Danielle Shroyer

On Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, we remember the Last Supper Jesus shared with his disciples and friends, breaking bread and sharing wine. And in John’s gospel, we also encounter Jesus as servant, kneeling before a wash basin and washing the feet of his students. John 13:12-15 says:

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord–and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

We talk a lot about the Golden Rule at our house. It’s one of the many mantras my kids endure far more frequently than they’d like, I imagine. And frankly, most days the Golden Rule is a good enough benchmark to set. It’s tough to love someone as you love yourself. But I hope at this stage in my spiritual practice as a follower of Jesus I’ve also become someone who is also attempting to love others the way Jesus has loved me, which is to say unconditionally, with unending mercy, with a love that conquers all. As Jeremiah says, God “has loved us with an everlasting love.” If I’ve learned anything this Lent, it’s that I have a long, long way to go before I get there. But it’s one mountain I find worth the climb. And I actually believe it’s more reachable than most of us allow ourselves to believe. (What do we think Jesus was showing us the example for? Guilt?! Or transformation?!)

This Holy Week, I’m trying to die to my sense of “fairness” or my own personal “rightness” and even my internal justifications of “that’s actually pretty kind, that will do nicely” in the hopes that what will be resurrected is the kind of compassion that has and will always change the world.

Many people during Lent attempt to spend more time in silence, prayer, meditation.  We all know it’s not easy.  We all know the cliches about how loud our lives are, and how noisy our heads have become.  I’m not a contemplative type of person at all, so when I try to be silent, every fiber of my being screams at me, “Do something!”  I have to yell at my productivity gremlins for quite a while before I can settle in.  And sometimes by then, I’m frustrated and not in the most prayerful kind of mood.  Silence to me is like exercising: I highly value it, love it even, but I don’t always want to do it.  I don’t wake up eager to be silent any more than I look forward to those grueling lunges.  But both of them give me the same end result: I feel centered. I feel strong. I really value the feeling of being grounded and steady under my own two feet. So I do it, most days, even though I don’t always feel like it.

During Lent, I try to find more time for silence.  This year I am trying to divert some of that space I’m freeing up by not reading white guys to time where I’m not reading anything at all.  Being intentional about that time and not defaulting to the norm is squirrelly business.  I’ve learned that my non-contemplative nature does better if I remember the “why;” if I focus on the larger intent of the action, it becomes purposeful, and I can concentrate more easily.  I’ve been thinking about something Kathleen Norris wrote in The Cloister Walk. She taught art to elementary aged children, and she would have them alternate times being active and being silent. Then, she would ask them to write down their impressions of each.  When a group of kids wrote about silence, Norris was particularly struck by one of the responses.  She said, “In a tiny town in western North Dakota a little girl offered a gem of spiritual wisdom I find myself returning to when my life becomes too noisy and distractions overwhelm me: ‘Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.’”

After I battle past the gremlins and arrive at that great place of silence, I feel the presence of my soul. That’s a word fraught with bad theology, but the way I express it is that place where I remember I am more than just my accomplished tasks, loved for that mysterious “just because,” enveloped in a peace that simply is and doesn’t have to be constructed or engineered.  And I realize all those things because God is there, and I am actually paying attention to God’s presence in a full-bodied, all-hands-on-deck kind of way.  You know, like elementary school kids do.  That place is worth gold. It’s absolutely worth the mess of getting there, even if I still don’t like the getting there part.

Dear Lent, thank you for sending me a pearl of wisdom from not a seventy year old theologian but an elementary aged little girl.  Lesson noted.

This past November, I was sitting in a room with seventy other people at the Emergent Village Theological Conversation in Atlanta listening to Musa Dube, a New Testament scholar from Botswana. She was talking about Western scholarship, and all the unspoken rules we have about what is good and what is not good and how one can tell.  As someone educated in a university and a seminary that followed these rules impeccably (even whilst attempting to sound disdained about them, which only makes it all the more prominent), Dube was saying nothing original or newly disturbing. But something about hearing it from her, in that room, made an indelible impact. It felt a little like a conscience-bomb exploding in my chest. I knew this before; but I did not know it, I did not feel it in the marrow of my bones in the way I did in that moment. I did not feel it in such a way that I felt exposed more than defensive.

So here’s my Ash Wednesday confession:  I judge all theology through the lens of Western scholarship. And I judge it unfairly, and poorly, and dismissively.

I thought about this over the next number of days, rolling it over in my head like a Rubik’s cube searching for patterns of meaning.  And here’s what I realized: I am addicted to Western theology (and philosophy too). I use the word “addicted” with a lot of intention. I mean to say that theology is like a drug for me, and Western theology is my drug of choice. I like the way the sentences are structured; I like the way an argument forms and then builds over a number of pages or chapters like a trail of crumbs that lead to a gingerbread house.  I like that I usually know the back story, the story going on behind the pages, the little jabs to one’s fellow theologian here or there, just subtle enough to be overlooked if you aren’t paying close attention.  I like that they speak my language (their language? our language?), and use words to mean primarily what I assume they mean, because “we” made up the words after all.  I like all these things for the same reasons anybody likes anything:  they make me feel alive and energized, they give me a feeling of home or comfort (these are “my people”) and, let’s be honest, they make me feel competent in something I care about. (And who doesn’t want to feel that way about their career of choice?)

I am not attempting to be dramatic with all of this drug language; it’s the best metaphor I have for what I mean to say.  And what I mean to say is, I can read any theology and enjoy it. But the kind I enjoy the most, my drug of choice, is Western white men- and frankly, German ones, which should not come as any big surprise.  (I mean Barth, too. I die over a good Barthian sentence.)  That, my friends, has “Lent discipline” written all over it:  something that is good and necessary and stretching, something that pushes you out of your comfort zone and forces you to work a little harder, something that will bring you some new perspective, something that makes you mindful of something that doesn’t normally even pass over your radar screen.

And let me be clear, if I haven’t been:  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my liking Western theology. Clearly, I’m a big fan. I think it’s worth reading. I have no problem whatsoever with it.  What I do have a problem with, for myself, this Lent season, is that I read far too much of it for my own good, to the exclusion of other voices that I probably need to hear more often than I do.  (I mean, when given the choice between reading Moltmann and ANYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD, guess which one I’ll pick.) So I’m giving up white men for Lent.  All of them.  Including–pause for huge gasp that’s coming–Moltmann.  That means no reading any books by them, no quoting them (sorry- Moltmann Mondays will have to wait until Eastertide), no commentaries or articles or blog posts written by them, no using their ideas in sermons, nothing. It’s cold turkey, across the board, for forty days and forty nights.  Also, just to make it more interesting, I’m including my Lenten discipline to mean ALL the books I read, not just theology. So no fiction, or nonfiction, philosophy, or biographies from the white dudes either.

Dear Jurgen, see you at Easter.

I watched a Lenten documentary tonight.  It wasn’t about Lent, technically, but it was one of the most powerful descriptions of our human condition that I have seen in quite some time.  The documentary was called Pray the Devil Back to Hell and tells the story of the courageous and powerful women of Liberia who banded together to bring peace to a country bloodied by war.  The film was directed by Abigail Disney (yes, that Disney) who was present at the screening and afterward engaged in a Q&A session with us.  To hear her describe how people in Bosnia and Jerusalem and Burundi and Washington D.C. have seen the film and been empowered by it was powerfully hopeful.  It felt a little like Easter, actually, partly because I felt I had just experienced the fullness of Lent.

Lent is the forty days we use to get reacquainted with ourselves, and this has both negative and positive connotations.  The negative side of Lent’s coin is that we are ugly, that we are broken, and that we have often done terrible things.  To hear the stories of women in Liberia tonight who were held at gunpoint and raped is to acknowledge at the very depth of our being that humanity is capable of horrific atrocity (and historically women and children have paid the highest price).  We are not allowed to run away from that sobering fact in Lent.  We are instead required to publicly acknowledge it.  This is why we become, rather intently, people who confess.  We confess that we have done things we should not have done, and that we left undone those things we should have done.  We confess that we have not faithfully followed the One we so valiantly claim to follow.  And in these confessions we get to know ourselves again, behind the veils and the lies and the masks of our own desired sense of holiness.  We have to see the ugliness of who we really are, the terrible capacity we have for a world of evil.

The positive side of Lent is that we are also called to confess that we are made in God’s image, and therefore both capable of and responsible for acts of love, peace, forgiveness, and beauty.  For my part, I nag about this under-developed side of our story frequently, because without it there is only despair.  There is both danger and possibility in what we are, and in what we could be.  And I saw what we could be tonight when those Liberian women linked arms and forced an entire compound of power-hungry warlords and government officials and heads of state to find a roadmap to peace or stay locked up in that room, hungry and in need of a bathroom, until they did.  Those women used their voices and their passion and their commitment to life and to peace, and against all odds, they won.  Humanity is capable of stunning acts of goodness and justice that defy every limitation we considered final.

Abbie Disney said afterward that the biggest gift of this documentary has been the ability to show humanity our true selves.   Although this story was extraordinary, it did not require women with superhuman powers, but simply women who were willing to do what they were capable of doing.  I know she meant it probably exclusively in this positive sense- that we are capable of changing even dictatorial governments through peaceful means. (And amen to that!)  But I also hear the fullness of that Lenten statement resonating in my heart.  This is the full picture of humanity, both of which are necessary for us to have a chance at truly knowing ourselves enough to invite transformation.  We are capable of dire evil, and we are capable of incredible good (and of course everything in between).  Lent affords us the opportunity to look intently at ourselves and ask who we have been, and who we want to be.  Our human actions can be used either to destroy this world we have been given or to hold it up as the world Jesus rose to save.  I pray the despair of the first always leads us to the transformational hope of the second.