Reflections on Observing Holy Week

We are drawing close to Holy Week, and I would like to share some reflections on how to enter more fully and freely into its observance.  It is the most important time of the Christian year.  It is also the most challenging time of the Christian year.  To experience this time meaningfully, we need to avoid its pitfalls and embrace its promise. 

 

Two Big Pitfalls

It is important to acknowledge up front that Holy Week lends itself to the worst kind of anti-Judaism.  While the Church has acknowledged that “the Jews” did not kill Jesus, our sacred texts and liturgies can still reinforce this idea if we do not handle them with care.  As one of my parishioners pointedly (and rightly) reminded me:  “We have to do better than just throwing the other team under the bus.”  If we come away from Holy Week believing that Judaism is the bad guy in this story, then we have missed the whole point. 

 

So, let’s be clear:  Jesus is a Jew, and his ministry was very much a reform movement within Judaism.  The texts of the New Testament are written primarily (perhaps entirely) by Jews, and they express 1^st Century conflicts among competing interpretations of Jewish faith.  Some Jews came to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.  Others disagreed.  This was very much an intra-Jewish debate.   Context matters and it is important to keep this context in mind. 

 

Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire for sedition at the behest of some local Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.  John’s Gospel, properly translated, refers to them as “the Judaeans,” not “the Jews.”  Scholars like John Dominic Crossan have worked assiduously to separate out the historical kernel from the theological husk of the Gospel accounts. 

 

Theologically, Jesus’ death reveals the duplicity and cruelty of all human regimes of domination, and the veneer of religious piety within which it is hidden.  The Passion narratives rip away the political and religious justifications to reveal the violence at the heart of human civilization and the innocence of its victims.  Who killed Jesus?  We all did.  Human civilization did.  That is the theological significance of the Passion that the Gospels seek to convey.  The Passion is not a story about what Jews did to Jesus, much less to Christians, but rather about what humans do to each other.  Sadly, the history of what Christians have done to Jews only serves to underscore the truth of the violent human dynamic that the Passion story reveals.  Using this story to reinscribe the very “us” vs. “them” binary that Jesus seeks to overcome indicates just how seriously Christianity too often has misinterpreted it.

 

This leads to a related pitfall during Holy Week: the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.  It is the idea that Jesus’ died for our sins, bearing the punishment that we deserve to satisfy God’s demand for retributive justice.  Jesus did not die for our sins.  He died because of our sins, because of our collective enslavement to order based on sacrificial violence.  His death is liberating, not because it placates an angry God; but because it confronts us with the truth about ourselves, and makes it possible for us to consciously choose sacrificial love instead of sacrificial violence as the basis for human and ecological community. 

 

The theological meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the evolutionary leap in human consciousness that it inaugurates, unleashing an unlimited potential for growth in wisdom and compassion.  The Eastern Church understood rightly that salvation is deification, recovering the image of God within us.  Jesus died, not to liberate us from divine wrath, but from human wrath, so that we might reclaim our identity and our unity in divine love. 

 

One Big Promise

This is the big promise of Holy Week:  that by dying to the way of violence we can be reborn in the way of love.  We can partake of the divine nature by realizing the potential of our human nature.  There is another way to live. 

 

Holy Week is a dramatic rehearsal of the way of love.  Its practice is familiar to any good community organizer.  It begins with intentionally raising the tension in the system to make visible its violence and inhumanity.  It does so creatively:  a march on Jerusalem from Galilee with a symbolic entrance into the city that recalls prophetic hope for justice, a symbolic cleansing of the Temple in protest against exploitation, and a teach-in calling the authorities to account for their complicity with oppression. 

 

It continues with a kind of political ju-jitsu, confronting civilizational violence with a willingness to sacrifice oneself in solidarity with its victims.  Jesus refuses to deny either the reality of oppression or the humanity of everyone involved.  Conflict is heightened, not through reciprocal violence (sacrificing other people), but by raising consciousness through a willingness to make sacrifices in the service of truth and reconciliation (risking vilification, arrest, punishment and even death).  Sacrificial violence is opposed by sacrificial love, so that that the binary of “us” vs. “them” is overcome.  There is only “us.”

 

Sacrificial love escalates the confrontation by expanding the circle of community embracing the path of love.  The “them” keeps getting smaller and the “us” keeps getting larger as we realize and manifest the flow of mercy in tune with the beating heart of God at the center of reality.  The promise is resurrection: life lived from this center.

 

May we honestly and carefully navigate the pitfalls of Holy Week as we journey together to claim its astonishing promise.  May it become the pattern of our collective life until the promise is fulfilled. 

 

 

 

Forgiving, Re-membering, Forgetting

 

“The soul which has apatheia is not simply the one which is not disturbed by changing events but the one which remains unmoved at the memory of them as well.”  - Evagrius Ponticus[1]

Evagrius writes in the latter half of the 4^th century.  He is one of the great theoreticians of the spiritual life and through his influence on John Cassian, transmitted the wisdom of Origin of Alexandria and the early monastics of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in a lineage that continues through St. Benedict of Nursia to our own day.  His influence on ascetical theology is enormous, albeit underappreciated. 

 

Like many of the desert fathers and mothers, Evagrius was an astute psychologist whose teaching was rooted in experience and observation.   He understood the prominent role that memory plays in our inner lives and its capacity to disturb and even paralyze us.  This is why he insists that being unmoved by the memory of past events is an essential element of apatheia.

 

By apatheia, Evagrius and the tradition that he represents does not mean “apathy” in the modern sense of the word.  It is not a state of indifference to events, but rather “a habitual state of imperturbable calm.”[2]  It is a state of awareness in which our emotional energy is integrated with the rational faculties of consciousness, so that we have the capacity to be fully present to our experience and perceive reality clearly.  It is a state of freedom in which we can respond to events rather than simply react to them.  It is the prerequisite for what Beatrice Bruteau describes as creative freedom, in which genuine agency or initiative becomes possible rather than simply responding to stimuli.[3]  

 

Evagrius recognized that spiritual growth requires the healing of memory, the resolution of emotional disturbances the prevent the past from becoming the past.  Contemporary trauma theory provides a neuroscientific basis for understanding what Evagrius intuited.[4]  We can be and often are disturbed by the memory of past events; or rather, by the inability to integrate past experience as memory.  Victims of trauma experiences their suffering as a continuing present reality, unable to consign it to the past.  Their emotional responses are frozen in the mode of fight, flight, or dissociation, interfering with their ability to perceive and respond to reality in the present. 

 

The healing of trauma involves creating conditions in which the victims can feel safe enough in their bodies to relax the autonomic responses that keep them in emotional upheaval.  Then they can begin to articulate for themselves a narrative of the past and reintegrate their emotions with the cognitive centers of the brain that allow for the development of memory.  The healing of trauma is very much connected to what the Christian contemplative tradition has described as the purification (or healing) of memory.

 

Ancient monastics like Evagrius created the conditions that allowed for the healing of the past through spiritual practices that cultivated moral self-discipline, introspection, and meditation.  These practices integrated body, emotions, and intellect.  Through ascesis, assiduous commitment to these practices, one eventually obtained apatheia and, as Evagrius noted, “agape is the progeny of apatheia.”  The sign of healing, of mature spiritual development, is the capacity to love freely unconstrained by self-centered preoccupations.  Conversely, it is the experience of being held in love, of intuiting directly the divine agape in the present moment, that allows the past to become the past.  The healing of memory is the freedom to love.  

 

This process of healing involves both forgiving and re-membering.  Forgiveness means no longer being defined by the harms one has suffered or caused; this is genuine freedom from the disturbance of past events.  As forgiveness ripens in the soul, it leads to re-membering.  The past becomes the past and no longer has any power to disturb (though it continues to inform) our perception of the present and hope for the future.  

 

At the deepest level of our being, we begin to understand that our identity is not what has happened to us.  We are part of a larger wholeness in which everything belongs.  We are free to make different choices, unhindered by the past, that can advance personal and collective flourishing.  One can even achieve a kind of forgetting that is not minimization or denial of the past, but a complete transfiguration of one’s inner life that simply no longer identifies with it.  It drops away because its purpose is fulfilled and transcended.[5]

 

This is a degree of interior freedom that is perhaps rarely achieved, but it does point to evolutionary possibilities in human consciousness that are essential to our collective healing and hope for the future.  Apatheia creates a capacity for intuitive knowing through sympathetic resonance; knowing another from the inside out, as it were.  It leads to a profound realization of our interconnection with all of reality and evokes compassion and wisdom.  We begin to embody agape, acting for the well-being of others.  This is the freedom of the prophets who can imagine a future no longer constrained by the past.  This is the consciousness of the saints and the bodhisattvas:  those who forgive and forget.   

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[1] Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, translated by John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1972), p. 34. 

[2] See Bamberger’s translation, Ibid., p. 63.

[3] Beatrice Bruteau, “Prayer and Identity” in Contemplative Review, 1981.

[4] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).

[5] Constance FitzGerald, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis of Memory” in CTSA PROCEEDINGS 64 (2009): 21-42.  FitgzGerald carefully notes the caveats to “forgetting” when considering the requirements of social justice in response to collective traumas, but nevertheless offers a provocative argument for the importance of the purification of memory in the development of genuine prophetic hope.