IN HER MOST famous poem, “Not Waving but Drowning,” Stevie Smith offers an unsentimental vignette of standers-by on a beach watching a man drown. Is he waving to us or drowning? The title holds the dead swimmer’s response.
I recalled Smith’s line this fall when one image from the carpet-bombing of Gaza pinned itself to my memory. A girl’s hand in the rubble, waving around, trying to attract the attention of rescuers. We stand speechless before our own human brutality. We are all complicit in this supply chain of suffering.
Lent is a time of great silences. Silence can be duplicitous. Silence can be traumatic. Silence can be holy.
Last Lent, I was feeding owls on Good Friday at the raptor rehab center where I volunteer. Wings in flight across the mews are felt, not heard. A ripple of air. A slow shadow. The warning clack of a beak.
The prophet Isaiah names owls as one of the first to return after the Lord has laid waste to empires that God had found guilty of hoarding wealth and acting like there was no God. Isaiah describes the rubbled landscape: “They shall name it ‘No Kingdom There,’ and all its princes shall be nothing” (34:12). Owls are birds of desolation. In the half-light of the aviary, a great horned flicks its ears, stretches one wing, turns its yellow eyes to me.
Lent is a penitential season — an invitation to bear our souls, to take our layered defense systems offline, to give God consent to look deeply within us. “Penance” is the action we take to acknowledge and repair harm. While it’s important to act to repair the harms that we know we’ve caused in our relationships and communities, the Christian tradition also recognizes that we are all part of sinful systems.
Every institutional sin or social injustice has roots in individual choices, in each one’s conscience. This doesn’t mean that we take responsibility for everything (hubris) — but we do track down and repair our part in the supply chain (humility). “Principalities and powers,” as Paul diagnoses them, are systems that become distorted into little gods, wreaking havoc on the lives of innocents. More than that, the disfigured (some would say demonic) spirituality of these powers tempts us to despair by constantly advertising that we have no moral agency and are complicit in harms we can’t repair. Why not just give up? whisper the powers.
The traditional Lenten acts of penance are prayer, fasting, and giving aid to those who are poor. The genius here is in restoring our moral agency. We may be complicit in some systems, but one can pray in any circumstance, one can choose vulnerability and dependence on God (fasting), and one can always share what one has with someone who has less. Prayer, as Ched Myers unpacks it in Binding the Strong Man, is the struggle to face both the demons within us and the darkness of our historical moment so that we can summon the courage to stay on the Way of the Cross.
Prayer opens our imagination. Fasting restores our agency. Giving restores relationship.
Lent is a season for reclaiming our identities as free people liberated by God. Not because we are perfect, but because God called us, and we followed.
In Isaiah, the owl that flits over the rubble is also a bearer of wisdom. She hovers like the Holy Spirit, silent and brooding over chaos. She is a reminder that, even in utter destruction, there are refugia, small pockets where life thrives.
From under the collapsed buildings of the tomb, a hand reaches out. Perhaps it is neither waving, nor drowning — but rising.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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