You could say that alcoholism saved her life—or more accurately, it put her on a life-giving path through AA.  

 

I admire those souls who can grow in that “rocky soil” that Jesus described without getting choked by weeds in the form of parents who took way too big a share of the family’s emotional and financial resources and offered little in return. 

 

Alice seemed living proof of the spiritual wisdom that we have to lose our lives to find them.  In an environment where so little attention seemed to have been given her, she is a living reservoir of forgiveness and patience.    I’ve seen it happen over and over again . . . where parents are lacking, sometimes children have to turn to the wider universe for comfort.   It is powerful when that “still small voice” can speak through a family’s raging, a child’s tears and anxiety, and provide a spiritual sanctuary even in a violent home.

 

She spent years drowning the anxiety with drinking.  And in a miraculous moment, realized that she was simply carrying on her parent’s abuse—admittedly, more quietly, but equally life-threatening.    It is a challenge, when you leave a home like that, to know what you have a right to expect from the world.    Giving is easier than taking, demanding, setting course.   At what point does “giving” just morph into “giving in”?  Never easy to know and it’s a life journey to discern those steps.

 

AA became a family for her.   She knew something about trusting in that higher power, but it felt great to hear other people talking about it, too.  A vague trust in a world better than the one she saw in her own household had gotten her through childhood and adolescence.  AA helped her start building it.  Step by step.  Trust.  Friendship.  Honesty.  Compassion.  Honesty.  She came to church because of AA.  It was AA that pushed her through the door, looking for a spirituality that grew from the life of a community, a tradition that had lived through the centuries.

 

When she joined the church, she said that she didn’t really know anything about Christianity.  She just needed a church.  Fair enough–since most of us who “know” a lot about Christianity are trying to “unlearn” it and start again, anyway.   I asked her to read one of the lessons in our Good Friday service that year.  She’s not one to enjoy being in front of a group but she agreed, somewhat reluctantly. 

 

She arrived at the church that evening an hour early, wanting to read through the text to make sure she got it right.   Since she had so much time, I just handed her a Bible, showed her the particular part of the story she was to read, and left her alone in the sanctuary.

 

When I returned, tears were coming down her face.  “Is that really what happened to Jesus?” she asked.  “It’s just terrible what they did to him!” 

 

Seriously.  It had never occurred to me that she didn’t know that this was where the story was going. 

 

I guess I’d taken for granted the dramatic and memorable Good Friday experiences that drummed the story of Jesus’ last days into my psyche.  I remember our priest actually getting a whip  one year.   You could tell the acolyte felt awkward and embarrassed as he used it, on the priest’s instructions, to punctuate the reading  about the torture of Jesus.  (My mother, in good Episcopalian sensibility, was appalled at this dramatization.  “Tacky,” she said.)  Well, maybe it was . . . but it sure brought the message home.  

 

And here was Alice, realizing for the first time, the cruelty that entered Jesus’ life. 

 

It was moving to me to see her sympathy for him; again, a testimony to such a loving heart that had grown among the weeds of an abusive home, a heart that with just a little compassion and care offered so much to the rest of us.   She would probably think it presumptuous to compare Jesus’ story with her own, but Jesus would want it that way, I am certain. 

 

It’s a cruel world we live in, so many of us.  Last night, as I was praying, I found myself thinking about the children of Darfur and the unspeakable violence they have suffered, witnessed, and yet survived.   I imagined what some of them must be feeling.  What else is there to say but “Lord, forgive us, we know not what we do…”  Whether or not any of these children know Jesus by name, they know him.  They know the story of suffering that can only be lifted to God.  Sacred stories.   Stories of a child’s anguish and the pursuit of life.

 

 I’m not sure what it means when Christians say that Jesus died “for” us.  I know that it is true to my experience and to the testimony of so many others that Jesus dies “with” us.   

 

When I am in the presence of Alice, who has known the power of death so intimately, and yet is able to love, to grow, to empathize, to grow life from such rocky, weedy ground, I feel like I am seeing resurrection in front of me.  Sometimes a door opens for us and we can find our way to healing on this side of life.  Some of us go all the way to the cross and beyond it.  Only God can roll away the stone.  

 

It is just terrible what we did to Jesus.  What we do to each other.  

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