To further explore the disruption of lent...from Fleming Rutledge...
"The second woman (let's call her Jane) is a woman whose husband and children I used to know pretty well. Although Jane appeared to be a very agreeable person to those who saw her socially at the club or the church, I knew it to be a fact that she made life difficult for her family. She was manipulative, domineering, willful, and unforgiving. The fact that she had a pleasing personality on the surface only made it worse, because she was used to getting her own way with blandishments. It was almost impossible to get hold of her to help her see what she was doing; she considered herself a person of superior virtue.
During Holy Week several years ago she said something that, from my point of view, was deeply revealing. First I should explain that, although many churches have been doing dramatic readings of the Passion narrative for many years, the church she belonged to had not done it before. On one Palm Sunday, she participated in such a dramatized version for the first time. As a member of the congregation, representing the crowd, she was supposed to shout, "Let him be crucified!" This part of the reading is often a significant moment for those who take part; in fact, I know people whose faith has been kindled, or rekindled, at that moment. After the service was over, several of us were standing around at the coffee hour talking about how moving the service had been. People were especially talking about how they had felt when they shouted, "Let him be crucified!" At this point Jane said, with considerable energy, "I just couldn't do it! I just couldn't say it! I just couldn't say such an awful thing!"
I have often thought, since, how terribly sad that was. In her stubborn blindness, Jane could not identify herself as a sinner like all the rest of us. She could not admit that she, too, was capable of evil thoughts and malicious deeds. She was preoccupied with her own virtue and her own religiousness. Because of this, she could not see who Jesus is or who she is.
A wise Benedictine monk once said, "If you can't handle the violence in the Psalms, you can't come to terms with the violence in yourself." This is even more true of the cross. If we can't look at the cross, then we can't look at ourselves either."
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A key principle of Peacemaking goes a step further and suggests that if you can't come to terms with (at least acknowledge) the violence in yourself, then you will not be able to come to terms with violence in the surrounding world, be it violence in your own family or violence in the Middle East. In fact, you will be left powerless to do anything but blame and judge others in your own defense, ironically planting new seeds of violence.
This inability to “handle the violence in the Psalms” is certainly symbolized in the removal of the crucifix in (mostly Protestant) church buildings (to be replaced with a neon cross and a flag of the empire), as well as the grotesque tactic to use violent imagery (Hell Fire) to scare people into salvation. Neither allow for a "peeling of layers".
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