Good Friday Christian

I know where grief lives inside my body.  I can put my hand over the spot.  It’s below my left breast, pretty much where I place my hand to say the pledge of allegiance.  Grief moved in there years ago when I lost my father.  It took hold of me and squeezed.  It hurt.  My heart hurt.  I lay on the floor, gasping, and holding my chest, and I thought, “This is what it feels like.”  Since that introduction, grief wakes up in the face of all sorts of sad events:  when loved ones die, when good friends lose a child, when we say goodbye to a beloved pet.  That spot in my heart stabs and aches.  It stabs and aches on Good Friday.

People say that there are “Good Friday Christians” and “Easter Sunday Christians”.  I am a “Good Friday Christian”.  The grief I carry in my heart needs an outlet, and that outlet is the passion of Christ and the veneration of the cross.  For me, without that, the rest of the Christian faith would be just false cheer and whistling past a graveyard.  It would be hope and rainbows and magic promises.  Good Friday is when sh*t gets real.

Good Friday is when we all cry “Crucify Him!”  It is when our righteous indignation and anger result in the death of God.  We participate in the passion to remind us that we, too, are capable of horrible acts.  We participate in the story so we recognize our own tendency to screw things up, to miss the mark, and to hurt ourselves and others.  And we grieve.  We grieve for our own brokenness and the pain that it has wrought in our lives.  But we are not alone in our grief.  We listen to the Lord, crucified by his own people, by our own selves, cry out in pain, “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me!”  And that is when the grief in my heart joins the love of God.

God sees me while I sit and worship, while I sing, “Where you there when they crucified my Lord?”  God sees me as I kiss the wooden feet of Jesus on the cross.  It isn’t easy to be seen as I am and still be loved.  It means I have to be honest about my failures and forgive myself for them.  And, as I forgive myself, I must forgive those who also failed me.  It means that the universal, catholic love and grace of God that sees me as I am and still loves me, also loves every other person, just as they are.  For that sacrifice was made for each and every individual one of us, just as we are.  We all cried “Crucify” and we are all loved.

As I sit in the darkened, bare church, listening to the Gospel reading, I am overcome, again and again. In the image of Jesus’s final sacrifice for all of mankind, my grief and the grief of the world is bound by love.  God-made-man, the divine incarnate, gave up his power to the evil of the world, laid down his life in scandalous surrender, crying out for his God.  Within in this exquisite pain, there is no rationalization, no mental gymnastics, no search for meaning.   I weep, my throat closes up, and my heart breaks open, one more time.  The only real thought in my head is, “make me worthy of this sacrifice, Jesus.”  Jesus saved me, with all my pettiness, selfishness, and brokenness.  I long to be worthy of the immense gift of God’s love.  As I sit crying in the dark, God holds me in my grief, stitching my scars together with love.

I know where grief lives inside my body.  It lives in my heart, surrounded by love.

Blessed Good Friday.

The tyranny of politeness--no more "walk up not out"

#walkupnotout
#bekind
Make new friends.  Mix it up and sit with someone at lunch.  

All of these are great ideas for educators and parents to instill in their children.  As a middle school teacher and a parent of three, I want my students and my children to be kind and respectful to everyone.  I want them to include others, to stand up to bullies, and to befriend those who do not have friends.  I try to lead by example and encourage these values and behaviors every day at school and at home.  But there is something insidious about implying that by being polite to others, we could stop gun violence.  There is something offensive about telling kids to be nice to people so they don’t get shot.

I wasn’t a very friendly student in high school.  I had a small group of friends and I enjoyed school and learning.  But, I was also an introverted, intellectual snob who snubbed most of the social events and structures.  I played the french horn, for God’s sake.  I wore t-shirts with wolves on them.  I sneered at cheerleaders.  I joked that the football players must barely have IQs of 85.  I read Vonnegut and Shakespeare and I thought people who did not must be vapid, ignorant cretins.  I’m pretty sure I was a pain-in-the-ass to some and invisible to most.  I wasn’t very angry and I certainly wasn’t violent.  But, I really, really would’ve detested being told to “walk up” to someone.

If the homecoming queen or quarterback had sat down at my lunch table, I would have been appalled.  I didn’t mind working together on group projects or biology labs, but why on earth would I want to spend my precious leisure time with people who seemed to have nothing in common with me?  I pretty much felt I was better than most people--smarter, funnier, more ironic.  I’m not proud of how I behaved.  I know I missed out on some wonderful people by closing myself off to them.   But, if my high school had held a “mix-it-up day”, I would have gagged on my own derision.  I didn’t need forced politeness to navigate my high school years.

What I did need, and what I received from my teachers and certain peers, were a few authentic relationships.  I was trying so hard to find myself that I made it hard for others to find me.  I had a few teachers who truly saw me, who noticed when I was reading Vonnegut, and invited literary criticism, who must have ignored my sneers enough to teach me some empathy through literature and friendship.  I had a few friends who accepted me, who indulged my sense of irony, and who seemed to think my snarky attitude was endearing (or at least harmless).  Through my high school years, I was fortunate to find a few people who listened when I spoke, challenged my arguments, reinforced my endeavors, and recognized my thinking.  I am very doubtful that those kinds of relationships would be built by a “walk up not out” day.

Of course, the truth is, I was in no danger of shooting up a school.  I was a mostly well-adjusted teenager with a strong nuclear family and strong academic motivation.  But, I wasn’t nice, not very often, not really.  And, in the early 1990s, my “not-niceness” was a luxury.  No one bothered me or tried to cheer me up or make me more polite.  No one sent me a message that if I wasn’t nice to the quiet kid in the corner, I might get shot.  No one sent me a message that they were being nice to me because I WAS the quiet kid in the corner, and they were afraid that I was going to shoot them.  I had the space and the freedom to be as cranky as my teenage self desired.  

When I go to work, I spend my energy noticing students’ thoughts, their reactions, and their individual emotions.  I give them space to be angry, or surly, or sarcastic.  I don’t urge them to all be friends, or to even be friendly.  Some days, that just doesn’t work.  I do try to truly SEE them, as I was truly seen by a few people during my formative years.  I do this because it was transformational to me and I hope it will transform others.  I don’t do it in order to prevent another school shooting.

Let’s be honest about the fact that our kids aren’t safe.  Let’s stop telling them to solve their own problems by sitting with new kids at lunch.  Let’s build infrastructure in struggling schools, so teachers have time and energy to actually make relationships with students and nurture them.    Let’s start having real, problem-solving conversations about common sense laws to reduce the number of guns.  Let’s stop the tyranny of politeness and start protecting our children.