Good Friday Dark Friday

Good Friday for some, for others Earth day.... Or maybe both. While I may be spending most of my day reading Eating Animals and contemplating all my ethical food choices to a greater world view (and losing my appetite), I also hold Good Friday somewhere in there too.

It's a beautiful sunny NW day which rarely comes along - it doesn't FEEL dark... But reading this passage reminds me of what this day represents. Not just the ugly death and separation and betrayal; but it also reminds me that even in dark, inky times- beauty is hidden behind the veil. Waiting for it to be torn, waiting to be discovered. Waiting to be basked in.

I am a black sheep dressed in all the beauty of the universe.
I may not bike to work (I don't believe I possess the muscles),
I may not compost (yet),
and I'm certainly not going to any religious services this week (I work anyway)....

But Today, I celebrate the beauty of earth and the beauty of grace on earth. Today (like every other day I seem to so miserably fail at), I pledge to do my best to unveil that beauty in myself, in others, and in the world. To honor that grace given to each of us

Isaiah 53

Who believes what we’ve heard and seen? Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?
The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
a scrubby plant in a parched field.

There was nothing attractive about him,
nothing to cause us to take a second look
He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.

But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.

We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve done wrong, on him, on him.
He was beaten, he was tortured,
but he didn’t say a word.

Like a lamb taken to be slaughtered
and like a sheep being sheared,
he took it all in silence.
Justice miscarried, and he was led off—
and did anyone really know what was happening?
He died without a thought for his own welfare,
beaten bloody for the sins of my people.
They buried him with the wicked,
threw him in a grave with a rich man,
Even though he’d never hurt a soul
or said one word that wasn’t true.

Still, it’s what God had in mind all along,
to crush him with pain.
The plan was that he give himself as an offering for sin
so that he’d see life come from it—life, life, and more life.
And God’s plan will deeply prosper through him.

...Because he embraced the company of the lowest. He took on is own shoulders the sins of many, he took up the cause of the black sheep.

Thou art Love

If I forget,
Yet God remembers! If these hands of mine
Cease from their clinging, yet the hands divine
Hold me so firmly that I cannot fall;
And if sometimes I am too tired to call
For Him to help me, then He reads the prayer
Unspoken in my heart, and lifts my care.

I dare not fear, since certainly I know
That I am in God’s keeping, shielded so
From all that else would harm, and in the hour
Of stern temptation strengthened by His power;
I tread no path in life to Him unknown;
I lift no burden, bear no pain, alone:
My soul a calm, sure hiding-place has found:
The everlasting arms my life surround.

God, Thou art love! I build my faith on that.
I know Thee who has kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should doubt Thy love.
—Robert Browning

Female Genital Mutilation (Or: Pain and Idealism)

It’s easy to get swallowed up in your own misery.

It’s all that you can see until something BIGGER and GREATER than that misery stretches into your world and _DIPS it’s finger into your heart.

Sometimes those fingers wrap around you and let you know you’re not the only one with misery, and sometimes they point far off to tell you that your misery is the misery of a privileged and very blessed person who has not known real loss.

Sometimes, it’s a bit of both.

Each of us has our own misery

Sometimes the pain feels like something we deserve, Sometimes the pain feels like something we need in order to hold on to something we lost. Sometimes we keep our pain because it becomes part of us, and to let go, feels like losing ourselves and our dignity or even our comfort.

...Sometimes we become so infused with that pain, the only way to live is to inject and subject others to pain.

Tonight I read about Victoria, a young American born Nigerian girl who lost her proud, beautiful spirit in the wake of female circumcision. It is a beautifully written story about two young, kindred souls standing together as one of them navigates the exclusion, shame, and brutality of this custom.

This is not about that brutal custom (though I will give it my voice)

This is not about guilting you into feeling better about your miseries because there is always worse.

THIS, is about pain and the big picture of life swirling around us at a hundred million seconds covering us over and over and over with more and more pins and needles and bruising and damaging our hearts again and again.

It’s about seeing other people’s pain and learning to stand beside them in their silence if we can, and it’s about seeing other people’s pain and finding the courage to muddle through our own.

All people, know pain.

I don’t think misery should be measured or invalidated. But I do think some misery deserves a broader picture because sometimes our misery is stuck in a space so narrow we can’t get out.

You are not alone.

You feel misery. So does your neighbor. It does not matter so much sometimes how we come by that misery. But let us see each other and stand beside each other, even abstractly, and find the courage to move beyond that pain.

For me, reading this story drew me out of my world. Sometimes we weep together, and sometimes we weep alone. But we are never, never, the only ones. It doesn’t take my pain away but it makes my world bigger, which makes my pain smaller. And suddenly I have the courage draw my glazed over miserated eyes toward something beyond myself.

It’s idealistic, I know, to see us all solely as humans muddling through this life often in pain (and sometimes beauty) when in reality it’s so, so, much more complex than that. But when I see life like that, everything becomes so simple. Motives, silence, mistakes, cruelty and even evil all seem so simple. So easy to overlook and heal and correct. So easy to move out of our own pain.

There is pain (and hurt) behind it all. It’s all stacked one on another. We just need someone to sit beside us. We just need to see that we are part of something bigger, that our pain is not the only pain.

In my world, if we could all see that, all the time, there wouldn’t be so many complications…so much evil and hate.

We’d reach our fingers into a hardened heart and say: “I acknowledge your pain” and that heart would melt and be sorry for taking your toy truck because really, they just felt left out. And we wouldn’t care what they did because it just was about some form of pain and we knew that.

and we would sit beside each other and breathe because we are not alone.

And then we’d share a cookie.

It’s idealistic, it isn’t the whole story…. and not even I can operate in a world as beautiful and connected as that.

But what if we all could? Even sometimes. There would be less pain. And maybe more interactions where we reach inside each other’s hearts and say“I see your joy, I see your beauty” instead of seeing so much pain.

It would be nice.