As mentioned by Br. Juniper in the first of our (the OEF Council’s) Lenten reflections, this year’s theme of our convocation is care and harm, specifically in this little, dispersed community of ours. Being dispersed as we are does make this concern difficult to address, to say the least.
Let’s face it: there are hurts within our order. Those of us who are relatively new to the order are probably not aware of most of the hurts. Those of us who have been around much longer know what many of them are, and still carry them around in their bodies and souls. They carry these hurts as wounds and scars. These hurts affect everyone in our community by virtue of the fact that those who carry the pain are in our midst. People do things the way they do in part because their remembered, internalized hurts.
Most, if not all, long-standing communities have such a dynamic. It is not healthy for any community. The hurts do not just go away, even over long stretches of time, even when the hurt generation passes and only the new, previously unscarred people are left. Plus, we keep on hurting each other, so no generation is immune, none unscarred. Each hurt carries on in time and passes into the way that we are.
So, how does a community deal with such long-term pains that just don’t go away?
Of course, it would be great if we didn’t hurt each other in the first place. Years after the occurrence of a harmful event, we may be able to identify what we could have done in the moment to prevent the harm at all, or at least to mitigate its effects. It would be nice to think that we can always nip such things in the bud. Listen as best we can, we’re still going to fail to hear what’s going on. Or else we will fail to have the courage to act. We often leave things to fester. That isn’t going to change, no matter how hard we work at setting up our loving community. And our dispersion makes the entire healing process that much harder.
So, how do we, the OEF, deal with the hurts that are always going to be with us, that just don’t go away?
I don’t have any answers. But it is now Lent, after all. A time of repentance. A time of forgiveness. And a time to journey to Jerusalem, to pick up our cross and bear it daily thereafter. Mary sat at Jesus’s feet on the way there. And at the end of that journey, another Mary sat at Jesus’s feet. Part of my Lenten practice has been to imagine myself sitting at Jesus’s feet, at the foot of the cross, just absorbing as best I can the holy mystery of that moment, as Mary absorbed as much as she could, while Martha swept.
I believe that we must face our hurts and try to heal them, so that they fester no more. So that they no longer have major impact on who and how we are. This is a big part of our care for each other. The task is, again, doubly difficult by virtue of our dispersion.
I think that part of our call as a dispersed order is to do the work of figuring out how to do caring and healing at a distance. The COVID19 pandemic has only heightened what was already there: we have been “apart together” for our entire existence. We should be very good at this by now, and yet, the hurts are there, affecting our communal life, and we need to address them better, do a better job of healing-work, of caring for each other. Maybe we can learn something; maybe we can even pass that teaching along.
The cross, I believe, allows us to do so. Let us gather, all of us, at Jesus’s feet, to discern how we can best deal with our communal hurts, knowing that we will fail & get up, fail & get up, over & over & over again, repenting & forgiving ad infinitum (at least 70×7). But in the trying, we know that Jesus will be with us. We know that the compassion, the wisdom, and all else we need will be given to us.