Stripped of words: a homily for Good Friday

 

I am preaching at Morning Prayer at the parish today, a reflection which had its seed in an interview with Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe by Fr. Jim Martin SJ (you can hear the relevant piece here) and in a reflection in the forthcoming book for next Lent.

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…So shall he startle many nations,
because of him, kings shall stand speechless;
For those who have not been told shall see,
those who have not heard shall ponder it.…Isaiah 52:15

As we move through the Triduum, we also grow silent in the face of the enormity of what has been accomplished by God. Later today we will sit with St. John’s account of the passion, invited as Isaiah implores us to watch and to ponder. When I hear this version of the passion I am often struck by how Jesus, too, gradually grows silent. Gone is the sharp give and take with the religious authorities. He offers virtually no defense to Pilate. There are no words to reassure the repentent thief crucified next to him about paradise.

Once Jesus wept as he fervently prayed for relief. Now, we no longer hear him lifting up long, eloquent prayers to the Father. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we do not hear him pray at all. He does not cry out to God asking why he was abandoned. He does not commend himself to the Father’s care.

In the end, there is only his battered body, wracked with thirst, hanging on a cross. 

Some time ago I heard Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe reflect on what it had been like to try to pray during his recovery from a grueling surgery. “When I tried to pray the Our Father,” recounted Cardinal Radcliffe, “I couldn’t get past the two words…Our Father…I was just a body lying in bed.”  Still, he thirsted, not just for the water he was not allowed to have, but for God.

Here is this man who preached to the synod — who preached to the pope about hope and prayer —  confessing he could not pray. How many of us have found ourselves in these straits? Caught up in the maelstrom of illness — our own or those of people we love —  or overcome by fear or despair in the face of events that upend our lives, or shake the world, and unable to find the strength to reach for God. When even the prayers we know by heart slip away from us.

I am reminded of a snippet of poetry from Ranier Rilke’s Book of Hours, “like sand slipping through fingers,  all my cells are open, and all so thirsty. I ache…in a hundred places, but mostly in the middle of my heart.” Thirsting for God in every cell, aching for mercy in the depths of our hearts, our physical body becomes the prayer. Like the disciples who ask Jesus to teach them the words to use in prayer, we, too, are looking to Jesus to teach us how to pray in our most desperate moments, when the anguish of our wounds  is more than we can bear, and we cannot find even those words, “Our Father”.

Jesus’ silence on the cross speaks volumes. His arms wordlessly stretched out between heaven and earth, his whole body is a prayer offered to the Father for our salvation. It is a potent reminder that when our strength fails us, we can still pray as Jesus taught us from the cross, arms stretched out in longing, every cell thirsting. That when injustice or illness or infirmity or age strips us of our words, our very body becomes a prayer.

Rube Goldberg mornings

 

I like a good Rube Goldberg machine, I do. Push the marble down the track and zip, ping, zap, eventually the cat's food pours into the dish. Or whatever. But the unplanned machines can be a mess...

This morning I went to put away the clean dishes from last night's dinner. The sheet pan had been set down on a wet soapy counter. It was stuck. I pulled it off. My elbow knocked over my water glass sitting by the sink spilling water. The glass straw from the cup hit one of my favorite tea cups*. Which fell into the sink and broke.  And I cried.

*The tea cup was from the pandemic, depicting all manner of calamities in a classic Delft blue. It always made me laugh.

In transition: Preaching Tuesday of Holy Week

When I was preparing to preach today, I thought that like Peter I've had three chances to preach these readings — for books of Lenten reflections in 2018, 2020 and the one coming out in the fall for 2027.  And when I look back at the reflections I wrote I feel like I've fumbled them a bit, not quite recognizing the weight of what is moving in this liturgy. But as St. Benedict was apparently wont to say, "every day we begin again." So here I try again to capture a little bit of the unfathomably holy space we are sitting in today.

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I sometimes wonder if we think that the Monday, Tuesday and even Wednesday of Holy Week are sort of a holding pattern, where we are just marking time between Palm Sunday’s intensity and the solemnity of the one long liturgy that is the Triduum. (And also some time for rehearsing and decorating and perhaps juggling our regular jobs).

Even if these days are just holding space, space, as musicians know, matters. Rests give shape to music as much as the notes.

But I hear more than a rest marker in the Gospel for today. Today’s pericope from John is a bit of a jumble. It  comes after the account of the washing of the feet and before the Farewell Discourse which will occupy the next three chapters. It’s a narrative transition, setting up the betrayal by Judas, and Peter’s betrayal, too. The choice of this Gospel for today scrambles the timeline a bit. Yesterday’s installment was a flashback — we were clearly outside Jerusalem with Mary and Martha and the anointing with aromatic oils. Today we have skipped past the washing of the feet which we will return to on Thursday. Tomorrow we will see Judas’ betrayal through Matthew’s eyes, positioned, it seems, well before the entrance to Jerusalem.

Praying with this Gospel the last few days, it occurred to me that today is the pivotal moment, the moment at which we are staggering at the edge of catastrophe, the moment when we tumble over the edge into chaos and confusion, into passion, death and resurrection. 

In chemical reactions, there's something called a transition state. It’s a tipping point, a fleeting moment in the course of a chemical change. Move a fraction backward and you return to whence you came, unchanged. But move a fraction forward and you tumble inexorably to completion, transformed — transfigured. From that point on there is no turning back, even if at first little has seem to be changed.

What John recounts in today’s Gospel feels like a transition state. Once Jesus hands Judas that morsel, once Judas picks it up and leaves the room, there is no turning back, even as the disciples don’t yet see what is coming. Peter surely does not. But at this moment, it is all set in train.

This is when theory becomes practice.

I was reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this weekend and I ran across these lines.

"Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest, but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet."

God is not toying with Judas, or with us. For this fleeting moment we stand at a point where we can see Jesus’ life and death laid before us, where we can see all of salvation history spread out like a banquet, where we can see the choices. Jesus' choice. Judas’ choice. Peter’s choice. Our choice. Today. May we have the courage to choose the unfathomably holy, in solemn, deliberate earnest. 

Made in solemn incomprehensible earnest

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 270)

I spent the afternoon wandering though poets. Marilyn Nelson. Marie Howe. I walked Tinker's Creek with Annie Dillard. It was like binging on an incredible box of chocolates. So rich, so many flavors, each one a grace, and all together -- too much.

...only able to endure it by being no one and so/specifically myself I thought I'd die/from being loved like that. (Marie Howe, Annunciation)

Yesterday I picked up the notes I had made when I was 50, on the 30-day retreat making Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. I didn't find what I was looking for, quite. But maybe I have now. #4thWeek

The world is wilder than that...more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 268)

Tinker's Creek was my mother's, which I found on the shelf when we cleaned out my parent's house. There was a page marked toward the end, the back cover tucked in. So anxious was I to find the last chapter today, I unthinkingly pulled it out. Now I have no idea where the marker was left. Nor why. Was it something I would want to return to? Or just as far as she got before someone blasted in the door from school, from a wild and extravagant and bright day? My mother was 42 when Tinker's Creek was published. Would this young woman have advice for my much older self? I want to weep at my inattention.

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time...The gaps in the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish, too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap...and unlock a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you. (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek, p. 269)

I remember bundling up on a bitter January day to sit on Brace's Rock just off the retreat house at Eastern Point, somewhere in the first week of the Exercises. Cowering from the wind in a cleft of rock, hoping to catch a glimpse of God from the outside.

I have spent the afternoon. 

 

Stalking my calling

 

I was not stalking my calling, but hunting up a poem, when I stumbled across my copy of "Living like Weasels" from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. (I'm doing a brief reading at commencement in May, and was looking for my copy of this poem by astronomer Becky Elson, which I love, but is it too dark for commencement?)

If you haven't read it, it reads like a bloodthirsty take on Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day. The one with the line about "your one wild and precious life." (And which I am definitely not reading at commencement.)

The whole weasel essay is a joy, science and language and imagery all tangled together like the wild roses and poison ivy around Hollins Pond. Or snapped into a single whole like Dillard's mind and the weasel's. 

She opens with the story of an eagle found with the dry skull of a weasel clamped onto its neck, driven by its predatory instincts to bite even as it became prey. To do as it must, to do as it was meant to do — bite — even in extremis.

Dillard closes the essay by mulling  about vocation. "We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse...I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft..." 

In these last few weeks of teaching I seem to be stalking my calling again, looking for the tender spot, for the pulse point, and the willingness to seize it, letting it grasp me as I grasp it. To do — to be — as I was meant to be.