When you decide that something no longer fits your pathway, maybe it’s because the existing world ceases to have meaning. Sometimes it means a new world explodes in front of you or creeps quietly into your life. If it is the second then you are left in no doubt about what is succeeding the old for you. A certain amount of courage is required to convince friends and family and former community members that you are taking this new path now, but at least you have quite a firm idea of where you are going.
If it is the first, however, the period of grieving for the familiar and the popular and the community who you were happy in before you weren’t, doesn’t have a happy ending in sight. There is a gap, a hollow, a hiatus, a nothing, where before there was some thing.
I didn’t realise until a recent funeral that I had so thoroughly left the interventionist God behind. I had talked about it theoretically, but when the funeral celebrant suggested we might be angry at God for whisking away our friend so suddenly out of our lives, I got a real shock. While I was as discombobulated as everyone else at the suddenness of the death, it never occurred to me to blame God for it. Fortunately the celebrant made no attempt to have that conversation after his first acknowledgement of what for him was a theological problem. I would have found that hard to take.
Easter has followed soon after. In 2019 I was conducting services for my last Easter as an active minister. I wrote a complicated sermon which linked the re-creation of a perfume from the DNA of an extinct Hawaiian hibiscus with the idea of resurrection. I remember relating a scientist’s description of the transfer of genetic code from a scrap from an old desiccated hibiscus flower into a yeast cell which then made the perfume. I then likened that to Jesus’ DNA code of how-to-be-authentically-human being transferred to us so the fragrance of it continued long after his own extinction from the world.
I don’t remember now how I felt last Easter (2021). The previous Easter (2020) we were all caught up in the mysteries of our first lockdown, of course. This year I found myself thinking about the gap in which I found myself, having let go conventional explanations and theologies of the point of Christianity. I wondered about attending a Maundy Thursday mass at the Cathedral. I knew I didn’t want to go to any kind of Good Friday event and Easter Day has long been expressed in terms too triumphal for me to endure, especially when fighting and victorious imagery is used.
A Palm Sunday Holy Shed helped with the revelation (for me) that the significance of the foal was to underline the point that Jesus was riding a female donkey. And I like the explanation that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a treasonous statement in a world where it was mandatory that Caesar was Lord. But still that leaves Jesus lording it over me, the source of all spiritual power, external to me.
A fellow colleague posted a comment on Good Friday in which the point was made that Jesus’ death was result of his being human. This set off a train of thought. I have thought much the same about Jesus’s death for some time. He was the most authentic human being the world has known, and he acted authentically all the time. He didn’t back off being authentic when It looked like that might get him into trouble. It is always true that in a world where the majority of people are hiding behind inauthentic masks, an authentic person will cause discomfort and distress and eventually anger.
When I think about it, I can be authentic for a while, but in front of some kind of danger (and it doesn’t have to be very much danger – just disapproval will do), I will back off, soften my statements or keep quiet. Jesus managed to be himself all the time. I am sure the Authorities of his day sometimes sighed and thought “The idiot, if only he would keep quiet, but he’s spoken out so we have to do something now.” In a project I am engaged in, recently, people have changed their stories once they were out of the face-to-face situation. It was too hard to keep speaking up when you sensed disagreement across the table,
And yes, I agree with the other concept which the post my friend put up included: That to be human means to suffer. It doesn’t have to be the kind of political suicide Jesus committed in the interests of true authenticity. It may be having chronic arthritis, or post-viral fatigue syndrome (ME, CFS, Long covid), or being sad because your children have left the home nest, or being disappointed at the end of a long working life that you hadn’t been braver, or depression or being fed up with a pandemic and how scratchy it has made us all. It may be suffering discomfort and opprobrium because we align ourselves with an oppressed group from Maori to Pasifika to LGBTQI to refugees, women and the abused.
The escapist literature many of us like to read is as seductive as it is because it pictures a world where authentic people win out, not the unscrupulous, comfort and ease are possible all the time and love is everything and fixes everything.
But life is, while not about unrelieved suffering for most, about being disappointed, disillusioned, forgotten and abandoned a lot of the time. ‘Life is difficult’ said M Scott Peck in the opening of The Road Less Travelled. When my mother read that book, she bought a copy for each of her children. I never asked her exactly why, but it had something to do with that first statement. Being human is living as gracefully and honestly as we can through all those different difficulties.
Perhaps a phrase to typify the celebration of humanness which I would want Good Friday to become might be ‘Life is difficult – make it count’ or ‘Life is difficult, live it well.’ or ‘Life is difficult enough, be yourself at all times.’ Good Friday could become a day when we lament the difficulties within life, support those wrestling with them and commemorate those who have gone before through the difficulties with head unbowed, like Jesus, looking to them for ways to be authentic ourselves.
What do you think?
Susan
Orders: jones.rs@xtra.co.nz
Info: www.jonessmblog.wordpress.com
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