Tag: Jesus

Only One Thing is Necessary

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Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.
Luke 10:38-42

          I’ve usually identified with Martha in that famous story—despite her unflattering portrayal as a complaining, somewhat self-righteous woman whose concern for superficial domestic details distracts her from Jesus.  More recently, I even started to question the moral of the story. Fine and well for Mary to soak up Jesus’ wisdom while her responsible, hardworking sister takes care of the rest, but really—what would the three of them have eaten for lunch if both sisters had been passively basking in their guest’s company? To broaden the sweep of my question, exactly who is supposed to take care of starving children and trafficking victims and do something about all of the injustice in the world if we’re all just contemplative hermits or church people who spend more time singing praise choruses and studying the Bible than we do engaging with the world outside our religious enclave? Maybe now a few others can identify with my defense of Martha.

But in response to these questions has come the gentle whisper that perhaps this story is not the simple dichotomy of practical action vs. pious devotion that is often taught, on Sunday school felt boards as well as in sermons intended for adults. I’m beginning to recognize the Mary in myself, too—the part of me that does want to just sit with Jesus and be still and be loved. And it occurs to me that the Mary in the story might have felt the same ambivalence and tinge of guilt while she sat there as I do. Maybe when Martha appealed to Jesus for some help with her “lazy” sister, her accusation tapped into that inner guilt and caused Mary to expect a rebuke from Jesus rather than the reassurance he gave her that she was justified in her stillness.  Perhaps Jesus’ response was a surprise to both sisters, rather than being a rebuke to either of them.

The more I reflect on it, the more I become convinced that the condition of distraction or of presence with Jesus is much more a matter of the heart’s posture than it does with external activity. It’s clear from Jesus’ life and teachings that there is a lot of important action that needs to be engaged in—he spent himself on behalf of the poor, healing the sick and shepherding the harassed crowds of the oppressed. But the equanimity with which he was able to meet both acceptance and rejection; the infinite patience and compassion he demonstrated for the mobs of needy people that followed him wherever he went—all of this leads me to believe that even between his times of obvious solitude, Jesus never really left his Father’s caring embrace. He was somehow fully immersed in the suffering of the world while managing to sit at the feet of God the whole time. He offered love, acceptance, and peace to the people around him out of the vast supply of what God was breathing into him on continual basis.

I feel attracted to this possibility growing in my own life. I hear Jesus’ invitation to sit contentedly with him in the hours of waiting in crowded hospitals and the scenes of violence in my neighborhood as well as in the quiet moments of prayer in the morning with my door closed. Paradoxical as it sounds, I believe Jesus when he says that he has called me to live in this crazy place and to do nothing but sit at his feet. It may take more time of focused sitting before we’re able to multitask with all the buzz of the realm of action and external events, but that inner stillness is the only thing that will sustain our action over time and give it significance. No point in running ourselves into the ground if we’re forgetting the one thing that is necessary.

Blessed are those who mourn

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An oil pastel reflection on Rachel’s lament (Matt. 2:13-18), inspired by recent events in our neighborhood.
          Last month there was a very sad day in our community when two children—a one-month old baby and a two-and-a-half year old boy—died suddenly of fever and diarrhea within hours of each other.

On this particular day, I sat under two white funeral tents, one after the other, staring at two tiny, motionless bodies with perfect, chubby baby faces that looked as though they might only be sleeping. I sat with the grieving mothers and siblings and aunts and grandmothers and felt their sadness seep into me. My husband went with the men twice to the graveyard, helping to carry the bodies which felt much too light, watching over them while the other men went into the mosque to pray namaz on the way to the cemetery, and helping to bury them as each of the men poured one or two handfuls of dirt into the grave. No one will ever know what these children actually died from. Were their mothers anemic during pregnancy? Maybe, but nearly three quarters of poor women in India are. Was it dengue, or some other mosquito-borne illness? It could be—others are dying of that this time of year. Maybe it was as banal as dehydration. But it’s unlikely that their births were ever officially registered, so their deaths won’t even contribute to statistics of child mortality, and there certainly won’t be any information on how to prevent future deaths, if these deaths were indeed preventable. Both mothers have lost children before, in what could only have been similarly baffling circumstances. I used to be confused by my neighbors’ apparent paranoia with taking their kids to the doctor for every little cold and cough, but now I understand—with every illness, no matter how minor, memories of other children remind parents that this could be the fever or the cold or the cough that suddenly ends their child’s life, for reasons that they don’t understand. I have spoken before about poverty of relationship, but poverty is also about lack of information, lack of control…

In this culture, a bed will be carried outside of the house into the alleyway, and the body of the person who has died will be laid on it. Then someone will set up a white tent over the area (for white, rather than black, is the color of death in Asia). The viewing goes on all day, and there is a custom of women sitting together, gathered around the body for hours and hours, not really saying anything to console them but just bearing witness to the grief of the person’s family, crying with them, and being together. Then the men carry the body to the graveyard for burial. When they come to wrap the body and take it away, a wail goes up from the crowd of women and the mourning reaches an inconsolable crescendo. This is the moment of final separation from faces never to be seen again. Sometimes people don’t even own photos of their children.

At first, I was uncomfortable with these rituals that center around crowds and noise when my culture treats grief with such distance and silence. This was not the reverent hush of a funeral home, or the solitary contemplation of a graveside service. Funerals here are crowded, and between all the stories being passed from one person to another about the circumstances surrounding the death, all of the ruckus of the babies on hips and children running around underfoot, and all the vocal lament of those closest to the deceased, funerals here are loud.  But I am coming to understand the value of this type of mourning process. My neighbors are well acquainted with grief, but that doesn’t dull the pain. Sitting together, each is able to enter into the sorrow of the other through the door of her own experiences with loss. No one tries to hide their sadness. Emotional demonstration is accepted and encouraged. There is power in that kind of solidarity where one is sure that all of the people around her truly understand what she is going through and that she is free to express it, because their pain resonates with hers.

I keep thinking of Jesus’ words: “Blessed are those who mourn” (“for they shall be comforted”), and I wonder: what did he mean? Perhaps those who mourn are also connected with God’s heart in an intimate way because God also mourns—She knows what it’s like to lose a son. God knows the grief of watching powerlessly every day as precious children die of preventable disease, violence, and poverty. Perhaps Jesus is also alluding to the coming of his Kingdom in which thing will be set right, people and families and societies will be restored, and life to the fullest will be the rule instead of the exception. But I think part of Jesus’ meaning must have been for right now. Maybe it’s that we can’t receive comfort until we’re willing to face our loss, share our pain with others, and actually go through a process of mourning—no stiff upper lip, no denial or repression. Mourning invites people to come and comfort. It invites community. If this is the case, then I am realizing how often I have missed out on the blessing that is meant to come in the midst of pain.

Confessions of a Violent Pacifist

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“My experience tells me that the Kingdom of God is within us, and that we can realize it not by saying, “Lord, Lord” but by doing His will and His work. If therefore, we wait for the Kingdom to come as something coming from outside, we will be sadly mistaken.”—Mohandas Gandhi, Young India, 12 May 1920“He or she [the nonviolent person] must have a living faith in nonviolence. This is impossible without having a living faith in God. A nonviolent man can do nothing save by the power and grace of God. Without it he won’t have the courage to die without anger, without fear and without retaliation. Such courage comes from the belief that God sits in the hearts of all and that there should be no fear in the presence of God.”   –Gandhi, Harijan, 23 March 1940

“[A]s my contact with real Christians increased, I could see that the Sermon on the Mount was the whole Christianity for him who wanted to live the Christian life… it seems to me that Christianity has yet to be lived.” –Gandhi, as quoted by Stanley Hauerwas in Performing the Faith, 2004
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I feel convicted by the words of Gandhi on the subject of the Sermon on the Mount and the pursuit of the Kingdom of God. It occurs to me that in many ways, the way of Jesus is “yet to be lived” in my own life. I haven’t yet attained the courage to free myself from anger, fear, and desire to retaliate in the face of mistreatment and violence.

I am walking down the side of the road alone. A motorcycle brushes past me from behind, much too close for comfort. Two men look back to stare at me, the foreign woman walking alone. My mind immediately begins to play through the hypothetical situations of what I would have done if they had actually touched me, what I will do if they stop to cause any trouble. My eyes fall to a brick lying in the dust ahead of me. I picture myself picking up the brick and throwing it at them with full force.

In the sea of people leaving the park, a man walks past me in the opposite direction and gropes me. I wheel around and hit him in the back with my water bottle. No physical harm done to him (unfortunately, I think to myself), but I know that it would have been my knuckles into his back if he had been any closer—my reaction was instinctive and automatic.

Crossing the street with my husband on the way to a friend’s house, a man cat-calls at me and proceeds to make animal noises. I’ve had enough of this kind of disrespect. We walk swiftly toward him (and the rest of the day laborers he’s sitting with) and confront him in Hindi: “Are you an animal? What are you making those noises for?” Before I know it, there’s a hand on my shoulder and a middle-class Indian friend who lives nearby is taking my place in front of the man scolding him about his harassment. But before she’s finished, another middle-class man—a total stranger—has noticed this gathering of important-looking people confronting some poor, low-caste riff-raff from the villages and steps forward to hit the man without even knowing what has happened (or caring to ask questions). At this point A. and I both move forward to stop the violence, but it’s too late. Policemen pull up on their motorbikes out of nowhere and similarly enter the fray, beating first and asking question later. We try to pull them back from the man, saying that there’s no need to beat him; nothing has really happened. What began as our confronting a man about his dehumanizing treatment of women has rapidly turned into the wealthy, powerful people ganging up on the poor—who, due to malnutrition and hard manual labor, are literally half their size. The man is suddenly clasping his hands and appealing to me for forgiveness—but of course, this is no heart transformation. Fear has driven out any chance of reason or reflection. He fears for his life under the police officer’s baton–the same batons that threatened women and children at the protest rally a few weeks ago. This was not a situation I had intended to create. I wasn’t happy about it. And I didn’t feel any vindication in my dehumanization being paid for with his. The same system of domination and violence was oppressing us both, and we had both become pawns in its game.

If I don’t commit violent acts but only fantasize about them in my head, then am I really free of violence? And if I don’t use physical force, but seek to demean, insult, and control others with hateful words, then can I really claim to be overcoming evil with good? Am I seeking the transformation of my own heart and the redemption of my enemy when I respond to their aggression in kind?

These stressful situations bring out parts of my inner self that might remain hidden forever in a different environment—say, my hometown. I am forced to face the limits of my faith, and the gap between my stated convictions and my actions and ingrained reflexes. It’s one thing to talk about the Sermon on the Mount. It’s quite another to find creative ways of loving my enemies, especially when they outnumber me or have superior social position and physical strength.  But surely Jesus was aware of these sorts of situations when he charged his hearers to repay evil with good and to love their enemies. I’m sure that Roman soldiers had similar tactics and maybe even similar weapons when they came down on Jewish peasants in occupied Palestine during Jesus’ days.  And even sexual violence is certainly nothing new. But creativity, and self-restraint, and even a willingness to suffer (NOT to be confused with passive acceptance of abuse) certainly take a lot of practice, and ultimately, as Gandhi says, they can be put into practice only “by the power and grace of God.”

I don’t know all of the answers, but in the active “satyagraha” (“the Force which is born of Truth or Love”) resistance that Gandhi taught and practiced—the same method of active-nonviolent resistance that inspired Martin Luther King’s “soul force” movement in our own country fifty years ago—I am challenged to pursue and experiment with Jesus’ teaching under the assumption that it is not only possible, but necessary as the only way to resist the cycles of violence in our world rather than reinforcing and becoming a part of them.

May it not be said of our lives that we have left the way of Jesus untried.

This night is dark

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Delhi rape protests: demonstrators clashing with police in the capital yesterday
          Yesterday Andy and I participated in a protest march here in our city. Earlier this week in Delhi, where we used to live, a young woman was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus, and this horrendous crime—an extreme case of the rape and violence against women which are commonplace in India—has aroused national outrage and a public cry for justice and change. As we marched with our flickering candles in the cold dusk, I thought about the pain and the terror that woman in Delhi had endured, the grief and shock of her family, and the trauma shared by so many other victims who have not been wealthy or important enough to garner the media’s attention when they have lived through (or been killed) in other life-shattering sexual assaults. I thought about all the women in my neighborhood who suffer violence on a regular basis, and yet were not even able to take part in a protest like this because of how strictly controlled their lives are.

Those flickering, vulnerable flames we carried as we marched made me think of Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (“…til he leads justice to victory”). These words are describing Jesus, but lately I am coming to see that Jesus himself is also that bruised reed and that smoldering wick. He is vulnerable and fragile. He himself was stripped and tortured and killed by the powers of evil in his day. Even today, his kingdom comes through the weakness of human beings, often human beings who fail or who are overpowered by the colossal systems of injustice and evil that they oppose. The strange and wonderful thing about those seeds that fall to the ground and die is that their life is actually multiplied and continues (John 12:24)! Those words from Jesus are a wonderful explanation of the paradox of resurrection.

As John chapter 1 says, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.”  The thing I struggle with is that, at least for the present, neither has the light overcome the darkness. Following Jesus is often like a candlelight vigil in the dark. The darkness of an entire room can be lessened by the presence of a single candle.  But the harder you focus on the light the more pitch-black the surrounding darkness seems, and the candle cannot completely dispel the darkness after all—only the sunrise can do that. Jesus’ life was that candle, that flame of truth to light our path through the dark; that sign of hope that the Dawn is coming and we can begin to walk in the light even now. Our lives are that fragile, flickering candle, burning with love through the night with the desperate hope that Day will come and the shadows of violence and evil and confusion will recede once and for all.

There were signs of hope in that protest. Unlike the protest in Delhi going on at the same time, the righteous indignation did not descend into violence: none of the protesters forced their way through blockades, and the police did not fire water cannons and tear gas at us or beat us with their wooden rods.  At the rally, people spoke not only of the need for police to make cities safer for women and for government to actually prosecute rapists and mete out harsher sentences. They spoke also of the need for men and women to begin to address the degradation of women in society at a root level by raising their sons and daughters as equals in the family. There were placards that spoke of how backwards it is to teach women to be careful in order to avoid rape, instead of teaching men not to rape. These messages are closer to addressing the heart level of the matter.

But there were also discouraging placards calling for retributive violence. The anger everyone feels is completely justified, but we were especially disturbed to see men carrying signs that advocated torture and death for rapists. It’s easier to completely dissociate themselves from the “monsters” who have done this than to acknowledge their common humanity—and to have the chilling realization that those roots of selfishness and lust which grew into this savage act of brutality are lurking in their own hearts, too.

We are still waiting for the dawn. In a society where domestic violence, rape, commercial sexual exploitation, and routine sexual harassment of women are a virtual pandemic, it would be more useful for men to examine their own role in creating this unsafe atmosphere for women than to demonize the few men who have acted out in an extreme way. As long as women are objectified for male consumption, as long as their bodies are turned into sexual commodities, and as long as they are denied equal status in marriage and the family, we can’t honestly claim to be surprised by horrific rapes like the one that has turned India upside-down this week. But we raise our candles and we renew our commitment to throw our lot in with the Bruised Reed who could not be broken, and the Smoldering Wick who lit the world on fire.

Religious Druggery 

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The following poem is from our friend Kristin Jack.  He and his family lived in Cambodia for 17 years.
We have turned the teachings of Jesus
into a religion,
living words into opium.
We have turned a blasphemous prophet
into a harmless sacrament
that comforts and confirms:
we are druggists,
who have made Jesus safe.

We have taken a table,
a love feast spread
so that zealot and harlot,
leper and lunatic,
could be welcomed and fed,
and turned it into
unearthly symbol
of wafer and thimble
for the righteous instead.

We have taken a cross,
clotted rack of brutality
(electric chair built
to burn heretic and radical)
and crafted it into
pop fashion accessory.
We are publicists and anesthetists
who have turned this Jesus
into someone respectable:
a pillar of the community,
a seal of approval.

We are druggists and alchemists
who have turned his blood into water
(thin and insipid and easy to swallow)

we have taken the food of the prophets,
the poets, the revolutionaries,
we have taken living bread,
words that burned with holy rage,


and turned them into
pap for the pious,
pills for the nervous,
and homilies for the dead.

revolutionary Jesus