the spiritual practice of the Via Dolorosa

Holy Week in the heart of the empire

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The sun is shining. The birds are singing. The flowers are blooming. My baby is (forever) teething and laughing and on the verge of crawling. Groceries are expensive, but I can buy them anyway. And I really only think about Gaza when I choose to.

I think about thinking about Gaza. I wonder what it has done to us—surviving an ongoing pandemic—millions and millions of graves unmarked by the collective—the phrase “since the pandemic,” which really means “since we made an unspoken pact: every man for himself.” I took my baby to the ER with Covid at seven weeks. I am harder now. I’m more fearful now. I’m not always sure anymore that it matters whether I choose to care.

I think about how long we have slowly despaired of a common life, and how helpless we feel as a result. How hard it is to imagine a years-long bus boycott, or a long, hungry labor strike—the heroic efforts in decades past of unsung masses determined to make a change. We’ve let ourselves be convinced that we’re alone, and maybe it is true.

Maybe the first step in making a change is to ferociously reassert the right to claim one another.

I am doing my taxes and thinking about the pact I was born into as a citizen of this country: comfort and safety in exchange for silence. Don’t ask where the money goes. Don’t ask where the weapons are pointed. Here, buy a clutch of daffodils. Geopolitics is complicated. Taxes are complicated. Here, buy a streaming service. Here, buy a chocolate bunny.

I am not actually thinking about Gaza. I see a photo of an emaciated little boy and quickly close the window.

Empire has now tutored us in the art of distracting ourselves.

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It’s hard to be with a teething baby for hours every day. My teething baby, anyway, because he copes by yelling all the time, throwing his toys out of his own reach, and demanding to be picked up, then demanding to be put down. He’s just uncomfortable! All the time! His yelling is almost certainly preferable to the cranky sarcasm I devolve into when I’m in pain.
But still.

I find myself reaching for my phone, a lifeline to Adult World, a way to take the edge off the feeling that I Need to Work. I grab my computer and try to write in snatches while the baby tries to crawl, both of us doing our work, both of us frustrated, both refusing to be comforted. For days, we do this.

I grow increasingly frayed. When I’m not with my son, I’m doing chores and trying to think of the next essay topic. When I’m not doing chores, I’m pushing back my bedtime, claiming to myself I’m relaxing, but still feeling anxious. When I’m alone, I’m “working on” the taxes or Easter planning or family vacation ideation, but in a haphazard way that doesn’t actually result in progress. My thoughts compulsively return to the writing Work I’m not doing—and can barely even define. All the scraps I’ve started in the nursery lie abandoned.

Perseverating compulsively on what I’ll write next feels like it should be solving a problem, but finally I have to admit that it’s only compounding it. The truth is, I can only write what I want to write when I’m immersed in the work—which I can accomplish in little 15-minute snatches but cannot do while entire days are frantically committed to the phone-grabbing and fake multitasking.

It’s not that I like dividing my time and attention this way. And, sure, maybe it’s partly just an awkward phase of the adjustment to parenthood.

But it’s also that if I stop and think too long, I think about Gaza.

I put the computer aside for a few days. I get on the floor with my baby, who is in pain.

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Today I scouted out the route of the Chattanooga Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage on a test walk, baby dozing contentedly in his stroller. “I guess we’re supposed to be praying,” I said to him.

How do you pray? How do you pray for any of it?

The pilgrimage tagline is, “a Via Dolorosa of solidarity.” Remembering the miles that families in Palestine have walked trying to find safety. I think about Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’s cross. I think about the women, who stayed. I keep walking.

A plant store. A group of conference attendees wearing their goofy badges. Crosswalks. Just…crosswalks, functioning normally, and I try to imagine if this city I love was in tatters of rebar, concrete, and dust. I can’t do it. I actually cannot imagine that. But I can keep walking.

It’s almost Holy Week. Every single year I’m unexpectedly moved by the invitation to walk with Jesus along this seemingly inexorable journey to the cross and the resurrection. Time dilates at the end of each gospel to detail the days, and likewise the church calendar simultaneously speeds up and slows down. Palm Sunday, Spy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Resurrection Day.

Good Friday we encounter in especially sordid detail. The sleepless night before Jesus’s crucifixion contains its moments of drama, but it’s also a tragedy of banality: arguments over jurisdictional red tape, bungled attempts to charge the man with technicalities, and utterly transparent grabs at impossibly petty scraps of power. The Via Dolorosa is here, too—the betrayal aching all the more for its farcical trivialities, its viciousness, its sheer laziness.

Empire reduces us to this. It dangles convenient excuses in front of us and offers extra credit for feeling vaguely guilty over what we “can’t control.” You can keep your sunny-day cortado at the crosswalk. You’ll never need to reduce your worldly belongings to what you can push on the bottom of a stroller, walking to an already-broken promise of safety. All you have to do is not ask.

Or you can stay, or you can at least try to stay. Every year I end up walking—sometimes bravely and carefully—mostly inadequately, distractedly, flinchingly, lazily—alongside Jesus. And then I am overcome by what it cost for Jesus to walk so devotedly alongside me. Alongside us. Alongside the starving, the bombed-out, and the orphan.

I walked on a spring day to the middle of town and back out again. I stared and stared at my perfect baby, perfectly safe. I wished there were any number of miles I could possibly walk that would cause a single meal to reach a single belly.

Near the end of our route, I remembered what a painful way that would actually be—my distances are usually limited by a pregnancy-related foot injury. But all that made me think of was how thoroughly, how irreparably, how unhesitatingly and repeatedly I would shatter this foot step by step into pieces if my home became a war zone, if it could offer even a chance at making my baby safe.

I still don’t know how to pray. But Holy Week is coming, so I walk on.

peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey

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The Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage movement asks us to stand in solidarity by donating to Churches for Middle East Peace, a coalition of churches advocating for U.S. policies that advance justice and peace in the Middle East.