It isn't easy to remain teachable. To remain open to new insight and understanding, new possibilities, requires of us a certain amount of humility and a willingness to say in the face of life's many mysteries, "I don't know," and "I don't understand."
To step further and deeper into life with a question resounding in one's heart rather than an answer requires great faith, great hope, and great love.
Holy Week is a time in the lifecycle of the Christian community that invites "living into the questions" far more than it does "applying the answers." Who is this man who enters the holy city on the back of a donkey? Who is this strange king? Why is he called anointed by some and named heretic by others? Why, in the end, is he betrayed by so many and followed by so few? Why must the story take this terrible path? When I meet this story with my life, what does it mean?
As we enter this week that the church has named "holy," I remember and am challenged by the words of W.H. Auden:
We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And see our illusions die.
May God lead us to deeper encounter with the questions that call us to faith, and call us to follow the Way of such an unlikely king.
A prayer for Palm/Passion Sunday:
O
God, as we direct our attention
to
the path Christ took from the
gates
of Jerusalem
to
the cross of death
and
beyond,
break
through our presumed familiarity,
shatter
our assumptions,
unbind
us from the small answers we too quickly offer.
Help
us to remain teachable and transformable.
Help
us to see in Christ's journey
the
shape of our life,
the
shape of our neighbor's life,
the
shape of the world's life:
the
suffering and the dying that is in all,
and
the joy, the beauty and the birthing
that
transcends all.
We
pray this in the Living Christ,
the strangest of kings. Amen.
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