riding on a donkey

I grew up a good Midwestern Protestant child and I’m sure this was the picture posted in every Sunday School room on every Palm Sunday of my little life.  Jesus in a white outfit on a cute donkey.  The first step in what turns out to be a pretty eventful week.  Which, as every Sunday School kid knows, ends in the Glory of Easter Sunday when the stone is rolled away and our salvation is made Real.  Holy Week is something you just have to get through; the prize at the end is worth it.

Becoming Catholic, I learned about the value of Jesus’ suffering in a different way.  I started contemplating the mysteries of Holy Week, the Stations of the Cross, and started to see each event, no matter now humiliating and painful, as important in itself and not just the means to an end.  I started to think of Easter as a refreshing rain, cleaning away the stains and invigorating the start of life everlasting.

It’s taken a lifetime, then, for me to arrive at this point.  I’ve given contemplation and meditation my sincere best.  But this year the questions come rushing back and for once I can’t ignore them:  What does Holy Week say about being human?  I see Jesus barreling towards heaven, but is there a message in this about human life on Earth?    To me, the notion of the Incarnation is one of the holiest things I can imagine–and I can only barely imagine it.  God made human.  God willingly entering human existence.  God partaking in everyday life.  This is touching beyond belief.

The plot advances.  The second person of the Trinity, Jesus, grows up in obscurity and starts traveling at the age of 30.  His message is provocative.  People in authority don’t like him.  He doesn’t care.  He knows they will kill him.  The last week of his life rolls around, and when he is confronted by the people who don’t like him he gets sullen and sassy–at least that’s what my mother would say if she made a comment about how we were acting and we replied, “You say that’s what I am!”   On the cross, Jesus has no time for the thief who is obviously frightened out of his mind and asking awkwardly for some help, but he offers relief to the guy who notices  he’s been framed.  Is this where the mystery of the Incarnation has been headed all along?  You can’t wait to become human, then you can’t wait to get out of the human condition. 

The Jesus stories all have to mean something.  There are lots of twists and turns.  A sort of narrative cohesion develops in the Gospels, but it’s not seamless.  As a reader, as a thinker, one is anxious the whole way through.  This makes for a rich lifetime of meditation.  It can also make for some very lazy thinking:  let someone else interpret what’s going on and hang onto it with all you’ve got.  The meaning of the Easter story, I was told, is that God loved us so he died in our place to atone for our sins.  He came to show He loves us.  He came as one of us. 

Nobody wants to talk about the inconsistencies, the questions left unanswered.  Jesus sat on the donkey and everybody loved him.  By Friday afternoon, he was dead.  One of the messages I’m getting out of this is if I’m defiant, I’ll pay a price.  Even if I have approval, I can’t count on loyalty.  Friends will let you down.  Prayer might be painful.  The Incarnation to Calvary progression points to a failure in the human experiment (for this insight I’m in debt to Jack Miles, though I’m not accurately paraphrasing his work).  We, as created beings, might have once been delightful but in this story we are disappointing, corrupt betrayers.  Original sin notwithstanding, it feels a bit like a set-up.

Which, I guess, is where faith comes in.  So I’ll try to look toward Easter with the eyes of faith once more.  I’m not afraid of doubt and healthy skepticism.  I’m not worried if it doesn’t make sense–and I’m willing to admit it doesn’t.  The Jesus story is a tough one and this week’s episodes are some of the toughest.  I can hardly wait ’til Sunday.

…and to dust you shall return

We partied too hard (we watched TWO episodes of MI-5 instead of the usual ONE) and ended up sleeping late, so Walter missed the bus, so he had to take the car to work, so I had to walk to Mass and walk home.  So I’m tired.  Mardi-Gras’d out.

I’m also aware–already!  it’s not even noon yet!–of the main talking point about Lent.  Just try giving something up, anything–the more trivial the better, and you’ll immediately hear that relentless inner whining about how important you are and how your special, special needs cannot be ignored.  I’m already face to face with my personal number-one shortcut to sin:  rationalization.

Today we are fasting and abstaining, which, under the current rubric is not a huge deal.  Two small meals and one regular sized one.  No meat.  But there I am, trying to rationalize why I NEED a snack because I (*sob*) had (*sob*) to (*SOB*) WALK HOME (*SOB!*).

I do very poorly at delaying gratification, let alone forsaking it.  I am stellar at disobedience.  Once more faced with Lenten discipline, I’m busted.  I will try one more time to make a little progress.  The Church, though, understands the irony of my situation.  When the priest made the sign of the cross with ashes on my forehead and said “Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you shall return,” he reminded me that all my efforts are the same weight as my sins, the same weight as the ashes themselves.  I will make my efforts at penance and self-sacrifice fully aware that, huge and painful as they may seem to me, in the big picture they are only gestures.  I might easily rationalize that they don’t mean anything.

Fortunately, I have had just enough Easter mornings to know these gestures are part of the music we offer to God.  Mysterious, beautiful, fragrant.  Only 39 more days.  I’ll try to make the most of them.

Daily Mass

In late October of 2005 I was seriously injured while taking care of a labor patient and subsequently have become disabled.  I have found the transition from vitality, stamina, and full participation to weakness, physical uncertainty, and benchwarming to be a lonely one.  I wouldn’t be managing as well as I am without several key elements:  the support and good humor of my family;  huge doses of  music, heard and played, and the unwavering encouragement of fellow musicians (interestingly, fellow nurses dropped out of the scene almost immediately);  the evolution of daily exercise into a rich yoga practice; and attendance at daily Mass.

Becoming disabled is a spiraling process.  Unless you have the most serious of injuries or conditions, you rarely start down the road to disability knowing that you’re on it.  I, as most people do, began the recovery process after my injury believing I’d be better very soon.   At some point I realized the changes I was experiencing would be permanent.  Still, I tried to have an organized, deliberate life.  I wanted to maintain some kind of meaningful schedule; I wanted to accomplish things.  My exercise routine and getting ready for Mass propelled me into action every morning and became the equivalent of getting-up-and-going-to-work.  As time went by I was less and less able to participate in “normal” activity, but I could almost always make it to church.

Many, many mornings I would sit in the pew, head bowed, holding back tears.  I tried, and I still try, to make the Mass a place to offer my own sacrifice of pain–without self-pity, with dignity and privacy.  The physical motions of the Mass were difficult; I struggled to continue doing them in unison with the congregation.  I wanted, and I still want, to be part of the larger prayer, to weave my efforts seamlessly with the rest.  I feel the Mass as a collective sigh, a shared gesture to the glory of a loving God we will never begin to comprehend. 

About 25 of us are “regulars” at daily Mass.  We are all aware of the subtext of one another’s brokenness:  the family whose child recently died, the woman with cancer, the man who lost his job, but we rarely speak about our troubles.  I think we are learning together the old notion of continence.  It’s not important to wear your heart on your sleeve.   As the priest begins the liturgy  “To prepare our hearts to celebrate these Sacred Mysteries, let us call to mind our sins..” we share a  moment of intimacy and vulnerability unmatched in any other part of life.  We look into and past our own souls and begin to put aside all the things we understand to make room for all the things we don’t.  Our individual dramas lose some of their glamour.

Over the course of many years I’ve relinquished a  loud self-made, self-important brand of spirituality for one that listens for the still small voice.  I’m also relinquishing (as, of course, all of us eventually will) physical independence for hesitation and loss.   Daily Mass is teaching me to love my own humanness, to be humble, to walk quietly with the others to be fed, to simply say thank you.  I am grateful that, no matter how incapable I may physically become, I will always have a place.  I will always be able to pray.