Searching for Hope in Holy Week

The Poetry of Pathos

Another year on my calendar turned last week. For those younger than me, I'm now old. For those my senior, I often hear the phrase, "Ahh, to have so much life before you." The drearier types say, "Just wait til you're my age to see how sore you feel in the morning." My favorite reply came from a 70-year-old, “you are one step closer to death.” Ah, the comfort of friends.

Perhaps it's the passing years or the sushi I had for dinner last night, but I am increasingly turning toward the poetic to express my thoughts, indeed my soul. Palm Sunday with messianic hope looms on the horizon. It’s a poetic, mythic entrance to a week where all the best-laid plans collapse. A colleague confessed his loss of spirituality in these trying times. He asked if I had some words of splendor. “Are you seeking a sugar fix?” I asked. Our conversation ended on the prophets and poets and the Zen Buddhist saying, “No mud, no lotus.”

In brief, there is only a spirituality of s*!t, the human condition, our long, slow slog to death, accompanied by glimpses of beauty. Jesus enters the week knowing this more than anyone.

Most healthy spirituality turns toward open space, as if it needs room to grow—the kind of open space void of easy answers and sweet comforts. The Spanish poet Federico Lorca hints at this in his poem "Casida of the Rose."

The rose

was not searching for the sunrise:

Almost eternal on its branch,

It was searching for something else.

One could easily ask what in the world he is writing about, and I'll confess, I don’t know. But this poem has a longing and a leaping that touches something in me. Does it speak to your hunger or your wondering?

The rose

was not searching for darkness or science:

Borderline of flesh and dream,

It was searching for something else.

I know that space between the flesh and the dream. I felt it last night when I woke from a conversation with a woman. We exchanged a dialogue without words about a piece of abstract artwork that resembled an empty ribcage. When my eyes opened, I sensed that dream still with me, crossing over a threshold from the unconscious to the conscious. I could write a dissertation on this dream and footnote a hundred books, but that would kill it.

The rose

was not searching for the rose.

Motionless in the sky

It was searching for something else.

Federico Garcia Lorca. (translation by Robert Bly)

Sometimes, the dream, the rose, and the soul must remain unexplained, something we live with and meditate on.

Some consider Federico Garcia Lorca to be the first modern poet. He resurrected a kind of poetry that dates back thousands of years. Robert Bly, poet, and translator, calls this leaping poetry because it leaps from image to image. The Hebrew Bible contains this kind of literature. We killed it when the rationalists kidnapped the scriptures and tried to make them literal newspaper accounts of events. Read this portion of Isaiah to see the many imaginative leaps he makes.

Shower, O heavens, from above,
and let the skies rain down righteousness;
let the earth open, that salvation may spring up,
and let it cause righteousness to sprout up also;
I the Lord have created it.

Woe to those who strive with their Maker,
earthen vessels with the potter!^[c]
Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, "What are you making"?
or "Your work has no handles"?

Woe to anyone who says to a father, "What are you fathering?"
or to a woman, "With what are you in labor?"
Thus says the Lord,
the Holy One of Israel and its Maker:
Will you question me about my children
or command me concerning the work of my hands?

I made the earth
and created humankind upon it;
it was my hands that stretched out the heavens,
and I commanded all their host.

Isaiah 45:8-12 (NRSV)

From skies raining down blessings to a potter's hands to a parental figure and back to hands- whoa, talk about leaping poetry. Try rationalizing that, and you get, well, you get modern US American fundamentalism merged with nihilism. The result is an ugly religion void of beauty and filled with envy and judgment, not just in Christianity but in Islam and Judaism as well. I've even met a few New Age literalists in my time. Who knew such zealotry among vegetarians could exist?

But the poetic, yes! Please give me the imaginative poets. Now I'll admit the dangers of subjective interpretation. But it also offers dancing, imagining, and the soul's maturation. This dancing, this delight of the soul, can also happen in poetic imagery, paintings, and photography. Just this morning, a friend sent a photograph of his wife lying in bed with her mother, who is now in hospice care. As Carl Jung once said, her days are closing on this chapter between two great mysteries. The photo conveys so much that it cannot be described. I'd share it with you, but no. Some things are too intimate, too personal, too profound to reveal. I'll leave your imagination- and likely your own experience of love- to fill in the space that is not empty at all.

We find ourselves in Holy Week, that time between triumph and disaster. It is a time of pathos, a Greek word meaning both suffering and experience. Yes, there is hope on the other side, but let's not forget our present circumstances. We are in Holy Week. The reason it’s holy is because we learn that the sacred One was somehow in the muck all along. But that’s a discovery made after the fact. In this time of pathos in our world, it's easy to wish it all would go away. We long to sing Alleluia, but we are not there yet. Ask anyone who knows grief and loss; tell them to cheer up, and they'll likely look at you and ponder how best to deliver a left hook to your jaw. Most won't act on that thought, but it lingers in the back of their mind.

Pathos Week (my word for Holy Week) is brooding, filled with treason, denial, deception, and cruelty. That’s true of Holy Week in the past and the present. Read any lengthy history of our government's actions, and you'll soon discover that what we are experiencing is not new. Yes, we have also been heroic and noble. We, the complicated people of these Estados Unidos, have embodied Normandy as well as Abu Ghraib. We are both/and. We are of saint and sinner in this world. (Martin Luther's honest description of our human condition – simul eustes et pecatur.). However, nowadays, we seem to be leaning hard into treason and cruelty, doing so with glee. Our collective shadow is unleashed before our very eyes. We live in the midst of a very long week (years?) of pain and passion, one in which I hope and pray will one day find redemption.

One day, the rose will find what it's searching for. That is my hope because I cannot live without the search.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood is an author and photographer in Rhode Island. His website is www.jameshazelwood.net. He is currently editing his next book which focuses on the Holy Land.