Scandalous Love

Holy Week begins.  Usually Mondays are Sabbath days for us at the Companionary, meaning that we don't have scheduled prayer and work times.  We relax and let life flow a bit more.  But during Holy Week we know we need to pray together - we want to pray together.  So we had a late Matins and Eucharist, before moving on with the day.  We read again of Mary's gift to Jesus (John 12:1-8).  The gift, I see, is not only the gift of costly ointment.  It is the gift of herself.  To anoint his feet and dry them with her hair is enormously intimate; something to be done only in extreme private between family members.  Mary lays herself open to scandal here to express her devotion and grief.

As we head into the these great days.  I wonder about the scandal.  Paul refers to the scandal of the cross - literally, a stumbling block (1 Cor. 1:23).  But over the years, what had been a scandalous faith became the routine mark of citizenship in the imperial Church.  Jesus and the cross became respectable.  The scandal was when someone questioned dogma or practice.  Often, those who scandalized others were precisely the ones, like Mary, whose devotion was too big and too flamboyant for an institution to contain.  Monks (male and female), virgins, hermits, "heretics" - most of those we now celebrate expressed their devotion in ways we would not allow in our churches today.

So I wonder: where's the scandalous faith that lives in you?  Where's my scandalous faith?  When the Companions started we might have seemed scandalously risk-taking, but now we're kind of comfortable.  We dress respectably, and when we worship "outside the lines" we do so in the privacy of the Companionary, or alone.  But in my heart the scandal burns.

I want to love Jesus like Mary does.  I don't mean I want to provoke scandal for the sake of scandal.  I want to sit and find, in my soul, what needs expressing - and then to express it.  I don't want to worry about whether it's coloring in the lines or not - I just want to know it's true for me, as deep as I can go.

This week we will go to Trinity Retreat Center.  Most of the action will be organized by others.  I will sit.  I may drum or chant or dance in the rain.  I may cry at inopportune times.  I may laugh too.  I don't know.  But I know there's more in me than some liturgies, however beautiful they may be.  I pray to find and express it this week.  Jesus, I love you.