Liturgies for Lent: The Veil

“Ancestors, I walk in your honor; your stories are now unburied, your spirits alive.  I go forth speaking your names, feeling so close to your presence that anyone can see from the way I walk that you are inside me.”
-Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Image by Whitney Leigh Carlson. You can find her work here: Holy Week Art cards for sale here.

Scripture for reflection

Jesus passionately cried out, took his last breath, and gave up his spirit.  At that moment the veil in the Holy of Holies was torn in two from the top to the bottom. The earth shook violently, rocks were split apart, and graves were opened. Then many of the holy ones who had died were brought back to life and came out of their graves."
-Matthew 27:50-52 (The Passion)

"In light of this hope that we have, we act with great confidence and speak with great courage.  We do not act like Moses who covered his face with a veil so the children of Israel would not stare as the glory of God faded from his face.  Their minds became as hard as stones; for up to this day when they read the old covenant, the same veil continues to hide that glory; this veil is lifted only through the Anointed One.  Even today a veil covers their hearts when the words of Moses are read; but in the moment when one turns toward the Lord, the veil is removed.  By "the Lord" what I mean is the Spirit, and in any heart where the Spirit of the Lord is present, there is freedom.  Now all of us, with our faces unveiled, reflect the glory of the Lord as if we are mirrors; and so we are being transformed into His same image from one radiance of glory to another, just as the Spirit of the Lord accomplishes it."
-2 Corinthians 3:12-18 (The Voice)

"If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple."
-1 Corinthians 3:17 

“After this, I will pour my Ruach (Spirit) on everyone.
    Your sons and daughters will prophesy.
    Your old men will dream dreams.
    Your young men will see visions."
-Joel 2:28

Meditation: On the veil

Not many of us spend our days in the book of Numbers.

I learned recently that Numbers, before it was translated into English as such, is the Hebrew word Bamidbar, which literally translates to “in the wilderness.”  Davar, the root word is, “to speak.”  Our spiritual ancestors, the Israelite people, who wandered the wilderness not only inhabited in the place of God’s speaking, but also reclaimed their own voice in the process.

Two and a half years ago, my family embarked on a trip to our ancestral home of Grimstad, Norway, the birthplace of my maternal great-grandparents.  I sat in Fjaere chucrh (pictured above) where my great-grandmother was baptized, confirmed, and married, a church that has stood for centuries since 1100AD. We learned there that women and men sat on opposite sides of each other, the women's pew holding fourteen, while the men's row sat a spacious eight.  Women occupied space on the left, the side associated with evil, with Eve, a punishment for her choice to eat of the fruit of good and evil. 

My great-grandmother sat on the left, as penance.

My grandmother never saw women in church leadership in her lifetime.

My mother, not permitted to dance, her body seen as dangerous.

And I inherited a very damaging theology of sex (i.e.; purity culture)
 
The church has done great harm in exploiting women. The headlines are endless.  Our bodies and our stories, our voices and our giftings, suppressed. And she has also believed, called, empowered, healed and liberated us to go about the work of God in the world.  I live at the threshold of both experiences.

In the days of the Exodus, God had chosen a people, the Isrealites, to be set apart.  God gave them specific instructions for the Ark of the Covenant, how they might create a space wherein God might convene with them.  There was the holy place, a curtain, and the Most Holy Place, where only the high priest was allowed to enter and atone for his sins, and those of the community's. 

But when Jesus' body breathed his last, the veil in the temple was torn in two.  The people were liberated, not confined to a particular space to meet with God.  All space could now contain the Holy.  And what is more startling, is that our very bodies became that space.

God has a lot to say about bodies.  God's work on the cross made peace with us and God, us and each other, us and the earth, and with ourselves, our of-the-earth bodies.  Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, all breathing testaments to embodiment.

“Jesus was a body.  You are a body, and we, collectively are a body,” Dr. Hillary McBride writes.  Our individual and communal bodies were made into the Holy of Holies, the temple wherein the Sacred might reside.

The most important work of my life thus far has been reclaiming my relationship to my body.  Reimaging my body as holy.   During my most formative years, I was taught to hate my body. I punished her, rejected her, starved and stuffed her, pushed her past the brink, disregarded her needs, when all along God was hidden there, a meeting place.  Every time she was violated, objectified, intimidated, silenced, God was listening, bearing witness to the scars of the ancestors, grieving.

Research has recently shown that trauma is transmitted epigenetically fourteen generations.  Thus, we literally carry the stories of our ancestors in our bodies.  We are not just ourselves, we are a people before and behind us, a heritage, a lineage.  Their stories built us and we must make and unmake and be made new in the life that they gave us.  When I repair in my body, declare her as holy, I heal the ancestors before me, and those after, by correcting, by evolving, by dreaming of an alternative story.

Jesus’ stint in the wilderness for forty days was a long-standing tradition, a communing with his ancestors in the meandering.  The wilderness became a metaphor for those on the margins.  Our spiritual ancestors got a bad rap for grumbling and complaining, but they reclaimed the voice that was stolen from them during slavery in Egypt.

The wilderness, like the church, is a place of remembrance, at its worst, of oppression, at her best, the doorway to liberation.  We would do well to dismantle patriarchal imagination conflated with God.  To celebrate, cheerlead, partner with, listen to, elevate, believe the women, those who have inhabited marginal places in our pulpits and congregations for far too long.

The veil is torn.  The promised land is near.

She's speaking.

Breath practice

Yahweh.  When Moses saw a burning bush in flames, and took off his sandals on holy ground, he asked what he should tell the Israelites, who sent him.  And God's response: "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14).  These letters in Hebrew are Y, H, V, H, pronounced: ‘Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh,"  the breathing sounds, considered so holy and mysterious in some traditions, they are indistinguishable from breath.  Richard Rohr writes in the Naked Now, "The one thing we do every moment of our lives is...to speak the name of God.  This makes it our first and last word as we enter and leave the world."  God, as close as breath.  Everyone on earth, those we love, those we're afraid of, those we judge, speak the name of God.  Today, as you live and move, and have your being, may you remember to take deep breaths, Yah (inhale for three), Weh (exhale for six).  And may you be filled afresh with ruach, the breath, wind, and Spirit of God, in the here and now.  Amen.

Poem of contemplation

Out of rivers you fled
Into wilderness
Barren
As darkness descended
Angels attended, The Spirit
hovering
 
Maybe in your suffering
A remembering
Of your forbears bore with
Moses, inheriting the promise
Hagar, opening her eyes to see a wellspring
Jacob, wrestling until the blessing, came
 
Maybe you remembered your name
Beloved
A baptismal blessing written in stars
 
In our wildernesses, God
In our waking and wandering
In dreams still veiled
Into this liminal light
Breaking skies wide with wonder
 
In our ends and endless attempts to begin
May the Voice who spoke, speak again.