Palm Sunday: a day to step beyond the barrier

Sunday is Palm Sunday, a day when we begin Holy Week. The church will be full of those seeking that cherished palm. And yet, it should be more. It should be a reminder of life, and how no one, not even Jesus, is exempt from suffering.

The week ahead will not be productive for us unless we find a way to remember it in light of grace and glory. And that light comes from remembering that Jesus' only crime was claiming a union, a oneness with God. This was unheard of by the people of his time. And yet, this is the main message of Jesus: you will be like gods (John 10:34).

Jesus tells us we can be so filled with the spirit of the Divine as to be transformed. And is that not the purpose and intent of Holy Week? To remember that no matter what we suffer, Jesus has in some way suffered the same with us? He was not content to "know" suffering intellectually. He accepted the kinds of suffering he knew we would experience: rejection, misunderstandings, loneliness, betrayal, mental anguish, physical pain. He wanted us to be able to look at him and say, "I can talk to Jesus about this. He will understand."

And just as Jesus accepted suffering such as we endure, he reminds us we can take on Divinity. "The Father and I are one." he exclaims in John 10:30. Why else would this upcoming week be called Holy, except to demonstrate how pain and sorrow do not have the last word, but we who know not to let it destroy us can take it one step further, to breaking the barrier of self and stepping into transformation.

Teach us to pray

One of the most interesting lines in scripture are the words of Jesus disciples, "Lord, teach us how to pray." They had the whole Jewish cycle of prayer, they had the law, they had the customs of their day. They had the temple, the rabbis, the priests. Yet, they wanted Jesus to teach them to pray. Why? I think that when the disciples saw Jesus pray, it was different, he was different. They wanted to know what he was saying in prayer that caused him to experience the Father in a way that was real and tangible.

Simon Tugwell says when we come to God, it is not to force our moods or our interests onto God, but to receive God's interests and to let God, in a sense, share moods with us...

Is that not prayer? Is it not a time when we become aware that God has approached us. Is not this what caused the disciples to ask Jesus about his prayer? He became different. They wanted to too.

Helen Waddell writes in her introduction to the Desert Fathers, The truth is that to look for the secret of the Desert under any form of words is to lose one's pains. They [desert Abbas and Ammas] are seldom eloquent: but---their every gesture is pregnant.

Pregnant with what?  With the power of prayer. Their power came from letting prayer transform them. Even as it transformed Jesus. Even as it transforms you and me.

Stepping out of time and into the past

I love sunrises and sunsets. It's the time of day when the sun weakens and becomes vulnerable, so that we see what we could not see in the bright light of day. As the sun's rays shatters, they break open, revealing a myriad of brilliant colors. Those same shattered rays stretch far across the horizon, as though they must touch land and sea, clouds and stars and moon before being put out. Amazing. We actually see the most glorious part of the sun when it is at its weakest point.

Holy Week is like that. It's the time when Jesus' life went on display, and the words of Jesus were stretched for all to see: shadows and darkness, brilliant colors of blood and bruising, bread and wine, palms and thorns, cross and garments. It is the time the weakness of Jesus appears, Jesus being vulnerable, being wounded, dying. It is the sunset of Jesus' life.

If you would see the glory of God, find a way to step out of time and into the past, I encourage you to find a place that celebrates the many ceremonies that commemorate Holy Week. Start with Palm Sunday, a day that begins with a triumphal procession and ends with the reading of the Passion. 

Better yet, take time to sit with the Gospels and read the Passion account for yourself. Let the sunset of Jesus bring rays of hope to your life. Let the life of Jesus be broken open for you, so that you may see the glory of God, and find God's healing rays.

Life is not a tragedy

Life is not a tragedy, writes L Giussani. Tragedy is what makes everything amount to nothing. Yes, life is a drama. It is dramatic because it is the relationship between our I and the You of God, our I that must follow the steps which God indicates. (343)

If only we could remember that when we have thoughts of defeat, worthlessness, and loss; when we feel that what I am going through, my disappointments, my discouragement, my failures makes life amount to nothing.

No better reflection could prepare us for Holy Week. Who, more than anyone, could have thought this way? Jesus. Three years of training his disciples, and they run when he needs them most. Three years of drawing unimaginable crowds, and they turn on him in his time of need. All the preparation, all the prophecies about Jesus and his destiny come to naught. And Jesus prays, "Father, remove this cup from me!" 

But God did not. And Jesus had to experience defeat, betrayal, isolation, public humiliation and death.

And we celebrate this week with great ceremony. Why? Because life is not a tragedy. For Jesus, all the trials of this week did not make him forget the relationship between our I and the You of God. It is Jesus going through the suffering of Holy Week that teaches us the value to be found in such things.

Tragedy is what makes everything amount to nothing. Let me not think in those terms. Let me rather believe I have something more, that defeat is only defeat if I forget the I and the You of God.

The journey

In our age of literacy, we tend to put a great deal of stock in the written word. But do you ever wonder why Jesus never wrote anything down for us to read? He spoke volumes to his disciples. But he never used any of his time to make a written testament, something for them to treasure, something for them to keep in their pocket and refer back to time and time again. Why?

I think it is because of our tendency to become attached to such things, to hold on to a word rather than to a concept. Even today, Christians who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus so often get stuck on a scripture verse, get set in stone, get very un-Christ-like in holding on to the meaning they want it to have.

I think this is because we crave permanency and security. We do not want to continue digging for the hidden meaning. We do not want to continue to journey forward into the unknown. It can become tiresome, even for those who accept the concept of life as journey.

The bible tells us Jesus roamed about without a place to lay his head. In our own lives, we too must accept our Christian life as one where we never allow ourselves the luxury of settling, but continue to dig into the mystery.

We will find continued life in it.

The Prodigal

Sometimes when I hear familiar passages from the Gospels, I think we've got it all wrong. For example, take the story of the Prodigal Son. It seems pretty straightforward. Squander your livelihood, and you'll end up crawling back begging for forgiveness.

Yet, I do not think that is the real interpretation we should get. The story is really about each one of us, how God gives us an inheritance and sets us free to follow the desires of our hearts.  The message is not sinner come crawling home, but God who understands. For who who of us, in our efforts at life, gets it right the first time? If the prodigal had not gone away and seen life from a different perspective, he would never have come to really know his father. Knowing that father took the honestly of acknowledging he'd made a mistake. And as the story so dramatically portrays, the Father didn't love him less for that, but more.

I sometimes think our tidied up religion keeps us from seeing the reality of life. We cannot live within a structure that keeps us from all harm. That isn't living; that is slavery. To venture forth means to deal with life as it really is, without pretense or false virtue. We will be robbed, we will be a victim at some point, and we will also betray our own best selves. But that is not the end of story (like time now to crawl back and beg). That is part of our journey.

I know only too many who, for fear of making a mistake, continue in a false life, where expectations can be met, and no surprise will throw them off guard. Yet, they are the most unhappy people I know.

The prodigal son took a chance at life. And in the end, he grew. What am I willing to chance for spiritual growth?

Mystical prayer

In his book Discovering the Hidden Reality: A Journey Into Christian Mystical Prayer, George Maloney writes: Our culture feeds us with the idea that we can do anything that we set our minds to do. In the time of St. Augustine, this concept was called "Pelagianism." 

Maloney goes on to explain how such a concept keeps us always busy about "doing" things, so that silence, especially the silence needed for mystical prayer, not only becomes foreign to us, it actually frightens us. Such attitudes seep into our way of praying. We want it to be active, to be asking, to be fingering, to be vocal. We are not good at sitting in the presence of God.

Mystical prayer requires that stillness and silence, the ability to gaze at God so as to learn his goodness. It doesn't so much ask God for gifts or plan great deeds for God. It consists more of openness, listening, waiting and wanting God.

Maloney writes further: There is a subtle type of pharisaism that uses God as a static object who will flood us with consolations and a feeling of a good conscience. What we fail to see is that we have gradually lost the willingness to take the wild risks of Moses and the Israelites as they followed God for forty years in the dry and threatening desert.

Perhaps that is why we do not step out of the crowd of believers. We have forgotten the practice of mystical prayer, and the power it offers. Let us bring it back. Otherwise, we shall give up at the desert's edge, without even entering upon the long journey.