Healing Death

"Healing Death"

Death may be healing or not, neither or both; we are not about sanctioning, sanctifying death, but about solving, silencing, obstructing, opposing, overcoming, presenting our lives in the way of as much death as humanly, as complicitly possible! Making way for divine opportunity to move even further. Imagining, for instance, this miracle: We as a species stop killing! What other miracles, powers, lie just beyond our believing? Our doing for dying in all that we do, so all death inclining toward "natural," just lives in our bodies worn out in the end, none lasting forever, nor leaving alive!

Everyone's life about healing death! Every malicious intrusion on planet! Elijah beseeching for widow's unbreathing son, Are we, all imaged of God, not
ferocious with you for fairness in midst of every unfairness festering here?
Abraham arguing fates for Sodom, Gomorrah? Jacob wrestling for blessing all night? Moses standing with people stiffnecking him? People rebelling as PERSONS, as PEOPLE, from brick-broken bondage in Egypt? Psalmists, Prophets ranting for all? Jesus upending Law, Tradition, rallying, ringleading, access of all to each?

No winning without risk of losing: Most of a night in chaplaincy training, Intensive Care waiting room, with parents of 10 year-old never awakening from "routine surgery;" trying to outguess God, staying a step ahead, preoccupied with avoiding mistakes in my prayers, causing no god-staining shame or embarrassment; abandoning any, all solidarities, finally hauling ass out of there, hiding exposure as wrong about God, on losing side of my own prayers.

Faith not about winning but hoping, dreaming, living, working, for so direly better a world as bound to dismissed losers, taunted as flaming fanatics; for, after all, in a lifetime, how much can be won against violence and war? Poverty and disease? Racism and climate change? Our very Story inscribed by losers, most notorious "winner" strung up alone between treasonous fellow-strangers, even Omniscience, Omnipotence winning some, losing some -- or many!

Imagining numbers, much less names, of families numbly haunted with grief for children lost, and losing; Elie Weisel when asked "where is God" in Holocaust: on the gallows! in the ovens! No helpless reposing, resigning, with Jesus, always reopening, reinviting, rewelcoming, reempowering -- responding to every reaching by every unreachable, touching by every untouchable, moving by every unmoveable, changing by every unchangeable, fearless of any corruption or tainting of him, whom nothing outside can defile -- only our inside answers.

Where else Jesus learning of footcare, caress, if not someone doing it for him?
Where else, how else, do we learn? Washing friends' feet that last gathering, as this anonymous one -- onto to whom all other men present potentlessly project -- first washes his feet; with her tears, her bodily fluids, her hair! Even now sexiest, most controversial, coverable part of Herbody! Kissing, anointing, expensive perfume! Earned in proverbial "hard way?" Jesus not dying for rules, laws, or traditions -- but for her.

In her, "audacity, need coalesce, single impulse, tiny breakthrough, precipitates," moistens, liberates us, our creative juices, "into a precarious moment of hope. A dam of saline grief broke, making clear rivulets in a grimy flesh wiped clean with hair." (Elizabeth Canham)

Tentatively, she entered. She knew she was not welcome here . . . She and her child and her guilt survived on the lust and disgust of the likes of them. The poor who are always with us would do things differently if they could. Jesus looked right through her, and saw that she was good. (Miriam Therese Winter)

What keeps us from welcoming, especially, women, children? From seeing in them alternatives leading to more love than war? From holding together the most common truth: Everyone's somebody's child! Imagining hearts where our treasures are! Bleedings of billions a month into wars only making more wars. Demonizing another, all others, to point more deserving of death! "Failed" persons, peoples, states, we say, losing all Godlikeness to us, exhausting all claims to existence, expendable beyond contempt? Enabling our actions too grim to own, even to loan and return.