Spokane poet Chris Anderson finds God in life’s ‘imperfect’ moments with ‘Love Calls Us Here’

Spokane poet Chris Anderson finds God in life’s ‘imperfect’ moments with ‘Love Calls Us Here’

News story by Emma Maple | FāVS News

Spokane native and “imperfect Catholic” Chris Anderson has just published his fourth collection of poems titled “Love Calls Us Here.” 

His website labels him as “the imperfect Catholic,” a title that his daughter created. 

“It’s perfect,” Anderson said. “Part of what I want to suggest by that is that we’re all imperfect, and that we need to have a kind of humility and a kind of joy in that. And it’s sort of a signal that I want to focus on ordinary human, day to day things and not be rigid and rule-obsessed.”

First poem

Anderson’s life as a poet began in first grade, when he wrote the following poem: “Red, white and blue, the flag is for you, I’d sail the ocean blue, to bring the flag to you.” 

After that, he said “I just kept writing and writing and writing poems.” 

Eventually, poems became one of the mediums he used to connect with God. 

“For me, poetry is a kind of prayer,” he said. “When you write a poem, you can kind of dwell in it and focus on it and pray over it, and strip down the language so that you’re experiencing the moment more directly. So it became very much a way that God was speaking to me, and I was speaking to God.” 

Anderson said the theme of “Love Calls Us Here,” and all of his poetry, is that God is present in every moment of our lives. 

Paul Willis, a peer English professor who has been friends with Anderson for about 30 years, said there is a “miraculous Divine presence and everyday that comes through again and again in these poems.” 

There are a few poems from his book Anderson said stick out to him, including “What Happens at Mass,” “Love Calls Us Back” and “The Nurse and the Child.” 

‘Meaning between the lines’

“The Nurse and the Child” is a story about an emergency baptism that Anderson was called to perform. 

“By the time I got there, the baby had already died,” he said. “She was swaddled so you could only see her face. And the mother was crying, reaching out over the railing of the bed, and the father was standing there. So I took it [and] I tried to pour a little bit of water on the baby’s head, but I poured too much, so it kind of spilled off her brow and ran down her cheeks.” 

At that moment, Anderson said “the most beautiful thing happened. This nurse came, and she knelt at that bassinet, and she folded a paper towel and she wiped that water away.” 

“That’s just a powerful moment,” he said. “I can’t explain the theology of suffering. I don’t know why God would allow a child to die. But that was a horrible moment, and a beautiful moment. So in a sense, all I want to say is, look at that.” 

Anderson described his poems as parables, or stories drawn from everyday life that tease us into thought. 

“The meaning is sort of between the lines of the experience,” he said. “I just tell stories about moments where it seemed to me that God was present or the spirit was moving.” 

“[His book] is very sacramental,” Willis said. 

Falling in love

Outside of being a writer, Anderson is also a teacher, a deacon, a husband and a father. 

He grew up in Spokane. He met his wife, Barb Anderson, while they were both in band at North Central high school. 

“She played the drums and I played the clarinet, and she had long red hair and a yellow honey skirt, and I fell in love with her,” he said. 

After graduating, Chris Anderson went to Gonzaga University where he fell in love with two more things: literature and Catholicism. 

Barb Anderson’s father, who was an English professor at Gonzaga, became Chris Anderson’s mentor after he decided to major in English. He began to spend more time around the Jesuits, and, eventually, he said he started to think, “maybe I want to do this.” 

“It was a sense of falling in love with ideas, falling in love with the idea of the Incarnation in particular and falling in love with sort of the culture of Catholicism,” he said. 

After undergrad, Chris Anderson went to the University of Washington for a Ph.D. in English. He then taught English for 38 years. 

Anderson said that the combination of grad school and working to achieve tenure buried his love for poetry. 

“Poems were always kind of in the background, but it felt like something I didn’t have the luxury to do,” he said. 

Learning the Benedictine life

However, in the middle of teaching, Chris Anderson and his wife took a year-long sabbatical and spent time learning and working at Mount Angel Abbey and Seminary. 

“We just fell in love with Mount Angel and fell in love with the Benedictine life,” he said. 

At that point, Chris Anderson said, “I started to feel this sense of being called to be a deacon. And then when I knocked on the doors, all the doors opened.” 

He went back to school to get a master’s degree in Theology. While sitting in class one day, he said he felt a sense of freedom and joy and decided to start writing poetry again. 

“That’s kind of my first love,” he said. 

Chris Anderson has now been a deacon for 27 years. 

“One of the great things about being a deacon and being a poet is that being a deacon gives me all kinds of things to write about,” he said. 

Chris Anderson also enjoys spending time in nature. 

“I think he’s very open and aware of the nature around him,” Willis said. “I think there’s this kind of both dedication and faithfulness, but this sort of unique openness to what surrounds him at the same time.”

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