But first a poem...
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Jalaluddin Rumi Translated by Coleman Barks
I was raised lovingly in the Roman Catholic tradition and despite no longer practicing the religion of my youth, I recognize that today is Good Friday and think of it as a day to contemplate death and the victory of love and how it's all tied up together in us, in Earth and throughout time.
But what is the victory of love and how does the image of the suffering Christ play out in my life today? In contemplation I turn to the mystic's tradition of seeing unity in all things.
The mystic's mind sees wholeness-- the beauty and darkness-- and knows intuitively that this means seeing the entirety of life --the good, the bad and the ugly-- both inner and outer as my good friend says.
That and the utter non-dualism of love. But this isn't always easy.
My west coast sister and her family are grieving the loss of a sweet young neighbour to the opioid crisis a few days ago. So many difficult truths. She doesn't know what to do to help the grieving father--how to reach out in this time of social distancing and he, a single dad of an only child, is so alone. She plans to make some soup for him and drop it off.
Isn't this Holy Week's message?
That even the bullied teen who tried drugs for some kind of break from the torment will not be left behind? That his dad and friends can rest in the knowledge that a rock has been turned away for them by the love of others. By soup, by kind words-- but how to fill the gaping hole in that father's heart? And why couldn't the sixteen year old who died have had that suffering rock of rejection turned away for him before he died by percocet laced with fentanyl?
Perhaps these teens and young adults dying every few weeks in my sister's affluent community are the sacrificial lambs? And too, those jailed for dealing the drugs and on and on.
Maybe because society can't see what it has done to generations of young adults (through us all fulfilling our insatiable desires for image, greed, power and intense competition for status coupled with the downright evil corruption of big Pharma) and so these deaths are what it takes to wake people up. Like Covid-19 and the climate crisis to the global community, showing even more clearly to humans that we are in a crisis of spirit and flesh both and how terrifyingly our youth and most vulnerable are affected by these crises.
Perhaps these dying kids are the crucified and the risen Christ both. Except that I find it hard to think they have chosen their own suffering. And I fail to see the risen Christ in their deaths. The suffering Christ yes--but where is the risen Christ?
So I must cast my net wider--is the risen Christ my sister's soup?
The healing balm of nurturing and love in the face of unimaginable pain?
And then I see they are inseparable.
The soup and the suffering.
The dying and the rising up.
The love and the grief.
You and I.
All petals falling from the crown of thorns we each must wear. Oh how my heart breaks.
My sister sends me photos of her flowering shrubs, the wildlife in her yard, her kids, the moon and the other eve she said to me that there is an end to the tunnel--and there is light as well. That there is an end to the Covid-19 lockdown and she can see it nearing there for them on the west coast.
But what of the opiod crisis and climate change and the millions of other ways the world is suffering? And all the while flowers still bloom and migrating birds return in the midst to nest and mate and rear their young...there cannot exist darkness without light or life without death.
We just need eyes to see it.
I sincerely hope that the suffering Christ tunnel of Covid-19 and the opiod crisis and Earth suffering will attune us better to that light of the risen One-ness. By which I mean that I hope the world will have slowed down enough to own its darkness and the light still flickering in its communal heart. Both.
Truly we are of this Earth and we are One. In our birth and dying and the ten thousand little joys and sufferings we live the whole way through. In winter's final splays and spring's new growth and in cycles of moon and tides.
This is, for me, the resurrection story. The ebb and flow of life.
There is a better way forward so long as we have hearts enough to brave it, one compassionate step at a time.
Wishing you much! Jill
This would be a beautiful homily during the Easter triduum