When Darkness Descends

a Tenebrae homily preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, Illinois, April 9, 2009

 

Life can be good, there’s no doubt about it.  On a spring day, birds singing, new life bursting forth all around, no medical issues, worries about the economy on the back burner, everything going your way on the sunny side of the street – life can be good, and it’s easy to be thankful for your blessings, magnanimous to your friends, merciful with your detractors.

But there are those other days, when the sun couldn’t break through to save its soul and even if it did, you couldn’t see it to save yours.  There are as many reasons for having bad days as there are bad days:  it can’t all be diagnosed as clinical depression even if some of it can.  Not getting enough sleep doesn’t help, whether the lack of sleep comes from pushing yourself too hard during the day or from an overactive imagination during the night.  Sometimes you can chalk it up to indigestion from indulging in the wrong food or drink.  Sometimes there’s a deeper dis-ease trying to get you to pay attention.

Many bad days come along by themselves and so, twenty-four hours later, on your next good day, you’re wondering why you were so out of sorts.  Maybe we have those singular bad days just so we know how miraculous it is to feel good most of the time.

But there are other bad days that require more than better sleeping or eating habits, more than a little medication, more than a few rays of sunshine to get through, get past, get beyond, get healed from.

Just listening to the news these days is enough to send us running for emotional and physical shelter.  Wars, rumors of wars, natural and unnatural disasters, sectarian suicide bombings in the Middle East and Afghanistan, senseless killings of children and mass murders of immigrants here in this country, even shootings within the walls of churches.  Nothing is sacred, no place safe, none of us immune from the horror.

Death is not the only culprit.  Sickness comes to many of us, and the better-off among us have at least some access to the health care system – many, many of our neighbors do not, which makes the class divisions in society more pronounced than ever. 

The crash of the economy can wreak havoc on our lives and the lives of those around us.  Evaporating investments, falling salaries, concerns over lay-offs, actual lost jobs – none of those is easy to live with, and the uncertainties continue into an unpredictable future.  Families that were on the edge have been and will continue to be pushed over, and the structures we used to trust to take care of them will drown in the flood of needy people.

There is a free-floating anxiety in the world now that is just waiting to attach itself to the next horrific news story, and those of us who care what happens to other people in the world have a hard time not being caught up in that anxiety, especially when we have our own worries, our own concerns, our own losses to deal with.  Many of us have been clobbered by the economy.  Many of us have suffered with the news stories of the day.  Many of us have had our own medical diagnoses and struggles to contend with. 

It’s no wonder we have bad days.  It’s no wonder we’re anxious.  It’s no wonder we lose sleep and eat badly and have indigestion and suffer more dis-ease than we used to.  And then there’s the specter of death – our own deaths and the deaths of the ones we love.

Here we are gathered in the darkness of the Thursday evening of Christian Holy Week.  There have arisen, in some Christian churches, unsettling ways of telling the Christian story that overlook this difficult part of the week.  Those ways of telling the story go straight from the lively celebration of Palm Sunday to the ecstatic celebration of Easter, attempting at all costs not to mention the horrible days in between, the days of suffering and death, bad days indeed.  Our own Unitarian and Universalist traditions have sometimes been interpreted and practiced as such “feel-good” religions, unconcerned about the losses so many of us feel, unmindful of human brokenness, eerily quiet on the topic of human suffering and finitude.

The real story of Holy Week includes the celebration of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week, but then it moves into the uncertainties of mid-week and on to that ominous final meal together before confronting the terror and pain of Maundy Thursday night’s arrest and Good Friday’s crucifixion.  All hard enough to be sure.

But then we have to be careful, because our tendency is to want to leap straight from the crucifixion on Friday to the resurrection on Easter morning without sitting with and reflecting on the utter devastation and misery the disciples must have felt that Friday night and Saturday.  If you miss that, you’re missing something terribly important in the story.  Those people’s whole lives had been given to the idea that Jesus had shared with them – that a new world was about to be born, indeed was already here if you could but open your eyes and see it.  Now, with his death on the cross, that whole heaven-on-earth that Jesus talked about was gone, vanished.  The world had collapsed.  The curtain of the temple had been torn asunder.  Darkness had descended. 

This was no longer heaven on earth.  This was Hell.

That is the darkness we sit within tonight.  Death happens.  Suffering is real.  Loss is an unavoidable part of the human condition.  And to overlook that truth is to participate in a great lie.  We will, each of us, come face to face with death and suffering and loss, no matter who we are.  So the key to a life well-lived is not found in denying death and suffering and loss, but must be in facing death and suffering and loss.  The key to a life well-lived is found in being able to hold the paradoxes of life and death in one’s mind during the bad days as well as the good. 

Easter will come, but not before we have spent our days of generative immersion in the depths of Hell.

 

In a few minutes, we’ll speak the names of our loved ones, friends and family, who have died in recent months.  Each of these people lived, each of these people touched other lives, each of these people loved and were loved by others.  Each of these people is now gone in important ways – we can no longer hold their hands, we can no longer call them on the phone, we can no longer see their facial reactions when we share our secrets with them.  But in other important ways, they are still with us.  They shaped us, they gave our lives form and function, their words and deeds live on in our words and deeds.  We grieve their loss, even as we recognize that they still live on in us, with us, through us.

 

In preparation for our prayer and the speaking of the names, let’s remain seated and sing together our hymn #89, Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life…