Vicarage Notes: Holy Week & Stomach Flu

On living the (unexpected) drama with flair

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise

Without delayes,

Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise

With him mayst rise:

-George Herbert

Jozef Sekalski, Noli me Tangere

Easter greetings, good friends!

Live the drama. That's what I wanted to write way back in the dark ages before Easter. I was radiant with excitement at the idea of really walking Holy Week with my children. I was going to let them stay up for all the services, stand in the blessed dark round the Easter fire, walk in awe into the darkened church to sing their Alleluia's and ring the bells with all their might and welcome Christ. Oh, it was going to be wondrous, like living a fairy tale, the real fairy tale as C.S. Lewis might put it, the hero tale of the heavens which is the real story of all our lives, if we only will take the time to remember it. Oh, I was going to help them remember with a wild will and a vim.

Until a violent stomach flu rendered all my plans null. The sort of flu that leaves grown adults flattened in its wake, not to mention children. (Is it too much information to reveal that Lilian threw up 18 times?) Thomas was hit the worst in a week that is, for a priest, more precious and busy than Christmas. The long and short of it is that not a single member of our family made it to a single Holy Week service. I was entirely bummed. Grieved, really, for a joy I had craved, a story I needed to inhabit again for my tired self. The church bells rang out our windows every day and we couldn't answer their call even once. I didn't manage  one of the liturgical activities I'd planned. We scraped through those days by sheer grit, God's grace, much honeyed tea and… movies. 

But ah, thank God for the movies. 

In my one flailing effort after something themed to Holy Week, somewhere around Good Friday I sat with the children and showed them The Prince of Egypt for the first time. We'd planned to watch the film for our annual Good Friday movie night (a surprisingly contemplative and devotional tradition we've kept with each other and now, the church). I knew I'd have to skip a lot, but I thought it might be a way of the children and I entering into a little of the larger Easter story. 

I did not expect to find myself biting back sobs throughout the film. I hadn't watched it  since becoming a mother, and my goodness, the opening sequence with Jochabed sending her baby into the river, wailing a cry for God's to save him was enough to unravel me as I held my Elanor. But as I sat there with my children, watching this drama of God's mercy and power breaking into the broken world where his people suffered, where all people suffer the hardness and heartbreak of evil and loss, I found myself in that deeply attentive prayerfulness I usually come to in much different circumstances. There it was, that glimpse of a God at work to save and heal the world he made, the world that abandoned him. There it was, the grief of sin and the wail of the world for mercy, and the answering, gracious fire of God in his severe grace, his forgiveness, his power. There it was, there He was, a fire that burns and does not consume, a mercy that does not fail, a goodness that endures beyond all touch of evil and transforms what is broken into what is healed and new. Gratitude swept over me in a warm, arresting rush.

And my heart leapt up in a cry half ache, half adoration.

At that moment, someone called for the bowl and the baby cried and another child spilled her tea. There was no time to linger in the anguished joy of all I had remembered, all I had known once more of God's mercy. Part of my brain rose up in frustration at the fleeting nature of such moments, and how the illness had cheated me of the chance to dwell more richly in their grace that Holy Week. But a great quiet stopped me. That moment of sight, that moment of encounter with God in the vivid images of a cartoon, I could not diminish their gift or grace by any bitterness. What I could do was be loyal to the beauty they'd shown me. To rejoice that any sliver of the gracious drama had found me in those difficult days. I could shape the inward response of my heart to the gratitude I'd felt in those brief, sweet moments. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that:

“I believe” means: “I remember.” For what is belief? Every one of us, at least once in our lifetime, has been able to perceive the existence of the Creator. Every one of us, at least once, has merited a glimpse of the beauty, the serenity, and the strength which flow from the souls of those who have walked with God. However, such feelings and inspirations are not common occurrences. In the lives of most people they are as meteors which flare up for a moment and then disappear from sight. There are, however, people for whom these flashes ignite with them a light which will never be extinguished. Faith means: If you ever once merit that the Hidden One appears to you, be faithful to Him all the days of your life. Faith means: To guard forever the echo which once burst upon the deep recesses of your soul.

So much of life, so much of faith, is stomach flu in Holy Week. 

It is a reaching for glory from the roiling, gritty upset of a broken world. It's struggling mightily to keep some hold upon hope when the sheer exhaustion of our bodies makes just the normal rounds of life a bit beyond our grasp. We are Jacob, wrestling with God, not because he is our enemy, but because we live in a broken world and wrestling is the only way we can get our hands round the Mercy that will one day set us free and give us peace.

But sometimes the peace breaks in, a visceral taste of the joy that waits beyond all our struggle. Sometimes, the drama breaks in and we glimpse the larger story in which our lives are woven, the Beauty weaving us whole. When those moments of unexpected benevolence come, when against all odds we glimpse God's radiant kindness in the midst of our loss and grief and illness, we always have a choice. We can live by the narrative of what those moments tell us, the hope those ‘flashes ignite’ within us, or we can turn from them. Denise Levertov, in her poem about the Annunciation, observes that annunciations come in everyone's lives, ‘when roads of light and storm/open from darkness in a man or woman’. 

The life of faith is a life of loyalty to what we have witnessed of God's mercy. A conscious choice to act upon every little annunciation, to narrate our stories, to live our drama from within the gracious narrative they offer. 

I managed that, just barely by the end of Holy Week. I'd wanted to live the drama liturgically, to have the grace of candlelit church and choral music and ancient words said in faith with my community. I didn't get that. But I did get to live the drama of Christ. I got to inhabit the story once more of God's kindness reaching into the trouble and trauma of my upended life, of our broken world, I got to reach up and find his mercy in a steady, sweet grip upon my heart. I got to live the drama of turning my heart in thanks, in faithful obedience, in response to that tiny moment of joy, allowing it to transform my weary days. At least in the inmost places of my heart. And that, my friends, was a drama well worth finding. 

Books

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

We're exploring this book this month over at my reading fellowship. I've been going at it in drips and drops when I have time, but just a few paragraphs in, I'm heartily intrigued. Within just a few pages, Pieper is opening a discussion about our modern proclivity to see knowledge as work, as something we do, rather than something we receive. Now, obviously, there is an element of work in the rational kind of knowing by which we navigate the world, but it's not the only kind of knowing we experience as humans. There is also a knowledge that come by simple beholding, by reception, by the gift of something that is beyond the realm and reach of human ratiocination (as I was told to put it in an old tutorial!). I think I find this intriguing, because one of the things I examined in my upcoming book on quiet is the way in which in entering a space of silence, of attention, of quiet, we come to a place where we receive something beyond what we can conjure or create for ourselves. I have great hopes for this book and great anticipation for the discussion to follow! 

Beauty

Betty and the Leaves by Anita Klein

Anita Klein is an artist I've come gradually to love. I discovered her when I was buying cards for a friend with a newborn: her images of mother and child were a marvel to me. I discovered that she has created a body of work over her career that honours the quotidian and tender, the small moments of home life that become the great treasures of a family. It's a bold choice in an art world that often honours a far more individualistic ideal of the self, that prizes the avant garde and often, the transgressive. I love her grit and cheerfulness in honoring the beauty of marriage, child, mother, garden, innocence, and affection. It's my someday wish to own one of her prints. You can read a guardian interview with here here. 

Theology

‘… and yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it [Hell] contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.’

I re-read Lewis' The Great Divorce in preparation for a Patreon talk and ended up evaluating my thoughts on good and evil, hell and love. I love the statement above. It draws on Augustinian ideas of evil being merely a corruption of good, as something that can neither create nor exist independently from the good and thus will one day utterly end. Only good will radiantly remain, and one of the things I love about The Great Divorce is the way Lewis' portrays the visceral, tangible ‘realness’ of heaven's good, the heft and solidity and beauty of it, one that makes evil itself look like a phantom. This isn't to negate the real suffering caused by wickedness, the real consequences of hatred and death, all suffered and shared by Jesus. It's to say that Good, the good we know in the resurrection of Christ will be final and comprehensive in a way we have never yet glimpsed in this world, unless it's in the happy ending of fairy tales and the moments of our lives in which a joy ‘beyond the walls of the world’ (good ol' Tolkien) breaks in to show us a little of what's to come. When God says he will wipe every tear from our eyes, it really does mean that every cause for grief will be ended. Only Good will be left. It's almost unimaginable, and yet, this is behind the Easter cry, ‘death has been swallowed up in life!’ It's beautiful.  

Friends, may that cry continue its haunting, holy echo in your hearts. May you live in loyalty to every glimpse of God's light that you find. May you choose the story of the Beauty breaking into your darkness, the joy interrupting your trouble, and may you find the grace to narrate your days in it's kindly light.

Love,

Sarah