Category: spiritual reflection

In My Bones: Holy Week Reflections

Holy Week began a few days ago, on Palm Sunday. Many Christians processed into worship, colorful banners and streamers and emerald palm branches dancing in the air as they went.

I do not dance with ease or grace on any day. I stumble even more on Palm Sunday. My uncooperative sense of rhythm is only part of the problem. I process with awkward reluctance because my heart and mind are reluctant to grapple yet again with the seven days Christians have marked as Holy Week.

What makes this particular version of Sunday through Saturday holier than other weeks of Sundays through Saturdays? Judging by the headlines in this morning’s news, I think it is fair to say that human endeavors will not do much to create an ecology of particular or peculiar holiness during this week (though I suppose we can be on the look-out every week for those moments when human courage and faith ease or even transform some element of communal brokenness). How do our ritual actions during this week speak of God in and to communities crucified every day to appease the gods of commerce or politics? What do our 21st century embodiments of Jesus’ story mean in a world where disease or violence or war disrupt life and where too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right things are resurrected? These questions trouble my feet as I make my way in fits and starts along well-traveled Holy Week pathways.

But I am a liturgical theologian. So when my heart and head have no insight or energy with which to reckon with what Christian theology speaks, means or accomplishes, my bones take over. I do not understand the physiology or spirituality of why it is the case, but I am somehow able to believe in my bones that something about what we embody in Christian worship connects us to the on-the-ground realities of our neighborhoods and communities. And something about what we embody as community in Christian worship connects us to God’s Spirit.

For me, worship—communal ritual practices—keep our feet on the ground when our thoughts roam without direction through complex ambiguities and when our feelings ebb and flow without rhyme or reason. When we cannot embrace the barest bones of belief, our physical bones incarnate, carry out and do as best they can what we understand God to be in the midst of suffering. When in spite of our lack of rhythm, we decide to keep on stumbling together along potholed Holy Week pathways and let those pathways take us to streets where people are hungry or into neighborhoods where people have been forgotten, ignored or cast out, then we at least stumble together on holy ground.

A Jesuit theologian, Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, is helping me to limp with more grace through Holy Week this year. Orobator writes that in the midst of the “flawed words and stubborn sounds” of our worship practices, there remains a prophetic and graced Word. What we do during this week is more than theological abstraction or ritual legalism. What we do during this week is more than scripted rhetoric about Jesus’ crucified body and our redemption.

During Holy Week, we break bread on Maundy Thursday and lean with longing into the silence of a Friday that is anything but good. In that silence, says Orobator, in those moments when Jesus cries out to a God who does not answer, another holy Word is spoken. What Word? The Word that speaks in the lives of unacknowledged, marginalized, and ignored prophets who in their work in their cities and neighborhoods “show the ‘face of redemption turned visibly’ toward the sick, the poor, the refugees.” These ones absent from word-centered religious, political and economic institutional arenas? They are sacraments of God’s saving presence with God’s people. They believe with their bones—with their beaten down backbones, their arthritic fingers, and their road weary feet—and in their believing they incarnate in despairing places the promises of God’s grace and love. By remembering and acknowledging their presence, we remember Jesus.

I drove past a local church this past Sunday on my way to my own church’s Palm Sunday celebration. Their triumphal entry was under way. I looked, and then I looked again. Two women, one in a wheelchair and the other using a walker, waved palm branches in the air as others helped them down the sidewalk and into the sanctuary. At my church? We remembered Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and then heard in word and music the story of Jesus’ passion, Jesus’ suffering. The choir sang the haunting laments of the season—“O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” “Beneath the Cross of Jesus.” The pastor spoke about Jesus’ pain-wracked and broken body. The sacramental irony? I sat in worship just inches away from our community’s newest member, an infant a mere four weeks into this beautiful, joyful, terrifying thing we call human living. As those mournful songs washed over us, that infant yawned, slept, stretched, kicked the air with tiny feet, gurgled, and cooed.

They grounded me again on Palm Sunday, those aging ones who we too often forget and that tiny one who so needs our care. And as I waved my palm branch and smiled at that sleeping child, I felt it in my bones, the tingling presence of Holy Week’s absent One.

So, I will do it one more time, limp through Holy Week, and be glad that my bones, though reluctant and aching as they make the journey, ground me. I pray that they take me, by the power of the Spirit, to the same kinds of human communities where Jesus’ own bones took him.

 

Lent 4: Laughing Matters

Red Doors

“Church is no laughing matter,” some may say. “Indeed, church is serious business.” And many of us might agree that the state of the world right now is no laughing matter. Too much violence. Too many troubles. Too much injustice. The season of Lent can’t last long enough for our introspection even to make a dent in this ole’ world’s difficulties much less to make us aware of the part we play in them.

And yet, this Sunday, March 15, is the fourth Sunday in Lent, called in some traditions “Laetare Sunday” or Laughter Sunday.  Laetare means “rejoice.” To some, this may sound peculiar. Why is there a “Rejoicing Sunday” in the midst of Lenten introspection, fasting, and austerity? The exact midpoint of Lent is the Thursday of the third week of Lent; thus, the fourth Sunday of Lent was viewed throughout much of Christian history as a day of celebration. Linked to an ancient mid-March Roman festivals called the hilaria (related to the word “hilarious”), Christians viewed Laetare Sunday as a day when the somber disciplines of Lent were lessened. Laetare is also known in some places as Refreshment Sunday or Holy Humor Day and liturgies include moments for recalling the joy of the Lord in the midst of Lenten penitential pilgrimages. Some churches that observe Holy Humor Sunday even begin the worship service by telling jokes to invoke and perhaps provoke laughter.

Now I, for one, have never been much for jokes. I forget the punchline when I tell jokes, and I often don’t “get” the punchline when others tell jokes. Perhaps that is my problem with Holy Hilarity Sunday. I have not yet gotten in the marrow of my bones the sheer hilarity of God’s liberating creativity that is working even when we don’t “get” it to create a world of radical carnival. And that may just be what we can laugh about even in the midst of Lenten times that seem to stretch beyond Lent’s official 40 days. God breaks in, breaks open, and breaks forth into the world in unexpected, even peculiar, ways that can, if we are paying attention, make us giggle like children or guffaw out loud as we proclaim: “You’re kidding!” Or “that’s too funny!” Or “how hilarious!”

God’s Gospel story turns the world on its head and can turn our lives upside down. Our response? When we allow the peculiar promises of the Gospel to get inside of our bones, perhaps the best response is to laugh, to release, if but for a moment, our lament into God’s cosmic and ironic rendering of a world redeemed. But wait. The world’s a mess. How can we laugh?

A response emerged—or erupted—at church one Sunday during the “moment with children.” Three-year old Michael is not an introvert. His mouth was moving as fast as his feet as he ran to the front of the sanctuary with the other children. The leader sat on the floor with Michael and the others and began to talk about birthday parties. “What do you like about birthday parties?” she asked. “Cake,” Michael said as his hand shot into the air. “Balloons,” Rhonda said. The children all had answers—and one said the magic answer: “Presents!” That was the leader’s signal to ask the second question—the one that she was headed for to make her point. “And what do you say when someone gives you a gift and you unwrap it?”

Now—I cannot read the minds of folks in church, but I suspect that every adult in worship that day had an answer to this question scurry to the tips of their tongues. And then, just when I was ready to smile at the nice work the leader had done to teach the children about gratitude, Michael prophesied. He witnessed. He proclaimed. Well—he blurted out the answer that rose up out of his young heart. “What do you say when someone gives you a gift and you unwrap it?” “Oohhh!” Michael said.

And we all laughed, that “caught-off-guard” laughter of those made wiser by a child’s prophetic insight. “What is the second thing you say?” the leader then asked. But now the children were in sync with each other and with the dancing of God’s spirit in our midst. “What is the second thing you say?” “Wow!” Rhonda exclaimed and giggled.

Church continued on its usual course that day, but my heart and mind had been invited down another road by the children’s wise exclamations. What if—what if this is where we begin to fashion communities that transform lives—that offer justice and hope and healing. What do I mean? Michael’s response to the imagined birthday present was not the polite response of one schooled in gift-receiving etiquette. Rhonda’s response was not based on whether or not the birthday wrappings contained the long-desired or asked for expected gift. Their responses bubbled up out of the possibilities of gift-giving and receiving and their authentic expectation of delight.

And we laughed. Perhaps that is the point of the Gospel after all. God’s response to the world’s pain and brokenness is not at all what we expect. Jesus is not what people expect. Jesus’ responses to the world’s suffering and cruelty are not what people expect. But here and there, now and then, we get it. Something happens to release us from the too often oppressive limits of expected religious etiquette, and we laugh, not at the world and its hurting people but with each other because we care about and trust each other. We laugh that caught-off-guard kind of laugh that surprises us and sets us free to join God in God’s peculiar, if not, hilarious plan to redeem the world.