Palm Sunday Meditation: Small Is Holy #2
""Exposing the Paradox of Creation: the Via Negativa"
Introduction
Celebrating Palm Sunday with you like this makes me think about how the early community of faith we now call the Church entered into these holy mysteries. We know from the gospel readings for this day that there was excitement and confusion. There was also great fear in those early days as the Jesus movement practiced radical hospitality and humble tenderness in a hostile environment. St. John’s gospel tells us that on the first Easter Sunday the disciples were hidden away in the Upper Room for fear of the violent and threatening realities that surrounded them in Jerusalem.
That violence and fear – always present to some degree in the human condition – began to bubble up on Palm Sunday and boil over as Holy Week ripened. For a moment in time, the profound paradox of creation was revealed: new life and tragic death always exist side by side. My favorite prayer in the Book of Worship for the United Church of Christ puts it like this: "O God, who in Jesus Christ triumphantly entered Jerusalem, heralding a week of pain and sorrow, be with us now as we follow the way of the cross. In these events of defeat and victory – humiliation and exaltation – we are aware that the way of Jesus includes martyrdom and majesty. Bless us – as well as the palms we carry – to your use to be signs of a new way of living in this broken and beautiful world. Come, Lord Jesus, come. Amen."
That same paradox has been revealed to the world once again as we mark the start of Holy Week 2020: there is fear and hope, clarity and confusion, solidarity and strife, new life and countless deaths wherever we look. And for people of faith the magnitude of this moment is pushing us to wrestle with yet another aspect of this paradox: honoring the wisdom of our grief even as we search for the moral meaning of this plague. That’s how NY Times columnist, David Brooks, speaks of Holy Week this year: becoming consciously aware that how we live and move, breathe and act in the world will either strengthen the bonds of human love, or, pour gasoline on the fire of cruelty and madness.
It is too early, of course, to draw comprehensive conclusions about how we might live on the other side of the coronavirus: there’s just too much suffering still ahead for that. But it is not premature to ponder what values and ethical objectives will shape our response to this tragedy. The prophets of ancient Israel taught us that without a vision the people will perish. So Brooks references Victor Frankl who, “writing from the madness of the Holocaust, reminded us that we don’t get to choose our difficulties, but we do have the freedom to select our responses. Meaning, he argued, comes from three things: the work we offer in times of crisis, the love we give and our ability to display courage in the face of suffering. The menace may be subhuman or superhuman, but we all have the option of asserting our own dignity, even to the end.”
Insights
That is why the Passion Narrative of Jesus is often read on this day in churches all over the world: it reminds us that unless human beings consciously practice staying grounded we’ll get caught up in the emotions of the day or lost within our own brokenness. It is no accident that our tradition starts Palm Sunday with shouts of “HOSANNA! HOSANNA!” but then quickly shifts to cries of, “CRUCIFY, CRUCIFY THAT MAN!” Learning how to move with compassion and integrity in this tension is at the heart of the paradox of the passion of Jesus during Holy Week.
You see, the arc of worship over the next 8 days exposes both the possibilities of tenderness and the certainties of cruelty that live in every heart. The liturgy shows us that those who have befriended Jesus will not only betray him in their fear, but desert him when he is most vulnerable. Simultaneously, the women in this story who have traveled with Jesus from the start continue to stand by him even when threatened by the swords of Roman legionnaires. The men cave-in and hide-away with tears of shame while the women stand silent witness with tears of love so that Jesus does not have to face the agony of the Cross all by himself. This paradox is personified in Peter, who denies ever knowing Jesus when it really counts, and, Mary Magdalene who refuses to hide her solidarity and stays with Jesus through it all.
At its deepest level our Holy Week story asks us to realize that the worst of our humanity is always in tension with our best – and God’s love is there in the light as well as the darkness. From start to finish the men are present as well as the women, the fear is there alongside the joy, and the death is every bit as true as new life. For this is the paradox of creation: the good is always surrounded by evil, life is never just about winners or losers, women or men, happiness or despair. It is always about making sense of both: just look at the CROSS as it holds both seeming opposites together at the same time.
And that feels true to me right now when our deepest fears and anxieties are alive and all too well within us every day and night, and, at the same time women, men and children are courageously sharing love in death-defying ways as well. I don’t know about you but on any given day, my feelings can bounce around within like I’m on an emotional trampoline only to be suddenly replaced by a peace that passes under--standing all in my same body! When I watch the news – and mind you, I limit it to just one hour a day so that I’m not overwhelmed by the emotional propaganda and advertising for anxiety – I experience a full range of feelings from rage and sorrow, to gratitude, despair and hope. And while I take in all the news – not just the feel good stories, but also the current incompetency as well as inexorable sorrow to come – I pay careful attention to how the vast majority of us continue to incarnate a love that is bolder than any act of love we have ever seen before. Somebody on Facebook posted this meme:
When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself: This looks like the end of the world. What you’re seeing is love in action. What you’re seeing in that negative space, is how much we really care for one another: For our grandparents, for our immune-compromised sisters and brothers, for strangers we will never meet. People have already lost their jobs for this love. Some will lose their businesses and some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you’re out on your walk, or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into this emptiness and marvel at all that love. Let it fill you and nourish you. Remember: it ISN’T the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness.
In contemplative spirituality this is part of the Via Negativa – a path into God’s love that is empty rather than full – a way of being that finds assurance in the sacred silence more than the sounds. Some of our friends in the mystical traditions of Judaism say that just as there is wisdom in the black letters of the Jewish alphabet, there is also insight to be discovered in all the empty space that surrounds those letters. In the mystery. Most Americans are well-rehearsed in the Via Positiva – the evidence-based ways of living of commerce, bottom lines and science – so we don’t really know what to do when that realm is shut down. When, as another person put it, the old normal is so gone forever that it can never be restored because the old normal is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. Brooks writes:
This particular plague hits us at exactly the spots where we are weakest and exposes exactly those ills we had lazily come to tolerate. We’re already a divided nation, and the plague makes us distance from one another. We define ourselves too much by our careers, and the plague threatens to sweep them away. We’re a morally inarticulate culture, and now the fundamental moral questions apply. In this way the plague demands that we address our problems in ways we weren’t forced to before. The plague brings forth our creativity. It’s during economic and social depressions that the great organizations of the future are spawned.
The fact that we are gathered together using Facebook on Palm Sunday is evidence that this moment is calling us beyond the worn-out ways of what used to be normal into a new life that is still mysteriously taking shape and form. For me I trust that we are being existentially trained into a spirituality that adds gravitas to our souls, paradox to our working vocabulary and nuance and patience to our hearts. The Via Negativa is at the heart of Holy Week and the moral meaning of this plague. But like all new ways of being, it takes practice and time to trust. Do you know the poet Rumi? The great Islamic mystic? Some twenty years ago, when I came upon his poem, Love Dogs, I felt a veil had been lifted so that new light could be revealed. Better than most, you see, Rumi describes what it feels like to live into the Via Negativa. Coleman Barks translates it like this:
One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising, until a cynic said, “So!
I’ve heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that. He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?” “Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“Oh this longing you express is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.
The men who were friends and disciples of Jesus discovered their longing through shame and betrayal and yet Jesus made a point to come back to embrace them again with forgiveness, grace and tenderness. The women lived deeper into their emptiness by standing silent witness at the foot of the Cross and the tomb when everyone else ran away and Jesus returned to them appointing them the first apostles of this new life of love on Easter morning. Dear people of God, there is meaning in this suffering – in this emptiness – in these fears. And we don’t have to understand it all right now. As I said earlier, the grief that is yet to come will be onerous and incomprehensible. Bearing it well is what this hour requires. Christine Valters-Painter at the Abbey of the Arts wisely proclaims in her poem, “It Is Dark.”
Do not rush to make meaning.
When you smile and say what purpose this all serves,
you deny grief a room inside you,
you turn from thousands who cross into the Great Night alone,
from mourners aching to press one last time against the warm flesh of their beloved,
from the wailing that echoes in the empty room.
When you cry out who caused this, I say pause, rest in the dark silence first before you contort your words to fill the hollowed out cave,
remember the soil will one day receive you back too.
So sit where sense has vanished… and every drink tastes bitter despite our thirst.
When you wish to give a name to that which haunts us,
you refuse to sit with the woman who walks the hospital hallway,
Hears the beeping stop again and again,
with the man perched on a bridge over the rushing river.
Do not let your handful of light sting the eyes of those
who have bathed in darkness.
It is dark now – there is so much we don’t know – and that is how it is meant to be for now.
Conclusion
Save this – as we wait, as we wonder, as we weep and pray and find new and creative ways of being together in our solitude – know that God’s holy love is growing deeper within you. As you honor this as “The time to be slow, to lie low to the wall until the bitter weather passes” as the Irish poet, John O’Donohue, said: as you “Try, as best you can, not to let the wire brush of doubt scrape from your heart all sense of yourself and your light. Know that if you remain generous, time will come to good, and you will find your feet again on the fresh pasture of promise, where the air will be kind and blushed with beginning.” This is the promise of Holy Week for those with ears to hear. Please be with me in prayer: Eternal God, whose whisper silences the shouts of the mighty, quiet within us every voice but your own. Speak to us now through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ – and the suffering and death all around us - so that by the power of your Holy Spirit we may receive grace to live more profoundly into Christ’s love as our lives are join into his service. Lord, may it be so for each and all of us. Amen.
Introduction
Celebrating Palm Sunday with you like this makes me think about how the early community of faith we now call the Church entered into these holy mysteries. We know from the gospel readings for this day that there was excitement and confusion. There was also great fear in those early days as the Jesus movement practiced radical hospitality and humble tenderness in a hostile environment. St. John’s gospel tells us that on the first Easter Sunday the disciples were hidden away in the Upper Room for fear of the violent and threatening realities that surrounded them in Jerusalem.
That violence and fear – always present to some degree in the human condition – began to bubble up on Palm Sunday and boil over as Holy Week ripened. For a moment in time, the profound paradox of creation was revealed: new life and tragic death always exist side by side. My favorite prayer in the Book of Worship for the United Church of Christ puts it like this: "O God, who in Jesus Christ triumphantly entered Jerusalem, heralding a week of pain and sorrow, be with us now as we follow the way of the cross. In these events of defeat and victory – humiliation and exaltation – we are aware that the way of Jesus includes martyrdom and majesty. Bless us – as well as the palms we carry – to your use to be signs of a new way of living in this broken and beautiful world. Come, Lord Jesus, come. Amen."
That same paradox has been revealed to the world once again as we mark the start of Holy Week 2020: there is fear and hope, clarity and confusion, solidarity and strife, new life and countless deaths wherever we look. And for people of faith the magnitude of this moment is pushing us to wrestle with yet another aspect of this paradox: honoring the wisdom of our grief even as we search for the moral meaning of this plague. That’s how NY Times columnist, David Brooks, speaks of Holy Week this year: becoming consciously aware that how we live and move, breathe and act in the world will either strengthen the bonds of human love, or, pour gasoline on the fire of cruelty and madness.
It is too early, of course, to draw comprehensive conclusions about how we might live on the other side of the coronavirus: there’s just too much suffering still ahead for that. But it is not premature to ponder what values and ethical objectives will shape our response to this tragedy. The prophets of ancient Israel taught us that without a vision the people will perish. So Brooks references Victor Frankl who, “writing from the madness of the Holocaust, reminded us that we don’t get to choose our difficulties, but we do have the freedom to select our responses. Meaning, he argued, comes from three things: the work we offer in times of crisis, the love we give and our ability to display courage in the face of suffering. The menace may be subhuman or superhuman, but we all have the option of asserting our own dignity, even to the end.”
Insights
That is why the Passion Narrative of Jesus is often read on this day in churches all over the world: it reminds us that unless human beings consciously practice staying grounded we’ll get caught up in the emotions of the day or lost within our own brokenness. It is no accident that our tradition starts Palm Sunday with shouts of “HOSANNA! HOSANNA!” but then quickly shifts to cries of, “CRUCIFY, CRUCIFY THAT MAN!” Learning how to move with compassion and integrity in this tension is at the heart of the paradox of the passion of Jesus during Holy Week.
You see, the arc of worship over the next 8 days exposes both the possibilities of tenderness and the certainties of cruelty that live in every heart. The liturgy shows us that those who have befriended Jesus will not only betray him in their fear, but desert him when he is most vulnerable. Simultaneously, the women in this story who have traveled with Jesus from the start continue to stand by him even when threatened by the swords of Roman legionnaires. The men cave-in and hide-away with tears of shame while the women stand silent witness with tears of love so that Jesus does not have to face the agony of the Cross all by himself. This paradox is personified in Peter, who denies ever knowing Jesus when it really counts, and, Mary Magdalene who refuses to hide her solidarity and stays with Jesus through it all.
At its deepest level our Holy Week story asks us to realize that the worst of our humanity is always in tension with our best – and God’s love is there in the light as well as the darkness. From start to finish the men are present as well as the women, the fear is there alongside the joy, and the death is every bit as true as new life. For this is the paradox of creation: the good is always surrounded by evil, life is never just about winners or losers, women or men, happiness or despair. It is always about making sense of both: just look at the CROSS as it holds both seeming opposites together at the same time.
And that feels true to me right now when our deepest fears and anxieties are alive and all too well within us every day and night, and, at the same time women, men and children are courageously sharing love in death-defying ways as well. I don’t know about you but on any given day, my feelings can bounce around within like I’m on an emotional trampoline only to be suddenly replaced by a peace that passes under--standing all in my same body! When I watch the news – and mind you, I limit it to just one hour a day so that I’m not overwhelmed by the emotional propaganda and advertising for anxiety – I experience a full range of feelings from rage and sorrow, to gratitude, despair and hope. And while I take in all the news – not just the feel good stories, but also the current incompetency as well as inexorable sorrow to come – I pay careful attention to how the vast majority of us continue to incarnate a love that is bolder than any act of love we have ever seen before. Somebody on Facebook posted this meme:
When you go out and see the empty streets, the empty stadiums, the empty train platforms, don’t say to yourself: This looks like the end of the world. What you’re seeing is love in action. What you’re seeing in that negative space, is how much we really care for one another: For our grandparents, for our immune-compromised sisters and brothers, for strangers we will never meet. People have already lost their jobs for this love. Some will lose their businesses and some will lose their lives. All the more reason to take a moment, when you’re out on your walk, or on your way to the store, or just watching the news, to look into this emptiness and marvel at all that love. Let it fill you and nourish you. Remember: it ISN’T the end of the world. It is the most remarkable act of global solidarity we may ever witness.
In contemplative spirituality this is part of the Via Negativa – a path into God’s love that is empty rather than full – a way of being that finds assurance in the sacred silence more than the sounds. Some of our friends in the mystical traditions of Judaism say that just as there is wisdom in the black letters of the Jewish alphabet, there is also insight to be discovered in all the empty space that surrounds those letters. In the mystery. Most Americans are well-rehearsed in the Via Positiva – the evidence-based ways of living of commerce, bottom lines and science – so we don’t really know what to do when that realm is shut down. When, as another person put it, the old normal is so gone forever that it can never be restored because the old normal is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. Brooks writes:
This particular plague hits us at exactly the spots where we are weakest and exposes exactly those ills we had lazily come to tolerate. We’re already a divided nation, and the plague makes us distance from one another. We define ourselves too much by our careers, and the plague threatens to sweep them away. We’re a morally inarticulate culture, and now the fundamental moral questions apply. In this way the plague demands that we address our problems in ways we weren’t forced to before. The plague brings forth our creativity. It’s during economic and social depressions that the great organizations of the future are spawned.
The fact that we are gathered together using Facebook on Palm Sunday is evidence that this moment is calling us beyond the worn-out ways of what used to be normal into a new life that is still mysteriously taking shape and form. For me I trust that we are being existentially trained into a spirituality that adds gravitas to our souls, paradox to our working vocabulary and nuance and patience to our hearts. The Via Negativa is at the heart of Holy Week and the moral meaning of this plague. But like all new ways of being, it takes practice and time to trust. Do you know the poet Rumi? The great Islamic mystic? Some twenty years ago, when I came upon his poem, Love Dogs, I felt a veil had been lifted so that new light could be revealed. Better than most, you see, Rumi describes what it feels like to live into the Via Negativa. Coleman Barks translates it like this:
One night a man was crying Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with praising, until a cynic said, “So!
I’ve heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?”
The man had no answer to that. He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?” “Because I’ve never heard anything back.”
“Oh this longing you express is the return message.”
The grief you cry out from draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.
The men who were friends and disciples of Jesus discovered their longing through shame and betrayal and yet Jesus made a point to come back to embrace them again with forgiveness, grace and tenderness. The women lived deeper into their emptiness by standing silent witness at the foot of the Cross and the tomb when everyone else ran away and Jesus returned to them appointing them the first apostles of this new life of love on Easter morning. Dear people of God, there is meaning in this suffering – in this emptiness – in these fears. And we don’t have to understand it all right now. As I said earlier, the grief that is yet to come will be onerous and incomprehensible. Bearing it well is what this hour requires. Christine Valters-Painter at the Abbey of the Arts wisely proclaims in her poem, “It Is Dark.”
Do not rush to make meaning.
When you smile and say what purpose this all serves,
you deny grief a room inside you,
you turn from thousands who cross into the Great Night alone,
from mourners aching to press one last time against the warm flesh of their beloved,
from the wailing that echoes in the empty room.
When you cry out who caused this, I say pause, rest in the dark silence first before you contort your words to fill the hollowed out cave,
remember the soil will one day receive you back too.
So sit where sense has vanished… and every drink tastes bitter despite our thirst.
When you wish to give a name to that which haunts us,
you refuse to sit with the woman who walks the hospital hallway,
Hears the beeping stop again and again,
with the man perched on a bridge over the rushing river.
Do not let your handful of light sting the eyes of those
who have bathed in darkness.
It is dark now – there is so much we don’t know – and that is how it is meant to be for now.
Conclusion
Save this – as we wait, as we wonder, as we weep and pray and find new and creative ways of being together in our solitude – know that God’s holy love is growing deeper within you. As you honor this as “The time to be slow, to lie low to the wall until the bitter weather passes” as the Irish poet, John O’Donohue, said: as you “Try, as best you can, not to let the wire brush of doubt scrape from your heart all sense of yourself and your light. Know that if you remain generous, time will come to good, and you will find your feet again on the fresh pasture of promise, where the air will be kind and blushed with beginning.” This is the promise of Holy Week for those with ears to hear. Please be with me in prayer: Eternal God, whose whisper silences the shouts of the mighty, quiet within us every voice but your own. Speak to us now through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ – and the suffering and death all around us - so that by the power of your Holy Spirit we may receive grace to live more profoundly into Christ’s love as our lives are join into his service. Lord, may it be so for each and all of us. Amen.
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