Words Half Heard: suffering

Showing posts with label suffering. Show all posts

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Syria, Solidarity, Sorrow and Repentance

Syria's Nightmarish Narrative, Consortiumnews.com

I would like to live in a simple world.

Simple. Safe. With easy answers. Do-able solutions.

A world where good guys smile and bad guys sneer and the difference is obvious and justice comes riding long before the credits roll.

A world free of persistent evil and crushing human pain.

I confess, I’ve been trying hard not to pay attention to the news of Syria.

Even as my time this summer in Finland and Sweden set me thinking about the hazards of small nations caught in the path of desperate power, I’ve kept my gaze averted from the swelling humanitarian crisis.

The ongoing story of bombs, burned houses, rebels, refugees.

It’s over there, wherever “there” is.

I’m here.

I have enough to pray and wrestle with.

Right?

An on-line conversation between two friends set me reeling earlier this week.

One friend, a young mother of two, a dear sister in youth ministry, a conscientious, caring soul, posted on Facebook:

I've been crying today over the pictures of the Syrian child washed up on the beach in Turkey. Every time I see him, I see my own children. We cannot afford to believe that the immigrant and the refugee is other than us. They could be us. That boy is my baby.

The second, another sister in ministry, somewhat older mother of two, writer, thinker, determined activist:

I'm sorry to be such a skeptic, but I am not sure our sorrow, which is heartfelt, will change anything unless we are willing to advocate for change...to be the change. I say this not to discount your sorrow, or anybody else's, or my own, but as someone who has been writing about Syria for years and finally hardened my heart because our national indifference got to be too much to bear. Maybe I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. And forgive me if I sound arrogant or impatient.

What shook me was the sudden awareness of my own grave hardness of heart.

My own determination to look the other way.

My unacknowledged, almost crippling grief at our national indifference.

My deep sorrow and not-well-processed anger that those most determined to speak as “Christians” clap and cheer when presidential candidates use global unrest as political fodder and brag about what they’d do to shut out the homeless, tempest-tossed.

My doubt that change is possible.

I repent.

Not for the anger, although I may get there.

Not for the sorrow – although it’s probably misplaced.

I repent the hardness of heart, the determined disinterest, the doubt born of soul-deep weariness at living in this not-yet world, where injustice seems to rule the day and gentle civilians are trampled and torn by power-hungry bullies.

I’ve been repenting all week.

Praying, reading, wondering.

About causes, solutions, boundaries, borders.

Let my repentance go deeper: in my self-righteous impatience, I wondered why we, the US, don’t take up arms and stop the nonsense driving so many innocent civilians from their homes. Wouldn’t that be better than struggling to find homes for so many who would obviously prefer to live in safety in their own country?

Let me be more politically correct – I wondered why the UN Security Forces haven’t done what they were created to do: intervene. Stop the slaughter. Make Syria safe so the refugees can go home.

My first thought – in this as in so much else - is to look for someone to blame:

Arms dealers!

Russia!

The UN.

Assad.

Israel.

ISIS.

Oh, sure, President Obama.

Am I missing someone?

I am, on a fairly deep level, a pacifist, yet I found myself tracking across the Internet, looking for military solutions. Surely that’s possible?

Maybe not.

I won’t try to sketch out the complexity of the issues in my targeted 1200 words.

The BBC offered a reasonable summary last March in “eight short chapters”.

And I won’t set out, here, just war arguments, hesitations, cautions. Gerard Powers, Director of Catholic Peacebuilding Studies at the Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies , recently offered a quick overview of the just war discussion applied to Syria, and concluded:

There are no morally clear or clean answers to the moral conundrums the international community faces in Iraq and Syria.

The United States, in particular, faces a serious moral conundrum. U.S. policy has suffered a double moral failure: it was immoral to intervene in Iraq in 2003, and in the years since, its self-serving, misguided, incompetent and sometimes grossly negligent policies have failed the Iraqi people. The first moral failure made the second more likely. These many years, many deaths, many billions of dollars, and many missteps later, we are tempted to say that we have done all we can do and wash our hands of the problem, letting Iraq and Syria be torn apart by their “ancient hatreds.” But that would be shirking our moral obligations, for the United States has become –voluntarily! – very much a part of those hatreds.

The more serious temptation at this moment of crisis is to do what we did in 2003: pursue a quick-fix military solution justified by best-case scenarios about the good that would be achieved – peace, freedom, and democracy for Iraq and the region. But that approach lacks the realism essential to any ethic of military intervention. Because past U.S. interventions helped create the current crisis, we have a moral obligation to act. Limited military intervention might be necessary. But without a serious effort to address the larger political, economic, and cultural dynamics – to engage in nation building in two countries torn asunder, it will be no more successful than it has been until now.

Yesterday, tens of thousands marched through European city centers in solidarity with refugees who have been fleeing Syria in what has been described as the biggest mass migration since World War II. In Denmark, an estimated 30,000 chanted “Say it loud and say it clear: Refugees are welcome here!”

Here in the US, a Facebook group Open Homes, Open Hearts is looking for ways to offer support, inviting families to post photos offering welcome.

International groups like Oxfam and Mercy Corps are working to provide for refugees, while smaller, more localized groups, like Migrant Offshore Aid Station and Hand in Hand for Syria focus on more specific concerns.

In my thinking and praying this week, I came across a group, and video, that humbled me, challenged me, and gave focus to my thought and prayer. The video was made in 2012 – so it’s out of date. And long: 53 minutes. I almost said “too long”.

But the group promoting it, Cultures of Resistance, intrigued me.

And the title, The Suffering Grasses, reminded me of the same reality I’d seen in Finland: “When the elephants fight, the grass suffers.”

It’s worth watching, in part for the way it brings to life the early days of the conflict in Syria.

And in part for the way it makes clear that lack of awareness, lack of interest, lack of global outcry, has made it possible for the mayhem to continue.

It offers a hope for peaceful solution: through creative resistance, digital documentation, reminder of the long history of peaceful coexistence between different clans and religions.

Watching, I found myself wondering at the courage of the video’s creators and those who filmed and spoke, where they are now, what they would say. How many are dead? How many have left Syria/

In church this morning, our sermon, first in a series on Acts, focused on Paul’s conversion. Bent on violent persecution, he encountered the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and was forever changed.

Damascus is the capital of Syria, oldest inhabited city on earth, site of one of Christianity’s most famous conversions. I had been struggling with how to pray, and I was sharply reminded: pray for repentance, conversion, change of heart.

As I was reflecting on that, our rector, Richard Morgan, mentioned almost in passing the experience of a Muslim woman he knew, who encountered Christ in a dream, and found her life forever changed. Pray for dreams, visions, miraculous intervention!

Our prayer leader cut through my reverie once again with a strong, compassionate prayer for the people of Syria: pray for comfort for those in distress, care for those in need, wisdom and strength for those called to offer aide.

And then, the prayer of confession, a prayer I needed, and continue to need:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent ...

No neat solutions.

Yet I open myself to learn more, to listen better, to pray more consistently.

To hold fast to the knowledge that God can change hearts, minds, situations, nations.

Syria.

And my own.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Lent Four: Expecting Suffering

When I write a blog series I usually start with a few words that I write down, rearrange, pray and puzzle over for weeks, sometimes months.

Sometimes patterns emerge. Sometimes new things jump into focus.

This Lent, I somehow ended up with “e” verbs: embracing, eluding, exploring.

Expecting.

Expecting what?

The last weeks of Lent traditionally focus on the passion of Christ – from the Greek word paschein (πάσχειν), to suffer.

He warned his followers in Luke 9 (the same chapter that speaks of John's beheading):

The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”

Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. (Luke 9:22-23 )

Matthew’s version of the story includes a brief interchange with Peter:

From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me." (Matthew 16:22-24)

Jesus’ point seems harsh, but clear: those who follow him should expect to encounter and share in the pain of the world. Those who object are a stumbling block, trapped in a flawed perspective.

Jesus wanted his friends to be ready, not caught by surprise.

Expecting sorrow. Sacrifice. Suffering.

As a North American Christian, I’ve been taught that things should go my way. I have rights, protections, expectations. Suffering, sacrifice and sorrow have no place in the story my culture has promised.

Yet suffering, sacrifice and sorrow are part of the story we’re all called to, the part of the story we object to and avoid.

This morning’s news is full of stories of suffering: a monster cyclone shattered the impoverished island nation of Vanuatu.

A convent was attacked in eastern India and a 74 year old nun raped by six men.

Since I sat down to write, this latest story: “Bombs outside two churches in the Pakistani city of Lahore killed 14 people and wounded nearly 80 during Sunday services, and witnesses said quick action by a security guard prevented many more deaths.”

Whatever sacrifices we make in Lent are small, symbolic, and hardly representative of the real suffering of the world. Whatever suffering I’ve seen or experienced seems very small in comparison to even this morning’s news.

And sacrifice? It seemed almost irreverent this year, to be discussing giving up chocolate or Facebook, while on the other side of the globe followers of Christ are giving their lives, burned and beheaded by extremist enemies of the Christian faith.

The response of those communities is instructive, humbling, and deeply moving: Beshir Kamel, brother to two of the Coptic Orthodox Christians beheaded on a deserted beach in Libya, thanked ISIS for not editing out the last words of those kneeling as they waited for death: “Ya Rabbi Yasou”: Rabbi (teacher, master, great one, Lord) Jesus. O Lord Jesus. Help.

Beshir Kamel went on to say:

“Since the Roman era, Christians have been martyred and have learned to handle everything that comes our way. This only makes us stronger in our faith because the Bible told us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us."

Reflecting on the deaths of these men, and so many others, Orthodox Christians point to their two-thousand year history of persecution and martyrdom, and remind other outraged Christians that this is part of the story, not cause for calls of revenge or war:

In the precipice of martyrdom, St Stephen, the Proto-martyr begged God to forgive his killers. Was there an apostolic uprising following that?

Hieromartyr Eutychius, disciple of St John the Theologian, was beheaded after starvation in prison, an attempt to burn him alive, and cruel beatings with iron rods…which were made to cease by his prayers. There is no account of retribution. . . .

We stand proudly with the martyrs, whose blood is the foundation of the Church. And we beg God to grant us equal strength when we have to face what they did.

In worship in our church this morning, I found myself thinking of the video I chose not to watch: of the men beheaded, and their final words.

I had an overwhelming sense of their presence now with God, their names written on Jesus’ hands, their broken bodies carried in his arms.

I had a sense of God’s love flowing through them – through their wounds, their blood – to their heart-broken families, their shattered church.

I was struck by how reluctant I am to see past my own sanitized, safe little world. I don’t want to see their blood. I don’t want to kneel with them in their pain.

Yet I felt convicted to come home and watch, and pray.

It took a while to find the uncensored five minutes video. And no, I’m not going to link to it.

Icon of the 21 Martyrs of Libya, Tony Rezk

But I did watch it. Kneeling.

The world can be a brutal place.

And humans of all kinds can be agents of great evil.

In my recent reading in Acts, I was struck by the account of Paul heading off to Jerusalem after being warned by Agabus that he’d be bound by the Jewish leaders and handed over to the Romans. He acknowledged the warning and continued on his way, expecting trouble, but not moved by it.

It reminded me of accounts of the marchers in Selma, moving toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge: expecting trouble, but unmoved.

In 1960, Martin Luther King wrote:

I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Recognizing the necessity for suffering I have tried to make of it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transform myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation which now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive.

There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation. So like the Apostle Paul I can now humbly yet proudly say, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God.

From what I’ve seen and know of the world, suffering is inevitable. It can sweep through like a cyclone, smashing everything in its way.

Or it can linger like the drip drip drip of mental anguish: Altzheimer's, psychzophrenia, unrelieved depression.

We can spend our days looking for ways to stay safe, running from choices that would open us to pain, responding with fury when our defenses fail us.

Or we can choose to expect suffering, choose to move forward forewarned and aware, but not gripped by fear or dissuaded from what’s right.

This is the fifth in a Lenten series.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Ice Shards that Pop Soap Bubbles of Comfort

Philippians 1: And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. Philippians 1:9-11

Somehow, despite a half-century of experience to the contrary, I still find myself clinging to the idea that growing in love will somehow be easy. I set out to expand the reach of my own compassion without weighing the cost, or pausing to review what’s already clear: love demands surrender of our own agendas, our own self-protective impulses. Our own self-sufficiency.

Last week I asked “What’s it like to be you?”

Then plunged into a week of being me that stirred a host of new questions, a tsunami of revelations.

The week started with a snowstorm. A predicted four to six inches dumped more than a foot of wet, heavy snow, disrupting plans, demanding attention.

Then came ice. The ominous tinkling of falling ice late Tuesday night was soon joined by the groaning of tree limbs, then wild, cracking sounds and the thud of falling limbs.

Then darkness, as the bedside clock went black and the neighbors’ porch lights vanished.

We’ve never lost power for more than twenty-four hours, so expected to have lights and heat back soon.

Despite warnings that more than 80% of our county had lost power, that repair would be hampered by wind, ice, and cold.

One day stretched into two, and makeshift attempts at normalcy gave way to next steps: daylight hours spent elsewhere. Nights in the cold, blankets piled high.

Two days stretched into three. A plea to friends for a warm, well-lighted guest room.

While lights went on in neighborhoods around us, ours stayed dark. Apparently a very large tree, loaded with snow and ice, took out a crucial utility pole and the network of wires surrounding it. When we finally discovered the web of downed wires, draped across snowy sidewalks and streets, persistent hopes that the power would be back any minute gave way to more thoughtful plans for facing the days ahead.

This post is being written in a corner bedroom in a lovely home twenty minutes from my own, with coffee, wi-fi, all the comforts of modern life provided by gracious friends who two days ago were wondering when their own power would be back on.

I confess, in the middle of disruption, it’s hard to care about anyone else. Which makes me wonder: is compassion a luxury for the comfortable?

Another confession: I have never expended much thought on those whose lives are disrupted by war, tsunami, hurricane, drought. Yes, I listen to news stories, think “how awful.” Give a nominal contribution to those hard-hit by disaster. Join the prayers of the people on Sundays when we pause in our worship to pray for those in trouble.

But I’ve never invested much imagination in picturing lives unexpectedly derailed. Never spent much time in genuine prayer or thoughts of assistance for those plunged into the misery of not knowing where the next meal will come from, or exhausted by lack of a safe, quiet place to sleep.

Last July Pope Francis spoke in Lampedusa, the Italian island off the coast of Tunisia, about the thousands of asylum seekers who have drowned trying to cross from chaos to safety:

Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the Levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: "poor soul…!", and then go on our way. It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged.

The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a fleeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others; indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference. In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!

My week of discomfort has shaken my soap bubble of comfort, opening my heart, just a little, to those who live in misery: cold, hungry, unable to think beyond the next meal, the next cup of water. Mothers with small children, men and women past the age of resilience. Desperate people with no home to return to. Refugee camps, erected to provide shelter for a few weeks or months, still

housing families years, even decades, later.

Easier to say “it’s none of my business!”

But if it is my business, what then?

Pope Francis suggests a first step in compassion would be to grieve:

We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion – "suffering with" others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep! . . . let us ask the Lord for the grace to weep over our indifference, to weep over the cruelty of our world, of our own hearts, and of all those who in anonymity make social and economic decisions which open the door to tragic situations like this.

It’s not just grief that’s needed, though. “Suffering with” demands rejection of easy answers. If we imagine that suffering only comes to “those people,” over there, it’s easy to affix blame: somehow it must be their fault? Did they do something to deserve it? If so, isn’t it okay to distance myself? To walk by on the other side of the road?

When the bubble of comfort pops, when we find ourselves asking the hard questions of “why?” the easy answers and self-protective defenses are stripped away.

Yes, some bring suffering on themselves, through foolish choices and rash decisions. But much more suffering is caused by external circumstances, invisible causes, forces beyond any one person’s control: tribal conflicts, global trade policies, chemical spills.

Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Ice storms. Tsunamis.

I repent of my indifference.

I repent, as well, for my self-sufficiency.

I hate to ask for help of any kind. But as I read through Paul’s epistles, consider the signs of a healthy community, I’m forced to acknowledge: love that imagines a one-way flow of care is something other than love.

In the introduction to his collection of essays, No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton wrote:

Selfless love consents to be loved selflessly for the sake of the beloved. In so doing, it perfects itself.

The gift of love is the gift of the power and the capacity to love, and, therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So, love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received.

Hardest for me this past week has been the feeling of neediness. Needing help to get through the day: provision of coffee, meals, showers, warm bed. Encouragement. Advise.

A week older, and wiser, I give thanks for friends and family who have offered help, not just now, but other times, other ways.

I give thanks that grace and generosity offered are not dependent on my own offerings of grace or generosity.

And I consider, from a humbler, more vulnerable point of view:

What is it like to be you?

To be me?

How do we continue to grow in love and understanding?

How do we give and receive love in a world where global indifference is the norm?

Is experience of pain, loss of our “soap bubble of comfort,” an essential part of our growth in depth of insight?

If so, how do we embrace that more fully, while still longing for our own warm beds, our own safe, quiet corners?

In honor of Valentine’s Day, and as a warming exploration in a very cold, gray month, this is the second in a four part exploration of love.

What's It Like to Be You?

Please join the conversation: just click on __comments below and add your thoughts.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Talitha Koun. Girl Rising

There’s a movie I’ve been wanting to see, Girl Rising. It will be showing this week, on Wednesday, at the Phoenixville Colonial Theater. If you’re in the area, come see it.

"One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world."

It’s about nine girls from nine countries who face the challenges too many girls face: child marriage, sex trafficking, slavery, abandonment, staggering poverty.

This past Friday, the UN celebrated the 16th birthday of Malala Yousafza, the teen shot in Pakistan last October for daring to speak out against the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education. Malala spoke to the gathered world leaders “as one girl among many”:

"I speak not for myself but for those without voice ... those who have fought for their rights -- their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated."

"In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering”

In Malala’s home nation, only one in three women can read a newspaper or write a letter.

And one in four girls is married before turning 18.

According to a 2012 study by World Vision, the number of child brides continues to rise:

“One in nine girls around the world is forced to marry before her 15th birthday.

“Those who are subjected to early marriage are more likely to experience domestic violence, forced sexual relations, poor reproductive health, and lower levels of education, according to the report.

“Early marriage poses a serious challenge to extremely hard-won development gains in least developed countries . . .And yet, in the face of these facts and the widespread condemnation of the practice, early marriage continues to flourish.”

I’ve been reading in the Gospel of Mark, and a passage from Mark 5 has been troubling me. Jesus, traveling to heal the daughter of a church leader, encounters a woman “who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years." After spending all she had on a series of doctors, “instead of growing better she grew worse.”

The woman reaches out in the crowd to touch Jesus’ cloak – a forbidden act. Woman touching man; unclean, untouchable person reaching out to share her uncleanness. Jesus stops, wants to know who has touched him (you can read the whole story here). She falls at his feet, “trembling with fear,” and explains her humiliating story. His response is gentle, affirming, and deeply compassionate: “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

The story continues with Jesus’ arrival at his original destination, but the girl he’s come to see is dead.

No matter.

“He took her by the hand and said to her ‘Talitha koun!' (which means, 'Little girl, I say to you, get up!')"

Set aside discussion about whether miracles happen. Mark’s description is matter of fact, and as precise as he can get it. No respected religious leader of the time would call a woman breaking the rules “daughter.” No ordinary man could see the depth of the woman’s misery and meet her there, so gently offering freedom from that suffering.

And that little Aramaic sentence Mark gives us: apparently he thought the heart of it would be lost if he translated it into the Greek of his text. “Talitha koun”: sweet little lamb, dear little girl, treasured little ewe child, hear my heart and rise.

As I’ve been trying to understand more about the suffering of women around the globe, I’ve carried those words with me: daughter, be freed from your suffering. Sweet treasured girl, rise up.

Several years ago Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof, authors of Half the Sky, tried to quantify the misery of women:

“More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

"The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day... life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.”

And this:

“In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world.”

In a chapter entitled “Family Planning and the ‘God Gulf’” WuDunn and Kristof discussed the deep divide over funding for abortion, contraception, condoms, even sex education.

“One of the great scandals of the early twenty-first century is that 122 million women around the world want contraception and can't get it."

That number, according to the UNFPA (the UN Population Fund) is now close to 222 million, but funding for the UNFPA and for clinics that offer contraception and prenatal care has become a political football, with groups opposed to abortion insisting on cuts to UNFPA funding, even though the organization “does not support or promote abortion as a method of family planning.”

Numbers can’t convey the story, but sit with these statistics a day or two:

About 16 million adolescent girls give birth every year – most in low- and middle-income countries.
Worldwide, one in five girls has given birth by the age of 18. In the poorest regions of the world, this figure rises to over one in three girls.
In low- and middle-income countries, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are a leading cause of death among girls under twenty: more than 70,000 each year.
An estimated three million girls under twenty undergo unsafe abortions every year.
Globally, only 50% of women received the minimum recommended prenatal care – just four visits with a skilled caregiver. 20% receive no care at all.
One third of all women have no skilled help during labor and delivery.
More than 2 million young women live with debilitating, untreated obstetric fistula - caused by teen pregnancy and inadequate obstetric care.

Numbers, I know, but each number represents a little constellation of suffering, a story of powerlessness, fear, physical and mental pain.

I’ve read much of what groups like Concerned Women of America have to say against the UNFPA, and I’ve spent time reading the Fund’s materials on abortion, family planning, training of midwives, International Guidelines on Sexuality Education.

As I read, I find myself thinking about the Pharisees, and their outrage over perceived violations of the law.

And I think of Jesus, and his compassion for the suffering women of Mark 5.

Maybe it’s time to get past the arguments about gender equality and family planning, and focus on girls, and the women they’ll become: women trapped in a cycle of powerlessness and poverty, or women who know they have value, who dare to learn, and dream.

As I said, I’ll be watching Girl Rising on Wednesday. Join me if you’re in the area.

And be thinking about how to join Jesus in saying “Daughter, be free from your suffering.”

Little girl, rise up.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Blessed to Walk in Love

My preferred way to celebrate Good Friday would be to spend the day in darkness. If I had my way, I’d draw the blinds and spend the day alone.

Good Friday, for me, of all days, is the day to acknowledge the depths of our desolation. What kind of world is this, that calls for the crucifixion of the kindest man that ever lived? Poetic refrains echo in my mind, words of warning, of coming destruction:

White Crucifixion, Marc Chagall, 1938, Paris

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
(Second Coming, William Butler Yeats)

Two thousand years after Christ’s birth, death, resurrection – with all we’ve learned, all we’ve seen, all we’ve been given - we still spend our energies in building better bombs, arguing for more guns, tricking the poor and hungry into buying seed that will lead to more suffering, spending time and money on food that can never satisfy.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
(The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot)

Most days I live in hope, but Good Friday seems the day to stare most deeply into our depravity, to sound out the word “hopeless.”

Beyond hopeless.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

(Eliot, Hollow Men)

For me, Good Friday commemorates the journey of Jesus Christ into the very heart of our darkness: his gathering to himself our betrayals, our outrageous inconsistencies, our dirty secrets, our petty, enduring hatreds, our self-righteous explanations for violence and greed.

The least I can do is travel with him, as much as I’m able, examining my own participation in the pain of the world, my own contributions of selfishness and stupidity, my own deliberate defiance, my complicity in the colossal horrors of our day.

There is much to grieve, much to lament, much to repent of. When I turn in that direction, I can feel the weight of it – the destruction of forests, lakes, rivers in the name of cheaper fossil fuel, ever more electronic tools and toys. The enslavement of a new generation of children, in the name of cheap chocolate and coffee, more tee shirts to stack in our already stuffed closets.

Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under the stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies!
Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!
(Howl, Allen Ginsberg )

Christ is Nailed to the Cross,
Anna Kocher, 2006

I’ve always imagined Jesus, in agony beyond the physical agony of crucifixion, one of the most painful deaths the human imagination has devised. I’ve imagined the emotional pain of betrayal and loss, the deep spiritual pain of seeing, carrying, absorbing all our idolatries, hatreds, desperate violence.

But I’ve been working my way through the beatitudes, and this year, these words stand out:

"Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

I had somehow thought that blessing was somewhere off in the future. Hang in there, because later it will be worth it. Great is your reward in heaven.

But as I've been reading, praying, studying my way through the beatitudes, it's become more and more clear: the blessing described is also now, here, present, immediately available. “Makarious,” that joyful participation in eternity, that deep harmony of love given and received, is available now, as we walk deeper in obedience to God.

Is it possible that Jesus’ hours on the cross were not just hours of suffering, but also hours of joy?

Is it possible he himself was rejoicing even as he struggled for breath and gathered to himself the accumulated darkness of multiplied depravity?

I think of Peter and John, singing in prison, after a painful beating.

And of Stephen, face shining, as he staggered under the weight of his stoning.

In the Good Friday observance of Christ’s seven last words, I’ve often struggled with the only statement recorded in two gospels: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani.” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I’ve seen that as evidence of Jesus’ mental anguish, but have also found it troubling: did God really turn away from his son? Does he turn his back on us? And if God is so holy he can’t look on sin, was Jesus in some way not God as he went to his death?

How to reconcile that loud shout from the cross with verses that say “darkness will be light to me,” or “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ”? Or “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.”

Puzzling over various explanations, I find myself drawn to the idea of “remez”: a rabbinic practice of using a few words of a passage to refer to the entire passage. For any well-trained Jew of his time, Jesus’ cry, “why have you forsaken me?” would have drawn to mind the psalms that deliberate quote introduced: Psalms 22 to 24, the shepherd song trilogy.

In calling those psalms to mind, Jesus would have been calling attention to the very specific prophecies of Psalm 22: the mocking crowd, the pierced hands and feet, the terrible thirst, the casting of lots for garments.

He would have been proclaiming, for all who were listening: “I am that shepherd you’ve been waiting for, the prophecied Messiah.”

And he would have been calling attention to God’s faithfulness in time of trouble.

Crucifixion, Georges Roualt, 1920s, Paris

From Psalm 22:

“He has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.

From Psalm 23:

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,I will fear no evil, for you are with me.

Even while taking on our own sense of distance from God, our own cries of abandonment, our own moments of doubt, Jesus affirmed, through reference to the psalms, his father's unending faithfulness and love, and drew us closer to himself, and his father.

For me, the cross symbolizes the compiled lies, hatred, violence of generations before and after, the futile attempts of the powerful to maintain control, the self-protective withdrawal of those afraid to challenge evil.

Even the word “tree” is symbolic mockery of all that is God-made, good, and beautiful, a misuse of the created tree, reshaped as instrument of death.

Yet the cross symbolizes blessing as well, and belonging, love deeper than I can comprehend, God’s willing acceptance of the worst man can offer, patient forgiveness, extended embrace.

If we want to see what love looks like as it stares evil in the face, we need only look at the cross. It is the cross that shows us the nonviolent love of God, a God who loves enemies so much he dies for them ... for us. It is that cross that makes no sense to the wisdom of this world and that confounds the logic of smart bombs. That triumph of Christ's execution and resurrection was a victory over violence, hatred, sin, and everything ugly in the world. And it is the triumph of the glorious resurrection that fills us with the hope that death is dead -- if only we will let it die.(Shane Claiborne)

As I come to the close of my exploration in blessedness, I pray I will share more deeply in the love shown on the cross, that I will join Christ in such deep compassion that my own safety, comfort, agendas, interests, can be set aside for the good of those still distant.

Like Paul, who carried the forgiveness of Christ through beatings, arrests, and eventual beheading under Nero, and like countless other followers of Christ, forgiving, loving, open-handed in the face of persecution and betrayal, I pray to live out the words repeated in our services every Sunday: