The past 10 days have been an emotional roller coaster for me – or many of us, too – and now it is Palm Sunday. Seven mass shootings and massacres just last week – NOT two – but seven. Count them:
· Tuesday, March 16: eight people slaughtered in Atlanta.
· Wednesday, March 17: five people in Stockton, CA mowed down in a drive-by attack.
· Thursday, March 18: four people murdered together in Gresham, OR.
· Saturday, March 20: five people outside a club in Houston, TX were shot but not killed.
· Saturday, March 20: eight adults in Dallas, TX were wounded by an unknown assailant.
· Saturday, March 20: at an illegal party in Philadelphia, PA six adults were shot and one died.
· Monday, March 22: ten people including a police officer were killed in a shooting in King Soopers supermarket.
Filmmaker and cultural critic, Michael Moore, got it right on Face Book when he posted: From Atlanta to Boulder, SEVEN mass shootings over the past seven days across the USA. We’ve been praying to get back to normal and for America, you can’t get more “normal” than this: So who wants a whole new friggin’ normal? Add to this the spring-break/super-spreader madness, the next round of stimulus checks, a deepening commitment to vaccinations, the surge of enrollment in the expanded Affordable Care Act, record snow fall in the mountain states, the teaser of spring’s imminent arrival following the vernal equinox, Georgia’s new voter suppression law, the Senate’s affirmation of Dr. Rachel Levine as the nation’s first trans cabinet member and it was a week of extreme highs and heart-breaking lows. I was up and down, in and out, and all over the place emotionally and spiritually last week. So, when I came across this poem by the Polish poet, Adam Zagajewski who died this past week, too, I spontaneously combusted into a grateful but exhausted puddle of prayerful tears:
Try to praise the mutilated world
Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries,
drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world -
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.
This is Holy Week 2021 – and every Holy Week, for that matter – a sacred time scared by sorrow and cruelty yet sodden with the presence of vulnerable love, acts of tender mercies, and just a hint of Easter blessings that are as yet still masked and obscured from our sight by darkness, anxiety, and grief. It is a time for the freedom feast of Passover and Peter’s denial, the betrayal of Judas and the fidelity of Mary Magdalene. Some of our Jewish friends have described the liturgies of this season as the ritual experience of feeling sadness within our joys, and exuberance within our sorrows to remind us that neither should ever constitute the entirety of our expectations. I would add because both are always with us.
In our faith tradition, Holy Week is when we come to grips with the Cross: symbol of our faith, sign of excruciating suffering, doorway into God’s love. “Behold,” says St. John the Baptist, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Behold indeed: behold the bearer of inconvenient truth, behold the nonviolent messiah who exposes the horror of state sponsored violence used against a culture’s outsiders in order to maintain cohesion, behold a small and silent savior.
When I behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, I no longer see Jesus as victim or God’s ransom sent to pay off our original sin. No, now I see him as the gentle warrior of the holy who, like his mother before him, freely chooses to accept God’s invitation to incarnate love in his flesh. And he does so by showing us what capital punishment and cultural violence looks like from the perspective of the scapegoat. Not the victor, not the powerful, not the military or police force or the winners, but the beaten, the discarded, the outcast, the losers and prisoners. Look at THIS, Jesus tells us from the Cross, and know that you can make better and more compassionate choices. Behold, the Lamb of God, who exposes to you what it looks like to execute your fear rather than embrace it.
· THAT is what calls to me on Palm Sunday 2021: the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world by showing us the consequences of our choices and offering us a better way. If we were together in public worship today, we would be grounded in polar opposites. First, we would bless the palms and sing songs of joy only to quickly shift into the proclamation of the Passion Narrative and the Bible’s lengthy recitation of all that happens to Jesus on the way to Golgotha and the Cross.
· Today’s liturgy was crafted to be an extended encounter with paradox: ancient Jerusalem shouts, “Hosanna, hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord” with one breath, only to later snarl, “Crucify, crucify, crucify that man” with the next. It is not a senti-mental recreation of what took place 2000 years ago, but a consciously schizophrenic, unsettling, simultaneously intimate and alienating confrontation with the mystery of our faith and the consequences of our choices. The prayer of invocation from my old United Church of Christ prayerbook sets the stage well:
Loving 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, you have sealed the closeness of death and resurrection, of humiliation and exaltation. As we wave our branches of palm, we recognize that they will become for us symbols of martyrdom and majesty… Travel with us now, Lord, that we may trust that your whisper silences the shouts of the mighty and quiets every voice but your own. Speak to us this week through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that we may receive grace to show Christ’s love to the world in lives committed to your service. In Christ, with you and the Holy Spirit, who live and reign forever as one God, we pray. Amen.
This prayer suggests that we consider the worship of Holy Week to be a living poem. I heard Naomi Shihab Nye interviewed by Krista Tippett last week on her clarifying and holy radio program, On Being, and was arrested when she told us, “I think that all people THINK in poems.”
… this is very important — feeling your thoughts as text or the world as it passes through you as a kind of text; the story that you would be telling to yourself about the street even as you walk down it or as you drive down it; as you look out the window, the story you would be telling. It always seemed very much to me, as a child, that I was living in a poem — that my life was the poem. And in fact, at this late date, I have started putting that on the board of any room I walk into that has a board (whenever I lead a class in poetry.) She amplified this saying: I just came back from Japan a month ago, and every classroom, I would just write on the board, “You are living in a poem.” And then I would write other things relating to whatever we were doing in that class, but I found the students very intrigued by discussing that. “What do you mean, we’re living in a poem?” Or “When? All the time, or just when someone talks about poetry?” And I’d say, “No; when you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another — that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.”
That’s what worship during Holy Week aspires towards: savoring, pondering, wondering, wander-ing, waiting, thinking, listening, weeping, laughing, eating, waking, sleeping into the holy as it has been made known to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We rarely speak – and even more rarely teach in Christian formation – that our Holy Week observances are a choice to con-sciously live into our lives as a poem – and all the more the sorrow – because a poetic conscious-ness offers us the spaciousness to listen, discern, and go deep. One of Shihab-Nye’s Japanese students told her after a seminar:
In Japan, we have a concept called ‘yutori,’ and it is spaciousness. It’s a kind of living with spaciousness. For example, it’s leaving early enough to get somewhere so that you know you’re going to arrive early, so when you get there, you have time to look around.” Or — and then she gave all these different definitions of what yutori was, to her. But one of them was: “And after you read a poem, just knowing you can hold it. You can be in that space of the poem, and it can hold you in its space, and you don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to paraphrase it. You just hold it, and it allows you to see differently.”
Holy Week gives us a full seven days of spaciously and symbolically entering into the agony of real life that is also filled with the life-saving presence of the holy. In fact, the whole week is conceptualized as a solitary and continuous act of worship with a call to awareness at the start of Palm Sunday but NO closing benedictions until the last hymn of Easter Sunday! It is one, long, spacious seamless garment that must NEVER be labeled a day of holy obligation. How can we be OBLIGATED to open our hearts and minds to faith as poetry? That smacks of a cruel, controlling, manipulative deity who is the polar opposite of Jesus.
A spirituality of obligation reeks of shallowness creating a culture of clock watchers and hoop jumpers instead of poets, mystics, and sacred clowns. Not women, men, and children ready to welcome the whole of life so that we might see, feel, and act differently beyond our grief.
No, Holy Week is our time to practice praising a mutilated world. NOT a spiritual fantasy, not magic or escapism, but praise and mourning intimately intertwined. Shihab-Nye wrote about speaking to her Palestinian-born father in the aftermath of September 11th that sounds like Holy Week to me:
I call my father, we talk around the news:
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows, to plead with the air: who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?”
I sense something similar where we’re what does a true follower of Jesus DO now.? And I believe that Holy Week gives us part of the answer. We start with Hosanna – quickly move into the foot washing of Holy Thursday – and then nearly tumble in confusion to the cries of crucify him. Along the way we get on our knees and live as servants not leaders. We listen as people just like us betray the ones they love and cherish so that we might own some of our own deceits. We spend a lot of time in the darkness as candles are extinguished rather than lit, the exact opposite of the growing light of our Advent wreaths. And for two full days – 48 empty and anguished hours – we’re told to wait. And wait and wait some more. And just when we think we’re supposed to stop waiting and make a broken peace with the grave, new life suddenly and mysteriously appears within us. In ways that defy logic but feed our hearts, we find ourselves unable to do anything except sing Christ the Lord is risen today – alleluia!
I’ve come to trust that living poetry between Palm Sunday and Easter morning is how we learn to live and even sing praise for a mutilated world in the manner of Jesus as Christ. Part of this has to do with joy and grief. Most people, I suspect, believe their experiences with happiness and sorrow are unique. We tend to feel that what WE’RE living is more important and profound than what others are encountering. Not that we want to deny their reality.
But without some critical perspective, many of us live in a childish and self-centered way, where we imagine that OUR anguish as well as our exuberance is special. Consequently, part of what the next seven days tries to tell us is that our pain is just a part of life. It is no more IMPORTANT than the experiences of another but no LESS so either. What we feel is what everyone feels as life matures. Joy, pain, anxiety, and trust are a part of the shared human experience no matter who we are or where we live. Somehow this hard and humbling truth has become sadly obscured in so much of contemporary Western Christianity. And I suspect this is at least one of the reasons for the deep and mean-spirited divisions that wound our politics.
In that interview, Krista Tippett said: “There are just so many mysteries about people wanting to presume their pain has more of a reality than someone else’s pain.” Once the best of our religions insisted that the key to coexistence began by waking a mile in another’s shoes. The poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, added: I think all the holy persons of all backgrounds and faiths have always called upon us to empathize in a more profound way, to stretch our imaginations to what that another person might be experiencing. (Religion and spirituality strive for empathy and solidarity.) But these days, when you listen to the loud voices all over the world, you wonder, what’s happened to that? What’s happened to the awareness that we don’t have to be vindictive and continue on in a cycle of revenge and violence? That WE are all a part of a whole?
Some of the big personalities in our story, the archetypal characters like Judas and Peter, Christ’s mother Mary or Magdalene, the aloof Pontius Pilate or the slimy politician King Herod, give us poetic windows through which we can look at ourselves and ask: where am I in this story? What do I feel as it unfolds? Who am I most like this year? How have I changed? How MIGHT I be changed over the course of a new year so that I might think and act differently? More like Jesus. That’s what can happen if we walk through Holy Week in another’s shoes: we can discover something about how the holy is calling us to go deeper.
And one of the sacred truths of Holy Week is that Christian people do this all over the world: in Palestine and Peoria, Mozambique and Michigan, Sao Paulo and San Francisco. Every year we have a chance to ask ourselves what do I have in common with others throughout the world – and how can I walk for a spell in their shoes? We’re also get to ask: how have we been changed over the past year – and what does that mean? I know that some years I’ve felt like Peter denying my Lord three times – or three thousand times – but there’ve also been years when I am more like Mary Magdalene standing at the foot of the Cross trusting that God’s love is greater than the sorrow I feel when death breaks my heart. Doing this in the company of others helps me know that whether I am in Rome, Riyadh, Rangpur, or Raleigh, NC people just like me are trying to recognize our shared humanity during Holy Week, too.
In fact, millions and millions of people like you and me are discerning how our joys and sorrows can become one of the places we meet God. That’s why the liturgies of this holy week are not passive: they insist that our bodies live into the poetry of the Cross. To do it right we have to move around and feel the words so that they unclog our hearts. This is one of the ways the Lamb of God brings healing into the world. In those embodied, participatory, subversive liturgies we experience a solidarity beyond race, class, gender, age, and ability.
That’s one of the blessings I have been given by being a part of the L’Arche Ottawa community where people with and without intellectual disabilities from all over the world live and move and learn to love one another as one body. Henri Nouwen, who served as a L’Arche chaplain for ten years, said that L’Arche is built upon the body not abstract words. It is a way for the words to become flesh. “The community is formed around the wounded bodies of those with and without physical and intellectual disabilities where feeding, cleaning, touching, holding, and waiting is what builds community. It is the heart of prayer at L’Arche.”
One of the truths that I have been asked to own at L’Arche is that my pain as well as exuberance is NOT the center of the universe. It I am a part of the whole, then my feelings and experiences are just a part of reality, too. A reality filled with pains and joys that are real but never the totality of creation. L’Arche is a simple and sacred place to learn about the marriage of humility and solidarity.
· The first year I participated in the Holy Thursday foot washing liturgy at L’Arche, I was a stranger. I’d played guitar for a few retreats and shared supper with my new friends at Mountainview, but I didn’t know anybody very well. And that night, in candlelight, about 100 women, men, and children of different faiths, races, spiritualities, class backgrounds, physical and mental abilities gathered into ten small circles of ten where we were asked to wash one another’s feet.
· Now, I didn’t grow up with a foot washing tradition, but I love it and have made it a part of the various faith communities I’ve served over the past 40 years. In my group that night, there were young women and men from Syria, a few Francophone Quebecers, a mostly nonverbal woman Anglophone in a wheelchair, another nonverbal woman with more physical abilities, and me.
After the welcome and opening prayer and songs, we all sat together in an awkward silence for a moment or two. Then, as group leader, I knelt and asked: “Are we clear what we’re to do now?” There were a few questions – and I needed a bilingual person to do a bit of translation into French – and then I said: “Please know three things about this sacrament. One, there’s no WRONG way to do it; if you share it with love it will be perfect. Two, it is mostly a nonverbal prayer. It’s about being vulnerable and tender with our bodies so don’t fret if you feel awkward, ok? And three, at the close of each foot washing, the one whose feet have just been washed is asked to give a blessing to the one who is kneeling.” Most of those in my circle that night were new to L’Arche making the two core members, those with the physical and/or intellectual disabilities, the experts.
But they were nonverbal so I suggested I could model what this was all about and then pass it around the circle. I was already kneeling in front of a refugee from Syria, so I took off his shoes and socks, gently poured warm water over his feet, and sensed the presence of Jesus in the process.
· Everyone’s feet are different, right? Some are beautiful, some are broken, some are young, some are old, some are clean, and some are not. But all of our feet place us closest to the ground – that’s something we have in common – so feet really put you in touch with this body prayer – and it is as tender and sacred as the first time you hold a newborn baby.
· When I finished washing my new friend’s feet, drying them carefully with a towel, I forgot that he was going to bless me. So, he gently put out his strong hand upon my head and said with authority: God’s peace is within you and upon you, James, servant of Christ Jesus. May you always know and trust this. Amen.
For a moment I couldn’t see – I was so disoriented as tears poured from my eyes – so I just knelt as he kept his hand on my head. And when it felt right, he helped me stand and move back into the circle so that he could wash another’s foot. Smiles and tears, hands and feet, opened our hearts to the Living God in that night over the next 20 minutes. Each person with different abilities knelt to become a servant using their gifts with love, then rose in their own way to become the font of another servant’s blessing as the incarnational Lamb of God took shape and form before our eyes.
Reading Fr. Nouwen’s journals I found that he, too experienced what I did during his first encounter with a L’Arche foot washing ceremony: “Everything within me wants to move upward,” he wrote. “Downward mobility with Jesus goes radically against my inclinations, against the advice of the world surrounding me, and against the culture of which I am a part… Wherever I turn I am con-fronted with my deep-seated resistance against following Jesus on his way to the cross and my countless ways of avoiding become small, poor, and invisible… (but) sitting in the basement room in Paris, surrounded by forty poor people, I was struck again by the way Jesus concluded his active life. Just before entering the road of his passion, he washed the feet of his disciples and offered them his body and blood” to be sustenance.” Nouwen added that:
The words of Jesus to Peter (at the close of St. John’s gospel) reminds me that Jesus’ transition from action to passion must also be ours if we want to follow his way. He told Peter, “When you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you like, but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will gird your waist and take you into those places where you would rather not go.” Come to me, Jesus keeps saying, come and let me wipe away your tears…for the voice of Christ does not offer us a solution to our problems, but a friendship. It does not take away our burdens, but promises to be there with us to help us carry them.
Mostly without words, always with intimate, respectful, and safe bodily touch, the foot washing ceremonies of Holy Week push us towards sharing our humble lives as beautiful, broken, living, breathing, fearing, and trusting vessels of Christ’s love. This is how we behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Fr. Nouwen put it like this:
I don’t think you’ll ever be able to penetrate the mystery of God’s revelation in Jesus until it strikes you that the major part of Jesus’ life was hidden. Even the “public” years remained essentially invisible as far as most people were concerned. Whereas the way of the world is to insist on publicity, celebrity, popularity, and getting maximum exposure, God prefers to work in secret. You must let that mystery of God’s secrecy, God’s anonymity, sink deeply into your consciousness because, otherwise, you’re continually looking at it from the wrong point of view. In God’s sight the things that really matter seldom take place in public… Jesus’ life is marked by an always deeper choice towards what is small, humble, poor, rejected, and despised.
This week I wish we could be together to wash one another’s feet – but, like the Passover liturgy says – NEXT year in Jerusalem. If, however, you are feel called and would like to join with me and my friends at L’Arche this Thursday at 7 pm Eastern time, send me a note. We’ll be introducing the foot washing ceremony quietly at that time and asking people in their homes to participate how-ever it feels right. We will also be Zooming the stations of the cross on Good Friday at 10 am the following morning. The poet, Padraig O’Tuama, has said that for 10 years he prayed and walked the 14 stations of the cross everyday in his quest to find God’s loving presence in the midst of his pain. He’s written: “What I like about the Stations of the Cross, is that they don’t say, “Oh, 14 ok, but then, there’s the fifteenth one, where it’s all lovely, fantastic.”
No, in the traditional understanding, there isn’t a fifteenth station. The idea is to find hope in the practice of what seemed to be the worst. And it is the worst — there’s no pretense that abduction and torture and murder are anything other than abduction, torture, and murder; however, there is the understanding that within it, we can discover some kind of hope — the hope of protest, the hope of truth-telling, the hope of generosity, the hope of gesture — even in those places.
You may wish to join us for this time of quiet reflection on the Lamb of God, too. Drop me a note and I will privately send you the link. This is the hour when we proclaim with believers throughout the world: behold, the Lamb of God, who quietly, in small and mostly hidden ways, takes away the sins of the world with love – and invites us to join him. Pray with me:
O Jesus of the unexpected, for at least some of your life this was not how you imagined its end. Yet even in the end, you kept steady in your conviction. Jesus, keep us steady. Jesus, keep us steady. Because Jesus, keep us steady. Amen.
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