Attempting to participate in the movements of Holy Week and Easter this year has been a challenging thing. Our world has changed. As a global community, we’re in the midst of what feels like the long middle of a story, and we don’t know when it will be over or how it will turn out in the end. Being in Southern California with my family during this time, I experience a mix of gratitude and grief that—without intending to wax melodramatic, by any means—feels like nothing else I’ve encountered before.
Regularly, we offer thanks for our blessings during these times: that most of us are healthy, that family members who have been affected by the coronavirus directly have recovered fully, that we are together during this time, that our basic needs (and then some) are met, that the sun still peeks through on the rainier days that have dotted this past week’s calendar, that functional technology keeps us connected to our loved ones elsewhere during these strange times, that we have meaningful and regular work that can be done remotely and safely. My parents, brother, and I have been praying together more often than we ever have before, and that is a gift, in and of itself. But we don’t hold hands during the Our Fathers that mark our at-home communion services, and we don’t hug each other to share a sign of God’s peace at the appointed time. In order to protect those whom we love, especially those whose immunity is compromised, we keep physical distance from one another. We do not touch as we otherwise would, especially in times of crisis.
There have been times in recent weeks, in recent days, when I am keenly aware of the ways in which we are simultaneously grieving. We grieve this lack of physical contact, however necessary it is. We grieve not being able to celebrate milestones like birthdays and baby showers in the ways we had imagined even weeks ago; not hugging one another when my mom picked me up from the airport, when we receive sad news, when we are working through something hard. I feel this grief most acutely on mornings when I wake up not feeling rested, regardless of how many hours I’ve slept the night before.
Focus has been elusive. While I check off items on my lists of To Do’s each day and look forward to seeing the faces of my colleagues and my students via Zoom each week, I have not been able to be as present to my academic writing as I would like. Even as I type these words, a voice of judgment threatens to criticize me for naming this, as though naming my struggle to write somehow robs me of the ability to stand in solidarity with those who are suffering right now. One of the insights that Brené Brown shared in a recent podcast has been helpful to me when the voice of judgment tries to take over. In it, she reminds us that having compassion for ourselves actually grows our capacity for compassion for others. Having compassion for ourselves enables us to show up for others in ways that honor our values.
That desire to live in a way that reflects solidarity with others, especially those who are suffering most acutely as a result of the coronavirus—the elderly, those without health insurance or a home, those in prison and in immigration detention, those whose immune systems already are compromised—is rooted in my faith, a faith that is corporate and communal. Our salvation is wrapped up in one another. As I watched women who have become friends give their testimonies and lead us in the recitation of the rosary during the mobile Pésame at Dolores Mission on Good Friday, I felt this interconnectedness anew. One of the few times I’ve been able to do so since the shelter-in-place order has gone into effect, I wept bitterly at the kitchen table in my childhood home. Standing near my parents, the three of us hovering around the iPhone that broadcast the Pésame by Facebook Live, I felt the emotional release that can come with tears. I remembered what these women have taught me with their lives, how rooted those truths are in what my mom and my Mamita had taught me at that kitchen table, how those truths illuminate the Gospel and, in turn, salvation history.
Ignacio Ellacuría, a Spanish Jesuit who was gunned down alongside his brother Jesuits, their housekeeper, and her daughter on the lawn outside their residence in 1989, often spoke of el pueblo crucificado (“the crucified people”). In the midst of the Salvadoran Civil War, he recognized the crucifixion of Jesus in the suffering of the poor. He saw how the powers and principalities of Rome; how modern-day markets serving the gods of neoliberalism, how policies denying access to the most fundamental of human rights worked together to put Jesus of Nazareth and the vast majority of Salvadorans at risk, even to the point of death. These forces colluded to deprive them of the right to live.
The time I spent with the women of a crucified community in East Los Angeles has acquainted me, second-hand, with the kind of trauma that can come from living in a neighborhood marked by violence. The photo above was taken on the Feast of the Holy Family in 2015; it is of the crucifix that hangs behind the altar at Dolores Mission Parish. I listened to the stories of women who belong to that community, women who, at times, had put the mattresses of their children on the floor before bedtime to protect them as best they could from the possibility of a stray bullet whizzing through the window; of women who had grieved alongside mothers in their communities who had lost their children to that violence; of women who witness to resurrection in their advocacy for conditions in their neighborhoods that support not just surviving, but thriving. These women know trauma, but they also know what it is to find deep and abiding joy in lo cotidiano, in the struggles of daily living.
On this Easter Monday, I wonder what it means to sing Alleluia in these times. How can we sing songs of praise in the midst of such suffering? Today, I aim to take my cue from these women who celebrate life in the face of suffering as a form of resistance to forces of violence, as a witness to resurrection. They show me that to sing a song of praise is not to deny the existence of suffering or even the persistence of death. Rather, to utter an Alleluia in these times is to place our faith in one who saves, who breathes life into each of us. It is an act of radical trust—not a blind faith that things will somehow magically turn out alright in the end, but rather a radical trust in one who saves. We trust that the Spirit of God can guide us back to one another; that in finding our way back to each other, we might rebuild our relationships—individually and societally—on the other side of this pandemic in ways that witness to the upside down values of the Kin-dom of God. Let us sing Alleluia. Let us join these women in practicing resurrection.
