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courage, helpless, Holy Week, lament, loss, Notre Dame, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pain, pray, presence, suffering, The Sophia Center for Spirituality
This morning as I read the psalm of the day (69) on the USCCB website I was reminded of the prayer service that we prepared in December for the feast of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, a prayer of lamentation for the caravan of migrants streaming toward the southern border of the United States. Bereft and sorrowful because of great loss, God’s people are searching for comfort and consolation in the present in the same manner as has been true throughout the ages. This seeking, I realize, can be an inner or outer experience – or both – and I find it again appropriately expressed in the paragraph below that was an introductory reflection for our prayer service in December.
Lament is a tool that God’s people use to navigate pain and suffering. Lament is a vital prayer for the people of God because it enables them to petition for God to help deliver them from distress, suffering and pain. Lament prayer is designed to persuade God to act on the sufferer’s behalf. Lament is often most effective as a communal activity. Reading and reflection are intended to express empathy for people suffering as a result of great loss.
Today the flames that devastated the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris have died out but the reality of the loss as seen in the photos rends our hearts. As was true at our prayer service, I believe that the spontaneous gathering of thousands in the Paris streets – inhabitants and visitors alike – who stood and wept, prayed and sang as the cathedral burned must have felt the power of community in that excruciatingly helpless moment.
On this middle day of Holy Week, I wonder if Jesus felt the lament of the few faithful ones who remained with him at the cross. Can we feel the reality of his suffering as present in the world today and enter in a true and visceral way to stand with those who deserve our presence and courage?
Today, sorrow and lament fill the praying world as ritual attempts in word and song and sometimes even gesture to reach the depth of pain that is recalled to us from across the ages as “the scandal of the cross,” the suffering and death of Jesus. If awake enough, we see this suffering repeated again and again in our own time and know it as a vivid manifestation of the pain body of Christ. In that way it becomes our pain as well since we are not separate but merely different cells in that very real and present body.
Today our Church remembers Mary under the title of “Our Lady of Sorrows.” There are many feasts in our Church calendar honoring Mary but, this year especially, I find this one particularly poignant as images arise of present-day mothers. I see Syrian refugee mothers cradling their hungry and frightened toddlers, then a mother reaching out of a helicopter to fetch her child from the basket that has saved her little one as it saved her from the swirling waters of Hurricane Harvey, then a young mother at the side of her ten-year old child’s hospital bed, then a would-be mother mourning her miscarriage…
In our conversations this weekend about Mary Magdalene and Conscious Love, we have often spoken of the need to surrender to life, letting go of our “small-self” desires in service to the greater good. In our meditation sessions, we let go of any thoughts that arise in order to allow us to be present to the Divine. I found a resonance in Alan Cohen’s reflection for today in his book, A Deep Breath of Life, that seems appropriate to share as we depart from this very valuable group experience. Cohen writes:
I’m thinking about laundry this morning, specifically the necessity of working really hard to get spots off clothes – usually new ones that I’ve just worn for the first or second time. It would be nice to just drop a little bleach on the salad dressing or beet juice or whatever has created the offending stain, but that only means total ruin of the garment. It might have helped the biblical fuller though – the one from the third chapter of Malachi (3:2) where “the one who is to come” will be like the refiner’s fire or like the fuller’s lye. I remember from my childhood that lye soap was the strongest kind, used in the big laundry sink where clothes got really scrubbed on the washboard. It’s a vague memory, blotted out by modern conveniences like a wringer-less washing machine and every kind of spot remover possible to human invention. Our lives have been made easier in lots of ways but it would be unfortunate to lose the meaning of this analogy in Malachi’s prophecy.
I am probably going to sound like a broken record today but in the face of all the “bad news” that greeted me when I turned on my computer this morning, I can’t help it. It would be easy to stay frozen in my rocking chair and figuratively “bury my head in the sand” knowing all the devastation of hurricane Matthew thus far in the Caribbean and anticipating “his” arrival in the United States or reading so many e-mails asking prayers for loved ones diagnosed with terminal diseases. I won’t even begin to talk about politics and the state of our nation! For solace I turned to Meg Wheatley. She quoted Sharon Salzberg’s concise dictum that I believe could solve everything if we could just intuit the depth of meaning in it and choose to embrace it fully. Salzberg says:
This morning I’ve been searching unsuccessfully in all my favorite sources for a way to express what I can only describe as the pain of the world – but not a universal pain. There is that, but the sadness/distress that washes over me now is closer to home, residing in Albany, New York, West Virginia and California. It is about fire and flood, the fire appearing on east and west coasts and the floods devastating so many lives in between. “We’ve lost everything” is the refrain from those whose homes are reduced to ash as well as people – young and old – who slog through mud still waiting for word of loved ones who may have been swept away by angry streams or rivers. One cannot help but weep for their pain. At the same time there are images of store and restaurant owners who open their larders to feed the people in their towns who have nothing. Groups form to shovel mud and fold donated clothes for the needy while others come to pray their grief and that of their neighbors.
