Toward Pentecost: "Imagine Me Gone."

Next Sunday’s Gospel, John 17:1-11, is all ablur in pronouns. 

Ablur.

Jesus is standing with us, but instead of talking to us...about the Father, he starts talking to the Father…about US.  And we’re left to listen and try to make sense of it. There are, by my quick count, 56 pronouns in the reading, 25% of the words.  It takes some time to figure out who Jesus is referring to. 

Time.  

Perhaps that is the reason for the blur of pronouns; he wants to get us confused, so we listen.  It’s time for him to leave, to leave us, to leave us to our own devices.

Imagine someone who means (or meant) the world to you…leaving.  Everything changes, doesn’t it, at least for awhile?  This is what Jesus is trying to invite us to consider, as we sit around in an untidy, squirming circle, wondering why the heck he is talking to the ceiling.

He's saying "Imagine me gone."

We have nine days from this Thursday to consider this, to join those confused disciples. 

Perhaps you have lost someone who...

An Eternity Together

This Sunday’s Gospel invites us to continue circling the tree in the morning mist, trying to find the bird that is making the music that slows our pulse, softens our step, and pushes back on our preoccupations and worries and fears, as long as we keep listening.  Jesus is talking with his disciples again about being gone, and remaining.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he begins, knowing that this is not a head trip, but a journey of consideration by the softer part of his male companions, the more vulnerable.  He will leave them.  All of us leave each other, don’t we?   We know this is true because we have been left by others, others who have been parents or friends, or God help us, children. 

Jesus is leaving, but he will remain, he says.  And in this is our greatest hope, of never being abandoned, never being alone.  The film “Cherry Blossoms” finds Rudi, losing his wife as we who watch know something that he does not, that he himself is dying.  That we know allows us to see his days of living after his Trudi’s death as his most precious.  And in these days, he circles the tree in the mist of death and listens to the silence, and tells his children “I want to know where Trudi is!”

In life, she attempted to dance him, to bring him to the miracle of the moment, to the intimacy of touch and movement, of being one.  It was not until she was gone that he allowed himself to be surrounded by her, to be drawn in to her, to understand that he and she were indeed one.

Perhaps it is the same with us Christians, we who struggle with the “gone-ness” of Jesus and circle the tree in the silence and mist, trying to recall the song that we have heard sung from time to time, wondering if there ever really was a bird, or if it was just our imagination.  We want to know where God is!

And here He is all along, so inextricably wound in us, in the love that is beyond imagining, but is hinted at by duets in dance and song.  Perhaps that is why it is these duets that can move us to tears?  Perhaps it is the insinuation of voices and arms that are the notes of that birdsong finding our ears through the mist of our hoping.  Yes, it is real.  It is not just my imagination.

Doing Daringly Despite Doubt

How dare we even try?  The world seems so messed up, so far beyond our control, problems so much bigger than us.  Does this ever touch you, this sense of the response that aches to…?

Last night while we were having dinner with our neighbors who just returned from a winter away, a little bird thumped into the dining room window and fluttered, dazed, to the arm of a deck chair.  After a brief chorus of sympathetic “Aww’s” we found ourselves back in conversation.  But from time to time we would glance over, one or the other of us, and check on the little bird’s progress.  When at one point I looked over and it was gone, I shared the good news and we all smiled, relief displacing nagging but deferred sympathy.

In tomorrow’s Gospel,  the Good Shepherd has something to say about Bad Shepherds, remarking about “thieves and robbers”.  My friend Dave shared with us last Tuesday morning that Jesus was following up on some tough words from Ezekiel 34:

Are not shepherds meant to feed a flock?  Yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock.

You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the injured ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost.

My flock is astray on every mountain and on every high hill; my flock has been scattered all over the world; no one bothers about them and no one looks for them.”

"For the Lord Yahweh says this: Look, I myself shall take care of my flock and look after it.

Dave’s translation used the words “You pasture yourselves,” and the words thumped into my heart, and since then, I have been looking over from the dinner of my days at the poor and hungry and homeless outside the window of my safe, warm, secure house, the deferred sympathy nagging at me.

I don’t know that any of us at the table last evening would have known what to do with that little bird.  We may have done more harm than good.  And our relief may have been wishful thinking, with half of such birds dying later of brain injuries.  This link explains it, and gives us ideas about avoiding bird strikes.  

But what of the poor and hungry and homeless?  There are so many!  Where’s that manual on how to help them?  

Here we return to the message of Jesus: What now, that I am dead and risen and will soon return to my Father?  What now, indeed?  What do we do?  How do we even enter the world of so many to be fed, so many weak to be made strong, so many sick to care for, so many injured to bandage, so many lost to bring back?  So many!

I’m the way, Jesus says.  Enter through me.  Like Peter, he calls us from our boats of safety across the water to himself.  “Just look at me.”  Like Moses at Meribah, I doubt myself.  How could God possibly get enough out of this rock-self of mine to quench so much thirst!  And Jesus stands at the sheep gate of the sick, injured, lost world and calls me, and calls you, too, I think.  “Just look at me.  Don’t look down.”  And for God’s sake, don’t look away and go back to dinner-as-usual.

Perhaps it was not coincidental that at the table, our neighbor Gary mentioned a video about a runner not hesitating to get up and try the impossible, or we recalled the Derrick Redmond race.  Please watch it and listen to Josh Grogan’s song.

Raising up the fallen may be simply responding as we are called, doing what seems only natural.

Get up.

When is a Door Not a Door?

“How did you get in here,” the heroine screams, clutching her spidering-tense fingers to her mouth, as if to protect herself from the unseen intruder.   

Sunday’s Gospel, John 10: 1-10  begins with Jesus saying “Amen, amen I say to you….”  This is like saying “look at me; I’m going to say something important.”  And what he has to say is that “whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate but climbs over elsewhere is a thief and a robber.”  And he goes on to tell us that he is the sheep gate through which we should enter the world.

Do we enter the world through love, or some other way?  If there were signs over the various doors, what would they be?

Members Only

I accept exceptionalism.  I feel comfortable with those who speak as I do, who act conventionally, who conform to the norms I accept.  They are Catholic, perhaps, or White, or Educated, or Male.  And they accept me just as I am: Catholic, Educated, Young, and Male.

Security

I’ll do what will keep me safe.  I’ll hold on to what I have so it will be there for later when I need it.  If I’m sure I have enough I’ll share some of the extra, but I’ll hold on to some of it too, just in case.

Faculty Entrance

I know, you know.  I have an education, and lots of experience.  I should be able to walk right in, and people ought to know that I know.  What do I know?  What they don’t.  I’m special, and need to be treated as, well, above them.

Baggage Pickup

I gotta bring my stuff.  I choose the car that is attractive, that shows whatever it is I need to show others.  I’m frugal, or I’m sensible, or I’ve really arrived, or I’m hot, baby!  Cell phone in my left pocket (smartphone, you know, with all my numbers and my calendar too) keys in my right, wallet in my back pocket, with clout.

(Your Name Here)

This guy is just standing there, holding as sign with your name on it.  He’s looking at you with an expression that is calm, and his mouth betrays a certain mirth, warmer than a smirk, as if he knows you.  I walk over to him, and he says, “Amen, amen I say to you. Come with me.”   You start to follow him, and he says “Leave you stuff here; all you need will be provided.”  

OoHOO!  A...men!

So here we are, facing these five ways in.  How do we choose, really?

Dance of Days

A grain of wheat in nature falls to the ground and roots itself.  I saw a film of this several years ago, before computer videos became so common.  The hairy strand at the top of the seed curled and uncurled with the changing humidity of night and day, curling and uncurling, making a place in the soil to take hold, pulling the seed into the soil and beginning the germination process. 

Of the seven children of the five mothers I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, I knew six.  No, I know six.  With the nights and days of my life, my memory of them plants them in my soul soil, curling and uncurling and finding purchase.  I remember them in their vitality, and their “gone-ness” makes me aware of my “here-ness”.  They give me the gift if presence, of breathing and seeing and smelling and tasting and touching, of longing and striving and slowing down, too, and being still.

They make me aware of my own adult children's here-ness, too, of the gift of their todays. 

When an Arab man becomes the father of a son, his name in changed.  My name, John Daniels, would have become John abu-Christopher 36 years ago.  It would remind me each moment that having become a father my life is forever changed, and my very identity. I think of these five mothers, whose names were not changed in the moment of their children’s passing, but that everything else did, especially at that first terrible moment.

For all of us who grieve, the probing of that tendril, curling and uncurling in our troubled hearts to find a place to grow in us determines and occupies the time of first shock.  My prayer for these five mothers is that as in the process of those grains of wheat in nature, the green shoot that emerges reaches to the light, dancing them in that phototropic gentleness and grace, teaching them the steps, accompanying them in that place that might otherwise seem like abandonment, that life somehow become for them the green dance of days.

Grieving Mothers

Mathilde Roussel Giraudy "lifes of grass"

The pastor’s Mothers’ Day homily was masterful…but in the end, he was just a guy, well-honed logic too dull to cut through the binding cord of loss.

The Opera Turandot was written by Giacomo Puccini – up to the first few lines of the final duet, when the composer died of a heart attack while being treated for throat cancer.  The pastor, a lover of Italian Opera, waxed romantic, inspired by the idea that Puccini’s students completed the work he had begun, allowing it to become one of the world’s greatest and most often-performed operatic works.  In the same way, he said, that God’s saving work is to be completed by the Church, a mother takes God’s miracle of conception and completes it by nurturing it with her own life.

Wow.  I imagined myself shouting “Bravo!” at the end of his homily, as one might do at la Scala in Milan, where Turandot was debuted.  How elegantly he had touched each mother’s heart, ennobling them with the holiness of their charge, to bring God’s work to fruition.  I did not shout.  This was, after all, not an opera hall, but a typically conservative church.  But I did hold on to that glow of appreciation for the composition and delivery of his homily.  Mother completes the unfinished work of God.  Wow.

Then I saw Sarah at the other end of our pew, and tears came to my eyes.  She had lost her son a year ago.  God’s miracle of conception entrusted to her for completion….  I thought of the burden of maternity, of carrying out the work that God has begun in creating a life, and tears flowed

The Eyes of the Heart: Alma Mater

Do you notice how the main characters in these after-Easter appearances of Jesus – the locked room and the road to Emmaus – are guys?  In the U.S., today is Mother’s Day as well as the Third Sunday of Easter.  No doubt.

Earl the Twirl - courtesy UDM Athletics

ALMA MATER
In this morning’s Detroit Free Press is a story   that warms my University of Detroit Mercy heart.  It’s on the Sports Page.  It’s a Mother’s Day story – about a guy.  “Earl the Twirl”, we called him back in U of D’s Calihan Hall, this 6’ 9” basketball transfer who ran with his thumbs up all the time, most noticeably when he was loping across the court after scoring, like he was giving himself a thumbs-up, and maybe us, the cheering throng, too.  We guys saw him as points and rebounds, our hope to get back to the NCAA tournament after the Dick Vitale/Long/Duerod/Tyler years that gave our struggling urban university some time in the spotlight.  His mom saw him as a college student.  And she believed in him.

I think that the reason Jesus kept appearing to guys after that first Easter morning was that

Risen? It Just Ain’t Logical

Caravaggio - "Emmaus"

Puppy or baby – take your pick.  They whimper at night, alone in their place, while you are in the next room.  You peek in, comforting them, “I’m right around the corner.  I’m here.  Don’t be afraid.”  Maybe you reach out and touch them, so they know you’re really there.  And bit by bit, day by day, they begin to understand that out of sight does not mean gone.  They begin to feel better just knowing you’re near.

So Doubt Week is the first week after Easter, and during this second week we begin to enjoy a process of reminding, of Jesus peeking in again and again telling us, “I’m still here” and tucking us in, comforting us, teaching us faith.  On this Third Sunday after Easter, Jesus begins to teach us not in our heads but our hearts.  Two men are walking “conversing and debating”

Meribah – the Field of Dreams

It has been the homeless who have helped me see the Doubting Thomas in me, and it has been they who have shown me the Doubting Moses.  Kathy and I were for decades members of a “prayer group” in Gesu Parish in Detroit.  The prayer that the group did was less and less overt; we simply grew together in the growing edges, the wounded edges exposed to each other in prayer.  Every year Gesu would host a group of homeless neighbors for a week during the winter, part of a rotating shelter program in the city.  I would use my over-committed life at the university as an excuse to avoid volunteering for the program.  But one year when I was working (from a safe academic distance) with the problem of homelessness, the prayer group people let the word out that we would be making sandwiches one day for the homeless to take with them when they got on the bus after breakfast that day, to spend time back in the inner city while the kids were in the school that had been their home the previous night. 

Jesus' “Touch THEM!” that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog came to mind, and I saw keenly my hypocrisy in studying the idea of homelessness but not serving those in front of me.  The experience that I had with my prayer group made a small crack in my heart,

Entering the Wound of the World: Revulsion

Around age 35 I was invited by Jesus to do what Thomas was invited to do, and I can still feel the shame of my response.  Psychologists suggest that most of us are held back in our psychosocial development to a point in life where we suffered trauma or loss.  Most of us, they say, find ways of coping with this retardation, compensating one way or another, some combination of masking, withdrawing, or creating a false strength, like the Phantom of the Opera.  One way or another, they say, to be healed and to grow authentically we need to return to that place of trauma, face it as truth, and integrate it into our lives.

Perhaps the same is true of a hard truth encountered, an insight or knowledge from which we have fled.  We cannot honestly become ourselves unless we are honest about that truth we’ve attempted to evade.  For me one such hard truth was revulsion at touching the wound.  My first “Ignatian” retreat, 8 days in silent prayer and meditation in the style of the Jesuits under the guidance of a Spiritual Director, found me, as in its essential method, experiencing a scene from the Gospels (Luke 8:43ff) in which there was a crowd following Jesus. 

The woman with the hemorrhage was the subject of the story, and her faith that if she could just touch Jesus she would be healed.  “Touch me, Jesus,” I heard her say, and soon in my ears I heard the crowd murmuring the same plea, “Touch me, Jesus; heal me Jesus, Love me Jesus!”  I found myself joining the crowd, murmuring with them, and then I stopped, realizing that I wanted to be his companion, his friend.  I wanted to be someone special, and not just one of the crowd.  In my room alone in prayer, I said the words aloud: “I want to touch you, Jesus, to heal you, to love you.” 

Jesus looked at me (this can happen in this kind of prayer, by grace) and said to me, “Don’t touch me, touch them,” gesturing to the crowd.  I looked at them, and smelled them, and felt revulsion.  “I don’t want to touch them,” I said to Jesus, “I want to touch YOU!”  I cannot recall the look on his face, of the tone of the words, but I remember clearly that he repeated his words.  “Touch THEM.”

I sat and wept.  I wept the tears of a pupil with a paper full of corrections and a poor grade from a teacher I admired, emulated.  I wept in shame at my revulsion.  But in that meditation, I did not touch them.  I let the scene close and ended my session.  I had been given my truth.  I did not want to touch the dirty, needy crowd.  I wanted to hold myself above them.  Shame on me.

So when I experience Thomas’ invitation to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side, I feel this revulsion of touching something…what…germy?   This is Jesus, for God’s sake!  But it’s there, that revulsion, even with Jesus.  It’s not doubt, though that’s not resolved, merely overshadowed by revulsion.

Next: the gift of the homeless

Thomas: Reluctance Beyond a Doubt

I felt this cool, pudgy little hand worming its way into mine.  It was a practiced movement, it seems to me now, the fingers pursed into a kind of spongy spear, opening inside my passive palm to make room, making a place for itself inside.  Startled, I turned to see the smiling face of the little girl in the pew in front of me, smiling up at me, smiling the word…PEACE.

While we call Thomas “Doubting” and focus on the same hesitation that kept Moses from entering the promised land (“Go ahead, Moses, hit the rock with your staff and water will come out for your thirsty followers”) the little girl’s hand reminded me that perhaps the greater, though more subtle message of the story of Thomas and the risen Jesus is the reluctance to enter relationship. 

God is a God of relationship.  “Go ahead.  Put your finger into the wound in my hand.  Go ahead.  Put your hand into the wound here in my side. No, no, it’s OK, really.”   And hoping that the revulsion that is literally turning our stomach doesn’t show on our faces, we try to politely say to the God who just four days ago died out of love for us, “No, thank you.”

It was, so perfectly, at the “Kiss of Peace”, the ritual of greeting at the Catholic Mass after we say the Our Father and before we receive Communion.  Before we moved here to Traverse City, we spent 40 years of Sundays in Gesu Church in Detroit, where rather than the usual restrained, polite handshake with those within an arm’s reach, this greeting took several minutes.  We left our pews and walked around hugging, slapping backs, sometimes weeping momentarily in each others’ arms,  sharing some deep loss or great joy.  After years of sharing the same urban reality black and white, young and old, secure and poor, we had come to know each others’ wounds.  Tears come to my eyes as I recall walking all the way across the sea of people one Sunday to embrace Henry Bellaimey, the kind, gentle man who I had watched for those 40 years change from a ramrod straight-backed dark haired smiling business owner to a white haired old man bent to a right angle at the waist, but still with the same broad glad-to-see-ya smile.  One daughter lost to cancer, a wife sick with the same for years at home until her own death, a beloved son moved far away in geography and faith, here was Henry with his other daughter, opening wide the arm not bracing himself on his cane, opening so that I can enter and be embraced within that bent-over body of his, wrapped in his warmth and kindness and history. 

Here in our new parish, the greeting is more restrained, more proper and polite.  We maintain a certain distance.   Kind of like Thomas.  We just don’t want to go deep.  We don’t want to impose. 

Oh, I hope this little girl never loses this innocence, this freedom to enter, to make a soft little spear of herself and to gently find an opening in another’s envelope, into another’s soul. 

Next: entering the wound of the world: a lesson from Thomas and Moses

Beyond Doubt

A locked room full of fear.  A trumped-up charge by a controlling state.  A missing corpse.  Wow.  The makings of a mystery.  But I think you’d agree that the lead-up is to the entrance of the missing gang member. I’m talking, of course, about today’s Gospel, the one about “Doubting Thomas”: http://www.usccb.org/nab/050111.shtml#gospel He’s the guy who personifies doubt, is absorbed in his role.

Over the past three evenings I’ve watched the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.  “The Girl” is Lisbeth Salander, a young woman besieged by troubling memories and a lifetime of sexual abuse and manipulation.  Her role is played by Swedish Actress Noomi Rapace.  No.  The role is not played.  The role totally absorbs the actress.  I was shocked to see the actual actress, in an interview with Charlie Rose, her face warm, her speech animated, her personality self-disclosing and trusting.  Gone were the piercings, the black makeup, the face a locked room full of fear. 

How she had allowed herself to enter Lisbeth’s wounds!

Thomas finds a way to escape the fear that has brought his companions to this room after their leader Jesus is executed.  He lets doubt absorb him and goes about his business.  He forgets the whole thing and goes on with his old life, the life he had before Jesus.

We can do the same. Jesus came back a second time.  Thomas had heard from his gang that Jesus showed up.  He rejoined the gang in that room, and sure enough Jesus comes back and … you know the story.

What stuck with me as a kid was the (ew, gross!) thing about Thomas being told to put his finger and hand into the wounds.  And it strikes me now, but in a different way.  I think that if we’re going to escape the escape, the withdrawal from hope into lives of despairing forgetfulness, we going to need to be willing to get into something that can absorb us like those wounds did Thomas’s finger and hand: life in the real world.

The locked room and business as usual: these are the popular options available to post-Easter Christians.  But there is, too, the invitation to enter the woundedness of the world, as Noomi Rapace entered the woundedness of Lisbeth Salander.  She did not enter the role alone.  The credits following each film ran for several minutes, listing the hundreds of people who made her successful role possible.  And we do not enter the real world alone either. 

Jesus knows in his own humanity that these guys are going to need a lot of help.  He breathes his Spirit into them (literally inspires them) and begins to give them “sacraments” (literally, “holy-making” tools) like reconciliation and ordination. We need help too, and so these next weeks we’ll find more of the same: more surprise appearances, more sacraments.  Will they convince us to be absorbed by the role?

The wounded world depends on our response.