I have this quote impressed on a piece of driftwood that sits on my writing desk:
Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says “I will try again tomorrow.”
Mary Anne Radmacher
Take a five minutes in silence with God. Where have you exhibited this kind of courage without recognizing it? Let Him bring these times to mind. Let Him speak to you about how He sees you today.
Friends, an apology.
I know it’s not necessary. I know you will understand. I know because of the beauty of your souls and the glory that is in each of you, the shimmer of God’s image that graces you every time you smile. I know.
But I wanted to say it (write it! per Elizabeth Bishop), because I had the best intentions for Holy Week.
Instead of writing out a reflection on each of the icons for Holy Week, a kind of guide and confessional, a sense of watching the mystery unfold together, I’ve been thrown into a living icon of this week. One I didn’t choose, but chose me, chose us—which is what Holy Week is all about anyway.
On Tuesday, my beautiful community of stumbling saints and sassy sinners lost one of our own in a horrible accident. Kevin leaves behind a deep-hearted wife and a 5-year-old pixie girl, and our community reels, our hearts smashed.
Kyrie eleison
Christi eleison
Kyrie eleison
That’s what we’ve been breathing in and out, what I’ve been breathing in and out—gasping, hoping, living this week together.
There are no meditations on icons here this week because I am living in one. It is holy. It is hard. It is hopeful.
Tonight we will wash one another’s feet, and watch the cross covered as Christ is taken away to be tired. Tomorrow, we will gather in solemnity, knowing His is crucified. Saturday, normally a day of holy silence, we will break the hush to honor the life of a man we love, whose life has been cut short. And Easter we will gather again—holy, hopeful, broken and brave.
I’ve been here, in this place, and not with you all, on this blog. I know that you understand, that you will pray with us and you know I am praying with you as you each journey into Holy Week in your own way.
Thank you for your grace as my plans were taken over by His plan. May that always be true of us.
It is hard. It is holy. It is hopeful.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” John 13:34
Today’s icon for Holy Week is called “The Bridegroom” and is a central image for this week.
The image represents the watchfulness of Christ, His presence and His coming, as well as our own responsibility in keeping awake for His coming. The parable of the ten virgins will be our icon for tomorrow, but today, we gaze on Christ.
Interestingly enough, March 25 is also the Feast of the Annunciation—the appearance of the angel Gabriel to Mary. The Church celebrates this feast exactly nine months before Christmas, which finds us on the first Monday of Holy Week this year (a relatively rare occurrence.)
I’ve been reading Luke 1:26-28 in light of this concurrence of events, and as I stay with this image of Christ, I’ve begun to wonder how Jesus would have seemed to Mary this week. Would she have known, deep in her somewhere, that just as the angel came to tell her of His birth, that this week’s events were foretelling His death? What would a mother’s love have seen in this icon? What does that invite us to see in Him today?
I know, I know. You’re already cringing, aren’t you?
How is it, exactly, that I could possibly think linking Downton Abbey and the Passion of Our Lord Jesus might, in any universe, work? Shouldn’t I be acting a bit more, I don’t know, holy? Pious?
It’s like watching someone sidle up to the edge of a cliff. You’re pretty sure they’re going to be fine, but everything in you is twitching to rush up and snatch them back from the edge of death. I mean, it’s pretty far down there, right?
Bear with me. I’m going to dance on this edge for a little bit, because I think this edge is exactly what Palm Sunday is all about. We’re meant to feel uncomfortable, thrown off, maybe in a smidge more danger than we’d like to be.
Because it’s a long way down, friends, and Jesus is about to step off that ledge.
Palm Sunday is a day of contradictions. This morning our rag-tag community of earnest and tired, hopeful and despairing, bedraggled and beloved believers processed into the sanctuary waving branches. We cried “Hosanna to God in the highest!” and let holy water wet our cheeks, our bodies, our branches.
Hosanna means save or save us, and together we know what we’re crying when we say that.
We know what we’re crying, and we’re grateful, so grateful, that Jesus is here in our midst. We delight that He is making Himself known, stepping into Jerusalem, the heart of things, and we’re here to watch Him do it. This is the high point of the week because, until Easter’s celebration, we’ve got an inkling that things might not go exactly the way we were hoping they might. We cry Hosanna all the louder.
I’m a Downton Abbey fan . I’m pretty sure I haven’t crossed over into fanatic (I don’t own any pieces of clothing with any of the characters printed on it), but I may or may have received The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook as a Christmas gift this past year. That said, I wasn’t able to watch the finale of Season Three until nearly a week after in aired.
I tried, oh I tried, to keep myself from spoilers. I stayed off of Facebook. I shushed my friends whenever they brought it up, but I knew from the loud wailing heard from houses all over the United States that Sunday evening that SOMETHING terrible had happened. And it wasn’t just a little something, either.
I knew from the magnitude of the outrage, the number of thinly veiled references (Downton, you’re dead to me! pronounced more than one friend of mine), the sheer volume of emotion that it was probably a major character, and it was probably death. I knew who I didn’t want it to be, and I knew that it would probably be that very character.
When Bryan and I eventually settled down of an evening to watch the finale (coincidentally after I’d finished running a week long retreat meditating on the life of Christ), I braced myself. And I held myself, braced, until those last, fateful moments when Matthew began driving, joyously, recklessly, home to share the news. New life! It’s a boy! Life is complete!
Matthew’s death felt random and unfair to so many, I know. But when the credits rolled (and rolled, and rolled—how in the world did PBS think that anyone was going to give them money after THAT plot twist, I wonder?), my husband turned to meet my eyes. We’d both caught the tenor, the gist of the general outrage before watching the episode—How could something so horrible happen so suddenly! They didn’t prepare us! This isn’t want we wanted to happen!
A few days earlier, I’d been caught by a post by a friend of mine. I didn’t know at the time that he’d spoiled the plot completely (and I didn’t really care). Thing was, he’d summed it up so well:
Sometimes you get the girl you wanted and she gets pregnant and then has the child you both dreamed of and you’re driving back in your coupe to tell the family and the future’s so bright you have to wear something along the lines of X-men goggles but you don’t see the truck coming and you flip the car and that’s it. Does it seem a soap opera like ending, and could the writer have done a better job with your exit? Sure, that’s possible, but Sunday night’s Downton episode shakes us back into the reality that things do happen all of a sudden, out of nowhere, often at the sun’s apex, and the bigger barns we were planning and designing, be they literal or figurative, will be inherited by someone else or possibly even torn down to make way for an Eddie Bauer outlet. That can leave you asking ‘well, what’s the point then?’ or it can spur you to suck the very marrow out of this one wild and precious day while it is still called today.
I quoted this to my husband, sitting on the couch as the credits rolled, and he agreed. We sat, hushed by the only thing that really hushes us well, the solid presence of one another, and Bryan turned to me again and said, It’s sort of like getting a voicemail message in the morning, a message that your wife left telling you how much she loves you, how proud of you she is, how much she loves the life you lead together because despite all the sweat and tears and financially scraping by (and oh, how we scrape), we get to help people, love people, care for the hearts and lives of those around us, we get to see healing and hope and restoration. We get to see the Kingdom of God—Hosanna in the Highest!—advance because this is the life we choose together, and she’s crying because she’s so thankful. She’s crying and she loves me, and it’s all worth it. And then, she goes to her office for the day and has a heart attack.
And I nodded, because I am that wife, and because that’s what happened. I wasn’t driving in a coupe with the wind in my hair, but I might as well have been, and, yup, that was my heart attack. I could say that’s the day things tilted off the axis for us, and in some ways that’s true, because it was the beginning of a very hard set of years.
I could also say, though, that was the start of our Hosannas really being tested.
It wasn’t that they were insincere before, not at all. We’d both seen our share of heart ache, both had our share of time in the valley of the shadow of death. We knew some of suffering, to be sure, and to say we’ve known more than a taste since then would be flippant and false.
But that day—the day the coupe gets hit by the truck, the day the 33-year old gets driven to the nearest emergency room with chest pains, the day life seems to go off the rails (whatever that is for you)—that day is the day you stop asking “Who is Jesus to me?” and start asking “Who is Jesus, really?”
That day in Jerusalem, everyone had an agenda for Jesus. Many of them were good, many well meaning. Many of them He seemed to be agreeing with—I mean, He was retracing the route that David took as he returned to reclaim the city for God nearly 1000 years before. His disciples were still hoping for something flashy, for the reign of God to be made manifest through this Messiah in a physical way. They had some expectations for the way the plot should go. Hosanna in the highest!
But then things started going off the rails. People were getting angry, the character that they wanted to take over the estate, He kept talking about a lower way. Their agendas, their anger, trumped what was really happening. And, to them, their way was the better way. You’re dead to me, Jesus! You’re disappointing, this isn’t the way it should go.
The way Jesus saves us doesn’t always feel like saving.
This place, this week, is where the Hosannas get tested. Our expectations get dashed, our view of Jesus get disrupted, our images of Him get complicated by something that doesn’t make sense.
In the middle of that mess, we—you, me, us together—get invited to see Jesus how He really is, not how we want Him to be, or how He has been to us in the past. We get invited into the now, the today, the Real.
It’s troublesome, this being forced to see things are they really are. It’s troublesome, having to ask who Jesus is really, instead of who Jesus is to me. But asking those questions leads to some real answers (as well as a few more good, disruptive questions.) Asking those questions leads us to the Upper Room, to Pilate’s courtyard, to Golgotha, to the Cross. Asking those questions leads us to the empty tomb, to the One disguised as a gardner, to the realization of the Resurrection, and to more story than we know what to do with. Asking those questions, the questions about who Jesus is really, leads to life out of death.
No offense, but take that, Downton Abbey.
Friends.
First, thank you. I’m so grateful for the community that this blog and Facebook page represents. It’s such a deep joy to be journeying with you as a rag-tag, delighted-in, contemplative-and-sometimes-crazy community of redeemed souls. I love dwelling in these thin places of silence in an electronic world that so full of sound and fury, and doing it together. I consider it gift.
As Palm Sunday (March 24) approaches, I’ve been considering how I’m going to enter into Holy Week. As I’ve reflected and prayed, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re going to shift things around a little, both on the blog and on the Page. (By the way, I love that Anne Rice refers to her community as “People of the Page”… I’m starting to wonder if I should call you all “Oblates of Anam Cara.” What do you think?)
So, to enter the hush of Holy Week together, I’m going to slow things down a bit, and gently enter into each day with prayer. Instead of the morning quote or though, I’ll be posting a short prayer that I invite us all to pray together throughout the day. Then, the Midday Meditation will be a short meditation (in blog post form) on one of the traditional icons for Holy Week. If you’re not familiar with meditating on or sitting quietly with icons, Henri Nouwen has a lovely little book called Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons that opens up this practice in a way that is accessible to Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox.
Then, in place of our artistic afternoons, I’ll be posting an invitation to silence, an image or a Scripture verse that invites us to close our days with openness to the Father and His heart for us this week.
The other thing I’ll be doing (and I’m writing about it and putting it before you so that I don’t chicken out) is writing out letters to those I need to forgive or those from whom I need forgiveness every day of Holy Week. I probably won’t be posting those here, just so you know. They will need either to be sent to the people in question first, or, when that’s not possible or safe for my heart, they will be give to God and processed with my spiritual director (see, even spiritual directors have spiritual directors.) It’s my desire to come to Easter this year, or to let Easter come to me, as free of unforgiveness as possible. Please pray for me in this, as I will pray for you.
In other news, writing has been fruitful recently, and I would love for you to continue to pray for me as I work on the book (especially after the tea + computer incident last month). Believe me, I’m backing up regularly.
There are other very exciting things going on in the background at Anam Cara, and I will be delighted to share those when the time is right. We’re dreaming dreams here, and listening intently for the call of the Spirit to draw us forward into what God has for us all.
While I love all the men in my life and spiritual direction practice, I thought I would share a small glimpse into hearts of the women of valor that I have the privilege of sitting with every day.
Let me tell you about her.*
Let me tell you how she was at the end of her rope, ready to give up on it all. All the talk, all the bumper stickers, all the happy-clappy Jesus-is-the-reason platitudes that made her want to throw up had pushed her right to the edges of faith. Let me tell you how she was so done, but she knew, deep inside of her, that she needed to give God another chance, one more opportunity to disappoint her.
Let me tell you how she showed up at my office, walls up. How she looked at me like she looked at all the other people who professed to have some answers, sideways, waiting for me to disappoint her. Let me tell you about the courage that kept her shields up, and, as the silence lengthened, let her drop them.
Let me tell you how she showed up the next time. Maybe a little more hopeful. And how she showed up the next time. Unsure. And how she kept showing up. Again. And again. And again.
Let me tell you about how she fumbled her way back to faith, knowing that she’d never really left.
Let me tell you how you’ll never know her story, or how much courage it really took to make it, but how you’ll feel the impact of her hungonthroughthehardtimes faith in everything she does.
Let me tell you about her.
Let me tell you about how she just wanted me to give her the right answers to the questions. How she’s spent her whole life figuring out how to do it well, pass the test, impress the judges. Let me tell you how tired she was, how broken, but how she was holding on with everything in her.
Let me tell you how she fought me with everything in her when I invited her to live in the questions. How she knew herself well enough to know that she would fall apart. Let me tell you how her spirit rose, how she showed her strength by standing stubbornly for the way she’d always done it.
Let me tell you how that strength was made perfect in weakness, and how her busy plans to scale that wall she’d been running up against became a resting in the arms of the One who was whispering to her to stop, just stop for now, beloved.
Let me tell you how all the doing it right fell away, how her sense of peace allowed her to enter any room knowing that the God of the Universe wasn’t interested in her passing a test, but living loved.
Let me tell you about her.
Let me tell you how she sat on my couch broken in spirit and bruised in body. Let me tell you how she knew that she couldn’t go back to him, but she couldn’t go to another Christian counselor who would lecture her about the sanctity of marriage.
Let me tell you about the way she trembled, the haunting of a love lost forcing her back into the cushions, the shame curling her body into a cup of despair.
Let me tell you how the Spirit spoke, and she began to believe. How she heard her Jesus call her name, and she turned from the open grave toward the face of a gardener who was inviting her back to an Eden she never knew possible.
Let me tell you how she wept, the grieving a birthing, and the travail in that childbirth brought forth a new life, a one washed clean by Christ, not because she was dirty was sin, but because He makes all things new.
Let me tell you how she gathered up the shards of her soul and made something beautiful out of the shattered pieces, His love the light that shone through into the brilliance of those who have suffered and still sing of His mercy.
Let me tell you about her.
Let me tell you about how she opened her hands to let her husband, her partner, her boyfriend step into spiritual direction with another woman. How she knew that he needed companionship as he felt blindly into place his life with God had become, not really believing that He was really there at all.
Let me tell you how she trusted another woman with the contours of the faith of the man she loved, knowing that she was too close to speak words that he could hear. Let me tell you how she held him in prayer, a silent witness who wrapped each small moment, each wrestling in the kind of hope that only love can produce.
Let me tell you how she stood, and stood, and stood, as he wandered and wondered. How she worked, how she served, how she kept herself before her God. Let me tell you how she wove letting go into the tapestry of their lives together, and how she rejoiced when he returned, just a little more whole, just a little more able to turn toward the One who had been weeping, watching, and waiting with her.
Let me tell you about her.
Let me tell you how she came exhausted, more in need of an hour’s sleep than an hour with me. Let me tell you how she arranged for a sitter, same time every two weeks, and had to wrestle the details to the ground each time anyway, a screaming child on each leg.
Let me tell you how desperate she was for God, how her alabaster jar was filled with the tears of she wept for her children as they fought their first feverish night, their first struggle with words, their first broken bone. Let me tell you how she tenderly wiped the feet of Jesus with her hair, her face to the ground as we held together the messy mixture of desire and duty, parenting and prayer.
Let me tell you how she began to practice the Presence in the laundry, and laugh at the days to come. How the daily became the holy, and both her desperation and desire didn’t diminish, but grew. How she found peace in the process, and home in the journey.
Let me tell you how she thinks no one ever sees, but knows that God does. How that’s often, not always, but often enough, and how she waits with Christ for the dreams unrealized, the hopes to come, patience in the face of tomorrow.
Let me tell you about her.
As we sit together, she shows me what it is to be a woman of God, even as she searches for her identity in Christ.
She is the reason I get up in the morning, the subject of my prayers, the reason I weep in gratitude for every moment I spend as a spiritual director.
She is my patron saint, she is my spiritual midwife.
*For the purposes of confidentiality, all descriptions are composites. Any reference to specific stories have been removed and any congruence with the stories of those I journey with currently or in the past is purely coincidental.
Pause.
Now breathe.
Good. You may need to do that a couple more times to still your heart, your mind before continuing on. The words that follow are a gift of wisdom from Henri Nouwen. Each time I read them, I feel myself pulled into deep waters. Behind these words lie truth, and power. The power to change your life, perhaps. If you let them.
So pause.
And breathe.
And when you are ready… read on.
Your pain is deep, and it won’t just go away… Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others. Yes, you have to incorporate your pain into your self.
This is what Jesus means when he asks you to take up your cross. He encourages you to recognize and embrace your unique suffering and to trust that your way to salvation lies therein. Taking up your cross means, first of all, befriending your wounds and letting them reveal to you your own truth.
-Henri Nouwen, Lent and Easter: Wisdom from Henri Nouwen, p. 24
Now pause. Breathe again. Consider how those words make you feel.
Your pain is deep.
It won’t go away.
It won’t be ignored it into non-existance.
…bring that pain home…incorporate it into your self…
These wounds beg, plead, demand to be acknowldged. If ignored, the ripples of pain that emanate from them affect far more than you alone.
This is what Jesus means…take up your cross…
Embrace your unique suffering…
Trust…befriend your wounds…
Let them reveal to you your own truth.
What courage is required for this! What presence of mind, of body. Trust. Trust in the goodness of God, in the story He is weaving – through your own unique suffering. Can you feel it? The deep waters rushing all around you as you ponder this. Breathe. And pause. As often as you need. Re-read. Write. Explore the depths of you, and your own unique suffering. Be bold, be courageous, be whole.
“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 …”When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
During our Ash Wednesday service this morning, our community of dusty, stumbling penitents heard these words from Matthew 6. And I thought (and truly thought more than prayed), Lord, let me not be like the hypocrites.
As soon as I thought it, though, my knees wobbled. And I knew, as I know in this moment, as I knew last week, and I will know tomorrow: I’m not just like the hypocrites, I am one.
Here is where the dusty, marked and marred among us get real. I don’t know about you, but I feel a little self-righteous about the cross I wear today, Ash Wednesday. Even when I forget, rub my forehead, lose the feeling of the palms burned and given back to the very ones who claim to praise—even then some small part of me feels self-satisfied.
And, oh, how that humiliates and humbles me.
I am such a child of Earth. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return, said the priest, my friend, my bishop. I hear the words, receive them like life. They humble me and give me hope. They are bread for the day’s journey—the rare day that a gathering together doesn’t culminate in bread and wine, but in prayer and fasting. These words are food, but (oh I wish it weren’t true), by the time I’ve returned to my seat, I’m wondering how the cross I’m wearing looks. I’m positioning it not as a symbol of my sin, but as another form of fig leaf. Something to hide my weakness behind so that you won’t know how wounded, how broken, how off the mark I am so. very. often.
And that’s why I’m here. Confessing. Saying to you (yes, you), and my whole community of dusty travelers of the Way that I am a hypocrite humbled. I am wearing my weakness today, and this whole season in which Christ asks me to remember my need.
Today, it’s this ashy cross, this conflicted symbol that I hope in and hide behind. And today it’s also my weakness, my need for help, my need for repentance from all the self-sufficient arranging, impression-managing, impressing I try to do (and will try, I know, to do again).
You see, God’s asked me to give up contact lenses this Lent. I’ve thought about not telling anyone (When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show others they are fasting), just doing it without having to draw attention to what God’s up to in my life. But I’m realizing that the NOT telling is allowing me to stay secretly self-congratulatory. Because I’ve been asked to give up contact lenses for Lent precisely because I am a hypocrite. I despise my glasses, these inconvenient reminders of my weakness, my physical limitations, my broken ways of seeing. I hate the fact that just a glance over their rims brings life less clear, and I’m confronted once more by my lack of vision.
I hate they way they signal to everyone else that I need help.
And that’s what God’s after in me, this Lenten season. Because I’m precisely the one in need of the most help when I’m wearing those lenses day in and day out. You can’t see it then, but I’m hiding my needs, refusing to let others in, putting on a front of holy self-awareness.
Glasses, just like this today’s dark ash, remind me that I am daily hiding, from others and from God. That He’s calling me, not out of punishment or promised pain, to a deeper knowledge of my need. He’s calling me to humility, to an intimate knowledge of who I am—weakness and all—so that I can move beyond the hypocrisy into healing and wholeness. So that He can breathe life into this Earthen frame, if only I will let Him.
And so, here’s me (and the smudge of bread dough that’s calcified onto our kitchen wall because I forgot to clean it off). Me, my hypocritical cross, and my glasses. I’m showing up, taking off the fig leaf by putting on my specs.
And maybe I’ll see a little more clearly His love as a result.
I’ll also be taking up the Daily Office this year for Lent, a practice of intentional prayer. So how can I pray for you? What can I hold tenderly up to Jesus? Leave a comment and I will pray for you these 40 days of weakness and penitence. Will you pray for me? (And thanks, Sarah Bessey, for the inspiration.)
“God’s mercy is greater than our sins. There is an awareness of sin that does not lead to God but rather to self-preoccupation. Our temptation is to be so impressed by our sins and our failings and so overwhelmed by our lack of generosity that we get stuck in paralyzing guilt. It is the guilt that says, ‘I am too sinful to deserve God’s mercy.’ It is the guilt that leads to introspection instead of directing our eyes to God. It is the guilt that has become an idol and therefore a form of pride.
Lent is a time to break down this idol and to direct our attention to our loving Lord. The question is: ‘Are we like Judas, who was so overcome by his sin that he could not believe in God’s mercy any longer… or are we like Peter who returned to his Lord with repentance and cried bitterly for his sins?’ The season of Lent, during which winter and spring struggle with each other for dominance, helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.” – Henri Nouwen (from A Cry for Mercy)
So, I find listening to myself speak fairly horrific. I’m cringing at all the umms, ahhs, likes and awkward pauses, not to mention my really lame jokes.
That said, if you’d like to wade through all that, Renovaré has just posted their first podcast, which is a recording of a talk that I gave on November 20, 2012 called Living Sacrifices: How Redemption of the Body Forms Our Souls. It’s about an hour long. Enjoy!
