Reflection for February 5, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.