I'm excited to begin the Triduum here at the monastery, as a sister again, a companion of the women who stood by Jesus. These days feel to me to be special for women. We know they were at the events of the three days, sometimes serving the men, sometimes just standing by helplessly, sometimes getting ready to prepare Jesus for burial. We don't know the details, but I feel them every year as I work in the sacristy, or wash feet, or sit in a dark quiet place.
Last year I went to Israel. We went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the supposed spot of Jesus' death and burial. At the entrance there is a large flat rectangular stone, imagined to be the stone on which his body was prepared. It is called the Stone of Anointing. Now, the stone has only been there 100 years or so. Its historical connection to the crucifixion is tenuous. But pilgrims have been pouring oil and scent on that stone for a century, and it now smells and feels like a place of anointing. I bent down and smelled it, and it captured me. All around me pilgrims poured olive oil and spices onto the stone, and soaked handkerchiefs and crosses in the oil. I soaked the only thing I had, a rosary I had bought on the trip. For a while, it smelled of the tomb. I still smell it, in my mind, when I hold that rosary.
For me that stone belongs to the women. That love, that outpouring, that oil and tears and scent, was the gift of the women as surely as any gifts brought to the manger by wise men. But these three days of love and pain and fear and hope belong to us all.
Have a blessed three days, rising to new life and love.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Blessed is the one who comes
Today I preached at the monastery. Here's my sermon.
Blessed Holy Week to you!
The story is told that St. Teresa of Avila, on one of her many journeys, was crossing a river when she was thrown by her horse into the river. Landing with a splash, she looked up to heaven and said to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!”
It’s not just Teresa who encounters this problem. Jesus enters Jerusalem with blessing, coming in the name of God. Soon he will be dead at the hands of imperial power, abandoned and betrayed by many of those who today pronounce the blessing. No wonder God has so few friends.
But I don’t think God is the one with the problem. I think we have a problem. We have a scandal in our midst. Our faith is centered on one who is blessed, and the blessed one is crucified. What are we to make of that?
We can call it irony, but it’s not ironic. We can call it tragedy, but it’s much more than that. We can call it paradox, which is a nice version of contradiction. But all of those evaluations of this moment rest on a mistake. There’s no irony here, no tragedy, not even really a paradox. There’s simply blessing.
But what, exactly, does it mean to be blessed? Being blessed, like being God’s friend, is both less and more than it often seems to be.
When we hear the word “blessed” in the Bible, we are actually using one word for two distinct concepts. In the Beatitudes, we hear that the poor, the humble, the sorrowful are blessed. That’s a good word. In Greek it is makarios. It means to be happy, joyous. It’s good to hear Jesus tell us that things will not always be as they are, that we can turn around and rejoice, that we will be blessed.
But that’s not the kind of blessing that Jesus gets. When the crowds cry, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” the word Luke uses is eulogemenos, one receiving a blessing. The Greek in turn is translating the Hebrew barakh, which means to kneel, to receive a blessing.
Blessing, in this sense, does not make the blessed one happy. It makes them holy. It marks them off, it consecrates them. Our English word, “bless,” comes from the Old German word for spattering blood on the altar. To be blessed is to be a sacrifice.
Jesus was blessed, not as one who gets to have a quiet life with a wonderful family, but as bread and wine are blessed. Jesus was marked as God’s own, as a sign of God’s power, but not for his own enjoyment.
He really meant it. He did not come to do his own will, but that of God. He was blessed.
This is such a hard truth to grasp. Throughout our history we flee from this. We want to believe that virtue brings worldly success. that if we honor God we’ll get what we want. Like a good business deal.
We want the prosperity gospel, not only for the material goods it promises, but because it makes the world line up in an orderly way. It’s not just greed or self-interest that draws us to think like this. It’s just as much the desire for a world that makes sense. We want virtue to be rewarded and injustice to be punished. We need at least the hope of order and justice in the world.
But that’s not what blessing is about. If we honor God, we will indeed find joy and peace, but not in any simple way. If we honor God, we will more likely find ourselves in Gethsemane with Jesus, praying for the peace of the world.
Being blessed means walking into the chaos of the world. It means being a sign of God in the midst of a world that defies the power and love of God.
Being blessed in this sense is not a privilege of those of us who go into places of pain to serve others. Being blessed in this sense begins with those who are there, in the center of the pain. They are the signs of God, walking in the pitiful procession that leads to the cross. We, who the world considers more blessed than they, are in fact the spectators on the journey into Jerusalem. It is the poor, the homeless, the victims of rape and violence, the addicts, who walk in that procession. Jesus rides in on a donkey, not a Mercedes. Soon Jesus will walk back out, in even humbler fashion. And he will still be blessed.
We’ve each been blessed. We were blessed at our baptism, marked as Christ’s own. We may hope for blessings of peace and happiness, but they were not guaranteed in that blessing. We were dedicated to God’s service, like the vessels we will eat and drink from in a minute. We were given to be poured out, like the wheat and the wine. We were blessed. We are blessed.
Being blessed means walking with Jesus into the places he walked into. This week we will remember him in the temple, in the prison, and in the tomb. But remembering him in those places is not enough.
Today there are others who defy the Temple, the centers of religious power that turn toward serving themselves rather than God. We need to walk with them as they call us back to true worship and service.
There are people, faces of Christ, in prison and serving those in prison. We need to walk with them, and sit with them, in the black holes of despair and anger.
There are people on their way to death, victims of state violence and victims of private exploitation to the point of death. We need to walk with them, to protest their treatment, to lift the cross from their shoulders.
And there are people carrying less obvious, yet excruciating burdens, among us and within us. We need to walk with them too.
We need to do this because we have been blessed.
We need not fear this blessing. This blessing is good news. For God goes before us and with us, leading us into places we might rather avoid. God carries us into the darkest corners of the world, and the darkest corners of our hearts. But God goes with us, and gives us what we need to walk this road. We can even celebrate, as God carries us to joy and wonder beyond our wildest dreams. But we only get there by being blessed.
In the 8th century, Andrew of Crete wrote:
“It is ourselves that we must spread under Christ’s feet, not coats or lifeless branches or shoots of trees, matter which wastes away and delights the eye only for a few brief hours. But we have clothed ourselves with Christ’s grace, with the whole Christ - “for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” - so let us spread ourselves like coats under his feet.”
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Blessed Holy Week to you!
The story is told that St. Teresa of Avila, on one of her many journeys, was crossing a river when she was thrown by her horse into the river. Landing with a splash, she looked up to heaven and said to God, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!”
It’s not just Teresa who encounters this problem. Jesus enters Jerusalem with blessing, coming in the name of God. Soon he will be dead at the hands of imperial power, abandoned and betrayed by many of those who today pronounce the blessing. No wonder God has so few friends.
But I don’t think God is the one with the problem. I think we have a problem. We have a scandal in our midst. Our faith is centered on one who is blessed, and the blessed one is crucified. What are we to make of that?
We can call it irony, but it’s not ironic. We can call it tragedy, but it’s much more than that. We can call it paradox, which is a nice version of contradiction. But all of those evaluations of this moment rest on a mistake. There’s no irony here, no tragedy, not even really a paradox. There’s simply blessing.
But what, exactly, does it mean to be blessed? Being blessed, like being God’s friend, is both less and more than it often seems to be.
When we hear the word “blessed” in the Bible, we are actually using one word for two distinct concepts. In the Beatitudes, we hear that the poor, the humble, the sorrowful are blessed. That’s a good word. In Greek it is makarios. It means to be happy, joyous. It’s good to hear Jesus tell us that things will not always be as they are, that we can turn around and rejoice, that we will be blessed.
But that’s not the kind of blessing that Jesus gets. When the crowds cry, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” the word Luke uses is eulogemenos, one receiving a blessing. The Greek in turn is translating the Hebrew barakh, which means to kneel, to receive a blessing.
Blessing, in this sense, does not make the blessed one happy. It makes them holy. It marks them off, it consecrates them. Our English word, “bless,” comes from the Old German word for spattering blood on the altar. To be blessed is to be a sacrifice.
Jesus was blessed, not as one who gets to have a quiet life with a wonderful family, but as bread and wine are blessed. Jesus was marked as God’s own, as a sign of God’s power, but not for his own enjoyment.
He really meant it. He did not come to do his own will, but that of God. He was blessed.
This is such a hard truth to grasp. Throughout our history we flee from this. We want to believe that virtue brings worldly success. that if we honor God we’ll get what we want. Like a good business deal.
We want the prosperity gospel, not only for the material goods it promises, but because it makes the world line up in an orderly way. It’s not just greed or self-interest that draws us to think like this. It’s just as much the desire for a world that makes sense. We want virtue to be rewarded and injustice to be punished. We need at least the hope of order and justice in the world.
But that’s not what blessing is about. If we honor God, we will indeed find joy and peace, but not in any simple way. If we honor God, we will more likely find ourselves in Gethsemane with Jesus, praying for the peace of the world.
Being blessed means walking into the chaos of the world. It means being a sign of God in the midst of a world that defies the power and love of God.
Being blessed in this sense is not a privilege of those of us who go into places of pain to serve others. Being blessed in this sense begins with those who are there, in the center of the pain. They are the signs of God, walking in the pitiful procession that leads to the cross. We, who the world considers more blessed than they, are in fact the spectators on the journey into Jerusalem. It is the poor, the homeless, the victims of rape and violence, the addicts, who walk in that procession. Jesus rides in on a donkey, not a Mercedes. Soon Jesus will walk back out, in even humbler fashion. And he will still be blessed.
We’ve each been blessed. We were blessed at our baptism, marked as Christ’s own. We may hope for blessings of peace and happiness, but they were not guaranteed in that blessing. We were dedicated to God’s service, like the vessels we will eat and drink from in a minute. We were given to be poured out, like the wheat and the wine. We were blessed. We are blessed.
Being blessed means walking with Jesus into the places he walked into. This week we will remember him in the temple, in the prison, and in the tomb. But remembering him in those places is not enough.
Today there are others who defy the Temple, the centers of religious power that turn toward serving themselves rather than God. We need to walk with them as they call us back to true worship and service.
There are people, faces of Christ, in prison and serving those in prison. We need to walk with them, and sit with them, in the black holes of despair and anger.
There are people on their way to death, victims of state violence and victims of private exploitation to the point of death. We need to walk with them, to protest their treatment, to lift the cross from their shoulders.
And there are people carrying less obvious, yet excruciating burdens, among us and within us. We need to walk with them too.
We need to do this because we have been blessed.
We need not fear this blessing. This blessing is good news. For God goes before us and with us, leading us into places we might rather avoid. God carries us into the darkest corners of the world, and the darkest corners of our hearts. But God goes with us, and gives us what we need to walk this road. We can even celebrate, as God carries us to joy and wonder beyond our wildest dreams. But we only get there by being blessed.
In the 8th century, Andrew of Crete wrote:
“It is ourselves that we must spread under Christ’s feet, not coats or lifeless branches or shoots of trees, matter which wastes away and delights the eye only for a few brief hours. But we have clothed ourselves with Christ’s grace, with the whole Christ - “for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” - so let us spread ourselves like coats under his feet.”
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Cat update - sigh
Over a month has gone by since Shadow had her meltdown. We've kept the two cats separate almost entirely since then. We thought we'd let them calm down. But in fact we're stuck. No progress.
Now, with spring here, Shadow is getting restless. She's used to being outside overnight from March through October, chasing things and running around. This year, because we live next to a big road, she's becoming a house cat. She's not happy. As soon as I open the bedroom door in the morning, she goes to the glass door and starts watching. She's getting whiny. She needs more exercise than I can give her with her flying skunk. (Yes, flying skunk - with hot pink fringe.)
She could be more active, more involved, if we could open more doors around here. But we're still in apartheid. So now we're trying again. We've been rubbing them each with a towel, then rubbing the other one with that scent. Phoebe seems OK with it, but Shadow hates that towel! She won't even lie on the one that smells like Phoebe.
We have the plug-in pheromone going - so far, no action.
We've heard that two adult females are the hardest combination to bring together. Hmmm. Hopefully that applies only to cats.
Pray for our cats. Pray for us.
And enjoy the crocuses!
Now, with spring here, Shadow is getting restless. She's used to being outside overnight from March through October, chasing things and running around. This year, because we live next to a big road, she's becoming a house cat. She's not happy. As soon as I open the bedroom door in the morning, she goes to the glass door and starts watching. She's getting whiny. She needs more exercise than I can give her with her flying skunk. (Yes, flying skunk - with hot pink fringe.)
She could be more active, more involved, if we could open more doors around here. But we're still in apartheid. So now we're trying again. We've been rubbing them each with a towel, then rubbing the other one with that scent. Phoebe seems OK with it, but Shadow hates that towel! She won't even lie on the one that smells like Phoebe.
We have the plug-in pheromone going - so far, no action.
We've heard that two adult females are the hardest combination to bring together. Hmmm. Hopefully that applies only to cats.
Pray for our cats. Pray for us.
And enjoy the crocuses!
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Hi folks,
Some of you said you couldn't post on the blog. I've changed the setting to allow you to write back. Please try, so I know if that worked!
A beautiful day up here, sunny and warm after several inches of snow Thursday night. We had a great second meeting of women, with 10 of us in our tiny living room. We're going to have to move!
I'm so inspired by these women. People say that it takes faith and courage to do what Elizabeth and I are doing, but I think it takes a ton of faith and courage and stamina to do everything that people are expected to do these days, and still make time for sharing about their faith. In a world that sees that as a luxury, it takes a clear vision and firm resolve. So thank you all for showing up! I'm looking forward to hearing from everyone, and seeing the leadership in each of us blossom.
After a week thinking about Beguines, now I'm reading Teresa of Avila for the Women and Christianity series. She lived a very different life from the Beguines, but they shared a vivid passion for life. She included dancing at her convents, and is sometimes shown with a tambourine. That's what I want - dancing for recreation! Beguines with tambourines! A big swirl of rejoicing in the love of God.
But now, for something completely different - Vespers at the monastery. A swirl of rejoicing, but so stately and quiet you might almost miss it if you don't pay attention. Listen . . .
Some of you said you couldn't post on the blog. I've changed the setting to allow you to write back. Please try, so I know if that worked!
A beautiful day up here, sunny and warm after several inches of snow Thursday night. We had a great second meeting of women, with 10 of us in our tiny living room. We're going to have to move!
I'm so inspired by these women. People say that it takes faith and courage to do what Elizabeth and I are doing, but I think it takes a ton of faith and courage and stamina to do everything that people are expected to do these days, and still make time for sharing about their faith. In a world that sees that as a luxury, it takes a clear vision and firm resolve. So thank you all for showing up! I'm looking forward to hearing from everyone, and seeing the leadership in each of us blossom.
After a week thinking about Beguines, now I'm reading Teresa of Avila for the Women and Christianity series. She lived a very different life from the Beguines, but they shared a vivid passion for life. She included dancing at her convents, and is sometimes shown with a tambourine. That's what I want - dancing for recreation! Beguines with tambourines! A big swirl of rejoicing in the love of God.
But now, for something completely different - Vespers at the monastery. A swirl of rejoicing, but so stately and quiet you might almost miss it if you don't pay attention. Listen . . .
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Begin the Beguines!
I've been reading about the Beguines as part of my preparation for my series in Women and Christianity, and I'm so excited! I think we are the next wave of Beguines!
The Beguines were groups of women (there were some men, called Beghards, in separate communities) who were primarily based in the Netherlands and Belgium, from the 12th century through the 15th (though I hear there are still one or two houses today). They lived and prayed together, but they were not enclosed. They worked in various industries to earn their living, including weaving and teaching. They did not take life vows, and they were free to leave. Some were married, but all took vows of celibacy while they were members. They did not have a distinctive habit, but lived simply. They did not have a formal written rule - they lived according to their Gospel values.
Often the Beguines lived clustered around monasteries. Some lived together (an early use of the word "convent"), and eventually many gathered into large compounds called beguinages. They were not recognized by the institutional church, except as a threat. Many Beguines were suspected of heresy, and one, Marguerite of Porete, was executed for her "suspect" writings of mystical love.
As I read, I thought: this sounds like the Companions. When we first began meeting, in fact, one of our earliest collaborators suggested we look at the Beguines, but we never really discussed them. But now I think she was brilliantly perceptive. Networks, clustered but loose; women living according to values rather than regulations; women madly in love with God, and not just as a father figure. Wild women - of the most respectable sort, of course.
I don't know if this is us. It's early. But we could do worse.
It seems that every time the Church gets itself stuck, tripping over its own institutional shoelaces, the Holy Spirit sends a breath that can't be taken in through normal channels. And some people are lucky enough to catch the breeze and float with it. I pray to be one of those, and I pray that you will be too.
Let's begin the Beguine - again!
The Beguines were groups of women (there were some men, called Beghards, in separate communities) who were primarily based in the Netherlands and Belgium, from the 12th century through the 15th (though I hear there are still one or two houses today). They lived and prayed together, but they were not enclosed. They worked in various industries to earn their living, including weaving and teaching. They did not take life vows, and they were free to leave. Some were married, but all took vows of celibacy while they were members. They did not have a distinctive habit, but lived simply. They did not have a formal written rule - they lived according to their Gospel values.
Often the Beguines lived clustered around monasteries. Some lived together (an early use of the word "convent"), and eventually many gathered into large compounds called beguinages. They were not recognized by the institutional church, except as a threat. Many Beguines were suspected of heresy, and one, Marguerite of Porete, was executed for her "suspect" writings of mystical love.
As I read, I thought: this sounds like the Companions. When we first began meeting, in fact, one of our earliest collaborators suggested we look at the Beguines, but we never really discussed them. But now I think she was brilliantly perceptive. Networks, clustered but loose; women living according to values rather than regulations; women madly in love with God, and not just as a father figure. Wild women - of the most respectable sort, of course.
I don't know if this is us. It's early. But we could do worse.
It seems that every time the Church gets itself stuck, tripping over its own institutional shoelaces, the Holy Spirit sends a breath that can't be taken in through normal channels. And some people are lucky enough to catch the breeze and float with it. I pray to be one of those, and I pray that you will be too.
Let's begin the Beguine - again!
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