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A Reflection for III Easter All
Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, N.C. May 4, 2014 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
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| Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus |
One of the problems with being my age is that I remember
things that happened long before other people were born, and I will say things
like, “Of course you remember Adlai Stevenson’s comment about losing an
election?” The usual response is a quizzical look which says, “I don’t know who
the heck you are talking about.” So, let me fill you in. Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic Governor of
Illinois from 1949 to 1953, and he ran against Eisenhower for President in 1952
and 1956. My father was a lifelong Southern Democrat, and while he voted the
party line, he thought that Stevenson was honest, articulate, bright, witty,
and had vision and would have made one of the best Presidents this nation had
ever had. But he lost, lost both times,
the second time worse than the first. He did not just lose; he was, as we say
in the South, “whooped real bad” or “He was ridden hard and put up wet.”. When
asked how he felt, he replied: "Someone asked me...how I felt, and I was
reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell - Abraham
Lincoln. He said he felt like the little boy who had stubbed his toe in the
dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh."
Anybody in this room ever been disappointed? Disappointed so bad that it just hurt all over
and you felt like crying no matter how old you were and felt as if you would
never laugh again. Try as hard as you might, you could not ever understand how it
had come to be. That is what is happening with the two men walking away from
Jerusalem in the Gospel story from Luke for today. They had invested their
heart, time, money, and energy in this man Jesus, and it all ends so badly, so
badly that they leave town in order to get away from the place of defeat and
humiliation. Yet as they walk, these two ex-disciples, now without someone to
follow, keep going over every detail of the failure. Unable to leave the past
behind, they carry every aspect of it with them, having what some would call a
“monkey mind”, feeling like a tree full of monkeys - in this case, angry
monkeys – are all chattering away inside their skulls and in the space between
them about their own and others’ failures.
I suggest that this is beyond sadness over the loss
of a friend and starts to enter the realm of depression as we notice the use of
sarcasm and projection. The sarcasm appears in the form of the comment, “Are
you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened?” The
projection occurs when they accuse Jesus of not being able to see, when they are the ones who cannot see Jesus
in front of them. I know from firsthand
experience the difference in being with someone who is sad versus someone who
is clinically depressed. If I am with someone who is sad, I can, by an act of
empathetic imagination, feel their pain.
It stays their pain but I can
honor it and help them go through it. However, with clinical depression, I
start to get infected by that person’s anger and it threatens to become my
anger. Then I am of no help to them but,
instead, become one more angry monkey. These men on the road are under the
mistaken impression that, if they can work this out in their mind, then they
can come to peace with it. They are so absorbed with their loss and placing
blame that they don’t even notice that it is Jesus who is walking with them.
He enters into the discussion with them and they do
some Bible Study, but the problem is that they are so far up in their heads
that they still don’t notice that the Risen Lord, the one who the women were
saying they saw and interacted with, is walking with them. They have so much
energy in their pain that, before they know it, they arrive at their
destination. It is in that place that they stop and breathe. They sit down in
silence and Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them.
Then their eyes see for the first time the truth that had eluded them - that
the Risen Christ is their guest. It is only when they stopped their minds long
enough to give thanks for what they had instead of focusing in on what they had
lost were they able to see the presence of the Holy all around them.
I remember the death of my brother. I didn’t think
my mind would ever shut down - the monkeys of blame just kept holding court in
my brain. I kept as busy as I could in the vain hope that I could figure it all
out, that there would be a good reason for all of this. I, like the men on the
road to Emmaus, lost a lot of time not noticing what was going on around me. I
got busier as the monkeys - and I - got angrier. I went to my yearly pre-Lenten
Confession, one more thing to do, and my confessor surprised me. She told me
that she would make my absolution conditional on my doing two things: the
first, going to a psychiatrist, because by that time it had moved into a clinical
depression.
The second thing she told me to do was to go on a
silent retreat at a nearby monastery and to be still, give thanks for what I
had, and open my eyes to see the world as having a center other than my anger.
The psychiatrist could help heal the mind but the stillness and giving thanks
would help cure my soul.
The church is not in the therapy business, but it is
in the business of healing souls. I think the church saw in the experience of
the travelers to Emmaus an enacted metaphor for dealing with “The Slings and
Arrows of outrageous Fortune …The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to”.
The world is a place where there are many
disappointments and things do not always make sense, and because of that, we
get out and go to a place called “church”, an English word derived from the
Greek word for Lord, “kyrie”. The Lord is the host of this house, this
church, and in the Lord’s house, we can be still and listen to the silence of
God and, in giving thanks, have “our hearts burn within us” and our eyes opened to see the world in a
different light. Losses do not disappear but they get placed into different
hands. We, like the travelers on the Emmaus road, listen to scripture and enter
into a dialogue with it as we deal with that reality. Then we re-member – bring
to life again - the actions of our Lord who takes, blesses, breaks, and
gives. He does this with himself as he
takes his life dedicated to God, allows it to be broken, blesses it with
forgiveness of those who have failed him, and gives peace and strength to all
who partake of him. We take that peace and strength to re-mind – bring to mind
again- that we are the bread that is also taken, blessed, broken, and given for
the sake of the world.
Today my prayer for us is that our Risen Lord will
be known to us in the breaking of the bread.
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