reflection on ascension sunday, tears and the sacrament of humility...

SPIRITUALITY OF TENDERNESS: The Feast of the Ascension 2020
One of my favorite centering prayer chants is the children’s song: “Frère Jacques.” Do you know it?

Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques: Dormez-vous – Dormez-vous?
Sonnez les matines – Sonnez les matines: 
Ding, dang dong, ding, dang, dong.

I reclaimed this little ditty as a resource for getting grounded during a sabbatical in Montreal some five years ago. Like many, I learned to sing it phonetically as a child, but had no idea what the words meant. Part of the unexpected but blessed revelation of that sabbatical was revisiting the core of my spiritual life: finding out what still worked, what didn’t, and letting the garbage go. Bringing a similar methodology to this song showed me that it was a gentle call to prayer in the real world for Friar James.

· Now I had no idea what it meant to be a friar. As a young boy, I was a big fan of Robin Hood – so I knew that Friar Tuck added comic relief to the drama – but I had no idea what a friar did or how he differed from a monk?

· Fr. Richard Rohr teaches that Franciscans are not monks, they are friars, those who are called to care for the whole community. A monk is cloistered – living a life of prayer for the world within a discrete community that is set apart from others – while a friar freely moves throughout the city sharing love, food, shelter, presence, and encouragement.

Most friars are neither priests nor pastors, they are simply brothers - Frère Jacques – equals living in the world with love and service to all without rank, authority, or hierarchy. That was my first discovery – and being a New Age friar fit my emerging spiritual identity. The second was that the song asked Brother James if he was sleeping: dormez-vous? Are you awake, alive, and engaged, or, are you out of it? Sleepwalking or distracted because you’re too busy to know what’s really going on?

If you are dozing, and it happens to us all, just listen, listen to the gentle bells of Matins: sonnez les matines. There’s music to bring you into the morning's first office of prayer. So come, Brother James, come in gentleness to join the others, lending your voice and presence to the day. No guilt or shame, ok? No false sense of importance or drama either. Just awaken to the bells of Matins and take your place. What a life-giving, tender-hearted spirituality in this little song: bells and prayer, music and silence before sharing yourself with the people of God throughout the city. This felt like a gift to me – a revelation – much like the way St. Paul spoke in this morning’s first reading as he prayed that his sisters and brothers might see with the eyes of their hearts: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Source of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and insight, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may trust the hope to which God has called you… 

That is foundational to the Feast of the Ascension – seeing with the eyes of the heart – being awake and aware of the presence of Christ that illuminates creation. Each liturgical season in the Christian year teaches us something about how to go deeper into God’s loving presence. As I’ve said before, Advent takes us into the silent darkness of waiting in anticipation, Christmas and Epiphany flood our senses with comfort and joy. Lent leads us into the dark waiting of grief before revealing the unexpected blessing of new life on Easter. The pilgrimage of 50 days in-between Easter and Pentecost is yet another time of kinesthetic learning where we wait again for guidance in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; this time we wait by contemplating the foolishness of Christ, the upside-down nature of the kingdom, what some call the Paschal Mystery where new possibilities emerge from out of the embrace of human suffering and God’s gifts. 

The gospel for today puts it like this: After his death, Jesus presented himself alive to his friends in many different settings over a period of forty days. In face-to-face meetings, he talked to them about things concerning the kingdom of God. As they met and ate meals together, he told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but “must wait for what the Father promised: the promise you heard from me, God’s power from on high. John used water, but soon you will be baptized by the Spirit. Then, one way of engaging the presence of Jesus ended, it appeared as if he rose into the sky, and a new time of wonder washed over the disciples: quit staring up at the empty sky, the angels said, and starting figuring out how you are going to go out into the world again to share Christ’s tender love with those outside the community. That’s just what Jesus had said: God has called me to com-mission you: Go out to everyone you meet, far and near, with this way of life, marking them with signs of the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you – and I will be with you always and in all ways.

The content of contemplation between Easter and Pentecost is the new commandment: love one another as I have loved you. Jesus embodied this by washing the feet of his disciples, enduring the Cross with a mystical trust in God’s grace, and then reminding his friends through prayer and reflection on the scriptures of all the ways God shares compassion for real live, hurting human beings. The Ascension announces that now is the season to figure out how to take Christ’s healing into the world using our lives. You are not me and you can’t do what I did, Jesus told his friends, but you are you – blessed and beloved of God – and you must figure out how this love becomes flesh through your thoughts, words and deeds.

In the liturgical calendar that’s what the nine days between the Feast of the Ascension and Pentecost represent: after learning, praying and practicing the essence of trusting God through the vulnerability of foot-washing, now we are called to go beyond the safety of our sanctuaries and homes. The work of the Ascension is discerning how our gifts can best bring Christ’s love to life in our ordinary circumstances. I think that’s why Frère Jacques grabbed me so profoundly. It validated that I was now more of a friar than a pastor in these later days of ministry – and invited me to use my gifts of music, presence and prayer throughout the city – beyond the confines of professional expectations, titles, and institutions. A poem by the late Denise Levertov she calls “The Gift” speaks to this truth:

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

Frère Jacques was an answer, of sorts, making it clear that it was time for Brother James to wake up, honor the tender call to prayer and music floating throughout the world, and join in the full celebration of live. I didn’t know it at the time, but the opening words of Matins are the same ones I use to start this gathering every week. From Psalm 51: O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall proclaim your praise. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Give to me the joy of your saving help again and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit. All glory be to the undivided Trinity: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and every shall be, world without end. Amen. The heart and soul of the Feast of the Ascension is discerning what unique gifts God has entrusted to us and how to share them to strengthen compassion?

Jesus promises that if we trust the Spirit to show up at the right time, the Spirit will show us how best to do this – meaning we can let go of our anxieties because now we’ll be acting on God’s timetable. One wise old soul put it like this: Your calling by the Spirit is wherever your greatest joy intersects with the world’s greatest need. Our life in the world must be authentic and salvific for both you and creation. No more guilt tripping by the church. No more exhaustion from resentment either; just your greatest joy embracing the world’s greatest need. I am certain that’s what Jesus meant when he said: Follow me, I will fill you with peace as you learn to live into the unforced rhythms of grace. Or as we used to say: Come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy laden and I will give you rest. I rather like the way Glennon Doyle put it in a short poem: “Life cannot be handled. The secret is simply to show-up. It’s about witnessing it all – even the pain – and letting it touch you and make you not harder, but more tender. Showing up, feeling it all – this is my new kind of prayer. I call it praying attention, and it’s how, for me, everything turns holy.”

· And here’s the most startling blessing born of Christ’s grace and freedom that I have experienced: the more I trusted, the more pondered how to use my gifts for the love of God, the more I wept. Now, let me tell you, I would never have called my tears a gift from God. For most of my life I’ve HATED how easily I cry: my father used to ridicule me about it when I was a teen because I would weep when I was happy and cry when I was sad; quietly shed tears of joy when beauty took me by surprise – in a song, a poem or a movie – or sob keen when grief, anguish, or injustice washed over me.

· In my house, tears were considered a sign of weakness for a boy. So, while I could never stop them, I learned to hide them. Bury them and deny the. But three Roman Catholic priests in three different places kept encouraging me to make peace with my tears – these were men who were strong and tender, real and faithful, open even in their wounds – and they kept telling me that there was a blessing to receive in this peculiar gift.

Fr. Richard Rohr of New Mexico put it like this: Unless you somehow let yourself weep over your own phoniness, hypocrisy, and woundedness, you probably will not let go of the first half of life. The gift of tears helps you embrace the mystery of paradox, of that which can't be fixed, which can't be made right, which can't be controlled, and which doesn't make sense. But if you don't allow this needed disappointment to well up within you, if you surround yourself with your orthodoxies and your certitudes and your belief that you're the best, frankly, you will stay in the first half of life forever and never fall into the Great Mercy. Many religious people never allow themselves to "fall," while many sinners fall and rise again.

Fr. Edward Hays at Shantivanum House in Kansas wrote: Tears are the prayer-beads of men and women because they arise from a fullness of the heart. Such an overflowing can be the result of great sorrow, or else great joy. Tears appear as an expression of the heart – and seeing with the eyes of the heart is always good prayer – so that makes tears one of the ways we worship God. The prayer of our tears are not manufactured, manicured, memorized or controlled… they are free and flowing… making tears sacraments of humility. Fr. Ed used to tell a story about a reporter interviewing an old, Indian guru about his work in giving spiritual guidance to Americans. “What is the first thing you try to teach Americans?” the reporter asked. And the old man answered, “I try to teach them how to cry again.”

And Fr. Jim O’Donnell of Cleveland, a mentor and spiritual director, said: James, Jesus wept – and that should be all the permission you need to make peace with your own tears - but probably you won’t until you make a confession. So, the sooner you do so, the quicker you’ll be able to honor the blessing of those tears. And Fr. Jim was right: my first formal confession took place during Lent at Fr. Jim’s retreat center house. It unlocked such a reservoir of tears that they poured out of me for 30 minutes only to make room for a joy that was sublime. I get it when the old hymn sings: I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.

Tears became for me a sacrament of humility and the prayer beads of a full heart. When Jesus wept over the death of Lazarus, he gave form to what compassion means in the midst of sorrow. When St. Paul wept, he showed us the way out of religious rigidity and into the unforced rhythms of grace. When Magdalene wept, she first embodied a full-hearted prayer that was simultaneously sensual and salvific, and then gave us an expression of gratitude as the apostle to the apostles. When St. Peter wept, first he remembered his tears of fear that caused him to betray Jesus; as he owned his tears of shame that compelled him to run and hide, Christ accepted all of those tears and they became tears of joy and in the forgiveness of Easter. When my children wept, they opened my heart and called me to comfort their hurts. When my grandchildren weep, it breaks my heart – especially now when I can’t hold them – and can only hear their tears virtually. And when my wife weeps, it is a summons to stop whatever I’m doing and pay attention because in that moment her tears are the only thing that matters.

Each of these saints have taught me a little about praying the sacrament of humility through their tears. They have helped me honor my own tears, too. Frederick Buechner put it like this in his little book, Telling the Truth: 

YOU NEVER KNOW what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure: Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next. 

So, let me add two more names to my list of mentors in weeping: Michael Daniels and Lou Reed. They both broke open my heart in different ways. Driving back to Massachusetts after attending a jazz and liturgy workshop in Cleveland, someone in the back of our van said, “Oh, damn, Lou Reed just died.” We were at a rest stop on Interstate 90 outside of Buffalo and it took a few seconds to register: “Lou Reed just died.” It was Sunday, October 27, 2013. I grew up with Lou Reed and the Velvets. Not literally as part of Andy Warhol’s Village scene, nor figuratively as part of that pale tribe of misfits who “only came out at night.” But chronologically and aesthetically, I came of age with those musicians and felt that they expressed something dark and alive in my psyche. I bought their first LP – the one with a banana on the cover – one afternoon after submitting to a forced haircut back in June 1967. It was suburban CT in the summer of love.

Today I ask myself, “What the hell did I know about ‘waitin’ for my man with 26 dollars in my hand up on Lexington and 125th Street back then?” But back then, somehow, I got it – or part of it. Not the smack or the grit. But the aching energy behind those pounding guitars sounded a whole lot like my own throbbing emptiness. And when I played Lou Reed alongside “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles – both were released in the same month – something told me this was truth. This music made me cry. I didn’t know words like paradox or the via negativa in the ninth grade, but I did know that something was going on that helped me live even as I hurt.

And now Lou was dead. It was disorienting. He had been my guide into genre and gender bending. He raged against the same sentimentality that I saw sucking the soul out of the religion I loved. He encouraged me to “take a walk on the wild side” when I really didn’t know what that meant. He prophesized against eco-disaster and class war, pseudo-mystical cheap sex and the collapse of culture with the cry: “you need a bus load of faith to get by!” When my sister, Linda, was shriveling on the vine of life with cancer of the cervix and radiation ate her alive, I wore out Lou’s “Magic and Loss” cassette driving between Cleveland and Walter Reed Hospital.

Howling along as the master I lamented: “What good is seeing eye chocolate, what good’s a computerized rose? What good is cancer in April, no good – no good at all.” For decades, Lou Reed had been one of my spiritual anchors – and now he was gone. Later that same night, as if by design, I learned via email that another old friend from Cleveland, Michael Daniels, was also six feet under as well. I met Michael one nasty, sleeting night on Cleveland’s West Side. My church office had received a call that Cheryl Daniels' father had died and she wanted to plan a memorial service. We set up a pastoral visit and I headed off into one of the rougher public housing projects.

When I found their darkened house both residents were trashed: Mike let me in and stumbled back to his recliner while Cheryl shouted a garbled welcome from the bathroom. There was garbage, newspapers, pizza boxes, and unopened mail everywhere. As Michael fumbled around to clean off the sofa for me, and search for his missing cigarettes, a revolver fell to the floor from under more unopened mail – and he never batted an eye. I was certain I would never get out of there alive. Still, I sat on the sofa and waited – waited for ten excruciating minutes of silence – while the blackest man I had ever met stared at me and smoked cigarettes with his gun on the floor. Cheryl eventually appeared and somehow amidst the liquor, smoke, and unmentioned pistol, we planned a memorial service. Three days later the liturgy came and went, and I wondered if I would ever see anyone from the Daniels' clan again.

It often happens with people wrestling with grief and addiction: they show up in the life of a church only to disappear after the crisis passes. They come and go without any conscious plan – getting what they need for the moment - and moving on. After a few weeks, that’s what I thought would be true for Mike and Cheryl. Ten months later, however, Michael called me in tears saying that Cheryl had disappeared. She’d been treated for bipolar disorder and after quitting her meds had gone missing. We searched bus stops and homeless shelters, drove down dark streets and checked-out popular dumpsters for a few nights.

Eventually she showed up in the psych ward of the county hospital just around the corner from our church. In time, she was released, but her new meds made her almost catatonic. People from church helped them move into a new apartment after being evicted from public housing. And things seemed to be getting better. Six days after the move though I got another frantic call from Michael saying he had just been arrested. When I got to the city jail he told me that when he’d gone out that morning for cigarettes, Cheryl put his gun into her mouth and killed herself. “That God-damn gun again!” I thought to myself as he confessed that she had gone off her meds one more time and he didn’t know what to do. Afternoon slid into evening as I waited with Mike until, finally, the police determined that Cheryl’s death was suicide. I was free to take Mike home. Only now he had no home – during his incarceration all his belongings had been thrown out the window on to the front lawn by his landlord. And by the time we got to his address, the junkies and scavengers had ravaged through everything of value and Michael had been evicted once again.

With nowhere else to go and in shock over his wife's death, I took him home with me, put a mat-tress on our living room floor, and begged my wife and children to be patient. They were understandably nervous having an alcoholic, homeless stranger sleeping on their living room. But he stayed for another few days until a room in a transitional housing dorm opened up. One of the non-negotiables in the shelter was that everyone stayed clean. Mike managed a white-knuckled sobriety for three days but fell off the wagon one afternoon thinking he could fake-out his hosts. They gave him one last chance. But the day after Cheryl was buried, he blew it again and was kicked out of this port of last resort. More tears and shame followed as we sat in my church office. I wept with him because now we both had run out of options. At some point I recall saying some-thing like: Man, the time has come to make a choice. I can't bring you back to my house and I can’t leave you here. So, either we say good-bye right now, walk away from one another and who knows what the hell happens next? Or, I drive you to the detox unit right around the corner and maybe we can start again.

With almost no hesitation Michael said, "I done lost EVERYTHING I loved already... just take me to there. It can't be any worse than this." Twenty-eight days later, he came out clean and sober – and stayed clean and sober for twenty more years. On the anniversary of his sobriety, Michael would call me making jokes that the only reason he went to rehab with me that night was because I was the blackest white man he ever knew. A brother. "Dude, I know you are passing" he laughed. "But your secret is safe with me; just never forget I know you be black.” This man who once terrified me to my core was now making jokes with me. Together through our tears he had come to trust me – and I him – and beyond the divides of race and class those tears led us into a friendship of tender-ness. And now he was gone – both Lou and Michael were dead – on the same day.

It’s funny in an odd way how tragedy can lead to healing, but those two deaths gave me permission to trust what all my mentors in weeping had said. So, I wept for those guys – really wept – and those tears connected me to all the tears I hadn’t shed for the ones I had loved and lost over 40 years of ministry. And the more I wept, the better I felt. I wasn’t hiding them anymore and found myself weeping again when a hymn touched me or the grocery clerk smiled at me on a hard day. I cried in terror and gratitude when our first daughter greeted us in her hospital room after the birth of our first grandchild. As I made a pilgrimage through that reservoir of tears, my tears freed me from a ton bull shit – mine and others – because now life was just too precious and short to do otherwise.

And I’m telling you this long-winded story right now because during this pandemic, even as one phase winds down but the rest roars on in all its life-defying uncertainties, I know many of you have been weeping, too. Some are exhausted from all the tears you’ve already shed while others are just getting started. And I suspect that if we’re honest a whole lot more of us will be weeping this week-end in solidarity and grief over the 100,000 American dead. So, what I want you to know, wherever you on this journey, that your tears are sacred. Holy. And part of God’s healing for you.

This time is like the uncertain in-between time of the Ascension and Pentecost. The first followers of Jesus were just as unnerved by this in-between time as we are right now. They had been assured that Jesus would be with them always. But now he was gone – they were left on their own – and they didn’t know what would happen next. In those in-between days, the early believers felt every bit as unsettled and anxious as we ourselves. And our tears are much like theirs. So, let me say this as clearly and tenderly as possible: “Our tears right now are the prayerful activity of mature women and men searching for the presence of God.” Beloved, I want you to know that the divine is with us in these tears. Fr. Ed once wrote: If we find in Jesus a pattern for our own prayer and way of living, if his love and grace makes sense to us – and we remember that he prayed a prayer of tears over the city of Jerusalem, at the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus and probably countless times not recorded but ever so real when he walked and lived among us – like when his friend was married at the wedding in Cana, or during that mystical meal he shared after washing his disciples’ feet, and what about in the garden when he was abandoned and facing certain death…then we must know that our tears are bathed in the holy… Our tears, like those of Jesus, show us what it means to be fully alive, fully compassionate, fully grounded in reality.

I trust that the prayers of our tears are heard and honored by God. Right now in America our old myth is dying – and as David Brooks wrote in the NY Times: “something more profound is taking place in that death. We are undergoing a more permanent shift in national consciousness, a true reconstruction of meanings, symbols, values, and narratives. If the old American creed grew up in an atmosphere of assumed security and liberty, the new one is growing up in an atmosphere of vulnerability and precariousness… and we are learning to value community over individualism, being connected over autonomy… and the new American identity that is growing up in the shadow of the plague celebrates our shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the precariousness of life, and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long struggle against an invading force.” As much as it hurts, I give thanks for our shared tears.

It has taken me the better part of 50 years to make peace with them – and sometimes I am more at peace with them than at others – but I know they connect heaven to earth and the holy to our humanity in a sacrament of humility. So, as you ponder this, let me play for you my reworking of an old Lou Reed song: “Sweet Jane.” He used to do it hard, punching out the lyrics under a raunchy rhythm section that cut like a knife. The words, however, were tender. They were humble and I think they sometimes got lost in the noise. So, as I listened to them – and reclaimed their sweet message – they, too became another prayer for me like old Frère Jacques. Take a moment and see what bubbles up for you now…

Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand
Jack’s in his corset, Jane’s in her vest and me, me I’m in a rock and roll band
Ridin’ in a Stuz Bearcat, slim, o, those were different times
All the poets, they studied rules and verse, and the ladies rolled their eyes
Sweet Jane…

Now Jack he is a banker, and Jane she is a clerk
And both of them save their money, honey, when they come home from work
Sitting by the fire, the radio it plays, little classical music for you kids,
And if you listen closely, you can hear Jacky say:
Sweet Jane…

Some people like to go out dancing, others like us we gotta work
And there’s even some evil mothers who’ll tell you life is made from dirt
That women never really faint, that villains always roll their eyes,
That children are the only ones who blush and life is just to die

But anyone who ever had a heart wouldn’t turn around and break it
Anyone who’s ever played a part would turn around and hate it
Anyone who’s ever had a dream, anyone who’s ever played a part
Anyone who’s ever been lonely, anyone who’s ever slit apart
You’re waiting, waiting down and ally – you’re waiting all alone
You’re waiting down the corner so you can come back home
Sweet Jane