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.