Tag: crucifixion

A death in the neighborhood

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There’s so much more I want to write about the things that go on in the lives of my neighbors and in my own life, but sharing it in short bursts online seems an inappropriate avenue. It would take a book to convey the complexities of all our lives, tangled up as we are in each other’s stories, and to explore all the things I am learning and unlearning in this wild, beautiful, and terrifying place. I intend to write that book someday, after more of the dust has settled and I am able to understand my experiences more clearly than I can today. But for now I’ll have to settle for sharing the soul of what’s on my mind, without sharing the details of the stories that have brought it about.It’s sad and confusing to see a life end with no apparent redemption in the arc of its story.

The bulk of my time and energy since has gone into being with those who are still alive and must carry on, but the suddenness of death in our neighborhood—again—turns my thoughts toward the reality that whether we die unexpectedly or old and boney, there is no surprise in the eventual end of life for each one of us. We are finite creatures, and death is unavoidable. I so often approach life as a project: I plan out the arc of my life, what I will accomplish, where I will go, who I will become. I try to assume control by planning, scheduling, keeping busy. But then I am reminded how quickly grief and loss could change my life completely, stealing away the people I love most, taking away the relationships and routines that make up the day-to-day fabric of my existence. I am sobered by the reality that all of this is beyond my control, and in the end life is not so much what I create for myself as it is what comes to me, and how I choose to respond.

All this meditation on death isn’t intended to be morbid. It’s actually a reflection on life: in light of the impending obliteration of all my worldly ambitions and activity, what is really worth my attention and energy in the meantime? What will remain after that final deconstruction of everything I have sought to accomplish and become? No status, recognition, or accumulation of possessions or material comforts will matter. Only the actions which I join to God’s larger action in the world will last, because God will continue to act in the world after I am gone, just as He was doing before my birth. Joining God in loving, serving, working for justice, and promoting truth is what will continue to matter beyond my lifetime. This is also what grows my own soul, and what prepares me for my continuing journey toward God, beyond the expiration date of this temporary body.

This doesn not mean that our bodies and spirits are entirely separate from one another, or that “spiritual” things are more important than “material” ones—God’s love is the cornerstone of the whole universe, and it’s the basis of everything else that is. In fact, the resurrection that Jesus talks about includes our bodies–scripture talks about God’s plan for healing and restoring the earth and raising us to live again within it, not taking us away to live somewhere else as disembodied spirits. So the warmth of the morning sun on my neck, the chirping of birds in the trees, the steaming cup of coffee in my mug, the laughter that I share with friends, and the gratifying soreness I feel in my muscles after exercise are all good and important things. They are gifts from this loving God who is the author of Life itself, and in whom everything lives, moves, and has its being. Life was God’s idea—sex and good food and sand between our toes.

But the trick to really enjoying all of these material gifts is being able to let them go. Detachment from each of these pleasures as an end in itself is the only way to embrace the Giver himself. It is also the only way that we will be able to experience the full breadth of existence, instead of constantly struggling to avoid suffering, grief, and loss (which are also gifts to us, if we have eyes to see). Spiritual teachers from the time of the Buddha, or probably earlier, have taught that life is suffering, and they have sought to free themselves from that suffering. But Jesus takes things a step further by turning suffering itself into a means of liberation: his suffering and death have transformed those things into sacred tools which can serve our good. Death has no power to destroy us, if the growing weakness and eventual defeat of our bodies gives us the chance to learn at an accelerated pace important that have eluded us throughout our lives. At the moment of death, we are no longer able to maintain our beauty, health, strength, usefulness, or whatever else we used throughout our lives to try to earn love, or to perpetuate the illusion that we were independent and in control. Freed from all these things, we have the chance to learn for the first time that we are loved apart from any of it—loved for ourselves alone.

Paradoxically, the path to authentic life takes us smack-dab through the middle of death. This is the mystery of resurrection: not simply life or death, but crucifixion and rebirth. Life has the final word, God has the final victory… but He has won by way of passing through defeat. This reflection on the transience of my life makes me long to move at last from compulsion to contemplation; from building a life and creating myself to accepting life and surrendering to the process of uncovering the self which God has already created: the one that so often gets lost or obscured behind the images I project to the world, the coping strategies I employ, and the things I strive to do or become.

 

Easter

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“The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio

 

In my little corner of the world, I see a lot of suffering and death. I spend a lot more time contemplating the crucifixion and that silent Saturday when Jesus remained in the tomb than I ever used to in the West. It’s easier to believe in victory and new life when most of the people around you are doing well, and most of the stories you know turn out OK. It’s harder to keep faith in resurrection when most of the people around you aren’t doing OK; when they’re doing horrible things to each other and having horrible things done to them. Sometimes you lose track of the plot line when bad things happen one after another with no resolution and no catharsis, just banal disappointments that drip out like a leaky faucet.These days I often find myself walking through thin places between hope and despair, and the question is unresolved in my mind as to whether or not anything we do is worth it; whether all will be made well in the end. But there is room for all of that in faith—there has to be. Without that kind of desperation, what is the meaning of hope?

These last few days as I have contemplated the story of Jesus—his tragic death, his closest friends betraying and abandoning him, his anguished voice wondering aloud from the cross whether God is still with him in the midst of so much pain—something new has come into focus for me for the first time:

The resurrection was a surprise.

Everyone, everyone had given up on Jesus. His closest friends and followers whom he had literally spent years teaching and preparing for this moment. He had told them so many times that he would suffer and die, but that wouldn’t be the end, and they couldn’t grasp it. When he was tortured and killed by the state and the religious institution they were still fumbling around in the dark for what the kingdom meant and how it was possible that their fearless leader could have failed to accomplish his mission. He was dead and gone, and they thought it was over. The women mourned him and prepared spices to pay their last respects; the men returned to their fishing nets, disillusioned.

I think it was only their total despair which catalyzed such unbelievable joy when these disillusioned followers discovered Jesus alive, and it was this tangible experience of moving through death and loss to new life that made their faith so strong from that point onward. If they had confidently expected his triumphant return all along, then perhaps they wouldn’t have had a real sense of being delivered from any real danger or pain. Real suffering brings questions to the surface, and even to the lips of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So Jesus didn’t hold his friends’ doubt against them. Peter, poor Peter who had denied his best friend and teacher three times to save his own skin: Jesus cooks him breakfast on the beach, reinstates him, and entrusts him with the future of his movement (“On this rock I will build my church…”). There is resurrection in Peter’s own heart as Jesus forgives him and Peter learns to trust himself again. Later this former turncoat will be faithful to the point of death on a cross himself.

I often feel overwhelmed by the current state of the world, and I wonder how the kingdom can ever come. I find it hard to imagine history somehow rolling on from the present into heaven on earth. But I read this story and I realize that there is a place in the Easter narrative for the grief and confusion I so often feel. For Peter and the others, there was as little continuity between their experience of absolute loss on Friday and absolute joy on Sunday as there is between my current experience of the impoverished, suffering world as it is and the world as it will be when it is restored.

I am not lost. I am seeing Saturday. But Sunday morning will come, when I least expect it.

And it does come, even now—in those little signs of hope, tiny as mustard seeds, that spring up through the ground of despair. We see resurrection in our relationships when we offer forgiveness after conflict seems to have killed off affection and friendship, or when we creatively imagine new possibilities out of apparent failures. We catch a glimpse of the kingdom when we share a joyful meal with people of different languages, cultures, and religions, choosing to build community instead of walls. There is resurrection in my own heart when old wounds are bandaged and they heal. There is hope when we sow and sow and sow, and then one seed (maybe one in a hundred) bursts into life, we know not how.

I wrote last year about hope being a candle in the dark, never quite filling the room but never ceasing to burn either. Sometimes hope still feels like a lonely candle, but other times I get the sense that what I’m seeing is not just a small flame in the darkness, but rather slivers of a huge light behind everything that’s merely been painted over with black. Perhaps as we work to uncover more and more, we discover that the darkness, convincing as it may be, is what is surface-level and temporary, while the light is what is real and permanent and strong.

May we have the courage to suffer with Christ in the people around us.

May we have the faith to live in hope of new life,

the eyes to see it coming,

and the joy of helping to bring it into being.

May we practice resurrection in our lives.

Comfortable Crucifixion 

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Picture

art by Banksy
          I’ve been contemplating this image a lot since I came across it a few weeks ago, thinking of how poignant it is for the nails in Jesus’ hands to be represented by shopping bags; for the sin nailing him to the cross to be the greed and excess of consumerism.  More specifically, of my consumption.

Living “simply” doesn’t mean I’ve conquered that internal drive to pursue comfort by acquiring more. I realized the other day that when I think of my home country, for example, what often come to mind are the products that I miss. Jamba Juice. Peppermint mochas from Starbucks. Scented body wash. Comfortable furniture. And I suppose that’s not bad in itself, but why are those the things that come to mind when I’m feeling tired and discouraged? The other day I thought about wandering around the supermarket in my hometown and just the idea of leisurely browsing aisle after aisle of specialty foods in air-conditioned comfort with endless options and variety and a massive supply that never runs out sounded so good to me. I found myself daydreaming about just walking around there, not even buying anything.  I mean, I like eating hummus and cheese and Fritos and all those things you just can’t get easily in Northern India, but even just shopping for them sounds comforting and familiar. The idea of the glossy lights and colors of the cosmetics section brings up similar feelings, even though I hardly own any makeup and am usually turned off by all of the advertising when I’m actually near it.

The Kingdom of God that Jesus is constantly talking about in the Gospels encompasses God’s vision for humanity to enjoy freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and inclusion in a community of love. In first century Palestine, the powers of evil which killed Jesus were embodied in the brute force of Rome and the religious authority of the Pharisees, whose legalistic, judgmental, and top-down religious system was set against everything his Kingdom stood for. In the same way, perhaps a big part of the Empire and religious establishment of our day is the soulless system of materialism, consumption, and ever-increasing wealth in which we are all enmeshed in some way or another, whether we realize it or not. Globally, this system values profits and products over people, exploits the poor and vulnerable with low wages and unsafe working conditions to create cheap, mass-produced commodities for the wealthy, and often involves the degradation of the natural world in order to create these disposable items that will one day become trash in a landfill.

And this impersonal system of commerce not only harms our neighbors—it eats away at our own souls as well.  We consume to feel beautiful, important, safe, impressive, comforted, or just distracted from the needs of the world and the inner turmoil of our souls.  Maybe we even pursue more and more external stimuli and experiences and possessions in order to be distracted from the gaping fear that if we ever stopped to look too deeply within ourselves we might find that we are not who we present ourselves to be, or—worse— that there is nothing of substance within us at all.  There are a lot of buoyant memories from my younger years of happily buying a new outfit or accessory or CD and feeling a sense of fulfillment with the new appearance or experience I was instantly gratified with, but I remember too that none of those times ever felt like the last time I would need another stick of eyeliner or some new music. There was always more out there that I didn’t have, and as trends changed I would inevitably want more or at least something different than what I already had. Seasonal fashion and planned obsolescence and insecurity  in who we are can fuel continuous consumption that makes us feel like we’re on the way to being a happier person by satiating ourselves or achieving a certain image, but we never seem to arrive. I still find this mistaken belief system at work in my heart.

As I consider this unorthodox but rather profound image of Jesus on the cross, the thought strikes me that this carefully-cultivated superficiality needs to be crucified before authentic life can grow in its place.