[koshvoice] And so it begins...

Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week.

I don't talk about religion a lot. Partly this is because it feels like a separate aspect of my life: there is queer disabled fannish me, and there is religious me, and I don't cross-talk a lot. (I possibly should.) Partly this is because there are a lot of people I know that have been hurt by organized religion, often Christianity, and I don't want to further this hurt, even though I am not saying the things that are themselves inherently hurtful.

And partly, I haven't figured out what the fuck my religion is. I have Jewish heritage that I don't want to lose even though I am not really a practicing Jew by most definitions. I am part of a Presbyterian church, but I don't believe everything that is in the Book of Order. I am Christian, and yet I find myself wrestling with some of the core theological ideas of Christianity.

In particular, I won't -- can't -- worship a God who sends Their only human incarnation to die. It's too cruel. And I can't adhere to a religion that says that all suffering is Part Of God's Plan.

And yet, that seems to be the core of Holy Week: Jesus entering Jerusalem, for the celebration of Passover but also (according to Christian theology) knowing damn well what was going to happen to him, and doing it anyway. And there is suffering, and there is death, and at the end there is resurrection, but we can't really skip from the Hosannas of Palm Sunday to the Alleluias of Easter without traveling the week in between.

(Well, we /can/, technically, but it misses the point.)

The last couple of years, this included, I have really needed Easter. Not just the resurrection bit, but the darkness beforehand, because that is where I am, and having a religion that officially acknowledges that /as part of its core theology/ is ... kind of nice.

And I realized today what Holy Week means for me.

Not really a digression: A few years ago, a friend pointed me at an article by Nancy Eiesland about God and disability, and about how the holiest Jesus moments, the post-resurrection Jesus, /is fundamentally disabled/. He is resurrected, but not cured; he has, and is in fact identified by, the wounds in his hands and feet and side. That the Son of God is disabled is kind of worldspinny and yet at the same time powerful, particularly for those of us who are disabled.

"Pray hard enough and with enough faith, and God/Jesus will cure you" is something that many disabled people have heard too many times from well-meaning people; and the corollary, that if you don't get magically cured you aren't good/faithful/whatever enough, is almost nauseating. But Jesus, who presumably had access to all the divine healing power he could want, chose to come back not in a perfect, whole, unflawed body, but in a form that people could relate to.

And Holy Week ... is like that, only more so.

Given the theology that Jesus knew what he was walking into, he could have walked away. He could have gotten out of it. He could have avoided the pain and suffering. But he didn't.

And because of that, God (through Jesus) knows what it's like to hurt, and be in darkness, and be alone, and to die; and that makes it a little easier for me to believe that God can still accept me, still love me, still walk with me, even when sigma is eating my brain, even when I am drowning in self-pity, even when my body is not cooperating, even when I hurt.

There's something about "I am / have been where you are" that makes support more possible. However well-intentioned they may be, people who have not experienced chronic pain can't empathize in the same ways as people who have; people who have not experienced depression can't empathize in the same ways as people who have; people who have not experienced loss can't empathize in the same ways as people who have.

Holy Week, for me, is not about the descent into darkness.

It is about God joining me in darkness, and then bringing me into the light