Who's the more haunting, more hurting? Mother watching son die?
Son watching mother watching son die?
Hasidic Tale: One asking another, "Do you love me?" "Yes, I love you very much." "Do you know what causes me pain?" "How can I know what causes you pain?" "If you don't know what causes me pain, how can you then say you love me?"
Can the heart that breaks open contain the whole universe?
Elie Wiesel, haunted by self as small boy in Auschwitz, now asking,
"What have you done with my life?"
I tell him that I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation . . .
No one is as capable of gratitude as the one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would be to betray them.
Our lives no longer belong to us alone . . . .
This is my body, broken for you. Do this, remembering me.
* * * * *
A favored congregant hands me an Easter card and says, "I hope it is not irreverent." "I hope it is," I return, "What's more irreverent than Easter?"
Talk about waking the dead! Not letting a sleeping church lie! Or at least not to claim lie as truth! If we cannot sleep in church, then where? In good conscience? No matter what else about my preaching, you will not get much sleep! I preach that "Chicago style," lately notorious.
So the card reads, "Today's Easter sermon is . . . Where in the hell have you been since Christmas?" Jesus passing through Hell these past few days -- descending deep into death, turning loose all manner of banished ones there -- Resurrection not missing a trick! Open to all, if to any; Jesus just first; not over till Death overcome.
Nobody has to ask, When's Christmas this year? But Easter, like resurrection, not staying put in any one person or place! Breaking out all over whenever it will! For a moment in planning actions last week, marking Fifth Year of This Fucking War, remote chance some might be risking arrest; even, by faith, ending up jailed this morning! George said he was preparing to fill in as preacher, beginning, "Well, it's Easter -- and nobody's where they're supposed to be!"
Needless to say, by a similar faith, like Jesus' own fair-weather friends and followers, by the end of the week we finked, fickled, faded, and fled.
Guess I hope no one goes to jail for this war, for ending or for starting it;
but even if we were to do so -- as Jesus' nonviolent resistance does to all powers, seated and afoot, in Jerusalem, in all the capital cities -- we would not begin to pay proximate price for all the war-wasted already -- military, civilian; "terrorist," "freedom-fighter;" combatant, noncombatant; Iraqi, American, other; very young, very old --
If promise of resurrection does not speak to them, how dare it speak to us?
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