Easter is an altogether different kind of fact.

We’re pushing 5 weeks of Easter now, almost to the end. We’ve gotten through the empty tomb, “side wound Sunday” with Thomas, and eating fish on the beach.  This past Sunday, the raising of Tabitha in Acts for this Sunday and Jesus talking about his sheep hearing his voice.  All kinds of encounter with Jesus trampling down death.  All kinds of truths, all kinds of people trying to figure it out for themselves.

In my vacation week after Easter, I visited the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, where an exhibition of the artist Walid Raad who, the ICA tells us, “informed by his upbringing in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), has spent the past 25 years exploring the ways we represent, remember, and make sense of history.”  The exhibit is full of things that are “true” in different ways—in a conventionally factual sense maybe or maybe not, but still true. It also holds a not un-pointed critique of American naiveté, which the Boston Globe’s art critic Sebastian Smee grapples with brilliantly in this review.

In all of my preaching this Holy Week I felt confronted by the wideness of the view of our new stations of the cross, as I wrote here in March. The Raad exhibit asks a similar question. How much are we willing to see? What lives, in the words of writer Judith Butler, in her book Precarious Life, are actually “grievable?” The crucifixion of Jesus only, or also that of the criminals on either side? We can have all kinds of lovely ideas about Jesus and compassion and justice, but if we don’t see those put to death next to him, that’s a pretty thin participation in God’s love.   Any metric of our faith depends more on those criminals and on those in our world now than on Jesus himself.   Too often, we don’t see them, and the American tendency toward tidy narratives and easy answers is literally fatal to those who fall in the cross hairs of our foreign policy.  One of the series of photographs is of shell casings Raad found as a child growing up during the civil war in Lebanon. My kids find Easter eggs; the world that he grew up in is plainly un-imaginable to them. 

In the middle of the Raad exhibit there’s a wall of images where visitors can leave their own categorizations of facts as tending toward one of three categories—emotional, aesthetic, or historical. Easter, it occurred to me, is a different kind of fact altogether.  Factually, the tomb was empty. We can offer explanations about what happened, conjecture about resuscitation or body theft or, even, true resurrection. But the empty tomb is only understood in confrontation with that space of death, at the same time confronting how it becomes a space of life. That transformation, though, doesn’t happen in our heads: the tomb can be empty or not empty, the body stolen by grave robbers or raised by the almighty power of the living God.  The transformation happens in our lives, in our own lives and that of our communities.

I’m not persuaded intellectually that “Christ is raised from the dead and that death no longer has dominion” (Rom 6:9). I have come to believe, day by day and week by week, in what I have experienced and seen of the risen Christ. I don’t believe because I’m afraid of the alternative, of heaven vs hell or joy vs some cartoon of eternal punishment, I believe because I have tasted it and heard it and walked with the truth of the resurrection and I know that that dead don’t always stay dead.   (My sermon about Tabitha is here). It’s not a historical fact or an aesthetic fact or an emotional one. It melts the categories and then knits a scarf out of them.

Just as, or even more powerful than any belief in resurrection, though, is the invitation toward resurrection. I am doing the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace through Dorchester to stand with victims of violence and to go, bodily, in my part of the risen body of Christ to be one with the risen body of Christ of the city.  I am writing Governor Charlie Baker to advocate for full inclusion of transgendered people because the risen body of Christ is a female body and a male body, and a neither, both, between body. All of these encounters with the world are encounters, also of the peculiar kind of truth that Easter is.

So there it is, again—more questions than answers, more labyrinthine steps than journeys  completed. Thanks for reading.

Being present

Palm Sunday.

Two weeks later, I still find myself fascinated by Marina Abramović’s 2010 retrospective, The Artist is Present, in which I found my “Prodigal Son” sermon a few weeks ago. After watching the 3 minute clip of her “reunion” with her ex-partner Ulay, I ordered the documentary of the whole exhibition and her preparation for it. It was a teensy bit disillusioning—apparently she and Ulay had planned for him to come, but what I hadn’t known before was that the two of them, forty years earlier, had done a piece in which they sat and stared at each other for hours on end, which offered a new dimension to her project in general and him sitting with her in particular. Seeing the short scene of the two of them was not less moving, though, having watched them prepare soup together at her country house a few days before.  The image remains—hands reached out looking for connection, a moment of desire for another that transcends everything, dissolving into a pure encounter of fully seeing the other, love at the center.

 Watching Abramović prepare for the work—of sitting still for eight hours a day for three months—was especially striking while, as a priest, I peer forward into holy week. These days between Palm Sunday and Easter are a singular experience—there’s no “working ahead,” no way to even contemplate Easter before you’ve gone through Good Friday.  And by “gone through,” that’s what I mean:  you celebrate with palms, you wash feet, you hear the words: “Love one another.” Then, the suffering of the cross, the almost perverse way we prostrate ourselves at the symbol of suffering, trying to merge our own pain with Jesus’ and grasp what it means.   Holy Week is always different from year to year, but also always the same: I know Sunday is coming, but I also know there’s still a long way to go before we’re there.

Watching Abramović train the students who would recreate some of her pieces, it’s obvious just how much is demanded of the artist; physically as well as spiritually. The self and the piece merge, but also split each other open. The woman on the wall, practically crucified, can’t just step into the role. There’s more to it than that. Abramovic says that the artist has to be a warrior: unreasonable feats of endurance become a necessary vocation.  

Hearing her talk so passionately, I think: that’s the kind of priest I want to be. I learned on sabbatical how dependent I am—both in my self-perception and in my prayer—on doing Sacraments in community. I am a priest—for now, a parish priest—in a particular context—but I’m also a tired mother who crashes on the couch after her kids are finally, finally asleep, and can barely articulate her desire for Indian instead of Chinese for dinner.  Sometimes being split open and poured out is a lot less romantic than she makes it sound.

This is how real vocation works, I think—the artist, the priest, the poet, the activist--these endeavors are not optional. Like most sometime-writers, I mope around wishing I’d done more, and only sit down to focus when not writing is the only thing worse than writing.  My poor self-esteem over my bad creative habits is not particularly warrior-like.

The genius of Marina Abramović, though, is so much deeper than that—of course we “are” the things we really care about.   Watching people actually participate in her work, the most moving part of it was how she offered her gaze, her singular gaze, to each person who came. And in seeing each person, she opened a space for that one to see himself or herself reflected there in its wholeness and integrity. In love.

 As best as I can tell, that’s what the work of God is; the imago dei, the image of God in each of us that is so singular and lovely and precious. The mirror reflection of God in us is so eminently worth seeing, even as we live our lives wiping shit all over it. That gaze is also impersonal, showing that we are each loved no more, but crucially no less, than anyone else.  Nothing is required of us.  You don’t have to sleep on the sidewalk waiting to get in and no security guard will escort you away if you make a false move.  It’s always there. It’s who you are, whether you are faithful to your blog or your meditation practice or check your email too often at your kid’s soccer game. Though it would still perhaps be better if you did those things.

So, now, Palm Sunday.  As happened last year, this week I also have a funeral to contend with, which also will be fine. All shall be well—I can fear this walk we undertake, from death into life. I can resist it I can do it well or poorly, preach coherent sermons or babble on. The grace, though, for the priest (as well as the artist) is that in front of the altar, all of that comes along, and none of it matters. You can only have feelings “about” the future or the past. You can only inhabit the singular moment.

You can only be   

present

I will be

present

offer

receive

presence