The Wonderment

Holy Saturday: Emptiness

Emptiness tends to frighten people used to fullness. It is a distasteful state; many even believe emptiness to be a moral failure. Reflect on the emotional connotations to the word: empty cups, empty pockets, empty-headedness, empty souls. It is a hard word in English, hard to pronounce clearly, demanding a carefulness that reflects our fragility in this place of emptiness.

 

Emptiness doesn’t need to frighten us. It isn’t a moral failing and it isn’t a communicable disease. Emptiness is simply a state of being, demonstrating our pouring out, our leaving behind, our making space and way. The basket already full to bursting cannot hold any more food. Our lives full to overwhelming, spilling over, need some emptying to make room.

 

The emptiness that happens in moments of defeat can also open the way for new possibilities and new energy to enter in. We might have done everything we could and failed to reach our goal, but in that emptiness we can pause and recollect ourselves, our bigger goals, new strategies, engage in retelling and remembering and then preparing to begin again, with new energy.

 

The emptiness that happens when we lose someone we love hurts, as we hold onto what was good and what can no longer be repaired, as we wait in that longing and wait in that stillness, until our hearts are ready, slowly and tentatively and then more and more surely to love boldly again, to risk relationships that matter.

 

The emptiness that happens when we clear away the extraneous stuff – the obligations that turn out not really to be duty, the accretions of habits, the physical things we become caretakers for – is a practice of opening ourselves again to possibilities that we were previously too full to appreciate or grasp.

 

Holy Saturday is a day of emptiness on the christian calendar – a day of loss, a day of mourning, a day of clearing, a day of pondering, a day of waiting, a day of getting comfortable with what can happen when emptiness happens. Of course, that emptiness happens with a full tomb, and tomorrow? What happens when the tomb is emptied? But, wait, that’s tomorrow. Here is today and it is wide open for making room.

 

Good Friday: Staying Present

The march through the death of one we love, particularly a tortured death to maintain fear and oppression – to deter us from changing things, to keep us quiet and stilled – is terrible. Day after day there are horrors large and small playing out around the planet, horrors that keep us off-balance and afraid, that keep us from staying present and responsible for change.

 

Today is a day when we practice staying present to what is very unpleasant: to inequality and injustice, to violating people and violating the land, to justifying terrible actions and mundane decisions that add to toxic burdens. Today, we have another chance, just by waking up this morning, to be present, to witness, to advocate, to care compassionately, to do what we can do resisting desecration and violence and degradation and nurturing instead hope and justice and mercy and ecological restoration and peace and love beyond imagining.

 

It isn’t easy, but we’re so far from being alone. People will be turning today to how we can heal the hurting earth: what can each and all of us together be doing? How can we call each other into healing and hope with love and accountability? What real actions can we take?

 

It isn’t easy, but we’re so far from being alone. People will be turning today to witness to and reach out for the homeless and disposed. What can we do? How can we join our efforts to make justice and mercy in our neighborhoods, our towns, our lands?

 

It isn’t easy, but in every prayer, in every shared song, in every person gathering in witness, in protest, in the work of healing and hope, we’re staying present with what is holy.

 

What shall you be doing today as you join the many bearing witness and mercy, health and renewal? As Ella Baker reminds us: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

 

Holy Thursday: Risking Reconciliation

The stories we recall and the rituals traditional to the observance of Holy Thursday teach us about faithful risk and being so gripped by fear we violate who we are as people called to greater love, mercy, peace, justice, and, ecological health. The colonial setting of the story is important here, because we’re reminded of the deals people make to survive in environments where people are just one more natural resource to be used and expended, and like destroying the rivers to make shipping the clear-cut timber down, as the Romans did to the new harbor at Caesarea, the fact that it is unsustainable and wrong matters little when we’re terrified of torture and death.

 

When we’re frightened by scarcity and loss of control and ecological change that shows up as rapid desertification and newly built harbors silting over in a generation, when we’re terrified of conscription and state-endorsed assault and torture as a legal means to control, it is extraordinarily difficult to live faithfully in the ways we’re called. Lest we think we’re all just cowards and wish to dismiss Judas or Peter or Joseph of Arimathea, or priests or guards (both classes part of the authority structure, but also in terrible danger and under control themselves), let us pause and listen to an invitation deeper than the story itself offers on the surface.  Let's really weigh and understand and appreciate the decisions made. I know that isn’t how the gospels are written, and recited in our congregations,  because those gospels were created and edited largely in a time of increasing persecution as the first and second generations of leaders passed away, and were communities trying to define themselves through their stories. That's why we need to listen to the invitation within, not the surface and cultural meaning. These are inspired stories and important ones – but to buy each and every word as literal truth is to condemn people who were suffering violence or accept the responsibilities for violence done since in the name of one called the prince of peace. So, no, I’ll invite us into a different place with those stories, taking up the easy to dismiss characters and inhabitants and ask us to do something else: find ourselves in them. How have you broken faith, betrayed your heart's calling, offered half-heartedly only the minimum required but not what was really necessary?

 

Have you ever failed, from weariness or fear, to do exactly the right thing? If your first answer is a quick ‘of course not’, ask yourself again and sit with the discomfort that maybe you have. I know I’ve failed. I’ve done things that hurt the environment and I’ve snapped in anger and I’ve caused real pain. And then, too, I live in an interdependent world, and yet was part of a society that still very much exploits the resources of this world. I know I’ve eaten – wittingly or unwittingly – a tomato grown by people paid below the level of subsistence. Have you ever failed to live fully and boldly into this faithful calling?

 

We need to understand and appreciate what it is to be so afraid we do bad things. We want to grow in faith so we don’t do those things, but neither do we completely dismiss or deny the people who do. For there is no mercy and no accountability, no love or true justice in that, and those, too, are part of our calling. We cannot be faithful to a love past imagination if we allow our own disgruntled hearts and limited imaginations to dismiss and deny each other learning and growing, failing and reconciliation. Yes, we need to risk ourselves faithfully for this calling. Part of that is knowing just how difficult it is to do, encouraging one another, and when we fail, finding the grace to reconcile, offer paths of restorative justice, and risk forgiveness, trust, and love.

 

When have you failed your larger calling?

How can you cultivate understanding and empathy for those who also fail?

What kind of reconciliation path are you following?

How shall we, together, heal and restore this hurting world?

 

Let's gather together for healing, for prayer, for risking reconciliation so we can tend this hurting world.