The Slow Way: Earthed Jesus
The liturgy of these holy days leading up to Easter might just transform our ache into belief.
This Sunday we will wave our palms at church, a tradition I find powerful every year. Joining our voices with the ones who cheered Jesus into the city of Jerusalem, where his three-year-journey of walking and teaching finally culminated. He comes into the city with the genuine praise and welcome of ordinary people, and one week later is removed by the forces of the Roman Empire. We will walk through this week and all of its bittersweet goodness: The teachings of Jesus on Thursday night that have stayed with us for two millennia: “Greater love has no one than this, than he lay down his life for his friends,” and “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” We will hold tight to his reassurances: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” We will sit with the intensity of his prayer in the garden: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.”
The liturgy of Holy Week was created to walk us through the story of Jesus, from Sunday through his death on Friday, to push us to wait in the discomfort of the ache of Saturday, and somehow practice waking up to new life on Sunday, to a God who not only brings a beating heart back into the body of a dead savior, but brings a beating heart back into us as well. “Behold, I am making all things new!” the Divine One says from the eternal throne in that wild and confusing book of Revelation. On Easter we set our hearts and minds and hope on the impossible chance that there is One beyond us who promises that because of Easter, because of the new life of Jesus, that impossible beating heart can point to a someday when this world’s heart will beat impossibly true as well.
During Holy Week we long for a world of justice, a world worthy of the kind of beauty we only grasp from time to time on this earth. And that longing points to our journey toward Easter. As CS Lewis once wrote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in the world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Often at Easter I find myself *trying* with all my heart to believe as I think I should. To stand up on Easter morning and proclaim Christ risen with all the true believers, doubt washed out of my mind, holding only to the good news that if Jesus is alive, then all will be made well.
Some Easters I’ve felt it, and others I haven’t. Some I’ve spent praying that God might just switch on the belief nozzle, at least for the day so I can settle into the goodness of the story.
But as I’ve learned to be more comfortable with my own sorrow, my own longing for a better world, and my own weakness in believing the right things, I’ve found that the ache of Easter is enough. “If we are agnostics most of the time, we can believe at least during the liturgy,” Kathleen Norris quotes Gail Ramshaw in her book The Cloister Walk. I’ll add to that. I think the liturgy of these holy days leading up to Easter, might just transform our ache into belief. The wanting of a resurrected Jesus who turns and resurrects this broken world—the hope of a new beating heart for this earth—is enough.
The word humility comes from the Latin word humus, which means earth. To be humble is to be grounded, to be from the earth. I think about that when my faith starts to feel like a loose balloon in the sky, untethered and tossed who knows where. When we practice humility, when we recognize that there are actually things we don’t know, things we cannot prove, hope we can’t explain, we discover the work of being earthed. There is a grounding in humility that helps us find our way from the wild untethered feeling of ballooning to the relief that comes with accepting and living into mystery.
Jesus was earthed too. This is the week we remember the one who was cheered into Jerusalem, arrested by the empire, falsely accused, and unjustly condemned to death. We will sit in the tears of his prayers pre-arrest, teach ourselves to recognize our own fear and disloyalty when the disciples hide from the ones who accuse their teacher. And we’ll practice sitting in the ache of his death, and the dark long Saturday he is earthed: dead, alone, enclosed.
What does this week have to teach us about our own ache? What will our longing for that cold stone heart’s renewal say to us about ourselves?
We are invited to those questions, to the wisdom of humility, the reality of Jesus’s dark day in the ground, and the hope that lives in our own longing. What a gift to sit with ache, knowing that sometimes our sadness is everything we need to discover new life on the other side.
A Slow Practice
What comes to mind when you consider your own ballooning faith — the life moments when your faith felt wild and out of your control, and perhaps also alive in a way that feels far off now? What do you do when faith feels like it floated so high you can no longer reach it? What does it look like to settle your faith into the earth, ground yourself in humility, in the recognition that you don’t have to understand everything, don’t have to have every answer, and can actually find your hope in the place of mystery?
This week as you walk through your own practice of Holy Week, as you wave your palm on Sunday, remind yourselves of the teachings of Jesus, consider his washing of the disciples feet and his final Passover with his disciples, and as you sit with his heartbreaking prayers on Thursday night, what mystery are you invited into? What is the ache you notice in yourself? I wonder what it would mean for you to lean into that ache this week.
My prayer for you and me this week is found in that Earthed Jesus. We are welcomed to the mystery of waiting, of aching, of sitting in all that we don’t yet know, because of gift of Holy Saturday is the humility found in the in-between spaces.
Today let’s practice some breath prayers, which may be a simple way to bring your mind into the story of Jesus. Breath prayers invite you to pray one word or phrase as you breathe in, and one word or phrase as you breathe out. What I love most about breath prayers is that there’s no pressure to say or do the *right* thing in prayer. It’s all about your connection with God, not your words. It’s about your heart’s posture, not what you accomplish.
Pray with me:
Breathe in: Jesus, you were welcomed with shouts of hosanna.
Breathe out: Help me to welcome you.
Breathe in: Jesus, you looked on the city and wept.
Breathe out: Give me eyes of love for the pain around me.
Breathe in: Jesus, you kneeled and washed your friends’ feet.
Breathe out: Teach me to lay down my pride and love others well.
Breathe in: Jesus, your friend betrayed your love.
Breathe out: You know how it feels to be deceived.
Breathe in: Jesus, you begged God to give you a different story.
Breathe out: I am not alone when my story aches.
Breathe in: Jesus, you chose to heal instead of fight.
Breathe out: Teach me the way of peace.
Breathe in: Jesus, you were misunderstood.
Breathe out: In you I am known.
Breathe in: Jesus, they mocked you and hurt you.
Breathe out: Be close to the suffering and abused.
Breathe in: You were killed and placed in the earth.
Breathe out: I will cling to hope.
Breathe in: I long for your resurrection.
Breathe out: Teach me to wait for the work of God.
A List of Things:
This week’s thoughts on ache and longing began when I listened to this conversation on We Can Do Hard Things with Susan Cain about her new book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. As someone who has always been naturally melancholy, and who has fought against the ache of sadness most of my adult life, I felt so known hearing Susan talk about the longing for a better world that is at the heart of all religious traditions. Also she used the phrase “stretching toward” (our definition of attending!) to talk about what longing means. Love that. Can’t wait to read her book.
Did you read the NYTimes article called the “The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right” about the way rituals of Christian worship and right-wing political passion have become intertwined? It’s disturbing, but not shocking. Absolutely worth a read if you haven’t seen it yet. Also, Diana Butler Bass has a really helpful take on the one thing the article gets wrong: that it’s not as new as the writers seem to think: “Why do conservative evangelicals love Trump, live in an alternate information universe, and believe that a great revival is at hand? They believe it because it is the world they were born into, this is the faith that raised them, given by their grandparents and parents before them, a biblical birthright. It is their reality . . . reality they believe to be God’s.”
This week’s schedule will look a bit different because of Holy Week. Our regular episode of The Slow Way Podcast will drop like usual on Tuesday. But you can look for a special newsletter and episode of the podcast on Good Friday, in addition to a special Easter newsletter and episode on Easter Sunday. Excited to walk through this week with you, dear ones.