The Sweat of Suffering

Compassion hurts when you feel connected to everything. You also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.

         Andrew Boyd

 

On the Via Dolorsa in Jerusalem, Station 6 is Veronica’s Veil.  It’s my second most favorite Station (Station 8 with the weeping daughters of Jerusalem is first) because of the story and because there is a grotto where you can go inside and pray in the cool dark. There is no biblical story that talks about a woman named Veronica but there are plenty of stories about the holy face of Christ she captured on her veil when she went to wipe his sweaty face as he passed carrying his big cross.

Some say Vera Icon, the true image, is the name of the cloth and not the woman. Others identify the woman as the one who was bleeding for 12 years and reached out and touched Jesus’ cloak as he was passing and was healed.  Now she reaches out again and is gifted with his face for eternity. Others talk about the miracles attributed to looking at or touching this veil with the imprint of Jesus’ face.  The Veil is no longer at Station 6 but somewhere in St. Peter’s Basilica for all to see.

What I am drawn to however is something different in this story. I am drawn to the fact that this unknown woman reached out and tried to ease Jesus' suffering by wiping the sweat off his brow. Like the weeping women at Station 8, she understood what was happening and offered not tears but a physical touch. On that wrenching Friday when Jesus carried his own cross up to Golgotha, she who had been healed, reached out again to offer some kind of comfort and in return received his face imprinted not only on her veil but her very soul. This is what interests me.

So this got me thinking, wondering about what experiences or images of suffering are we holding onto here in this place of so much daily and sometimes grotesque violence and suffering. And I have have been wondering if it is it necessary that we reach out? Also how can an image heal or move us not only to tears but to compassionate action? And where or how does it imprint itself in us? And then what? What is the difference between an act of compassion and an act of solidarity? Are they the same? Is her act considered less than "carrying the cross?"

So I invited people in my facebook world, people I know and people I barely know to share an image or experience that has impacted them, has stayed with them from this ongoing military Occupation. Most people responded that the recent attacks on civilians in Gaza were the images that were imprinted on their hearts. Here is what my fellow  minister, Pastor Carrie Ballenger Smith said about not only the images from Gaza but the look in the eyes of those parishioners she serves:

Some of the images coming out of Gaza this summer will stay with me forever – neighborhoods gone, children sitting among the rubble of their homes. The eyes of the children especially. Speaking of eyes, what I encounter most often as pastor here are the eyes of those who are working in the places most affected by the conflict. People come to worship on Sunday after having worked in Gaza, in refugee camps, in hospitals, and at checkpoints. One of these aid workers told me of sitting with a father in Gaza, who described holding in his arms his child who had been cut in half by an Israeli bomb. Such a horrible image can’t help but imprint itself in your mind and heart – and I could see the same thing in this parishioner’s eyes. The horror of violence and war is replicated again and again, forever changing.

I have many experiences that have burned themselves into my heart from living here. The first was an experience of a soldier shooting at school children in Tequa, home of prophet Amos and now a place of great violence from both settlers and soldiers. After I posted this story in my blog back in 2011, a friend commented that I must be a changed person. I posted back, “Yes. I will never forget this. Yes, I am changed.”

A few years later I find myself back living in Palestine, this time in Occupied East Jerusalem during one of the most violent summers in recent history full of drive- by kidnappings and nightly clashes outside my window.  One night a friend of mine came to me for healing. He had been shot with his brother while walking down Saladin Street. He came for that thing I do with my hands, Reiki. And I realized when I put my hands over the bullet holes in his shoulders and behind his knees that I had no training in this, no experience in dealing with this level of physical violence on a body.  My hands will forever remember what a bullet hole feels like, what a grown man looks like curled into a fetal position.

Throughout the 50 days of attacks on Gaza, I watched TV and the news like everyone else crying and lamenting the destruction of whole neighborhoods and families. Each week I wrote an Action Alert calling our partner's attention to the genocide taking place before our eyes and to do something to stop it. I was traumatized like others by the effects of condemned weapons from the US that blew off children’s heads and limbs.

But there are two images of mothers that will stay with me always because they are about that desperate attempt to save our children. One I posted for an online mourning place called Everybody Has a Name where we posted the names of all those killed and the other is a picture I used in an action alert. It’s a picture of a woman’s hand holding her baby’s face. They are buried in rubble, most likely their home.  I am this mother. 

The woman who wiped Jesus’ face was his mother, his wife, his sister, his daughter.  The suffering of another person makes us kin not only to Him but to each other. This is what he meant when he told his mother that John was now her son and that his mother was now John’s mother. We become family or rather we are commanded to live as related folk, sisters and brothers in Christ.

Showing compassion, or becoming one with the crucified peoples of the world can be a transformative experience but this won’t necessarily lead to action or redemption.  For this you need outrage and a community to mourn and act with otherwise you will be crushed by the weight of the pain.  And as Boyd says you “must grow strong enough to love the world and empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”

 

I invite you this Holy Week, this Sad Friday as we call it here, to not only walk the Way of Suffering but be one of those people like this woman who reaches out in love to wipe the sweat of the brow of another. Join his passion story with your own but also become empty enough to sit with the horrors, to allow them to become imprinted on your very soul for all to see.