Week 5: Mourning
This week we turn toward the world.
The first four weeks have been interior descent. Fasting, silence, body, feeling. We've been learning to soften, to stay present, to hold what arises without running. That's real work. It builds capacity.
But the capacity isn't just for ourselves. Because the patterns we've been noticing in ourselves these past four weeks (the reaching, the numbing, the armor, the refusal to feel) are the same patterns running through the world. They just scale. The self-protection that clenches my jaw is the same impulse that builds walls between nations. The numbness that keeps me from feeling my own grief is the same numbness that lets us scroll past suffering. The contemplative work we've been doing these past four weeks isn't training for seeing the world more clearly. It's what happens when we stop pretending we're separate from it.
So then, this week we ask: can I hold what's happening in the world? Can I let myself see clearly and stay soft? Can I grieve without collapsing into despair or hardening into rage?
I keep being drawn back to the cross. Not the theology of it yet, just the scene. He's surrounded by mockery, violence, abandonment. The religious leaders have their reasons. The empire does what empires do. His friends have run.
And when I look at the cross, I can't help seeing it happening again.
I see it in families separated at the border, children taken from parents by policy, the word "invasion" used for people made in God's image. I see it in the wars we never should've started. I see it in the Epstein files, in men who built entire systems so they could take whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted, and in the decades of silence that made it possible. I see it in Black bodies treated as threats, in systems that rank human worth by color. I see it in patriarchy, the systematic permission men receive to dominate, to take up space, to control bodies and decisions and rooms, permission woven so deep it feels like nature rather than construction. I see it in my own numbness when I scroll past the faces.
The honest truth is that I am not just a spectator, but I am a part of it. I benefit from systems I am under. I participate in separateness I want to resist. We all do.
What happened to Jesus on the cross keeps happening throughout history. René Girard called it the scapegoat mechanism: communities under pressure finding someone to blame, someone to expel, someone to sacrifice. The violence against the scapegoat temporarily restoring a sense of order. We've been doing this for as long as we've been human.
But Jesus, looking out at what's happening to him says, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing."
I've only heard that passage as God's amazing grace and forgiveness till now. But I think it's something closer to a demonstration. That line shows us what it looks like to hold the worst without becoming it. To absorb cruelty without returning it. To see your torturers clearly, and see through them to their captivity, their blindness, their own bondage to the systems they serve.
I've come to believe the cross isn't God requiring a sacrifice. It's God exposing what we do and refusing to let it have the last word. Jesus is the scapegoat who doesn't stay dead. His resurrection reveals the innocence of the victim and the guilt of the crowd.
And we are invited to participate. Not just to benefit from something Jesus did, but to join in what he's still doing. Holding the world's pain. Refusing the scapegoat mechanism. Absorbing evil without returning it.
The temptation is to numb. Scroll past. Look away. The other temptation is to rage, to scapegoat the scapegoaters, to become what we oppose.
But the question Lent asks is not "whose side are you on?" The question is: can you see it? Can you see it and stay soft? Can you hold the ones who are being crucified and the ones doing the crucifying in the same grieving heart, even as you resist the crucifying with everything you have?
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
I don't know how to hold that. But I think learning how is the work.
Hope to see you at the session tomorrow.
Lectio Divina
Ephesians 2:14-16
For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us, abolishing the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.
