The Bees of Holy Week
Palm Sunday – April 13, 2014
All Saint’s Episcopal Church,
Rehoboth Beach, DE
(the Rev’d Dr) Elizabeth Kaeton
In the name of
God, + who is Mystery, who is Incarnation, who is Spirit. Amen.
As I consider
the significance of this day – Palm Sunday – and the beginning of what we
Christians call Holy Week, I have been visited by the continued buzzing of piece of a
poem called “Last Night As I Was Sleeping” by the great Spanish poet, AntonioMachado. It begins:
Last night as I
was sleeping,
I
dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring
was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along
which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are
you coming to me,
water of a new
life
that I have
never drunk?
It is the second
stanza, however, that continues to visit me:
Last night, as I
was sleeping.
I dreamt -
marvelous error!
that I had a
beehive
here inside my
heart.
And that the
golden bees
were making
white combs
and sweet honey
from my old
failures
Listen again to
that last sentence!
And that the
golden bees
were making
white combs
and sweet honey
from my old
failures.
If you listen closely you will hear them. There, in the far
distance. – a low hum is beginning
deep in your soul. The hum
will grow steadily into the sound of a buzz, which will grow fuller and deeper
and louder as the week continues.
Holy Week begins
the gathering of the Golden Bees of Heaven.
The Golden Bees
of Heaven need you. They need your regret and your grief, the memory of which
causes your heart to ache again in the places where it has been broken.
They
need the sense of loss and anger which have left a sour taste on the back of
your palate.
The Golden Bees of
Heaven are especially fond of betrayal and disappointment, but, oh my, how they
love the rich, deep, bitter darkness of depression.
All of these
human failures are pollen to the Bees.
They will buzz all ‘round the story of
Holy Week, and wait and watch as the story of the Passion of Jesus draws out
the pollen of regret, grief, anger, betrayal, disappointment and depression
from the depths of your own heart and soul.
They will take them – all of these
human failures – to their very bodies and carry them to the Queen of Heaven
where She will make of them a gift to be wept over and blessed with Her tears.
Then the Bees
will return them to us and begin to make of these, our old failures and
regrets, brilliant white combs of wax, which will provide the framework for us
to find our own salvation.
I know. I
understand. This is not what you were taught as a child. God, we were very
carefully taught, is the Great Master Puppeteer, and we are Pinocchio with
Geppetto-as-God-our-Father, controlling all the strings of our lives.
God is supposed
to remember the sacrifices you made – the chocolate or wine you gave up for
Lent.
If you sacrificed enough and prayed really hard, He – God – was supposed
to bring you that brand new bike or those spiffy new shoes or get you on the
team or help you pass the test for your driver’s license which would open the
door to unspeakable freedoms.
Later, that same Geppetto-Father-God, you thought, would get you
that job. Or, save your marriage. Or, heal your child.
And when He –
God – didn’t do these things, you would shrug your shoulders and figure you
weren’t good enough or deserving enough. That Santa Claus must have whispered something in God's ear which made it to God's Big Book of Failure. And your shoulders slumped and your heart was heavy and you feared asking for anything else. Of God. Or yourself. Or life.
Or, perhaps you repeated the cheery mantra that “When a door closes, God opens a
window,” and you would try to get on with a life of magical thinking, hoping against hope to find a Genie-In-a-Bottle of sorts who would help you find the right mystical incantation to unlock the Gates of The Treasures of Heaven as your own.
Or, maybe you would
get angry and blame something or someone – sometimes, even God – and never
really trust God enough to let yourself really be vulnerable and pray. Ever.
Again.
Some of us grow
up and come to be spiritually and emotionally mature enough to understand that life holds an abundance of
sophisticated irony and paradox and absurdity.
That all of these, our human failures, are
God’s repeated attempts to offer us the sweet honey of grace and mercy and the opportunity for a
new, transformed life.
Ernest
Hemmingway once wrote: “The world breaks everyone and afterwards, many are
strong in the weak places.”
Some
of us don’t – won’t, can't – understand that.
Yet God is persistent, battering down
our hearts with three-fisted Love in the form of mystery and incarnation and
spirit – all of which are especially present to us in the midst of the Passion
of Jesus in Holy Week.
Antonio
Machado’s poem ends with this stanza:
Last night as I
slept,
I
dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God
I had
here inside my
heart.
We are more able
to find God inside our hearts when we get a glimpse of the failures and fragility of our human lives. When we do that - when we are able to look at the absurdity and paradox and irony of life - we awake from our waking dream and discover our marvelous error.
Something is set in motion. The whole field shifts and
sets loose some strange mystery which we can neither comprehend nor control.
That is the work of Holy Week – to awaken us to the failures of the human
enterprise which, paradoxically begin to create the framework for us to find
our way to salvation, and open the floodgates of the waters of new life which we taste again as if for the first time.
It is Palm
Sunday. The Bees of Holy Week are beginning to gather. If you listen, you can
hear the hum of their buzzing.
They are here to gather to their bodies our
human failures – the pollen of regret, grief, anger, betrayal, disappointment
and depression from the depths of our own hearts and souls.
We will walk with
Jesus this week, as the story of his Passion unfolds. The Bees of Holy Week
will take all these human failures, if you surrender to them and don’t mind if
they sting a time or two, and make of them the sweet honey of Easter Resurrection.
We know the story. We know how it ends.
The Bees of Holy
Week are gathering.
Let them come.
Amen.
Note: I am grateful to my colleague David Anderson for reminding me of Antonio Machado's poem and for his idea of 'the Bees of Heaven' which became, for me, 'the Bees of Holy Week'.
