Hopeful Grief

There are times where I just can’t work. I feel like I don’t have the energy to do much of anything and push myself to go outside for a walk, get fresh air, escape the confines of “stay at home” orders. It can be quite depressing and with very little purpose. The saving grace is some arts and crafts time with the kids which focuses me on their youthful energy, despite the feeling of wanting to go right back into hibernation when they leave. These are hard days, even for an introvert. Sure, it may be my natural inclination to find time for self-reflection, but I’m also a person who loves making connections, not only with others, but within myself and even assisting others to do the same. There is, if I could ever admit it, a grief unlike any other I find myself going through right now, after a year of tremendous moments of grief, all seemingly to be different than the one before.

As I stand on the proverbial threshold of another year of life, my 48^th birthday and the beginning of my 49^th year, I am mindful of this grief. Although there’s often a grief on such thresholds, this one seems very different, one coupled with hope. It was a year ago at this moment in which I officially resigned my position of pastor and found myself, what I like to call quasi-homeless, and searching for a place to land and land quickly. I think back to such moments now and wonder how I had the muster within me to do what I was doing, stepping away from a life I knew well and yet was killing me on another. There I was, on the threshold not quite knowing what was lying ahead but willing to take a step, and it is just one step at a time, to a healthier life. It is a threshold, as I didn’t know then, leading me to the “home” within myself and not necessarily needing to know a street address I could call my own because somehow this home would give me all I needed.

Thresholds and transitions are always staged within grief. It always marks the end of one chapter or book and the beginning of another. I didn’t know when I stepped through how it would look, and at times, still do not. We can never fully know what we are getting ourselves into at any given moment. The threshold we find ourselves standing at these days seems only to vastly grow wider. It seems as if there’s no end in sight to the confinement of our homes and lives. It explains the lack of energy at times of simply wanting to lie on the couch, slide the screen of my computer, and every other distraction I manage to find during the day, all because I know there’s no crossing this threshold at the moment. All any of us really can do is stand and dream of what lies on the other side and begin to tap into the creative energy which seems to have laid dormant in our society for all too long.

We can’t seem to run from the “stuckness” we’ve found ourselves and the lack of creativity associated with it. It feels all the more visible these days, unable to outrun. When we’ve allowed ourselves to create and recreate reality television programming, sequels to endless movies, is it any wonder we’d be somewhat drawn to movies like Groundhog Day when it’s the life we’ve often settle for before we’ve reached this threshold. It has been about doing the same thing over and over again, insanely believing it will somehow be better the next time around. It never is and yet we try. I’m reminded of the words of a therapist who had told me the trick with eating a delicious slice of cake. There is nothing like the first bite when we can taste all the succulent flavors hitting the various parts of our tongue. However, we’re never satisfied with the first bite. I know I’m not. We immediately live with this false sense of hope each bite following the first will not only compare but outdo the first. It never does. Yet we try, over and over and over again, believing if I try just one more time somehow this will work and be the best. Take it from me who loved to jump around, it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with the cake in the first place. It was the lack of satisfaction and creativity in my own life, numbing the grief rather than confronting my own pride, filled with arrogance and ignorance as if I knew what was best. I didn’t. It wasn’t about the cake. It was about me. It’s hard, packing up, nowhere to go, quasi-homeless, looking to land, standing at thresholds, wondering what’s next, a new year beginning, confined to home. Who wouldn’t be grieving? It appears we are now unable to avoid it.

Grieving, though, can easily turn into depression. We see it everywhere around us. Whenever the cruel parts of this world catch up with us and force us to slow down and even stop, we’re simply left with ourselves. Sure, there have been other moments but not in my life do I remember being confined in such a way. I’m not who likes this feeling to begin with, knowing my own anxiety as I wrote in the previous post. It has led to restless nights, questioning in ways I haven’t before, and lots and lots of writing, trying to make sense out of things beyond the rational mind. It’s hard to listen to reports knowing there’s nothing I can do. I suppose some of the grief comes from feeling helpless in these moments, when we know there is greater risk in venturing out than there is staying home.

There is, though, hope. We see it in the world around us as pollution decreases in these days, crime has fallen, people are finding ways to connect and assist, it is a moment when we can all empathize with one another. The place we call is getting a much-needed rest from our utter destruction out of our own selfishness. I was struck on Friday watching Pope Francis walking alone in the darkened square facing out to a quieted and rainy city of Rome. There was simply a light in the midst of it all, guiding him along his way. We have been blinded not by light but by our darkness, our grief. We have believed what has led to darkness to be the light. We seek something and someone beyond ourselves to give us the answers to our difficult questions. It’s not to say we can’t find answers through our relationships and connections, but it is only deep within ourselves, our home, where we find what it is we seek for in life. We can’t help ourselves to be mesmerized by the darkness and its lure of artificial light. We’ve settled for superficial, less than, the loudest voices, glitz and lights, an impossible dream, and so on. We have not sought the light; we’ve wandered in the darkness, and whether we can admit it or not, we’ve liked it despite its ability to fulfill us.

This is the threshold in which we now stand. It feels even more relevant for me as I embark on another year of life following a year of tremendous upheaval and yet great peace and fulfillment. I’m not sure I’d even be in the place I am today, standing on such a profound threshold, if it wasn’t for the year which has passed, resigning, months living and working at Bethlehem Farm, countless miles traveling back and forth as my father was dying and his inevitable death, questioning what’s next, quasi-homeless, do I start my own business, and so forth. Is it any wonder there’s grief? Is it any wonder the threshold carries such magnitude? I know, though, I don’t stand there alone right now. A year ago, I felt it was a crossing I had to do on my own. Little did I know a pandemic would close out an already unusual year for me, and for that matter, welcome a new year. Yet, it’s what is reality at the moment, the one thing we try most to bypass. It’s a time for creativity, questioning, grieving, self-reflection, wandering in a darkness and seeking what really matters, our deepest values. We mustn’t fear the darkness of our own lives; it carries many of the answers in which we seek.

The grief we experience right now is real and profound. It contains all we have become and all we can be. It contains all our regrets and our dreams. It contains all our fears and hopes. We need not pass up the moment being given to us. We are given the time to do, individually and as a society, an examen of who we have become and question what we take beyond the threshold. As vast and wide as the threshold appears, it’s as narrow as the “eye of a needle” and so we only take what really matters now. It feels like tremendous loss, as if we can’t live without so much, and yet it’s the path towards the freedom we love to tout and the meaning and purpose we really desire. If moments like this don’t lead to deeper questions, we may never move to a place of deeper consciousness and continue to settle for our selfish ways, feeding a pain shared by one another and a tired earth. It doesn’t undermine the loss of life, the great suffering, and the utter darkness some experience in these days, but it is only hope and courage allowing us to take the next step for ourselves into the next year of our lives. For myself it comes in the form of a birthday, but for all of us it comes in the form of a new birth and a new world in a post-pandemic world, but first we grieve a world we can’t and mustn’t take with us beyond this threshold.

Passing Through

The images presented in the Passover account of Exodus leave not much room for imagination as the details of slaughter and splashing of blood on doorposts mark an event, a sign, for a people of what is later referred to as a “pilgrimage to the Lord.” It seems like rather odd images of how one pilgrimages to the Lord but it is a “forever” statute for a people that understood slavery and the lack of freedom that seems to be a means to somehow arriving at the “Lord” and what it means to be a people of faith.

Although the pilgrimage may vary for each and every one of us, the marking of such events and the Passover of our own lives carries with it much of the rich tradition that has been from the initial marking of such events for people Israel. To this day the Passover and the events of our own exodus in life are marked with the shedding of blood, in some ways, and the trauma of leaving behind a life, that, despite it being thrust upon Israel by Egypt into slavery, was all that they had known. When the moment comes to pass over, they do as is commanded in utter trust and faith that God would somehow free them from the bondage, a bondage that went far beyond Egypt to the very heart of a people that would require a sacrifice and a shedding that went beyond the leaving of one location but their very way of thinking and learning to live with a transformed heart.

For Israel it will be the shedding of layer after layer, and even the splattering of blood and the loss of life, or at least a life, before they could begin to taste the gift of freedom that is being offered them by this God, not a freedom to do as they wish but rather a freedom that opens them to deeper and greater trust and faith as they pass over, not just the splattering of blood, but the very waters of the sea that very well could engulf them in their lives, swallowing up a life once known in order to open them to the new life and the eternal promise in which all hope has lied.

The shedding of layers marks a very intimate moment for the disciples in John 13 in the washing of their feet. As Israel is stripped of all that it has known and forced to flee that only life they had known in Egypt, Jesus again models a new way, and a passing over, of his own, much different than the accounts of the other gospels. John presents Jesus in the very act of removing the layers in which he wore, that somehow “marked” him as different or someone other than the disciples, and reveals the richness of his own humanity that often lies within, a humanity no different than their own. It’s the act of humility where reality is revealed to the disciples as to how to follow and the way to passing over in their own lives to the deeper richness of who they are as followers.

The symbolism of blood and water, even on the night before he died, reminds us of the pilgrimage to the Lord that we too are to make in our own lives. Over the course of our lives we tend to accumulate layers that we believe define us as people and it’s not until we begin to shed the layers, revealing our own vulnerable humanity, before we can begin to make sense of the passing over of Israel nor the passing over of the Lord. We become enslaved to the personas, images, and illusions that we have created and which we too need to be freed from in order to understand these events as a lifelong covenant, a statute forever, that as we accumulate and become enslaved ourselves, it is only in the painful process of passing over, through the turbulent Red Sea and the confinement of a grave where we can begin to come to a deeper understanding of our own identity in Christ, marked on each of us before the world began.

Do this in remembrance of me? Do what would be the most obvious of questions that the people of Corinth would ask. Do what? Seemingly it’s become an act of obligation in a celebration that often seems to lose its bearing by our own doing and definition, but the act of blood poured out and bread broken open moves us to the place of our own passing over. It is the Passover of the Lord but is also ours as well, as Israel reminds us. They’re not simply told to gaze upon it or even simply to eat it. They’re told to “do it”. Do the passing over of your own life in the shedding of layers revealing our own humanity and the deeper intimacy we desire, freed from the bondage of our own thought, personas, illusions that we believe give us what we want but simply act as our own Egypt, confining us and the Lord, to being who we are and then doing it. The doing follows the being.

In the commemoration we are pointed towards the pilgrimage of our own lives from slavery to freedom. In the commemoration we don’t simply remember an event that once was but a mystery that continues to unfold in which we are invited, shedding the layers of our own lives, the outer garments in which we have grown attached, painfully feeling like the shedding of blood splattered on the very doorposts of a place that has held us captive, in order to grow more intimately in trust with the Lord and the lives given freely to us. It is the Passover of the Lord, the Passover of Israel, the Passover of our own lives that we commemorate and live. Although our own Egypt entices us to return to our enslavement, the promise lures us out of the darkness of slavery to trust and to faith in order to live a fuller life, revealing as it does for Jesus, our deeper humanity, a humanity beckoned to love and to be loved, the true culmination of the commemoration of this pilgrimage of life moving toward the Lord.

 

Kingdom Dwellers

Ezekiel 34: 11-12, 15-17; I Cor 15: 20-26, 28; Matthew 25: 31-46

All year we’ve heard from Matthew’s gospel and today we come to what many consider to be the culmination of what he was all about in his writing, the Judgment of Nations.  Keep in mind it’s not about individual judgment as we’ve often associated.  For Matthew, the other gospel writers, and Paul in today’s second reading, salvation was not an individual sport.  It was about the collective salvation and their own seeking of the common good in this life.  It, of course, has been overly politicized over the years and many times rightly so when we neglect people in need for one reason or another, but that’s not necessarily the context in which Matthew writes nor the lens we need to read it.

If we had to sum up Matthew’s approach to his community, as one he often struggled with, fearing division and its demise following the destruction of the Temple, it would be a journey of interior change and how we handle change in our lives and how our experience of God changes.  If you know anything about Israel’s history you know the destruction of the Temple seems to almost be a regular occurrence for them.  It wasn’t just the center of their faith life but was also the center of politics and economics so everything was intertwined.  With that being the case, it should be no surprise that it is destroyed over time.  However, just like it is today, when they all become intertwined in that way it’s without a doubt that God is going to come third in line, and so, in some sense, Matthew tries to lead the community to a much harder change, an interior change, to recognize that there’s something bigger than the Temple and that an encounter with God can happen, often times even more, beyond the temple dwellers.

From the beginning of the gospel, if we recall from Advent and Christmas last year, Mary and Joseph were on the run, refugees.  The Magi come on their own journey and return differently because of the encounter with the Christ, something is changed interiorly in their lives.  Throughout the gospel the disciples are being led outside of Jerusalem to experience the Christ in the acts of healing and forgiving, rather than something you go to they are being led to be an embodiment of that love that takes on flesh and they find their true strength from within.  It’s what makes Jesus so dangerous to the Pharisees and other temple dwellers.  As disciples, the Temple has it’s place but they aren’t meant to dwell there.  Rather, they’re kingdom dwellers with the Spirit of God going with them into these encounters.  This God that Matthew portrays to us and that we’re called to embrace can no longer be confined to a particular time and space.  At that point it’s not God anyway.  Rather this God cannot be contained and is going to lead them to the places of discomfort and uncertainty to learn to put their trust not in the Temple as has been their history, but the temple of the Holy Spirit acting within the community and each other.

It is new, of course, for the people in first century but even new for us at times.  However, the message has been a part of Israel’s history, even at the burning bush when God is revealed in name and that they mustn’t get hung up on the location of these events.  When they do that it begins the gradual confinement of God to a time and space and we find ourselves living in the past.  It’s where the prophets have tried to lead the people, over and over again, but with great resistance even costing them their lives at times.  They too get hung up on the temple dwellers and thinking that God can somehow be confined to that space.  Yet, with this enmeshment of faith, politics, and economics, the question really should be, as it was in the parable of the talents as well as the wise and foolish virgins as to who is the master they’re serving.

Ezekiel, in today’s first reading was one such prophet.  If you read it in its larger context you know that he’s going after them for this very thing, their own corruption.  Israel once again finds itself in exile during the time of the Babylonian Exile and they’re not being cared for.  The people responsible, the shepherds of the time, were not taking care of the needs of the lost, the strayed, the injured and sick.  They had become their own gods in some sense, temple dwellers themselves rather than seeing beyond and being moved to the place of discomfort in their lives.  When you have it all and you’re on top, even in our own time, it seems as if there really is no need for this God.  I’m quite fine with the gods I can hold onto, that bring me comfort, that keep me safe, rather than leading me outward while being inwardly changed. It’s the opportunity to not only encounter God in a different way but to learn of myself in a new way and light.  It’s not about changing others.  It’s about allowing ourselves to be changed, our hearts to be changed by going to the very place we fear.  It’s the story of Mary and Joseph.  It was the Magi.  It’s the embodiment of love.  It’s the journey Matthew has invited us into this past year.

So it brings us to the culmination of his gospel and the judgment of nations.  Needless to say we have often failed at embodying love.  We have allowed ourselves to be temple dwellers while often enmeshing faith, politics, and economics, while neglecting sometime our very own rather than surrendering it all to the true God.  Like Israel in all its history, when the three become enmeshed, God, without a doubt, will become confined and the other two will take their place as the gods of our time.  We all fall prey to it and all find ourselves as sheep and goats.  But for Matthew, it meant something more.  It meant an embodiment of that love and not just loving neighbor.  Rather, being one with neighbor in the sick, the poor, the refugee, the imprisoned, the stranger. 

Every one of us is good at making ourselves comfortable.  For Matthew, our faith is quite the opposite.  We’re not called to be temple dwellers where we grow comfortable and safe, confining God to our particular time and space.  There’s a place for it but it resides in something bigger than time and space.  Rather, kingdom dwellers where we seek the eternal, the Christ, with prayer always on our lips for a change of heart.  It’s what it’s all about.  It’s messy.  It’s hard.  It’s frightening.  Yet, with Mary and Joseph leading the way for Matthew, we’re called to go out and encounter the living God and to be that embodiment of love that we’ve witnessed through the eyes of Matthew this year.

 

Can We Weep With Them?

There have been two stories that had touched me deeply over these past few days, neither one related in anyway. The first is that of 80 year old Donald Sterling, now banned for life from the National Basketball Association and that of Clayton Lockett, probably less familiar to most, but was the recipient of a botched execution this week in Oklahoma. Neither related, neither person condoned for their behavior and actions, but both, as we sometimes forget, human beings themselves.

There aren’t many that will weep for these two men. If anything, Donald Sterling has been run through the ringer, mostly for his racist remarks but also very much for his relation to women and how he views them. I caught myself earlier this week listening to a story on the news about him and they were joking about him and this young woman. She simply provides the sex and he provides all the material goods this woman would ever need. The story continued about the rather grotesque image of him in the paper and all started to laugh. And I started to laugh. And I caught myself. This wasn’t a time for laughter, but rather weeping, and weeping hard. Why, you ask? Who hasn’t been in his place? No, maybe not on such a grand scale as Mr. Sterling, but who hasn’t had a racist thought at one point in their life, maybe not towards a person of a different color, but someone who is gay, someone who is Latino, someone who is in a lower socio-economic class than myself, a woman or a man, someone who, for whatever reason, I deemed less than myself in order to make myself look better. And I wept. Who hasn’t done it?

It takes a great deal of work on oneself to begin to move beyond such judgmental thoughts and to begin to accept and love that the person over there is really me. In that moment I prayed that when I reached his age I wasn’t still holding thoughts like that that weigh me down. I prayed that by his age I would no longer objectify men and women because of my own insecurities. I prayed that I wouldn’t have to kill another rather than confront my own prejudices, my own judgments, my own insecurities in life, because I know I have them, just like everyone else; but I also know they say more of me than the other. Have we not done to him what he had done to another? And I wept. Who hasn’t done it? Or maybe harder yet, who hasn’t been the recipient of it in one way or another?

Then there’s Clayton Lockett. My heart broke when I heard this story, not only because of the horrific crime he had committed, but to see that he too ended up dying in the same way the woman did that he had killed. A botched execution, rushed to take his life, witnesses leaving the room as they watched him struggle to breath, ending with a heart attack that consumed his life. Justice, some cried! But not really. There’s nothing just in taking another life nor for taking the life of someone who has taken a life. Life in prison, beyond the cell, a prison this man created for himself and within himself, failing to see life as gift, failing to see the dignity not only of this woman’s life but of his own. And I wept. He may have even wanted to die at this point; death was nothing to fear when you reach such extremes. I think I’d want to if I were in his place, locked behind layers of security and confinement, without human touch and care; a death he seemed to endure from the moment he arrived on death row. In the hearing of that story, yes, even hundreds of miles away, a part of me died as well, with him, the pain of violence and brokeness, stripped of dignity. And tears filled my eyes in prayer.

No, they aren’t related in anyway, but humans nonetheless, brothers, who we suffer with and seek to allow those parts of us to die in order that life may follow. Oh how painful it is to watch and even more so to endure. Can we take the time and weep with these two and the countless others that walk the same path? Can we take the time and walk in their shoes for just a moment and rather than laugh and crucify, weep? Can we take the time and feel the pain of their family and friends who now carry the burden with them, tainted by the weight of death, of one’s ego and one’s life? Can we weep for a broken humanity in which we are not immune, but rather participate? Can we weep at our own wounds that become the catalyst of hurting others? Can we weep with these men who are them but also us?