I wasn’t going to post as Good Friday is a day of contemplation and sorrow for many of the Christian faith, but I felt led to. I pray that you receive this with the intention with which I wrote it and with the love with which I received the blessings that I am going to share with you. If you are grieving, perhaps come back to this episode at a later time, but if you are thirsty for hope and joy, perhaps even in the midst of suffering, then I pray that this encourages you.
Anchor
Then Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and teacher of the Law, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to them all, “This day is holy to the Lord your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people had been weeping as they listened to the words of the Law.
Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.” — Nehemiah 8: 9 &10
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When Jesus came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” — Luke 19: 37-40
Sea
Last year, I celebrated Good Friday by releasing my newsletter Chasing After Wind. It all began with a guest post I wrote for my good friend Julian’s newsletter, Julian’s Note.
This year, Holy Week has felt somewhat different. My friend Aysha and I decided to share meditations on the seven last words Jesus uttered while hanging on the cross.
I expected this Holy Week to be somber, especially given the reality that Palestinians are still being executed, blown apart and burned alive; given that people in our country are being disappeared without due process of law; given that most of the world still lives with hunger, and 60% of sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t have clean water.
But to my surprise, I was shocked by how many times Jesus told me not to weep this week. How many times he pointed me back to the Triumphal Procession.
Jesus wasn’t the only person processing into the Holy City two thousand years ago. I just learned this past Sunday that Pilate and Herod also had processions that day. The former represented the military might of empire, and the latter represented the wealth, prestige, and intellectual curiosity of the cultural elite. Jesus represented a third way into Jerusalem: down the Mount of Olives, through a graveyard.
Today I walked a mile to a graveyard: Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery. 48 acres of sprawling burial grounds, including a historic African-American cemetery, a field of unmarked graves, a Jewish Cemetery, and a Confederate Cemetery. The original African American cemetery called Slave Square was desecrated, the graves having been dug up to resell the plots to white families after the cemetery had run out of space. Black people’s remains were scattered and dumped in the paupers’ field.
Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
A few years ago, my friend Max gave me a game and a mandate whenever I visit a graveyard: snap a picture of the grave of someone (other than an infant or a stillborn) who died on their birthday. Four years in, I’ve found tombstones in Atlanta, Corsicana, and the Netherlands.
The game gives me an excuse to go where I want to go anyway. Why do I like cemeteries? I couldn’t tell you. I always have. At the beginning of the pandemic, I would walk to Oakland Cemetery, lie beside my favorite tombstones, and take a nap. It was so peaceful.
While life felt fragile and on hold, spring was not. The flowers were as alive as they’d ever been. Azaleas, Peonies, Tea Roses, and California Poppies. Eventually, I started going to the cemetery for the flowers as much as the graves.
This time of year, the irises are in bloom—the biggest irises you have ever seen in your life. Ghost trains and Guilt-edged Bonds, Slovak Princes, and Restless Spirits—yes, those are the names of some of the bearded iris varieties.
I love this time of year because flowers grow on the graves, even the graves of dead children whose names no one remembers. And they grow well, a sign that the promise of life exists not just after death but through it.
Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.
Today, a phalanx of His Royal Highness Irises caught my eye and led me to a cluster of graves I’d never visited before. Walking past one, it was so weathered I had to rub my fingers over the lettering to make out the date.
Samuel Mueller Born July 8, 1853 Died July 8, 1904.
I found one—the grave of someone who died on their birthday. A surprise? A parable? Or both.
God never leaves anything incomplete. Creation started good, and it will end the way it started. Sometimes you won’t see it; you’ll have to trust and feel your way through… like Jesus did on Good Friday.
I thanked God, snapped a picture, honored the dead, turned a corner, and walked about 100 feet towards a beautiful tree of pink and red flowers. Then I looked to my left:
Nancy R. King
Nov 7, 1921 - Nov 7, 2008.
Ok, wow! Stunned, I said out loud to the Lord, “Shall we make it three?”
Three graves later:
Not even a full minute had passed. This was truly bizarre. I’d found two such gravestones once before on a visit to a large graveyard like Oakland Cemetery, but never three. And within five minutes! God must be playing the game with me. In a graveyard. On Good Friday. But how? Why?
Because, I think, in God’s plan, even a day like today is good.
Sometimes it seems like evil’s power to crucify is greater than God’s power to resurrect. Yet Jesus reminds us: In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world!
The truth is, I do not think I would find peace in a graveyard if I didn’t know that one day graves will open—that in the past they already did. I could not have peace in this world if I did not know that the Son of God suffered in solidarity with me, not because He had to, but because He chose to. And when empire and religion and racism and biotry and sin and death had done all it could do, Jesus said, “It is finished….” You are finished. Then He rose three days later, scarred and sovereign.
God graciously extends Christ’s victory over me and to me so I can confidently say: Greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world.
God still plays with his kids, even on days like today. He says to me, “Do you believe I can make you laugh in a cemetery? Do you believe I can make you dance in a graveyard?”
For all those troubled by what is happening in our world, for all those who have lost someone they love, it is ok to grieve and weep. Indeed, it is appropriate. Still, I am reminded of what side of the empty tomb we are staying on. The joy that He had for Mary Magdalene early that Sunday morning, He has for me now—monumental joys and silly, sparrow-sized ones.
Verily,
Alysia
Sail
An old poem of mine that I am falling in love with again. Exegesis with a Line from Richard Siken. The audio sucks in the first 15 seconds but it clears up. The words are below with a slightly different ending than the one in the video. Poets are constantly revising. This one needed a different ending given the times.
Exegesis with a Line from Richard Siken
People ask me about the world
whether I think the world is worth
saving. I think the world is first
worth loving. For it is just a marble
of the human heart. Turn it and behold
all its contradictions. Sometimes it is azure sapphire,
sometimes it’s downright gangrenous. Singular, always,
this tiny gem of life in a fist of dark,
the earth and the human heart.
People ask me why
believe in God?
Why have faith at all? Why not just do
good deeds? Faith is the pillow
on which all of my good deeds sleep—
And whose true religion is not an attempt
to recover the Beloved
to their bed?
So when I say Amen,
when I say, “The dawn is breaking the bones of your heart like twigs,”
look at every fall we’ve taken, and remember we are still august.
Consider the tiniest sparrow:
its belief in its seeming invincibility.
Its ringing throat.
Its eggshell bones. A body so feeble
all it has is song. Well, there may be no
gorgeous harmony for us at the end of the day
but predators I pray, won’t you feast on this praise?
What I mean is,
Creation will kill you
it is so beautiful. Look at how brightly
it unmakes
all its children.
So when I say humanity is my first love,
I mean 276 girls studying physics,
80,000 Palestinians and a black boy.
When I say burial, ashes to ashes and dust to dust
I mean I also saw life today. It fasted
from sun up to sundown and broke
with much joy, and there is no shroud
white enough to smother the muzzle
of spring, its fatness, its pink.
So when I say feast,
I mean quince, parabolic
pear, or peach
or perhaps
my tongue,
or lower,
my breasts,
or lower,
my
flesh like a claret ribbon in your mouth
because it’s all love & it tastes good
to me, it tastes
good to me it
tastes good to me. When the fruit in your hand becomes red meat,
what do you need to know
about the sine or the cosine, except
the apple curves to fit
the vivid frame of your lips.
And that’s another amen.
When I say Let's stay
marooned in this here chapel
of a few hours, remember how we
have all kissed someone in the scratched-out
light. They became a fountain,
and our mouths were full
of pennies after.
When I say hell,
I mean He’ll heal.
Look around you at this forgiving miracle:
to burn one day and not burn out.
When I say alleged heaven, remember
the crime they have tried to make of our living.
Remember the body
has so many things to apologize for
for which it is not sorry. I am not
sorry
for bearing witness.
For loving what I could not
love, for living in the creases
of your palms like salt. I am your excess
tears and I am not sorry. I am
not sorry for turning this into a lament
or for using familiar words to comfort you,
for taking up language as the prosthetic.
A prayer for a phantom limb so that I can hold this world
with extra hands. That’s how much I want
to keep it.
How much
I want to keep you safe.
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