Soon we will begin the procession into Jerusalem singing Hosanna with the crowds, waving palms and wondering what salvation means now. Tantrums will erupt as things are not as they should be and we will repent. Or we will try.
We will bend to tenderly wash feet and try again to understand what wondrous love is this. That is my favorite part of the rituals we share that week and the one my children love most. It’s the part that they can find themselves in most. They know how to do this without any help. They can pump the soap into their fat little palms and gently cleanse my feet with one of the washcloths we still have from when they were tiny babies.
They know that Mommy gets sad the next day but they don’t really understand why any of this needs to happen. It seems God could do something else with this story other than give us this ending on a cross.
I really want better answers to this question of why bad things happen and I’m not really sure I believe that God is responsible for everything that happens. Some things just happen and we are left to find meaning in those events. We have to figure out how to tell the story after that terrible thing happens. Amelia Richardson Dress does a beautiful job with this in the Passion Story in her children’s book but there are terrible things that are still happening that we have to figure out how to explain to ourselves and our children.
This year, especially, I’m thinking about the stories we repeat to ourselves. There are certain narratives we allow to take up more space so that they define us with greater significance. Some of these stories no longer serve us who we are becoming but we haven’t challenged them and do they remain part of our identity. They are a part of our backstory and we can’t separate from them like the way that we tell the end of the story on Good Friday. Churches repeat the same story from the Gospel of John year after year which blames the Jews for everything that goes wrong. Clergy will blame the Revised Common Lectionary because the narrative in John is the set reading for the day. We get stuck in our own patterns and can’t see beyond what we think we know. We need a nudge to shift our vantage and wonder if this is the only story we could tell.
New Testament professor and Jewish studies scholar Amy-Jill Levine pushes churches to consider telling a different story. She suggest scraping John in favor of any of the other Gospel accounts but indicates a particular preference for the way that Luke shares his version of events. In this account, Jesus is not the only one to die that day but there are “the other two Jews who died that day. Luke prompts us to ask: Who stood by them as they died? Who buried their bodies? Who mourned them?”
I find the headlines hard to read right now but every week I’ve been more and more drawn to the photos of the week collected by the amazing photographers connected to Atlantic Monthly. There are a few other weekly archives of photos that can be found through a simple Google search but this is my favorite so far. I’m amazed each week by how much living is done in just one week. Some are disastrous and some are just amazing that I can’t help but wonder about the story of every person in those photos. What about that bird? What has it seen? Where has it flown? What does it hope to find?
A photograph can remind us how limited our vision can be. We can only see what is within the frame. Everything else is cropped out but that doesn’t mean it is not there. Nor does it mean that what is not immediately evident does not impact what we see. Maybe it’s not in the image but it affects how we see it. We do this all the time. We don’t allow ourselves joy when there are terrible things happening just outside our view. We struggle to hold all these things together all at once. It’s too much for us to process. We prefer to focus on one thing. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a survival skill. Maybe it’s just how our brains work. Even so, I want to play with my limited understanding of the world at this moment. I invite you to join me using something from when I was in art school.
Though I rarely did this because I was too impulsive (ahem), I was trained to make a viewfinder to create a composition. There are rules that every artist is supposed to follow and there are also really good reasons to break these rules. A viewfinder helps the artist to literally find their view. It focuses and defines the artist’s composition just as we are all trying to figure out how to hold onto all the things that are tangled in our prayers. We need a viewfinder to find our way.
You might not choose to craft for your prayer practice but instead use your fingers to create a frame as you wander through your day. As you spread your fingers apart, you may find new openness. Or new questions might arise just from focusing on some tiny detail that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.
For those prayers that feel too big to fit in any frame you might craft, you might focus instead on how a story is being told. As a visual person, my imagination runs with metaphors that are used to express something that we struggle to name. What does that image mean? What else could it be telling you? Or maybe it’s not an image but a word that keeps appearing in a radio news report? Maybe it’s a phrase your colleague keeps repeating that makes you curious so that you shift from your vantage point to understanding their narration of events. There is always more to the story, always something beyond our perspective. How might the story change if we shift our viewpoint? What more might we learn about God and ourselves?
If you have a journaling practice (or are looking to start one), you might read this essay on the essential role of literary reimaginings and then take your hand at retelling a story from your life, the news or even the gospels to see what you might discover with a slightly different view.
If you are finding yourself not sure how to form words of prayer for the situation in Israel and Palestine, this prayer echoed with my heart. And if your soul is feeling especially weary, I found a balm in this essay. I hope that with all of these questions you find that something is starting to happen within you and perhaps even a new story is starting to take shape in your life.