Our Lady of Sorrows

It’s one of those statutes destined to drive non-Catholics a little batty. Bigger than life size, extravagant in detail and anguish, Simeon’s prophecy to Mary given flesh and steel.  Something to contemplate this Feast of the Seven Sorrows.

One thing that surprises my Protestant brethren is my statement, oft repeated and heartfelt, that had the Real Presence not been enough to bring me into the Church, her teaching on suffering would be.  It’s important to come to grips with suffering—there is so much of it in the world.  While I might like a world that doesn’t suffer, it seems I have not been given one.  And the usual explanations of suffering as punishment or lesson are hard for me to stomach, insufficient in a world where evil is so evident and the innocent suffer far more than the guilty. There is a clear mismatch of punished and punishment if that's the operating theory; and the evil seem so hard to educate.

That is, of course, why the crucifix is front and center in our churches.  The moment of our redemption was the otherwise senseless death of the Innocent at the hands of the guilty.  There’s a lot of that around these days. 

Overwhelmed by such things some time ago, I asked Him of the Impossible Penances why it is that I have escaped any significant hardship or suffering.

Luck of the draw.

I suppose so.  My faith hasn’t been tested in any real way.  Not that I am asking it to be.  It’s not up to any real test; not sure I can handle it.  How do you keep faith after enduring such brutal things, or seeing them up close and personal?

If your worldview is that such things ought not happen, I suppose you don’t.  But if your worldview is that such things do happen, it’s possible.

Not only do such things happen, it seems that they are programmed into the very fabric of this world.  I was a medical examiner  and I know that truth; I’ve seen it at one remove if I have not lived it firsthand.  Sometimes I look at the crucifix and rather than just than a price paid, I see a passion demonstrated and endured: the lengths God will go to in order to be with His people.  What He endures out of love, to remind us that He is with us, never to abandon us, if we only recognize Him.  

Mary had a long time to ponder Simeon’s prophecy.  I suppose she might have had some instant, supernatural understanding and acceptance, but if she did, she’s not the role model I need.  I need a mother who felt the creeping anguish, the uncertainty, the unfairness, the confusion, perhaps even the anger that comes from watching a loved one misunderstood, ridiculed, betrayed, abandoned, and condemned to die miserably and not being able to change that fact or exchange places.  I need a mother who felt every single moment of the terror and the heartbreak and trusted anyway—not because she knew but because she kept faith in world that is all too obviously unfair and tragic and senseless.  I need a mother  who understood that the world is the way it is and because she did, and kept faith, could follow her Son wherever He went, even to Calvary, where is was his passion to die and hers to live.    

How could she stand beneath the cross and watch her son’s anguish?  Then again, how could she not?  The paradox of love: unspeakable anguish and unbreakable connections.  The mystery of suffering, by which we can, if we accept what is rather wasting our hearts than longing for what we think ought to be, will bring us to the foot of the cross, to the moment of our very redemption by Love.

Catholics—who seem to have a devotion for everything—have a Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows: Simeon’s Prophecy, the Flight into Egypt, the Loss of Jesus in the Temple, the Meeting on the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, Receiving Jesus from the Cross, and the Entombment.  Likewise on the same beads, one can pray the seven joys: The Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Finding of Jesus in the Temple, the Resurrection, the Assumption and Coronation.

I take comfort in the fact that the third sorrow and the fifth joy are the same event, viewed from a different perspective: a bit later in time, the fruits of the anguish, just as the Resurrection must first be preceded by the Crucifixion, the receiving of the body, the laying in the tomb.  The world is like that, full of sorrow that is senseless and undeserved, but sorrow that when joined to Christ has the power of new life for all of creation, even when we do not understand it and can only stand mute before it, weeping.  Perhaps it is then we keep faith the most completely, for beneath the cross is the temptation to flee; once on it we can no longer refuse the burden.  There are only two places for the Christian when it comes to the Calvary: on the cross or at the foot of it.  We all get there sooner or later and Mary stands waiting for us and with us.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Martha, Martha Redux

One tries not to get athwart ones guests.  However, if one is yours truly, that doesn’t always happen….this time it was in discussion of Martha, my patron saint and on her feast day no less.

I have to admit that I am a bit touchy on the subject of Martha.  So much of the conventional interpretation of her story holds her up as a prime example of what not to do.  I have to grit my mental teeth every time I hear the “contemplative life is better than the active life” homily that seems to be so prevalent when the story of Martha is told.  A friend with whom we are vacationing ruffled my feathers just a bit with his comment that Martha was a complainer.

We Marthas are so misunderstood.

Martha found me when I was preparing to come into the Church.  Trust me, left to my own devices, I would have chosen a more exciting saint.  Jerome, perhaps (who has become a second, very good friend) or Teresa Benedicta of the Cross…not homebody Martha, the brunt of so much teaching that seems to say that the main reason for her existence is to be a cautionary tale to others. 

Like I said, we are so misunderstood.  I see Martha from a very different, very familiar perspective.  Martha’s world was structured according to plan.  Everything with a place and everything in its place, a perspective most of us share whether we admit it or not. A good Jewish woman, I think she would have seen her vocation as hearth and home, and in keeping with good Jewish thought of the time, that vocation was ordered from the beginning of time and it was her job to do her best to help perfect an imperfect world, by accepting her role and fulfilling her duties. A cherished and honored role—read Proverbs on the value of a good woman.

Modern folk sometimes lose sight of the fact that there was at least a strain of Jewish thought that held that in order for the Messiah to come, the Jewish people had to hold up their end of the bargain: You will be my people and I will be your God.  Given that a good deal of the prophetic literature was given over to the unfaithfulness of Israel, it’s not surprising that there developed an emphasis on right behavior as an indication of dedication to and belief in God.  That’s at least one reason for the periodic outrage over Jesus’ breaking of ritual law—dropping a liturgical or ritual stitch was the equivalent of delaying the Messiah or so they believed.

Martha’s gift was to serve and to live the life she had been given.  I can imagine that for her, hospitality to the stranger—as well as the friend—was her treasured duty, the duty of all the women of the house, a sacred, not just a social, obligation.  Her world was predictable, it made sense to her, and everything had to fit into it because…well, that’s Martha.  Really, that’s all of us, each in our own ways.

When Mary abandons the work of the kitchen—the work to which, in Martha’s vision of things, she has been called, a duty in its own way as important as the priesthood because it is all that she has and all that she can do to bring about the perfection of the world—Martha is flummoxed.  Some see in her statement to Jesus a whining complaint; I hear confusion.  Here is Jesus, a great teacher and prophet of Israel at the very least.  Mary instead of honoring Him in the traditional way—by service at table—chooses to sit at His feet and listen to Him speak—something women simply did not do.  

I can feel Martha’s confusion—almost panic—it is important for her that things be done right because it’s all she knows.  So she asks—perhaps not in that shrill voice that so many preachers imitate—but a quiet one: Lord, do you not care that my sister has left the serving to me?  Tell her to come and help.  To my ears, it’s more a request to re-establish the familiar norm, the only one Martha knows—or expects—in the Kingdom.  Jesus knows her world, He understands, He can help.  It is after all His role to instruct, to help order things as they are meant to be.

And the answer that comes back isn’t sharp, it’s gentle in my mind.  Martha, Martha.  You are anxious and worried about many things.  Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.  Notice: He does not tell her to stop complaining, he speaks to her heart that is confused and unsettled by this turn of events, and He directs her attention there.

Scripture is silent about what follows, but I suspect that Martha turned those words over and over in her mind as she worked in the kitchen and cleaned the house.  I suspect that she and Mary spoke often of it, but if my experience is any guide, Mary was as incapable of communicating to Martha what moved in her heart as Martha was of explaining why it troubled her.  Contemplatives and Actives don’t share much of a common vocabulary.

When next we meet Martha, her brother is desperately ill and she sends word to Jesus to come to Bethany.  Jesus delays his departure and when He arrives, Lazarus is dead and buried.  This time it is Martha who breaks with tradition; she leaves the house to meet him and Mary stays behind, as mourning custom required.

The first words of Martha to Jesus are Lord, if You had been here my brother would not have died.  Even now, I now that whatever you ask of God, He will give You.

Easy I suppose, to hear in this a complaint.  In fact, my friend harkens back to the first story to prove his point: Martha is a complainer, it’s natural that she complains.  But such an interpretation forgets one thing: Martha has spoken face to face with God and He has spoken to her heart.  Such an encounter does not leave one unchanged.  One may enter in or one may retreat, but the status quo is never an option.  Think of the bread of life discourse: some Jews rejected the idea of consuming the flesh and blood of Christ and left.  The Apostles don’t seem to have understood, but they accepted it.  I think the same thing happened to Martha.  Unlike the Scribes and Pharisees and the ones who abandoned Him when He did not meet their expectations, those who retreat from Jesus’ challenge to the order of things issued directly to their hearts, Martha seems to have embraced it.

Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  Not a complaint but a statement of fact, a standing naked and hurt before the Mystery that is God right before her.  Of all the people in Israel that Jesus healed, asked the crowds, could He not have healed this man He loved?  That question was in Martha’s heart too, but something in that prior story moved and changed her.  Something she did not understand but gave her the courage to trust and the courage to voice her pain and confusion in the bargain.  And in contrast to the first story, she asks nothing, demands nothing, does not tell Jesus what to do.  She is changed by it all.

I’ve been in that spot, a few years ago, when faced with the possibility of my husband’s serious, perhaps even fatal illness.  I remember collapsing in a sobbing heap, my own version of If you spare all these others, why not my husband?  Why not me?  And I heard the words of Christ from the lips of a mere man Do you realize it is all part of the gift? 

Jesus doesn’t say it quite that way to Martha; He tells her Your brother will rise again.  Not a given among a people whose theology did not necessarily include a concept of life everlasting, but Martha responds I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.

Whereupon Jesus says perhaps the most incomprehensible thing in scripture: I am the resurrection and the life… Do you believe this?  This is no mere door, vine, gate analogy, this is an image quite beyond understanding.  The Man standing in front of her Resurrection itself?  And yet, Martha, homebody, active, grumbling Martha—not contemplative Mary-- gives the greatest testament of faith: Yes, Lord; I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.  There is a world unspoken in that statement: I don’t understand.  I am in pain.  I can see a better way, but I am not God.  I’ll take the pain, the confusion, the disorientation.  It is all part of the gift.

But Jesus isn’t done with her yet.  They go to the tomb and He directs that the stone be rolled away.  Perhaps Martha’s admonition is just that. Lord it has been four days, there will be a stench.  Martha, again attending to the niceties asserting her view of things.  But maybe there is something more. 

Martha is deep in grief, feeling the absence of her brother; yet when she saw him last, he looked as though he were asleep, still her beloved brother.  If the tomb is opened, she will have to confront the reality of decay, the inevitability of loss and it is too much for her to bear.  Absence is one thing, more easily managed than loss that opens up a great chasm in the heart.  Perhaps it is her way of saying that she would rather deal with things as they are for the moment than risk any more of herself in trying to understand this confusing Lord of hers.

 cxxxcccc

So when Jesus replies Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God? it sounds on my ear a gentle reminder, invitation, not a reproach.  You believe in Me, you have come so far, do not lose courage, believe….It’s all part of the gift.  Take just one more step, even in the darkness of your grief.

Every time I read the story of Martha, I see in it more of my own and I am so glad that she found me on my journey. Heart speaks to heart, after all.  Martha comes to faith in her own way—not inferior to Mary’s contemplation, just different.  She struggles with a world shifting under her feet and grapples with the pain of a life that, in the long run, doesn’t seem to make sense at all. She uses the only tools she knows, her place in life and her care of others.  She is searching, and Jesus is kind, not cutting, to those who seek and He promises that they will find. 

And she does, in the most remarkable way.  

Mystery

I love mysteries.  I’ve written two (please, God, a publisher!)  and have read hundreds. I cut my teeth on Sherlock Holmes, own several collections of the tales including the ultra-nerdy annotated version.  This  is probably why I am not fond of “sequels” or most of the film versions of characters I see so clearly in my own mind. For my money Murder By Decree and Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey, Jr.,  come the closes to my personal and infallible interpretation of the Holmes canon.  To prove the exception makes the rule, I also enjoyedThe Adventures of Schlock Holmes, which contains a scene in which Holmes is talking to Watson about his disguise.  Watson says in amazement, “You were a full six inches shorter!”  to which Holmes replies, “Special shoes…”  But I digress…

The whole point of the mystery as literary genre is to solve the problem, a gift that is both skill and cross for me.  You see, if you’re reasonably good at solving problems it becomes unreasonably irritating when something escapes your attempts to define, categorize, explain and de-mystify it.

Enter today’s reading:

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes…

I have since checked out half a dozen translations and they all use “things.” Somehow or another, today I heard ”mysteries, ” and that happy mistake led me off to a new and different place.   I have heard that snippet of scripture often, and until this morning, took “revealed” to mean “explained.”  In what can only be described as a palm-plant sort of moment, it dawned on me that that isn’t the case at all.  Revealing isn’t explanation at all, at least not knowing in the walking-around knowledge sense .  Jesus alluding to,  I think, of knowing in the relational sense.  Today I heard a real caution not to let too much thought get in the way of God.  To know him in the sense of relating to Him, not in the sense of explaining Him, which is a fool's errand in any case.

In my defense, it’s an honest enough mistake.  In mysteries—the book kind—the reveal is where everything is explained.  You’ve read it or seen it many times—the Great Detective brings the entire cast of characters into a room and in dramatic fashion explains everything, the murderer confesses or tries to escape, the law nabs the culprit and all ends happily.  It’s considered poor literary form, by the way, to write a mystery that doesn’t give all the clues so that a sharp reader (that would be me) can solve the puzzle right alongside the Great Detective.

But God is not a Puzzle to be solved. He is a Person to be encountered, in some manner understood, but never explained, never solved, never an exercise to be counted among life’s accomplishments.  Revelation in this context seems mean something very different than it does in my beloved mysteries—a simpler, deeper, richer, harder, more complicated  meaning of the term: Someone shown forth for Who He is.  And that is mystery in the religious sense: a reality that cannot be known by the machinations of mind and logic alone. a reality that requires the deepest response of our whole being, spirit and mind and faith all together, a response to God’s showing Himself forth in creation, in Christ, in the Church, in our brothers, in our lives, in all the world.

This is—of course--a definition of mystery I have repeated many times to myself and others, a caution I have made many times in the course of years of teaching the faith.  No more than I seek to define and explain my husband, can or should I seek to define and explain God.  The understanding, the knowledge, comes not so much from fact as it does from experience. Funny how the most familiar things are the most profound when once one takes a moment to stop and really let them seep in.

That kind of learning is what babes do—they experience their parents in  relationship to them, and the experience that gives rise to a sort of knowledge that is so bound up with that relationship that it can be lived—for better or worse-- without much conscious thought, so intimate that it colors everything we do, everything and everyone we encounter.  Completely Other, intimate and entirely beyond us, all at the same time.

I’ll still enjoy my mysteries. I’ll still spend hours and hours immersed in books because piecing things together really is one of my gifts and it gives me great, unfettered delight to figure something out. 

I hope I’ll remember that that’s not an end in itself. The great good of all that thought and puzzle-solving comes not in conquering a mound of facts or in explanations but in bringing me into closer relationship with God and man.  His gift to me, mine back to Him 

And that remains, thanks be, a mystery all its own, before which I am happy to sit in wonder at the beauty of it all.  Rather like a child.

The Right Question

I spend my life answering questions.  Always have.  People come to me for answers, right, wrong or indifferent, every day in my line of work. 

One of the first things I have learned is that answering the right question—which is not necessarily the one asked--is critical.  Our Lord was a master of that, directing conversation, thoughts, hearts away from the wrong question to the right one.  Those of us in His Church, maybe not so much.

Think of all the times someone asked Jesus a question and He refused to answer, posing a better question instead.  The Pharisees, concerned about healing of the withered hand of a man in Temple on the Sabbath asked Jesus whether it was lawful to heal on the Sabbath.  He didn’t answer; He posed His own question: Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do evil?

I was put in mind of Our Lord’s strategy this week when I found myself ruminating—in sequence--on the perpetually divisive question of whether there are souls in hell; a column by a favorite blogger in which a person at the scene of an accident attempted a baptism with diluted coke when no water was available and the injured man was in danger of immediate death (and, presumably, unconscious or nearly so); and when I sat in the back of Church on Saturday evening and watched the usual cadre of folks receive communion and walk right out the back door without taking time to make an act of thanksgiving or to wait for the final dismissal.

It seems to me, these all share a common root in someone, somewhere feeling compelled to answer the wrong question, the one posed, the one that may not need answering at all, the one that leads astray.

Apropos the population of Hell:  Our Lord’s words on the subject of Hell, though many, are not exactly crystal clear when you put them all together—lots of hope, lots of caution.  Most importantly, the Church has made no definitive declaration concerning the population of Hell and it is not a matter of obligation to hold one opinion concerning the inhabitants thereof over the other—though universalism, the belief that all will (not may) eventually be saved is a heresy. 

Those who vociferously argue both sides do great damage, depending on the audience.  Too much emphasis on mercy ignores the reality of sin and separation for God and its devastating effects.  Too much emphasis on sin and judgment has turned many a soul from the Church out of fear.  My family manifests both: my daughter has yet to overcome a hell-fire and brimstone Sunday School teacher who told her that if she didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus (something that seemed rather elusive to a fourth-grader) she’d better get one fast or she was going to hell (and this in an orthodox, Anglo-Catholic church).  An in-law, exposed only to the mercy school of thought, sees nothing in Christianity to commend it over any other path, including his own mixture of Eastern spirituality laced with some New Age belief and lately, a little Native American thought thrown in for good measure. 

And really, the question—is anyone in hell—is rather beside the point.  The better question—the one I’d ask back—is this: Why is this of concern to you?

Because Hell is real and people need to know that sin is real and separation from God is serious and can lead to eternal suffering.  True enough—go spread the word!  You don’t need the example of anyone in hell to prove your point.

Because Christ came to redeem the whole world—and it is critical people know then can return to His mercy without being frightened away.  Hell is a teaching, but it’s not the only teaching.  Lead with Mercy.  We may still hope for the salvation of all, and pray to that end.  Great, good point.  Go spread the word, pray long and hard.  But don’t fall into the trap of thinking that everyone automatically gets to Heaven.

Because I want to know which group I am in.  Sorry. The Church teaches that we cannot know the state of any living human soul, not even our own....so learn to live in the paradox, and have faith in Jesus, who redeems you.

The discussion about the baptism was a little different.  The combox got heated and detailed, rather than lofty and theological, with all manner of discussion on form and matter and desire and infants and adults…..  My question to the person who wrote in, who did the best he could under terrible circumstances would be this:  Why do you want to know whether the baptism was valid or not?  Is this perhaps the better question: Did you respond to a fellow human being in love in the best way you knew under the circumstances?  Is it not better to leave the rest to God? 

In Beginning to Pray, Anthony Bloom  recounts a story of a pilgrim who visits a farmer; they begin to discuss God.  The farmer allows that he knows little about God, but  he does know that He likes milk.  The farmer is confident in his knowledge because the farmer puts a bowl of milk out for God every night with his prayers and in the morning the milk is gone.  The pilgrim, knowing better,  makes the farmer stay awake to watch and the farmer sees a fox drinking the milk.  He is shattered.  That night, God tell the pilgrim: He was praying in the only way he knew how, and besides, the fox likes the milk.

It seems to me the discussion about emergency baptism was more an exercise in “being right” rather than in paying attention to the relationships between people.  Those who have been present at a gruesome accident can attest: there is little time to think and less to second guess.  Regardless of what one person did in extreme circumstances, there is very little danger of the faithful suddenly taking it upon themselves to baptize folk with soda willy-nilly; less still that in the usual course of things that a priest would do the same.  

In an emergency, with a fellow human at death’s door, a child of God did the only thing he could think of in the best way he could with what was at hand, which, sadly, did not include water.  Validity  of the sacrament seems to be something of a moot point—and in God’s hand’s. More to the point, the discussion fostered unnecessary division and distress in the Body of Christ, most particularly, I would think for the poor soul who asked the question in the first place. Comments soon turned to “how he could have done it better” by just praying a Divine Mercy Chaplet, or "should have waited for the EMTs to provide some water when they arrived," or “should not have done it at all because the injured man had not requested baptism.”   Had I been asked, I might have responded to the initial question with a simple: Why ask?  Why burden yourself with the worry about whether the baptism was valid or not?  You did the best you could—and you spent time praying with and for a dying man.  In this world, that counts for an awful lot.  Celebrate that grace.  Let God worry about the rest.

Which brings me to the early departures from mass.  Ask any of them and they’ll tell you the “rules” about how much of mass you have to attend to satisfy your Sunday obligation.  But that, of course, is a result of answering the wrong question.

How late can I get to mass and how early can I leave and still not commit mortal sin? puts the whole world in the wrong perspective.  Answering the question in agonizing detail, chapter and verse, just seems to have made things worse by encouraging minimalism.  If there are rules about the minimum, then the minimum must be just fine.  And so much easier, so much less demanding.

Perhaps the question back is: You are spending time with the Creator of the Universe, the Redeemer of your soul.  What’s your hurry?  Do you count the time spent with the Love of your Life, anxious to escape?  And if Jesus isn’t that love, isn't that worth some thought?

Isn't it?