More scripture, and a meditation below the fold:
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, "Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me."
--John 12:1-8
Someone asked me the other day how we can keep idealism alive in young people. It’s an apt question. The villagers have had pitchforks and torches ready wanting to kill this Frankenstein’s monster of a war for years now, but no one’s succeeded. The Iraq Supplemental was a step in the right direction, but as Digby says, these things are frightful sausage-making at its worst.
How then to keep the spark alive, when all around is greed, death, powerlessness, and cynicism?
The answer suggested by this scripture is a kind of radical specificity. John is insistent on the details: at this particular time in this particular place, these particular people came together, and here is what was said and done.
Mary appears to be the first disciple to understand that Jesus’ death is imminent. In grief and love, she pours out her feelings. Judas, by contrast, can’t be bothered with the particularity of relationship. He asks a question obstensibly directed at Jesus’ ideals but - as John tells us – in truth motivated by his selfishness. Even in the aside, we have the specificity of the broken relationship between the two men.
The lesson here is plain. Mary has no idealism left in her. Even if she did, she would soon lose it at the cross. But she does have hope forged in the choice to stand in relationship to Jesus, whom she loves, even as she knows she will soon lose him.
It’s a hard-nosed kind of hope. It’s not based in promises left unfulfilled, in abstract reasoning, not even in faith or revealed truth. She is going to lose Jesus, and at this point, she doesn’t even have the mystery of the empty tomb to comfort her. All she has is the wonderful, instinctual urge to care for the person in front of her. She is going to do him justice while she still can, in the here and now.
We need to do the same.
The spirit that sustains activism isn’t abstract idealism. In its most elemental, it is the nitty-gritty of caring for this person in this time and this place.
Narrowing our focus to being as specific as we can afford to be produces a change in us. It shifts our attention from success to simply doing the work that can be done. But it also keeps the fires inside going long after idealism has burned out. Because as long as this person needs our help, we will be motivated to continue our service. As long as this friend needs someone to stand beside them, we will stay as the shadows approach. And as long as this citizen needs us to reason together and work to solve a common problem, we will participate in the political process.
This is what it means to "keep faith": to walk with one another, one by one, and to find hope in what can be done, here, now, in this particular time and this particular place and with these particular people.
Let us pray* that we have the strength to choose that kind of hope.