A few weeks ago, we had our first on-site retreat, here at the Palace. Throughout the year, immersive members are split into two sharing groups, and usually spend one evening a week together. For these four days, however, we spent most of the day just with our six members and three leaders. The stories of Jesus’ visits to the town of Bethany and his relationships with Lazarus, Martha, and Mary informed our sharing time, as we tried to grow in trust and honesty. During our personal prayer time, I did some free-writing related to each day’s scripture passage. For now, they are fragments, and I might “finish” them later, but I also like the idea of preserving the insight I found during that week of intense openness and vulnerability with my Community.

Peace, in this second month – JFL

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JOHN 11: 32-44

They knew me. They knew the pressure on me.

Sometimes thousands came close to me, sometimes just three or four, but each needed something. I knew that. I wanted to give it to them, but that power still had to come out of me. Feeding four thousand means I also talk to four thousand people, hear four thousand stories, kiss four thousand babies. I love every second of it, love each of them and remember them all, but it’s exhausting. I’m human after all, aren’t I?

My friends and I, sometimes we can get away. We fish, we debate, we grill out, we throw parties for each other, we go up into the hills to find waterfalls. Sometimes I get some time to myself, but usually its all of us together, and I still feel pulled in every direction.

They knew me, the pressure I felt, but they still sent for me when we were across the Jordan, when everyone needed something from me. Lazarus was sick, they said. We prayed for him, and kept working. He died. Lazarus, my friend with the large table and soft beds, the garden with date trees and cucumbers, the sisters who bustled around like my own sisters and mother had, who realized when I needed to go and sit by myself, had died.

We headed towards Jerusalem, towards Bethany. Four days of walking, but Lazarus had been a follower, a friend, just as much as his sisters. I could feel their pain in my heart. Martha met me at the end of the road.

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JOHN 11:17

When I was little, my mother — a Greek who became Jewish, a proselyte, observant but still a little different — told me the stories of her childhood. In one, two sisters had to decide if they would bury their brother who had rebelled against their city. The one willing to break the law had explained, “If it had been my husband, I could have married again; if it had been my children, I could have had more, but my brother is my only brother.” Those words came back to me when Lazarus died, when I should have been making plans for the burial, should have been sending servants to all our relatives, should have been cooking his favorite meals for the last time, should have been cleaning, should have been crying at least.

Instead, Mary said we shouldn’t bury our brother, and those silly old verses came back to me. We should wait for the Master, she said. Jesus, I corrected, did not come when he was sick. He can raise the dead, she said, remember Jairus? Remember the Roman’s servant? Surely he would do the same for his friend, do not bury him just yet.

She thought I had no faith, just because I don’t sit with the men when they talk. I still listen. I even do the talking sometimes, when I go to the well early in the morning and the other wives and girls ask why we have so many people staying with us. I tell them how kind this Jesus is to us, to me and Mary and the women who travel with him, how loving he is, how different. He isn’t like the men in the synagogue who hush us and tell us to go home, to brew the tea. He isn’t like that, I tell them.

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JOHN 12: 1-8

Six days before Passover, so everything was pointing to this day — like every year for the family of Bethany, but differently, too, for Jesus knew what was to come. As usual, Martha manned the kitchen, perhaps remembering the Lord’s direction that simplicity could rule the day, so that she could enjoy their time together as well. For all of them, however, the events surrounding Lazarus’ illness, death, and resurrection were close at hand.

Lazarus welcomed Jesus and sat at table with him. Every bite of food and each embrace still seemed like a gift, but strangely impossible, as if he was hearing the Lord’s voice from within that cave, “Lazarus, come out,” each time his friend spoke to him. He had emerged to see Jesus and his sisters, each one with red, wet eyes and their arms around one another.

Now, Martha could not keep from smiling, from squeezing her brother’s shoulder when she passed by, from heaping extra beans and grains on Jesus’ plate. Only Mary was quiet. She and Jesus were close, closer than she had been with her siblings growing up. She was the dreamer of the family, the baby left to make up stories in the garden. After Martha had begun to clear the red clay bowls and platters, Lazarus wondered at the sweetness of a peach, but Mary slipped away to her corner of the room. She returned with the jar of perfume their parents had left for her dowry. Small, made of pale-white stone, and sealed.

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