On Palm Sunday we celebrate great joy and great grief, consolation and desolation, and the question is: how do they go together? Does one cancel out the other?
Jesus rides in on a donkey and everyone is singing and throwing down their cloaks and waving great branches, and by the end of the reading the disciples have abandoned him and he is hanging on the cross.
I run into a friend as Bumble and I are walking in the woods. She’s walking her dog, too, and we stand on the road and talk about the country, our anxieties, our worries, our outrage, and we agree. We’re on the same page. But no matter how much I try to nudge the conversation in another direction, no matter how I try to change the subject, my friend insists on being outraged. She insists on not being there. She’s in Washington D.C. She’s on the border.
All the while the trees have leafed out and the cherries are blossoming and a purple finch is singing. The sun has broken through the clouds.
Who are we to say? Who are we to refuse the gift we have been offered? And to ask this isn’t to avoid compassion or obligation. Not at all. To ask this is an act of humility. “We have to remember the principle,” Thomas Merton says, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “that certain desires and certain pleasures are willed for us by God.”
Merton frequently comes back to this issue in this book. As a contemplative it haunts him: what value is there in living the solitary and hidden life of a monk when the world is falling apart? As a monk is he a guilty bystander?
But “why can we not be content with an ordinary, secret, personal happiness that does not need to be explained or justified?” Merton asks. Why do we feel guilty “if we are not happy in some publicly approved way?” God gives us the gift of every moment, “the gift and capacity,” as he puts it, “to make our own happiness out of our own situation.”
It’s not hard to be happy, simply by accepting what is within reach, and making of it what we can. But if we do this . . . we still wonder if there is not something wrong. Are we getting something that others cannot have?
Everything we need is right here, he says, and yet we worry,
as if it is not allowed. As if we could not be happy without the sanction of Madison Avenue, or Washington, or the FBI or somebody. And yet this, of all things, is precisely that for which no permission is needed.
Joy is a gift, a grace, given to us in one particular moment, on a road, or in a coffee shop, or at home reading a book, as who knows what gift the poor woman at the border is given, too? The civil servant, just fired from his job? What glimpse? What memory?
I think Jesus felt joy as he came into Jerusalem. I think he felt the sun on his face. I think he heard the shouts of the crowd. I think he felt the swaying of the donkey beneath him. My dad always said, “be where you’re at,” and Jesus always was. He was always in the moment. He was never too busy to stop and talk to the people who came up to him. He had no big projects to distract him, as Luke Timothy Johnson says. He was remarkably available.
And I think he was bereft when the time came. I think he was afraid, he was grieving, as he also knew he would be. He suffered. He hung on a cross.
I don’t see how anyone can get the idea of Christian Nationalism out of the gospels. We can do it only by reading the story of the entry into Jerusalem out of context, without the story of the upper room, without the crucifixion, and then by misinterpreting that first moment, when Jesus comes through the gates. He’s on a donkey, after all. Not a tank.
He hangs on a cross.
Did we really think we wouldn’t have to suffer, too? Nothing is different now than it ever was. We always have to die to ourselves. Now we just may have to do it more, and in solidarity with so many others who have been dying for a long time. One day some of us may even have to die in the flesh for our faith, as the martyrs did, as we all have to die anyway sooner or later, even if only in our sleep.
What did we think, that we would never have to die?
In a way we all have to be dualists, radical dualists, whatever our call. Nothing matters more than God.
In a recent interview, the poet Li Young Lee puts it this way:
I’m telling you, all that is left are love songs to God. With all the world’s conflict, motion, and noise, none of these things are as important as love for the one who accomplished everything. I’m going to write love song after love song to God.
And yet at the same time, Lee is saying, we have to reject dualism entirely, avoid otherworldliness completely, because the kingdom is here and now, in this moment and every moment.
It’s because Jesus observed the birds of the air and the flowers of the field that he could hang on the cross.
Be here, he says. Let tomorrow come tomorrow.
It’s because we hear the purple finch that we can act. It’s because we rejoice in the blossoming cherry that we know what to do, and why.
And hearing the finch is an act. Of defiance. Of hope. Who knows what benefits flow from our quiet thinking and feeling, out into the world of violence and stupidity?