Lenten Series: #6, A Spiritual Foundation for Resistance to Empire
This post includes excerpts from Sharon’s book, The Cross in the Midst of Creation.
Creation: Moving from Awe to Lament to Resistance
The terrible silence of God in response to Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane was more than a deathly stillness. Mystics have felt it too, in the dark night of the soul in which everything that makes life worth living dries up, and hope disappears from life. Martin Buber called it “the eclipse of God.” -Jurgen Molmann
As heartening as the No Kings demonstrations were this past weekend, both locally and around the country, I am hoping that people will respond enthusiastically to the calls for a general strike on May 1st. We will have to step up our resistance and work together to be become a strong enough movement to carry us through the current “polycrisis” and come out on the other side.
Today, Maundy Thursday, I am attending two worship services. The first is a meal that commemorates Jesus’s “Last Supper” with his disciples as portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels. The second is a service with a traditional liturgy based on John’s Gospel account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet on their last night together.
After the meal, Jesus went out with his disciples to the Mount of Olives and the garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed about how events in Jerusalem would unfold. He told his disciples to stay and keep watch with him, but they kept falling asleep. Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26:39 NIV), and again, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Matt 26:42).
This is not the rationalized story of a deterministic God who had pre-ordained the sacrifice of Jesus as a payment plan for human souls so they could get into heaven. Rather, it is the account of a very human response to the experience of “the eclipse of God” in horrible circumstances.
Jesus prayed there in agony, knowing he had a very real choice. According to Luke, “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22:44). He could foresee the likelihood of his death, considering the ways he had challenged the ruling authorities and they had targeted him. He wanted the cup of suffering and violent death to pass from him. Still, he chose to be true to himself, to his followers, and to God by facing the deadly confrontation that awaited him.
In this response to the domination system of his day, and in his responses throughout his ministry, Jesus sets an example for us to follow. In this Lenten series on “Spiritual Foundations for Resistance,” I propose that for followers of Jesus, prayer and resistance go together. In prayer we release burdens too heavy to carry alone, assimilate actions we have taken in the world, and receive clarity and inspiration for acts of mercy, justice, and nonviolent resistance to the powers. In our actions in the world, we express the love and insights we have received in prayer. Prayer is a way of deprogramming from the “wisdom of this age,” which expresses and underlies the powers of this world, and of attuning ourselves to the wisdom of God.
In her book The Silent Cry, the late German theologian Dorothee Soelle says, “As in the journeys of former times, the stages of today’s journey flow one into the other. The three stages are as follows: to be amazed, to let go, and to resist.”
By being amazed Soelle means the via positiva, which includes the experience of God in nature, radical amazement, bliss, and praising God. This aspect of the spiritual journey expresses the joy and jubilation that are the gifts of ongoing connection with God and the revelation of the divine through the natural world. However, she points out that so much damage has been done to the earth that our ability to celebrate God through creation with our “original amazement” is hindered: “Mystical spirituality of creation will very likely move deeper and deeper into the dark night of being delivered into the hands of the principalities and powers that dominate us. For it is not only the poor man from Nazareth who is tortured together with his brothers and sisters on the cross, it is also our mother earth herself.”
To explain the stage of letting go, Soelle points to the via negativa, by which she means a process of relinquishing consumerism, addiction, possession, violence, and ego. This may include the experience of the dark night of the soul or a sense of the absence of God. She speaks of the bondage of the soul in today’s “consumer culture of plundering” and says, “The ego turned into an addicted identity functions as the best guard in our jail; it controls and effectively suppresses our attempts to escape.”
Soelle links letting go to resisting, which she names as the third stage of the spiritual journey: “To enter into the way from the ego to ego-liberation is a beginning in resistance.” She describes resisting as the via transformativa (transformative way), which includes compassion and justice, living in God, and changing the world. She explains her rationale for including resistance: “The concept of resistance that meets us in many places of mystical tradition is broad and diverse. It begins with not being at home in this world of business and violence.”
Practicing prayer in today’s context enables us to face and bear what seems unbearable— that is, that the rulers of this age, the powers that be, seem to have the upper hand and are crucifying what is precious, destroying our hopes and dreams and everything that we hold dear. But the ability to bear this apparent reality— that the dominant institutions and systems of our world are moving us toward global death— depends on a stance of resistance. Otherwise, how could we simply “accept” this cruel, unjust, and unspeakable state of affairs? That would be consent and complicity. The only way to face the horror and retain our integrity is to stand in solidarity with the crucified Jesus and with contemporary victims of the powers, to follow him in nonviolent resistance, and to risk the same fate that he endured. In this context, prayer is a way of practicing resistance to the institutional powers, which lure us into conformity and threaten us with death in so many different forms.
Reflections such as these become a means of grace as we allow ourselves to be immersed in the depths of God and as we face and repent of our participation in the domination system. As we stand in solidarity with Jesus Christ crucified, we stand in solidarity with all who suffer, especially those who suffer unjustly at the hands of worldly powers, as he did. This solidarity becomes the foundation for actions of resistance and social transformation.
This post includes excerpts from Sharon’s book, The Cross in the Midst of Creation: Following Jesus, Engaging the Powers, Transforming the World (Fortress Press, 2022). Her newly released revised version of Love in a Time of Climate Change is also available.
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