Feasting in time of war
Twice in the past week we have gathered with good friends and let the candles burn low over delicious food, good conversation, singing, reading Scripture and poetry, praying, telling stories of the people of God at our All Saints Day feast, and stories of my husband as teenager (always a treat!) at our annual Friendsgiving dinner with friends who have known each other since they were kids.
It was beautiful, and I’m filled with gratitude for this good, good life…and at the same time I have to admit that it all feels a little decadent in these war-torn days.
I pray Psalm 10 slowly, weight filling the silence between verses, then I get up and set the table with every single candle we own and two vases of mums and my kids’ leaf collection. I see a picture of an old man tracing the lines of the each face on a cluster of Missing posters hanging on a chain link fence, then stir the rich, velvety soup simmering on my stove, adding a pinch more salt. I read half a headline, but have to stop, then I peek out the window to see how my two oldest are faring as they sweep leaves off the front walk and plug in the porch lights in the waning daylight. I light the candles and turn on music just before the first friends arrive, while praying under my breath, “Christ, have mercy.” Then, before everyone descends on the dinner that is bubbling and warming in the kitchen, I proclaim with our houseful of dear ones, faces glowing in the candlelight: “In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word.”
The psalmists are familiar with the push and pull of asking in despair, “Where are you, God,” and then groaning, reminding, convincing, reclaiming as they confess: “Yet you are holy. Yet you are with me.” Jesus himself experienced the depths of this agony on the Cross as he echoed the writer of Ps. 22, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps. 22:1; Matt. 27:46), yet addressing God directly as his Father multiple times during his crucifixion, knowing that the Father was present, hearing his voice.
God did not exempt himself from our suffering, but rather joined us in it, uniting his own voice to chorus of humanity throughout time who have asked, “Why, God?” In the same way that he joined himself to our questions when he took on flesh, Jesus has joined us to his life by his own death and victorious rising.
This does not answer my questions about why others are suffering the worst atrocities that image bearers can commit against one another while I enjoy relative peace. But it does give me something solid to hold onto (or perhaps the knowledge that Someone solid is holding onto me) as my eyes adjust to the dark and I learn to spot the light of God’s goodness that has not been snuffed out—even here.
And in the space between here and that eternity-long peace that is coming for God’s redeemed creation, those scarred hands are the only ones that can hold together the whys and hallelujahs, pleas for mercy alongside candlelight dinners with friends, lament and the enjoyment of a beautiful life. So I will keep my gaze fixed on the One who knows what it is to be human, imitating his perfect ways, following him in his lament, in his questions, in his trust, in his laying-down-his-life kind of love for his neighbor, in his feasting, in his gratitude to the Father.