My dear spirit-friend:
The writing during Holy Week begins to find me at different times each year, with different nudges, Nudges. This year has involved three I want to name before diving into my "What does resurrection mean to me today?" musings. A dear friend from Canada is turning 40 this September, so she wrote me a handwritten letter (4 pages long!), inviting reflections on a variety of topics. One prompt was to remember my 40th birthday, with any insights from it. What a gift it was for me to reflect on that with her--my Upper West Side Jewish Immersion Experience, visiting you and your family, your communities, given we'd just finished teaching the Wisdom Formation course. [Long prose, but if you're curious, here.] Second, Brian and I received a sweet note from Brad Friday morning, which is not unusual. We often touch base on our holidays, with a nod or a card or whatever. But this time, he asked us to reflect with him on Good Friday, if we were willing. I was already 5 pages into this week's writings, but this request shifted my attention a little. I shared with him this Holy Week practice so important to me, to give him context, even as I cloaked you, personally. Not sure why, but I felt protective of this space, for myself, for how this is our thing, yours and mine.
[My note to him: I was moved by your note, by your invitation this morning. No reason to have ever mentioned it, but I've long had an annual practice of reflecting on "What does resurrection mean to me now?" It began over 15 years ago, with a dream where I was sitting at table, talking with a Buddhist lama and a Jewish spirit-friend I'd just met. "I don't even know what resurrection even means anymore!" I exclaimed with some frustration. Which is when I woke up. Each year, ever since, I've asked and mused on the question for Easter morning--sometimes intimate, sometimes professionally-tinged and blog-worthy. Sometimes it's a bit each day--Maundy Thursday through Easter morning--sometimes it's just some paragraphs about the whole week/day/season. This note is just to you, as I rarely share my words with Brian. He and I are in such different spaces, as you know, though I do share orally with him, what seems to rise as share-able. Usually after he's had a stiff drink, up on the shore/Grand Marais, given his poor churchman's soul rarely knows what to do with me. :):):) The Good Friday musings for this year are pasted in below.]
The third thing was then sitting with an old spirit-friend who I'd lost track of through Covid and life, but with whom I have since reconnected: Mary Reaman is her name. Our conversation brought the Unseen Song back into my awareness, and I've not been able to stop listening to it. It's been the soundtrack of what's emerging for me here...
I think I’m too Jewish to be Christian (as understood today) and too Christian to be anything else.
Jesus, the name above all names, so I’ve been shaped to hear, to know.
Jesus, the one who emptied himself–though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited (Phillipians 2:5-9).
Jesus, the One who I suspect would be dumbfounded today with what we’ve created in his name, in the Church, outside of the Church.
I have done my level best to hold the both/and Jesus models in his Person, in his life-death resurrection, yet this year, I find myself wondering if my need to reconcile who he is to me, for me, is not the very attachment it is time for me to release…? Not releasing him. Not releasing what I know to be true within Christian wisdom streams. But beginning to encourage it all as path, not proclamation; pointing forth, not rehearsal for some future reconciliation. [It strikes me as significant that the substantial transition my own institution is undergoing is relevant here. For over a decade, the current Dean has inspired community able to hold both/ands in relationship despite polarizations and even a denominational schism. The current Board’s inability to breathe into this vision has now led to the Dean’s departure to become President of another seminary (Asbury Seminary). The both/and work I have always been about now seems to have no immediate context of community-lived. Post-election, I have less energy for both/and too. Not surprisingly, then, here we are in Holy Week, the spiritual-soil-sample of where I’m feeling Led…Perhaps my both/and work is done?]
Brian became on fire this spring as he preached through the Letter to the Hebrews for his congregation, for the season of Lent. The message he received? That atonement does not actually center on the Crucifixion, as so much Christian theology idolizes it, but on the Ascension. On the offering of Life back into Life that every Israelite priest would recognize in Temple observance. It’s not about the blood, in other words, but the Life that blood signifies. Brian came to Life himself with the awareness, the excitement in him in this new learning for him. While I didn’t draw Brian’s attention to it, I had already learned the offering of Life back into Life as I prayed the Rosary with the Way of the Rose community. I had already learned the cyclical nature of life into death into new life, a pinnacle reached when the Queen of Heaven receives her crown but which only continues to live as the Jesus story begins again. And again. Then again.
More and more of my own visceral receivings, seekings, have breathed in this awareness that resurrection is not actually unnatural, but a divinely configured reality within what Cynthia Bourgeault named (for me) the Imaginal Realm, in the overlap of worlds in which energy and materiality dance. I no longer need one specific Resurrection, embodied in one man 2000 years ago, to drop my jaw with wonder at the spiritual mysteries, enchanted worlds within which we catch glimpses of Connection, Communion that can never be undone. Only changed. Never lost. None of which requires me to deny the embodied resurrection of this one man, 2000 years ago. It simply places this Wonder alongside named and unnamed Wonders, some of which I’ve been blessed to experience, most of which, I only catch the Glimpses Given me. But such an observation suggests I’m more Jewish than Christian, in a traditional sense.
The primary yearning in my life right now is to live in as enchanted–re-enchanted–a world as I can withstand, as I can imagine. I don’t doubt the challenge of this, given my primary soul partner (an Enneagram Six, governed by anxiety and fears of poverty) has made choices defined almost completely by the ecclesial worlds in which he now has standing, status. [Which is not to say he’s shallow or solely ego-driven or whatever, but he is one less adept at adventure and risk, is all. His maven-competence with history means that he attends almost entirely in seeing the depraved or concrete parts of our worlds he can imagine as grounded in what has come before. I am not burdened by that, except through him!] I am hungry for a transformed world, a world with more hope and possibility, however foolishly postured. My Outlander obsession drove me to re-listen to my birth-chart interpretation, given nearly 16 years ago now. I wanted to know if one of the previous lives this interpreter told me was in the Scottish highlands. [No, if you put stock in such things. One in Germany interested me, of course, having done all my dissertation work in a similar era, on Hildegard of Bingen. And no, it wasn’t that I was Hildegard, but simply a young woman with avid religious yearnings, ripped out of a convent for political purposes by her own father, used as a political pawn for things she didn’t see in time. But who knows? I certainly smile at the presumptions here…!] I’m also immersed in the Wilde Grove series of novels, set in the just-post-Covid world, England, with The Grove–a pre-Christian monastic community that Christians would fear and call pagan–and its symbiotic partner, Wellsford Church–an Anglican parish, whose rector has just arrived, startled now that she can see the dead. Morghan, the Lady of the Grove, and Winsome Clarke, the rector, become friends and companions in shepherding the dead safely to their Rest. But the characters are compelling, with an expansive “the veil is dropping between the Worlds” kind of worldview. Which I find so compelling right now.
I seem to be living in this week as an Easter Portal, yes, but not in the traditionally liturgical significance I’ve known for so long. I have journeyed with Mary Magdalene in a shamanic journey led by Cissi Williams (in England), witnessing so much of the Passion Week in my own life, the many ways in which I crucify others, myself, again and again. To sit with the innumerable ways I fail to love deeply–my soul-partner, my folks, my sister, my colleagues, those unknown to me–and to really feel that death-dealing energy within me. To allow it. To release it into the hands, the energies, of Holy Helpers wiser and more adept than I. It met my need to bring this story closer to Home, closer to the ones I know and do love, however imperfectly.
Which I realize is more of what I yearn for… To claw our attentions away from this one heroic self-sacrificial figure, so to bring our hearts–our attentions–back to spaces in between us all, immersed in our real humanity, shared in all its ugliness and beauty. Scripture, worship, Jesus…all has seemed to become idolatrous, distracting, deadening. Preventing us from feeling, from remembering clearly, from knowing all the interconnection we refuse in our perceived and real separations. Preventing Christians from actually being grounded in the historic tradition, which posits a Trinity, a relationality so complicated and paradoxical that no one could truly define it all. My year’s work has been coming to terms with this energetic reality, this Force or Flow that seems to never let me go, as a renewed and renewing trinitarianism, grounded in the community led by my elders of faith but not confined nor determined by it, them. The continuity matters to me. I am not separate from “my root tradition,” but deeply grounded within it, pointing to what I’ve been given to see, to feel, to know within my woman’s body. I seek not legitimation from others, validating my experiences, but I do seek collaboration, co-creation, participation in imagining What Could Be, were we to move from interconnection instead of separation, Life instead of fear of Death we proclaim is broken, so to receive liberation from our fear.
I think I’m too Jewish to be Christian (as understood today) and too Christian to be anything else. (Part II)
Not to move into cliche or to make light of the sh*tshow that is today’s inhumanity to humanity, but this year’s Good Friday brings me a vastly different message, Invitation, than I’ve entertained before. What we attend to, we create more of. Christianity’s obsessive focus upon the excruciating suffering of one man has been an attempt to give meaning and purpose to senseless suffering, to proclaim Good News of Salvation through the heroic self-surrender of a God-Man. My conscious feminine spidey-sense simply doesn’t buy it anymore, but has no interest in arguing about it. What we attend to, we create more of. What are we creating most today, collectively? Senseless suffering. What faith might it require to attend to Life first, to interconnection first, to how we are one another, first? More than religious traditions can inspire or imagine.
Which is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, by any means, but simply to begin to make a case for what’s been growing in me for weeks, months: this restless yearning for a world way more enchanted and mysterious than the one(s) I’m living in in day job(s), even in my own home, overwhelmed by church as it always is by this time in Lent, Holy Week, two days before blessed time away. My sense of faith has vastly changed, though I will argue it's actually more true to my tradition than what we've been taught for centuries. And then I was returned to a song yesterday that found me about a year ago. Unseen Song, by Samara Jade. Worth a listen, to feel into what is to come here… I am hearing this Unseen Song everywhere these days...
Good Friday for me hasn’t been about the passion of Jesus for years now. Jesus has become an idol for most Christians I encounter [which is what makes me more Jewish than Christian today]. I remember when the emotional import of the crucifixion landed in me, probably 2008 or 2009, after a rabbinic Jew came into my life as spirit-friend across the distances. I was sitting in the downtown cathedral church, Westminster Presbyterian Church, next to Brian, the noon Good Friday service he and I could attend together as participants, not leaders. The jolt of awareness landed in my body, what it might have felt like to see one’s teacher, one’s friend, up on the cross. I had a face and a name now, of a Jewish friend and teacher, co-learner. Deep belly sobs erupted out of me, which I attempted to swallow, keep quiet. The liturgy shifted ever after for me that day, to the connections with spirit-friends utterly disregarded, violently refused, to the interconnection refused between spirit-beings, to the preferences for an objectified suffering of one man purported to save us from our sin. I remember thinking what a literate-minded, body-dissociated idea such salvation seemed to be. So like the men in my family, in my marriage (though I love them dearly). But what if it need not be like that at all? What if the sacred liturgical purposes I’d lived for so long had been served, now needed to be changed for a planet groaning under dissociation, separation and senseless suffering? This move does not argue with the liturgical significance, in other words, but simply shows it to be insufficient unto the day. And of course it would be.
Don't go to war with the way things are; create alternative realities, I am reminded. That Good Friday, I began to refuse prioritizing tradition(s) over persons, honing my heart-spirit energies into the relationality that literally breathed my life anew. Not just one, to be clear, but numerous, all with a charged energy of spirit I recognized as sacred, even Christ-centered (as my language of the time required). More and more of us are ready for this kind of interconnection, though our faith communities can often make it difficult.
Ever since, I can no longer stomach Christian congregation’s focus on the suffering of this one man, for sacred purposes they’ve been taught, while disregarding the suffering all around us. I’m too Jewish now. I honestly don’t think Jesus would want to be worshipped, would want his crucifixion to become the focal point of well-meaning but misguided patriarchal attempts to bring meaning to life out of death. Human beings deeply grounded in the sacredness of their own bodies, deeply steeped in the Silence interconnected with earth, earthlings, would never think this way. Traditional Christian proclamation here is so very insular, narrow, self-serving for uniqueness in an ironic way.
Praying the rosary with the Way of the Rose community solidified a different awareness for me, in my body, interconnected with earth-earthlings, as the Mysteries move past the crucifixion into resurrection, but not even only resurrection but the Holy Spirit, the Ascension, and the crowning of the Queen of Heaven…before playing out the pre-birth, birth, life, death, resurrection, post-death, new life rhythm all over again. And again. And yet again. Then this spring, Brian becomes on fire in his reading, exegeting, then preaching on the Letter to the Hebrews, realizing that atonement is not centered on the cross but on the ascension. The offering of Life to Life, which any Israelite priest would have recognized. Christians focus on fear and death being broken by a savior, but the priestly work is offering Life to Life. Death is a sideshow, a necessary part of Life. A Life we regularly refuse so to enjoy the stability of a traditioned familiar Sacred. We refuse the Unseen Song, not out of malice or even awareness…
So I listen again and again to the Unseen Song today, recognizing my faith journey, my own priestly work of offering Life to Life, nodding to death but honoring its limited role(s). Listening to silence…til it was no longer silence. Sunset til it was no longer sunset, but a darkened sky filled up with stars. Flowers, no longer flowers, wilting, drooping, dying, turning to seeds and back to flowers. Answers into questions, shining light upon the answers that had been there all along.
Something in this speaks to what I have written before… More and more of my own visceral receivings, seekings, have breathed in an awareness that resurrection is not actually unnatural, but a divinely configured reality within a much more mysterious, energetically unimaginable world–what Cynthia Bourgeault names the Imaginal Realm–with an overlap of worlds in which energy and materiality dance. Only with contemplation, with extended practices of silence into the Great Silence, does such a possibility even become visceral, sensible, plausible. I don’t expect to be perceived well in this new sensibility, knowing. But for my purposes here, I no longer need one specific Resurrection, embodied in one man 2000 years ago, to drop my jaw with wonder at the spiritual mysteries, enchanted worlds within which we catch glimpses of Connection, Communion that can never be undone. Never lost. Only changed. Jesus points to it throughout his recollected words, acts–healing, body-wholeness, communion. I think he’s horrified that he’s become such a holy distraction.
None of which requires me to deny the embodied resurrection of this one man, 2000 years ago. It simply places this Wonder alongside named and unnamed Wonders, some of which I’ve been blessed to experience, most of which, I only catch the Glimpses Given me. My own dance with Jesus has always been one of Path more than his Person, his pointing the way forward more than our proclaiming the Good News some historic community can articulate in words, or Word, now flattened into print and weaponized in fear. Jesus points to the radical invitations to participate in Godde’s creative and redemptive work, to lend one’s body to the energetics of a renewed and renewing Trinitarianism the church will rarely allow in its ecclesial grasping. [Which must serve a purpose, as it’s so prevalent…?] So I shrug my shoulders, trusting and honoring, moving beyond as much of my own grasping as I can into the re-enchanted world that beckons, through suffering, focused laser-like on Life, visceral, deep feeling, grounded in the earth.
It doesn’t make suffering any easier to bear, of course. It actually increases the pain felt, suffering willingly engaged, when you allow yourself to feel the sentience all around you–dissociated, unconscious, conceptually and actually violent in such a potentially beautiful world. So it seems to me, that the stronger work of spirit, of S/spirit, is to tend to Life in all things. Not disregarding or neglecting the forces that distract, that create anxiety and fear. Not to deny the everpresent force of evil, so obvious today, so heart-wrenching and death-dealing. But breathing into body, into Life, into grace, and through them, seeing–imagining, hoping for…? Life. Prioritizing joy, which is both grief/praise.
The grief work required…the energetic practices of transmuting the suffering around you into Light (as in tonglen, Buddhist traditions)...are exhausting even as they are life-giving too. “Freedom on the other side of forgiveness,” as it (and such a phrase) has found me. Completely insensible. Illogical. No less visceral for all that, however.
Tonight, I will dress in my black robe, read two of the scriptural pericopes retelling the Passion of Jesus, then pick up the Christ candle, removing it from the sanctuary in a ritual way, singing acapella “Were You There?” all the way into the fellowship hall. The effect for the congregation is the Light of Christ being moved away from us all, into the mysteries of Holy Saturday, the day in-between, the liminal space of waiting in Christian liturgical traditions celebrating his crucifixion-death, until we proclaim that Death Breaks in Jesus’s saving work. I am happy to offer my voice for such dramatic effect. I even enjoy it.
There is usually a litany honoring Jesus’s crucifixion where the congregational response is “We worship you.” In this, as well as throughout the liturgy, I remain silent throughout the service, but for the pieces I’m asked to lead. I serve in the norms of those in Brian’s community, his norms, in other words, all the while knowing a dissonance with and freedom from all of it. Only Love can sit in the incongruities, I find. I can offer my gifts here (and at United, for that matter), though my own journeying moves further and further down that Road to Emmaus, walking along with an unrecognized but welcome Teacher Whom I feel again and again in my life as spirit-friends connect, share their lives with me, suffer with me in all that today is. Who has led me to this Life I know, beyond forgiveness, in the lesser-dense realms of mercy, compassion, wonder.
Thank Godde I am not required to make sense of any of it, eh? I know my path is one of Feeling. Letting the grief take me, in sobs and tears I often cry without any sense of why or what-for. Allowing any Light within me to transmute all I sense in the sh*tshow of today, any I encounter, particularly those who irritate or anger me. Always my go-to in refused grief. So how to breathe Life, hold space at the Center, look for the next small act lived in a world often only I (and some dear friends, with whom I stay sane) can see. Enough for now. We’ll see what Holy Saturday, Easter morning, instigates…
Holy Saturday
The last several years, I have led worship with Brian in his church in the evening Good Friday service--reading a couple scripture pericopes, then removing the Christ candle from the sanctuary in a formal, liturgical act of slowly leaving the room while singing "Were You There." It's been meaningful to many and I am heartened to be able to serve in this way. The liturgy itself is increasingly problematic for me, given my own faithing distrusts the church's fascination with sacrificial atonement and worship of Jesus, which contradicts his own life relinquishing divinity, finding it not to be exploited. But church does what it does, and I'm there to sing, not worship. Hold reverence, yes. Unbeknownst to me until midway through the service, I saw I was to read Matthew 27's rendition of Jesus's death. I glanced it over, making sure I knew any Hebrew phrases or unfamiliar names.
This perfunctory posture of soul did not prepare me to read the text aloud, however. My scholar self held the text's question just fine: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" but my bodysoul was not prepared to read aloud to my husband's congregation, "...that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Unbidden tears arose. My voice choked. I paused, unable to read further for a time...then got it together enough to finish the reading. My body's memory was sitting on the couch in my living room, reading Cheryl Bridges Johns’s essay in a Brill volume whose name I forget now, her weaving of scripture into the warrant for all that would come in the Pentecostal Feminist writings therein.
On this side of it, I am struck by what a gift it was to be assigned that particular text, that particular liturgy. I winced inside as Brian and others ascribed their own assumptions as to the meaning for me, which for good or ill had little to do with Jesus's death, as horrific as it was. So I sit here at Pettibone Coffee in Dayton, finalizing a summer syllabus in preparation for some sacred days away with Brian up at our Lake Superior 'hermitage' (East Bay Suites, Grand Marais!), wondering at the undesired gift of it all. It was good to say it aloud, in that setting; it was painful that no one around me could receive (last night) what my own experience was, to be seen, witnessed, honored. It’s good to have spirit-friends with whom I can be seen, heard, in what is actually significant for me here.
