24 March 2018

My Own Personal Holy Week

I am writing this week from my parent's house on the Oregon Coast. I've been down helping my Dad care for my Mom for the past two weeks. This week she entered hospice care.

Uncertantly is all around me.

I am wondering if I am feeling like the diciples felt when Jesus told them:

“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; 34 they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”
~Mark 10:33-34

The disciples had seen Jesus doing miracles. They had seen him make the lame walk, free the demon-ridden, and bring Lazarus back from the dead. Suddenly he's telling them that he will be betrayed, beaten, spat upon and killed and that it will all happen very soon, when they come to Jeruselem.

None of them really knew what was going to happen. They had the words of Jesus but had not yet experienced the reality of his death and resurection.

I face my mother's inevitable death but I don't know when or how it will occur. Like the diciples I have been told what is to come but I have no actual experience of the reality. I won't know it until I meet it.

My Dad has been studying Buddism for years, working to let go and live with impermance. It has revealed his wise, kind, gentle self. I'm doing my own best to live in the moment and not worry about what is to come. This is made easier by being with my parents and being able to help from moment-to-moment.

Jesus disciples were able to stay with him until he was betrayed and taken into custody. From that moment on they could only be onlookers as Jesus was taken around the city, shuttled from authority to authority until he came before Pilate and was condemed to death by the crowd.

It is that way with my mother. She has started a journey that I can not join her fully in. I can stay by her physically and help where I can, but I can't truly understand how she is feeling and where her spirit is going.

She has always been good about living in the moment, it is natural to her. I'm trying to follow both my parent's examples and not worry about the future, but be fully present now.

Maybe like me, some of the disciples tried to live in the moment when they realized their remaining time with Jesus was short.

Based on the story of the betrayal, none of them were really prepared for the end when it came. The moment in the garden when Jesus was taken from them seems to have come as shock, even though he told them in advance that it was coming.

In the past, when I have read the gospel passages where Jesus tells the disciples about his death to come and the ressurction that is to follow, I have had the luxury of focusing on the resurection. The resurection has been a fact of my faith since I first learned to sing "Jesus Loves Me" in Sunday School.

My mom's entry into hospice care reminds me that the disciples didn't know how their time with Jesus would come to an end. Even though he told them he would rise again in three days they didn't really accept it.

We see that in the moment when they didn't believe Mary Magdalene when she told them she had seen Jesus resurrected. Nor were they any more open to the idea when the two disciples saw him next.

According to the Gospel of Mark, it was only when Jesus appeared to all eleven of them and told them to: 'go out into the world and proclaim the good news' that they believed.

To me, the story of the diciples in the lead up to the death of Jesus shows me how very human it is to not really comprehend a thing until it is actaully happening.

There is a huge uncertain gap between theory and practice. My mom and I had many discussions about death after she was diagnosed but now that we are walking the actual walk much that seemed certain is no longer so.

What does give me comfort, is the fact that the disciples, for all their faults, fears, and disbelief managed to muddle through it all.

If they could do it, so can I. I will live on 'in sure and certain hope of the ressurection', one of my favorite phrases in our Book of Common prayer.

Even more so, it is my hope that I will be able to live on in my mom's example. To live as fully as I can in the moment, to let the future take care of itself, to speak truth to power, and to try to make the world we live in now a better place and not wait for the hereafter.

10 March 2018

Active Atonement

TW: for discussion of sexual harassment and abuse.

I've been thinking a lot about atonement and forgiveness in the light of #MeToo movement. It was horrifyingly unsurprising to see the magnitude of sexual harassment and sexual violence in our culture through a twitter hash-tag. Unsurprising because, at least in my experience all of my female friends have stories about being harassed or violated. Some of my male friends do as well, and I don't know how many more might have been but are afraid or ashamed to share their own stories.

Horrific because the fact that sexual violence permeates our culture is not news to most women, LGBTQ people, or people who are marginalized for any reason. Sexual harassment and abuse is an expression of power, rage, and/or control and is never really about sex. The people who wield sexual harassment or abuse already have the power (though they may not admit it to themselves).

#MeToo and the Harvey Weinstein scandal seem to represent a tipping point in our culture. We, all of us, have been made aware of the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, and are finally ready to listen to the survivors and take action.

Some actions will be taken in the courts, some in public, some at work places, and some of the work will be done in the church.

This brings me to confession, atonement, and forgiveness. Sometimes, as Christians, there is a temptation to skip right from confession (or sometimes accusation, if the abuser is caught rather than confessing) to forgiveness. In particular, survivors of abuse who report it are sometimes pressured to 'forgive' the abuser-- to let it go and move on.

This is not an act of faith or a way to 'heal' a community. This is yet another form of abuse the survivor endures at the hands of their community and the people who should be acting to protect them.

I think this emerges because people are fundamentally lazy and the work of atonement, the real work needed to bring healing to the survivors and, hopefully, to find a path back to humanity and grace for the abuser, is difficult.

It means calling people, people we might otherwise love or respect, to account. It means listening to survivors (some of whom are not as charming or loved as the abuser). It means disruption in the short term, if the abuser is a priest or person of power in the congregation. It means fear of loss, that not only might the community be damaged by this but that it might be lost all together.

However, if we skip the all-important work of atonement we only invite further destruction further on down the road.

Secrets kept in a community can eat away at it like acid; over time destroying bonds of trust.

The survivor of abuse who is told to forgive instead of having their claim fully investigated and action taken against the abuser is further damaged by the community.

Frequently they are forced out of their community by this failure of atonement. The community is further damaged both by rumors that spread in such situations and by the survivor taking their story out to the world and sharing how they were abused and then driven out.

In the short term the lazy impulse to skip atonement may seem like the easy way to solve a problem; however, like an untreated stain that sets in the dryer, failing to tackle the sin of abuse right away only makes the problem worse and much harder to fix in the future.

Jesus didn't call us to take the easy road. He showed us how hard the work of atonement can be when he died a painful death on the cross. He didn't shortcut the process and skip right to the resurrection. We can't have the resurrection without the death.

We can't have forgiveness without confession and atonement. Atonement must take place and like the death on the cross it will be messy and painful.

However, Jesus gave us another gift. He gave us the grace of God to sustain us through difficult times.

There is no shortcut to justice and true forgiveness for the sinner, but there is the promise of grace and the hope of resurrection if the work is undertaken faithfully and with a true desire to atone.

No one can force this work on another and even if an abuser starts the work of atonement the community should act to protect the survivor(s) first.

This may mean taking difficult steps to remove an abuser from a place of power or to evict them from the community. Allowing an abuser to stay in power just because they say they are working on atoning is not atonement, it is enabling them to escape consequences.

We must not use the idea of the importance of forgiveness to shield abusers. We must not give into the temptation of laziness to make our own lives more comfortable in the short term by asking the survivor to be the scapegoat carrying our sins away from us.

We must confront abusers in our midst, call them to account, and remove them from power.

We should confess to survivors that we as a community failed them by allowing an abuser the power to hurt them.

We can atone as a community by taking action to remove the abuser and accepting the messy disruption that such an action will entail.

Given the prevalence of harassment and abuse in our culture, we, above-all, need a plan in place to deal with it.

-=-=-=-=-

Originally posted at The Episcopal Cafe on 8 March 2018.