The Diary of Jesus Christ

Some Sunday morning thoughts as I check in on the Alvarez-Djokovic final at Wimbledon this morning…

I drop in to the Van Gogh Cypresses exhibition at the Met, and it’s crowded of course, and yet the organizers have wisely spaced the paintings out so there’s at least some room between them. A quote from a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “I also need a starry night with cypresses – perhaps above a field with ripe wheat.” Of course it’s a glimpse into what will become “Starry Night”, so famous at the Museum of Modern Art, and now part of the Met exhibition. Flowing fields of wheat, a small village somewhere in France, and above it all swirling stars. At both MoMA and the Met, everyone wants a picture of it.

At MoMA, a series of black and white photographs from South Africa, from the apartheid era, and one of them shows a public bench with a sign on it that reads “Europeans only.” A well-dressed white woman sits on the bench. Other photographs show blacks waiting in a long line for medical care. These are photographs from not long ago that show what life was like, and likely continues to be like, for many in our world today. Art has a way of showing all that.

A book I find, “The Diary of Jesus Christ” by Bill Cain, SJ. He is a Jesuit who lives in Brooklyn. Interesting how he imagines Jesus keeping a diary, with his observations about daily life in Nazareth, his encounters with local people (his favorite person growing up is not the rabbi, but the local baker who makes abundant amounts of fresh bread and takes great joy in distributing it to anyone and everyone – such an insight!).

His forty days in the desert lead him to a great loneliness, and move him toward an understanding of the lives of so many lonely people around him (interesting in today’s New York Times an article about what seems an epidemic of loneliness in our country – it’s out there).

It’s all a very human Jesus, who is formed, influenced, shaped by his experience of life around him, and all of this is so very different from the kind of majestic, have-it-all-together Jesus we so often seem to imagine. He sees people, seeks to understand people, looks for moments of fun and joy (how much of that did we hear growing up?!). It’s the kingdom of God as abundance and plenty and receiving and open to all that is good in life.

So often, sometimes especially in church, we hear otherwise, a kind of grim list of what to believe and how. I still remember in Raleigh one of the questions for kids making their confirmation was “Define the trinity.” Define! How to define mystery? To define means to be precise, to fence in, to contain. There’s a place for that of course, but not in our relationship with God. This book opens that experience up.

OK, time to check on Wimbledon, and almost time for the farewell reception for our pastor Fr. Tom – blessings on everyone’s week!

Ordinary is not so bad

It’s my first Sunday back here in several weeks, after having been on the road a lot in June, and I have the 4:00pm mass on Saturday afternoon, hot and muggy both outside and inside, as several people in the church are fanning themselves with their programs. Back in Ordinary Time after the long Easter season, Pentecost, all those Sundays with the white vestments. Now it’s green, and the church half-filled if that, many of the people hear surely travelers or tourists, as St. Francis on 31st St. is known by many all over the world.

Ordinary time, with its slow and steady walk through the Gospel of Matthew for this year, Year A. A few weeks ago I see an ad on a commuter train, and it’s an ad for a private jet service, and it reads “Depart from the Ordinary!” Another ad for a university in North Carolina: “Be Extraordinary!” And I wonder, what’s wrong with the ordinary? It’s here, all the time, rarely dazzling, and maybe easier to live with, as who wants to be around the extraordinary all the time? Who knows, maybe it’s just me.

Gospel of Matthew and this weekend Jesus seems to look into the heart of many, “come to me, all you who are labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” “You who labor and are burdened…” – well, that seems to be just about everyone these days. What do people carry around with them? Here at St. Francis on 31st St, we hear from people, and the burdens are many: addictions, loss, grief (our bereavement group has been meeting here), loneliness, illness. I wonder, after seeing those ads which seem to downplay the “ordinary”, if this constant striving to be extraordinary takes a toll on us.

At St. Francis Springs last week, I took a walk with a 90-year-old friar who uses a walker, and he said to me, let’s go out as far as the Francis statue and then back. We talked along the way. We got to Francis and then turned back. It lasted all of ten minutes. Nothing extraordinary at all, only time with a long-time friend as talked about his upcoming move to an assisted care facility, and about all the ordinary visits to used bookstores we had taken through the years.

And so here we are in Ordinary Time, and maybe it helps us to appreciate ordinary time, and the words of Jesus which acknowledge the weariness and burdens of ordinary life, and then an invitation to “come to me, my yoke is easy and my burden light.” No need to depart from the ordinary on a private jet, no need to become “extraordinary” at some local university. The voice of Jesus, time with Jesus, who sees through all the false images of our culture, a voice that settles us back into the wonders of our ordinary lives.

Silent retreat goes well (!)

Just returned, slight flight delay out of Greensboro into LaGuardia, after a week-long silent retreat at St. Francis Springs in Stoneville NC. A farewell to my friend Fr. David Hyman on Sunday last week, as he moved north to an assisted care facility near St. Bonaventure University. And then, the retreat, a silent one (mostly) began on Monday morning.

A theme of encounter, based on the words and example of Pope Francis, and we begin with his encyclical Laudato Si, and in his introduction he draws on Saint Francis’s great song of praise for God’s created world, his “Canticle of the Creatures.” Saint Francis saw a deep interconnectedness to all things, called things brother and sister (Sister Water=if the water is our sister, then how are we called to care for our oceans, rivers, lakes?). Pope Francis sees Saint Francis’s relevance for our times: his sense of care, compassion, attention to what we’ve been given.

And in his introduction, he also writes about the way we have seen God’s good creation as “lords and masters” – we lose sight of the earth as gift, and seek to dominate it. And we see the effects everywhere.

And so, as the week began, we entered into the silence: silent meals together, time alone in silence, and for many, it was daunting: what do I do with this silence? What emerges: I will have an “experience” of God, I will receive a message from God, God will give me an answer to something, the skies above will open up and a dove will descend upon our retreat house..:)

As the week went on, we found we had to let go of our search for an “Encounter” (capital E) and be open to receiving an encounter with a small e. So much of religious faith is tied into doing: pray more, pray harder. And yet a silent retreat teaches me that it’s not about my doing, it’s about creating a space to begin to see differently, to be attentive to what’s here now, to my life as it comes to me.

One woman on the retreat describes a dragonfly which lands on the book she’s reading, how she reached for her phone to take a photo, and in the reaching for the phone, the dragonfly flew off. Maybe that’s an image for a retreat like this: we want to capture something, hold something, and yet that “something” is elusive and can’t be held, can’t be contained.

All this seemed liberating for the group: how do we let go, what do we need to let go of, what do we carry around with us? Deer sightings: fleeting, just a glimpse, and then gone. We see, want to hold, possess: let it go. And we are left with: ourselves, in all of our flaws, distractions, wounds, and in a silent retreat, we bring that to the chapel with the San Damiano cross, here I am Lord, enlighten the darkness of my heart (a prayer of St. Francis), show me who I am, show me who You are. Rest in that.

Beautiful days at the Springs, rich reflection among the group, and the silence ends on Thursday night at dinner (a little early, but that’s OK). The group has connected with each other. I find a book in the library which I had read years before, “Return of the Prodigal Son” by Henri Nouwen, which is a beautiful reflection on Rembrandt’s painting of the parable. I read it in my room at night with the dark woods just outside, its questions of who am I, the younger son, the older son, or the father? Or all of them at one time or another? Let it speak to me…

Silent retreat

At St. Francis Springs in Stoneville NC for a silent retreat which begins tomorrow morning at 9:00am, and I will be presenting each morning a short reflection on Pope Francis and a “culture of encounter” of which he has spoken so often. I will weave in passages from Pope Francis, from St. Francis, and from poets, and I have brought with me poetry from William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Elizabeth Spires. Maybe more if I’m inspired by what I find here.

It is bittersweet as tomorrow Fr. David Hyman, who has been here at the Springs for nine years, will be moving north to Allegany NY to an assisted care facility. He is 90, almost 91, and we have been friends for more than 25 years. At one time in his life he raised chickens, and one time he and I walked into a used bookstore somewhere in the South and he asked, “where is your poultry section?”, to which the person at the desk responded, “Poetry? Right over there!” He has left here at the Springs his vast collection of books on African-American subjects, and I write from the room where much of it is stored, shelves and shelves of history, fiction, poetry, spirituality. It’s a treasure.

Retreatants arrive soon, and our time of silence begins tomorrow morning, though not complete silence of course as we’ll have presentations and also opportunities for individual meetings, and mass each afternoon. Meanwhile, it’s quiet here, so very different from being in NYC, and I have my own hermitage for the week, its own deep silence.

I have a quote from the great teacher on Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating, about silence: “The greatest teacher is silence. To come out of interior silence and to practice its radiance, its love, its concern for others, its submission to God’s will, its trust in God – even in tragic situations – is the fruit of living from your inmost center, from the contemplative space within.”

An invitation to the week, an invitation to make a space, as Mary did in the Annunciation, for a humble God to enter in. Blessings on your own week!

A little time with the Vermeers

I find at the Strand Bookstore a book of essays by the poet Robert Cording, and I am always interested in what poets have to say, how they see the world, how they see the stuff and events of the world, and how they put all that into words. How a poet doesn’t necessarily try to figure things out, but looks, sees, offers images, ways into our mysterious world, and lets us dwell with it for a while, aware of an often hidden grace among us.

He describes in one of his essays the experience of a judge who is overseeing the trial of a Serbian military leader in the 1990s. This judge is asked by a journalist how he “keeps from going mad.” And I can only imagine: atrocities, atrocities, atrocities. Then, in that time, and now, in our time.

The judge is asked the question and answers, “as often as possible I make my way over to the museum to spend a little time with the Vermeers.” And isn’t this the answer, doesn’t this keep him (us) from going mad in the face of violence – by “the Vermeers”, this judge means an exhibition of paintings by the 17th century Dutch painter, perhaps most famous for his painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” about which at least one novel has been written, and a film made.

Vermeer painted fewer than 30 paintings in his lifetime. There is currently an exhibition of most of those paintings at a museum in Belgium, and the response has been overwhelming, with crowds lining up to see. What is most remarkable about his paintings is the light: a pale, luminous light that emerges from a window, illuminating a desk, a chair, a corner of a room. Art historians comment often on the way he paints light, and aren’t we always looking for some form of light in our lives – sunlight, light to see by, distant light on a horizon, the warm light of relationships, the lights in a dark and dim church which, even amid all the stuff of the world, seem to call us to the mystery of a God who sometimes seems flickering in the world, but is always among us.

And so when I have time, I like to make my way over to whatever museum is nearby – the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, Philadelphia, and “spend a little time” with a painting, a sculpture, something beautiful, something that brings light into our collective worlds, that reminds us that beauty and goodness are essential to our lives.

60th anniversary!

My continuing travels…I haven’t been on the road this much since Covid, but it’s been a busy month of June so far, with our provincial chapter this past week (Sunday night till Friday morning, and by the end, everybody was ready to go, only so much “sharing” one can do at these things), now in Boston for yesterday’s 60th anniversary gathering for my parents, and back to NYC tomorrow night. So some days in Boston, which is the first big city I ever really knew, and now it hardly seems a big city especially compared to where I now live in New York City.

But it all comes back…the Common, the skyline, Faneuil Hall Marketplace, TD North Garden with its statue of Bobby Orr out front, and the sense that this is a city by the sea, and perhaps that fact in itself matters for something: an openness to what’s over there, what’s out there, comings and goings. The Custom House tower once was the highest building in Boston but that was long ago; it’s near the waterfront and tells of ships arriving from all over the world. And of course there’s also the Boston accent, and the word “wicked” as in “wicked hot today.” And, it seems, a Dunkin Donuts on every corner. Got to stay caffeinated.

And my parents’ 60th, June 1st, 1963 at St. Barbara’s in Woburn, and I am the first born in April of the following year. Friends of my parents arrive who I have not seen in years, and the old cliche, we’re all getting older. A few need help twisting the cap off a bottle of water. Most are cold sitting outside on the deck and want to move inside. Memories of the sixties, the seventies, and onward, shared family experiences, their kids are now my brothers’ and my own age with kids of their own. My brother brings catered pasta and antipasto (oh how I love a good antipasto) and I bring an assortment of Italian pastries from Mike’s Pastry here in Boston. It’s too much, but better that than not enough.

Afterwards, questions my brothers and I have for my parents: plans for getting older? How long can you stay in this house (the house we all grew up in)? Two sets of stairs, can you continue to do that, laundry and all to the basement? How’s your health? Dave, Jim and I are aware that Mom and Dad, she 83, he 88, are slowing down, and how does anyone plan for that? We wish they would.

Commuter train back to Boston and I am staying with friars here, right downtown, all the activity of the city all around me, and a nice room with a bedroom and – bonus – a little living area with a couch and TV, so I switch back and forth between Red Sox-Yankees and the Stanley Cup final which is still going, Vegas up 3-1 over Florida (two sunbelt teams in the finals! It’s the world now). Off soon for another train ride up to see my parents, a walk to North Station and then 20 minutes north from there. All in all, good to be here….

At Siena College and the Future of Religious Life

Siena College near Albany, and I have arrived here this afternoon for the last provincial chapter of Holy Name Province, as HNP will be merging with five other U.S. provinces into one new U.S. province, to be called the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Dinner tonight, followed by a prayer service, and from tonight until Tuesday afternoon will be a kind of retreat before we move into other things later in the week. The speaker quotes Walter Burghardt who once said that contemplation is a “long loving look at the real.” I had heard that before, and I like it: contemplation not as something esoteric, but contemplation, or contemplative prayer, as attentive to whatever real thing lies before us. Too often contemplation sounds dreamy or something. But it’s far from that.

And so I am settled into my spare dorm room with its spare dorm room furniture, and a kind of quiet surrounds the campus, students gone, distant sound of a train whistle, and an early evening walk through a small nature preserve, wild grasses and flowers and swamp and the interconnectedness of life. Lots of friars mingling downstairs but my introverted self needs to withdraw into my own quiet space. Conversations to come during the week as we talk about what comes next: merger in October, possible moves (some already announced), as religious life adapts to a rapidly changing church and culture. And yet for now, my quiet room, a small assortment of Hershey’s Zero Sugar chocolate bars (what a find!), and our own contemplative days ahead.

To See and Make Sense of it All

I go on Sunday to Philadelphia, just 90 miles or so south down the NJ Turnpike, and I stay at St. Francis Inn in the Kensington neighborhood, the place where I got my start as a Franciscan, and on Monday I take the Market-Frankford line to 30th Street Station, and from there walk along JFK Boulevard and then down a set of steps to a walking/biking trail that runs along the Schuylkill River. I walk north, and I can see in the near distance the Philadelphia Museum of Art, looming over the river and the surrounding landscape, its honey-colored stone exterior, its graceful columns, its promise of beauty and light inside its walls.

There is an exhibition of photography there, the work of Judith Joy Ross, who herself lives in Pennsylvania, and who, the woman who works in the shop tells me, sometimes comes in to see the show herself from her home in northeastern PA.

What is it about photography that draws me in? It’s different from painting of course. These photos are in black and white, and they are mostly portraits of….almost anyone. Nobody famous, only ordinary people in ordinary places, caught by the photographer in a moment of ordinary life. There is a description of Ross’s work near the entrance to the exhibition, and part of it reads this way: “For [Ross], the camera is a tool not only for connection but transcendence. ‘Without a camera, I am often anxious and unforgiving in my judgment,’ Ross has said. ‘With a camera, I can come to see and make sense of it all.’”

It’s the camera as an instrument of art, of coming to see the world and all that’s in it with a more forgiving eye, with a less judgmental eye. How easy it is to judge in this world – social media, news feeds, a constant flow of all kinds of things, and it becomes too much. But then how often does art enter into our lives and invite us to a new and different way of seeing? Who is this person in this photograph, what is their life, their history, their story. Lay aside your judgment, this exhibition seems to say, and learn to see anew.

How I love this museum, far less intense and crowded than the NYC museums, and moments of quiet, of empty galleries, and dwelling a while by a 12th century cloister with a fountain, or a small painting of St. Francis with a donor from the year 1285, or a Cezanne of a mountain in southern France, of a Van Gogh of sunflowers, and all of it resting there while just outside the noise and busyness and anxiety of the city goes on as always. And then…enough, time for some fresh air and sunlight, and I’m out and back into the city, content to have the time among such beautiful things.

Perfection and grace

She comes in to talk, and it’s about her work and her life and how she tries to be faithful to God, how she tries to be make peace between people, and then she looks at the crucifix nearby, Jesus hanging on the cross, and she says, “I need to be perfect like Him.”

And as I hear this, I pause the conversation for a moment, and ask her, “really?” What, I wonder, is this sense that people need to be “perfect” to follow Christ in the world? It’s in one of the gospels, but the translation of “perfect” might better be translated “whole” , which has a very different sense than “perfect.”

What have we learned about God growing up? What do we carry with us about God as we make our way through this complex world? “Perfect” – no one is, no one can be. And yet it’s probably a remnant of the way the Church developed within a Greek-speaking culture in its early centuries – Greek with its Platonic idea of the perfect and ideal form. And it lingers among us, “I need to be perfect.” Or “pure.”

Well, I say to her, what would it be like to let go of this idea of perfection? What if we replaced “perfect” with “gentle,” or “humble?” – human descriptors of the life and ministry of Jesus? She pauses and considers that.

We carry so much through this life and the last thing we need is to carry this sense of the need to be perfect. None of us can be, and I do not believe that is God’s expectation of any of us. Be faithful, even within your doubts. Expect to fall off the path every now and then (the disciples did, didn’t they?). Be faithful to any kind of prayer life, prayer, as Simone Weil said, as “attentiveness.” Don’t worry about being distracted in prayer. Pray on the bike path, in the car, in the shower, in a quiet and empty church off hours. Say, in your prayer, that you can’t pray right now, can’t feel God’s presence (this happens more than we know), that you’re feeling lost and confused. Say it to Jesus and don’t worry, as another woman said to me, that “he’ll be disappointed in me.” I suspect he expects it and hears it more than we know, and knows that it’s part of our modern condition.

And let go of this idea of being perfect, which subsists in the spiritual lives of so many people. Was it Leonard Cohen who said he was more drawn to the imperfections of people because “the cracks in peoples’ lives are where the light shines in.” And how I have found that to be true, and refreshing.

She considers all this and takes it with her and she leaves, back out onto the messy and imperfect and maddening streets of New York City. Go in peace, I say, and she looks back and says, thanks!

Bono: Songs of Surrender

Last Sunday night and it’s the Beacon Theatre way up on 75th and Broadway, and my brother and I are there to see Bono: Songs of Surrender, and it’s the second to last night of the show. He of course is the singer for the band U2, and it’s not lost on me that 40 years and 1 day before the night of this show, some friends and I went to see U2 on May 6th, 1983 at the Orpheum Theater in Boston, as part of the band’s War Tour, as they were just beginning to emerge as a rising act. And here we are, 40 years and 1 day later, seats in the orchestra, and here he is, emerging from the shadows behind the stage, dressed in black, and this night will be a night of songs and stories, from his recent book “Surrender.”

He tells a story about growing up in Dublin, and growing up with “two fists in the air.” It must have been like that, growing up during the Troubles, and he must have been like many others in that time, ready to fight, ready for battle. Like so many in today’s world, right? So much conflict in our times.

And then he goes on to say what he has learned through the years, and especially through his years of social activism, of bringing the world’s attention to poverty and hunger and AIDS in Africa, and suffering mothers in Argentina (the band’s song “Mothers of the Disappeared” is utterly moving, about those who were “disappeared” during the 1970s and 1980s.). And moving from “two fists in the air” to what he has learned, “the best way to deal with an opponent is to not be one.”

And so there – straight out of the gospel (and he was unapologetic about his Christian faith): look for ways to bring peace to a divided world, and start with yourself (the hardest place to start, but the most honest and true place to start). I listened in that old theatre and I thought, well there’s homily material right there. And I remember the influence U2 had on me as a teenager and beyond, this idea that modern music could speak to the world, could have something to say. “Songs of Surrender” – sometimes we have to surrender the ideas we have about ourselves, surrender our righteousness, our own certainties, in order to bring peace and reconciliation about. And we heard that on Sunday night last week.

A little plug for an upcoming retreat being offered at St. Francis Springs in Stoneville NC at the end of June, and I’ll be presenting on Pope Francis and the culture of encounter, June 25-30. Call the Springs at 336-573-3751 for more information. Blessings on your week!