Final Walk - A Good Friday Meditation

After the dust and palm frond waves,
no steps seem more daunting,
even though each one forward paves,
despite bullies and faithless taunting,
a way, of being and living, that saves.

Servant leadership nixes vaunting
whose lie of pride and wealth behaves
so conspicuously mean and flaunting
— but all who would deny, poor knaves,
might ultimately be left empty and wanting
once redeeming love frees all of us slaves.

Good Friday is a day intended introspection rather than guilt. A newspaper headline about this day might read, “Man Acting Suspiciously Executed in Name of Empire,” and that brings it forward a few thousand years, doesn’t it?

I mean, why kill someone like the man from Nazareth? Why not sentence him to jail? After all, he did advise people that they should give Caesar what was due.

Well, it is all about the meta-message, and that was in part about upending the social strata. But that wasn’t the whole story.

Jesus tried to communicate to people that nothing about their lives was inevitable, unless they allowed it to be so. Oppression at the hands of functionaries of the Empire was the least of the difficulty. Tribalism and taboos; orthodoxy and the inevitable hypocrisy that accompanies that way of being and thinking; the creation and maintenance of ghettos—and by that I don’t just mean the ghettos that are imposed to shut people in (those are very real and devastating), but the ones we willingly create to shut people out. Jesus was trying to let us know that the fastest way to redress societal ills is not to blame, condemn, and fight, but to mitigate, ameliorate and serve.

Said another way, whenever we complain, act out or wait for someone else to solve a problem, we’re not writing ourselves into the solution; further, we are diminishing ourselves. This is not at all to say that organization and protest can be minimized to “complaint” or “acting out.” Jesus and his followers were construed to be rabble-rousers, but when they went into communities, their intent was to serve, and serve they did.

Some tried to say that what Jesus and his followers were doing was illegal, and if there was indeed a real trial, Jesus would have been convicted based on court legalities. In truth, what Jesus suggested is that to do the right thing, we are sometimes forced to act outside human law, especially where it is constructed to ensnare and weaken people in ways that serve no positive societal purpose (a real example: A court demanded a million dollars in bail for the release of a transient accused of arson. What purpose did that serve? There was no one to come forward for the man; the bail might even have been as low as $10K, and this man would have been stuck in jail.) or that are divisive toward the community.

When I reflect on the gospel message, I see that Jesus is saying we cannot use “the system” as an excuse. If “the system” needs fixing, we have to do it ourselves, even if our DIY is a “work around.” The can is kicked forward because the task of dismantling and reassembling the Tower of Babel is too daunting. So, what happens in the meanwhile? Nothing? Status quo? Complacency? All we like sheep, awaiting a new shepherd?

No. The message is clear and irrefutable: There is no easy way out of the thicket of wrongs and the legalese of inequity, but love finds the way. Love can only find the way if we have compassion and if we truly care about and are empowered toward just outcomes. This is such an outcome driven world, and yet so few people invest in the good outcome unless “good outcome” means wealth and status.

Jesus took the final walk trying to awaken us to a desire for the “right outcome.” If we want “right outcomes,” we need to invest self into the equation. Denials and excuses don’t cut it in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is here, inside each of us, and all around us in this life we are living, right now. The charge to “love thy neighbor” is a call to be and do the controversial (loudly or even secretly, if necessary), to buck the system, to do the right thing, the just thing, the very best thing.

Don’t let the dream die. Go in peace, my friends, to love and to serve.

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

The World's Worth

“The world is my country; my religion is to do good.”

~Thomas Paine

The World’s Worth

There is no thicket of identities
in this ebb and flow of crowds;
one is at once unique,
while also each and every,
as in the sharing of aspirations,
as in the dreaming of dreams—
we’re all water walking or rolling upright,

moving vertically over a horizontal world,
various mixtures of stardust and desert sand;
but we have yet to fully embrace personhood
as the embodiment of democracy.
What message should we add
to that old corked bottle
we’ll cast onto the oceans of time?
What future there may be
will only be found
where the good person,
in communion with all
others of their ilk,
is the sole expression
of the world’s worth.

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen