On Seeing And Not Seeing
Thinking Of Open Eyes And Broken Hearts On This Palm Sunday
That’s me this morning, in front of the gold-orange wall of the Serbian Orthodox parish in Budapest. I’m holding a book Linda Arnold sent me, that has the Divine Liturgy in side-by-side translation with Serbian and Church Slavonic. The great thing about it is the Slavic languages are transliterated out of Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet, making it possible to follow. Thank you, Linda!
Today is Palm Sunday. Here is the Gospel reading from the Orthodox services:
John 12:1-18 (Gospel)
1 Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was who had been dead, whom He had raised from the dead.
2 There they made Him a supper; and Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those who sat at the table with Him.
3 Then Mary took a pound of very costly oil of spikenard, anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.
4 But one of His disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, who would betray Him, said,
5 “Why was this fragrant oil not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?”
6 This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the money box; and he used to take what was put in it.
7 But Jesus said, “Let her alone; she has kept this for the day of My burial.
8 For the poor you have with you always, but Me you do not have always.”
9 Now a great many of the Jews knew that He was there; and they came, not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might also see Lazarus, whom He had raised from the dead.
10 But the chief priests plotted to put Lazarus to death also,
11 because on account of him many of the Jews went away and believed in Jesus.
12 The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem,
13 took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out: “Hosanna! ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!’ The King of Israel!”
14 Then Jesus, when He had found a young donkey, sat on it; as it is written:
15 “Fear not, daughter of Zion; behold, your King is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt.”
16 His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him.
17 Therefore the people, who were with Him when He called Lazarus out of his tomb and raised him from the dead, bore witness.
18 For this reason the people also met Him, because they heard that He had done this sign.
These passages from the Gospels tell us so much about who we are as human beings, don’t they?
There is Judas, hiding his greed behind the pretense of compassion. Yet even if he had been honest in his professed concern for the poor, Jesus reminded him that Mary’s offering was the right thing to do, because it honors God first. As Our Lord himself said in Matthew 6:33: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
This was Mary’s spirit. Remember the story about the time Jesus came to the home of Mary and Martha? From the Gospel of Luke:
38 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. 40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Though Martha was a devoted servant, Mary saw more clearly who the Man in their midst truly was. Likewise Mary (the sister of Lazarus and Martha, note well) understood better than Judas who Jesus was — and would have done even if Judas’s heart for the poor had been pure.
How often are we like that? Jesus is in our midst, and we don’t see Him. What else don’t we see?
This weekend I have been in prayer for a dear friend back in America. He is suffering a terrible crisis of depression (and for him, I beg — I beg — your prayers). It emerged in a shocking way. Obviously I won’t give details, but let’s say that none of us who love him, not even his beloved wife, had the faintest clue what he has been suffering. He hid it very well, for many years, and it was only by divine providence that the truth came out before it was too late.
I’ve been thinking all weekend about the burden this man has carried. We talked by video chat this weekend, and he didn’t even look like the man I have known. He looked utterly crushed and defeated. I learned from him that he has struggled with this inner darkness for almost his entire life, since his painful childhood, and he has been holding up a façade to the world, trying to be strong. If you had asked me a few days ago to make a list of my close friends who were the most solid in their lives, he would have been near or at the top. He has a good family. He is successful in business. He is devoted to God. And still!
I don’t feel guilty for not seeing this. Like I said, not even his wife did. He has been expert at keeping up appearances. He was Richard Cory — or could have been, had the Holy Spirit not intervened to reveal what was hidden.
This grievous weekend — so gorgeous here on the Danube, full of clear skies and springtime sun — has taught me how little we all see of reality. I’m sure that many people were shocked by the announcement of my divorce. The closest friends of my ex-wife and me would not have been, but most people who knew us casually probably were. We kept up appearances for a solid decade. We didn’t do it out of social propriety, but, I think, out of hope that somehow, the darkness within our marriage could be driven away. That experience has taught me a lot about mercy, and about the wisdom of withholding judgment. You just never know what burdens people are carrying, even those who look like they have it all.
Yesterday I went for a long walk along the river with a good American friend who is in town for a bit. He has known his share of suffering, and even now is struggling with unemployment. When I read online the snide comments of MAGA people sneering at the fears of those, like small business owners, who fear that the tariffs will leave them destitute, I think of how hard it is for my friends who are without work, though they seek it, and have been seeking it for a long time. When you are out of work for a while, you start to feel worthless, like the world sees some deep flaw in you that you can’t perceive. You might feel judged, even though the harshest judge is yourself.
My friend said an employment counselor he saw told him that in the US now, job demand is strong, but so is the supply. If an employer has, say, 24 characteristics he’s looking for in the ideal employee, it used to be that if you had only 18 of them, you were in the running for the job. No more: now you have to have them all.
My friend is a good man. He’s intelligent, hardworking, and has loads of integrity. And yet … nothing turns up for him. By contrast, I am doing well in my career, and have money in the bank. Despite this, I told him, I would trade it all to have a good marriage and a united family restored.
Again: you never really know the burdens people carry. During the final years of my marriage, I thought about suicide all the time. I was never, not even once, a serious threat to myself. I fear Hell and I love my kids too much to have done that. But the thought of making the pain go away by ending it all was often on my mind. You get to the point where you think you can’t bear another day of it. But you do. Somehow, you do. I think of an older man I used to know, now dead, who dealt with the pain of his wife’s cruelty to him by climbing into a bottle. I knew him well enough back then to confront him about his alcoholism, and to ask him to get treatment. He never did. He was not a religious man, so he did not have Christ to depend on. And, like many Southern men, he was too proud to admit he had a problem. Admitting that he had a problem would have been admitting to weakness, and that was something his proud spirit, formed in Southern shame/honor culture, could not bear.
He died, though not of alcoholism, and I’m ashamed to say I judged him. Then, when my own marriage went bad, and I understood what that man’s life must have been like, I realized that it was only God’s grace that kept me from climbing into a bottle too. Or taking drugs. Or doing anything to make the pain go away.
Nobody knew this. Nobody but my closest friends. No degree of worldly success lessened that burden in the slightest. I imagine that my ex-wife was suffering like that too. How can I judge her? We were companions in shipwreck till the end.
Today’s Gospel reading strikes me also in what it says about how little those closest to Jesus knew about him. This verse:
His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about Him and that they had done these things to Him.
The disciples were Jesus’s most faithful followers, and they knew the Scriptures — but still, they didn’t realize who he really was until after his resurrection and glorification! It’s like Kierkegaard said about the vexatious nature of living in time:
It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.
Note also how the chief priests wanted not only to kill Jesus, but Lazarus too — a man whom Jesus had raised from the dead! — because Jesus was a threat to their control of the religious order. I think of the Gerasene demoniac — the man who was so consumed by demons that he was utterly mad, and kept in chains in the cemetery by the villagers, so he wouldn’t harm them or himself. Jesus cast out the demons and restored the man to his right mind. What did the villagers do? They ran Jesus out of town! They could more easily bear the hideous suffering of the demoniac, because it made sense to them, than they could bear Jesus upsetting the order of things by setting him free.
As you paid subscribers know, all week I have been meditating on the lessons in the book Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets, the oral history of the fall of the USSR, by Svetlana Alexievich. It is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. In it, we see over and over the testimonies of people who know full well how evil the Soviet order was. Some of them had even been sent to prison, and tortured, for crimes they did not commit. And yet, many of them long for the return of the Soviet order, because it gave them a sense of structure, meaning, and purpose.
Here is what Margarita, a 57 year old doctor, says:
We loved our Motherland, our love for her was boundless, she was everything to us! The first Soviet car — hurrah! An illiterate worker unlocked the secret to making our own Soviet stainless steel — victory! The fact that everyone in the world had already known this secret for a long time is something we only found out later. Back then: We’re going to be the first to fly over the North Pole, we’re going to learn how to control the Northern Lights! We’ll change the course of the mightiest rivers … We’ll irrigate the endless deserts …. Faith! Faith! Faith! Something higher than reason.
… And yes! Yes! Yes! My greatest dream was to die! To sacrifice myself. Give myself away. The Komsomol oath: “I am prepared to give up my life if my nation should need it.” These weren’t just words, that’s what we were really taught.
She goes on to talk about learning of the mass deaths Stalin caused in Ukraine. She talks about how her own father, a diehard Bolshevik, was imprisoned on false charges and had his skull bashed in by interrogators — yet emerged from the gulag praising Stalin all the same.
You have to ask how these things co-existed: our happiness and the fact that they came for some people at night and took them away. Some people disappeared, while others cried behind the door. For some reason, I don’t remember any of that. I don’t! I remember how the lilacs blossomed in the spring, and everyone outside, strolling; the wooden walkway warmed by the sun. The smell of the sun. The blinding mass demonstrations: athletes, the names of Lenin an Stalin woven from human bodies and flowers on Red Square.
For some reason, I don’t remember any of that. My Lord in heaven. For this tormented woman, who gave this testimony in the 1990s, after it had all fallen apart, her liberation from the monstrous lies of Communism felt like damnation. The unspeakable suffering of tens of millions of her fellow human beings, even her own father, was a price worth paying for the sake of the glorious dream.
Margarita’s story is all over this book. We think that it could not be that way with us, but as Solzhenitsyn warned, of course it could. It could happen anywhere on earth. Look, in the lifetimes of many of us, the South was willing to live with the unjust torment of millions of black Americans, just for the sake of upholding the social order. Today we are willing to accept the murder in the wombs of millions of unborn children, for the sake of defending the Sexual Revolution. Catholic bishops (and no small number of laymen) condemned thousands of victims of sexually abusive priests to horrific suffering, for the sake of upholding the ecclesial order. My own family in Louisiana cast me, my wife, and my children to the margins, all because they had to believe that their way of life — a model that had no room for people unlike themselves — had to be upheld, as a point of honor.
I am certain that on this day, there is some injustice of which I am guilty, because facing it, and repenting of it, is too painful — and I am not even aware of it! This is true for you too. Count on it. That’s who we are as human beings. There is not one of us who is innocent.
Last week, I completed my course of EMDR trauma therapy, which worked wonders for me. In the final session, my therapist and I tackled an especially painful trauma, one that helped define my adult life: an event when I was age 15, on a school trip, and bullies held me down and tried to take my pants off to humiliate me in front of their girlfriends, while the two adult chaperones literally stepped over me to get out of the room, with me begging them for help. They preferred to leave me at the mercy of the bullies rather than confront the cool kids. The therapy session ended in redemption, and I was set free from the toxic power of that memory.
But walking around immediately after that session, I thought about how, when I face my final judgment, I will no doubt be confronted by scenes of when I bullied others, or walked away when I should have defended the weak. I don’t for one second believe that I am innocent of the cruelties those stupid teenagers inflicted on me. I, too, am a human being.
So we get to the final point I want to make about the Gospel reading today. That same crowd that cheered for Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem would, a week later, be standing before Pilate calling for his crucifixion. Once again, I return to Secondhand Time: the testimonies of how, once the Soviet order collapsed, people in the various ethnic republics turned viciously on ethnic Russians living among them, who had been their longtime friends and neighbors. In a flash, they turned savage — I mean, unspeakably savage: rape, murder, torture, any and all cruelties you can think of. There’s one horrible story about an Armenian Christian woman and her Azerbaijani Muslim husband. That poor man’s family cast him out because his wife wasn’t one of them. This was thought necessary to defend the honor of the Azerbaijani people. Russians were guilty of this too, in territories they controlled. Everybody did it.
In one of the Catholic Holy Week services, when the Gospel detailing Jesus’s condemnation is read, the entire congregation is directed to say, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”, along with the mob in Jerusalem. This demonstrates that all of us murdered God. If you doubt for one second, my Christian brothers, that you too would have been in that mob howling for Jesus’s death, you are not being honest with yourself. I probably would have too — or at best, in our fear, we would have been hiding out like Peter, hoping not to be noticed, and when we were, we would deny that we had ever known the man.
As Kamila Bendova, a devout Catholic anticommunist activist, told me about resisting totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia: You must not think, Rod, that our fellow Catholics were brave. Most of them kept their heads down like everybody else.
That’s who we are as humans. Every now and then, one of our kind does not keep his or her head down. Kamila and Vaclav Benda did not. Their brothers and sisters in the resistance, though not believers, did not. But most people did.
Here is a photo of August Landmesser, a shipyard worker in Hamburg, in 1936, who refused to make the Nazi salute, like nearly everybody else in the crowd:
These heroes exist. But there are very few of them. Landmesser, who was not allowed to marry his Jewish fiancée because of the Nuremberg Laws, knew what he was looking at when he saw the Nazis. And he was willing to suffer whatever they threw at him rather than live by their lies.
Are you an August Landmesser? A Kamila Bendova? I hope so. I hope I am. I doubt it, though, not because I’m particularly a bad man, but because like everybody else, I am human. That’s not a reason to forgive ourselves, but it is a prompt to ponder our own sinfulness. Yes, the Jews, and the Romans, crucified Our Lord. But so did we, and so do we every day, when in our thoughts and deeds, we deny him.
After the Gospel was read in liturgy today, I asked the Lord to open my eyes, so that I could see what I needed to see. I hope he will. I hope I can bear it. May God forgive me for judging my brothers and sisters who are trying to do their best under oppression, some of it unseen by the rest of us.
Our merciful Lord sees, though. Yesterday, my American friend told me on the walk about a woman he knows back home, whose mentally ill adult son had committed suicide. The family’s church was quite cruel about it. Later, her husband died of a fatal illness. Since then, the woman has had at least two dreams in which both her husband and her son have appeared to her, to comfort her, telling her that they dwell in a place where there is no pain. Maybe those dreams are merely wish fulfillment by a grieving wife and mother. But because I believe in a God who is all-just and all-merciful, I choose to believe otherwise.
This week, we Christians enter into Our Lord’s passion. Let us keep our eyes open and our hearts broken over our own sins, and the sins of the world. In fact, the only way to keep our eyes open fully is if our hearts are broken.
By the way, the first two episodes of the four-part Live Not By Lies documentary are now streaming to subscribers of Angel.com. Part Three drops on Tuesday. I recommend this for Holy Week watching — for the entire family. The final episode premieres on Tuesday April 22 — and trust me, if you can get through the end of that episode without crying at the heroic goodness of those dissidents, and the sacrificial goodness that some of us fallen humans are capable of, then you are a stronger man than I am. These men and women, whose names might have been lost to history, truly are lights shining in the uncomprehending darkness. They help the rest of us to see.
I don't know: when's the last time you really bullied someone, or engaged in cruelty on purpose? I think we probably overstate the case when we say that literally anyone could do anything. I mean, that's theoretically possible, sure, in the sense that we all share fallen human nature—but there seems to be some sort of baseline grace that offers protection at least against some lower limit. Not anyone just becomes a rapist depending on the situation.
Likewise, when's the last you called for the brutal murder of *anyone*, let alone a person you considered wise and beautiful and holy?
On the other hand, sins of omission are something else altogether, and they are probably uncountable: who knows how many times we've failed to do something that we should have done for others? That's something that everyone short of a saint is surely guilty of, constantly. And I could easily imagine walking away when Jesus was arrested and pretending it was none of my business; that's definitely something I could see myself doing.
The last couple of days, in particular, my thoughts have taken a bad turn. Not as bad as sometimes, but all the stress and frustration and ways of being able to tell myself I have failed can just get to a point of feeling like too much. And then, the sunrise over Racine. Or time with friends. Or even some tiny sign that reminds me that He is with me. That doesn't always make the moment or even the day feel better, but it helps keep it all from becoming too much. I'm not being asked walk across Spain - I'm being asked to keep putting one foot in front of the other and lean on Him as guide.
Have no doubt, too, that there's a lot of spiritual warfare going on at this point. Perhaps moreso this year because all Christians are unified on when we are actually celebrating Easter/Pascha. It is not good to discount this reality.