April 2020 – By Another Road

Holy Week at Home #8: Easter Day

The final installment of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; a meditation on happiness and joy in a season when both feel harder to inhabit. Yet still we say: Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Something I am continuing to discover is how joy and happiness are not the same thing. And on this particular Easter, when the usual signs of celebration are absent or muted by grief, understanding that distinction feels more important than ever.

Happiness is precious and usually comes, in its purest form, unbidden, from humble things. A flower blooming, a familiar voice, a gentle hand outstretched. But happiness also vanishes as quickly as it comes, and cannot be pursued. We must learn to hold it gently, and then let it go.

Thus I think of Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus in the garden on Easter morning. There is a flower and a voice and an outstretched hand, yes, but also this: “Do not hold onto me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father, to my God and your God.” This happiness is only momentary. Resurrection is not just reunion. It’s also letting go.

So, we must consider what we mean by joy, and Easter joy in particular. Not mere happiness, but perhaps, instead, a fullness. Fullness of life. Fullness of presence, both God’s presence and our own. A fullness that contains happiness, yes, but also grief, and confusion, and wonder, and mercy, and everything else that emanates from the deep heart of Life. A fullness that sustains us even when our pleasures feel meagre, as they sometimes do.

As we live into the reality of this unusual Eastertide, I find myself kneeling in the garden with Mary Magdalene, having experienced such a collision of grief and happiness that my soul feels stretched beyond its capacity. But I am choosing to trust that in the stretching, there is the shape of joy. In the stretching, Christ is forming me into something new. Something that can contain a bit more of the vastness of God’s dream, wherein Resurrection finds its source and endpoint.

Blessed Easter, dear friends. I wish you happiness to soothe your spirit. And I wish you joy, that each of us might become who God made us to be.

Holy Week at Home #7: Holy Saturday

A continuation of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; on Holy Saturday we are caught in that space between grief and hope. I have a particular love for the Virgin Mary on this day, who is known on Holy Saturday as Our Lady of Solitude. She has been with me through many seasons of waiting and wondering, including this one. I dedicate this poem to her.

In between beginnings, I must learn to live in interims.

And today I am here, in that shadow-place at the intersection of memory and hope,
The dove-grey moment
when the past ebbs, unreachable
and the cloud bears no hint of light.

Where have you gone, my beloved?

I wait, and yes, I grieve
the yet-unsatisfied promise
But I also find that

shadows cast their own illumination over those who pause to consider–
who ponder in their heart–
the saintliness of not knowing;
The beatitude of contingency.

And as the night enfolds understanding
As your absence drapes over me like a mantle of fog
I perceive how needed it is
To say goodbye, and to mean it

To let this waiting be its own solace
Its own teacher
Its own revelation of the
unchanging liminality
at the heart of my restless heart.

After the going and before the coming
There is simply this,
The sufficient poverty of now,
And that must always be enough
Or nothing ever will.

Son, behold your mother
in repose
in recollection
in the resilience you required of her
wild as the sea-grass
Bending
in solitude
But rising
in strength.

Holy Week at Home #6: Good Friday

A continuation of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; on Good Friday we stand at the foot if the Cross as Jesus is crucified.

Look up.

He is unfurled
aloft,

Like a flag of surrender,
So that you might see, and know
It is finished.

Like a scroll,
So that you might read the lines on his skin and find the place
where it is written in rivulets of tears:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.
I have been anointed to proclaim release.
And I am releasing—
I am giving up
my spirit.

A broken body
Arched like a question
inquiring into your frailty;
testing whether it is tolerable
For love to cost this much.

But if you will stay
In this place without answers
Then you will learn that the
rending and the mending of the world
are two notes of the same song.

You will learn that there is no such thing
as dispassionate salvation
or tentative redemption.

And how in the Divine economy
everything is given
And returned
Eternally.

You will learn that nothing is ever wasted
even when waste is the only credible conclusion.
Even when all the evidence suggests defeat.

You will learn that victory is not the same as winning;
that truth is not the same as certainty;
And that peace is not the same as pleasure.

But all of this is offered now, only now,
On this desiccated and necessary hill,
The final bequeathment of a dying God
Who cannot teach you the secrets of eternity
Without entering finitude.

Look up, into his face.

Look up, and see how he is grieving all of your endings.

Look up, and see how he is dying all of your deaths.

Look up, and see the world pass into something new.

Look up.

Holy Week at Home #5: Maundy Thursday

A continuation of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; on Maundy Thursday we commemorate Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, as well as Jesus’ anguish and arrest in the garden of Gethsemane.

Before I must die, he says, let me show you what cannot be killed.

Always, your tyrants will stumble. Your temples will fall. Time and plague lay will lay waste. Enmity will wound.

But there is something else, something underneath and beyond the brittle, crumbling certainties of this (and every) age. Something eternal.

Let us gather together at this table so you might glimpse it, dancing in the shadows as your faces shine in the lamplight. Let me feed you here, let me cleanse you. Let me be with you forever in this moment, even when I must go.

Begin to understand, beloved ones, that there are things more precious than that which you can hold onto. You must begin to see the strange inversion of Truth: how service is power; how love is relinquishment; how death opens us to life.

I admit that I could never explain this to you adequately in words alone. So now I can only demonstrate. I can only *be* for you what is commanded for us all. My tools are bread and wine and water basin. And tomorrow there will be other instruments, but let us not speak of them yet.

Oh, beloveds, how I have loved you, ever since my breath first swept across the waters, ever since I molded you from dust. How I have longed to be known by you.

And so, as you have said to me so often through the cascading generations, I now say to you:

Here Am I.
I Am Here.

I have come from across eternity to kneel before you. To breathe across this water. To wash the earth from your feet of dust.

I am the unkillable offering. I give you myself so that you will know how, even if you do not know why.

Do the same, always, in remembrance of me.

Holy Week at Home #4: Spy Wednesday

A continuation of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; on Holy Wednesday, also known as “Spy Wednesday” we focus on Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus. His reasons for doing so have been long debated in the Christian tradition; the Gospels leave a number of possibilities open to interpretation.

Facades are so tempting; they promise to make us presentable to the world, maybe even impressive. We plaster all the cracks, drape over the torn fabric of the heart. We adorn ourselves with fear and fig leaves, trembling and hidden like Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening, terrified of being truly seen.

Thus we find Judas, the “spy” of Spy Wednesday, peering out from behind his mask of virtue while rage, or jealousy, or longing, roils deep within. We don’t know precisely why he betrays Jesus, and that unknowability, that unbreakable facade is, itself, part of his tragedy–and ours. Empathy is only possible when we see below the surface. Without it, we are lost to one another, as Judas is lost to us.

But we should not dispose of him so easily, lest we exempt ourselves from the questions his story poses. Do any of us fully understand why we harm one another? Can we ever discern the exact balance of love and fear that motivate our daily choices? Is there a way to break free from the artifice, the suffocating ornamentation, under which we have burdened and betrayed ourselves?

Following Jesus is partly an attempt to reckon with those questions, even if our answers are fumbling. He stands there in the night, ready to receive our kiss, asking whether we know why we offer it. He stands there, forgiving us for the paltry silver we’ve gathered to justify our unexamined lives.

And here, finally, in the cool of another evening, we experience the ultimate futility of hiding from him; there is no more time for our pitiable facades.

He understands, even when we do not: only love and death, now. Only the integrity of naked flesh, and wood, and stone, now. In them, we will finally face ourselves. In them, all truth will be revealed.

Holy Week at Home #3: Holy Tuesday

Our entire life can be spent waiting for something to happen. Waiting for *that* thing to happen, the one we can’t quite name: the consummation of an unarticulated desire; the answer to a half-posed question, caught in our throat like a crumb of daily bread.

It is all-too-easy, though, to let this waiting be sufficient. To exist in a state of vague expectancy, neither starved nor nourished, having grown accustomed to glancing at life–at ourselves and one another–indirectly, furtively, never head-on.

But today we must let that go. We must risk an encounter with the emerging fullness of God’s purpose for us.

In Tuesday’s Scripture, Jesus does this. He accepts his own, pivotal role in that mysterious purpose: to be lifted up and poured out, revealing an unending effusion of mercy sourced in the headwaters of creation.

It is not the answer he wanted. Not the path he might have chosen. But we come to understand, in time, that our lives, lived most deeply, are not completely our own. And when the hour comes and the wait is over–when that existential answer arrives–it will inevitably lead us out, beyond the familiar and deadening malaise, beyond safety, to the place where our heart will be pierced and our eyes will be opened. The place of pure, unmediated Life.

Holy Week at Home #2: Holy Monday

A continuation of my “Holy Week at Home” posts; on Holy Monday the Gospel reading depicts Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus with precious ointment (John 12:1-9).

Spring is a season of guileless generosity. The trees and flowers cry abundant, blossoming tears of gratitude for the gentle return of warmth to the earth. The soft evening air feels gently magnanimous, like new love, or a reconciliation.

On Holy Monday we are told of Jesus’ anointing at Bethany; how Mary, the sister of Martha, pours precious fragrance on his feet and wipes them with her hair. Extravagant and unnecessary, says Judas, who cannot see beyond the imperatives of his limited, grasping imagination.

No, says Jesus, she has done this out of deep wisdom, for my burial approaches.

Extravagance is only harmful when it gathers bounty toward oneself, into the bottomless void of a misunderstood hunger. The extravagance of giving is the only possible satiation.

So, like springtime, like the exuberant wildflowers bending to kiss the dark soil, with the gratitude of one who has perceived the true cost of Love, thus has Mary poured out her gift. Thus has she anointed God with her necessary offering, for his necessary offering which is to come.

Help me now, Lord, in my fear of your Cross, and of my own. Allow me to rest at your feet. Allow me to gather what beauty I can, and then to offer it back; to let the blossoms loose and fall, as they must: an anointing of the earth, a making way, so to bear the fruit not yet tasted.

Holy Week at Home #1: Palm Sunday

With liturgies suspended for this (most unusual) Holy Week, I wrote some brief daily meditations/reflections/poems on social media as a way to navigate the passage from Palm Sunday to Easter without the usual guideposts of communal worship.

The process of daily writing and posting was a reminder for me that our praise of God is just as much about what we offer–the oblation of our hearts–as it is what we receive. So even now, when we are separated by circumstance and the usual blessings of the liturgy feel distant, we can still present our humble gifts with gratitude. With this in mind, here are the posts I shared last week.

PALM SUNDAY:

You know that anxious feeling of entry into something unfamiliar and inevitable, like the first day of school or that difficult conversation you simply can’t put off? The dry mouth and the churning gut? The sweat on the back of your neck?

Such is Palm Sunday. Bright, dizzying, crystallized, expectant, palm leaves that scratch your own palms, cries of praise that leave you hoarse. The big event that doesn’t quite satisfy.

Palm Sunday has a feverish quality, like infatuation that has convinced itself that it’s love. It is desire without generosity. Longing without trust.

As we stand at the roadside, or peer from our windows, at the man who enters our midst on a donkey, let us be mindful of all that we still project onto him, all the ways we demand him to solve the heartbreaks and hatreds of our own creation. He comes to illuminate suffering, but not to erase it. He comes to show us life, but we must still traverse through the narrow gate that leads there. When we cry Hosanna, when we wave the branch, we are greeting a very different sort of salvation than the one we privately hoped for. If we truly understood it, its magnitude and its cost, we would likely fall silent as he passed by.

Palm Sunday is the irony of ripping branches zealously; to kill the tender green prematurely– a misguided homage to the One
Who would not break a bruised reed.
In our plundering jubilation we are convicted–
but soon
he will gather the trampled fronds and
mend the broken branches back
onto the Tree of Life.