It is a courteous question: “How are you?” We ask it so routinely, we hardly wait for a response. The usual one would be, “Fine, thank you.” That’s not what we want to ask when our whole world self-destructs in huge chunks, day by day. We’d prefer something like this:

Don’t tell me you are well. Perhaps your blood pressure is right on the mark, and your high school graduate has been accepted at Harvard, but deep in your soul, chances are your mirror is as cloudy as the rest of ours, seeking full measure of divine glue, grace to draw our tattered cloaks about us, seeking protection from winds of doubt, and sorrow in the eyes of our fellow pilgrims.

Ruth Ellen Gruber once wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune about the mountain of Grabarka in Poland, where there is a forest of crosses pilgrims have planted through the years. Some are carved of stone; others of wood, as rough as the cross Christ must have carried to Calvary. Some are so short they almost go unnoticed; others are five feet tall, and still others reach to the sky. Today, not many of of us can climb Grabarka Mountain to plant our crosses, although we can do so in spirit, standing with Mary beneath the dying Christ, for it is only in his suffering that we can make any sense of the present.

The poet, Anna McKenzie, captured the confusion of mixed emotions as she addressed the problem of suffering to God, blessed words for this Pentecost Sunday:

Appendix

And so we must begin to live again,
We of the damaged bodies
And assaulted minds.
Starting from scratch with the rubble of our lives
And picking up the dust
Of dreams once dreamt.

And we stand there, naked in our vulnerability,
Proud of starting over, fighting back
But full of humility
At the awareness of the task.

We, without a future,
Safe, defined, delivered
Now salute you God.
Knowing that nothing is safe,
Secure, inviolable here.
Except you.
And even that eludes our minds at times.
And we hate you
As we love you,
And our anger is as strong as our pain.
Our grief is deep as oceans,
And our need as great as mountains.

So, as we take our first few steps forward
Into the abyss of the future,
We would pray for
Courage to become what we have
Not been before
And accept it,
And bravery to look deep
Within our souls to find
New ways.

We did not want it easy God,
But we did not contemplate
That it would be quite this hard,

This long, this lonely.

So, if we are to be turned inside out,
And upside down,
With even our pockets shaken,
Just to check what’s rattling
And left behind,
We pray that you will keep faith with us,
And we with you.
Hold our hands as we weep,
Giving us strength to continue,
And showing us beacons
Along the way to becoming new.

We are not fighting you God,,
Even if it feels like it,
But we need your help and company,
As we struggle on.
Fighting back
And starting over.

Bethlehem. Calvary, Pentecost. We cannot separate the three. The cross was the reason for the manger; love the reason for both, bound together by the Spirit. And in that love is our peace, our reason for walking with Him who first has walked with us.

A wise man, priest, bishop or cardinal, I know not, said that the most important virtue Christians need today is courage. It sounds so prosaic, does it not? No shouts of victory, only silent pleading for quiet, deliberate courage to stand one’s ground and lock arms to steady our companions, even as God and they steady us.

Amen. Amen.

Home

Archives