Mourning in the midst of Tyranny

 If the detention of students condemning genocide is not a station of the cross I don’t know what is. Thousands of us assembled in Somerville near Tufts University in solidarity with Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student, who we must remember aside many other detained by ICE including asylum seekers unable or intimidated to play the role of a prisoner of conscience. My family, residents of Somerville have typically experienced the corner of Tufts Triangle as a place to play soccer, afterwards walked around Powderhouse Square in some kind of exercise and play, but that evening, as a family living in the midst of tyranny, we were engaged in a civic belonging, grateful for community.

Many of us activated to the emergency protest had heard about the detention of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Kahlil whose wife Noor Abdulla, certainly comes today before our confessing hearts. Noor, which means “light” in Arabic, attests to the strength of the mourning women. In Luke’s Gospel narrative the mourning women see that the light of the world is diminished and Jesus tells them the light is about to be put out. Luke will tell us the death of Jesus brings a total darkness, an eclipse we can only describe as utter sorrow. ICE has blocked Noor’s light from shining on the face of Mahmoud, let us pray. Oh God, let your radiant light shine on all those in ICE detention. Confirm in our hearts the knowledge of your law, help us to grieve in the obstacles that prevent us from seeing your light in our world. Spur us to act as well as to mourn.

At her home’s threshold Noor Abdulla wailed--she refused their easy consciences. Spare our family, She begged them, pregnant, see, one hand on her swollen womb, one hand against the golgotha of ICE detention. knocked off his arm, spare our family. Noor Abudulla one hand on her swollen womb, she put her hand on the ICE officer to entreat him Her husband was gripped and taken.

"Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.' (Luke 23:26-29).

If today we Family the way to Golgotha. Let us confess our despair was hunkering at the threshold of our homes, numbing our response to the days that were coming. Blessed are the confessing hearts, the souls that keep church in the messing streets, a sign in our mystical community of ancient wounds.

Noor Abdulla eventually received a letter from her husband describing the plight of asylum seekers in ICE detention facing deportation. Not unlike a letter from Paul in the custody of the Romans--written to the believers, Mahmoud Kahlil wrote from a jail 1500 miles away, an expectant father aiming in solidarity with another. Mahmoud Kahlil saying don’t mourn for me, don’t weep for me, mourn because our loss, our broken system, weep for the family in the midst of tyranny.

The days are coming when the complicit Temple has bowed to State, defiled by its own sancitmonious priests, and later besieged, the holiest of holies burned and destroyed.

Jesus, the weaponized separation fills us with indignation, We mourn not only about another man, but for ourselves and the futures we took as promised, the famine and the epidemic we thought we had banished for good, the fights for civil liberties and human rights we fought and won, the days are coming--it will only get worse to reveal in time the strength of God’s justice, yet already it is worse in some ways than ever, and the law of the land seem torn to shreds, our neighbors are in dismay, stockpiling goods, some entrenched in bleak survivalism, some even though disillusioned, take heart in satire, “take our children, go ahead and eat them,” and yet we had reason not to trust in ourselves in the fragility of democracy.

Jesus told us the days are coming, a pronouncement into the crowds, shorn and tortured. We must remember the strength and courage of the women publically grieving. We receive their testimony of the crucifixion underway and the crucifixions yet to come, the persecutions yet to be born. Their discipleship is fertile ground with the dangerous memory Witnesses in contrast with the male discipleswe may not be immune to self pity, alienated and in division, stunned at our loss of holy ground.

Mahmoud Kahlil separated from his pregnant wife Noor Abdulla. A large crowd of people followed Jesus, including many women who mourned and lamented him. Jesus turned to them and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.' (Luke 23:26-29).

Bitter, blessing? A general repudiation of the grief. Thou shalt cry. A law. Cry bitterly the loss you yourselves would know. The law forbids future telling, and yet here going to his death, Luke’s Jesus is exception. Jesus portends the future that is every generation that has felt itself at the brink, and our very own mourning, God is singing a lament of the present abyss.

Do not doubt the truth in the midst of mourning. 

Question the easy quietism of private remote observance. 

Quest into the crowded and confused without regard for a pious devotional circumspect remoteness from the mess. Do not be overawed by authority. 

Do not be isolated to the complicit Temple. Do not be silenced by the performance of ritualized oppression. Let your faith in the power of God shine.

We do not lie to ourselves when we lament. Lying is a refusal to cooperate with the world. The world is mourning. 

The world is watching. The reigning powers gleefully consume our angry tears. Isolating us even as we struggle, the powers harness the crowd. The reigning powers consign the cross to minority business owners, to immigrants, making a surrogate of the crucified in Palestine like Mahmoud Khalil take up the cross so we pacify, the surrogate is ordered out of our midst to increase our grasp of the weight of the cross and thereby commodify our pain. Like videos and clickbait, we can all watch Noor Abdulla pregnant and refusing to believe. She joins the mourning women beatifide in the eclipse of moral contract in this country, and with her in tears, so we too beg at the threshold of our manifold, extreme, nightmare.  

We are not in the presence of an ethical intelligence that can be reasoned with--our tears free us from numbness. But when we cry, when we follow Jesus and Simon in tears, we do not rob others of our vision of the world.