Lord have mercy.
I am re-thinking how I go about doing this. Surely there must be more preparation for partaking than the 5-second Extra Confession ("Jesus sorry for all the bad stuff I did this week, forgive me, amen") I say right before accepting the bread. Surely there must be a deeper feeling of joy to be experienced during this sacrament of complete intimacy with Christ. Surely I should feel more unity with my brethren during the service than a unity of lipstick smudges on the chalice.
Surely.
Henri Nouwen, who has such very good things to say about living, said that the first step to full eucharistic celebration is coming in your brokenness, and only then can you burn with thankfulness for new life, for renewal. He says that "through mourning our losses we come to know life as a gift."
Which sounds wonderful. And I completely agree. But have I ever mourned anything in my entire life? I know I cried excessively when my iPod kicked the bucket a year ago; that was a hard time for me. I went into slight depression after finishing all my seasons of "How I Met Your Mother."
But true grief, full brokenness...I think I have only tried to avoid it.
Even in the midst of slashing sorrow, lying in bed with tears soaking my shivering face and feeling heartache so seething I felt I could not stand another minute of my own self, praying to fall asleep so I wouldn't have to feel any more...I still repeated in my head over and over, "It will get better, it will get better, it will get better. Some day I will everything will be okay." How typically Christian of me.
Christians, with all our lovely intentions, seem to have a bad habit of cheapening the Resurrection by skipping over the mourning and going right to the party. Most Christians don't attend a Good Friday service, because, hey, we already know what happens. But Jesus certainly didn't know what was going to happen, or He wouldn't have felt such aching betrayal, or excruciating defeat.
In our darkest moments, because we already know about Easter, we say "I know it will be fine, it will work out." Which is poppycock. We have no idea if it will be fine. More often than not, our darkest moments completely suck, and more often than not, they have made us lose our hope. And the last thing you want is someone to tell you in such a situation is, "It will be fine! Jesus is risen and Obama is president! Cheer up!" The last thing.
The Eucharist never tells us to "cheer up," to "snap out of it," to "turn that frown upside down." It only invites us in all our ridiculous mess to come pure and clean to the table to have be united with God in the most intimate way possible.
This is how God wants us: fragile and failed and pretty much major losers. And, at the end, not necessarily cheered up. Not necessarily happy. But thankful. Which is a really radical way to go about mourning, if you think of it. Celebration in the same breath as sorrow is very radical indeed. But you have to keep in mind this whole way of life is coming from the same guy who said that sad people, poor people, and hungry people were the ones who get the big heavenly rewards. Which is just absurd.
I think I need to learn how to mourn. You know, like REALLY mourn. Just get in there and mourn and mourn until there's very little left of me, just a scrap of Mari, stretching my hands up for some body and some blood.
I want to mourn well so I can celebrate well. I'm almost positive that's how it works.
But how do I mourn well?
I was listening to Myisha Cherry today, and I was struck with the way she grieves so productively, so energetically. She is a world-class mourner. I wish I could get up on a stage and speak poetry so loudly and wonderfully; that seems like a winning way to mourn. I could say incredible things I feel, such as: I don't dance no more, all I do is reminisce/Wish my soul could dirty dance with confidence once again.
And as you might have guessed, Myisha Cherry is also a world class celebrator: I just want to move and be free, and doing it in bravery without being concerned for what other people think is not only healthy, it's HOLY.
(No better way to celebrate than to dance of course. Especially to Whitney Houston I reckon.)
Constant grieving can't mean going through life crying all the time, just in case something good happens so you can celebrate it. I think it has more to do with acceptance. It seems an acceptance of loss and fragility can make our celebratory times all the sweeter, the more surprising.
Accepting that you are going to fail today, no matter how hard you try. In this life you are going to lose things, and people. This day will never happen again, nor will this minute, and that new dress you bought is soon just going to get torn or wrinkly, or stop fitting because you can't seem to keep eating extended series of ice cream bars late into the night (hey, supermodels ain't never saved the world).
You know how those gentle outbursts of grace are sometimes the most wonderful moments? Like when you're sweeping or scrubbing or perhaps putting on your socks, and a really good Bob Dylan, or maybe Patsy Cline, or Beatles song comes on and feels like a warm slipper--soft and comforting and so right. The times when you might have wandered a little but then you come home, right back in the center, to a place of warm thankfulness where you know you will never be isolated from God.
It's hard for me not to force these moments, because who doesn't want to celebrate all the time? As the song put it so adeptly, "I just want to celebrate." I prove my point.
But to paraphrase Eccelesiastes as I so oft do, there is a time to mourn your dirty kitchen floor, and there is a time to be surprisingly blessed by a good song as you're sweeping. I think mourning has a lot to do with waiting, with feeling it through before you force yourself into Happy, and to acknowledge that you have no idea what the next year...or 5 minutes will be like. And they might not be good. They may not even be decent.
But you are alive. Enough said.
I want you so bad
I rush
I’m sorry
I just want you here
forgive me
I will take my time
and wait for you
to come to me
beautifully
-- myisha cherry
2 comments:
"If to suffer is good for man, then, it is not by convention, but for a reason drawn from the depths of things. To understand well how pain effects infinite and true joy, will that not be to have resolved the supreme difficulty of life and stifled the worst scandal for human consciousness, by finally providing our will with the great relief of being able to ratify all? When we have the secret of finding sweetness in bitterness itself, then all is sweet."
Maurice Blondel, Action, (1893)"You may never be or have a husband/ you may never have or hold a child/ you will learn to lose everything/ we are temporary arrangements"
Alanis Morissette, "No Pressure Over Cappuccino"
"All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief was to be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it."
Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies
you always know what I need to read for some reason.
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