Put your sword away

He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and rise after three days. He spoke this openly. Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do."

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it."

I always thought Peter tended to get a bit unfairly characterized as the impulsive man with a big mouth and no follow-through.  Comparatively, at any rate, he certainly seems to show a lot more devotion than the other disciples: a lot of zeal with some real evidence of love.  I mean, let’s think of the things he tends to be criticized for:

• Jesus is walking on the water in a storm.  When Peter realizes that it is him, he asks if he can join him on the water, and then he proceeds to walk out of the boat in the middle of a raging storm in order to be near him.  Apparently he got a little scared, but I mean, everyone else was still on the boat.
• He and James and John see Christ transfigured standing between Moses and Elijah.  Peter is the one who speaks up and wants to set up a place of worship for the Messiah and those who have prepared the way.
• He drew his sword to defend Jesus in the garden.  Apparently he should have known that Jesus wanted to get arrested.  In any case, his later denial is more complicated than a mere fear of death; he was willing to die defending Jesus right then and there.
• Which brings us to his most infamous shortcoming: he denied Christ... when all the other disciples other than John had fled and hid.  Peter and John risked their lives to follow Jesus all the way to the High Priest’s courtyard.  John apparently had connections with the High Priest, so it was Peter who was most vulnerable in that moment, and he had willingly placed himself in that situation. 

Whatever faults Peter had, it didn’t seem to be a lack of follow-through, and it hardly seems to be fear.  At the Last Supper Peter declared that he was willing to lay down his life for Jesus, and in the Garden of Gethsemane he showed himself willing to put his money where his mouth was.  Peter showed no hesitation dying for the Messiah.

No, where Peter failed in the gospel reading from this morning, quoted at the top of this page, was not a fear of dying for the Messiah, but of suffering beside him.  Peter was all too willing to die in order to establish the reign of the triumphant King of the Jews; he was not prepared, no matter how many times Jesus foretold it, for the Messiah to be the one doing the dying.  The only way to follow a dying Messiah is to suffer shame and humiliation beside him, to give ones back to those who beat him, ones cheeks to those who plucked his beard, not shielding ones face from buffets and spitting.  It is not to die for him; it is to die with him.

Peter’s difficulty is still ours today.  The Messiah did indeed come, but the fact that he is not the kind of Messiah we feel that we so desperately need has not become any easier.  We are still as confused as we ever were.  We are still waiting even after his resurrection.  And he is still exhorting us to deny ourselves, to take up our crosses, and to follow him into his suffering and our own.

A Divine Thrusting On

I’m short profound, inspiration observation from my daily life this week, but since I've promised to try to post every Sunday night, you’ll have to make due with an observation from my exam reading (one that I've pondered before in a few better entries, in fact).  Non-academic readers, receive my sincerest apologies.

One of the exciting things about reading for comprehensive exams is that the inundation with sixteenth-century literature is sharpening my perception to repeated themes.  The past two weeks have been particularly inundated with Shakespeare.  See if you notice these repeated themes, all from different plays:

[My deformed birth] plainly signified

That I should snarl and bite and play the dog.

Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,

Let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.

A devil, a born devil, on whose nature

Nurture can never stick;

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion...and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on.

Men at sometime are masters of their fates.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

The first is from Henry VI, part 3 right after Richard (later Richard III) has murdered the title role and explains that his malice results from the defects of his birth.  The second is from The Tempest where Prospero describes the islander Caliban, explaining that his savage nature prevents the possibility of reformation.  The third is from King Lear, in which the crafty Edmund explains to the audience that his villainy does not result from his bastard birth but rather from his own will.  The final is from Julius Caesar in which the ambitious Cassius attempts to convince Brutus to murder Caesar, a betrayal that will bring down the republic and secure Brutus’ position in infamy as a traitor.

All characters seem to be asking, in the face of tragic villainy, whether our wickedness comes from within or without, and (more importantly) whether it is destined or avoidable.  

I find that in the face of my own monstrosities, I want to stand beside Cassius and Edmund who insist that we can take hold of our own destiny, that the accidents of our circumstances do not control our future.  And then I find myself, like the crafty bastard Edmund, taking hold of my destiny to bring it deliberately to the places I insisted I wasn’t destined to go. 

As a Christian, of course, I have the easy God-answer that seems like it would save me from the despair of Caliban and the ambition of Cassius: God can snatch me out of my own monstrosities and save me from my natural corruption.  But when he doesn’t, when year after year my weaknesses or deformities or struggles or corruptions remain, I’m not sure I like the answer that would imply to the question.

Maybe it is the wrong question to begin with—how I got this way or whether I can change.   Maybe that is why it is the Shakespearean villains who are asking it, and why they can never come up with a consensus about the answer.  Maybe that is why my attempts to find the Christian answer to the question are equally unsatisfactory.

I’m not sure what a better question might be, and I’m open to suggestions.  In the mean time, I’ll accept the grace to admit that I can’t always take hold of my destiny, and hope that such an admission does not abandon me to despair.

The glory of Lebanon

Fair trees! wheresoe'er your barks I wound

No name shall but your own be found.

-Andrew Marvell

 My old housemate Paul from my commune-days, in addition to his Easter fish breakfasts and his wild celebation, was infamous for his stories.  One of my favorites involved the time a Romanian pastor who was somewhat of a horticultural fanatic visited his community in the very lush city of San Francisco.  Because of the Bay Area’s year-round temperate and rainy weather, it supports a wide range of plant life, including many that are only found in rainforests.

“What’s that one called?” the wide-eyed Romanian asked Paul as they walked.

“Gee, I don’t know that one,” Paul answered awkwardly and somewhat deceptively.  Truth be told, it was not just “that one” whose name had escaped him.

“Ooh, what’s the name of that one?” the Romanian chimed within the next minute or two in their stroll through the veritable horticultural wonderland. 

“You know, I actually don’t know much about plants,” Paul replied a little more truthfully.

This admission did not deter the enthusiast, however, and soon as their walk took them by another green spectacle he interjected yet again, “Wow!  What do you call that one?”

Finally Paul attempted to make himself clear.  “Look, I actually don’t know the names of any of these.  I might be able to point out an oak on a good day, but I can guarantee you that I will be entirely unable to give you the names of any of the plants that you don’t already know.”

As the full confession sunk in, the Romanian looked at Paul with shocked surprise.  “But Paul,” he gasped at bit breathlessly, “if you don’t know their names, how can you love them?”

How indeed.

I remembered that story this week as I attempted to do damage control on my poor urban garden that has never really gotten very far off the ground.  I thought about the lush world of beauty around me, the many unique spectacles of nature that I pass by every day, rarely noticing them enough even to wonder their names.

And I thought about the redemption that we long to be a part of, whether the redemption Christ began in the Incarnation or that which he will complete in the New Creation when “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad” and “the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus.”  What a very earthy redemption that will be!

Come Lord Jesus.  In the mean time, may we be attentive to prepare places for you in the physical matter of the creation that waits with us for new birth.  May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and may we there with shovels in that earth to hallow the places we inhabit. 

Despite herself

My elegant grandmother, a relic of an age gone by with the Old South dripping from her accent and syntax, never saw my sister’s fiancé. 

“Now Sweetie Pie,” she had crooned to me across the breakfast table when I was about twelve, “what would you think if your brother came home one day and said, ‘Hey look y’all, I got married!’ and had a colored girl on his arm?”

The scenario confused my tender, adolescent brain, and after staring stupidly at her regal poise that awaited my response, I stammered the only reply I could articulate for this outlandish hypothetical.  “Well...” I hesitated, “I’d be really upset that he didn’t invite us to the wedding.”

There was a delay in Gramma’s chortle before she finally seemed to determine that I was joking.  “I mean, Doll Baby,” she winked good-naturedly, “what would you do if your brother wanted to marry a colored girl?”

I still blinked my innocent confusion, not feeling like I had been given enough data to determine a response.  “Do you mean,” I asked again, “without us getting to know her first?”

Finally Gramma seemed to determine the conversation would go more smoothly if she simply told me what she wanted to say.  “No, Baby Girl, I am just trying to point out that it is wrong for the races to mix.  There are many lovely colored people out there, and they should marry each other and have other lovely colored babies.  If the races mix, pretty soon there won’t be anymore races and we’ll all be a bunch of mongrels.  You wouldn’t want your brother to have a bunch of mongrel babies, would you?”

Dumbfounded, I had honestly not realized this was still a thing.

But my grandmother never saw my sister’s fiancé.  Oh, she met him several times in the past year before she died; she laid her frail, dignified hand in his caramel fingers, she interrogated him with regard to his life goals across the breakfast table, she offered him her litany of proverbs interspersed with her ever-changing anecdotes form her own life.  Essentially blind for the past six years, she could drill her sharp blue eyes into his sepia face without ever suspecting the nice young man to whom she spoke was one of the mongrels she had feared we might all become. 

Gramma’s blindness tortured the last years of her life before she died this summer, and in no way do I suggest that it was a good thing or that she deserved it.  Nevertheless, there was a bit of a poetic justice to the fact that her agonizing debility gave her access to a relationship that would have been barred otherwise.  Because she couldn’t see his face, Gramma could recognize him to be a nice young man for her granddaughter to marry.

I like to think that my perception of the world will become clearer as I age.  But until my heart is healed of its hardness, it is good to know that my debilitations can break down the barriers I have put around it.  I welcome the healing, even when it must come through ailment.  May we all find healing despite ourselves.

Lent I

There is no right way to dissever rubble—
Just shard by shard on pirouetting toes
That flit between the groaning rafters, those
Who lifted up their heads and now pay double
Under dust. So on the chafty stubble
Lay out each shattered plank, each corpse that froze
In his own trenches where the poppy grows
Along his veins; for man is born to trouble.

I cannot be rebuilt from my own grout;
Dismantle my decay to feel the sun,
For what is living in these mildew eaves
Is not myself and I would sweep it out.
For you who resurrect yourself have done
The same in souls as in the budding leaves.

Blessed are the who now?

I poked around some of my blogger stats and learned that some people have found my blog because it is the #1 hit on google for “ireland work ethic,” which gave me a chuckle. Of course, I also learned it is the #2 hit for “mildew conservatory” and the #3 hit for “can screaming at the top of your lungs cause a miscarriage,” so I can’t be too proud.

We don’t always get to choose what we are known for.

This lesson was more apparent to me last week when I received a card from an old friend, one of the seminarians (who is now a priest) who studied Latin with me in Ireland nearly four years ago. Among other nice things he said, he told me that he admired my “constant spirit of prayer,” and I was immediately struck by two ironies.

The first was whom it was from: I’ve mentioned this friend before as one of the people whose frequent promises to pray for me and requests for me to do the same made me realize how little I actually pray for people other than myself. A “spirit of prayer” was an odd thing for him of all people to “admire” in me.

The second was whom it was to. Seriously? Not to invoke a false humility, but his assessment of me was objectively untrue. I had just been reflecting about the way I had entirely neglected prayer for the past couple months, how the few times I did manage to pray seemed entirely vacuous, how I can hardly believed that prayer was even efficacious. My constant spirit of prayer? Of prayer?

But we don’t always get to choose what we are known for.

In a sense, this is the irony of the Gospel all over again. The poor get remembered as the rich. The weak get remembered as the strong. The small get remembered as the great. And somewhere out in Rome there is a young priest who remembers me by strengths I do not possess, by strengths I was humbled to see in him, and I don’t have the energy to argue.

It’d be just like God to rewrite my story while I’m in the middle of it, to redefine my very weakness as my gifts. Go figure. I guess if he sees us through Christ’s righteousness anyway, I may as well get used to it.

Mysteriously joyful

Christian devotional practices from the Middle Ages have included meditations of the “mysteries” around the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. The specific scenes selected for emphasis are called the “Joyful Mysteries,” “Sorrowful Mysteries,” and “Glorious Mysteries,” respectively, with five in each set.

Yet at the close of the Christmas season, I was suddenly taken aback at the name of the mysteries of this season—the "Joyful Mysteries." Perhaps we who read the story of Christ’s birth retrospectively in the light of his later death and resurrection can call these events “joyful,” but to the people involved, to Mary in particular, joy does not seem the most obvious common thread.

• The Annunciation: An angel greets a young teenager and announces to her that she will bear a son. The betrothed virgin is troubled, as any mother with an unwanted pregnancy can imagine, but humbly submits to what she knows will be a source of shame. A mystery, yes, but joyful?
• The Visitation: The pregnant girl travels eighty miles to visit her pregnant cousin. When she arrives, the baby in the elderly woman’s womb tips his mother off, and the secret is out of the bag. I wonder about Mary’s fear in front of her cousin. Her Magnificat may have expressed relief as much as joy.
• The Nativity: The long journey to Bethlehem climaxes when Mary goes into labor in the streets. There is no place to stay, and so the couple takes refuge in a barn, and Mary suffers the pains of childbirth on dirty straw among animals. Joy could only have come on the heels of fear and pain.
• The Presentation: The couple presents the poor-man’s sacrifice at the temple, and Mary hears Jesus’ screams as he is circumcised. An old man and woman recognize the child as the awaited Messiah, and Simeon gives a chilling prophesy that “This Child is destined to be the downfall and rise of many in Israel, a sign that will be opposed.” Then he turns to Mary and foretells that a sword will pierce her soul as well.
• The Finding of Jesus in the Temple: Mary and Joseph only discover they have left the twelve-year-old Jesus in Jerusalem after traveling for a day, and their panicked return must have been plagued by anxiety and grief. When they find him on the third day, the boy chides them for their fear and identifies his higher priorities.

I don’t know if I’m treading dangerous ground to say I don’t imagine these events being times of great joy for the Holy Family as they unfolded. Yet the Church calls them joyful: joyful for humanity, certainly, and thus by extension to the actors involved, however fearful and humiliating and painful they might have been at the time. Perhaps that is part of what is so mysterious about them.

I once wrote a (slightly controversial) post about God rewriting his own story in Hebrews 11, declaring against our available data that various men and women were heroes of a faith that they often did not demonstrate possessing. Perhaps the Church has done that here as well, pointing to this awkward union of God and humanity and declaring it “joyful.” The pain and fear of our human experience is not nullified by the Incarnation; it is heightened, and then redefined.

Only with a God who can enter a human womb can joy enter our human pain. As we close the Christmas season, that is still as much a mystery to me as it ever was.

Eyes of Redemption

Right before I went out of town last week, a year into home-ownership, I got a hefty check in the mail from my mortgage company, along with an explanation that my mortgage was going down a considerable amount due to a correction in their prior over-estimation of my property value. According to the state, it seems, I live in a rather worthless area of a rather worthless city. It was a striking assessment because, a year into home-ownership, I still find myself quite charmed with the neighborhood.

“I think you have a rather idealized image of the neighborhood,” one of my more disillusioned friends once suggested. I didn’t argue. All is reasons for disillusionment (e.g. here and here) seemed equally valid as mine for fondness (e.g. here and here), and I didn’t feel that I had the right to assert my optimism over his pessimism.

I also didn’t argue because I’ve been told that with regard to another little city in Ireland many times before by various less enchanted friends. Three years after my first visit to Cork, I returned this past weekend for my fourth summer visit, and the residents cannot believe I would willingly spend so many vacations here. I seem to have a history of falling in love with odd places.

I don’t want to discredit the suggestion that I may over-idealize certain places, but it may be that (ideally, at least) the Christian does so in general, not because he is delusional but because he sees the world through eyes of redemption. Perhaps there is a way that my neighborhood can be seen in the light of the original goodness of creation and the hope of the New Creation that has begun already and will be completed in the future Resurrection. Perhaps in that light the robberies and drugs and even the gunshots cannot dampen its beauty.

Either way, I returned to Cork last week with a smile on my face, and I’m sure I’ll return to my neighborhood in five weeks time similarly smiling. If these be eyes of redemption, the world sure looks lovely through them.

This is the night

I wish I had time to write, to process the events of the past week--from the six-hour procession around the city with the Bishop on Palm Sunday, to the night tainted by a murder on my street between leaving Christ weeping in the garden on Thursday night and observing his death Friday at noon, to faith in the resurrected Christ on Sunday that begins the new creation even on the very street on which I saw a dead man lie three nights earlier. You may get a lot of Easter posts as I process it all over the summer (if survive [academically] the next two weeks).

In the mean time, as we are still in some ways living in the night that the resurrected Christ has nevertheless entered, as the empty tomb still confuses us his friends who cannot always see him in a way we would expect, I thought I'd copy the words from the Easter vigil service on Saturday night, the night we celebrated the resurrection before even Mary Magdalen had discovered the empty tomb. These words take more faith than I can muster sometimes—try saying O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer! while a warm-but-dead body lies on your friends' yard, for example—but the Church says them nonetheless, and stands together in the faith that his Resurrection gives us.

Rejoice, my friends; rejoice, my neighborhood: Christ is risen, even as the night lingers.

* * *

Rejoice, heavenly powers! Sing, choirs of angels!
Exult, all creation around God's throne!
Jesus Christ, our King, is risen!
Sound the trumpet of salvation!

Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!

Rejoice, O Mother Church! Exult in glory!
The risen Savior shines upon you!
Let this place resound with joy,
echoing the mighty song of all God's people!

It is truly right
that with full hearts and minds and voices
we should praise the unseen God, the all-powerful Father,
and his only Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Christ has ransomed us with his blood,
and paid for us the price of Adam's sin to our eternal Father!

This is our passover feast,
when Christ, the true Lamb, is slain,
whose blood consecrates the homes of all believers.

This is the night
when first you saved our fathers:
you freed the people of Israel from their slavery
and led them dry-shod through the sea.

This is the night
when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin!

This is the night
when Christians everywhere,
washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

This is the night
when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death
and rose triumphant from the grave.

What good would life have been to us,
had Christ not come as our Redeemer?
Father, how wonderful your care for us!
How boundless your merciful love!
To ransom a slave you gave away your Son.

O happy fault,
O necessary sin of Adam,
which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

Most blessed of all nights,
chosen by God to see Christ rising from the dead!

Of this night scripture says:
"The night will be as clear as day:
it will become my light, my joy."

The power of this holy night dispels all evil,
washes guilt away, restores lost innocence,
brings mourners joy;
it casts out hatred, brings us peace,
and humbles earthly pride.

Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth
and man is reconciled with God!

Earth felt the wound

(Apologies for the long blogger silence as I prepared for my recent conference in Montreal and entered the long push at the end semester. Posts will likely remain scarce as I work on final research and prepare for a trip to Asia.)

On Friday I had the moving experience of reading through all of Paradise Lost aloud in one marathon sitting with a group of students and faculty at the university. All morning and afternoon we moved through some of the most stunningly beautiful lines of English poetry, and I found myself shocked by the wonder of creation in Book VII as God separated the waters from the land:

over all the face of Earth
Main Ocean flow'd, not idle, but with warme
Prolific humour soft'ning all her Globe,
Fermented the great Mother to conceave,
Satiate with genial moisture...

But as the evening approached and we moved into Book IX, my professor retrieved his basket of apples, passing them out to all the women as Eve reached out “her rash hand in evil hour” and directing us to eat when

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

The men of course were not off the hook, and they were directed to follow as Adam “scrupl’d not to eat” and

Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan.

It was a moving experience, the first time my heart has ever been quite so grieved to consider the Fall in which I myself am complicit.

I too have taken. I too did eat.

The season of Lent reminds us of our part in this great epic of human history: not the part of the hero, not even only of the victim. Indeed, we who have committed to fast during this season and have found our vigilance waning over the weeks may have questioned such apparently arbitrary strictures to be “suspicious, reasonless,” and may have found our appetites to get the better of our piety. We may have also slighted

that sole command,
So easily obeyd amid the choice
Of all tastes else to please thir appetite,
Though wandring.

Lenten fasting may indeed be an opportunity for penance, but this year I have also found it to be a canvas on which I have painted my own sin. I am the woman who has taken from the tree. I am the friend sleeping in the garden. I am the disciple who has denied my tortured master.

I too need a savior.

Three stages

A few years ago when my nephew was four, he pontificated to my brother from the backseat of the car:

There are three stages to life, Daddy. The first stage is when you are kid and you do what your parents tell you to do. The second stage is when you are an adult and you have to do the things adults have to do. The third stage is when you get thrusters on your feet and can fly.

The little fella had quite a sophisticated eschatology, I must say. I can't say much about the third stage yet, so I have no room to correct him. But now is as good a season as any to rejoice that the God who has seemingly entered all three of my nephew's stages of human development is preparing the way for us who are caught up in the second to enter the third. I'm looking forward to my thrusters.

God speed the day, Little One.

The woman I am

In order to guard against the graduate student tendency to write scathing, sophomoric criticism of other scholars, one of my professors gave us a rule of thumb for writing literary reviews: “Always pretend the author is sitting beside you as you write it,” she told us, “and that he is in a wheel chair.” A good rule of thumb.

For Christmas this year, my family (the few of us who are not in China, at least) are hosting my two elderly grandmothers: the frail Southern lady in her late 80s who could talk the ears off of an elephant and the short Polish woman in her early 90s who could keep Armageddon a secret. It’s been one of the strangest Christmases I’ve ever had.

And somewhere in-between the occasional “yes’um”s I inserted to punctuate the stream-of-consciousness tales that went from her father’s scandalous affairs that were ironic considering he had initially joined the KKK because he thought it existed to beat up men who walked out on their wives when he was a cruel man anyway and forced her to drop out of high school so she could work at his firm and make money for him to pocket while he told her that all she would ever have going for her was her good looks, which she used to the best of her abilities anyway at least four times over beginning with the blond teenager whom she married because she was getting a little too old to be single and whom she convinced to joined the marines because she liked their uniforms the best until she sent him a “Dear John” letter when he got shipped away during the War because she had never been all that crazy about him anyway, not anymore than the man whose marriage produced her first daughter right before it was annulled, not like my grandfather who nevertheless wouldn’t initially sell his car to buy the particular ring she wanted which almost cost him her hand in marriage because she determined he didn’t value her enough to show her off as the high class person she was, the high class of person she declared us all to be which my brother’s nice car and new job demonstrated.... somewhere in-between these stories and the lite suggestions for selective breeding of humans that ironically harkened to the eugenics that I associated with the Nazis her various husbands had been fighting.... somewhere in-between all this I realized two things:

One: that my grandmother is not unlike the various girls who had made my life miserable when I was in high school and who I strove tirelessly to avoid becoming.

Two: that in her withered frailty I could not criticize her the way I had spent my adult life criticizing those women.

It made me reflect that every one of those cheerleaders who hurt me in high school will all be old frail women like my grandmother one day, unable to see the make-up they still put on their face every day and the wig that covers their bald heads, unable to color coordinate their clothing that is still important even if they can’t see it anymore than they can control their bowels or taste their food. We are called to forgive our enemies because the eugenics that Hitler organized is not unlike my frail grandmother’s suggestions for selective breeding at the dinner table, because the arrogance of the prom queen is not unlike my grandmother’s haggard dignity.

Then I reflected that I will be like my withered grandmother one day as well.

Then I reflected that I already am. In contrast to the woman I was created to be, I am that frail woman trying to maintain a dignified poise while wearing Poise panty-liners. In contrast to who we have it in us to be, we are walking on brittle bones and can hardly make it up the stairs. We are called to forgive demented autocrats because we ourselves suffer with dementia. Sin is an ailment we all suffer through together, like old folks at a nursing home sharing the latest news of our recent medical disorders.

Rejoice, Christmas reminds us: Christ has taken on our osteoporosis. He is sharing our dementia and our irritable bowel syndrome, our blindness and deafness and shriveled skin. Rejoice; if he could cross from radiance into dung, there is hope that we may cross from our dung into his radiance.

Any hope I have to be reborn into that radiance is the same hope my grandmother has, and that those cheerleaders have, and that my great-grandfather who may have been a Klansman had. What is there to do but to forgive?

Surprised by unrefinement

“I can’t remember his name,” my 90-year-old grandmother grumbled at some point in our conversation. “I tell you, when you get to be my age, your brain just starts slipping away.”

The woman is of course the sharpest 90-year-old I know, so I didn’t take her momentary memory lapse very seriously. “Well Gramma,” I absolved her stupidly, “at your age, you’ve earned the right to forget a few things.”

The 4-foot-10, one-armed Polish woman looked at me with her silent eyes where the struggles of the Great Depression and World War II were long buried, and she raised an eyebrow that indicated her wit had spotted a opening. “Well,” she retorted gruffly, “I wish I coulda earned something I’d enjoy having a little more.”

No Gramma, I wanted to counter, your brain is clearly intact.

But she was right: we don’t always earn a particularly enjoyable trophy for all the hardships we endure to arrive at the other side. I always want to punch the people who say “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (except that it would probably make them stronger). Sometimes whatever doesn’t kill you makes you crippled or makes you bitter. I always hope to come out of adversity with confidence; instead I tend to come out of it with a limp. Yes, Gramma, I wish I coulda earned something I’d enjoy having a little more too.

Here on this process of sanctification, we don’t always get to choose our curriculum, and we certainly don’t get to choose our lessons (after all, they wouldn’t be lessons then, would they?). I would rather have the curriculum that involves turning me into someone a bit more stable; instead I get the one that turns me into a twitchy dog. I often want to question God’s pedagogy.

And when we limp our way to the finish line on aching joints and reach for the railing with our shriveled hands, surprised by our own unrefinement, I hope we will learn whatever it is that takes us 90 or more years to realize. Reaching sainthood is not about becoming superheroes. I rather wonder what it is instead.

Feast of the Transfiguration

The Pentateuch ends rather anticlimactically. As a cohesive narrative, the five books of the law could be read as the life of Moses rather than the history of Israel: after Genesis sets the background for the nation and how they got into Egypt, Exodus begins with the birth of Moses and Deuteronomy ends with his death.

Moses reluctantly accepts his calling to lead the people out of slavery, brings them out of Egypt with many wonders, enters the cloud of smoke on Sinai to receive the books of the law, leads the people to the Promised Land only to have them rebel, intercedes for them when God wants to wipe them out, and wanders through the wilderness with them for forty years. Then in Deuteronomy he delivers his farewell speech as they prepare to enter, walks Mt Nebo to look on the land, dies there, and is buried by the Lord in an unknown grave.

Though we know that the people do enter the land in the book of Joshua, as far as Moses is concerned (and as far as the Pentateuch is concerned), it ends there. The great work is left unfinished, unaccomplished, and the people are never at rest—not after Joshua conquers the land, not under the judges, certainly not under Saul, not even under David himself. The land is never at peace, though prophets continue to call out:

Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, “They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.”
As I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.” (Psalm 95)

Today, however, is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Christ takes his disciples up a mountain like the one on which Moses died with his work unaccomplished, on which Elijah hid ingloriously as he was hunted like a criminal after his victory over the prophets of Baal. Mountains are a place where God appears to prophets, but they are also a place of refuge in defeat.

And there on that mountain in the presence of Christ, Moses enters the Promised Land. The long awaited time of rest has come in the arrival of the Messiah who would proclaim from the height of his apparent defeat, “It is finished,” before he himself rested in the tomb on the Sabbath day. Christ reveals today what remained unfinished after 40 years in the wilderness, the elusive kingdom that brings rest for the people of God.

For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. (Hebrews 4:8-10

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest...

Like the dew that disappears

My five-year-old nephew revoked his friendship from me when I was babysitting last night because of my cruelty in withholding additional time on the wii beyond his daily allotment. “You better give me special Auntie-Em-wii-time,” he ordered, “or I won’t be your friend anymore!”

It brought back old memories from the church nursery when my childhood best-friend (except not evidently of that day) revoked her friendship for some now-forgotten crime of mine.

“I won’t be your friend again!” she had threatened.

Always a natural diplomat, I struggled to comprehend this dilemma. “But,” I reasoned helplessly, “you can’t not be my friend, because I’ll be your friend.”

“You can’t,” she countered, “because I won’t be your friend.”

I pondered my quandary. Whether or not friendship would have required a mutual agreement between the parties, we could hardly be enemies if one of the parties continued to extend friendship. She could withhold any benefits of friendship from me that she wanted, but could the friendship nevertheless remain intact if I continued to extend them to her? Beyond that, I wasn’t sure what friendship involved beyond mutual affection, so if my fondness for her continued, the doors to friendship would remain open.

(Seriously, I remember pondering all this, though perhaps not in those terms.)

“Well,” finally concluded triumphantly in the full capacity of my three-year-old articulation, “I’ll still like you.”

And certainly, one of the mysteries of the Gospel is that Christ continues to extend his friendship out to us after we have revoked ours from him like my nephew or my nursery friend. But while I would not go so far as to affirm the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace (at least not in its simplistic form), I have begun to hope that God’s friendship is not quite as helpless to childhood tantrums as my three-year-old capacities had left me.

Perhaps the deeper magic of the Gospel is that his open offer of friendship extends beyond our blockades, even those we maintain until our deaths. Perhaps his very offer of friendship begins the process of healing that our acceptance of it would complete (or at least would expedite). Perhaps healing comes to some extent whether I like it or not, as it does when I skin my knee. Perhaps though (as Hosea says) our love is like the morning cloud and like the dew that disappears, God has already (as Isaiah says) blotted out our transgressions like a cloud and our sins like a mist. Perhaps he hauntingly calls out to us, “Return to me, for I have [already?] redeemed you.”

For those who are not sure what I mean, never fear: I don't either. I just like to think our little tantrums might not have the last laugh.

Sonny, in memorium

Sorry for a heavy note in the beautiful spring. I remembered this story as I read a freshman’s essay about a meaningful family reunion complete with a brief scare (and there was reason to be scared) when the police drove by.

Sonny was a beautiful boy. In my days in the intercity commune, before my life plans were side-swiped and found me taking a surprising detour into graduate school, I loved living across the street from the 16-year-old and his mother Ms. Carol.

He was a beautiful boy, transitioning into a beautiful young man. He was charming, polite, and welcoming to the white stranger who moved in across the street from him, and I tried to imagine what he was like among his peers. I was sure the girls at school must have loved him: his well-carved form, his gentle voice, his bright eyes, his energy and charm.

It was beautiful to see him playing basketball with the little kids on our block, giving the little African boy rides on the handlebars of his bike on a Saturday afternoon. It was almost more likely for to see him surrounded by children than by teenagers his age. They all loved him.

It was beautiful to hear the brightness in his voice when I passed him on the street corner and he sang his cheerful hello to me, even if it was at night and he was with his friends engaging in questionable activity. I loved him.

It was beautiful to feel the love of Ms. Carol for him depicted in her motherly worry, her sighs when I asked how Sonny was doing, her shaking head and distant looks. She loved him.

“Did you see those police cars driving through the block?” Ms. Carol asked me one afternoon when I came home from work. She was standing in the middle of the intersection so that she could see down four blocks.

“No, what’s going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but I’m telling everyone I see to get in the house. Have you seen Sonny?”

“No, but I’ll keep my eye out for him.”

“Please do. I’m staying right out here until I bring him inside!”

A year after I moved out of the neighborhood, I returned from my first summer studying in Latin in Ireland to discover that Sonny had ended up in jail. The charge was severe, the young man was entirely guilty, and I am almost sure that by the time he leaves prison well into his adult years the brightness will be gone from his face. I will miss Sonny.

There is a twistedness to the world: it is not the force of evil that has infiltrated our culture and our families, but a rather a warping, a warping that has Ms. Carol warning the neighborhood of the police like an invading enemy that tears children away from loving mothers and dashes their hopes. Who are the bad guys in a story like this? Sonny? Ms. Carol? The police? The absent father, once a boy like Sonny? Somehow we have all become the enemies just as we are all certainly the victims; creation has been twisted in upon itself.

Yet it is still Easter season, and we rejoice in a God who has come into the very twisted places of creation and has begun it again from the inside. The Resurrection has begun, and Christ is the first fruits of the New Creation. Then raise us with you, Brother; resurrect the families of my students, the protection of the police, the love of Ms. Carol, the brightness of Sonny. Our good has been twisted; come revive it!

The Lady in Red

After making our way through the metal detectors and other layers of security and finding our seats near the processional wall, the seminarian and I were looking through the mass booklet that talked about John Paul II, for whom this mass was being offered. It was my first evening in Rome.

“Oh my...” my friend suddenly gasped. “Is that her?!”

I looked up to see a large man in a suit forcing his way to a woman in a bright red jacket two seats down from us in the row ahead. She, like many others with seats against the processional wall, was already standing and leaning against it in preparation for the Pope’s entry.

“Who?” I asked as the man, obviously a security guard, began whispering to her.

“The crazy lady who attacks the Pope!” he answered, seeming to find it difficult to stand still. Benedict XVI, despite the controversy in the Church (one of the scholars at the conference I attended this weekend pointed out that “There has been scandal in the Church ever since the cock crowed”), is quite a loved man, and my friend received the attacks against him like attacks against his father.

Sure enough, it was her. We watched as the large guard finished his whispered conversation with her, removed her chair from against the wall so she could not use it to climb over, and wedged himself against her. Then we all continued to wait for the processional as before.

“They’re letting her stay?” I asked my friend.

“They have to,” he answered with a combination of laughter and anguish in his voice. “They’re not about to ban someone from attending mass if she wants to.”

“Even if it’s a known habitual Pope-attacker?”

“Yep. She needs the presence of Christ in her life as much as the rest of us, and it is not our place to say whether or not she is repentant. We have to let her come.” He continued to squirm uncomfortably at the thought of her leaping over the wall to attack the Holy Father. “But if she tries anything tonight, I’m not letting her near my Daddy!”

The Catholic Church is under a lot of heavy criticism these days for its eagerness to forgive. Certainly, the cases in question are quite different from a lone woman attacking a well-guarded 83-year-old man in public, but it was nevertheless beautiful to see the eager-to-forgive principle applied to physical assaults against the Pope as well.

Sacramental theology (not just a belief in seven or in two Sacraments, but a belief that the physical matter of the world and the spiritual substance are inseparable) will do that to you. Forgiving the lady who attacks the Pope does not merely involve wishing her well, and wishing her well does not merely involve positive feelings. Since the Catholic Church believes the Real Presence of Christ is in the Eucharist physically, they cannot ban her physically from the room. Forgiveness, in this case, involves a severe physical risk that no other tight security of a well-loved world leader would ever allow.

Benedict, in case you’re wondering, ended up just fine that night, and the woman left right after the processional, giving me the chance to take her seat against the wall for the recessional. I don’t know if she showed up for any of the other events that week, but I do know that as far as the Church is concerned, she is forgiven.

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld.”
-John 20:23

God rested

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
-From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Today we have been sitting with the death of Christ, the great, deep silence that will not be broken until tonight (not to get ahead of the story).

If I had posted on Thursday, I would have mentioned something about the New Testament reading in Hebrews 5 that says “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (a peculiar use of the word “heard,” I would say). I mentioned before that this seems to be Christ’s credentials as the Great High Priest. Rejoice, he tells us; we have as a mediator a man who similarly prayed seemingly unanswered prayers. What kind of a high priest is a man who begs God to let the cup pass from him but willingly drinks it anyway?

But he did drink it yesterday, and it is finished. Now, on the seventh day, God rests. At morning prayers we read from the previous chapter of Hebrews that “there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.” Christ has offered his prayers to let the cup pass, he has drunk from it anyway, he declared his work finished, and today he rests. This is our high priest. This is the mediator of the new covenant. This is our model of suffering.

I read yesterday in a sermon of Melito of Sardis:

It is he who endured every kind of suffering in all those who foreshadowed him. In Abel he was slain, in Isaac bound, in Jacob exiled, in Joseph sold, in Moses exposed to die. He was sacrificed in the Passover Lamb, persecuted in David, dishonored in the prophets.

Now, it turns out, he is also prefigured (or postfigured) in everyone who has or will ever offer seemingly unanswered prayers, anyone who has ever tasted suffering he longed to avoid, anyone who has ever faced the silence of God.

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.

Therefore let us keep the feast

When I was a kid, I found myself baffled by the idea of eating crackers and grape juice to remember the crucifixion. Really, I wanted to tell the adults, if remembering is the goal, then surely we could come up with better ways to remind ourselves. Even when I pondered the connection between the Jewish Passover customs and Christ’s death as our Passover Lamb, communion didn’t quite make sense. Why would we eat the things that remind us of Jesus? Isn’t that a bit disrespectful? (I was a bit of an odd, overly-pensive child, I’ll freely admit!)

Holy Week in Rome is a bit too heavy for me to sort into short and pithy posts, but I can at least say that with a Sacramental understanding of, well, of the Sacraments, there is nothing more beautiful than the idea of eating Jesus. Christ entered our world not just spiritually, but physically; Christ enters the sanctuary not just spiritually, but physically; Christ enters us not just spiritually, but physically. Just as he comes to heal our broken souls, he comes physically to nourish our needy bodies. Just as we receive the whole of Christ, he receives the whole of us, bodies and all.

Receiving the whole of Christ, of course, is not only wonderful; it is offensive (and until I saw true evil at work, I never realized how offensive its redemption can be). As I mentioned once before, it is not a mere matter of “trading our sorrows” for his joy. We enter with him into his suffering as Mary and John and the daughters of Jerusalem did on Good Friday. We embrace it willingly, as Christ who prayed “Lord if it be possible let this cup pass from me, but not my will but yours be done.” In a Catholic Good Friday service, we even embrace it physically as the congregation processes to the cross and kisses it.

It is because our sufferings are united with his (wholly, sacramentally, physically) that Christ can tell his followers who will mostly all be martyred one day, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Christ has prepared the way through suffering into resurrection...

...but I am getting ahead of the story. Tonight, suffering is not to be triumphed over; it is only to be embraced.

If a tree falls...

“I hate philosophy,” I heard a girl in the table next to me say. It was startling enough that I looked up from my coffee to the table of undergraduates bustling beside me.

“Philosophy is retarded!” one of her friends agreed. The friend had the look of an engineer, and I was not surprised at his opinion or his inaccurate adjective. I looked back down at my coffee, trying to tune out the philistines.

“I took this philosophy course my freshman year,” she went on, “and we spent half the semester discussing when a tree falls in the middle of the forest with no one to hear if it makes a sound. I spent the whole class wanting someone to shoot me. I wanted to shake the professor and say, ‘This is retarded! It makes a sound already! Get over it!’”

As much as I hate to say this, perhaps the undergraduate was right. Perhaps it is ridiculous. Only humanity could ever come up with such a question; only we could imagine that our perception of the world changes reality.

Perhaps, at least, it is ridiculous (in a damaging sort of way) the way I have enacted the if-a-tree-falls principle in my faith. One of the things that drew me into sacramental theology six years ago after my Pentecostal/Evangelical/Baptist background was the deep peace I encountered in the realization that God’s presence is not dependent upon my ability to perceive it. In a way, sacramental theology is the faith that if a priest breaks bread in the middle of a church with no one paying attention, Christ is still present. And if I come forward without any spiritual epiphanies or transformational feelings, I am still receiving him.

These days, as my initial wonder and surprise at that notion has drifted into confidence and joy, it is a belief that fills me with great hope. There are too many things in my life dependent upon the efforts I can concoct; let the work of redemption, at least, be God’s work.