Liturgical Time - Deep Time

On Sunday we began Holy Week, the liturgical commemoration of the historical events in the last days of the life of Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago. But we also entered into deep time, time that is not chronological, that speaks a truth of events that are re-enacted in our lives in an unconscious way.

The American writer William Faulkner once said: “The past is not dead, it is not even past.” Perhaps this insight is nowhere more true than in Holy Week. We do not just commemorate the historical events of Jerusalem two millennia ago, we become conscious of the ways in which we live out Holy Week in our lives every day.

On Palm Sunday we like to think that we are part of the cheering crowd, standing there waving palms and welcoming Jesus the Messiah into Jerusalem. After all, we think, we would have been among those who understood and supported Jesus from the beginning. It is easy to be caught up in the crowd’s wave of adulation, to be part of the energy of the collective, to ride the tide of excitement and fervor.

But in our monastic celebration for Palm Sunday we follow the traditional practice of reading the account of the Passion on this day. We enter into the excitement of the crowd on Palm Sunday but we look forward to the fickleness of the crowd that will shortly be crying for blood. It is interesting that when the Passion narrative is read in public the part of the crowd is read by those in the pews. Those of us who are spectators at the liturgy once again become the spectators who were there in Jerusalem. And this time we are not on the side of the angels. On this day we become part of the crowd who has turned viciously on Jesus in the space of a few days. We go from adulation to retribution, from palms to cries of blood lust. The tide has turned and we along with it. We are the crowd crying out “crucify him, crucify him!”

What has happened in these few days, what has happened to us? There was a palpable sense of hope in the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Here was the Messiah, the Savior, the one who would make everything right, who would come in triumph to inaugurate a new order. But the new order was one of humility and suffering not power and might. The way would be neither quick nor easy. Then as now we are easily disappointed, we want simple answers and we want them now. Like spoiled children with short attention spans we have no patience for anything but having our way and having it now. The anger and disappointment of the crowd wells up in us still today. We want the easy way, the way of someone else doing the hard work for us. We don’t want the way of the cross.

And so most of us sit in comfortable churches and chapels, the words speak of experiences and emotions that are distant, detached, far from our immediate experience. But perhaps the call of entering into the Passion, entering into the events of this Holy Week, is to experience them as real and present. If we enter into the reality of Holy Week we will see that we are part of both the supportive, cheering crowd and the angry mob crying for violence. We will be the ones who feel the poignant service of foot washing on Thursday. The pain of the torture of crucifixion will be ours on Friday. On Saturday the darkest despair will give way to hope as we pass over from darkness and death to light and life.

The call of this time is to be conscious, to be present, to enter into that deep time that is never past bu always present. We are called to live these stories, to know that they are not part of some long-ago, antiseptic past, but the events of Holy Week constitute the dynamic of our everyday lives. The call is to know that if we are not aware, not awake and conscious we will simply become a part of the angry mob. But if we are aware and awake we can enter into the difficult, painful, joyous and astounding reality of Holy Week as it repeated in the ordinary time of our everyday lives. We will learn to live in the present moment when the Paschal mystery is lived out in each of our lives.

Palm Sunday and liturgical manipulation

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week. Am I the only one who wants to stand up and shout “Wait! I’m not ready yet!”?

Of course part of the problem is that I always feel slightly manipulated by liturgical time. The liturgical calendar says: it is now Advent and so you will feel joyful and in awe at the coming incarnation. That’s all well and good but frequently during Advent I am exceptionally cranky about the intruding values of the world and my inability to stay focused on Advent. Then I don’t seem to be able to enter into the intended meaning of the season and which in turn makes me more cranky about having to try and match my spiritual experience to the liturgical calendar.

When Lent rolls around it isn’t the least bit easier. I tell myself I should be focusing deeply and intensely on God during these 40 days, using the opportunity for spiritual growth and prayer. But then every year the reality of daily life seems to supersede my good intentions, I get busy and focused on necessary tasks and then suddenly it is Palm Sunday and once again I feel cranky and manipulated by liturgical time. (Do you begin to see a pattern here?)

It finally occurred to me though that this artificiality, this apparent manipulation of time in the liturgical year is the point, not an unfortunate by-product. By simply setting a particular time for a particular event in salvation history and saying that everyone will celebrate at that time is a way to remind us how time and God really work.

God works in God’s own time, not in ours. God irrupts into human history, in birth, in death, in resurrection, in triumph and in tragedy, in God’s time. The events of Palm Sunday, the great triumph that with its barely noticed, menacing shadows peeking out of the corners, echoes our own life. Great events don’t always come when we want them, when we plan them or when we have time for them. They just come and interrupt our lives and make us pay attention. Good Friday will come five days after Palm Sunday whether or not we are ready because death never comes when we are ready. Death will come unexpectedly as we cling to more time or it will delay and meander and take its sweet time when we are all too ready. Good Friday will come whether we are ready or not. Then Easter will come. It will come whether or not we experience it in our lives. The great vigil of Saturday night or the breaking dawn of Sunday morning may find us smothered in the reality of the cross and it won’t matter, Easter is here, new life is here whether you can feel it or not.

The liturgical year feels artificial and manipulative because it cuts through my illusion that I am in control of my own life, even my own spiritual life. I like to assume that I can think my spiritual thoughts and have great, profound insights on my own terms which I then report to God when I am good and ready. The relentless calendar of the year reminds me this isn’t the case. God comes when God comes. God acts when God acts. Like the child in the hide and seek game God always calls out “ready or not here I come.” In hope, in despair, in promise, in challenge and call, the time is always God’s time. God’s paradox speaks when the linear, calendar time of chronos becomes the God time of kairos by reminding us that every day is the day of God’s gift not of our own agenda.

Everyday Life: Liturgical Calisthenics and the Organ Recital

1 During the winter season, that is, from the first of November until Easter, it seems reasonable to arise at the eighth hour of the night. 2 By sleeping until a little past the middle of the night, the brothers can arise with their food fully digested….4 Between Easter and the first of November mentioned above, the time for Vigils should be adjusted so that a very short interval after Vigils will give the monks opportunity to care for nature’s needs. Then, at daybreak, Lauds should follow immediately. Rule of Benedict 8:1-2,4

7 As soon as the cantor begins to sing “Glory be to the Father,” let all the monks rise from their seats in honor and reverence for the Holy Trinity. RB 9:7

Sometimes Christianity can seem disembodied, a matter of intellectual faith in dogma and propositions, believing in an unseen and invisible God. For some, faith may not seem to have a whole lot to do with the messiness of concrete and corporeal problems, the reality of living life in touch with our bodies, the earth or just day to day reality. People who tend to think of their faith in this way have clearly never been to a monastery. There are few things as physical, down to earth and human as a group of monastics praying together.

Monastic prayer is very physical, very real. It is grounded in the body, even when the body isn’t always pretty. The body always reminds us that the body is what Christ came to share with us in the incarnation, the body in all its wonderful, messy, spectacular and occasionally grumpy glory. Monastic prayer doesn’t consist of disembodied, lilting, ethereal paeans to an unseen God in the clouds. Monastic prayer is embodied, it involves the senses, the body, and recognizing the holiness of things that don’t seem very holy.

We gather three times a day for prayer. In the monastery a bell rings ten minutes before the time for prayer and we begin to make our pilgrimage down the halls to the chapel. Most of us walk into the chapel. Some scurry, several limp, and a few meander in after everyone else is seated. You can tell a lot about people by how they walk. Some are deeply weighed down by life, their burdens bend them over and they seem to grow close to the ground. A few people bounce along, the happy Tiggers of a Winnie the Pooh story, a spring in their step, happy to meet the day and its challenges. A few stately ships seem to part the water as the glide majestically along the corridors and between the waves of chairs. Some people rush in like the white rabbit of Alice in Wonderland as if always late for a very important date. One may seem to silently trumpet her presence while another is silent, unseen and invisible.

Like most monasteries today we are mostly older, sometimes we look like a parade of the lame, the halt and the blind milling around, responding to a rumor that Jesus is in the neighborhood and might be healing people. At a certain age knees give out, hips creak and groan, feet hurt and it is easier to kind of shuffle. In the front row are the sisters who have lost this battle, they are experiencing the final growth in monastic humility that comes from being dependent, waiting for someone to take them into or out of chapel, help them with their hearing devices, hand them a tissue when their hands are shaking too much to get them for themselves. They are living with the final betrayal of the bodies that they bring to prayer.

Finally the grandfather clock chimes the hour, the signal to stand and begin. Some stand the way they breathe and move, calmly, effortlessly without thought. Others know that simply getting up at the end of prayer will be as much effort as they can make while some still struggle and heave with the effort. Our entire bodies have come to prayer.

All our voices intend to praise God as one, but some voices do a better job than others. At the signal an entire menagerie lifts its voice, a chorus that contains nightingales and bull elephants, twittering and trumpeting, some on key and some off on another planet. Some sing with great and joyful abandon, oblivious of how they sound. Others are sure that these joyful people are intentionally scraping fingernails across the blackboards of their souls with their sounds. A few rush ahead as if in a hurry to catch a bus while a few poke and doddle in their prayers, content to bring up the rear of the choir.

In between is the reality of Benedict’s reminder to allow time for monks to “care for nature’s needs.” We are surrounded by the same community that Benedict lived in, where you can tell what people had for dinner the night before, who has a sinus infection, who should have laid off the garlic and whose new indigestion medicine isn’t working. One of our sisters refers to it as the “organ recital.”

Listening to this particular organ recital day after day, and occasionally contributing to it, is a reminder that it isn’t our disembodied souls that will be saved, it is our whole, infuriating, wonderful, broken and blessed bodies that will be redeemed. In the meantime we will have lots of opportunities to anticipate that redemption, to practice patience with our own and others bodies.