Two things Sunday morning, after a still-born effort at Zoom liturgy.

Thing one – When I read through the scriptures for May 17th, what stuck to the cobwebs that pass for brains in my head was from Peter’s epistle “ . . . the reason for your hope.”

Why do I like it? Because it goes to something different than doctrine or rules, it tends to see ‘hope’ as something that is intrinsic to a spiritually animated life, a perennial blossom that asserts itself regularly in human discourse, regardless of how often adversity, accidental or deliberate, undermines life (as in the current reign of the dark Lord Corona) or how often the powers and principalities dose us with their “realism” which often as not turns out to be mostly snake-oil, false and self-serving and ultimately detrimental to the prospects of a really human pr1oject, political or otherwise.

What does “the reason for your hope” look like? Maybe an outburst of mutual care, greater in incidence in pandemic times than it is in “better” times. Peter Kropotkin’s anarchistic “mutual aid” hasn’t fared as well as an idea as his contemporary intellectual peer Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” dear to the hearts of those who succeed at aggregating wealth and power, and therefore a sanctioned virtually official slogan. Not, though, an idea that well serves the global majority, so much as it does the global masters.

Hope comes out of how people band together in community, then nourish and fortify each other along the way. That is a manifestation of organic and natural spirit-driven, even joy-driven impulse. Ideology or structure comes later maybe to institutionalize the powerfully contagious goodness it appreciates and wants to maintain. However such forces don’t always do well in such constraints and those devices get quickly preoccupied with their own self-perpetuation and yield to the temptation to demand conformity. 

Thing two – in supporting evidence of my musing in Thing one, the life of John X Linnehan, often simply known as X.

Word came that X passed on this past week at the age of 92 in Gainesville FL attended by his spouse of 47 years Martina. John & Martina together have been a force in their part of the world for justice, peace, and reverence for creation in too many ways to count for close to half a century.

 John had come to Florida many years before as a missionary priest of the St. James society commissioned by Cardinal Cushing of his home diocese of Boston. One of the reasons I warmed to him so readily is that he understood the sanctity of the Red Sox and Celtics, among other things. They were key people in supporting the Pershing Plowshares disarmament action eight of us undertook at Martin Marietta in Orlando in 1984. Easter, Passover, and Earth Day all rolled into one calendar date, Sunday April 22. A good soul that he was, when my grandmother died just days after my sentencing that July and my wife of just over a year were in the position of attending the funeral in my stead of part of my family she had barely gotten to know yet, John figured out how to be in Boston at the funeral home to support her, a surreal flashback for him to church personnel at least that he was 25 years removed from, by virtue of geography and his own pilgrimage.

One of the “fruits” of the Pershing Plowshares action was the decision of John & Martina a short time later to establish the Metanoia Community in St. Mary’s GA to attend to the evil of Trident through nonviolent presence, prayer, listening and action, leading an effort that spanned decades. The circle came round and closed when, despite some reservations, they offered a very articulate affirmation of the current Kings Bay Plowshares witness shortly after its manifestation on April 4, 2018. I like to think John passed into the Holy Cloud just in time to attend the forthcoming sentencing of the seven, scheduled at the end of this month.

Hearts out to Martina and to the justice, peace, and earth-loving movements of Florida & Georgia who will miss the real X-man.    

— 

Paul Magno 

Jonah House Community Member.

By Paul Magno

I am at Jonah House in Baltimore on Holy Thursday evening, which in itself is a broken play, in terms of coronavirus vetoing the usual observances of Holy Week that I/we are accustomed to. It is our usual custom to be gathered in Washington in one of our Faith & Resistance Retreats. We’d be thirty or forty people, including some college students from the mid-west, reflecting on the classic themes of Holy Week:  Holy Thursday – Jesus and his disciples observing Passover with a Seder meal, known historically to Christians as the Last Supper, and then his betrayal, passion and execution on Good Friday at the hands of church and state. We don’t leave this in the religious abstract; we consider the contemporary betrayals of Jesus and his crucifixion at the hands of the war-making empire we live under and endeavor to confront and resist.  We’d typically be at the Pentagon, author of never-ending war against peoples almost too numerous to name.

In my immediate recollection, I know that we have ridiculously long military engagements against Afghanistan and Iraq, dating back at least to the early part of the century, not to mention their twentieth-century antecedents.  Then Yemen and the US role in arming the Saudi kingdom with the wherewithal to inflict frightful torment, starvation and social catastrophe on that hapless country over the past five years.  

If we were at the Pentagon or the White House tomorrow, we’d speak to those instances among others liturgically as modern-day crucifixions, some of us would risk arrest to underscoring those realities.

Instead, we are corona-housebound and I’m settling for trying to sum up Lent and Triduum and anticipate Easter, death overcome; not a small thing considering the breadth and destructiveness of the medical pandemic COVID-19, or the more pervasive and longstanding lethality of the social and political pandemic known as a contemporary empire, a demonic litany of continuous lies and empty promises ad nauseum. 

I noticed, as I’ve prayed my way through Lent, how very aware Jesus is of his own danger from the collaborating forces of Roman occupation and Temple leadership. In one vignette after another, he is calibrating when to stay in hiding and when to come out of it.  He turns up suddenly and draws crowds, as when he gives sight to the blind man and sends him off to testify before the scribes and Pharisees. He waits days before responding to Lazarus’ falling ill and dying via a furtive rendezvous with Martha, leading to summoning Lazarus from the dead. The powers that be, hearing of that episode, decree that Lazarus should die yet again. Jesus meanwhile lays low on the outskirts of Jerusalem, waiting for an opportune moment to manifest himself. He gives his disciples cryptic instructions about finding beasts of burden to ride into town and equally peculiar instruction later on setting up their gathering for Passover.  All the same, they are infiltrated; he is betrayed, captured, tortured and marched off to death on Golgotha in a macabre spectacle of Roman humiliation and terror.

I’m mindful, (and those of us who are Christian could pay more attention to this) of what the Passover observance commemorates. It is not unrelated to our current corona experience. The Israelites in captivity in Pharaoh’s Egypt follow divine instructions in the original Passover. It seems that Egypt to that point had been successively subjected to not one, but ten plagues, each more frightening than the one before. Moses, in Yahweh’s name, tips them to the final one, the death of the first-born males of each household, instructing them to slaughter a lamb and mark their homes with its blood, to spare them from destruction, then roast the lamb and eat while dressed for flight to the desert, as Egypt is overcome by this plague.

We have to imagine that as the first nine plagues have proceeded, the enslaved Hebrews might have been much like we have been asked to be, of late. Bewildered and huddling in their homes, they must be wondering when this nakba will end.

For the beleaguered Egyptians, no relenting. Firstborn sons were slain by the angel of death, a shattering of families and of the political and social order Pharaoh’s rule relies on. All have collapsed in chaos and helplessness, much more severe than what confounds us today owing to the corona pestilence. Thus stricken, even the Sun King tells the Hebrews to get out. No telling what it will take to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Out of such harrowing cataclysm is the nascent Israelite people thrust into freedom in the desert, ready or not. This is what Jesus and the disciples remember in the upper room before his sudden demise.

Can we imagine that come Sunday, death will be overcome and the empire itself subjected to a frightful humiliation of its own, set back on its heels by mere Galileans’ refusal to stay cowed, stay dead, stay obedient to church and state’s prescribed order. If it hadn’t happened, who would believe that it could? 

God’s breath is Spirit and Life, ours maybe not so much. 

We are fearful these days

Of dying in consequence of breath. 

We stagger thru a penitential season

Bewildered by the great pestilence and frightfully under its power

Obedient to demands of social distancing and the solitude it imposes

Scripture speaks safely from the printed page

Of Heaven’s care for us  

Of blind man seeing and dead man upright,

Of putative messiah confronting, confounding world order

Animating the downtrodden, alarming our masters

What prayer is even adequate herein:

God is happy to hear from monks and Muslims

no less than five times daily, regardless of virus

And happy to answer, we presume.

Her breath shall renew the face of the earth

Threaten the mighty with resurrection, insurrection

Thee and we shall breathe together,

Kindle a fire of divine love on earth as it is in heaven,

torching greed and violence, a conspiracy of peace and life.