-dying trees. / Windows throw back the sun . . . To the poet there seemed something defiant despite the bomb damage, for he speaks of it as taller than the elms and of how its suspended bells / Beat when the birds are dumb.

He goes on to say: Every indifferent autumn, / I have looked on that proud front / And the calm locked into walls, / I have worshipped that whispering shell. // Yet the wound, O see the wound / This petrified heart has taken, / Because, created deathless, / Nothing but death remained / To scatter magnificence.

At this increasingly dark time of year we read biblical passages that speak of our world coming to an end, of temples reduced to rubble - and so somehow this poem speaks to me of the now vacated, demolished church of my youth, and of the demolition of the Faith in general that takes place in the media and on campuses and stand-up comedy shows every day – a once proud Church now often the butt of ridicule . . . damaged as if by “bombs” too many and too controversial to name.

Larkin, while nostalgic over the old, damaged church, questions whether the scattered magnificence of our Creed can be revived, as he closes his poem saying: And now what scaffolded mind / Can rebuild experience / As coral is set budding under seas / Though none, O none sees what patterns it is making? And yet how can one doubt what one cannot see? May not the coral be budding even now beneath the surface of things in patterns – just as magnificent - that we have never seen?

Reflection for November 14, 2010

2010-11-11T09:53:00.001-08:00

“Then the cloud covered the meeting tent, and the Glory of the Lord filled the Dwelling.”

The Book of Exodus ends with this event. In order to make God present to the Hebrew refugees from Egypt, Moses raised a tent and placed within it the Ark (or cabinet), which in turn contained the 10 commandments and other relics of their desert journey to the Promised Land – to make God “visible” to his people. Eventually this tent evolved into the great Temple of Jerusalem wherein the Ark and memorabilia as well as the Presence of God now resided, veiled off within of the Temple’s Holy of Holies. It’s the successor to this Temple of which Jesus says today: “The days will come when there will not be left a stone upon a stone.”

How can Jesus be so irreverent? Here was God’s house, the focal point of Judaism! But Temples do come and go. In 587 BC the Temple built by Solomon was leveled by Babylonian invaders. Indeed, Ezekiel describes the Glory of God (his Presence) vacating the place - leaving it to be dismantled by profane hands. So Jesus is only predicting what Ezekiel once predicted, relative to the Temple of his day. And why? Because the Temple’s priestly caste had gone stale, reducing the Temple to an empty symbol, a hollow place, no longer transformative. – an eggshell, easily crushed.

But not to worry, for although God’s Glory must exit any Inner Sanctum, which has become his burial vault, it will remain present and active elsewhere. Consider Luke’s Annunciation to Mary. Here’s a girl from the boondocks and yet she hears these words: “The power of the Most High will overshadow you (even as it did that Tent in the desert of long ago). Therefore the child to be born will be called the Son of God.” Mary has become a Temple of God. Next we find her going up through the hill country of Judah to visit Elizabeth (even as in the days of David the ark of the covenant, the throne of God’s Presence, was carried up through the hill country of Judah) and the arrival of the Presence within Mary causes John the Baptist to leap within his mother’s womb. Then again we see her as this vital, mobile Temple carrying her child up to the Temple of Jerusalem itself, there to meet Simeon who is clairvoyant enough to sing out: “Now, Lord, you may let me die for my eyes have seen . . . the Glory of your people Israel.” Then it takes only 12 years before this new, vital, growing Presence of God in Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to astound the Temple personnel with his evocative questions and answers – saying to his concerned parents: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?’

This theme of God’s dispersed Presence runs through the whole New Testament. Listen to Paul and Peter: We are the temple of the living God. As God said, ‘I will live in them and walk among them’; and: Remember who you are: God’s own people . . . living stones being built into a spiritual Temple that rests upon the foundation stone of Christ himself. So, given this intention of the New Testament to release God from his captivity within an Inner Sanctum built of impersonal stone, no wonder Jesus looks upon the static Temple of his day as destined to collapse.

But now it’s time to consider whether you, too, as God’s Temple, have locked his Presence within some Inner Sanctum of your own. That’s what you do when you live your life impersonally (wearing a mask, veiling your capacity for love, honesty, sincerity). For deep down within you resides a hypostasis, a substantial you, a personal you that is close to God. It’s whenever you let that substantial, hypostatic, personal you come from behind your facade, whenever you behave personally instead of impersonally, that’s when and where the Glory of God now appears upon this earth.

Reflection for November 7, 2010

2010-11-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.

Scholars tell us that the Sadducees (the Temple priests) mentioned in today’s Gospel were skeptics or traditionalists in the sense that they did not buy into a relatively new insight (around 100 BC) that we human beings are immortal, that there can be such a thing as our resurrection from the dead. Until then the general belief was that when we die we pass over into a land of shadows (Sheol) – a kind of underworld – the Big Sleep, as it were. As the Book of Job says: Just as a cloud dissipates and vanishes, those who go down to Sheol will not come back. Or as in Psalm 6 where the psalmist pleads that he may recover his physical health: Lord, save me, for in death there is no remembrance of you.

According to traditional Hebrew religion up until the time just before Christ, death put an end to life, as we know it; thereafter we are in never-never land, a kind of reduction, regardless of our status in this world, to a common denominator of nothingness. So pray hard that you live carefully and long and that you live on in your descendants – which is the only kind of immortality you can hope for.

Thinking that way, you can see how Sadducees might ridicule any notion of an afterlife – like the joke they present to Jesus in today’s Gospel. Hebrew law dating back to Moses required a brother to marry his recently deceased brother’s widow. Back then polygamy was ok. The idea behind this practice was to insure that the deceased brother lived on in the widow’s child (by him) who would bear the name of the deceased brother. It all had to do with keeping the extended family intact, keeping the property of the deceased brother secure, etc. SO say the Sadducees, what if the second brother dies and the widow is passed on to the third – and he dies and she’s passed on to the fourth – and so on – until they are all dead. If there is an afterlife, whose husband will she be when she dies!! (giggle, giggle)

And here Jesus challenges these Sadducees (who no doubt have a vested interest in keeping people within the frame of reference they’re used to) to open up to a new phase of life where the ways and issues and frames of reference that preoccupy us here give way to wider, more profound, yea even angelic dimensions, to a fullness of life – vitality, gracefulness, bigness, personal intimacy - that the fear, the cautions, the lack of generosity consequent upon our vulnerability this side of the grave impede us from risking. Indeed it’s that fullness of life that Jesus demonstrates both throughout his earthly career (and therefore intimidates the Sadducees) and in those forty days following his own resurrection – where doors locked by fear were of no consequence to him: he walked right through them.

But what does this episode have to do with Mass today? Well, aren’t you in some way a Sadducee, bound within opinions, inherited absolutes, biases, cherished doubts that allow of no other possibilities – especially mind-boggling ones? So today this Gospel challenges you to follow Jesus on into the Eucharistic core of our celebration – where, ceasing to be a Sadducee, you may feed upon his bigness, the kaleidoscopic, even angelic way of seeing and being he would share with you.