March 24, 2013.
Palm Sunday
Dear Friends,
We will gather together for our shared Badaliya and Islands of Peace Institute
Prayer on Sunday, March 24, 2013 from 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm at St. Pauls Church
in Cambridge, in the small chapel located in the Parish Center. Please join
us in person or in spirit as we encourage Inter-faith relations and pray together
for peace and reconciliation in the Middle East and especially in the Holy Land.
Today we begin the most sacred week in the Christian liturgical calendar. Today,
Palm Sunday, also known as Passion Sunday, marks the entrance of Jesus into
the holy city of Jerusalem in order to celebrate the Jewish Passover meal with
his disciples. As believing Christians we walk with Him on this journey that
will lead to His condemnation and death on a Cross. Latin Christians call this
"Good Friday", and Eastern Christians call it "Black Friday"
or, "Sad Friday". Even though we know the end of the story and the
joy and glory of the Resurrection, every year we enter into Christ's Passion
with open minds and hearts in order to enter into the experience of dying with
our Lord. Throughout these 40 days of Lent we have struggled with our own failures
to truly live the ideals of the Christian life. Here is our opportunity to "die"
to those failures; to love others compassionately, to ask forgiveness of others
and to forgive those who have injured us, to overcome our pride and arrogance
and our instincts for vengeance and even violence, as well as our failures to
seek justice and peace within our communities and our world.
The significance of the Cross for Christians everywhere lies within our interpretation
of it. Jesus is the model for us of the most radical form of God's Love
for humanity. Crucifixion was the most cruel form of persecution and death inflicted
on ordinary criminals by the Roman Empire. We believe that Jesus was both fully
human and fully Divine and that his incarnation into our world as a human being
allowed Him to fully experience the pain and suffering of our lives. Accepting
death on a Cross was not only an extreme form of trust in God but also an extreme
way of experiencing the death that all of us will one day experience. Taking
all of our sins upon Himself, Christ dies with us. Only on Easter morning will
we see the fullness of this enormous self-giving sacrifice of God for us. Then
we will know that our sins are truly forgiven and that death no longer has any
power over us because the "Lord is Risen". Today we begin the rituals
of Holy Week and are called to reflect ever more deeply every year on it's
signicance for our lives as we allow ourselves to be transformed by a loving
and merciful God who would sacrifice His very life for us.
It is this experience of Jesus' sacrificial offering of His life for us
that we might have eternal life that forms the essence of the Badaliya prayer
movement established by Louis Massignon and Mary Kahil in 1934. Massignon himself
wrote that after his conversion experience in Baghdad in 2008, the direction
of his life took shape through his loyalty to the vision and prayers of those
living mentors like the hermit priest Charles de Foucauld, the prayers for him
by his Muslim friends the Alussi family, and those of the well-known writer,
J-K Huysmans on his death bed, along with his deepening relationship through
his research on the life and spiritual writings of the 10th century Sufi saint,
al-Hallaj. Reflecting on how Huysmans influenced him to "retrieve his path"
he wrote that it was Huysmans, after his death, who sent Massignon to the writer's
former spiritual director, Daniel Fontaine. Here was the beginnings of an intense
belief and devotion to the Christian understanding of the Communion of Saints.
From his spiritual guide Massignon learned of the depth of meaning contained
in what Huysman's called "mystical subsitution", the essence
of the Badaliya prayer. He describes himself as the "converted sinner"
called to "participate, through mystical substitution in the sufferings
of his unrepentent brothers." To put oneself in the unrepentent sinner's
place before a merciful God of Love is trusting fully in the saving power of
a loving and compassionate God. This embracing of "redemptive compassion"
animated Massignon's entire life. (from 1957, Écrits Mémorable
vol.I, p.147)
This is a profoundly Christian interpretation of the Cross and is therefore
very different from our Muslim brother's and sister's understanding
of the life of Jesus. There are many prophets that are found in all three Abrahamic
traditions and Jesus is revered as a prophet second only to Muhammad in Islam,
yet the Christian interpretation and understanding of Jesus is disputed in many
places in the Qur'an. Exploring these very great differences in our traditions
is an invitation for us to "cross over to the other" as Massignon
would say, and to truly experience loving one another as Jesus has loved us.
"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's
friends.".(Jn.15:13)
Peace to you and a Blessed Holy Week.
Dorothy