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. 

As If Death Does Not Matter

Three years ago today the unthinkable happened.  As Kathy and I were packed up for our trip to the airport after a perfect visit with my family in Phoenix, my cell phone rang, and we learned that our niece had been killed in a horrible traffic accident. 

In three weeks or so the unthinkable will be remembered in Christian churches across the globe.  The only Son of God, sent to save mankind from our self-destructive path, will be humiliated, tortured, and hung on a cross as a spectacle.  And he will die.

This Sunday’s Gospel, a foreshadowing and harbinger, is John’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus.  Martha and Mary were upset with Jesus, the great healer, for not coming to save Lazarus from death, failing to show up to heal him.  We know the story.  Jesus raises him from the dead.

Yesterday morning I met with the group of men, husbands and fathers who look at the Gospels for help in playing those roles as we should.  One of them, Rick, a young father with two toddlers, found it interesting that before raising Lazarus from the dead, he asked Martha whether she believed that he was the Son of God.  She said she did, and in the moments between her expression of belief and her brother returning to life, this young father said that Martha had come, in her faith, to realize that it really didn’t matter whether Jesus could do anything about her brother’s death.   Rick considered the possibility that if Martha really believed that in that faith would be acceptance of everything, freedom from distress, even in the face of the death of her brother.

I came home from the meeting thinking how clever these gospels leading up to Easter are, how they give us three weeks to get used to the idea that death is not all it is cracked up to be, so that when Jesus dies, we will look beyond his death, and ultimately beyond our own.  My head could get around that, and I smiled.  

But just now, as I left a message on Mollie’s parents’ phone trying to express inexpressible feelings of condolence, I felt the reality of this in my heart, that the journey to accept death and not blame God is a tough one, perhaps because it is so unthinkable.  Maybe that’s why sitting in the story and becoming Lazarus, or Jesus, or Mary, or Martha might help us get beyond our heads, that grace might find some fragile foothold, someplace in the broken soil of our hearts in which to dig roots of hope and healing, where death doesn't matter.