Crisis

Wednesday, November 27, 2024

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Crisis

I, John, saw in heaven another sign, great and awe-inspiring: seven angels with the seven last plagues, for through them God’s fury is accomplished. Then I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire.

OK, if I saw this through any lens at all I’d be terrified. Fascinated, maybe, but for sure terrified. Whatever happened already isn’t as bad as this. I watched a movie of San Francisco’s earthquake – this is worse. Or is it?

On the sea of glass were standing those who had won the victory over the beast. They were holding God’s harps, and they sang the song of the Lamb: Great and wonderful are your works,
Lord God almighty.

There are those of us who have known the terror, but without the terror can we see who is standing on the sea of glass? Can we stand there ourselves, witnesses to the Lamb? Barbara Holmes died a month ago and until then she explored what it means, how to live through crisis. How to be a contemplative when everything is falling apart.

Kipling wondered too.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you …

If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run …

Kipling described this moment well. Barbara Holmes has her own poem, about what goes on inside if we allow it:

At the center of every crisis
is an inner space
so deep, so beckoning,
so suddenly and daringly vast,
that it feels like a universe,
feels like God. 

When the unthinkable happens,
and does not relent,
we fall through our hubris
toward an inner flow,
an abiding and rebirthing darkness
that feels like home. 

So I can panic, or I can be still and wait to fall through my hubris. This isn’t much in my control, of course. But I practice, awaiting the inevitable moment when my world collapses, sometimes just a bit, here or there, sometimes in an earthquake of everything I know, everything I am. In her book Crisis Contemplation, Barbara describes this moment.

The crisis begins without warning, shatters our assumptions about the way the world works, and changes our story and the stories of our neighbors. The reality that was so familiar to us is gone suddenly, and we don’t know what is happening….  

If life, as we experience it, is a fragile crystal orb that holds our daily routines and dreams of order and stability, then sudden and catastrophic crisis shatters this illusion of normalcy. The crises … are precipitated by circumstances beyond the ordinary. I am referring to oppression, violence, pandemics, abuses of power, or natural disasters and planetary disturbances. 

Sound familiar? Everything is relative; most of us have not been interned in concentration camps or been in a house when it was bombed, or a hospital, or a school. But many have. And we are all brothers, if we will let ourselves be brothers.

Until the moment that the crisis begins, you feel relatively safe and situated. Suddenly, everything changes. You are stolen from your village, placed in chains, and loaded onto ships headed to the Americas to be sold as slaves. Or, you are rounded up, placed on trains headed for a German death camp: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, or Dachau. Or, upon the orders of the US government, you and members of your tribe are rounded up to begin a forced march from native lands in North Carolina to Oklahoma. Or, without warning, they send you and other Asian neighbors to internment camps. In each circumstance, some of you will survive the experience, but many of you will not.

Jesus sought to prepare his disciples and the rest of us.

They will seize and persecute you, they will hand you over to the synagogues and to prisons, and they will have you led before kings and governors because of my name.

What will be our testimony? Jesus insists we wait for him to give us words. And Barbara reckons on this happening in spite of our attempts to control.

When the ordinary isn’t ordinary anymore and the crisis is upon us, the self can center in this refuge that I am calling “crisis contemplation,” a space that is neither the result of spiritual seeking nor the voluntary entry into meditative spaces. It is a cracking open, the rupture and shattering of self, community, expectations, and presumptions about how the world works. It is the result of trauma, freefall, and wounding…. 

Contemplation after or during crisis is a stillness in the aftermath of a primal scream, the abyss of unknowing, and the necessity of surviving the trauma together. Perhaps our definitions of “contemplation” need adjustment to reflect our unique social locations and inward journeys. As it turns out, there are many entry points into these sacred reflective spaces, doors we discover as we relinquish control. 

Barbara offers us all an alternative response to terror. After the first panic, we needn’t dissolve in despair. There is this other way, this “fall through hubris.” How much better is this way? So much better. God’s way. This is the way the world changes, not with whimpers, not with bangs, but in silence and trust and faith and hope.

Remain faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life.

 

(Revelation 15, Psalm 98, Revelation 2, Luke 21)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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