Holy Week Reflection: The Short Version

I am experiencing a remarkable Holy Week.

I don't think I can do it justice, but I will begin by saying that, a year ago, one of my seminary professors questioned the value of spiritual direction in terms of effective results vis-a-vis preaching, describing the former as "inefficient" in comparison to the latter, by which you can "reach hundreds of people at once."

I have given that remark a great deal of thought in the ensuing ten months, recognizing that the comparison is of the apples-to-oranges variety and yet, wondering what it says about how we spend our time and what our orientation to results is about ~ what the word "results" even means. My initial conclusions had something to do (1) with the fact that both of my spiritual directors (two years each) have been Jesuit priests who preach regularly and are engaged in a multiplicity of large-scale tasks ~ one is a university administrator and professor and the other a parish pastor ~ and yet consider one-on-one companionship with individuals to be a critical component of their ministries, and (2) with the recognition that much of what I am able to do for others is sustained by my prayer life and the opportunity to explore its unfolding dimensions with someone else who has cared for me over a long period of time.

Anyway. This week has been bracketed by a couple of hours spent with my current director last Friday and yesterday morning with my former director, who is in town for the week-end. In between and interwoven with my own turmoil have been a couple of conversations with other people about their suffering and about all of our inadequacies, and about their new insights into their relationships with God. And in the last couple of days: the Tenebrae service in my own church and a Catholic Good Friday mass.

I find that I am not yet remotely ready for Easter Sunday. In the Bible version, the Sunday joy comes much too quickly upon the despair for those of us who are in our own Friday-Saturday worlds to absorb. But ~ but ~ I am seeing things a bit differently this morning.

This endless conversation, this endless listening and watching for God, this careful vigilance to the pilgrimmage of a solitary person ~ whether I am the focus of the attention or the one trying to offer it to someone else, it is a remarkable experience of the presence of God's Spirit.

I don't think "efficiency" is the standard at all.

Lenten Reflection: Palm Sunday

It's Palm Sunday morning and I'm at home, thinking about my dear friend Lisa and about her profound question a couple of posts back in response to my desire to insulate myself from Easter: Do we have to be ready? Why do we feel that we need to be ready?

A question asked on occasion in spiritual direction, in the context of the Mary and Martha story, to someone who readily identifies with Martha:

What does that mean, that you would ask Jesus to sit on the porch and wait while you finished raking the leaves and spreading the mulch and putting your tools away? What does it say that you would suggest that he go out in the living room and spend time with your other guests while you finish preparing the meal?

And the extension of the question, to someone whose circumstances are more dire: What does it mean, that you simply remove yourself from the picture rather than risk the interaction?

Grief is certainly one of the most, if not the most, self-absorbing of experiences. It strangles joy, anticipation, pleasure in the ordinary. It makes it difficult to listen to a friend's recounting of a daughter-in-law's pregnancy. It makes a church service in which children wave palm branches and shout "Hosanna!" an unbearable prospect.

But what does that mean, that you cannot find it in yoursef to be one of the celebrants? Or even a quiet observer?

If it were 2000 years ago and noisy and happy crowds were thronging the streets, would you be curled up on a bed in a back room, wising they would just move on?

Probably.

What would it take to get you outside again? Just to watch? And if you were somehow about to manage that, what would you see?

Perhaps a glimpse of the one solitary person who knows what you carry in your heart? The heart that the first reading of Lent reminded you is broken beyond repair and scattered beyond reach?

Perhaps you would see someone who knows about that. Someone who is also enduring the celebratory chaos in the knowledge that it masks a pervasive darkness that has to be encountered in order to be conquered.

Perhaps your vision is becoming infinitesimally more accurate.

More Reflections on Ash Wednesday

Return to me with your whole heart. That was the line from Joel 2:12 that I heard early Wednesday morning.

Your whole heart, I thought? What can that mean, when your heart is not whole?

My heart is shattered.

It lies in tiny shards all over the ground.

Its jagged pieces spin into space, floating past Jupiter like lost little pilgrims.

Its dusty bits float on the oceans, bits of ash, sparkling grimly in the sunlight and filtering slowly downward, into the darkness where oddly luminescent sea creatures chart paths we can barely imagine.

One might want to turn to God again. The word metanoia slides off the tongue. It sounds graceful, and hopeful. But if God's desire is for a whole heart, if one can turn toward God only with an intact heart, then one is surely lost.

Late last night I turned to the passage in another version. Return to me with all your heart. Of course, I had known, in some small and isolated portion of my mind, that "whole" meant "all." I had known that in my own broken heart the response to what seemed a play on words but was really a conundrum of translation reflected my own longing for wholeness.

Your heart. In Biblical Judaism, the seat of your being. The essence of who you are.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So end the readings for the day, with the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:21.

Barbara Brown Taylor has a wonderful sermon about the treasure in the field. (The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew has a lot to say.) The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Why does he purchase the entire field; why doesn't he just dig up the one section? The treasure, she concludes, is scattered in plain sight, glittering all over the field.

Your heart accompanies your treasure and so there it is,

strewn across the field, scattered across the universe, mixed with the salt of the sea.

Return to me with your whole heart.

Return to me with the gift of a heart so cracked open that that in its wholeness it encounters brokenness everywhere.

Return to me with all of your heart.

You will find its pieces in places to which you would never have sought to journey on your own.

It is, indeed, an appalling thing, the strange mercy of God.

Ash Wednesday, Late

Our service was beautiful. Somber. Almost ethereal.

But not, of course. Not ethereal. Our pastor burned a palm branch he had picked up on the Temple Mount two weeks ago.

And then I found that I could not receive ashes. I simply could not do it.

Because I have ashes. Upstairs in my house.

Ash Wednesday Prayer: Even Among These Rocks

VI.

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.


(from T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday)