Screen shot of newsletter blurb previewing our class.

Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director today in advance of our session for June. I’ve been writing these for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them. 

Hi Sister —

Got your email with Monday’s link, and I’m looking forward to our session. Some very quick notes, and a link. I’ve been busy lately, not so much with spiritual reflection per se as with getting ready for a new module for Sundays@6, the faith formation group that Debi and I facilitate. So I guess you could call it second-order spirituality. Fruits of the spirit?

I’ll attach a copy the blurb from our parish newsletter with a little more detail, but basically we’re doing a seven-week Lenten meditation our denomination — ELCA, or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — put out this year in connection with a program highlighting the work our sister church — ELCJHL or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land — does in wartime. The title of the Lenten meditation — and our module — is “Sumud: For Justice in Palestine and Israel.” Sumud is an Arabic word meaning “steadfastness” or “persistance.” ELCA’s Sumud program connects ELCA members to our Lutheran companions in the Holy Land in working to establish the justice required for peace.

  • There’s more on the ELCA Sumud program — including an excellent brief introductory video — at https://www.elca.org/sumud.

It’s more of the time I reserve for reading, journaling and spiritual life in general. This is such a fraught topic, and it’s been so politicized, I feel like I need to do a lot more prep work than usual to get my head around the subject. Most of which I’ve enjoyed, tracking down sermons and videos, even ordering books from Amazon — even reading them! (At least the first and last chapters.) One catchphrase I picked up, which has kind of informed my  approach to the subject, comes from an Israeli standup comedian and peace activist named Noam Shuster Eliassi. — “From the river to the sea / We all need therapy.”

I guess it all kind of fits together though. 

A Jesuit contemplation on the empty tomb in Mark

My spiritual journaling — the only piece I stayed with all the way through to uplink a finished journal — was a followup to last month’s on the early Christianity scholar Elaine Pagels and the sustenance she drew from a passage by Walace Stevens — “After the final no / comes a yes.” It ended with a question — drawn from the passage in Mark she was discussing — what do we do after we discover at the empty tomb that life goes on and we still have work to do? In Mark, a young man in white robes tells Mary Magdalene that Jesus has been raised and that she is to tell Peter and the disciples to go back to Galilee.

So that’s the question. Placing myself at the scene as a hanger-on with Mary and the other women, I ask, what do we do back in Galilee?

And the Sumud module for Sundays@6, is the answer. 

Here are the excerpts: 

Three excerpts from the journal. The first is the quote from Elaine Pagels that includes the passages from Walace Stevens and the gospel of Mark. It’s as close as I come to what journalists call a “nut graf” in newspapering days, i.e. a paragraph that contains the kernel, or “nut,” of the post: 

A passage I found especially meaningful came as she described a sermon she gave after her husband’s death; in it she contrasted the “facile comfort that churches often dole out like Kleenex” with the narrative arc of Mark’s gospel, which “ends in disaster” with Jesus’ crucifixion but also “suggests that what looks like total defeat may end in hope.” Says Pagel:

[…] For those who find suffering inevitable — in other words, for any of us who can’t dodge and pretend it’s not there — acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me. How, then, to go on living, without giving in to despair? I recalled lines from Wallace Stevens: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun.” Only when I began to awaken in the morning and see the sunlight, grateful for its warmth, could I dive into the secret gospels again. [The italics are Pagels’.]

The second is from a bit of Ignatian contemplation that I worked into the post, leading into another nut graf:

This is all beyond creepy, but I’m fascinated and I poke my head in the entrance to the cave behind them. Back in the shadows, there’s this guy dressed in white robes. “Do not be afraid,” he says, and I’m thinking, yeah, right! Easy for you to say, buddy.

The guy tells the women Jesus has been raised, he isn’t here, to go tell Peter and the rest of our guys he’ll meet us back in Galilee. I have no idea how that’s going to happen, but you know what? I really, really like this idea of going back to Galilee. Right now! Let’s get out of here! The rest of it is just too much to process.

It looks like the womenfolk have the same idea — we all back out of the tomb and start back up the hillside to safety behind the walls of Jerusalem.

That’s where my meditation ends. At that point of discovery. I can well imagine the three Marys hurrying back to the upper room, or wherever Jesus’ followers were hiding out, and sharing the news. Good news, yes! But what does it mean? What do we do now?

Another question, one that comes to me 2,000 year later. What do I do with this good news? What do we all do?And, finally, my conclusion. Maybe that’s my nut graf? As a newspaper writer, I learned to work it in near the top of a story. But sometimes you’ll see essayists lead up to it inductively, and end with it. Kapow!  

Pagels suggests that by ending his account of the good news of Jesus Christ where he does (in the original version), Mark allows his audience to fit themselves into the story. He has been raised. (The passive voice is important.) He’s waiting for you back in Galilee. Like Pastor Ruge-Jones, I interpret that as a call. A vocation. Get back to work. The Empire still rules, but the hungry are still there to be fed, the sick to be healed. 

In my case, the good news goes something like this — I’ve still got a chronic disease, but it looks like we can keep it under control, day by day and CT scan by CT scan. That sure looks like a reprieve. So what am I going to do with it? What unfinished business, what opportunities await me back in Galilee?

Sundays@6: Sumud (steadfastness) in Palestine  

One other excerpt from what I’ve been writing. No link because we haven’t sent it out yet. It’s from the draft of a blast email Debi and I plan to send out previewing the Sundays@6 series. In a way, I guess, you could consider it my interim answer to the question — what am I going to do back in Galilee? Since I’ve got this day-to-day reprieve, what am I going to do with with? What am I going to do with my gifts? We wrote:

The subject is especially fraught now, since the Oct. 7 atrocities by Hamas terrorists and the consequent destruction of civilian life in Gaza by the Israeli army have triggered deep and conflicting historical trauma — the Shoah among Israelis and the Nakba among Palestinians. Jerusalem lawyer Daniel Seidemann, said it best in the online magazine Foreign Affairs: “On the morning of Oct. 7, many Israelis, briefly but powerfully, came face to face with the unspeakable horrors endured by their parents and grandparents in the Holocaust. Days later, Palestinians in Gaza packed their most precious belongings and fled their homes, much as an earlier generation fled the war in 1948 that started all this” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/18/israel-hamas-war-holocaust-nakba-historical-trauma/). That sense of historical trauma has not gone away. Nor is it likely to. Israeli standup comedian and peace activist Noam Shuster Eliasi put it more succinctly, if humorously: “From the river to the sea / We all need therapy.”

When Debi and Pete visited the Holy Land in 2012 as part of ELCA’s Peace Not Walls program — the forerunner to Sumud — one of the periodic Gaza wars broke out. At the time, Dahlia Lithwick, a US Supreme Court analyst with deep ties to Israel, wrote in the online magazine Slate, “the only way to cut through the mutual agony here is to find people who have solutions and to hear what they have to say. Bombing the other side into oblivion is no more a solution than counting your dead children in public. […] Please don’t judge. Work toward solutions. Because everyone on every side of this is desperate. This isn’t a way to live and we all know it” (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/11/israel-gaza-fighting-whats-its-like-to-be-in-jerusalem-as-the-conflict-escalates.html).

In that spirit, we have tried to find material for Sundays@6 that works toward solutions. We are also guided by ELCA’s 1989 social message on “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” (https://www.elca.org/Faith/Faith-and-Society/Social-Messages/Israeli-Palestinian-Conflict), which holds true today. This teaching document acknowledges we “are acutely aware of our sinful complicity as Lutherans in the past, especially in the face of atrocities previously committed against the Jewish people”; it also explains the ELCJHL has “requested our prayers and support in their struggle for a just and peaceful settlement of this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict,” and commits us to “pray for the coming of God’s gift of peace in this area so that Christians, Muslims and Jews might live lives free from violence and fear.”

[Uplinked June 22, 2024]

Published by zenlutheran

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