In my weariness tonight, I am inclined to skim the surface of things, post more beautiful, happy pictures, say something along the lines of The weather is wonderful! Wish you were here!
But I’ve just belatedly read a reflection on Maundy Thursday by Kenneth L. Samuel, who referenced the fact that “[t]he children of Israel were instructed to eat the Passover with their traveling clothes on, wearing their walking shoes and carrying walking sticks in their hands. They were to eat and hasten themselves into the new realities of their God-Given freedom.” And I thought, God help me, where is my exodus from bondage in this season? Where on Good Friday, when we have seen so very many stripped alters and shrouded crucifixes, is my experience of “the broken one,” as the theologian Debbie Blue says, “who gives up power for love”?
Indeed, experiences of freedom and love are here in Rome, in this little apartment by the Tiber River we are renting from another academic, who is currently teaching in Scotland, and whose mother, Laura, met us the first night, and angel-like, took us to get much-needed food, and who, angel-like, has met us two other serendipitous times in this crowded city of pilgrims, on a street and on a bus, and always she kisses me once on each cheek, and in our broken versions of each other’s beautiful languages, always Laura and I confirm that all is well, molto bene, or close enough.
But these experiences (of freedom and love and angels) occurred back in Wheaton, too. And these experiences will continue to occur in the time we will take to travel after Greg and I both teach for a month at a program affiliated with Gordon College which is located in Orvieto. Maundy Thursday and Good Friday will be part of the everyday when we return to Wheaton again, too. If only I choose to recognize them.
I’m not always as good as I’d like to be at recognition. I’m not always as good as I’d like to be at not just looking, but seeing.
God of Mercy, Comfort us in our darkest times. Intercede for us with sighs too deep for words.
The thing is, like many of you reading this, I’m sure, my family has been through a very difficult few years. Our experience is not entirely my story to tell—not at all—so I’ll only say this: I believe that only by some blessed combination of merciful grace, sheer will, and tenacious hard work are we are here in Holy Week, broken but intact, wearing our traveling clothes, exchanging power for love and bondage for freedom if and when we’re able. For my own self, the holy hellacious-ness of this past season of every days has left me living with rheumatoid arthritis, a fair amount of grief and sadness, a novel I’m thankful to have been able to write, and a family I cherish more now than ever before. But. And. Then again. Nothing is over ’til it’s over.
At the risk of sounding casual about Holy Week: consider Maundy Thursday, the first one. You’re a friend, sitting at table with other friends, professing absolute loyalty, feasting and having your aching, dusty feet, tended to in the most memorable of ways. It is good. Molto bene. And then it is not. Then you are falling asleep on the job, betraying the deepest of loyalties, having one of those tunnel vision kind of nights. Next day, it just gets worse. The tunnel narrows until the world goes dark. It is finished. It is really finished. Finished really. Finished. There are no words for this.
And then it’s not. Then the mountain moves, and you realize it was just a stone all along–okay, a boulder, maybe, the kind of thing that typically seals the deal. But not a mountain. And somehow. Look. Here you are in the garden again. Holy in the everyday. And someone says your name.
In Rome, as in Wheaton, we have our baggage. We are human and broken, downright tired and overwhelmed. What bus do we take now? How can we have come all this way, only to find this closed? To find you closed? Why did you say that, do that, look at me that way? Stop!
But Rome, like the Holy and the Everyday, teaches me. It taught me the first time I was here, when Greg and I were only a year married. We were young(er) and healthy (healthier), and we charged from one site to the next–me, writing word upon word in three (I kid you not) journals; Greg, taking hundreds of rolls of film (yes, film).
This time, here with our kids, I am not writing in a journal at all. Instead, I draw sometimes–those crazy line drawings where I don’t look at the paper when I draw; I just regard whatever I am drawing, and try to let my gaze touch upon it like . . . I don’t know . . . like the proverbial lover’s hand. My children laugh at my drawings–my drawings are laughable; I laugh at them too. But I tell my kids, I tell myself: this is not about the drawing. It is about the seeing. And they remember that fact, and I remember that fact, and we go quiet, and we understand.
When I am not drawing, more often than not, I am watching my son and my daughter. I am seeing them, and sometimes they are looking, and sometimes their eyes are glazed with boredom or tiredness, and sometimes they are seeing down to their very souls. This last, well, it thrills me. My daughter, like my husband, is relying on a camera to be her third eye. My son’s two eyes prove sufficient for his purpose. And I see my kids, oh, I see them. The holy in the everyday, death and resurrection so intertwined that they seem one in the same, the brokenness like a crack where the light gets in, and shows us the way.
