The Invitation to Mourn, Palm Sunday reflections
/This morning, Palm Sunday, I had the honor of sharing my reflections with my church community. It is never easy to pare down a message when there is so much one could choose to say. The following is where I settled for today.
John 12:12-16. Isaiah 50:4-7, Philippians 2:6-11, Mark 15:1-39
Blessings as we begin this Holy Week by joyfully welcoming Jesus with palms and ever so quickly turning toward mourning his condemnation and death. Two millennia later, we know that the joyful celebration of resurrection is coming, but on Palm Sunday we are not there yet.
We are invited into mourning.
In April of 2022, we are still reckoning with COVID-19. We are facing rising inflation. We are seeing backlash against the racial justice uprisings of 2020 through legislation about how race can and can’t be talked about in schools. We have witnessed the signing of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and see other anti-LGBTQ+ legislation around the country. We are observing from afar the horrors of the war in Ukraine. At U.S. and other countries’ borders, we see governments and media outlets treating certain migrants as greater than or less than others, based on the hue of their skin and their country of origin. These are only a few of the layers upon layers of things that pain us.
As I say all these things, you may notice your heart beat getting faster, your body tensing up, your breath getting shallower or faster or even that you are holding your breath. When is she going to stop with this litany of pain? Why didn’t she name my particular pain? Maybe the litany has stimulated your righteous anger.
In Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens, a Black, queer Buddhist minister, talks about his own grappling with anger in this way: “My anger is old, personal, and dependable. It is older than me, younger than the youngest child I know. It is so old that most of us no longer believe that it was ever born to begin with. It is the primordial deity that we come to worship, thinking that somehow it will be the revolutionary leader who will set us free. And yet it is also our jealous master.”
When I think about the chief priests, elders, scribes, or Pilate, when I think about the crowds yelling “Crucify him!” or the soldiers who beat and spit on Jesus, or the passersby who mocked him, I wonder if some form of anger had become their jealous master.
When I see the unwillingness of so many elected leaders to work together for the common good, when I see friends and family unwilling to cross lines of difference to talk to each other, I wonder if some form of anger has become their jealous master. When I think about how easy it is to use dehumanizing labels for those I disagree with, whether in power or not, to metaphorically beat them and spit on them, I wonder how often anger becomes my jealous master, too.
Lama Rod continues, “Anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event… One of the hardest things that I could ever admit to myself was that I was just hurt, that I wasn’t just pissed off… I was deeply in despair because of the situation. This realization just made me feel weak… And never in my life have I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness.”
I suspect that if we allow ourselves to go deep beneath anger, we may find that our hearts are broken, too. We wear the strong armor of anger to try to shield ourselves from the heartbreak that may feel like weakness.
Anger is a normal human response to pain and suffering. Sometimes we need that armor to protect ourselves. But we’re not meant to wear it all the time. And the hard expression of anger doesn’t free us.
The hardness of our anger armor constricts our movement toward loving all our neighbors. When we wear the same righteous anger armor as someone else, we may feel connected to them, but that armor also separates us from others. Anger prevents us from knowing our deep interconnection with All.
On one of my first stints in Palestine with what is now Community Peacemaker Teams, I found myself getting really angry as I witnessed Israeli soldiers harass, beat, teargas, arrest, and otherwise do harm to Palestinians, including children. When I joined CPT, I had made a commitment to practicing nonviolence and I knew that honoring that commitment meant I needed to figure out what to do with my anger.
During the less volatile moments around the soldiers, who were not much older than the young men I had taught at Trinity, I started a practice of trying to look them in the eyes. As I caught their eyes, I thought, “I don’t hate you. I wish you peace. I wish you love.” In my own softening toward them, I recognized that if I had walked in their shoes, I might well be doing exactly what I saw them do. In heart-opening grief, I had a simultaneous awareness of our inherent interconnection and our situational disconnection, and a deep desire to reconnect.
The soft practice of mourning has the potential to reconnect us and free us. Miki Kashtan says that “Mourning is a continual soft pathway to accepting reality without numbing ourselves, without distracting ourselves, without blaming ourselves, and without engaging in a spiritual bypass. Mourning brings tenderness to everything we put into it.” As we allow the tenderness of mourning, the world becomes softer, more ready for healing, more able to heal. Mourning together, we allow the communal composting of pain. In those moments of eye- and heart-connection with soldiers, I hope that I was both creating soil and planting seeds that someday will grow, bloom, and bear fruit.
Planting seeds on Ash Wednesday together, we opened ourselves to the pain and mystery of the transformation that happens in the dark and to trust that a burial does not always signify eternal death.
In mourning as in planting, we recognize that we are not in control. As we relinquish the illusion of control, we surrender our will to God’s. As we align more closely with God’s will, perhaps, like Isaiah, we “might know how to speak to the weary a word that will sustain them.” We allow seeds to be planted in us and we plant seeds. We cannot control their growth.
As we align more closely with God’s will, we come closer to the path of Jesus. Jesus wore no armor. To some who observed him, Jesus may have looked weak. And yet, we know that Jesus freely chose the softness of embodied divinity. He chose to allow his heart and his human body to be broken. He chose the redemptive suffering of nonviolence that exposed the violence of the system he lived in, all the way to his death.
May we, too, choose the path of nonviolence. May we take deep breaths, slowing ourselves down enough to touch the tender longing, to feel the heartbreak beneath our anger. May we acknowledge and mourn the ways we ourselves have fallen into the patterns of violence embedded into our systems. May we name aloud the shame we feel, so we may see that we are not alone in it. May we choose to re-humanize those we have dehumanized. May we mourn the harm that others do and still choose to recognize that harm-doers are made in the image and likeness of God. May we not seek punishment, but advocate for restorative justice that aims to heal both the people who are harmed and the perpetrators of harm. During this Holy Week, may we mourn and allow our tears to water seeds of love, peace, connection, redemption, and hope.
Excerpts from Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens
I am including here a couple of longer excerpts (bits of which are included and inform the above) from Lama Rod Owens’ Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger.
My anger is old, personal, and dependable. It is older than me, younger than the youngest child I know. It is so old that most of us no longer believe that it was ever born to begin with. It is the primordial deity that we come to worship, thinking that somehow it will be the revolutionary leader who will set us free. And yet it is also our jealous master.
Anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event. There’s tension arising from my unwillingness to be with this deep sense of being hurt. When I begin to look at that, one of the hardest things that I could ever admit to myself was that I was just hurt, that I wasn’t just pissed off. I wasn’t pissed off because of racism or homophobia or something else. I was actually deeply, deeply hurt. I was deeply in despair because of the situation. This realization just made me feel weak.
And never in my life have I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness. To sink beneath the anger or to move through the anger was to recognize the anger for what it was: an indicator that my heart was broken. When I allowed myself to experience my heartbrokenness, my activism began to change. I wasn’t out there in the streets any longer trying to do stuff because I was angry. I was out because I was just really hurt and I wanted someone to recognize that. I wanted someone to recognize that for the first time my struggle wasn’t to get people free or to disrupt systems. My primary struggle was to embody and communicate that I was not OK, that I was struggling to be happy, and that I wasn’t, above all, being distracted by the anger. I suppose, in other words, my activism was to first to give myself permission to be free to feel deeply into my experience so I could enter into change work more myself and then deeper attunement to other people’s struggle.
Okay, I can’t run, so maybe I should start befriending [anger] and learning from it. It’s always telling me, “Rod, you’re hurt right now and you just don’t have the courage to look at that, so I’m protecting you. I’m going to protect you as long as you choose not to look at what my function is.” That’s what anger is always telling me: no, look deeper, look deeper, don’t get distracted…
And yeah, it feels powerful... I hear people say, anger is important; we need it to be effective. I believe anger is like a controlled fire. We do controlled fires in forests to create room and space for new growth and to fertilize the soil. But that fire can get out of control if there aren’t any skilled people there controlling that fire. For us, if we have no wisdom, then our anger gets out of control, and it starts burning up everything. I see so many people burning up everything.
This gets to the question of how do we actually create community with people who are enraged; their rage is really unchecked. For me, it’s that I really need to hold space for my anger, not add fuel to their fire. If I’m going to be in community with someone, then I feel that I’m holding space for their anger and for them to be angry. I’m not going to fuel their fire, throw logs on it, say, yeah, you’re justified; I would never say that. I would say, yes this is your experience right now, and you should own it and be with it, and yes, that anger is pointing to something…
And once we gain some wisdom, we start asking ourselves what’s that anger about, what’s that anger pointing to? … So I remind myself I am experiencing this anger because I’m hurt in the situation, so I need to remember that this anger is reminding me to set boundaries, or to say something right now, or I’ll return to being hurt over and over again. But I still have a lot of work to do, though I’ve come a long way.