Mark 12:38-44 and Excerpts from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
by Audre Lorde
Sunday November 10th, 2024
By Rev. Nicole M. Lamarche
I invite you to join me in a spirit of prayer from Psalm 19. Gracious God,
may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be
acceptable in your sight. Our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I wasn’t sure what would happen, but I didn’t think it would be this, not like
this, not this time any way.
I feel like you do when things just go so differently than you thought they
would, that you have to stop everything. Nothing you had on the list is
possible now or at least very little of it. The agenda has now been decided.
The death of a path, this loss that is both surprising and not, bringing up a
pain that is both familiar and altogether new, a moment that is somehow at
the same time alarming and paralyzing, because suddenly the to do list is
different and scary and long and complicated and overwhelming. I didn’t
think it would be this, not like this, not this time.
And you know for me when the itinerary has been so dramatically altered
by circumstances beyond control, it means I have to stop. And you know
me. I have to sit. I have to put my head down. I have to let myself cry and in
this case a series of ugly cries. I have learned for me, that if I don’t just give
into this, something goes wrong with my body and my eyes start twitching
or I become impatient with the people I haven’t even met or I miss
important things. Grief looks different for each of us that I think we can miss
it sometimes. For some of us it shows up in an inability to sleep or a loss of
interest in the things that give us joy or becoming irritable, but some of us
don’t start with these things, we start with responding and then later come
back to them. Grief shows up in all kinds of ways.
On Thursday, I sat next to my friend Marc, a local Rabbi here in Boulder
who I hadn’t seen in a few months, and I cried some more. Some in the
group have worked together for justice for almost two decades and I am
coming up on six years with them and when you work on making the world
better together you love across all kinds of differences, you become real
friends. We were gathered around some tables arranged in a large square
for a meeting of local faith leaders dedicated to human dignity, the clergy
caucus of Together Colorado, an affiliate of faith in action a nationwide
faith-based group devoted to community organizing. Rabbi Marc introduced
me to his colleague Rabbi Ruthie who was just showing up to the group for
the first time. It was as big a group as we had before the pandemic, in the
before times. We were each asked to share something we could talk about
but wouldn’t and we did a few rounds of this exercise hearing how angry
some are, how frustrated some are, how disappointed some are, along with
how some others feel a deep sense of despair. Some expressed fear for
family members who are hurrying to figure out what is needed in case their
marriages become invalid, many expressed feeling tired, well more like a
weariness. I shared that what I feel most strongly right now which is grief. I
feel grief about more things than I can appropriately name here and I
realize that I am not alone. I am grieving about the celebratory chants for
cheap gas that would come with these elections results, cheap gas in
exchange for women’s bodily autonomy, ravaging our special wild lands
and making friends with dictators, yay…
I am grieving the truth that we still have a while with the patriarchal
paradigm and last week I said I didn’t know if it would be soon or very soon.
So it makes some of us feel so powerless that they need a strong man to
save them. I am grieving the fact that some of the people I love, some of
our people, are worried about their spouses and children and other family
members. I am grieving that some of our cries to hear the working class
were long ago ignored getting us into this situation. what they did to make
their own lives better. I am grieving the truth of the gap I feel between many
I love as one who left circumstances with limited options, got an education
and built a life beyond financial instability, homophobia and a few other
things and now I am what many of my old school buddies would call the
elite. I bet many of us in this room are. Now that means anyone with a
college education it seems, now even intellectual pursuits have become
politicized. I grieve the truth revealed soaked in racism and ableism and
sexism and I don’t even know what ism it is when a variety of groups are
called trash. I grieve that some want to ruin the idea of strong public
education, to ruin the idea of an independent federal reserve, to ruin the
idea of our incredible democratic experiment designed in response to bad
kings.
Rabbi Marc and Rabbi Ruthie reminded us that in the Jewish tradition there
is the ritual of sitting shiva which is first alluded to in the book of Genesis,
what is called in Judaism, the Talmud, when Methuselah, the oldest man in
the world, was mourned for seven days prior to the flood. And in Genesis
50:10 (in the Torah portion Vayechi) Joseph “observed a mourning period
of seven days” for his father, Jacob. Perhaps there is something primal
about needing space to sit with loss, when someone dies or a dream dies
and things just go so differently than you thought they would that you have
to stop everything. When what is happening isn’t at all what we expected or
would choose, we need at least a week to do little more than deal with the
new reality, whether that’s binge watching something that has nothing to do
with fascists throughout history, or ugly crying or stress eating like some of
us did this past Wednesday afternoon when we gathered here to eat
comfort food, light candles and we shared our laments. We get at least 7
days to be with our grief fully. One person shared that on Wednesday they
had basically eaten Doritos the entire day on Wednesday. Some people
slept. Some people hiked. Some in the clergy group shared about how
good it felt to lead their usual Wednesday services with boring old ancient
liturgy, putting themselves to that instrument that withstands all of time. I do
love that within our religious traditions we have built in ways to keep going
and to not be held back by the hardest things. There is another marker for
grief in the Jewish tradition and it is called the sheloshim, which is the
Hebrew word for “thirty.” I declare we have 30 days to let ourselves get our
mind around this, the time of transition between being completely
enveloped by sadness and the time of beginning to emerge back into the
world in some ways, even knowing it won’t be like we imagined. So this
means that we have until early December to get our bearings, to say
goodbye to the old agenda so let us give one another space for doing that
differently.
But then here is the thing, I don’t think we can stay much longer in that
place of alarm and feeling paralyzed and overwhelmed and despairing. It’s
not good for our bodies or our shared life together. As Rebecca Solnit wrote
a while ago, “You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you
have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles
are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves
you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is.” She said, “The fact that we cannot save everything, does not mean and we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
First, just like this parable from the gospel of Mark, as people of faith, we
need to give some of what have to this battle, after these 30 days, this is a
time to bring our gifts to the holy cause, whatever our gift may be.
Whatever it is we have to offer, I believe we are duty bound to give
something of ourselves to this battle going forward, to bring it forward for
the cause of love. As Kathleen Norris points out in Amazing Grace, in the
biblical context of this story, to be righteous is “a willingness to care for the
most vulnerable, which were in ancient Israel, the orphans, the widows, the
resident aliens and the poor.” So I believe after we grieve, the Spirit is
calling each of us to give whatever we can, whatever it may be, our time
and our treasure, our hope and our refusal to give up, to caring for the most
vulnerable inside and outside of these walls, those who will be hurt the
most by what comes next.
Second, I think that grief that we don’t acknowledge, in whatever way we
do it, can cause us pain. We must not carry this pain forever. As, Ehi Ora
wrote, “You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to
live that’s not within your body. Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it
live in music. Let it be devoured by building brightened connections. Your
body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.”
Your body is not a coffin for your pain!
Last, it might be that in some parts of our lives it becomes as Audre Lorde
wrote a war against dehumanization. It could be that our call together is to
keep showing up for the dignity of all human beings, which means that we
must remember we don’t need to be different than we already are, we don’t
need to have something we don’t already, the call is to offer whatever we
have in this moment.
As Audre Lorde wrote, “Sometimes we are blessed with being able to
choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more
usually we must do battle where we are standing.”
Communal Reflection
We are in for something for sure. What are you feeling? What do you have
to give to this next season? How will you let your pain live somewhere
other than your body?
Beloved of God, maybe we didn’t think it would be this, not like this, not this
time, not this way, so let us grieve how we need to and then let us be ready,
we didn’t choose this time or this arena or this manner for our revolution,
but it is here, and God is with us, we shall hold this space where all belong,
we must do battle as we are, right where we are, wherever it is, right where
we are standing!
May it be so. Amen.
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