Good Friday

It's Good Friday. Today I'm wearing my "Leo" socks as a reminder of what is altogether too human and untransformed in me: the inner Roman Empire where Pax is a matter of human will and force.

Here's why I am an Episcopalian: the Eucharist unglues me. Since I first entered an Episcopal church when I was 19, it always has. This ritual works, symbolically, on every psychic level. In the immediate language of dreams it is the act of incorporating that which we would emulate, of "swallowing the leader". Then again, it is the sacrificial breaking open of the Godhead to become food for the people. Or, on the other hand, it is the shattering of divisive human egotism into the larger God-centered awareness. It is unity and abundance, the ever-flowing abundance of the Holy. It is the dance of humanity and divinity meeting and parting and meeting again.

These sentences only approximate the meaning of the Eucharist. At it's heart, like any good symbol, it is mystery. It is something to be lived into, understood, and even then not perfectly, through a lifetime of engaging it.

These days, for me, the Eucharist is about family. It is the blueprint of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is the table at which all are welcome, the only table where I eat with people who are different from me in almost every way. Different races and ethnicities, socioeconomic strata, sexual orientations and gender identities, political affiliations, spiritual understandings -- we all eat bread and wine, elbow to elbow, at Christ's table. We divide up a common loaf of bread. We share a single cup of wine. Nobody gets more; nobody gets less. We're all in it together.

Good Friday, empty Friday: the male followers of Jesus scatter like leaves in a wind in the face of the death-by-torture of their Rabbi. The women, who as people of no account are flying under the radar, witness and mourn. It's all such a very public, so very demeaning tragedy -- for everybody. The Romans show their most brutish un-Pax-filled natures. The spiritual leaders of the Jews flamboyantly display their petty self-centeredness. The common people reveal the tendency of people everywhere to become with little provocation a mindless mob. Everybody is so very, very human. Re-enacting the story today I can find the bits of me that are like all of these characters.

Through all this walks Jesus, embodiment of the Kingdom of Heaven. In everything he does he remains true to his larger vision of Pax, a Shalom with the heart of God. He sees everything with compassion, teaches where he can and submits where he cannot. He gives us a Way to go forward with one another and he remains true to that Way through torture and death.

Pax will never come to the Earth through human effort and force. It only arrives when we become open to the Shalom with the heart of God. By myself I am like all the characters in the Passion narrative: petty, abusive, blaming, judgmental, terrified, vindictive, and stupid. Fortunately I have a family that comes together over bread and wine to approximate a different understanding. Each faith tradition has a place like this, a place where we are family and our hearts become transparent to the heart of divinity. From these places Peace can be made. May God help us to recognize them in one anothers' Way.