Reflection for April 22, 2012

Why all the fuss?

In the 1970 film Little Big Man we follow the adventures of a fellow named Jack Crabb (played by Dustin Hoffman) during the Indian Wars of the 1870’s. Crabb, early on, is captured and taken into a Cheyenne tribe led by Old Lodge Skins (played by Chief Dan George), whom he thereafter refers to as “grandfather”. Circumstances then return him to his own people but later on he is reunited with Old Lodge Skins – and when he reenters Old Lodge Skins’s tepee, the Chief, who is blind in his old age, welcomes Jack (or Little Big Man) back, saying, “Greetings, my son. Do you want to eat?” No rising, no outstretched arms, embraces, tears, no fuss (as in our parable of the Prodigal Son) but simply, “Greetings, my son. Do you want to eat?”

Later on, after much harassment by the U. S. Cavalry, Old Lodge Skins in a quiet moment decides it is “a good day to die” and invites Little Big Man to climb with him from their encampment up a mountain to a place he has chosen to lie down and die. After a ritual dance and chant and words of thanksgiving to the Spirit who lives at the center of the universe, the old Chief lies prone on his back, face to the sky. He closes his eyes and waits - with Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) watching. After a while it begins to rain hard and Old Lodge Skins gets up shakily, saying something like, “Sometimes the magic doesn’t work.” Then aided by Little Big Man he begins to return to his encampment saying, “Let’s go back to the tepee and eat.”

Old Lodge Skins believes the universe has a center (as does our biblical and church tradition). His problem with modern white men is: “ . . . they are strange. They do not seem to know where the center of the Earth is.” Knowing that himself, he seems always calm, graceful, not easily excited like modern “civilized” people. And so when he is reunited with Little Big Man he simply says, “Do you want to eat?” And when, after his buildup to his self-appointed meeting with death, nothing happens – there is no fuss, no frustration, no bewilderment, no emotion; simply, “Let’s go back to the tepee and eat.”

Now I know that in today’s Gospel when Jesus, after showing his wounds to his frightened disciples, asks, “Have you anything here to eat?” he is validating the fact that he is no ghost, that he is real enough to eat and digest food. But if we overlay what we know of Old Lodge Skins’s style on today’s reading, may we not also suggest that Jesus was trying to snap his disciples out of their unproductive astonishment, “their incredulous joy” (meaning: what they were seeing was too good to be true)? When amid all their wide-eyed, hands thrown back, mouths agape reaction to his risen presence, he simply calls them back to our everyday world with “Have you anything here to eat?” – may he not be saying, “Why all this fuss? So I have risen from the dead? Why should that surprise you? It’s been foretold in Scripture for centuries, it has been the aspiration of human hearts since the beginning of time. So now it’s happened! So let’s get on with it; tell everybody about it – that death has been conquered and need no long freeze us in our tracks and frighten us into crucifying each other. And by the way, do you have anything here to eat? That looks like a piece of fish over there.”

The effect? The disciples are startled into recovering their sense of hospitality. They no longer stand there idle but begin to grill that piece of fish as prelude to their going of into the wide, wide world encouraging people to stop making such a fuss over this transient thing called death.

Reflection for April 15, 2012

Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them “Peace be with you.”

It’s consoling to know that no matter how firmly we lock our doors, Jesus can still break in upon our privacy, bringing with him the radiance of a divine world we’ve long forgotten. There was a time, of course, when our doors and windows seemed to be wide open, when our senses of sight, hearing, touch, imagination were especially sharp to pick up the traces of God’s Spirit all around us, be it in a rose arbor or blue jay or the sound and scent of a seascape. Or as Wordsworth put it: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light, . . . But driven by some radical anxiety, similar to that of the disciples in today’s Gospel, we learned early to bridle our senses, to detect only the ominous instead of the wonderful in our environment. We learned to think survival, to lock our doors, shutter our windows - to dwell within a world of business gray.

Still, even as we grow older, Christ can intrude upon us as he did upon those mournful disciples. Now and again, by way of little signals, he can appear among us to remind us that there’s so much more to reality than our doubting minds will allow - as he did with Anne Porter, who tells of a wartime Sunday morning walk in 1940’s Manhattan with the littlest of her sons. First Avenue was empty and gray. No one was up. The bridges over the East River stood silent like great webs of stillness. Returning home past locked-up shops, she paused to notice one window heaped with old lamps, guitars, radios, dusty furs - And there among them a pawned christening-dress / White as a waterfall. That’s how Christ and the real world he represents can break in upon us - so that suddenly we realize how much we have let death constrict our minds and, if only for a brief moment, find ourselves ready once more to share in Christ’s victory over death, to explore with him once more the brilliant, eternal NOW that lies beyond our muted senses.

Marcel Proust in his masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time writes often of such moments when, for instance, the mere taste of a French pastry dipped in tea would lift his hero, Marcel, out of the boredom of his Parisian social life to taste again the sacramental quality of his childhood village of Combray - where the discovery of a simple hawthorn bush flooded him with affection and the names of the village streets (Rue Saint-Jacques, Rue Sainte-Hildegarde, Rue du Saint-Esprit) made him feel he dwelt in nothing less than a suburb of God’s celestial Jerusalem. And then there was the village church of Saint-Hilaire, whose sculptured facade and stained glass interior made it seem like a gateway into depths light years beyond the shops around it. And its spire! From wherever young Marcel viewed the local landscape, that spire always looked as if it were the very Finger of God tenderly touching the earth.

Indeed, so profoundly did he remember it that, later in life, were he to find himself in a strange quarter of Paris and to ask directions of a passerby to an intended destination and were the passerby to point out some distant spire as the place to turn to reach that address, Marcel would stand motionless, oblivious of his original destination, remembering the spire of his childhood. Only after a seemingly interminable moment would the passerby see him then begin to walk a bit unsteadily, turn the appropriate corner - but as Marcel himself comments, “The goal I now sought was in my heart.”

Moments of epiphany! Moments when Christ and the fullness of life he represents intrude upon our shuttered world! Stay alert! Their frequency may be only dependent upon how often you would like them to happen.