It's Doubt Week!

It’s Doubt Week! 

What, you don’t believe me? 

GOOD!  You’re getting into it already.  But since you so wisely doubt that this is Doubt Week, here’s my evidence.  The Revised Common Lectionary is used, believe it or not, by all Catholic and many Protestant churches to walk their congregations through the richest Scripture on a three year cycle.  Each of these years follows the life of Christ from Advent (the coming of Christ) through his birth, public life, crucifixion and death, and rising from the dead (now) and showing up repeatedly until he physically ascends to the Father, leaving us the Spirit.  

The Lectionary guides us through this one-year cycle three different ways, with three different sets of readings (Hebrew Scriptures & Psalms, New Testament letters and Gospels) to give us varying angles on the same basic truth and issues. 

But Doubt Week is celebrated best during Year A (the first if those three cycles) because this year we use John’s Gospel, which is more poetic, long on imagination and short on detail.  And the particular Gospel reading for Easter morning is one that ends, well, let’s say inconclusively.  It’s kind of like a teaser for a mystery show – just enough to make you wonder, to disquiet you and make you want to find out.  John 20:1-9   leaves us lots of room for doubt.

The doubt – what happened to the body, did Jesus really rise, as the Scriptures promised – is put to rest in this coming Sunday’s Gospel  when Jesus shows up in dramatic fashion, appearing to his hiding disciples, and returning later for “Doubting Thomas”. 

Didn’t you feel a bit like Thomas?  Don’t you?  The fact that this week exists, allowing us to stew in our doubt, is for me a validation of doubt as an appropriate Christian response, soil broken and barren and waiting for seed to be planted.  If we hide from our doubt, our attempts at faith will be a sham.

Take time today to sit with your doubt.  It’s a gift.

Entertaining Doubt

Waddyathink?  Did Jesus rise from the dead?  Too flippant a way of asking the question?  How dare one even ask; people have been burned at the stake for even speaking of such…DOUBT.

Some walk right past the tomb, never entering.  Mystery has a way of troubling us, so most of our society doesn’t even spend time thinking about this.  For them, Easter is about clothing sales and candy.  But those of us who have listened to the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the tomb, I think of three ways of living with it.

Faith

Some consider it true and live believing, considering the resurrection a tenet of their faith, something that makes them who they are.  I can’t write much about this without study; I’m not one of these.  I think of the Crusades, of the holocaust, of ways this kind of certainty can decompose into dehumanizing exclusiveness and elitism.  The image above of Meryl Steep in the Film Doubt reminds us of this example of the devil in certainty.  

Hope

I suspect that many apparently untroubled by doubt might more honestly rely on hope.  Accepting unknowing and uncertainty, a lot of us, if we were to speak honestly, consider the resurrection a possibility, and perhaps even long for it to be true.  Or we might long for what seems to us to be an untroubled, unquestioning faith.

Love

Some who have entered the tomb have walked so far away from it or are so wearied by considering its truth choose not even to spend time thinking about it.  The pious believers might consider them heathens.  But these, and I know so many of them, who spend no time considering the validity of such dogma, occupy their lime by simply loving.

Struggling with Dogma and Doubt can distract us from loving lives lived in real moments.  On the other hand, letting in the twilight of mystery can guide us in uncertain steps of toddlers’ feet to the truth that resides in our humanity, in our deepest center of meaning.

I pray not that we invite Jesus into our hearts these days after Easter, but that we entertain doubt.  

It’s in season.  All that Jesus does in Scripture these next weeks helps us to respect the truth of this so that we may step beyond it in a direction toward our truth, our best reckoning of Truth that is God.  And that God is Love.

Robin Sings of Resurrection

On Tuesday mornings I meet with a group of men to read and reflect upon the next Sunday’s Gospel.  Lots of the guys come looking for answers – like the disciples running to the tomb in this morning's Gospel.  The guys take turns preparing a kind of study of the Gospel, to bring us into conversation about it.  Tuesday it was Larry, a retired M.D., a Pathologist.  Pathologists study the cause, method, structure, and consequence of disease.  We need them to find answers.  True to his trade, Larry looks in Scripture for answers: Here are the facts, here’s the analysis, here’s the result.   He squirmed in his chair as he read John’s Gospel:

 …he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.

The usually reverent, gentle, gray haired old man slumped in his chair, shook his head from side to side, And said disdainfully “well, now, that’s a heck of a Gospel; it just kind of leaves you hanging.”  And so we are, aren’t we.  There’s no big Ta-Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!  Just a couple of burial garments in different parts of the tomb, one rolled up on the other side of the tomb.  Jerusalem CSI!

Again I repeat Frederick Buechner’s repeated Big Question, asked here by most of us on Easter morning: Can it really be true?  When we lived in Detroit, the Way of the Cross was all around us every day.  To the skeptic the roles were reversed.  It was the crowd that was carrying their crosses up the mountain, while Jesus stood to the side and looked on, or possibly wept.  God seemed, sometimes, to have abandoned us.  We who tried to live Christian lives sometimes felt overwhelmed by the demands of charity.  The needs were so great in our poor, dear city.  And so in Gesu Church there in the city, we identified with Holy Week, felt it as our own.  Good Friday put us into a real darkness, and we longed for Easter.  We dared to hope that somehow things might change, that God would find a way for our city.

Holy Saturdays have always been long for me.  As a kid, I would spend them looking longingly at my still-cellophane-wrapped Easter basket.  As a working person, I would itch to treat the day like one to get projects done, to be worldly and set Lent aside.  But on Holy Saturday 1999 there I sat with the ache.  In my heart and in my soul and on my mind one thought possessed me:“I need you risen!”  It had entered me as I walked out of the quieted church at 3:00 on Good Friday, the bell tolling slowly into a neighborhood suddenly on its knees.  I wept flaccid tears in bed that Holy Saturday night, repeating those words as a prayer, a glossolalic litany.  “I need you risen; I need you risen; I need you risen….”

It was a warm night, one of the first of the spring when the bedroom window could be cracked open, to let in fresh air.  I slept poorly, partially because of that open window, and the way sounds from the street made their way into the bedroom.  When I’d stir, I’d think of the waiting that the disciples did, the lostness, the despair, and I’d repeat my plea: “I need you risen!”  

And then, hours before sunrise and before any distinguishable hint of light in the eastern sky, a robin began singing in the tree just outside our window.  He sang a song of joy.  Despite the lack of substantial evidence, he knew.

Hope

Oh! Easter morn's elusive flight

From hearts whose hope is almost gone!

Oh, Oedipal eyes' mad grope for light

'Mid nightmares of the gibbet's Pawn!

Good Friday vespers' echoes fill

The heart weighed down by reverenced cross,

And redolent incense lingers still

In Friday's garments' listless toss.

Yet through night's window sweet confection

Penetrates the curtains drawn,

As robin sings of Resurrection

Long before the hint of dawn.

April 2, 1999…Easter

Was Your Good Friday GOOD?

Today is Holy Saturday.  Will it be holy?  Perhaps it will be determined by the degree to which your Good Friday was…good.

What Makes Good Friday Good?  If we get it we’re literally stunned, stopped in our tracks.  The air escapes from our balloon.  Our car runs out of gas and coasts to a stop.  The computer crashes.  The dog stops barking.  The power goes out. 

I read Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace because someone I treasure was going through a really tough bout with alcohol.  But I discovered that I am addicted to momentum.  I like to be moving.  It’s hard for me to stop.  Good Friday service at Gesu Church in Detroit ended with a somber but clear message, a caution and invitation.

"The Great Silence has begun."

What made Good Fridays good was not the intensely reverent reading of the passion, crucifixion, and death of the man we had begun to know as Jesus.  It was not about the kneeling and standing and kneeling and standing and trying to get a sense of what it was like for him carrying that cross up the path to the top of the mound, or whether we could feel the nails going into our hands (or was it into the wrists, so the nail would not rip through and drop our bodies into the bloody dust?)  It was not whether these attempts to be there, to be Him actually took.  It was not the sensation of the cross on our own shoulders or the gentle hands and loving faces of those who paired up to let us feel its weight, lightening the load on those already bent by age but letting the rest of us be bent by it.  It was not even consuming the day-old Eucharist, set aside the night before after the Last Supper, when the altar had been stripped. 

What made Good Fridays good was the silence, the death knell, the non-ringing of the gone-bell in our vacant steeples.  Jesus was dead.  What made Good Friday good was the non-socializing as the feast of faces that normally was spread before us was instead a dusty plain of downcast eyes, the sound of shuffling amplifying the silence. 

Yesterday Kathy and I were able to come back home alone together.  Our son who has brought life and joy and humor into it for the past two months was spending a few days with our daughter and her family.  The noise of Livernois Avenue in our back yard in Detroit and Quarton Road in Birmingham are not here on Bloomfield Road in Traverse City.  It was silent.  Years of pruning on this day had shaped Kathy and me into a ready form for receiving silence, and it was a quiet day.  In the evening we found a stunningly good film to watch, As it is in Heaven, and we wept in gratitude for the gift of it, the perfect relevance of it.  Try it today...or any day.

What is Holy Saturday?  It is the Day of Internment.  When my mother’s intimately close brother died, I watched in curiosity as she sternly tossed a shovel of dirt onto his coffin, her chin pushing her bottom lip up into a momentary There! as she turned away with a sense of completion and finality.  It’s done.  He’s dead and buried.  We got through the family meal and she thanked everyone for coming, and then she came home and let it hit her.  Steve is DEAD.  Until she fell asleep that night, it was all she could think of.

Holy Saturday is the day when the Tomb shouts deafening silence.  Perhaps we should blow eggs today, violating the shell so that we can blow air into it, displacing the promise of life that had been protected there so that our decoration will not be spoiled by its internal decomposition.  Oh! That sounds edgy, doesn’t it?    Maybe Holy Saturday is feeling the edge, feeling the bite of the drill that threatens to empty us of hope and promise, challenging our attention to the superficial so that when tomorrow dawns we can enjoy a deeply blessed Easter, a celebration of the truth that death is not real.

Heads Down, Wearing Beige

Scene One: Good Friday morning.  There they are, the apostles, or at least the ones who did not betray Him.  We call them saints, don’t you know:  Saint Peter, Saint Andrew, Saint James, Saint John, Saint Philip, Saint Bartholomew, Saint Thomas, Saint Matthew Saint James, Saint Thaddeus, Saint Simon.

It's good that you should know what they’re wearing.  They’re dressed like mothers of the groom.  Mothers of the bride, in the movies, are the ones in charge (to the dismay of their daughter who is merely the bride).  Mothers of the groom, meanwhile, are bit players without speaking lines.  Now, if we were to give IQ tests to mothers of the bride and mothers of the groom, there would be no significant differences in their native intelligence; ditto for education, languages spoken, projects undertaken and completed, weight, height, and circumference of the widest part of the skull.

Because of this consistent lack of innate difference between the mother of the groom and the mother of the bride, the mother of the groom needs to be coached in remembering she’s not in charge.  There’s a specific piece of advice that’s passed down from mother of the groom to mother of the groom: Keep your head down and wear beige!”  While it’s possible that women might benefit from such a rule of not ruling, the behavior seems to come natural to men, or at least these 11…and me.  We tend to hide when we’re not in control.

Good Friday morning.  Peter, you know, the one who Jesus puts in charge, takes the lead in denying that he even knows Jesus.  But they’re all, for all we know, keeping their heads down.  So this morning, as I make an effort to put myself in the story, I find myself one of them.  The fire that we huddled around last night is smoking ashes, and my eye sockets feel as dry.  I’m sitting slumped over, my shame and my fear rooting my rear end to the dust on the side of the road where we sit.  We don’t even want to look at each other.

...

Scene Two: some days later.  It has taken a number of appearances from the dead and risen Jesus to get them beyond their shame, and even with their shortcomings we 2000 years later wake up and know it’s Good Friday.

So, we’re out of control.  So, we hide.  He will show up, again and again, and every time he’ll greet us as the angel Gabriel, as the Prodigal’s Father: Don’t be afraid.  I’m with you.  I find two messages in this.  In a world beyond our control, we need to learn together how to live and act and respond regardless of our lack of control.  Second, this song that sings itself in me from our years in Gesu Church in Detroit.

Even these eleven sinners became saints.  Let’s get over ourselves and focus not on our fear and lack of control, but on the hope that Goodness and Love is in charge, and we need to keep our eyes on that truth.

Get up!

Washing the Feet by John August Swanson

Have you noticed that in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke we find the story of the Last Supper, but in John we find another way that Jesus teaches the same lesson?  In John He washes his disciples’ feet.  Yesterday a person I admire did an exceptional thing.  While she is not outwardly “religious” she did What Jesus Would Do.  When asked, she gave all she had and stepped aside in hope and trust.  The person who had asked her for help had become impatient and ugly.  She calmly stood in the face of it, gave the person what they had asked for, and calmly stepped aside.  The treatment she had received had hurt.  Shortly after the encounter the person called her, apologized for their impatience and rudeness, and remarked on her calm and helpful response.  They said that she was their hero.  The person got it.  They learned the wordless lesson.   They looked in the mirror and saw that they had some growing to do.

In both of these stories, the Last Supper and the Washing of the Feet, we can easily get into the theology of the act itself, the self-giving, the stepping down and being servant.  But in both stories, Jesus ends with the same essential point.  Do likewise.  It is as if he looked at them, fed and cooled of feet, and smiles, and said, “Get it?”  In the image above by John August Swanson, I am moved by the rendering of enlightenment.  May we be moved, in the wake of our activities and encounters, to reflect on the example we are given in calm service, and may the light go on in our heads!

Pisteo in Christus Resurrexit

I believe that my wife is a treasure to me.  But when I fail to act on that belief, what does it say about me as a husband?  And if I believe that Christ rose from the dead, but that belief doesn't impact my life choices, what does it say about me as a Christian?

As we leave church on Good Friday we stand like Lazarus, facing the exit from our tomb of doubt.  The possibility that faces us outside is the Easter Mysterium, the rising from the dead of Jesus of Nazareth.  In The Case for God Karen Armstrong makes a distinction that can serve us well as we confront the stone imprisoning us.  She names the stone Credo.

Credo, the Latin “I believe” gives us the word “creed”  a statement of belief that we can accept…or break into sects or religions over, or as in the Crusades, use as a reason to kill.  Credo entered the Latin Vulgate Bible in translation from the original Greek pisteo which means not claiming or holding a belief, but being impacted by it.

So as we encounter this week the real stretch that Easter is, perhaps we can spare ourselves the intellectual flagellation of doubt, and look instead at our lives lived in response to the possibility that this might be true, that death does not really matter.

Can we be pistons, the things inside our car engines that are propelled by the explosion of the gasoline in our cars that is ignited by the spark?  Can our lives be similarly energized by the spark of the Spirit that we feel in even considering the possibilities that we see laid before us this week? 

A song goes through my mind.  It’s not a church song, but one that makes me think of my wife when we were dating.  It’s Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me”.  Kathy was only 10 in 1957; I was just 11.  But ten years later, she’d become the spark of my life, and she’s sent me ever since.   Are we willing to let God who lives beyond death send us?   What a ride!

Dogma Or Mystery...YOU Decide.

Does He really rise?  Was He even really the Son of God?  During this week, I hope we all face this, this unknowing.  As soon as I had typed these two questions, I heard in my mind the howls of dogmatic Catholics calling me an infidel for even questioning these beliefs.  But in asking the question, I show the very faith they might argue against.

Faith is belief in the thing not known.  We don’t have faith that all points on a circle are equidistant from the center; we know (at least those of us who know geometry.)  We don’t have faith that two plus two equals four; we know.

But the gift of this mystery of the death and rising of the Son of God is something that, like love, we can fall into, something that we can allow to submerge us, to embrace us, a cloud into which we can enter.  Karen Armstrong says that the gift of mystery (like the Trinity – three persons in one God) is that it does not make sense, and so it calls us to abandon thinking.  To sit with mystery is difficult, because we want to figure it out.  Figuring things out is important to us.  We figure out what is good to eat, what is safe to give our kids, how to get to work safely, all so that we survive.  To stop and not think is contrary to our learned survival instincts.

How do we handle mystery (or more accurately, how do we let mystery handle us?)  Armstrong suggests three things: prayer, ritual, and charitable acts. 

• Prayer is the practice of the presence of God.  It is not logical or didactic.  It does not make sense.  Like meditation and contemplation, it slows us down, allows us to let go of our attachments, and our body responds with what we call peace but is perhaps a homecoming, and arrival at the place that gave us birth.
• Ritual – it’s really over the top during Holy Week, appropriate to the over-the-top mystery that we’re encountered by, the death and resurrection of the Son of God.  “Smells and Bells”.  Watch kids at a parade.  They’re all eyes and ears.  They’re taking it all in.  They are unaware of hunger, of cold, and even the presence of their parents.  They are taken by the spectacle.  So fancy vestments and clouds of incense and extra-melodic song and the repetition of verse and litany and jeweled monstrance…help us to forget taxes and mortgages and even pains and worries.  While we find it hard to stop, ritual replaces all that we do, and all of it stops.
• Charitable acts bring us to another place that makes no sense – another human face.  Isn’t every person honestly encountered a mystery?  Doesn’t the “homeless person” become so much more when we stand and really look at him…and so much more like us?  Thomas Merton’s encounter with the “bag lady” on the streets of Cincinnati changed his life, and all of us in the circle of his light.

Prayer, ritual, and charitable acts take us outside ourselves, beyond the constraints we put on ourselves.  We are like the Samaritan Woman understanding, the blind man seeing, and Lazarus walking out of his tomb.

Handling Mystery: My God!

A funny thing happened when I thought I might die.  I knew it would be fine, that it would all work out.  It was a knowing beyond knowing.  There was a peace in it like none I have never known. 

Perhaps part of it was my faith, knowing that it worked out OK for Jesus.  That sounds perhaps childish, but it is my truth.  This character Jesus has been with me all through my life, a relationship that I can comfortably call a lifetime friendship.  

The thing that troubled me most during his passion was that cry before he died – “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”  But if we look at the place where he got that from, we can rest in his knowing that it would be fine, and despite the pain and sadness that he was experiencing, he was not abandoned.  Psalm 22, which begins with that “My God, My God…” line expresses doubt and fear for several verses before remembering in verse 25 that “God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, Did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out.”

Perhaps the deepest mystery was that Jesus could, amid such evidence of abandonment, know that he was loved and cared for and would get through this.  My friend Toni is going through cancer in Detroit, and wondering how God will provide for her son.  My friend Michael has his newly-minted Doctorate along with a pile of debt and is working as a substitute teacher.  Bart wonders when his time is up in the shelter whether he will go back to drinking because he can’t find work and there are seven months left until he receives his Veterans’ retirement pension. 

Tomorrow I will meet with my “Men of St. Joseph” and we will have a cup of coffee and look together at next Sunday’s Gospel.  Here as we begin Holy Week and see ahead of us the misery, pain, torture, and apparent abandonment of the Godly Son who came to save us, we are skipping to the end of the story to see how it all comes out.  Seems like cheating, doesn’t it?

But the “coincidence” that we guys would be reading the ending just as the crisis is forming doesn’t ruin the story for us, but exposes the real mystery.  Perhaps it is that Jesus could trust all along what was happening to him because he knew the ending, and that is the message he gave us when he called out his last words.  My God!  Help me to believe, as I did those weeks when I thought I might die, that your love is that real, your companionship that intimate, that the darkness does not matter at all.  Please sit and read Psalm 22.  It can change your Holy Week.  It can change your life.

What do we do in the face of this mystery?  Tomorrow.

Open Up in the Name of the Lawd

In the old cops and robbers movies, the cops would come to the door in their tight uniforms and lean in toward the door of the robber’s apartment.  ‘Open up in the name of the law!” they’d shout (usually in an Irish brogue).  If their command was not enough to motivate the robbers, the biggest among them would put his shoulder to the door and they’d all follow him in like water rushing down a drain. 

Revelation 3:20 takes a slightly different approach.  “Behold, I stand at your door and knock.”  And unlike the cops and robbers, the open or not is up to us.

Knock, Knock.  It’s Holy Week.  It roared in last night with howling winds and late snow.  I awakened a number of times with the ominous sound of it, chilling the air and frosting the ground after two weeks of warm spring weather.  And I thought of the verses of today’s long Gospel referring to the moments after Christ died on the cross, that the old movies showed with such an ominous change in the sky, its portents clear:

And behold, the veil of the sanctuary
was torn in two from top to bottom.
The earth quaked, rocks were split, tombs were opened,
and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised.

The opening of the graves generally struck me in the past as, well, ghoulish, like a scene out of “Night of the Living Dead”.  But this year I recognized something different and encouraging

Open up, Jesus has said for the past three weeks in the Gospels.  Open up, woman!  Open your mind to the possibilities of living water instead of daily self-defense.  Open up, blind man, and see.  Open up, Lazarus, and come alive.  It was up to them to tear it down, the door that had become a wall, the closed mind, the closed eyes, the lost hope. And those three “Open up” calls seem to be ratcheted up in today’s Gospel.  As the ultimate act of sacrifice is finished, Matthew draws from the orchestra a crescendo that would make Mahler blush.  The curtain is torn in the Temple of Jerusalem, and now the door to God is eternally open.  The tombs open us and we are free to remember, to heal and be healed in memory, to again be accompanied by the blessed spirits of our own histories. 

The Grand Opening is announced: our own opening to all that God is all around us, and can be within us.  Seven days to prepare.

Tomorrow – handling mystery

Creation and Crucifixion

The cross is depicted most commonly as two pieces of squared lumber joined in a right angle, perfectly square.  The geometry of it struck me, the perfection of it, and reminded me of a kind docent at Notre Dame in Paris.  Kathy and I were looking, agape, at the Rose Window, on the south wall where it would embrace and diffuse the most light into this magnificent cathedral.  A kind docent who spoke good English asked us if we would like to know about the window.  Instead of obscuring the beauty of the window with names and dates and minutiae, he said: look at the circle, and look at the square corners at the base.  The circle represents God’s creation – planets, suns, orbs and orbits.  The square represents the human act of continuing God’s creation, like the stones of this building.”

The elegance of his bringing these contrasting forms, square and circle, into relationship in the act of creation stuck with me; the concept returns to me again and again, and now in the crucifixion.  There is the round face of Jesus, the mouth agape, the eyes, the shape of his crowned skull, the curved forms of God’s creation.  And there he is hung on a perfectly square cross of human design and construction.

Bill Hickey, who frequents this blog with rich comment and inspiration, is on his way with his wife Billie to Oak Ridge Tennessee for tomorrow’s “A Safer World is our Right” protest rally.  The sponsoring Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance describes itself as “a collection of eternally hopeful souls who believe we have the power to create the world we hope to live in. Even though most of them are old enough to know better, they’ve been insisting that nonviolent actions—speaking at public hearings; grassroots organizing; public workshops; civil resistance actions; letters to the editor—can lead to a world free of nuclear weapons.  OREPA is committed to nonviolence and believes in using every tool in the toolbox. Our main focus is stopping nuclear weapons production at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”

Nonviolence and creation.  While the Norte Dame rose window is a bright blending of God’s creation and man’s, the crucifix, like nuclear weaponry, is a dark fusion of God’s creation and man’s desecration.  It was the perfectly built argument of the leaders of the church of Jesus time that pushed the Roman procurator to allow the use of the efficient method of torture and death to be used for Jesus, this living threat to their power.  Christ crucified. 

And so it is that across the nave there in that cathedral in Paris, all the way against the dark north wall, that the crucifix shows how far we have diverged from the bright creation of God in our power-perverted acts of de-creation.  To Bill and Billie and the thousands who are gathering at Oak Ridge tomorrow, our prayers and thanks for turning us all to the light as God’s spring blooms all around, creation pleading that we learn from its beauty.

One Hand Clapping

He stands before Pilate with his hands bound.  

Mashad* sees the irony, and says to Lazarus, “See who is bound now, even as he unbound you.”  

Atashaah* hears his silence, this man of words, this man of truth, and wonders why he does not speak up.  “It is as if those cords that bind his hands strangle his throat too.”  

Lazarus remarks, “One is unbound within the bindings.”

Hands that cannot be loosed to heal, words that cannot be set free to teach; in my aging, I think of the restraints put on us in age.  But I can remember being a tongue-tied little boy with my hands in my pockets too; restraints have no limitation in time.

I find in this image of a silent, immobile Jesus a koan – the sound of one hand clapping.  A koan is a Zen technique that is akin to Jesus’ parables, meant to release us from thought and its traps.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  It is silence. 

Christians often look at the Passion as Jesus teaching us not to fear death.  But even as the Passion begins with his being placed in restraints, he begins to teach us that helpless is a condition, not an identity.  He prepares us not merely for death, but for a life in which constraints are part of being human.

Who are Mashad and Atashaah? See previous posts.

Asleep in the Garden

I awoke thinking of my first failure every year during Holy Week. Year after year, you see, I doze off during the reading of the Passion.  So it’s easy for me to avoid judging the disciples for their shortcomings while Jesus was being humiliated and tortured, starting right in by falling asleep right there in the Garden while he was in such distress.  I’m one of them. Here at the mere entrance to the week, the Sunday that starts it all, I’ve blown it already, even as the child in me is determined to be good, to be His perfect friend, the kind this Perfect Friend deserves.  And with that failure my holy Week becomes a reprise of my flawed Lent.  I’m like the seed that falls on shallow soil.  I spring up quickly but having shallow roots, fade quickly too. 

Just as I begin to feel despair at my imperfection, I remembered that I’m in this with some friends I’ve picked up along the way: the Samaritan woman at the well I have named Atashaah, my best estimation of the word “thirst” in Arabic.  From her I will seek the senses of taste, smell, and hearing; the man born blind I have similarly named Mashad for “sight”, from whom I will seek that sense; and Lazarus, from whom I will watch for awareness of touch.

In my story, I am there with the disciples…no we four are there with the disciples, and as my eyelids are getting heavy, I hear my three friends having a muffled but intense conversation. 

Mashad: "Look at that slight tremor in his hand.  Can you see it?  Look at the way his vein catches the shadow if the evening twilight, at the way it throbs with his pulse, as if it would burst."

Atashaah: "Listen to the quiver in his voice, to the rasp in his breathing!"

Lazarus: "I have felt this myself, as I was dying."

Mashad looks at me, sees my eyelids drooping, while Atashaah hears my breathing slow as I approach sleep.  Lazarus feels my slowing pulse he shakes me awake.

Atashaah: (to me and the sleeping disciples, strong and stern in her demeanor) "Wake up!  How can you sleep? 

Mashad: (sitting, reaching out as if begging them) "You have spent weeks with this man and yet you cannot see what a blind man could see, how he suffers!"

Lazarus: (voice quivering as he weeps) "What is the rock you hide behind that separated you from him?  How can you be so close to him and yet separate yourself?"

And now I turn from this and prepare begin my day.  These three come with me as I set out.  I bring with me the doubt of my sincerity, my faithfulness, my perseverance even as I look at Holy Week ever so slightly showing on the eastern horizon.  But I know that I have these three, and I have hope that they can help me be a more true companion of this most true Friend, to be my eyes and ears and nose and tongue and touch as I enter my numbingly compulsive patterns of living.

Making Sense of the Passion

Two weeks until Easter and I have a confession to make.  When I realized that next Sunday is Palm Sunday, I had the same thought I have most years.  I wondered how I might avoid standing through the long Gospel, the reading of the story of Jesus’ passion.  This man I like to think is my lord, my savior, and somehow my brother and companion is suffering humiliation, torture, and death, and I’m thinking of my discomfort.  I feel like a hell of a Christian.  But my psychology background comes to my rescue and tells me that my feelings are understandable; I’ve become desensitized.  Desensitization is a condition in which our brains do not process the stimuli received from our senses.  Old married couples talk about “selective hearing” for example; hearing the other’s voice so often, we stop paying attention.  Or when the first warm day of spring occurs, we go outside and feel the refreshment of the same warm air that we will soon not even notice as we become accustomed to it.

So here I am, wanting to walk with you through the next two weeks, the last two of Lent, our last chance to make something of Lent, and to share the most profound mystery of Christianity, and my senses fail me.  As I began to scan the Gospel for Sunday and felt this flat response inside myself, I felt the flatness, and felt too its contrast with the stirring stories of the last three weeks, the discourse with the woman at the well, the healing of the blind man, and the raising of Lazarus.

The thought came to me to bring these three along on the journey of thee next two weeks, so that they may guide me sensibly along this way to which I have become somewhat numbed by repetition.  I’ve given names to the first two. 

The Samaritan woman at the well I have named Atashaah, my best estimation of the word “thirst” in Arabic.  From her I will seek the senses of taste, smell, and hearing.  

The man born blind I have similarly named Mashad for “sight”, from whom I will seek that sense.  

We are already blessed with the name of Lazarus, from whom I will watch for awareness of touch. 

I know that I am lack what they have been so recently given by this same Jesus whose way seems out of reach of my own senses.  I pray this morning that in their company, I will enter fully this greatest mystery of Christianity with all of my senses at my service.

Going, Returning, Remaining

A final word on today’s Gospel, the raising of Lazarus.  In the final line of the scene, with Lazarus having emerged from the tomb wrapped in his burial shroud, Jesus says, “Unbind him and let him go.”  When I was perhaps eight years old, a friend of my parents gave us a dog, which my brother and I named Poochie.  It is only vaguely that I remember his physical characteristics - a lean white shorthaired mutt; what I recall viscerally, even after more than 50 years, is that he would run away if we let him go.  I suspected then, as I do now, that it was my mother’s severe punishment of him when he eventually returned that reinforced his bolting when he could.  But I do remember how he would bolt as soon as he could break free from his leash.   

I felt akin to Poochie, weeping with him as he shivered after a beating.  The same strap or hairbrush that had been used on him had been used on my brother and me, and the same frustrated shrieks of anger had come from our mother as she had swung it with her wiry, muscular arm.  I would hear the train whistle from the track a half mile away at night and wonder what it would be like to bolt.

So somehow this closing line seems odd to me, that Lazarus, so loved that he would be brought back to life would be let…GO; I imagine him bolting, pulling himself from the restraints of their loving arms. When Poochie came back, he looked like hell.  He was filthy, thin, and cold.  While the Prodigal Son returned in hope of being forgiven or at least fed, this poor beast came back knowing he’d be beaten.  What was it, I wondered (and wonder still) that made him come back all those times until he eventually did not return at all? I think of Peter’s words when Jesus asked him if he would leave.  “Lord”, he said in John 6:68, “to whom would we go?”

I’ve found an image that brings harmonizes this bolting escape of Lazarus with Peter’s truth that lets me accept Jesus’ words, “Let him go.”  A vehicle stops by an open field or a beach and a dog and its master emerge.  The master puts the dog on a leash and walks with it to the field or the beach.  The dog’s feet dancing, the master bends down to disconnect the leash, and off the dog runs, free, free, free!  It runs back and forth, away from and back toward (but not to) the master again and again, until it tires and trots back, wagging its tail.

Perhaps the most precious freedom is to freely follow, even in our animal nature, is the instinct to return, to remain. 

My mother was not an ogress, but a woman beyond her capacity to bear gracefully the demands of that period of her life.  Unlike Poochie, she could not run away from us.  I am consoled that as the demands of poverty and childrearing eased, she mellowed.  She often asked for forgiveness from us for those times when she acted out of anger.  I hope that as she died she felt the forgiveness.  I hope that she knew that when she returned to her God, there would be no belt or hairbrush in sight, but a nice dry towel, and a dish with fresh water, and another with her favorite food.  Oh, my, I hope she is OK with this image of her as Poochie in heaven! 

Here we are in this Lenten season, asked again to return, to remain. 

Please Release Me

This last day before we hear the story of the Raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45)  in church, come with me to the scene as Lazarus emerges from the tomb.  He’s not wearing his Sunday clothes.  John says he came out “tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.” I got a call from a reader in Santa Fe last night, bringing my attention to the wrapping, and the last command of Jesus.  I went to sleep with that command in my mind, and awakened convicted and sentenced to life unbound.

In my scene, I find myself as Lazarus, and as I stumble out blinking through the bands of cloth that wrap me, Martha and Mary are running to me to do as Jesus told them: “Untie him and let him go.”  They embrace me, weeping, the three of us born of the same salty water now confluence of the same salty tears.  And as Martha’s fingers begin to feel for the beginnings of the strips of cloth that bind me and Mary studies my face, I hear myself say, “Never mind, I’ll get it myself.”  

I am there now, even as I type, and I feel Jesus’ hand on my shoulder, and hear his gentle voice say to me, “Let them help you.  It’s impossible to unbind yourself.”  I’ve shared the story of the young man appealing to the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, asking him in the middle of some deep, esoteric treatise, “But Fr. Rahner, how does one pray?”  Even as the audience responded to his seemingly childish question with laughter and derision, Rahner smiled at him and said, “Lassen sie das es in sie anbaten.”  “Let the it in you pray.”  I wept over the word “Let…”.  And so when I hear Jesus say that same word to me, I know it is the deepest truth I need to hear. 

Today I will consider this self-sufficiency of mine; if you suffer the same need to try to heal yourself, perhaps you can place yourself in the story as Lazarus, and feel the coolness of the damp cloth on your cheeks, having soaked up your tears, and the warmth of your exhaled breath on the cloth over your nose, and the probing hands of your sisters.  Where does the story take you?  What are your feelings?  Who are the people unwrapping you?

Tomorrow: “Let him go.” 

I'm Calling You Out!

My friend Marv’s jokes included sweet sacrilege, to wit Sunday’s Gospel.

"Lazarus, come forth!" Jesus calls into the now opened tomb where his friend has been buried.

There is no response.

Jesus repeats, a bit louder, “Lazarus, come forth!”

Again, there is no response.

Finally, Jesus says, “Lazarus, are you in there?”

Lazarus replies, “Yes, Lord.”

Jesus: “Then why didn’t you come out?”

Lazarus: “You said that I should come fourth; I’m waiting for the first three!” (rim shot.)

We laugh, but there’s truth in this.  Don’t most of us find it more comfortable to stay in our caves?  I mean our rooms, or our houses, but I essentially mean behind the walls that we have built up that keep life outside.

For thirty years we lived in a little house that looked out on a front porch that was just four feet from the sidewalk.  The sidewalk had been poured in 1928, evidenced by the brand that had been set into every fourth or fifth section: “Gentile 1928.”  The sidewalks that lined the narrow street provided playground, meeting hall, city square and, once a year, ice cream parlor.  Our inner spaces could be small because the sidewalks and street were part of our homes.

For ten years we lived at a Retreat House that was nestled in a neighborhood of huge houses, inner spaces that attempted to slake the thirst for openness.  We rarely saw neighbors, even children.  They had all they thought they needed inside.  We saw clues to their lives on trash day, large cardboard boxes that had held large-screen televisions, exercise equipment, and furniture.

But I know that my pointing a finger at those in McMansions belies my own truth.  I often choose to stay in my own cave, not only socially, but spiritually too.  I choose to hide in the shelter of the comfortable life I’ve built around myself.  

And Jesus is saying “I’m calling you out!”  That’s a current phrase that means “You’re busted!”  Or, as we used to say “I’ve got your number” or “Who do you think you’re fooling?” What is the “life” to which we are being called, not just in the seasonal Scriptures but in morning robin song and blooming crocuses?  What is the “death” in which we choose to remain?  Why do we remain?

Today is my brother Dan’s birthday.  He would have been 66.  He chose to stay in his room.  We didn’t call him out.

Where are You Bound?

Yesterday I was moved by the circumstance of Mary and Martha in John's Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus.  They had lost their brother.  It was memory of my niece, the heartbreak of my sister-in-law and brother-in-law fresher on the anniversary of her death that made me think of the grief of those left behind by death.

But I have been moved since then by the call to enter the story as Lazarus, and what is in my mind is how he was bound, bound, bound.  Two weeks ago, it was the Samaritan woman at the well whose attitude of stubborn self-determination that bound her.  It took repeated logical argument to draw her beyond her suspicion and hostility to trust and hope.  Last week it was the blind beggar who was given sight not instantaneously by magic mud, but also by going where he was sent and doing as he was told.  They were not zapped, healed in a moment by the touch of the healer like they do on some of those “faith healer” TV shows. 

Healing is not an event, but a process of letting go of what binds us. 

So I’m Lazarus.  Bound, bound, bound.  The stone is rolled away, and the voice calls, the voice of my friend Jesus is one I recognize even through these wrappings.   I’ve awakened from my acceptance of the Big Sleep, and decided to return to the life I left, with the complex love of my sisters for each other and for me.  I’ve decided to return to the world of mornings and their call to action, and nights and their call to rest.  I’ve agreed to accept hunger and thirst in exchange for savor and refreshment. 

But I emerge haltingly, my hands and feet tugging at the rags of my shroud, like a convict being let into court in shackles.  And I do not weep at the sight of blue sky or the faces of my sisters, or Jesus.  My sight is obscured by that same shroud, even as the coins had fallen from my eyelids when I’d sat up.  It strikes me that Lazarus is bound in his mobility by the shroud...and all of his senses too.  I see in myself that when I was given freedom to retire, to be released from the daily requirement of going to work, that I discovered that I was not able to move around freely, my mobility bound by another layer of binding.  I discovered that my senses were not open to my new surroundings, bound as I was to my past.

So here we are nearing Holy Week, called to drop our daily grind like the Samaritan Woman and accept our gift of sight like the beggar, and now to let go of our bindings, bindings, bindings that we have allowed ourselves to be imprisoned in, just as Lazarus.  We’ll not climb Calvary in our shroud.  We have a couple of weeks to get with the program, to not only emerge from our cave but to reclaim our mobility and respond to our senses as we try yet again to believe that we can take on death with Jesus, and emerge from it.