Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Clay Wackerman
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 14, 2024
Click here for an audio of the sermon
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It's been nearly nine months since I arrived here at Holy Cross Monastery, and my gratitude for the experience extends deeper and wider than any ten-minute sermon can convey. I knew that I would have the opportunity to preach at some point, and for the past month, I have thought with great anticipation (and some anxiety) about what to say during my debut at the ambo. Brother Josep, my formator, encouraged me to incorporate some reflections on my time here.
When I opened the lectionary to today's gospel, I knew it would be a challenging task. I'm happy to report that there has been very little overlap between the beheading of John the Baptist and my internship at Holy Cross. I've witnessed no imprisonments, no executions, no lewd dancing in the refectory. Indeed it's been a rather pleasant time.
But when I look at the violence depicted in this text and the beauty I have witnessed here, the contrast gives me pause. I often ask
·.,-myself: how can such beauty and such violence exist in the same world? Is it possible to divide our attention between them without becoming utterly divided ourselves? The persistent duality is almost too much for one heart to bear, which is why I considered avoiding the tension altogether as I crafted this sermon. When I brought up the difficulty of this passage in a conversation with Br. Robert Leo, he assured me: don't lose your head over it.
So here I am today-head firmly attached-committed to working through this complex topic. On the surface, today's gospel reading is a gruesome one. It is the story of King Herod, who is a man of great power, yet seemingly powerless to the temptations around him. He makes a lofty promise to a dancing girl at a lavish banquet.
When she asks for the head of John the Baptist, he is too proud, too afraid to deny her. The consequences of his fear are tragic, and indeed violent.
The depiction of John's severed head in this passage reminded me of something I had seen last year when I worked as an English teacher in Thailand. I was volunteering at an art camp for elementary school children and I was tasked with supervising one of the activities. We supplied the students with paper and crayons and asked them to draw representations of their emotions. I strolled around the room, surveying the students' progress. For some students, happiness was a green field. For others, a clear sky. Another student sketched a meadow brimming with flowers. One student had drawn a severed head. He sat there very calmly, pressing the red marker into the page. I went to check on him, and he showed me his picture-a portrait of anger. I wish I could have asked this shy boy more about his
drawing-where had he seen this before? Were things OK at home?-but he was reluctant to elaborate, and in any event, my Thai language skills were not advanced enough to have such a discussion. Soon, it was time to share, and the students all gathered around in a circle with their pictures. It was jarring to behold: the ring of beautiful blues and greens broken by a single blood-red page.
As we discussed the drawings, I wished this one student had drawn something more agreeable. Perhaps the session would have gone more smoothly had he chosen to depict something like joy or wonder or peace, or if he had stayed home altogether. Fortunately, the other group leaders were able to address the tension. What happens when we have big, scary feelings? What can we do to manage them?
The students began to discuss their experiences, sharing what made them sad or afraid or angry, and what they could do when these feelings emerged. The conversation deepened, and despite the increasing gravity of the subject matter, the atmosphere of the room seemed to lighten, no longer burdened by the obligations of joy, positivity, or beauty. We started into the depths of the human heart in all its intractable messiness. That one child's violent drawing, which at first seemed to me an obstacle to the group connection was in fact a signpost directing to a different kind of unity, one more fraught, more intimate, more true.
It is this very truth that lies at the core of the Christian tradition-the truth that wounds are not just painful blemishes, but portals to deeper understanding. We have a tendency to cover them up in hopes of maintaining the appearance of beauty. Christ himself never advised this cosmetic approach. There is something beautiful about our image of Christ, a man often depicted as radiant with virtue, his thoughts so holy that they seem to shimmer upon his skin.
And yet this beauty comes to light only through his engagement with the profound horrors surrounding him-the devil, demoniacs, draconian rulers (oh my!). He was a man who walked the razor-thin line between the world's beauty and the world's violence, and he is calling us to follow in tow. He considered both the lilies and the lepers, the calm waters and the storm-wracked seas. His glory on Mount Tabor and his suffering on the cross are both crucial to his story, and they are crucial to ours, too.
To have a Christian attitude toward violence, one cannot shy away from it. We cannot force the discord to resolve into harmony or muffle it into silence. We must listen to it; we must arrange our lives around it. When I think back to that art camp in Thailand, I can see now that my desire to remove the child's violent drawing from the circle was itself a kind of violence. I had wanted things to go well. I'd wanted all the students to be happy. I'd wanted all their art to be beautiful. But animating all this hope was a dark paradox: the idea that beauty can exist without violence can be the very cause of violence itself. We want our gardens to be pretty, so we eliminate the weeds.
We want our homes to be clean, so we exterminate the insects. These are common practices. As history will tell us, the violence only compounds when we apply the same logic at the level of a community, a nation, or a race. This impulse is disastrous, and unfortunately enduring.
Throughout my time here, there have been several crises unfolding in the distance: the famine in Sudan, the civil war in Myanmar, and the persistent catastrophe in Gaza. During mass and chapter meetings here, we often offer intercessions for those afflicted by these tragedies. It is our way of acknowledging the severed head in the room. The life at Holy Cross Monastery is a life of abundance, but it is also a life of awareness. We know we cannot rid the world of violence, but we can at least remind the world that not all life is governed by it. Over the past nine months, I've talked to hundreds of guests about their relationship to this place. Invariably, they will tell me how much they appreciate the peace, the quiet, the hospitality, the food, the beauty, the people. And invariably, I will agree. A place like this is rare.
Many come here hoping to escape some of the stress of their daily lives, and many will find that escape. But to me, this place offers much more than escape; rather, it is an invitation to encounter the suffering of life deeply, and differently. This place does not promise to eliminate the suffering from your life, but I can promise you it will provide you with a new perspective on it, a view that includes the violence alongside the trees, the river, the meadow, the silence, and the cross.
Although violence may persist in beautiful places, so too does beauty persist in places beset by violence. For the past several months, I've been following the journalist Bisan Odwa on Instagram as she documents her experience of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Among the footage of hospital bombings and displacement camps, she dedicates one video to her favorite flower, the Palestinian poppy, its red petals splayed like rubies amid the rubble. The clip is profoundly moving; after all the chaos she has recorded, she takes the time to introduce her viewers to this coin-sized blossom as if to say: this too is worth noticing. Scholars speculate this flower, also known as anemone coronaria, is the very flower Christ himself referred to during the Sermon on the Mount. Those fields of destruction and the fields of the lilies are the same fields. Consider them.
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