“Let’s do it”, I said grimly to my best friend, Annie, as I
got into the car. She shuddered. We both remembered these words, which we
had often used jokingly as we loaded toddlers and gear into the car for an
expedition to the pool.
“Let’s do it”, I said grimly to my best friend, Annie, as I
got into the car. She shuddered. We both remembered these words, which we
had often used jokingly as we loaded toddlers and gear into the car for an
expedition to the pool.
Annie was driving me to the hospital, the day before my scheduled surgery, for my pre-operative tests and admission. I was scared, unable to face the prospect alone, so my friend came along just to be with me. She spent the day sitting with me in waiting rooms, doing handwork while I went in to talk to doctors and anesthesiologists (including the pre-op interview where the form you sign says that, among other things, you could die from this, and you realize that). The last step in the procedure was to pick up the form that said what they would be doing to me: a “total simple mastectomy.”
Total. Simple.
Then we went out to lunch together, a rare treat for two mothers of pre-schoolers, and talked about our feelings and our lives and our kids – usual and unusual things. Or we made grim jokes – mostly I did. Once, going from building to building, Annie caught my arm as a truck pulled out of the street we were crossing. “No point in getting hit by a truck on the way to my mastectomy,” I said. It can’t have been an easy day for her. I cannot imagine how I could have gotten through it without her.
PALM SUNDAY: the Invitation
“Let’s do it,” I said to myself – involuntarily, so that I was surprised I was saying it. I was at the church door, pausing before going in to take my seat for the Palm Sunday service, four months after the operation.
“See, my betrayer is at hand. Let us go forth,” says Jesus in the Passion story, which I had reread beforehand, surprised at how frightening the familiar story seemed to me this year. “Let us go up, that we may die with him,” said Thomas. To associate these sacred words and the events they recall with the emotions of that day at the hospital embarrassed me a bit. It seemed a melodramatic association, bordering on irreverence, and certainly not in the best of taste. But I have been learning to recognize these nudges from the Spirit – as if a voice were speaking to me, kindly but also in some exasperation: “Look! Pay attention to what you are feeling. Go through it. You were given these stories for a reason.”
Writers on spirituality routinely caution us against trusting our emotions too much. Mostly, their point is to recognize that the absence of a “spiritual high” in prayer and contemplation does not equal the absence of God’s presence: just because we can’t feel it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. But the call I felt here was to let the Spirit use some very painful and unfaced emotions as a way back into God’s presence – to acknowledge the pain I had been suppressing and bring it under the divine mercy, and into the community of faith. In a way, it seemed to be an invitation to use the liturgy itself as a healing process, almost as a kind of therapy – to feel what I was feeling and to look at it in the context of our faith, which, after all, has some things to say about suffering and death and resurrection.
And so I said to myself, and to the Lord, as the procession gathered and the organ began to play the steadying melody of “All Glory Laud and Honor.” “Let’s do it.”
MAUNDY THURSDAY: Blankness
Maundy Thursday is an odd day, liturgically, really. I had forgotten that the color for the day is white. The white-veiled processional cross now stays in my mind. The story of the day, the corporate celebration, are all joyful and close enough to our usual Sunday celebrations to seem familiar, even a little out of tune with the solemnity to come. In fact, it was no great emotional epiphany for me as I went through the service, worshipping as fully as I can or ever have. More a sense of blankness, really, of not knowing, perhaps fearing too greatly, what the next stage is going to be like.
I did feel a bit ashamed of my thinking myself so “special” these past few days. Everyone at that service had her or his own story. The stripping of the altar and silent procession from a bare church, the cross now veiled in black, was impressive.
This blankness I feel now scares me a bit. I can no longer pray “ I am with you,” or “let me be with you,” Lord” – though I’d like to – because I see that that kind of “being there” may well be beyond me. I do find myself wondering if I should be getting so anxious about what is, after all, “merely” an enactment – but I feel this odd blankness about tomorrow. I am not grieving, exactly, for I haven’t faced the fact of Jesus’ death fully – or what it means to say that He died “for me.” These are things I should be open to, but I may not be able to face them yet.
Forget about the “therapeutic” angle of this experience that will work itself out, or not. I can go through this day as an expression of love and devotion, to be with Jesus himself as a beloved “person,” as Annie was there with me that day at the hospital. I have never tried this kind of devotional exercise before – and there is no strong emotion propelling it. Only a blank sense that I need to “stay with Him,” and an occasional glimpse of His solitude as He goes out to “die for us.”
If those words come to mean something more to me than they have before, that will be an important step in my spiritual journey. And I hope that by trying to grasp it, I will always, also, be “giving back” some of the tremendous love that has been sustaining me.
GOOD FRIDAY: Already Accomplished
“Where I am going, you cannot follow,” said Jesus. We are called to follow Him on the way of the Cross. But what we are celebrating, in that passage from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to the Easter Vigil, is that in some mysterious sense the journey is already accomplished. He has gone through that dreaded darkness for us, and put an end to it. This must be what we mean in the creed when we say “He descended into Hell.” He has entered that place of separation where our fears and sins and inadequacies always seem to drive us, and broken it open, so that we need no longer fear it.
We can follow him, but only so far, to that gray vestibule-area, at the edge of the grave. Not that there will not be times of darkness in our lives – but the darkness can never be complete, even though it may feel that way to us while we are in it. That, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, is why we call this Friday “Good.”
And so, I also saw, there was no more need for me to use the liturgy as “therapy,” because I had seen what the Spirit had been trying to show me: that in all of my ordeal, I had never been alone. Indeed, the moments of deepest crisis had revealed to me a need for the love of God which I might not have found in myself without being made utterly weak. I saw clearly, my task for Good Friday was not to think on my sins nor on the cruelty that humanity can show, even to our God (not this year, anyway), but to say “Thank you” for what has already been done, graciously and without our help or deserving, for all of us. Devotion, not therapy, was the task of the day. If I did nothing during that hour but kneel and offer thanks, it would be enough.
And oddly enough, listening to the service with new ears, I saw that for all the solemnity of the Passion, the strangeness of receiving Communion from reserved sacrament on that one day of the year, the tone of the evening was also one of deep devotion and celebration. At the center of the ritual is that wonderful prayer for the Church, repeated again at the Easter Vigil the next night: “let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made.”
The most solemn day of the year, Good Friday is also the greatest opportunity that the liturgy offers for quiet and adoring celebration: we are observing and celebrating something that has been accomplished already, that we have not done, could not do for ourselves. As Jesus said from the cross, “It is accomplished.” Done. There is nothing to for us to do but say “Thank you,” from the depths of our hearts, to the Source of our being.
EASTER VIGIL: Hope Incarnate
As I watched the procession at the end of that Easter Vigil service, I could see clearly that a new phase of my own journey was beginning here. One of the lay readers that night was a woman about my mother’s age who had also had breast cancer, a mastectomy, and an ordeal of additional chemotherapy, just a few months before my own operation. We had never spoken, and I doubted that she knew about my experience, but it had been very sustaining to me, especially during Advent and Lent, to see her in church, and to observe that she seemed to be managing well, finding it possible to pray and embrace life. I especially remembered having seen her on All Saints Sunday, five days before my surgery, as she sang out heartily the hymn “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God (“for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one, too!”). The sight of her, looking well and faithful so soon after her own surgery, had been a real source of hope and strength to me on that day. Now, here we both were at Easter, singing out with all our hearts, “Jesus Christ is Risen Today,” with the whole congregation, in the middle of the night, in a space that we had made as bright and beautiful as humanly possible to reflect a joy beyond expression.
Entering into that joy, with a clear sense of the community sharing it, I found myself laughing with the deep and joyful laughter that is a kind of prayer. It was a prayer of thanksgiving, that I could now claim with all my heart, promises to which I had long given my intellectual assent. “OK, Lord,” I said, or felt, in that awesome yet living, laughing presence – “I see it now, yes – so this is what we mean – “the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” These things have always been real, but I know now that “the life everlasting” has already begun for me. We celebrate it in this place, and in this community. And we go out from here.
Some portions of this article also appear in Kathy Staudt's contribution to a new collection of essays, Imagining Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo, and forthcoming from Church Publishing in 2007.
Kathy Staudt works as a teacher, poet and spiritual director at a number of institutions in the Washington DC area. At Virginia Theological Seminary, her classes focus on writing, poetry, spirituality and Christian Vocation, especially from the point of view of the laity. She also teaches at Wesley Theological Seminary and at the University of Maryland. She has offered retreats and workshops at the Washington National Cathedral and at area churches, including the annual Evelyn Underhill Day of Quiet offered at the Cathedral each year in June. She is the author of At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics, published in 1994 by University of Michigan Press, and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture published by Edwin Mellen Press in 2003.