Did You Get What You Wanted?

Dear Friends,

This Sunday we celebrate the Liturgy of the Palms and the Passion, marking our final week of Lent and our entrance into Holy Week. That sounds like a lot of churchy words, but in essence what we are doing is walking alongside Jesus during the final week of his life, staring his loss and death in the face while we grapple with our own.

This year, in particular, the journey is going to be hard for me, as I grieve the loss of our beloved parishioner Stewart Gamage right alongside all of you. What has helped me is to consider what she might be telling us right now if we would listen; what might we see in this patchwork quilt of death in life, pieced together in haphazard patterns?

In our gospel reading this Sunday, it is the beginning of the end for Jesus. And the beginning of the beginning. We are invited to see the wholeness of his life even as death closes in, and yet the fragments of his final week create a story that becomes far too familiar. Perhaps we might try to listen better this year, take it in more slowly. Walk alongside the other disciples, feel their confusion and fear, hear Jesus confront the powers, offer the wisdom of silence, be abandoned and wait to be found. Pick up a fragment each day or two. Turn it over and over in the palm of your hand. Ask it for a blessing.

I think of Raymond Carver’s short poem called “Late Fragment” written in his hospital room when he was dying/living/dying. Here it is, in case you have not yet heard of it:

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.*

That’s all. Just a fragment, pieced into the quilt of his life because he had the courage to be at peace with his death.

During this final week of Lent, this week we call Holy, I invite you to keep some scraps of paper nearby. Listen for the fragments of Jesus’ life, and of your own, and ask of them, did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? Are you learning to call yourselves beloved, to feel yourself beloved on the earth? Are the fragments making you whole?

In Christ,

Amelie+

*Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment,” in A New Path to the Waterfall (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press: 1989).