Maundy Thursday

Mother, Washing Dishes by Susan Meyers
She rarely made us do it—
we’d clear the table instead—so my sister and I teased
that some day we’d train our children right
and not end up like her, after every meal stuck
with red knuckles, a bleached rag to wipe and wring.
The one chore she spared us: gummy plates
in water greasy and swirling with sloughed peas,
globs of egg and gravy.

Or did she guard her place
at the window? Not wanting to give up the gloss
of the magnolia, the school traffic humming.
Sunset, finches at the feeder. First sightings
of the mail truck at the curb, just after noon,
delivering a note, a card, the least bit of news.

On Holy Thursday, I kneel down on the cool hard floor of the sanctuary before a small basin of water. I take a stranger’s feet into my palms.  With my small hands I tip the heavy pitcher of water, and with great care, I wash these feet. I dry them.

And every year when I am through, I look up at a warm, humble smile. And for a brief, still moment, I offer one too.

I would never want to give that up.

Lying Awake

Recently, I read a beautiful little novel called, “Lying Awake” by Mark Salzman.  The novel chronicles the story of Sr. John of the Cross, a Carmelite nun in a community nestled in the hills surrounding contemporary Los Angeles.  Sr. John’s spiritual poetry has brought her fame in the world outside the monastery walls; this writing talent surfaced with recurring and increasingly intense mystical spells that leave her unconscious after a fit of voracious spiritual writing.   Not long after the novel begins, Sr. John is diagnosed with a form of epilepsy known to result in common symptoms not at all unlike those that have enabled her fame, including tremendous interest in religion and philosophy and rigorous fits of writing.

The good news appears to be that the epilepsy is treatable with a fairly safe surgical procedure.  Free of this illness, Sr. John’s community would be free of the burden of worrying about and caring for Sr. John when these trance-like experiences come over her.  Yet, assent to such a procedure is in no way simple for Sr. John: while the symptomatic mystical writing has brought her fame, it has also, more importantly, given her a consistent, incredibly intimate experience of God’s presence.

Amid her story, any reader is inevitably confronted by the question she faces: If I were in her position, what would I do?  Would I rid myself of these symptoms for the sake of my health and my community—but at the potential cost of losing this feeling of intimacy with God?  Or, would I accept ill health for the sake of this mystical life?

When discussing this book with friends, I have often said that I would choose mysticism.  So much of our lives are spent seeking clarity about the decisions we make, about the convictions we live by—thus, I can only imagine how liberating it would feel to experience the kind of clarity and peace that would accompany this type of mystical intimacy with God.  How could one consciously give that up after experiencing it?

However, one scene from the book made me re-think all that.  On the night when Sr. John must make up her decision, she vows to stay up all night, keeping vigil in the monastery chapel until she finds peace with her choice, one way or the other.  After a few hours in the darkness and quiet, her sisters, one by one, fill the chapel.  Saying nothing, their presence implicitly communicates that they, too, will keep vigil with her until she reaches her decision.  And in reading this, it occurred to me: It is very rare that God gives us the type of mystical clarity that Sr. John experienced for so many years. More often, I think, God gives us each other.

Surely, most of us still long for the sky to open and a divine voice to call out how to live and what to think.  But a longing for this type of clarity, for this type of conviction, can distract us from the gift of God in our midst—the God embodied in those who sit next to us, in word and in silent, as we discern all those small decisions that make up a lifetime. Would I exchange that for mysticism?  Well, maybe—I’ve never experienced the sort of thing that Sr. John did.  But, when I recall the many nights when people have kept vigil with me—around dinner tables, on long walks, over drinks at the bar—I can’t imagine trading that for anything. And I can’t imagine that God wasn’t right there, too.

For these Eyes

When the headlines appear, the questions come in. I’m used to this. And in fact, I’m absolutely flattered by it. It means a lot to me that people take the time to ask for my thoughts about whatever Catholic controversy fills the news on any given day. Sometimes, friends ask me to sort out the esoteric religious jargon for them.  I’m capable of this only sometimes, but I am always honored that folks trust my assessment of the tradition.  Other times, these blessed friends are simply concerned about how I’m dealing with it all. “How are you feeling about this, Jessica. How are you doing?”

In recent weeks when the news spread that the Vatican is making significant strides to revise its handling of clergy sexual abuse cases–all while allegedly linking the severity of these sins to the ordination of women–the questions came in, and I started to ask myself, “How are you feeling about this, Jessica?  How are you doing?“

I couldn’t stop thinking about the story my friend Katie told me the other day. During a recent weekend, she volunteered at a middle school camp for inner city youth run by the Catholic parochial school where she taught for a few years after college. On that Sunday morning, she went to Mass with the students and their teachers in the camp’s quaint wooden chapel. The presider was gracious with the kids, and a good homilist, too. “But the tabernacle there–” she told me.  That’s what got her. “The tabernacle looks just like the boy’s Catholic school down the street. Like the shape of their building.”  I began to smile as she went on.  I delighted in the fact that this friend anticipated the wonder I would share with her as she recounted this experience for me.  ”This is what Catholicism is about, isn’t it? Recognizing Jesus inside an inner city school like that? Like that?  Believing that Jesus dwells with the underprivileged so much that you make a symbol of it with the most important part of your sanctuary?”

I nodded as we savored this moment that captured the best of our Church.  In that small moment, we didn’t have to convince ourselves that we are so blessed to belong to this Church.  We are blessed to have  church that views inner city schools as tabernacles, and tabernacles as inner city schools.  And blessed to be raised in a church that has given us the eyes to see the world in this way, too. “I wish I had moments like that more often,” Katie said. I think she was referring to the tabernacle at the camp, but I was thinking the same thing about the moment we had just shared–that moment of unwavering pride for our faith.

I’ve been telling a lot of people that, for many reasons, I feel sad and disappointed about the recent Vatican stirrings.  And, really, I’m feeling tired of feeling sad and disappointed. But I am also trying to tell a lot of people about my hope. I’m trying to talk about that, too. I’m trying to tell them about the eyes this tradition has afforded me–Katie and me.  Eyes that recognize miraculous transformations in places and people that much of society overlooks. Eyes that see Jesus in the sometimes harsh and unglamorous realities of our cities.  Eyes set on recognizing God’s redemption of our world in any and every place.  Even in our Church.

Just Say the Word

When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering.”  Jesus said to him, “I will go and heal him.”  The centurion replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes… (Matthew 8:5-8)

There are many things about this section of scripture that make me squeamish.  In principle, I dislike charges of absolute authority, even as they are ascribed to the human incarnation of an omnipotent God.  I am especially uncomfortable with authority analogies related to the military, or any other institutions that employ violence as a means of enforcement, for that matter.  There is something about the centurion’s claim of unworthiness that gets me, too.  Perhaps I’ve seen too many well-intentioned Christians transform “humility” into unproductive guilt.

Despite all this, I cling to that declaration: But just say the word, and my servant will be healed.

This man knew the power of a word.

Jesus responded to the centurion, saying, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would!” I’d like to believe that “Go” was the word with all that power.  I want to believe that because it is often the smallest words that heal me.  Last semester I took a seminar that required students to circulate written reflections on the assigned readings before class. While reading the first reflection paper of the semester, written by male student, I was touched by the care with which he employed one little word. “When one does this, she experiences that…” Every non-specific pronoun he utilized in the essay was gendered female—a stark contrast to the ubiquitous male-gendered pronouns that filled the theological texts we studied all semester. With that little word—“she”—this colleague extended a powerful message: language so often excludes people of your gender, and I am invested in changing that.  This gesture brought a little bit of healing.

Big words and long phrases have power, too.  I keep a stack of blank note cards next to my bed; you will find me frantically reaching for them while reading Nouwen, Teresa of Avila, and Foucault when I have come across a line or a paragraph too precious to forget.  I scribble them down and pin them to the bulletin board hanging on my bedroom wall where they remind me that so many others out there share the truths that I have unearthed in this short life. These are healing words because they remind me that I am not alone in my search for sense and meaning in my strange encounter with this world.

When I think of being “Christlike,” I dream of bringing words that heal.  This is how I make sense of a life of so many books and computer screens. I am searching for the Word.  The Word that heals.

Can the Eucharist Unite Us?

Check out my latest post on Patheos.com, entitled “Can the Eucharist Unite Us?“

Pray for Us

Check out my latest post at From the Pews in the Back, entitled “Pray for Us.”

In Loving Memory of My Catholicism

My heart sank last week as I read Kate’s blog entry, “Done.”  In her testimony about trying to leave Catholicism, she wrote, “I’m feeling these days like I’m in the midst of a breakup, you know, the really horrible kind where you know it isn’t going to work but you want it to so badly that every fifteen minutes you manage to get yourself entirely convinced that it actually can work, only to remember five minutes later why it can’t, only to repeat the cycle over and over and over until it makes you crazy and you can barely remember who you are let alone the reasons why you’re breaking up.”  Kate wondered whether other ex-Catholics had experienced the same heartbreak in their final days with the Church.  I am not one of these ex-Catholics, and honestly, I can barely imagine leaving Catholicism—but to the little extent that I can, I imagine it would feel exactly like a horrifying breakup.

In Lauren Winner’s memoir, Girl Meets God, she recounts her transition from Orthodox Judaism to Anglican Christianity.  Couched among the tales of her various love affairs, the story of Winner’s tumultuous conversion mirrors her romantic relationships with men.  Winner writes of how she found herself consistently enamored by Jesus while persistently fighting against her burgeoning devotion.  In the end, she gave in to the love affair.  I read this book for the first time when I was sixteen—at the age of first love and first heartbreak—and undoubtedly, it gave me a paradigm for understanding my increasing attraction to the Catholicism of my upbringing.  If becoming Catholic was like falling in love, perhaps leaving would feel something like a break-up.

We have rituals for break-ups, for mourning the loss of a lover, a once-constant life companion.  We let ourselves cry.  We call our friends, and they show up, sit on our couches, and hold us as we try to catch our breath, like Kate. We take down pictures and put old letters into shoeboxes that we shove into our closets, perhaps opening them from time to time for grieving. When we have no paradigm for life without that ex-companion, friends tell us to wake up in the morning, to get out of bed, and they promise that someday it will be a little bit easier. Those around us testify to a hopeful future until we believe it.

Later in the day after reading Kate’s blog entry, I sat at dinner with my boyfriend Jack, telling him how I had carried her heavy words with me all day.  Jack leaned forward to speak—then paused. “I have a frank question for you, if I may?” he asked. “I know you don’t think you can leave, Jessica.  But do you ever wonder if you could, maybe some day?”  Jack has stood beside me during Episcopal liturgies where I wept silently, yearning to belong to a community like that—a more egalitarian space where, for instance, a woman could consecrate the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  Afterward, I told him I was crying because I could never imagine leaving the Catholic Church, even in the moments when I want to.  Feeling stuck in my relationship to the Church hurts sometimes—but I have no paradigm for life without the liturgy and people and tradition that I have loved for so long, even with its major imperfections.

“Sometimes I think it’s possible,” I responded.  “But, I think I would need a funeral first.” Jack tilted his head, wearing a confused look.  This was not a clever way of saying I will be Catholic until I die.  It had simply occurred to me, “I would need some sort of ritual. You know, at funerals everyone who loves you gets together, and they celebrate your life with them.  They mourn your absence but they commend you into another space.  At the very least, I think I would need that to leave Catholicism.  To feel okay about it.”

For many people, leaving Catholicism is a courageous decision made in response to the painful circumstances imposed on them by the Church.  Many suffer within Catholicism for many years before they leave, and for many leaving is a concerted effort to salvage Christian faith.  It is not a rejection of it.  More than ever, it is apparent to me that we need a pastoral response for those who need to leave.  We need some way of communicating those messages of condolence and hope that we share with our friends as they mourn the loss of a lover: “It seems that this is the best thing for you right now, even as it hurts,” or simply, “It’s going to be okay.” We need to go sit with them, and listen to the stories of their grief.  We need some way to say, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry…”

It was a friend’s mother who gave me Girl Meets God in high school.  She was raised Catholic, and during her college years she increasingly attended a local Protestant church. She became involved in their ministries, and eventually she found herself identifying with this new community much more than the Catholicism of her upbringing.  One summer she was at a Christian camp with young people from her church, and she befriended a Catholic priest who was also there with a group from his parish.  She told him about her life in the Church, and how she had decided to leave Catholicism for this new Protestant community.  This priest offered to say a prayer with her, one that would mark her departure from Catholicism and her entrance into this other Christian community.  And indeed, their prayer marked this transition for her all those years later.

When she told me this story as a high school student, I thought it was so strange. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would intentionally seek a mark of separation from Catholicism. Excommunication was the only thing I could equate to this type of event, and that is something forced on people—not sought out. But today I wonder what a prayer like that could do for people like Kate, or for many of the people I know and love.  And I wonder what the offer of a prayer like that would do for me.

Silence.

“We don’t need a moment of silence.  There has been too much silence already. I propose noise—a moment of clapping.”

A woman said this to Karen during her recent trip to Honduras. Along with a group of students from Harvard Divinity School, Karen was there to learn from the women of this rural Honduran community whose lives are plagued by rape and murder.  She had proposed a moment of silence to initiate the gathering of local women and foreign students that day, but she learned there was no more tolerance for silence in this community.  For too long violence and abuse has been hushed.

So they clapped.

Increasingly, I am aware of how silence shapes my formation as a young Catholic theologian.  Beginning with my early undergraduate years, I was schooled in the politics of Catholic speech: there are theological statements—even questions—that one simply cannot ask before certain audiences.   Over the years, however, I have learned that with meticulous care, one can find ways to articulate these inquiries in a language that veils its hints of potential “uncertainty” or “disagreement.”  If I break this decorum of speech, even in the nascent phases of my theological career, I fear it may cost me a professorship or a ministry job. I can already name numerous theologians and ministers for whom this is the case.

It is unsettling to recognize the many ways in which I must privately silence myself for the sake of avoiding potential silencing from others.  What kind of theology can happen in this environment? Can I produce relevant theology when I often feel that I cannot outwardly address the probing, courageous questions of my community?  Maybe once I’m tenured.  Can these questions wait twenty years?

For years, the unfolding public recognition of the Church’s orchestrated silencing of clerical sexual abuse victims has shaped my life as a Catholic.  These clergymen stood up and spoke before their congregations week and week—year after year—while their victims sat silently in the pews.  Yesterday in a report on Pope Benedict’s Palm Sunday Homily, the New York Times analyzed what sounded like an implicit response to critics who implicate his guilt in the European abuse scandals.  Granted, the Times reads between the lines of the Pope’s homily, but in the context of his public indictment, his words strike me as a clear attempt to hush his critics: “The pontiff said faith in God helps lead one ‘towards the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.’” The silence continues–and I continue to wonder what kinds of faith development, worship, or social justice work can happen in a church of whispers and hushed voices.

How can a young theologian, situated within her own matrix of silence, speak out against the perpetual silencing that enabled—and continues to enable—the grave injustice of the global clerical abuse crisis and its mismanagement at seemingly every level of church leadership?  My silencing—as a woman, as a lay person, as a theologian and minister—will never amount to the painful silence imposed upon so many abuse victims in our church.  Breaking my silence will not cost me nearly as much either.

I do not know how to speak to our Church right now. In fact, these days I find myself so hurt and angry words feel useless for articulating the magnitude of our situation.  But I know there must be noise. “We don’t need a moment of silence.  There has been too much silence already.”  There must be noise.

Perhaps on Good Friday when I approach the cross of Christ’s suffering with our suffering, there will be no moment of silence.  Perhaps I will do as Jesus did—I will shout. “God, why?”

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I Think God Moves in People

Sometime before midnight on New Years Eve I found myself nuzzled into the living room couch with another friend who studies theology in graduate school.  Amid the dancing, yelling, and clamoring of glasses at the party that surrounded us, she spoke one of the most simple, profound things I had heard about God in a long time.

After describing the details of a rigorous seminar course on prayer she had completed early that month, she said, “You know, I came out with a lot of doubts about whether God works in the world the way we often think God does.  But I do think that God moves in people.”

A poet friend of mine once described the different types of poems she writes.  She identified one kind by describing a visit to a museum when she found herself standing before this particular painting, staring and staring, simply captivated by it at the deepest parts of herself.  She couldn’t walk away.  She had to write a poem about this surprising moment of wonder that simply grabbed her.  She writes these poems about simple, startling moments.  I think God moves in people.

The more theology and philosophy I study, the more confused I am about the Infinite working in the finite. I’m reading Karl Barth and at the moment he is trying to convince me that in my human limitation I do not know God from within.  He says something like, human beings cannot know this wholly-Other God but through the revelation of scripture and the Church.  What to say?  I do not have convincing words for responding to this brilliant theologian at the moment.

But I have wonder:  I have these moments when God moves in me.  And in these moments the finite world may be simply what it is, but something in me is different.  The wonder persists beyond the limits of what I can explain with my rigorous reasoning right now.  I’ll keep trying to put words to it.

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The God Who Was Not There–or Here, Today

“‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ gave way–here is the heart of the story–to ‘But into your hands I commend my spirit.’ Jesus handed himself over to the God who was not there. And found God there.  In trusting the One who was not there, Jesus was resurrected…” –James Carroll, from Practicing Catholic

Sometimes, this is what it feels like to be a Catholic–like handing myself over to nothing.  Handing myself over, but with hope for some future resurrection.

In his autobiography, James Carroll writes the lines quoted above amidst a story about one of his mentors, American poet Allen Tate.  As a young seminarian Carroll visited Tate at his home, finding upon his arrival that one of Tate’s infant children choked and died in his crib only a week earlier.  Tate’s Catholic priest refused the infant a Catholic funeral, as the child died unbaptized and because, according to Tate, the child’s father was a “bad” Catholic.  The young Carroll was dismayed by the circumstances, and did his best to respond to his mentor with compassion and the message of a loving and unceasingly welcoming God.

In this quote, Carroll is telling his friend who God is–who Jesus is.  I can only imagine that Tate, this grieving father, could relate to Carroll’s description of Jesus, for Tate was also a human encountering the absence of God and the difficulty of handing oneself over the to this very real experience of despair.

When I read stories like Tate’s I am angered by the cruelties committed in the name of Catholicism.  I face these representations of the Church, and I think, “God is not there.” –Yet, Catholicism is my faith?

I also read about men and women like Carroll, though, and I remember why I still believe in Catholicism’s resurrection.  I am challenged to believe that God even brings resurrection to places and people that seem to be without God.  I am reminded that I still experience the same strange paradox of Jesus’ experience–and Tate’s experience: I have handed myself over to the God who was not always there–not always in Catholicism.  Yet I still find God there, in Catholicism.

It is comforting to know this strange reality belongs to more than just me.

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