The Reverend Dan Smith, MDiv '98, Lecturer on Ministry, delivered the following remarks at Morning Prayers in Harvard's Memorial Church on April 11, 2022.
♦♦♦
For our reading today, I'd like to offer a timely excerpt from the 1950s journal of an Austrian Catholic writer named Ida Gorres. "Holy week is beginning again," she writes. "And here I am once more, feeling so unadjusted to it. So utterly inadequate. Not that heart of stone feeling. Simply the sense of being completely out of proportion. Something momentous like the Niagara Falls is thundering down right beside me, and there I stand with a thimble in my hand and I'm supposed to dip in and collect something, catch it up, assimilate, reacting properly. Goodness knows how, but if you hold a cup under a waterfall, it's not only knocked right out of your hand, but empty to boot. The rushing, tumbling water rebounds. The only hope of scooping anything at all is to hold the cup up care fully at the very edge under a lost, thin trickle."
Thanks to a tattered collection of daily devotionals I've been reading almost every year for many years now, this watery image has met and guided me through my own entry into holy week for almost two decades. Though I didn't preach yesterday, I was reminded again of Gorres' words as we shared that Palm Sunday story at First Church.
In my mind's eyes, I imagined Jesus and the crowds, filling the streets atop the Mount of Olives, flooding them and then flowing, cascading even, down through them in that counter-cultural, anti-imperial procession, right down into the royal and tumult that awaits him and us in Jerusalem and in the events of this week. Hosannas, donkeys and branches waving all the way, instead of hail Herods, stallions and swords bracing.
If we pick up the story in Luke's gospel today, the very next line shows Jesus pausing. Verse 41. As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "If you had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace." And here I see even his tears flowing into that powerful and preemptive rush of divine love and peace seeking purpose.
His vocation is clear by way of the cross and his rising. He's called to know and understand the depths of our pain and suffering and death, yet also to embody a love that is stronger than our fears, more lasting than empire, more powerful than death. At Easter, God's love comes through it and flows on in new life and love and joy. But still, in the rush of this week, it can be too much to grasp. We can too quickly lose the plot.
So I circle back to Gorres and those Niagara Falls. Her journal entry continues. "This is how it is with me. I'm standing as near as I can get to the cataract. The thunder and roar of the water is deafening. I can catch next to nothing and I know very well that one step near and I'll be caught up or swept away. But maybe this helpless state of just standing aside, this overpowering sense of not being able to do anything about it is the only sort of adoration I am allowed just now. This too is one way of divining the immense of this tremendous mystery of paying reverence, at least, to something surpassing by far either comprehension or emotion."
Whether you are a Christian observing this holy week or not, I wonder if this imagery might find a resonance within you. Consider the steady crush of headlines that daily pour into our inboxes and devices, or that cascade of campus and course deadlines at this time of year especially, let alone whatever else may be coursing through those existential streams of our individual and family lives right now. Even without this millennia-old drama of holy week, we can relate, can't we?
There's an all most crushing weight of all that's going on in our world and lives right now. And the question remains, how do we bear witness and stay connected to the flow of loving purpose, not be drawn under or overwhelmed by the relentless pressure and demands of our warring, yet at wondrous world?
Perhaps Gorres offers just the humility and wisdom and posture we need. Did you hear it? The invitation to stand just aside, to de-center ourselves, to right size our expectations of our capacity, so as not to get swept up in our ego-driven efforts to understand it all, to know it all, to respond to it, to fix it, to own it. Instead, draw near as you can to the realities of the pain and the power it represents. Stay present. Bear witness helplessly, and humbly add your own tears to the flow. And in so doing, learn that of course it's all too much to hold alone.
We need each other. We need that greater beyond human love and purpose to guide us through. For persons of faith, especially as we prepare to hear again Christ's passion and agony, there is also an invitation, I believe, to hold fast to the enduring strength of God's love, to the promise that justice will yet roll down like water and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.
Can we imagine grasping even a thimble full of that power? Even to feel the mist of its companionship and hope? Can we imagine that cup being filled? Holy week is here. Let us enter in. Will you pray with me, please? God, help us to take hold of whatever thimbles or cups we can find and hold on tight, fill them with moments of reverence and adoration, that your mystery and loving purpose revealed this week, that we may yet recognize the things that make for peace. Amen.